Like most of you I'm at home, trying to work and pondering how the next weeks and months will look. I count myself lucky: professional writers are uniquely prepared to cope with both enforced isolation and working from home - it is pretty much the job description. But it also makes me wonder whether we are about to find out if the old adage, which says that everyone has a book in them, is true. We are in the middle of the world’s greatest experiment in homeworking, which presents a one-off opportunity for a considerable number of people, who have previously only toyed with the idea of writing a novel or a memoir.

Under normal circumstances, many aspiring authors start writing a manuscript, but never get to the end, because life gets in the way. Now that ordinary life has been suspended, having the time to write might be the silver lining to this huge, dark cloud. Or it might not be: don’t feel guilty if you don’t feel up to taking on a new project, especially anything as ambitious as writing a complete novel. Writing is hard: indeed, Thomas Mann defined a professional writer as “someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” You might want to flex your writing muscles first by completing one of many creative writing courses available online – those offered by Faber Academy and Arvon Foundation are particularly good. And there has never been a better time to start keeping a diary. Exploring ideas and writing - whether a diary entry or a poem – is a brilliant outlet for your inner thoughts and feelings as well as a memory aid. If you wrote a diary as a teenager, you will know that details get foggy in any looking back, so keeping a diary is a way of documenting the news that’s currently changing at lightning speed. It might also be the right time to interview your relatives and write down your family’s history.

Last September (though it feels much longer), I travelled to Yorkshire to hone my non-fiction writing skills on a Life Writing course. There were 14 of us students: some were aspiring or published writers, but more than half were people, who had never written professionally, and sought to develop their writing ability primarily for their own benefit. Quite a few wanted to write about their families so that the stories of their lives would not be forgotten. As we took turns to read aloud from our work, it became clear that every single person’s story was interesting and worth telling, even if it would never become an actual book. We no longer write letters, so diaries, memoirs and family histories will be an invaluable source of information for future historians. Albert Camus wrote in his masterpiece, The Plague: "So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories."

“In the end, we’ll all become stories”- said Margaret Atwood. In these strange times, recording our stories matters more than ever.