Write a novel: it's on many people's bucket lists, but how does one even begin such a mammoth task? How long does it really take and how many rejections do you face before someone is willing to speak to you? How is it even possible when you work a nine to five?
Authors often relay retrospectively rose-tinted versions of their own processes and provide us with vague advice such as 'just write,' when what we really want to know is if it's normal to spend hours crying over a laptop or if it should just flow like water, out of us.
Freelance journalist and published author, Harriet Reuter Hapgood's debut novel, The Square Root of Summer, entered a bidding war last year and will be released on 5 May. Here, she talks us through the real process of writing her first book, from pulling all-nighters, to suffering panic attacks in public.
