Find something you feel passionate about. You need passion to write anything, and that’ll take you through all of the drafts that you have to do.

I love writing for [different mediums] and feel lucky that I can. Novels are about people’s interior lives. Drama is about external events – you need things to happen. Radio lies somewhere in between: you can show internal thoughts or not show them, you can have a narrator, you can tell a story through letters – you have lots of options to bring it to life.

Any writer has unpublished work or unperformed plays hidden somewhere. I’ve got rid of mine – no one can find them if I get run over by a bus! Think of a carpenter who has to make some bad tables before he can make a good table. With writing, because we can all write, we think that it’s going to be much more straightforward – but actually you’ve got a craft to learn.

The more I write, the more ideas I have. Expose yourself to stimulating things, go to lots of places and meet different people. The more you read, the more you watch plays, the more you listen to radio plays, the more ideas you’re going to get, because possibilities open up and that’s inspiring. I saw a Frantic Assembly piece, Stockholm, which I loved because it was a writer working with physical theatre.

Seventeen per cent of plays are written by women and a lot of parts in plays are for men, not women, and that’s why we need women playwrights. Women have proved that they can write plays – it’s now a question of women keeping writing and not worrying about writing parts for women. You project yourself into the centre of a play; therefore if you’re a woman, you automatically write women at the centre.

Often we don’t rate women’s experiences as highly as men’s. In the history of novels, women do well because it’s an interior world and women’s lives can be quite interior. If you look at who runs the country, it’s very much men.

I wish someone had told me that it [a writing career] would take longer than I’d thought and that I’d have to put more work in than I’d thought. I wish that someone had been able to say that because I wouldn’t have worried so much.

If you rush and put work out before you’re ready, then what can happen is you get it right at the beginning but then you have to learn what it is you got right in public. If you’re writing quietly and building up experience, by the time you expose your work you know what you’re doing.

It doesn’t make you special, being a writer. You’re still a person doing a job. And it’s a craft: if you were a craftsperson, you would do it every day. There’s no mystique.

The important thing is to produce a complete draft. The famous quote that “There’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting” is true. It’s only when you complete it that you can work out what it is you’ve got: you write in order to find out what it is you have.

In Focus: the challenge of writing Bedlam for Shakespeare’s Globe

It was nerve-wracking but I ignored the pressure and got on with the job. Your job is to fill the theatre and at the Globe, your real job is to keep the audience there if it rains. When you start out, you normally write small plays because of the economics [of fringe theatre]; if you write a play with 12 characters, everyone will say to you that you won’t get it put on. The Globe turned that on its head: you have to start developing skills for writing a huge play, which we’re not taught to do now.

Nell’s latest play, The Beauty Manifesto, was performed by young actors as part of NT Connections, alongside plays from Molly Davies and Katori Hall.

Interested in writing fiction? Read Kirsty Logan’s advice on how to get started.