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When I first considered writing a novel, I was 17 years old and had never written anything longer than an A-Level essay. How could I possibly produce 100,000 words? For months, the prospect was too daunting to contemplate. Then I thought: You have to begin. So I did, and for most of my last year at school I wrote 500 words a day before assembly, modeling myself on Trollope (who also worked early in the morning) and dreaming about seeing my name on the spine of a book. When I’d left school, I went to live in Prague with a suitcase of clothes and a jumble of manuscript pages. I binned most of them and started from scratch; and this time I set myself a daily target of 2,000 words. For much of the day I’d feel sick; then I’d make myself sit down at my computer and write. Sometimes it took two hours, sometimes 12. But for 50 days I did it, and at the end of 50 days I had the first draft of my first book, The Drowning People.

This habit of judging a day by the number of words committed to paper on it remained with me through my twenties. There’s no one to tell novelists when to start or when to finish. It is easy to work all the time – but that’s dangerous, for your own sake and the book’s. In need of some way of gauging when a decent day’s work had been done, I became enslaved to the word-count and the sequence alt–t–w, which established it so easily.

I developed an addiction to the little thrill of freedom that washed over me when the screen showed 2,000. Unfortunately, the mere fact of having written 2,000 words means nothing. They need to be good. While writing my second book, Us, I tried to avoid the word count; but inevitably I was brought back to it, and couldn’t sleep easily at night if I hadn’t reached the magical, arbitrary target. That was no fun. When Us was finished, I decided I either had to give up novel-writing for good or find a very different way of making books.

Fortunately, I had recently read five years of my diaries for a passport application. From them I learned that anxiety rarely affects an outcome in life, and this changed my attitude. I killed my alt–t–w habit, set myself no deadlines, and followed my thoughts where they led me – to a novel about shifting family responsibilities, forgotten wars, and the thrills and spills of consciousness. That book, ‘The Lighted Rooms’, showed me the way to making many more.

The Lighted Rooms is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.