I unearth some home truths about nature writing and try to explain why it matters

For the last three mornings, I’ve been up at 4.00 am murdering adverbs.

I have just finished my book on Britain’s coastline, and my agent thinks I need to reduce the word count by about 4,000, of which at least a quarter will come from adverbs. She is right. Adverbs are what I do when I want to use emphasis to camouflage uncertainty (‘absolutely’), indicate humility when I don’t necessarily feel it (‘possibly’) or can’t think of anything else (‘actually’ etc), and they are always first to go before the machine guns when the book goes over the top. I adore them, but it turns out I am in a minority. Next time I go on Mastermind - (oh, yes, I did; about 2007; specialist subject: Flanders and Swann. Long story)- adverbs will be what I take with me as my specialist subject.

If the editing process is a bit like kicking out children that you have spent a lifetime rearing, then the actual researching and writing is quite straightforward so long as you know what kind of book you want at the end of it. Many books start as one thing, and then gradually morph into another but, fundamentally, there are five categories of nature book...