If ever I get stuck or ‘lost for words’ there are a number of books that I turn to that never fail to inspire me and have me heading for the keyboard. I’d like to share them with you now.

1. OK, so everyone knows about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, don’t they? This 10 week course will get you writing every day, for just ten minutes and will not only get your writing back on track, but will get the skeletons in your closet nicely aired too!
2. Stephen King’s On Writing is about his return to health after this famous Sci Fi author was hit by a car. It talks about how he got his own writing back on track. He is frank at all times and pulls no punches. Just as I was having a lovely old procrastinate, telling myself I’d write my novel after I’d got a new laptop, created a ‘writing corner’ and bought a new chair in which to sit, I read about King’s own experience of this and how, in the end, where he sat made no difference at all. All that mattered was that he just did it. He wrote.
3. I guess Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg was the first book on writing I ever read. It’s about writing anywhere, writing what is in your head, and giving yourself permission to ‘just go’ with the pen. This is the perfect limbering up book for writers.
4. I am ashamed to say that it took me 20 years as a writer before I found the work of Anne Lamott. Her Bird by Bird is a fabulous journey inside the mind of someone who makes her living as a writer. It teaches you, pretty much, as King explains, to cut the excuses and just write. But more than that, it explains how you just need to write in little chunks, just as you would if you were writing a book on birds, cover one bird at a time. Liberating stuff.
5. And the other one, Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, was written in the 50s and it’s another book that aims below the belt and gets me going again. In it she suggests that if you tell yourself that you will, say, write a page a day, or ten minutes a day, and then you fail to turn up, that clearly your desire to fail is greater than your desire to succeed. Boy, did that one get me back to the keyboard.

I hope these five inspire you. Further, I hope  you promise yourself to add every single one of them to your wish list!

We all have a book inside of us, but for so many, time, money and a general lack of understanding of the publishing industry stops us from even starting the process.

Back in 1998 when I left England and started my journey around the world, I promised my 92-year-old grandma I would write letters to her every 2 weeks.  The next time she saw me was in 2001 when I came back for a visit.  She presented me with a suitcase full of my letters and postcards and told me “now write that book” Read the full story