Why does one do anything? Because it makes you excited and gets you going, according to Michele Powles.
Many things have excited her but now, at 34, it's writing that stirs her up - writing adults' and children's fiction in particular, but any sort of writing, even reports, she says.
"There's something interesting in putting words down on the page. If I don't do it I get really grumpy."
As a child growing up in Hawkes Bay, dancing was a passion which she continued through her university days at Victoria and later as a professional.
At Victoria she also discovered a fascination for law.
"I was going to do classics and politics but took a first-year law paper and loved it so much, it captured my interest.
"It's the way of thinking. I had professors who were interested in teaching by the Socratic method, and I guess I found the methodology interesting and the way of reasoning.
There's a cliched thing about lawyers - you ask them a question and they say it depends and there's something in that, I think. Another cliche about lawyers is they are frustrated actors so there may be something of that sense in it."
After university she travelled widely, taught singing in India, and worked in the UK and elsewhere. Although she applied for jobs in both law and dance, she got none of the former but many in the latter.
Although she hasn't practised law, it has informed her working life, especially as a producer of dance and other projects - last year she ran New Zealand Book Month.
"When I look at my extended CV, what becomes clear to me is I've always been interested in communicating something. At one stage it was through movement, and at this point it's through the page," she says.
In 2006 she completed a master's degree in creative writing at Auckland University with Witi Ihimaera.
"It got hold of me and I decided I really wanted to be a writer when I grew up, having had this life of doing all sorts of things to make ends meet. In terms of making that career as a communicator, I thought I'd try and do this writing thing as much as I possibly can, and happily the universe has provided to put that all together to make it happen."
Her first novel, Weathered Bones, was published last year, and this year the Burns fellowship has given her the time, money and headspace to be able to write for a whole year without other pressures.
"The really important thing is the recognition that yes, you are a writer. It's very important for someone like me so early on in my writing career to be recognised like that. It means I can take myself much more seriously and I can push myself along further perhaps than I might have allowed myself."
This year she has been working on her second adult novel, a children's novel and several short stories, as well as being involved with the "FaBo project" in which a group of nine writers write chapters turn about.
"You relinquish a lot of control and we've been publishing it chapter by chapter on the internet and kids have been writing their versions of the next chapter and winning prizes and stuff. It's great fun," she says.
The project is on www.fabostory.blogspot.com.
So far, her novels have grown from a single character that has demanded attention, got into her head and wouldn't let go.
Weathered Bones originated from a search for a venue for a site-specific dance work and she came across the story of Mary Jane Bennett, New Zealand's first and only woman lighthouse keeper, who ran the Pencarrow lighthouse after her husband died in a boating accident.
"It was just a paragraph but it kind of got stuck in my head and went around and around and demanded to become a book. I thought it was going to be a movie or something. I got a chance to make a little dance work first based on that and the other two characters kind of walked in and it turned itself into a book as I was writing it."
The novel she has been working on this year is based on an Englishman who has emigrated to New Zealand.
"He's a musician so it deals with issues of music and also Huntington's disease, but it's actually about family and hope. There's a very strong theme of performance in that book, both with the music and the way that the character tries to rationalise and deal with what is or might be happening to him," she says.
Her children's book, aimed at 10-13-year-olds, is about black holes.
"I'd written a very short radio play in the UK for kids about a man who made worlds and I had always wanted to write a novel on a similar line, and that sparked a thought about where does stuff come from and what would happen if it all went slightly wrong."
Powles is now based in Auckland, where her husband works in the super-yacht trade, though she spent most of the year in Dunedin, returning home from time to time.
She enjoyed meeting and getting to know the other university fellows and has already started planning a collaboration, putting words and dance together with Suzanne Cowan, the Caroline Plummer dance fellow, with whom she worked in Touch Compass dance company.
Her other published book is the story of that integrated, mixed-ability dance company.
"My hope is to keep writing and I guess the reason I do is because I sort of get a bit antsy if I haven't written for a while, so it's something I now feel I need to do rather than want to do," she said.
"I remember Emily Perkins saying that to be a writer you just have to want to do it more than anything else because it's not about money. If you thought about it too much, you wouldn't do it. You have to really want to do it."