I am in the middle of editing a picture book. As I laid the scenes out yesterday and looked at the shape of the story, I realised that I needed to pull the whole thing apart. I began separating out the spreads, re-setting the text, cutting and pasting and movings things around – and then I saw the holes appear.

It’s tempting to give in to panic when I’m at this stage of writing – I nearly always convince myself that the whole thing needs to be ripped up and thrown out, that it’s rubbish, that I’m rubbish. And what was I thinking, starting this idea in the first place?

It doesn’t matter how long or short the project is. A picture book can take just as long to fix as a novel. I’ve got a picture book in production now which I first wrote in 2015. The editing was only just finished in 2021 because of the glorious dance that is involved in picture-book writing once a designer and an illustrator are on board: the pictures always end up doing a huge amount of the storytelling, and so I must cut my words again and again until the balance between image and text is just right.

While I was unpicking the current project I found myself thinking about my grandmother and how similar her job as a seamstress was to my job as a writer. Grandma made all her own clothes as well as those of her children and her grandchildren. Some she made from patterns she bought in the department store in the nearby town. Others she made by pulling apart old clothes, either to reuse the fabric and fashion it into something new, or to see how she had made the old item so that she could copy it in a new fabric. Either way, she started with a lot of odd-shaped pieces which, laid out on her dining room table, looked like nothing less than a very complex jigsaw to the eight-year-old me.

And so it is with writing – for me, at least. I start by rummaging in my brain for an assortment of off-cuts – snatches of conversation, a face, a place, the germ of a narrative – and then I begin stitching a few of them together to see how they’ll shape up. After a few days I normally have an idea of the overall pattern. There are some holes and there are a few pieces which might not look right when stitched together. But if I keep going long enough, I usually find I have something approximating a finished text. And then I sit back and take a long hard look at it – and pull the thing apart.

I could not bother with this unpicking and restitching and just send my agent a patchwork object, telling her, ‘It could be a short story, or a picture book or even the first few chapters of a novel. I’m not sure.’ But that wouldn’t be much use to her. She wouldn’t know what to do with it, just as I wouldn’t have known what to do with an old coat with an arm missing or a pair of trousers with a hole in the seat. But in the pulling apart and the laying out of shapes and the rejecting of tired bits of worn-out old cliché or chunks of jarring dialogue and clunky turns of phrase, I can refine the overall shape. And hopefully, I’ll end up with something that hangs together well enough to convince my agent I have written a story that will sell. Maybe some readers will even think it’s worth handing down when they’ve finished with it, just as I am still wearing clothes that my grandmother made.