We’ve lost the cheque. We’ll find it and pop it in the mail.’ The cheque’s in the mail? Yeah. It didn’t arrive for weeks.

I got to work. Took a two-term leave of absence from my job and settled to write. A full-time writer! Well, for eight or nine months, anyway. I didn’t waste any time. In the time that I had, I wrote three novels for eleven- to thirteen-year-olds: Possum Perkins, My Summer of the Lions and Shooting Through. A quarter-century later and two of the three are still in print. I am happy with that.

I was really given no option other than to write. Once, twice, occasionally more often than that, after school had closed for the day, two small boys would materialize at my front gate or would venture into the garden. Six or seven years old, pupils from my school whom I knew well, indeed had enrolled them as five-year-olds. If I was unwise enough to be sitting out on the verandah enjoying an afternoon cuppa, they would call out, ‘How many words have you writ today?’ Always rather accusingly and certainly seriously. Without a shadow of doubt I knew that I would have writ far more in half a day than either of them would have read in a week!

How many words have you writ today?

All of my books, everything I have ever written, begins life as a tiny speck, a grain of thought in my mind. A glimmer of something, no more than that. Then it gathers substance. Something like a snowball starting off small and rolling down a snowy slope gathering other flakes of snow to it as it travels. Or—another woolly analogy—maybe the gradual rolling of a ball of wool from a skein of the stuff.

Again, like all of my stories, Possum Perkins was fully worked out, held in my mind—the beginning, the middle and through to the end—before I ever committed one word to paper. I know my story fully, the back story, the lot. All the characters. What they look like and, more importantly, how they sound. Relationships, one with another, relationships with time and place. The only notes I ever make are mental. I have never kept a notebook for jotting down bits and pieces or ‘bright’ ideas.

Back then, of course, in the mid-1980s, before the common use of computers, all of my manuscripts were handwritten. These days, at least, I don’t have the struggle of having to decipher my almost indecipherable handwriting! The scratchings out, the scribbled inserts, the arrows indicating other bits up the top, down the bottom, in the margins, sometimes even back to the page before…Oh yes, a computer screen has much to recommend it.

The writing process itself is always done at speed, building from, at first, a meagre thousand words a day, and then gathering momentum to three, four, five thousand words a day…No five-day working week. When I work on a book it has to be every day, seven days a week. Miss a day and it seems to take at least three more to get back into the thing. To think back into the thing. Flat out for two or three weeks until that first rough draft sits there, complete. Well, not complete. That’s just the first stage.