Welcome to This Writing Life, Folding Rock’s new interview series where we take a peek into the lives and habits of our favourite writers – and ask them some questions submitted by you!

What was the first thing you did this morning? 

Cycled down to the beach at Portobello with my son. It’s one of my favourite places in Edinburgh, where I live – you can see all the way down the coast to North Berwick and across the Firth of Forth to the mountains in Fife.

Where are you right now? What can you see? 

In my study. I can see the books lining the wall in front of my desk, a print of a New Yorker cover satirising the US invasion of Afghanistan, a painting of a street in Venice by Hercules Brabazon Brabazon which was a present from my friend Roger, and a black and white photograph of William Gladstone, who was one my husband’s heroes. There’s a big window to my right through which I can see the tenement flats opposite, and in the distance, Calton Hill.

What are you working on at the moment? 

A new novel.

What are you reading at the moment? 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Tell us about a book that changed the course of your writing life 

When I was living in the US in the 1990s I came across an old Modern Library edition of the Selected Stories of Eudora Welty in a Chicago bookshop. I’d never thought of writing a short story, but the comedy and the pain, the precision and the lightness of touch in Welty’s stories made me want to try. 

Tell us about a moment that changed the course of your writing life 

Probably when my second collection of short stories won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2015. I’d been writing short stories for twenty years but this was the first time my work had won a big award – it drew the kind of attention and readership I’d never had before, and just as importantly, it gave me confidence.

What would your ideal day of writing look like? 

A day where I write something I really, really like. It might just be a line.

“I think you have to accept that perfection is impossible, and that this was how you told a particular story at a particular time in your life, and move on.”

What was the creative process for your latest novel, Clear? 

I never do much historical research until I’ve written the heart of a story – that all comes later – and Clear was no exception. What made Clear different from anything I’ve written before is that I wrote it ‘up and out’ of the Norn dictionary I stumbled across one afternoon in the National Library of Scotland. Norn is the now-extinct language spoken by Ivar, one of the main characters, and for ten years I kept going back to the 10,000 or so words in the dictionary until I could see him, moving through his days alone on his island, and began to sense that he was in some sort of danger.

Which piece of published writing are you most proud of?  

That’s such a hard question to answer. I’m always most excited by what I’m doing now, or have only just finished. The last thing I published was a magazine article about why there’s so much knitting in my novels. The piece is mostly about my mother, who died ten years ago, and I’m really happy I wrote it.

Which piece of published writing do you still want to edit? 

I’m never tempted to edit a story after it’s been published. I think you have to accept that perfection is impossible, and that this was how you told a particular story at a particular time in your life, and move on.

What’s the last thing you’ll do this evening? 

Read the next few pages of Heart of Darkness in bed on my kindle.