As a writer you have to get a balance between writing, reading and research. When I committed last year to #ayearofwriting this meant that I sometimes spent much of my time reading and writing (yes, you can class reading as research) but sometimes this meant that I was often left in the air unable to get back down, like a dirty trick that kids do to each other on a seesaw. You remember those games? You’d be sat at one end and as you went up another person would pile on the end that hit the ground so that you were stuck up in the air, holding on for grim death because that drop as a kid seemed endless. Sometimes writing can feel like that. Speaking recently with Simon Crump, the novelist, I asked about craft books and we discussed how we both wrote. We had similarities in how…