Writing a book. Don't do what I do...

Normal people (by which I mean people who don't write books or admire Tony Robinson with an almost fanatical devotion which, I now realise, is practically everyone except me) often ask how you go about writing a book.  Where do the ideas come from?  How does an idea go from brain to page?  And, vitally, how many biscuits do you need to eat to make it happen?

Answer:  a very lot.

I don't know if anyone who writes books really knows where the ideas come from.  Suddenly one day something will pop into my head - a line of dialogue, a name, an image, and from there on it's one inevitable HobNob after another until everything slots together into a form that is more or less book-like.  I don't really do 'drafts' either, I just sort of point myself at the page and keep going, if something doesn't work then I go back to the place at which it stopped working and do something else or rework it until it damn well does as it's told.  This means that sometimes I have to go right back to the beginning of the book and change something (the interconnectedness of all things in books means that one small thread that started to go awry in chapter three is wiggling catastrophically around and flailing characters to death by chapter ten, and must be stopped). I know other writers just put a note in the margin at this point, write on, and then go back and change things when they've finished, but this is as alien behaviour to me as ironing tea towels or hoovering behind the fridge. I have to go and put it right before I get to the end.

You know things are going wrong when you have to eat ten HobNobs before you can move on

It's also fairly common for books to sort of peter out towards the end, so I quite often write a quick ending in, just to get it out of the way and be able to say 'I've finished!', and then sneak back some weeks later and write a 'proper' end.  Having written lots of plot-lines and intriguing characters and twists and turns, I sometimes finish on a 'and then something happened and someone died and it was all a dream and the bad guy went away and they all got married and lived happily ever after.  Oh, and the aliens weren't aliens at all, and it wasn't a real ghost, and the dog came back.. oh yes, and the next door neighbour was behind it all. The End'.  Some time later I have to go back and finish it all properly.

But then, sometimes it really *was* the old janitor in a rubber mask...

 

If anyone is interested, Rhoda Baxter and I are holding another workshop, courtesy of Write Stars on 22 May in York, should you fancy coming along and hearing a rather more sensible way of going about your writing....