Having spent half my life obsessing over lists, plans, ‘what could go wrong’ notes and a small library of just-follow-your-dream books, I always thought about taking the time to read, write and make films properly. Full time, even just for a while. It always seemed fanciful, what other people did. Less successful people, less important people. Not me.

A number of things have changed my mind. One of the more notable was coming across a notebook, probably six or seven years old, in which I had scribbled film concepts and short story plots as a sixth-form student. The imagination, the variety, even the vocabulary was far better than anything I have developed over the past couple of years. I love my job and I have been incredibly privileged to have it, to travel with it, to learn through it, but as with many careers it leaves little room or mental energy for creativity.

In 2019 I will be leaving my current job, leaving my adopted home here in Paris, and for at least some of the year I will be focused full-time on creative ventures. I am absolutely terrified. I do not want to leave my profession behind, and I am already very excited at the prospect of returning to it once I have taken some creative time away. I look forward to learning how to balance all aspects of my life. There is no reason why focus on a non-artistic career should hinder creative endeavours. There is no reason anybody should be too tired to write, too stressed to read. When you are at home in all parts of your life, you are better in all parts of your life.

I am very grateful to be in a financial and professional position to be able to take ‘time off’, especially to spend on the (sometimes frighteningly expensive) pursuit of filmmaking. Many people are not so fortunate. If there is one thing we can do to make society a better place, it probably involves some collective re-focusing on what is important to us all. Our professional lives and what we can achieve as teams, groups, companies are incredibly important. So too are our creative outputs be they musical, artistic, theatrical, literary, as a photographer or a social media journalist, whether your audience is your family or friends or the masses. It wouldn’t be wise for me to say ‘quit your job and be an artist’; I neither believe that nor want to say it. Just take everything you want to do and be in life, and make sure that it all goes into defining you.

Sometimes it takes a hard reset to break old habits and allow you to forge new ones. That is what I am pursuing with this 100% creative interlude between lawyering. I want both roles to be a part of my life. I want to make some great work and return to the professional fold with new energy. A hard reset is just that – hard, scary, a breakdown of your ego. My mental health and I have had an interesting relationship over the past three years and with that I lost some of the energy that a younger me, the student that wrote a whole notebook of ideas in a summer, the ambitious lawyer on his first day, the guy who decided to move to France, once had. Now that I have taken the first leap I can already feel some of that energy returning. I’m really not preaching that everybody should do the same, just asking if the world could be patient while I try.

After a long, long time searching London for the perfect writing spot, I think I have found a favourite for the summer. Many cafés have been visited, many wines sipped in bars, many sharing platters sampled, from the quirky Alfie’s rooftop café on Church Street, to the sleek Hoxton in Holborn (confusingly), MaE in Marylebone, and in Villiers at Charing Cross. But they were all beaten by the members’ bar at Picturehouse Central (Piccadilly) with its delicious cocktails, three storeys of seating and views (including a glorious roof terrace), and the not insignificant benefit of seven cinema screens. I came across this hidden gem while seeing Lady Macbeth with Ashley this week as we caught up to discuss the editing process on The Beachcomber. And I’ve decided (much to the delight of my creative senses, and my wallet) to make it my version of Soho House for the summer months. Finally finding my writing spot also made me think more about the entire creative process, as I start work this week on a new novel – the first serious writing I have done in quite a while.

All good writing apparently starts with an idea. Certainly it is true that you need something to fasten on to, something to motivate you through what will undoubtedly be a long process. A single idea also suggests focus, and it is crucial to getting your work read that you can distil it into a single memorable line. However, there can be a danger in over-refining at the outset. I find writing extended fiction much harder if I have put too many hours into planning minute detail; bullet-point lists describing every moment of a scene can sap your energy, and leave you wondering why you even need to put pen to paper now the whole thing has been plotted out. Equally, short work – which often tries to capture the fleetingness or spontaneity of a single moment – can wither in the face of even the shortest of plans.

