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Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.

When I get started each day, I read through and correct the previous day's 2,000 words, then start on the next. As I reach that figure, I try to simply stop and not go on until reaching a natural break. If you just stop while you know what you're going to write next, it's easier to get going again the next day.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

It's the hardest thing in the world to dedicate to writing, but if you do that even once a week, after six months or a year you'll have something substantial.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.

I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.