My third novel, Star Gazing, is set in Edinburgh and on the Isle of Skye, where I’ve lived for seven years, on a hillside facing the Cuillin Mountains. Living somewhere as scenically beautiful as Skye and trying to write about it is daunting. What can you say that hasn’t already been said? How can you translate the grandeur of a mountain range into words? How do you avoid descending into breathless travelogue cliché?

But I wanted to try. I'd enjoyed writing about the remote Hebridean island of North Uist in my first novel, Emotional Geology and readers had written to say they’d enjoyed the evocation of the bleak landscape, so it was with mixed feelings that I decided I would tackle the challenge of writing about Skye.

As I mulled over ideas for the new book, I recalled my son teasing me about my writing, which he refers to as playing with my “imaginary friends”. I started thinking about an imaginary hero… Could there be such a thing? Could you write a book where the reader wasn’t actually sure if the hero existed?

It occurred to me that if you’re blind, the existence of other people is confirmed by voice, touch and the corroboration of others. But you only touch people you know well…And a voice could be something you’d imagined…And if no one else sees the man you can hear…Well, I thought I might be on to something.

Then it occurred to me, I could duck the whole issue of writing about the visual splendour of landscape. I could write about my island, but from a very unusual point of view, or rather no point of view. I could make my heroine blind – and not just blind, but congenitally blind. She would therefore have no visual frame of reference at all. Never one to do things by halves, I thought I might as well write in the first person, from my blind heroine’s “point of view”.

Could it be done? I’d no idea. I wasn’t blind or visually impaired. I didn’t even know anyone who was, but I thought it might be fascinating to write about landscape from a non-visual angle. Even if I failed, it would surely enrich and develop my writing in a new direction. (Western culture is visually fixated. We aren’t so aware of our other four senses and writers don’t employ them nearly as often in their work.) So I embarked on Star Gazing in the spirit of an experiment.

It was certainly tricky to begin with. I kept dropping into “sighted-speak”. I had no idea how much our language favours the sighted: I see what you mean…Now look, here…The way I see it…Reading between the lines…I didn’t see that coming!...It depends on your point of view…You get the picture?

Once I got into the swing of it though, I actually found it quite easy (and so much more interesting) to write from a blind “point of view”. I did some research of course, but mostly I relied on my imagination, shutting my eyes a lot and noticing how, when I did so, all my other senses immediately came into play. There were some positive writing advantages. It was a sensuous experience having to create a hero by describing how he sounded, felt and smelt! Ordinary situations became much more interesting and of course challenging when described from a blind “point of view”. Getting lost in the snow, alone and many miles from help, would be alarming for anyone. When it happens to Marianne, my blind heroine, it’s a life-or-death situation.

In Star Gazing the hero, Keir, takes blind Marianne to Skye to “show” her the island, in particular the stars in the winter night sky. He finds novel ways to do this and Marianne is able to experience the beauty of the island. I’m looking forward to hearing from my readers whether I’ve been as successful as Keir. But whatever the outcome, I know my blind “point of view” has changed the way I write. I’ll never look at things in quite the same way again.