I write because without writing, living is like scrubbing newly sunburned skin. It’s too much. Writing is what you do with the milk soft smell of babies, a soprano voice and violins, and the first perfect plum of the season. It’s what you do when feelings and other people’s stories and your own stories get stacked one upon the other, higher and higher, until one day you look up and you can’t see the sun anymore. I write because writing turns everything into words. And words bring in the light.
 
I write because stories are like splinters – they’re better out than in. Some parts of the story of my first novel Seeing the Elephant came to me when I was a year into a PhD about the Vietnam War.  I was way out of my depth… studying, parenting, running a business and almost definitely drowning, not waving.

​Water always runs to the deepest point, to where the land is lowest. For me, the same is true of writing. The words fall into the places that lie deep beneath. I think of them as the 2am places. The ones you usually hide with conversation and movement. The voice in your head that you hear because the only other sound is the hum of the fridge and your own quiet footsteps through a sleeping house.
 
For me this place is no aquifer. Words do not gush out onto the page. It is just a thin seam of honesty that can occasionally be mined for words. 
 
Sometimes I dream in words, in loops and strands across a page. My own handwriting in blue ink. But by morning, like dew, the words have gone.
 
The process of drilling down into the place where the words lie, though always hard and sometimes even painful, is also occasionally illuminating. If the events that are written about are not autobiographical, the emotions surrounding them most certainly are.
 
The passage in my novel where Frank describes his grandfather's love of horses is, in some ways, the most revealingly autobiographical: