When I was a child, most Sunday nights – the best ones – were heralded by the opening notes to When You Wish Upon a Star. That music – and the image of the cartoon Tinkerbell shooting across the screen – was a signal for a Sunday evening ritual. Pyjamas. Cushions. The comfort of a deeply familiar television format. Cosiness.

When my own children were young, our Sunday evenings found their own patterns of cosiness – mill teas (boiled eggs, toasted muffins…) and games of Uno. When I spend time with my young godchildren I am once more pulled into that quiet cosiness that children often crave (in this case, playdough and a BBC cooking program). In that end-of-week cosy state, I can see their equilibrium being restored.

Similarly, your imagination needs equilibrium. It needs rest. It may be that it needs a bit of cosiness.

Cosiness is that quality of easy comfort that allows rest and recuperation. It asks nothing of us. Often underrated, cosiness often connects to ritual, or nostalgia, or familiarity. It’s supremely sensory and requires no achievement other than a warm state of ease.

For me – clearly not for all writers – cosiness is connected to writing. My study is a cosy space – not brightly lit, littered with soft blankets and candles. Cosiness is perhaps connected to that Danish word, hygge – though for me, hygge seems to suggest a higher design standard. The word hygge means comfort – but it also means joy. And it also means ‘valiant’. Determined comfort. Courageous joy.

Creativity, yes, requires courage and determination. But it comes from – and breathes into – a place of rest and recovery. It can offer and receive comfort, the comfort of cosiness.

Is there a low-stakes creative play that asks nothing of you and creates a cosy ease? Playdough? Colouring books? Splashing waterpaints on paper? Baking?

What rituals restore you to a sense of cosiness? What are the foods or habits that make you cosy? Dinner on a lap tray? A particular piece of music? A soft blanket? Playing solitaire?

Whatever it is, take some time today, at week’s end, to make yourself cosy. Here, at midpoint, you deserve to rest and be restored.

How are you getting on with the daily prompts? Are you finding your way to your creative instinct? Are words arriving on the page? As always, be kind to yourself. I keep thinking about an interview Tim Winton did with the great Andrew Denton years ago in which he (Winton) referred to his creative practice as being like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “Some days,” he said, “there is no rabbit.”
Denton nodded sympathetically.
And then Winton added, “And some days, there is no hat.”

In other words, it’s okay if some days the hat doesn’t show up. The act of you showing up is building your muscle. As Anne Enright said of writing, day after day, year after year, with or without external validation: “It changes you, it just does.”

We’re now at the midpoint of the Immersion: Deep program. Midway is often the time of resistance, of tension. Midpoint is a perfect moment to look back. To check in with yourself. To take stock.

Take a little time today to look at what you began with at the start of this program. Take your loveliest journal (have I mentioned my obsession with vegan leather soft-paper square-paged journals?) and your favourite pen and reflect on the following questions:

• What have I created over the last few weeks?
• How have I showed up for my own creativity these last few weeks?
• What were my ‘aha’ moments of inspiration or insight?
• What moments or processes seem to have borne most fruit for me?
• What moments or processes felt difficult?
• Is there anything that could have made these weeks even more fruitful?
• What’s one challenge I have in my creative life right now?
• How might this challenge be inviting me to expand?
• What is my intention for the rest of the program?
• And what about my intention for the coming week?
• What single action I can take this week to deepen my creativity?

Today, look back with compassion, in order to look forward with clear eyed hope.

Several years ago, I taught a group of novelists who were struggling a little with that old ‘I can’t seem to get it written’ problem.  Listening to them, it became apparent that each time they failed to hit their ‘target’ (usually a word count), they panicked and raised the bar for the next day.

I have been an expert at this sort of game myself.

I wrote my first novel in a flush of excitement. Whole chapters would burst out in a rush, and when my agent sold it in a two-book deal, I decided that I needed a plan to keep those words rushing out whole chapters at a time. More than a plan, I needed a plan with dates, and numbers, and times. And a great big red marker pen, so that I could cross off each chapter as I wrote it.

