The first question I asked myself when I sat down, armed with a laptop and a half-baked idea, wasn’t “What is the meaning beneath the plot?” Neither was it “Where does the boundary of my newly invented world lie?” Instead, it was “What is that small, horizontal line?” Shortly followed by “Where do I put that thing with a full stop on top and a comma at the bottom?” Hours had passed. No words had appeared. Nothing to see, save for the metronomic flash of the cursor. When I went to bed that night, thoroughly dismayed, I opened a paperback and began to really look at the markings on the paper. I may as well have been staring at hieroglyphs.

That’s right: I didn’t know how to use a dash or a semicolon. I didn’t even know their names. Perhaps I did, once upon a time, before I spent twelve years and counting slogging it out in the corporate world, my writing restricted to stuffy emails and reports capable of soothing even the most hardened insomniac.

So, before I could transport myself behind the eyes of the imaginary people I’d created, I bought a style guide and tried to teach myself how to actually write. I spent hours researching the rules of grammar, before I realised I was sucking the fun out of it. And writing was supposed to be fun.

Away went the style guide. If I used a dash in the wrong place, would someone call the Punctuation Police? I think not. On I went until, 120,000 words later, I had what some might call a “manuscript”. This draft—now in its fourth iteration—is rough, raw, and laden with plot holes. Of course, I want it to be better, and I’d love for someone to read it and say, “Hey, this isn’t so bad”, but if that never happens, I wouldn’t care too much. The thing is, those words brought me so much more than praise, plaudits, or pounds. They made me fall in love with writing again.

The thing about diving straight into writing a novel when you haven’t written much else is that you’re squeezing every last droplet from an idea you genuinely believe in. Why not give it a shot? Who knows what will happen along the way? You might encounter some unexpected characters, or stumble across places that inspire you to tell more stories. You may even find the voice you’d lost—or feared you never had. If nothing else, writing might just brighten your day.

While it can feel like you’re building a house without the knowledge or tools, every brick signals progress. Each row should be celebrated: before, there was nothing; now, you may peer out from your roofless, wonky structure at your literary neighbours with their annexes and extensions, but that doesn’t matter. The beauty of building your own house is this: you don’t have to invite anyone in until you’re good and ready. You built it, alone, with nothing but an idea and hard work, and for now, it’s all yours.