Starting to Write - Another Door Opening

On the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning they had a feature about why so many of us forget what we have come into a room to do - you walk in, and it's gone.  Apparently, it's because doors have an effect on the way our minds work. Its official!  They encourage us to bury past experience and start afresh. So here's a lovely door from Burgundy, when many of the best of them are to be found.

When you are starting a new piece of work, picture yourself throwing your whole weight against a heavy door again and again, trying to burst it open and imagine the feeling when it finally gives and you find yourself flung into the room.  Take that sense of momentum and write something - anything - as long as it is vibrant and fresh.  But don't necessarily bury past experience -- draw upon it.

In the Beginning Was the Word (or how I came to write).

I'm always interested in how people become ensnared by writing, what it is that tips them over the edge into the skewed and intense world of the creative arts. With me, it was a kind of curiosity.  I was in a play (Rookery Nook - my finest hour) and didn't come on until the third act, so I used to sit nattering in my dressing room with another actress (Nichola McAuliffe - hello Nichola) and one day she mentioned that an ancestor of hers had been involved in the Rebecca Riots in South Wales.

You could have knocked me down with a feather.

One of my ancestors, a radical solicitor called Hugh Williams, was also involved in these riots, which took place between 1839 and 1842.  I was so struck by this coincidence that I began doing some light research into the subject and the information I uncovered was so particular and colourful and dramatic that it seemed like a story waiting to be told and that maybe it was even waiting for me to tell it.  So I started writing and my novel was published and I've kept on writing, because I've found that I just can't stop.