A few years later I had another couple of goes at novels in the same tightly planned way. I even managed to write two of them. It was boring writing them and I knew it was boring reading them. In a half-hearted way I tried to find a publisher, but when no one wanted them I wasn’t surprised.

Then one day in my late twenties I lay on the bed of the shared house I was living in. I was reading The Letters of Jane Austen (possibly to find out if she wrote from chapter outlines) and listening to Mr Next-Door’s dog yapping through its hopeless afternoon. I came across the sentence, ‘In the night we invent a few hard names for the stars.’ Who knew what Jane Austen meant by it, but it set off a vivid image in my mind: that famous bag-lady, Bea Miles, who’d offered recitations from Shakespeare on the steps of the Mitchell Library and was famous for having once taken a taxi thousands of miles to the Nullarbor to pick wildflowers. For a time she’d lived in a stormwater drain in Rushcutter’s Bay Park. I imagined her in her drain, looking up at the stars and inventing hard names for them.

Without having any idea of where I was going, I wrote five or six pages by free association, using Austen’s words as a trigger. Reading them back, I realised I wanted to know more about Bea Miles. I knew the bare outline of her life, enough to have a question—what had happened to get her to the steps of the Mitchell Library offering recitations from Shakespeare? I realised that to write out of a question was as good as— perhaps better than—writing out of an answer.

To imagine a story for Bea Miles, I didn’t research and I didn’t do a chapter outline. I started work each day by glancing through some ‘interesting things’—more of those Jane Austen letters, bits of Shakespeare, the letters of Flaubert, old-fashioned household hints about how to keep the moths out of fur coats, photographs of schoolgirls from 1912 in big lace collars. I’d allow the bits to suggest something that might have happened to my bag-lady character—an event that involved putting furs away for the summer, a memory of herself in a big lace collar—and write without a plan, following thoughts and images into the unknown, until I ran out of steam. Then I’d plunge back into the ‘interesting bits’ until something else got me going.

The criterion was energy. If I felt energised in writing a fragment or a scene, I’d keep going. If it began to feel like a chore, I ruled a line under it in the exercise book and started again.

It had worked. I called the novel Lilian’s Story. It was satisfying to write, got published, and even won a prize.