I think it’s important, no matter how confident you grow with your writing, that an element of fear and self-doubt is still there, keeping you sharp, prompting you to push and prod and question yourself. But yesterday the fear had ballooned to that size where I couldn’t quite see over it to what was on the other side, if there even was something - something worth seeing - on the other side. What I was trying to do, with the book I’ve recently started, felt daunting and enormous. I could have stared at my computer screen, but instead I walked and, as I did, the ideas and threads that were tightly locked up inside me shook themselves loose and began to make sense. When I look back at my books - the recent books, the ones I really care about, where I’ve stayed true to myself and done what I set out to do - all of them have come together on walks, and I suspect that will continue to be the case for as long as I can walk. It is a lesson I cannot learn often enough.