If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.

You're working with other people and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you want, and sometimes you didn't realise what a mistake you've made until you see it projected.

I give everything my best shot and sometimes it doesn't work out and other times it works out much better than you thought.

I had no intention of providing any answers or solutions, because you'd only look a fool, but I did want to talk about what it's like to be in a state where you're wondering. And perhaps I was also receptive to the fact I was entering middle age and those thoughts come - to pretend that they don't come is just crazy.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.