Lesson Seven: Rest days

Get ready to ditch the guilt

I am sitting by a pool as I write this. I swim most days and I don’t feel guilty that I am not at my desk. There, I said it.

It is probably because some of my best ideas come to me while I am swimming. Driving too is another time I have ideas. Or hoovering. Strangely anything to do with momentum. I remember the moment I came up with the idea for my debut novel, it was standing up, on a tube train. 

If you’re stuck when writing, it can often be when you go and distract yourself with someone else that the answer comes to you: walking, chatting, shopping, cooking. It’s the same as those ideas that creep into your brain just as you’re about to drift off to sleep. It is as if, when your mind is relaxed or distracted by something else – the more mundane, the better  – the answer you have been wracking your brains for is allowed to float gently to the surface and reveal itself to you.

I have told the story before of how when I was working with Wendy Mitchell on her bestselling book Somebod…