And each time I failed to write my chapter, I had to create a new schedule, with higher and higher word counts. My inner dialogue went like this: “Okay, so today I didn’t write two thousand words. That’s okay, because I’ll remake the schedule and if I now write three thousand words every day, I’ll be fine.”

Each week, my bar got higher and higher, until I realised that the only way I was going to stop sabotaging myself was to lower the damned bar.

When I told my students this, I said that I realised that I needed the bar to be so low that the only way I would fail to get over it would be if I was slithering on the ground. They took to this low-bar plan and gave it a new name: ‘Snake goals’.

You can only fail to get over the bar if you are an actual snake.

Whether it’s for a word count, or an amount of time, or for some other measurement – can you lower the bar this week?

If it’s a word count, find the figure that you know you cannot fail at. When I interviewed the Writers Mentoring Program alumna and author of The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams, she said that she’d settled on one word a day. For real. One word. She discovered that if she wrote just one word before that first sip of coffee, something more would usually come. And if it didn’t, she agreed to be kind to herself.

If you’re editing, set a smaller number of pages.

Or set a timer for twenty minutes and show up wholeheartedly just for that twenty minutes. Or fifteen, if that’s really all you have. And if that feels too hard: get an egg-timer.

Sometimes, all you can do is turn up at the desk. Sometimes it’s enough to simply, as Elizabeth Gilbert says, ‘touch the work’.

You’re training yourself into new habits. And that begins one minute, one word, at a time. So, seriously, make like a snake, and lower the bar.

I was at a dinner a year or two ago when the man sitting beside me asked, “What made you a writer?”

Barely pausing to swallow my soup, I began my origin story, the very one I’ve told at many writers’ festivals or in interviews, over many years. It’s the story in which I was a young actor scratching out scenes and notes late at night until I woke up with the idea for a play and wrote it in a white-hot rush over a couple of weeks, and then after it was produced, the artistic director of the State Theatre company asked me if I’d like to write a play….

My dining partner put his hand on my arm. “No,” he said. “Not ‘how did you become a writer’. What made you a writer?”

It was, I thought, one of the most profound questions I’d ever been asked at a social function. I took the question home with me, pondering it, turning it over and over like a lovely caramel in my mouth. Did I become a writer, I wondered, when I began my primary-school business of selling rude poems about our teachers to my schoolmates? Or was it before then, when I first fell in love with books and words? I remembered then all those moments as a child when I loved nothing better than to watch people. Tucked away quietly, listening to what they said and to what they didn’t say. Watching, watching, watching. It’s this watching and attending – the need to read the subtext – that made me a writer.

Knowing that, remembering that, now keeps me mindful of where to look for my own creative nourishment.

Dani Shapiro in Still Writing talks of her experience as a child in a house of tension, the way she became attuned to nuance. This, she feels, is what made her a writer.

The great Diana Athill wrote about spending her 20s and 30s beset by disappointment after being wounded in romance. And all of a sudden, “in the early 1960s nine stories “happened” to me. I say “happened” because I did not decide to write them, but suddenly felt a peculiar sort of itch, which produced them.” But the itch, although buried, was there all along, born from her woundedness and her hope.

And so, I invite you today to consider this same question.

What made you a writer?
Not how you began writing. Or when you began. Or when you hope to begin.

What made you? What led you here?

Connect with the origins of your creativity. It will remind you of what you value and it will become your guide.

I am known for having a very poor sense of direction. You know when people say, “You can’t possibly get lost on that route?” I take some pride in being the person who absolutely can get lost on that route.

Once, I got lost on a canal.

Sometimes, my lack of direction is limiting. And I spent many years judging myself mightily for the failing it represents. I’ve also learned that it can be a gift, leading me to unexpected places and new people. Recently, I spent some time in a Spanish coastal city. One of my great pleasures was to wander the streets of the old town with no idea of where I was going. It led me to a hidden hammam on the edge of that quarter, to a tiny antiquarian bookstore with a copy of Don Quixote from 1780 safely behind glass, and to the best anchoas del cantábrico I have ever tasted.

