Something struck me the other day about writing. It’s different from most desk-job workflows. Massively so. Let me put it this way. A typical ‘office job’, certainly at the kind of planning-and-control (‘manager’) level that writers have when working, involves a complex daily schedule of appointments. Time is divided up typically into hourly brackets, each often with  a quite different task – a meeting, a report, review or whatever.

For a writer, though, an hour is just barely time to get limbered up – time runs in blocks of four or five hours or more. My own ‘writing days’ are typical: I’ll get going early, but it’s a couple of hours before I’ll write anything particularly meaningful. Once I’m in the ‘zone’, though, things flow – and I’ll quite often keep going irrespective, because if that flow’s broken for too long then I…