THE AUTHOR'S GARDEN

I went to a proper author's garden today. It was exactly as I might have drawn it - charmingly scruffy, yet somehow still neat and interesting. There was an old bicycle, flowers trailing the quiet white walls of the house, and a pink flamingo watering can next to a bed of joyously colourful roses. There were a collection of bright, retro, wooden chairs, slightly chipped and battered, organised around the rough stones of an unweeded patio, and then, under a thick wooden frame of climbing green foliage, a very modern garden table, complete with wooden benches, where we sat in the shade with tea.

At the end of the garden, where the lawn was rounded by a bushy set of shrubs, there was a long wooden shed with glass doors - an office, I guessed, though I didn't ask. A leopard-like cat stalked its flat roof and turned to flash deep green eyes in my direction. It was all very peaceful.

We talked a lot about writing and publishing, me not really knowing a great deal about either, and certainly not about the delicate balance of the two that so often produces a 'book'. Like almost all the creative industries, 'publishing' seems to be saturated with an ocean of wannabes and only a handful of ships to pull them aboard. Publishers won't respond to cold-call submissions; they won't even reply. Sometimes I feel as though Generation Y collided with the X-Factor and produced a Z-list of dashed hopes and disappointed faces, bobbing around haplessly in the water.

Anyway, it's not all depressing. There might be ways to get things done, even if the writing is just writing for the sake of writing.

As we chatted in the author's delightful garden, I started to think it over. How old are we when we learn to write? By a fantastically young age, almost all of us have a grip on the only 26 letters ever needed, along with a vocabulary of thousands of English words! Writing seems almost a natural pursuit. By the age of 8 I was writing long tales of train robberies and space adventures; I still remember the feeling! I wasn't alone either - I expect we all did that.

In later life, writing becomes essential - first essays and exams, then emails, whiteboards, flipcharts, tweets, blog posts, text messages: we function on words and the thoughts expressed with them every day of our lives - we are all writers. And I think it's that reason that sometimes makes wannabe writers like myself look a bit deluded. We show a flourish, a turn of phrase, an imaginative way of describing something (I do this ALL the time) and we think we're Oscar Wilde. Or worse actually, others imagine we think we're Oscar Wilde.

"Writing," I said, very carefully in the garden of someone successful at it, "...is hard."

I was met by a surprisingly blank face. I don't think the author thought so. Perhaps you just have to sit in the shed and get on with it. Or perhaps to a few very fortunate people who've found their voice, it really isn't hard at all.

I'd like to be like that. I think if it came so naturally, so freely, so brilliantly, I might just spend more time sitting in a charming garden like that, tea steaming in a hot porcelain cup, thoughts of pretentiousness evaporating up into the delicate foliage of trailing roses.