I think research is important, though I am not a subscriber to the school of thought that you should know every detail about every character in your story. As Aaron Sorkin teaches in his excellent Masterclass on screenwriting, you want to be well versed in the world that your characters inhabit, such that you can inhabit it too, but being able to describe what your protagonist ate for breakfast a decade previously is just too much. For my new book, I am trying to do ‘environment’ research: I’m speaking to doctors about the atmosphere of the hospitals they work in, I’m reading about amnesia, about loneliness and silence. How will that impact my writing style? I’m hoping it will provide a sense of reality without too much baggage – I want this to be an enjoyable, relatively light read, despite its dark moments. I am also midway through rewriting a poem about London, and that has plenty of space for me to get heady, emotional language out of my system.

Where you write is very important for some writers, not so much for others. One thing I admired about the stunningly beautiful Lady Macbeth was its choice of locations. Ashley noted that, though set in the suffocating antiquity of a manor house, the cinematography of Ari Wegner opens up the space, giving the characters room to breathe and live. Whether or not it is so easy to write a novel in such an atmospheric space is another question; personally, my choice of hideout has transitioned from tiny cafés of antique furniture, through commercial coffee chains, to gardens, and now I prefer bustling and modern settings, ideally with some music. I think there’s an interesting tension in both extremes: I was horribly spoiled in being able to write in the prim order of Oxford’s quads for three years, and the quiet does allow you to focus, but at the same time I quite like the way that writing in a busy environment forces you to connect with people, even if they can be distracting.

One thing that also intrigues me is the huge disparity in drafting timeframes between different writers. From those who take years on every story, to those who need to challenge themselves and write a draft in a month or so, and those who are different on every project – starting a novel feels like embarking on a bewildering and sometimes overwhelming journey at the beginning, and I wonder if that ever changes, even for those on their twentieth? Certainly on this project, I have set the remainder of the year as my window, while I juggle The Beachcomber, life as a city lawyer, and a variety of other endeavours as well.

Find out more about Picturehouse Central’s bar here. And I should note, this is not a sponsored post – it really is a writers’ paradise (and Lady Macbeth is truly amazing). Watch this space for novel news throughout the summer.

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On Lily’s recommendation I had the pleasure of watching Tamsin Greig in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night broadcast live from the National a couple of weeks ago. As I was walking to catch the tube home – oddly, from the sweaty but fantastically full cinema into which I’d crammed myself and towards the NT itself – I looked out across the Thames for a moment and realised that London can be brilliant.

London, particularly as the weather gets better throughout the spring, is a city built on bars and cafes. These serve up the lifeblood of a writer: caffeine and alcohol, and also people, characters. Nobody can deny the city is overwhelming at times: I currently work a stone’s throw from Leadenhall Market during the day and oftentimes London just feels like a grey meat-grinder or a grape press, searching for every last drop of energy you have and taking it away. In fact, it’s this side of London – something I see every morning on my backwards-commute from Canary Wharf into town – that is the driving force behind a poem I am writing about my home.

But the sense of never-quite-belonging created by this relentless town is food for the imagination. It’s the upshot of a scary gamble people make when they move from the countryside. In villages, you have everything: tight-knit communities and a steady regularity to the world, which brings you a safety net that allows you to focus on ideas. But creativity can become stale when its creator isn’t forced to change. The grind of London, on the other hand, won’t let you rest, won’t let you engage on your own terms, and that can encourage you to use writing, film, art, dance as a response to what the city hurls at you, and as an attempt to make your mark against its walls. And the city gives you so much material to work with. Some of it can be expensive, but always worthwhile (the National, the Royal Court, the Royal Opera House all show you treasures you will never forget) but an awful lot of it is free too: the British Museum, the Tate, the National Gallery, the parks, the myriad small galleries, antiques shops, bookshops, dance studios and theatre spaces around the city.

London definitely needs better public libraries, and that’s something I would urge our councils to focus on. I was lucky and grew up surrounded by writing, and then I was spoiled rotten in Oxford, a city built out of books. But everyone deserves a good library; they’re like a farm for the soul. But even while that’s being discussed, let’s not forget the wonders that we already have here. I’m looking forward to discovering new places to read and write of my own as we slowly roll into the summer.

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