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In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people's lives present themselves.

There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.

The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.

I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.

It has gone past me now, the writing phase.

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.

It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.