Sometimes, we have to get lost a little in order to be surprised. And sometimes, loss creeps up on us, uninvited, making us lose our bearings.

In 2022 the musician Nick Cave and the actor Brad Pitt exhibited a series of sculptural works alongside works by the artist Thomas Houseago. Cave and Pitt had both spoken of being lost, unsure of how to find their way back to themselves, or to creative fulfilment. A series of meetings led them to each other, and to Houseago, and to new forms, new art, new discoveries. Pitt and Cave are often referred to as the greatest artists of their generation in their respective disciplines, which, as we know, isn’t sculpture. Yet in order to find some new energy, some new life, new solace – they each had to lose what they knew.

They had to become novices. Had to lose their way a little.

What would happen to you, if you let go of what you know about your own creativity? If you let yourself be a little lost?

What else might be waiting for you? What magnificent discoveries are lurking down those other avenues, the ones you’ve never explored?

Today, try to ‘un-know.’ Try to let go of your own excellence and become a lost novice, an ingenue.

If fiction has been the thing you love to make, try to write a scene of a play. Or a haiku. If poetry is your thing, the thing you believe is your art – try a story, or a memoir-essay, or an outline for a sitcom. Surprise yourself by changing the form or the rules.

Take it further if you can, by stepping away from the pen.

Play with some clay.

Or get a canvas, acrylics and brushes from your local art store (or your local dollar store), put some music on and start messing with paint. In fact, make the music yourself – get that guitar out and see what sounds you can make. Or the kazoo. Or coconuts.
Choreograph a dance.
Make some puppets….

What if what you think you know about yourself as an artist isn’t the whole truth?
Let yourself be lost today. Because then you can find what else, and who else, you are.

Long before Alan Garner was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, he wrote novels which informed the imaginations of a generation of British children. And after The Owl Service and the Weirdstone of Brisingamen were published, Garner wrote other books. While he wrote, he collected ideas – notes, clippings from newspapers, images. He kept many of them in a box which he stored in his shed. One such clipping contained a story about the British convict, William Buckley. After a few years, he glanced at the clipping and began to think about the voice of this long-forgotten Cheshire man. More years passed. A decade or so later, he began to make some notes. Another decade passed, during which he wrote other books. Then, as he tells it, one afternoon he was in his shed looking for something else, and out tumbled these notes on William Buckley. Then, the novel took hold. The voice of this man, William Buckley, formed from the strange rituals of Cheshire villages, began to sound. Thirty years after that first clipping, Garner’s novel, Strandloper, was published to international acclaim.

Sometimes an idea arrives, fully formed, bursting with energy, ready to be written.
And sometimes an idea takes a while to come to the light.

Some ideas need to prove and rest and prove again, like bread. They lie in wait, until we are ready to write them.

Fury was like that, for me. I knew that I would write that story decades before I actually did write it. Every few years, I pulled out the journals I’d taken with me on board the Ocean Thief, and I attempted to find a shape for the story. It took decades before it – or I – was ready.

Or perhaps, the idea was quietly calling, and it took time for me to hear it.

Sometimes an idea doesn’t just lie in wait, but asks you to dig at it, revisit it, find its form.

In 1970, Margaret Atwood published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a poetry collection inspired by the writings of the English-Canadian settler who first reported the case of Grace Marks, a servant found guilty of murder. Four years later, Atwood dramatized the story of Marks as a radio play, The Servant Girl. Even then, she didn’t feel done with Grace’s story. It nagged at her. What if she’d misunderstood? What if she’d got it wrong in her telling? Every so often, she returned to the story, researching, wondering. After twenty years, she changed her mind about Grace Marks, and so she came once more to the story, to create the novel Alias Grace.

All of which is to say simply this: if you have some ideas you’ve buried, forgive yourself. If you have ideas that have been slow to rise, forgive yourself. Forgive, and look again.

Is there anything hiding in plain sight, waiting for you to return to it?

Is there a story whose time has come?

I wonder if you could take some time today to revisit and harvest some of your own creative DNA by looking at your own ideas.

