As a child growing up in rural Sussex, travelling by bus between East Grinstead and Tunbridge Wells, gazing out at the tiny, sleepy villages, the misty green fields, the cricket pitch, I was always aware that there were other worlds out there. Wilder, hotter, stranger worlds. Countries with mules and camels, horse-drawn taxis, kaftans and hennaed hair. This knowledge had a huge effect on me.

I was four when I went off travelling with my mother and elder sister, and six when we came back. For almost two years we wandered through Morocco. We rented small rooms in Medina hotels, hitchhiked, bartered, attended festivals and hammams, spoke Arabic and French. We ate the food they cooked in cauldrons in the square of Marrakech, played with the beggar children, befriended the women who sold drums. My sister went to a Moroccan school and learnt about the pillars of Islam, the laws by which the people lived their lives. She also learnt the names for all the animals and how to count to ten. My mother became interested in Sufism and started praying towards Mecca on a rug.

Sussex by comparison was quiet and still. I remember, age six or seven, sitting in my classroom listening to the teacher ask if anyone had 'news'. 'News' was an opportunity for children with pressing things on their minds to reveal them then at the beginning of the class, and hopefully remain quiet until break. "Yes," my hand shot up, "I've got some news." And I darted to the front of the class and told them how I'd once ridden in the saddlebag of a donkey, my sister on the other side, and how terrified I was as the donkey clipped down the mountain path, how every second I was sure its hooves were going to slip. I wanted my school friends to see the mountain, the procession of bright people scrambling down, and to know that at the top, a camel decked in flowers had had its head chopped off.

For the next ten years I hardly left Sussex. The world outside became fixed in my mind as impenetrable and very far away. I had no idea that people went on package tours, arriving at their destinations within hours, or took weekend breaks that involved no life-threatening illness or delays. But the further away my own travels became the more determined I was not to forget them. My class at school received regular bulletins about orange groves and oases, the taste of cumin in bissara soup, and once when I had the floor all to myself I told them a long story about how my sister and I once saw a mirage. We were in the desert, riding on camels, half dead from thirst, when there in the distance we saw an island of palm trees and green grass. We trotted thankfully towards it only to find that it had disappeared. It's from this point that I can trace my future as a fiction writer. Of course I'd never ridden into the desert on a camel, never seen a mirage, although to this day I wish I had, instead I'd simply read about one in a Tintin book and exchanged the characters of Thompson and Thompson for my sister and myself. But by now I'd told my class so many unlikely stories it meant nothing to them to accept one more, and from then on I was free to elaborate and embroider, and the more I did it, the more natural it became.

But then something happened that stopped me in my tracks. A new boy arrived at our school and at 'news' he told us about Thailand. He'd seen a jellyfish, all wobbly and white, and he told us how it had floated up to him and brushed against his arm. The class shivered and gasped. "Did it sting you?" the teacher asked, and I thought I saw him hesitate before he launched into a detailed description of his rash. Thailand was fascinating and new, and no one wanted to listen to Moroccan adventures any more. My role had been usurped. Occasionally I did still tell the stories, but only to myself. I practiced them, honed them down, elaborated on them. If I was going to share them with anyone again I was going to make sure they were as good as they could get. And then slowly, slowly, my own life took over. I started living in the present, I made real friends, and Morocco faded into the past.

Years later, in my early twenties, I started going to a creative writing class, and after a series of assorted exercises we were set a task. Simply to write a longer piece. A five- or six-page piece about anything at all. What could I write about? I had no idea, and then as soon as I sat down, alone in a quiet room, my stories all came back to me. Of course I'd write about the camel festival and the cumin, the beggar girls, the drummer women in the square, and although when I closed my eyes I could remember, almost cinematically, my life as it was then, I realised I did have a head start. I'd practiced these stories before.

But sometimes, especially if my book was going well, I'd stop and gaze off into space. What if I could never write about anything else? What if I did think up another story, would I have to practice and embellish it for the next 20 years of my life? By now I'd fallen in love with the whole process of writing and I couldn't bear to think I'd ever have to do anything else. But as soon as I'd finished Hideous Kinky, (as my first novel became), I found there was a reservoir of stories waiting to be told. In fact Morocco had been so vivid and so colourful that it had almost submerged the importance of everything else.

I've since discovered that one of the most wonderful things about being a novelist is that, in your own mind at least, you can travel anywhere you want. I've just spent the last two years back in Sussex, conjuring up those mist-green fields, remembering the quiet of the country lanes where foxgloves and snapdragons grow tall. Once I set my mind to it, it was easy to find enough drama and suspense to fill a book, even on the Ashdown Forest golf course. Any number of things could happen in those leaded phone boxes, or even at the plank-board bus stops where as a teenager I'd been so overwhelmingly bored. Sitting in a London study with the sounds of the city never far away, I took great pleasure in sending my characters rustling through bracken, scooping up great armfuls of white hay or hacking down a gorse bush with an axe. But what I'll never know is how long it would have taken me to find my courage and become a writer if I hadn't had that first, pressingly urgent travellers' tale handed to me on a plate.