So just before Christmas, the senior editor of a prestigious literary magazine rejected one of my stories but said he'd love to see more of my work. Hooray! Except it's a bit terrifying and naturally it had to coincide with a ton of marking landing on my desk, my elderly parents getting snowed in, and my elderly dog, who has degenerative myleopathy, going into a sharp decline that means he needs a lot of care in these last few weeks of his life.

Cue a lot of stress and even less sleep than usual (quite an achievement, given that insomnia is normal for me). I've also discovered that I can't write fiction to order in the sort of businesslike way I'd like. For me, stories are a sort of magic. I perform rituals of effort and despair, seemingly to no avail, and somehow eventually a story appears out of nowhere - usually an entirely different story to the one I thought I was writing.

It goes like this. I had two short rough drafts sitting on my hard drive, so obviously my cunning plan was to work up one or both of these into something good enough to send to Mr Senior Editor. So that's what I did. One was just the nub of a story, a powerful conclusion with no real beginning or middle. I wrote a beginning and a middle for it. Then I realised that what I now had were two stories tacked together and clunkily trying to relate to each other. Not good enough, not even close. I ditched the bits that belonged to the original rough draft and rewrote the new parts. The process was arduous. It felt forced and I hate forced writing. Day after day, when I could spare an hour or two, I fought with this damn story. Hating it, hating myself for writing it.

Then, when I was convinced I'd never get the thing to work, the magic happened. The characters came alive. Scenes played out in my imagination in that strange, detached way as if they've lain there all along just waiting for a veil to lift. It's not quite finished yet but it's all there, exactly the sort of story I hoped I'd come up with. But it doesn't feel as if I created it. It feels as if it had been there all along and all the stress and struggle was what it took to find it.

It's not the first time I've experienced this but usually I have the luxury of writing out these discovered tales whenever the mood takes me, not when there's an editor waiting for them. It's taught me something about how I write: that I need to wrestle with ideas for a while in order to reach a point where something else takes over, where the story suddenly almost writes itself. It's also taught me that the stories I have to tell are often not the ones I set out to tell when I started.

And that's okay.