The Heart at War is nearing completion. It's an exciting time, and I'm looking forward to sharing my final draft with my editors, Janice and Amy, very soon. Even more so, I'm looking forward to being able to share the book with readers in the not-too-distant future. I have been working on The Last Descendants for a very long time - almost ten years in fact - and it's strange to realise that I'm nearing the end of an era in my writing life!

I thought I would update you on how the work on the draft has been going. At the moment, I am redrafting a few chapters, and editing carefully to make sure that all the threads of the story (and the trilogy) make sense and reach a meaningful conclusion. I have been rereading The Eyes of a King and Voices in the Dark. This might sound like a strange thing to be doing, given that I know them well enough to still remember whole sections off by heart! But at a certain stage in the redrafting process it becomes quite crucial to see your work from a reader's point of view. I want to make sure the conclusion of the trilogy is truthful to the start, and it helps to read the books all the way through like this.

I have recently been using a program called Scrivener to pull the draft together. It's a kind of virtual writing studio, which lets you link your synopsis, displayed on index cards, to the various different parts of your draft. Really, it's a much more sophisticated version of what I would normally create for myself on any available walls using post-it notes, A3 mindmaps, scribbled synopses and blu-tack! For the final book in a trilogy, the organisation of the story is extremely important and becomes very complex -- I've found that it's just too much to hold in your head over the whole length of the project. So using a computer program to put it all together helps me to make sure the shape of the story makes sense (this is one of the reasons my desk looks surprisingly bare at the moment).

I'm very grateful to all those readers who have waited so patiently for The Heart at War -- this quick update is just to reassure you that if all goes to plan, the end of the writing process is in sight and the book will soon begin the publication process. Over the next few weeks I've made the time to work several very long days on the book. This is important, I think, towards the end of a project, if you're going to get the space you need to check that the story holds together and has a proper coherence, a life of its own, before sending it out into the world. I'm going to see how far I can get during that time, and I'll update you with my progress as often as I can. But mostly it will involve lots of tea, concentration and writing!

Virginia Woolf said that 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'. She worked in this room:

You can visit it as part of the museum at her old country home, Monk's House. In fact, there seems to be a bit of a fascination with the places where authors work. If you want to, you can also go and see Charles Dickens', Jane Austen's or Leo Tolstoy's desk, which have all been carefully preserved (the last one with a glass box over it to protect his papers and notebooks exactly as they were, or might have been, when he was living).

We're curious about modern writers' workspaces too. A few years ago, the Guardian ran a series of 'portraits of the spaces where writers create' called Writers' Rooms. Each week, a photo of a different room was featured, with the writer's thoughts about what the space meant to them. Writers are an inventive group of people, and their rooms are no exception -- it's interesting to see how much importance they place on the furniture, the pictures on the walls, the view out of the window (lots of them seem to work in attics). For some of them, you sense that the room itself has been constructed with the kind of attention to detail they put into their work, almost superstitiously, in the hopes that it will be an ideal home for creativity.

I'm sometimes asked for a photo or a description of where I work. Mostly, I write wherever I can find the time and space; I've never had a writing room, and that suits me fine. But six months ago, I moved to a new flat in Durham, which had this store room:

And here's how it looks now:

A writing space. It's very simple compared to most of the writers' rooms featured in the Guardian, but this room has everything I need, and most of the things you can see in Virginia Woolf's room too: a desk, a window for some natural light, a lamp for when it gets darker. I think she would approve...

As an author still close to the start of my career, one of the first questions people ask me is: Which writers inspire you? I tend to list those writers who have written books that I admire enough to have read them several times, which makes my list seem rather eccentric: George Eliot, Vikram Seth, Raymond Carver, Thomas Hardy, Anne Tyler, Boris Pasternak, Tobias Wolff, Romain Gary, Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare, Thomas Malory, Lawrence Sterne, James Joyce, Jerome K. Jerome, J.D. Salinger.

The list always surprises people, and so does my answer to the follow-up question: Who is your favourite writer? Because my favourite writer isn't a pioneer of realism or young adult literature or speculative fiction. He isn't even a novelist. My favourite writer is this man, poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, who last week celebrated his 83rd birthday:

I first read Walcott's poem 'The Harbour' in school when I was seventeen -- about the same age Walcott was when he wrote it. At university, I wrote a dissertation about him, which involved reading more or less everything he's ever written. It took a long time; his career spans sixty years. Walcott grew up in St Lucia in the Caribbean, and had large ambitions. He wanted to be an artist, a kind of master painter who could put the island and its colonial past on the map. Later, he turned to writing, and has achieved more or less the same thing. He won the Nobel prize in 1992 and his speech was a beautiful description of the ways in which love (or writing) can put together what is broken in human experience:

At 81, he published his latest collection, White Egrets, and promptly won the T.S. Eliot prize for it. He is quite a celebrity, but in a recent interview he said: 'I hope that what I write is superior to whatever bullshit it is that I do.' What a legend.

So what connection do I feel, a 23-year-old who has only left Europe once, with the writing of an 83-year-old poet whose work is praised for capturing the sea and the land and the people of St Lucia, and in particular the aftermath of the colonial experience? What has Walcott taught me about writing? Well, not much it might seem. I didn't read his poems and begin writing poetry, or save up for a flight to the Caribbean so I could put the sea and the hills and the ruined colonial buildings into my own words. That would have been as pointless as trying to recreate Middlemarch or The Catcher in the Rye. It wasn't that direct. Like all my favourite writers, Derek Walcott isn't someone whose work I try to imitate -- which probably explains why there aren't really any young adult authors or modern realist authors or alternate reality authors on the list. Those things probably come from my own way of seeing the world. I don't want to write with the same style as Derek Walcott, or about the same subjects. I'm more interested in writing with the same spirit. For sixty years, Walcott has written with an attention to detail, a love for the craft, which is as extreme and unwavering as a master painter's attention to the strokes on the canvas. In fact, I think that's something that all my favourite writers have in common, which is perhaps why a lot of them are thought of as 'poetic' or 'artistic' in the way they use language.

There is a classic piece of writing advice that goes something like this: writing about the particular, the mundane, the ordinary, leads something to emerge that crosses time and place and speaks to people on the other side of the world about things like love, like loss, like what it means to be human. Walcott taught me that if you pay enough attention to the words on the page, something bigger than the words emerges. It is difficult to explain this properly, though Walcott himself could probably do a good job of it. I guess what I mean is that Walcott's poetry is not really St Lucia, but the love the islander feels for the island, not really the hillside shack or the white pillared colonial house, but home and homesickness and homecoming. If you read Walcott's poems, they show you the bare light of the island, the way the sea looks after a storm, the sounds of poverty, the voices of the islanders, but they also tell you things like 'There is no sea as restless as my heart' or 'there are homecomings without home' or 'I have not loved those that I loved enough.' You don't have to have lived in St Lucia for 83 years yourself to understand.

I write this in gratitude then, to Mr Walcott and my other favourite writers both living and dead, not for teaching me what to write, but for teaching me how to write, in what spirit to begin work each morning; for teaching me that words are hard work but that words are also flight, that true writing captures the world at the same time that it blesses it, upholds it, transforms it.