Recently, I returned home from a dreary winter spent in rural France. For three months I was alone, living in a 200-year-old farm house with a creepy cellar and an even creepier well in the back garden, the nearest shop over an hour’s walk away. My plan was to write a draft of my third novel.

This was not an unachievable goal. I was ostensibly trapped and had little else to do. I wrote, yes, but progress was slow, my word count unimpressive. Entire days passed where I didn’t open my laptop, despite waking up with enthusiasm to write. For a while I felt bad about my lack of self-discipline, my inability to commit to a rigorous writing routine. I’d been given the rare gift of space and time and was wasting the opportunity. I had arrived in France with the lofty idea that the way my mind worked would magically transform, but no. If I’d taken the time to revisit how I wrote Feast, perhaps I would have saved myself the guilt and frustration, neither of which are conducive to creativity.

I’ve never felt compelled to seek out the writing routines of novelists. This is because a writer’s craft, rather than their process, is far more interesting to me, but there is also a degree of ego to my apathy. When I hear a novelist say they write consistently every day, committing themselves to a number of hours work or a rigid, daily word count, it makes me feel unserious, uncommitted, lazy.

There’s no right or wrong way to write a novel. The process of writing Feast showed me that an unruly, undisciplined approach is as good as any other.