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Asking myself, 'Is this any good?' is pointless. It just slows down my writing, and I can't tell anyway. It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

'In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.