Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani-British writer, believes that some authors write one novel that is well received and then spend the rest of their career cranking out different versions of the same book.

At the first event in the autumn series of UEA Live, she said that these authors become lazy and no longer want to challenge themselves.

Resting on her laurels is not something Shamsie has ever done. She could easily write the type of novel she wrote two decades ago, she said, but that ease is why she aims to try something new with each novel, even though success is not guaranteed.

“For me, every novel is a place to become a better writer,” she said. You do that by setting challenges for yourself and doing things that are difficult.

“When I start a novel there has to be a little bit of terror. I’m not sure about things. That’s because you’re trying something outside your comfort zone.

“You may fail, but you’re learning something. There’s no such thing as a total failure. There’s some muscle that’s being exercised that hasn’t been exercised.”

Speaking to Dr Sharlene Teo, she said that she would advise students that even if what they wanted to write terrified them, they should go ahead.

Even if the writing proves difficult, the important thing to do, Shamsie indicated, is to finish the book – even if it all has to be reworked later.

In this first draft, Shamsie likes to simply “let things happen”, but because she does not know what she is doing, progress can be slow.

By the time she is on her fourth of fifth draft, things are much easier, not least because by then she knows the characters inside out.

“First drafts feel like wading through treacle; final drafts are like swimming in the sea,” she said. “I’m very bad at thinking through beforehand. The way my brain works, I need to write my way into it. With any piece of writing or most pieces of writing, there are certain gifts that come your way.”

Shamsie, 49, has had considerable success, having won multiple awards, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018 for Home Fires, and she has seen her work translated into no fewer than 30 languages.

He latest novel, Best of Friends, focuses on the friendship forged between two girls, Zahra and Maryam, at school in Karachi more than three decades ago.

While often it takes Shamsie a while to get to know her characters, with this book they “landed fully formed”.

“I knew them both and I knew them through their friendship,” she said. “I knew roughly the families they came from … As I started writing the first scene, I very quickly understood something.”

After dealing with their early years, the book skips forward to 2019 (the year Shamsie wrote the book), when the pair periodically meet up in London.

Zahra now runs a civil liberties group, while Maryam is a startup investor, and a key theme is how contrasting as adults the two friends are in their outlook and values.

“I wanted to create something where it would be impossible for them to look away from their differences,” Shamsie said.

“I wrote the book because I wanted to know what would happen to this friendship when you have this pressure on it.”

This contrast between the two friends as adults reflects, Shamsie suggested, a general truth about friends we make when we are very young versus those we make as adults.

“My sister said the friends we make as adults are our friends because we’ve got something in common, but the friends we made as children have always been friends,” she said.

So most of the people Shamsie has become friends with as adults have much in common with her, being writers, academics or journalists.

Shamsie finds that her friends from childhood are a more varied group and, as is the case with Maryam and Zahra, she does not always have a lot in common with them.

“If I look at my childhood friends … they’re bankers, they’re in architecture,” she said. “They live all over the place. They hold all sorts of views, sometimes antithetical to mine.”

Read our review of Kamila Shamsie’s appearance at UEA Literary Festival in 2017.

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