I will write this only once...

Sometimes it all just comes together. Sometimes you realise that all the false starts and abandoned ideas have been chances to build up your talents so that, when it does all just come together, you can make best use of the opportunity.

I wrote The Withy in one sitting, albeit it several years after the initial inspiration arrived from the story engine (my subconscious). It seems to feel like it too – it feels smooth, articulated and has an elegance of pace that would have been very difficult to install if I’d written it in dribs and drabs. (I’m sure I could have done it though).

There are a few things that help me get into the mode of thinking required to achieve a one-sitting piece. I need zero distraction, so I moor the boat at one of the wilderness locations I’ve collected (after a trip to a village shop somewhere); then I retire to the bedroom of my boat, where the porthole bungs mean it’s almost entirely dark. Candles help too; and finally, for some reason it helps if it’s eight degrees celsius – which is obviously more easy to achieve in the colder months and therefore why most of my best writing is done then too.

The Withy had become quite a complex concept, one that wouldn’t work if it was shoved down the reader’s throats, and one that the Withy himself was being cautious to discuss many years after it had happened. But I knew who he was and how he would speak – slightly aloof, detached, otherworldly, lonely, but determined to record his experience despite the suspicion that no one would understand his meaning.

All that came together once I had the other two things I always need. The first of those always comes first – it’s the character who has a story to tell. The second of those sometimes never comes, which is why I have a folder of over 30 well-developed concepts that may never be written. The second is knowing how the story ends; and I mean almost exactly, within a few words of what I finally write down.

When it works it’s simply brilliant. It’s complete justification of the creative career path I worked so hard to secure (in as much as it can ever be secure). It makes me feel like this is what I’m meant to be doing with my life – creating stories for people is my contribution to the human experience. It’s also, of course, completely exhausting, and there can be strange side-effects: often it’s difficult for me to wake up afterwards and understand I’m on a boat in the twenty-first century, and not on an island 12,000 years ago, just about to become the person who inspired Stonehenge…

As it happens, Jacob Holm-Lupo found himself writing the music for The Withy in one sitting, moments after he heard my brother John’s narrated version for the first time. So you know, we must all have been doing something right.