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It had been a busy few months for me what with the publication of a few poems and my first collection of short stories. Everything had been received fairly well by the commentators and critics who cared about such things, but I knew there was still work to do to establish my name properly. Not that I cared much for becoming an established name per se - but I was aware that a career as a writer would only ever be viable if my writing sold, and it was only going to sell if my name was well known enough to appeal to as wide a public as possible. My fledgling career as a writer, my agent told me, was just beginning, and needed to be sustained with a steady stream of writing that would, in turn, sustain the momentum that ‘we’ were building. It had been - and continued to be - a struggle to find anyone willing to publish my work. My agent insisted before that first break that it was just a matter of patience and time, that, eventually, some publication would take a chance on me, and after that, everything would begin to fall into place with greater speed. But following release of the stories, and seeing the poems printed in ink, the appetite for my work seemed to diminish contrary to my agent’s promise - despite still being relatively productive.

So with interest waning, I decided to go away for the summer, extricate myself from the funk of rejection, and instead focus properly on writing. Not that I hadn’t been doing so before, but I had a feeling that a change of scenery would be conducive to improving the quality of my writing. A romantic notion, probably. A novella, I felt, was a suitable challenge to focus on for the short period I would be away from home. Away from my common surroundings I believed that I would be better able to concentrate my efforts and come up with a stricter regime than usual - and such discipline would then enable me to produce something worthwhile.

I decided on two weeks in two places: Paris and then south to Pau. I didn’t want to go somewhere remote where I would be alone. Rather, I wanted some place where I could work anonymously, but that would be busy enough to keep me grounded, and offer some sort of veil of anonymity. A place where I could go for a walk and be amongst people. The two places, I hoped, would give me some inspiration, and splitting my time equally between the two gave me a sense of structure that I knew would enable me to work more productively. In Paris, I could lay the foundations. In Pau, I would perhaps finish the first draft.

Prior to leaving, it was around this time that I was becoming more and more desperate for a proper method of working. There was a growing feeling within me that I tossed about in the evening that there must be some kind of secret to becoming a writer - and all I needed to do was to learn the system or series of tricks, and then - and only then - would I be able to better function. I was curious to figure out a methodology that would enable compositions to flow from me like a waterfall. But I was like an energetic bird flitting from branch to branch in search of the best berries to take. For a stretch, it seemed like writing in the morning was the best time - then, contrarily, weeks later, in the evening. Writing without food, then with food; while drinking water, then drinking lager, then drinking coffee. Then drinking nothing at all. The notion of becoming intentionally dehydrated flickered briefly. Through this period there was a belief that success as a writer depended upon a specific set of rules which, if I was only able to discover and follow, success would flow unbidden. But what were these rules? The search, I soon realised, was probably a task for Sisyphus or for the Holy Grail. But it took time to appreciate this.

Ultimately, the best idea I had was to follow a routine and to take a rigid and disciplined approach to composition - and also to life around composition. If I was to become a writer, I not only had to write, it was necessary to read, to listen, to sleep properly, to exercise the mind and body appropriately - but all things needed to follow a routine of sorts, otherwise everything would fray into an untidy mess - including my efforts with words.

In Paris, I stayed in an apartment near the Gare de Lyon. I had taken the Eurostar from St Pancras and from Gare du Nord, the Metro to Gare de Lyon. I spent my mornings visiting the station because I liked looking at the flickering boards that displayed the arrivals and departures. Seeing European place names just a train journey away excited feelings within me and transported me to exotic cities that seemed so suddenly accessible - contrary to how they felt over the channel, where the cities on the continent seemed so distant. Back there, everything seems so far away.