For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to write. Writing makes me feel at one peaceful and alive; it feeds a raw need. I need to sleep, I need to eat and drink, I need to be with my family, I need to be connected to nature – and I need to write.

For many years, while I was raising my children, I did not worry about meeting the need I knew existed deep down inside. Their needs mattered much more, and there was the sense that while I needed to write, I wasn’t quite ready to do so. But then, once my children left home and I had the space and time in which to write, I faced a free choice: to write, or not to write?

To write!you may think is the simple answer. Writing is not remotely simple, however. I refer not to the arduous nature of the writing process; that would never deter me (indeed, I love to toil on a manuscript). I refer to the fact that writing is all-consuming. I knew, even before I began writing my debut novel Burning Embers, that to do so would be to open a door inside that I could never again close.

Recently, the Telegraph newspaper reprinted its last interview with the Booker Prize-winning novelist Anita Brookner, who passed away this month. ‘I think most writers are monomaniacs; they just go on,’ she said. That word, monomaniac, really struck a chord for me. A monomaniac has an obsessive zeal for a single thing. Yes, that is writers: consumed by putting words onto paper.

Reading the interview, I was struck by how important the process of writing was for Anita Brookner: it was the process, the act of writing, that mattered; not the resulting book and its reception by readers and critics:

‘It is actually quite a dynamic process, and very absorbing when you’re doing it. But when you’ve done it, you’re rather disgusted.’  Disgusted?  ‘Yes. Because it’s all over, and you must do it all over again.’  So no feelings of exhilaration?  ‘Oh no. Far from it. When it’s over, it’s over.  I mean, I can’t remember my books. I can’t even remember the names. They’re so finished.’  I ask her about her public reputation.

She says she knows absolutely nothing about it.  How attached then are you to the idea of Anita Brookner, novelist?  ‘Oh, not at all.’  So you put your books in a bottle and throw them into the ocean, and that’s it?  ‘That’s right.’ She gives a slight smile. ‘Still looking for justice.’  Criticism?  ‘Mostly ill-founded – with a sneer behind it. Take it or leave it.’  Praise?  ‘Irrelevant. It’s the process. Always the process.’

Did the lack of exhilaration surprise you? The word ‘disgust’ jar? Certainly, I reacted to this part of the interview; I am far more attached to my own books once published than Brookner apparently was. But I understand entirely her perspective, and I respect it. To be this consumed by the art of writing, to the exclusion of anything beyond the pen on the paper (or in my case, the cursor on the screen): there is something Zen-like about it; something beautiful and important – and also, something incredibly difficult.

The writer Ernest Hemingway famously said, ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’That is the honest truth of writing. The way it consumes you is at once wonderful and wrenching.

I knew all this about writing before I began to write my own fiction; I knew it on an innate level. All writers understand the cost of writing, I think, along with the gifts it brings. Fear can hold a writer back for years – forever; not so much the fear of failure, but the fear of being consumed. I am reminded of Marianne Williamson’s quote:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

With this in mind, one gloriously sunny day, I opened the door – and I sat in my garden and I wrote:

Coral Sinclair was twenty-five, and this should have been her wedding night. Instead, she watched a full moon sweep the Indian Ocean with silvery beams as a silent ship carried her through the night, its path untroubled by the rolling swell. It was misty, the air was fresh, and a soft breeze blew through her flowing blond hair. A solitary passenger on deck, outlined by a strapless, white-silk evening dress, she stood upright and still, her slender fingers clenching the rail, her voile scarf floating behind.

Those words I would add to, day after day, until eventually I had created:

When I hold Burning Embers in my hands today, feeling the smooth cover, smelling the inky pages, I hold evidence of the validity of the author’s need to create, of allowing the writing process to consume me. Of course, however, the evidence is not sufficient. I need more, always more. To write or not to write? To write. To write. To write.