How to cook up a successful novel - joke.

If you’re comfortable with words and organised, writing non-fiction is easy. The end result may not set the world on fire, but the doing of it is a simple matter of sorting out chapter headings and writing bite-sized essays to fit, one after the other. A linear, left-brain process.

 Writing novels is whole different ballgame - what one writer described as wrestling with a jelly(fish) and most often the jelly wins. Every novelist approaches it in a different way. Some start with a flash of an idea, a poignant human dilemma, and allow their muse to sweep them along on a magic, mystery tour into the unknown. I’ve a drawer full of unfinished novels that started thus; one of them swallowed me up in its darkness before chapter 6, others stuttered to a confused halt. 

 The other approach is to sort out the goodie bag in advance. 1. Story content – even if it’s a murder, find corpse find killer book, nowadays it needs a context. Global best-seller The Dinosaur Feather plunged the reader deep into paleontology; Mark Billingham’s Love like Blood into honour killings; Abir Mukherjee’s A Necessary Evil, a witty historical dip into old Raj India. Content dictates setting. Where, when and how best to tell the story. Robert Harris (sigh) always a genius storyteller, brilliantly evoked the horror of Pompeii through the eyes of a young water engineer who knew when the aqueducts stopped flowing that destruction was imminent.

  2. Characters – that you actually like, even if they’re reprehensible anti-heroes, since you’ll have to live with them probably for several years. Names can gum you up for days. Stick to them; if you change half way through it’s a real grind to replace. Always (memo to self) keep names of minor characters on file, since you’ll forget by chapter 28 what they’re called.

 3. Plot structure – read voraciously the Star Wars format - call to arms, dream stage, complications, crisis, resolution. Can you jam your story content, context, characters into the winding maze of a formula for success? Left brain applauds; right brain feels claustrophobic - too much like painting by numbers. Compromise – lay out map with permission to go off track as whim dictates.

 Then holding all of the above in your head, as well as coping with the money-earning day job, a mountain of domestic trivia and mandatory dog walking, you’re ready to go. Message to brain – construct a nuclear bunker where novel lives, breathes and can be ready to activate at the flick of a switch. Hah. Order more post-it notes.