I’d always planned to be a writer.  Obviously, it was completely impossible to write while holding down a job, raising children, doing the ironing and paying bills.  So, I had a wonderful – if vague – plan that, when I was retired and tastefully grey, wearing purple and that unbecoming red hat, I would sit at the window of my cottage overlooking the sea and craft words of stunning beauty.  I would also look remarkably like Dame Judy Dench.

For a long time I was quite content to wait for this peaceful writerly time to come to me.  Then, just over two years ago, I had my own personal annus horribilis to contend with. “They” say bad luck comes in threes.  Well, mine came in three groups of three, so maybe “they” are right.

At any rate, my poor brain struggled to cope with illnesses, accidents, deaths and enormous rows between family and outside forces.  The final straw did something it had never done to me before; it drove me to the computer.  I sat down and banged out a scene in which everyone who was driving me crazy died in horrible, ridiculous ways.  It reduced me to giggles.

I thought that was the end of it, but over the following days and weeks I kept returning to that ridiculous scene, until before I knew it I was crafting it into a story, then into a complete novel.  It wasn’t something I planned, but it was a compulsion like nothing I’ve ever felt before.  Whenever I wasn’t writing, the words were jumping in front of my eyes and demanding my attention; it was as though I was reading the completed story off the inside of my own eyelids.  Sometimes it felt like outright cheating, as though I hadn’t created these words myself at all.

In the real world when I wasn’t writing, I found it easier to cope with what was going on.  If someone was upsetting me, all I had to do was remember what I had caused to happen to a similar character in “my” world, and I would smile secretly to myself and rise above.

As time went on my writing helped me to gain some distance from real-world events.  My anger calmed, my frustrations evaporated and I became objective and philosophical.  I re-wrote the story, which had by now changed so much from the original angry piece as to be unrecognisable.  It had become a tale of hope.

After this, I stopped stopping myself from writing until I “had time”.  Now I just write.  Remarkably, I gain the most inspiration from the curveballs that life still throws at me from time to time, and I probably always will.

Writers advise you to write from what you know, and from life.  To that I add that to have lived means to have felt pain, and from pain comes a deeper knowledge of yourself.

And in that pain you’ll also find your writing voice.

You’ll find Jane here on Twitter – where she channels Jane Austen characters on a Friday, it’s very funny – and she blogs here.