The human qualities you need to write, and finish, a book. Or any major project, in fact.

Yesterday I lay on the lawn at a friend’s house, pressing my face whole body into the short, sweet grass, and tried to imagine myself melting into the earth. The earth smelt of sunshine and high summer, as bumblebees droned in the lavender and roses tangled around the garden. For about three months I have been moving very fast, my life a tangle of both packing boxes, and stacks of printed out pages, both of which have needed my constant attention.

The boxes contained my life, the clothes and books, ornaments, make-up, saucepans and plates, which have moved with me between England and America and back to England, and the pages were my book, which has been with me, all the time, everyday, in some way or another, for the last three years. The boxes of stuff need more work; I think they are all done, then I stumble across a new stash of them, in a bathroom, under a table, in the far room, which I avoid as much as possible. The process of unpacking seems unending and I am tired by it. Perhaps it is, since the process of making a home is ongoing, which is a better, more creative thought.

But the book? Well, on Wednesday, I pressed send and submitted that book to my editor. The book is finished. It’s no longer really mine, although there is a copy edit underway, where it will be checked and rechecked for spellings, accuracies and repetition, which I will obviously see, but my substantial work on it is over. Knowing it’s gone from my hands is a strange, liberating, sad and weird feeling. I have been working on that book since we moved to America, three years ago. But I’ve actually been thinking about the real meat and substance of it, for much longer - at least five years. I am proud of it, and slightly astonished by the process of writing it, too. It goes further than any book I have written, is more revealing, in every kind of way, and creatively demanded more from me than any of the four books that came before it. And it’s taught me a lot, too, about the qualities needed to finish a book. And those qualities can probably be applied to any major creative project in life. So, this is what I’ve learned, thought five books.