Some examples of what I mean by ideas: a woman is stuck alone on a space station; something inspired by Bram Stoker; a couple meeting on a train; story about a woman recovering from the loss of her family; world in which only the physically beautiful can rule; something about that man I saw in the square, the way he talked to his imaginary dog… Those ideas – that little magic spark – might come from a situation, a character, a setting.

It might be a fleeting thought, a ‘what would it be like to be that young doctor on the plane asked to step up and help that dying man?’ – or it might be born of a long obsession.

Spend some time calling up at least three ideas you had more than a year ago that you haven’t yet written – as many as you can think of.

Then jot down up to three ideas that you’ve had within the last year that you haven’t explored yet.

Write down the titles of up to three books, plays or movies that made you think, ‘I wish I’d had that idea.’

Do you see any themes or connections between these ideas?

 Do you notice any patterns in how you find your ideas? Or in the territory that attracts you?

When you look again, with the light of curiosity and compassion, at some of those abandoned ideas, does anything new spark?

Coax your ideas to the light. Wait for them. Because they are there, somewhere, waiting for you. If you can offer them compassion, perhaps they’ll unfurl.

My father was a horse breeder and breaker. Riding was to him as natural as walking. I was the fifth child, the youngest by far, so by the time I came along my father’s bones were already beginning to wear. But when I was very young, we would drive to Stroud to watch him ride in the rodeo. And every time the bronco threw him, he got straight back up. The one time he walked from the ring was the last time I saw him ride rodeo. “You always get back on the horse,” he said.

Horse-riding was not my natural mode. When Penny, my pony, threw me, I wailed and refused to get back in the saddle. My father said, “If you don’t get back on now, you never will.” I did get back on, but I did not stop crying. And though I never became a good rider, I am not afraid of horses.

If you’ve read The Breaking, you’ll have a sense that my father’s lessons came at great cost. But this one is so foundational that it is almost a cliché. We all have some version of it: horses, wagons, surfboards, boats. To be thrown is to face the challenge of remounting.

In the case of my rodeo-riding, horse-breaking father, this message was delivered as indictment. A tough guy always gets back up, a tough guy doesn’t care, doesn’t feel, and never gives up.

I don’t remember how often I did get back on the physical horse. But it seems to me that the exhortation to get back up doesn’t have to be about stern judgement. Rather, it can be about absolute compassion and positive expectation. It can say: I know you can do this.

Getting back on the horse, or the wagon, or the boat, or whatever metaphor is the one that works for you, is an action that has compassion at its heart. It acknowledges that this moment, this day, is its own self. The one that preceded it is gone.

I had a brief stint as a stand-up comedian (by which I mean, I did some gigs and then I realised that I did not like stand-up comedy). But in that brief period between being an actor and becoming a playwright, I received some brilliant advice.

In stand-up, unless you are Hannah Gadsby post-Nanette, it is common to appear on bills with other comedians, performing one after the other. One night, I was about to go on after a truly brilliant comedian who had absolutely smashed it. As she finished her set, I muttered ‘oh, that’s a hard act to follow’ to another comic waiting in the wings. He shook his head and said, ‘Once she leaves, the stage is empty. You’re not stepping into her spot. You’re stepping into an empty place which is waiting for you. Remember it’s always a new stage.”

It was a profoundly useful reflection, one which I’ve used many times over the years. Didn’t show up for your writing yesterday or last week? Remember, it’s a new stage. Empty, clean, waiting just for you.

If you’ve ever tried to give up smoking or any other addictive habit, you’ll know that it takes more than one attempt. You stop, start, stop and start – the success is in your willingness to try again.

In other words, it’s in your willingness to believe your own internal voice when you say: I’ll try again. To meet that new attempt not with scoffing (‘sure, you said you’d write every day, and you haven’t written for a week… that’s what you’re like’) but with loving-kindness, compassion and expectation.

You might have fallen out of practice for a day or two. You might have had a tricky week. It’s okay. Your story is there waiting for you.

Give yourself permission to fall off the horse. And give yourself permission to get back on it. Because you can do this.