(and How I Came to be a Moderately Successful Writer)

The most common question every writer is asked is, "Where do you get your ideas from?"

It's also one of the hardest questions to answer! For a start, I'm always tempted to corrected the questioner's grammar, and say, "Don't you mean, 'From where do you get your ideas?'"

The truth is that I get my ideas from a special service in Bulgaria; I pay them ten dollars a month and they send me ideas for stories and books.

Except that's actually not the truth, it's a lie.

The real truth is that my ideas are transmitted straight into my brain by aliens.

Except that's not the real truth either.

Okay, the absolute, really real and totally honest truth is this: Scientists have recently discovered that ideas are the result of a virus that some people are prone to catching. The virus is sort of like a cold, only with fewer hankies. Occasionally I'll be chatting with my author friends and we'll see that one of the gang has suddenly gone very quiet and has stopped moving. To the untrained eye, this looks like he's thinking, but we know what's really going on: he's caught the idea virus. The only cure for the virus is to lock yourself away for a while and give your fingers plenty of keyboard exercise. The fact that there's sometimes a story at the end of all this is really just an amazing coincidence.

All right, that was a lie too. But you have to forgive me - it's what I do for a living. That's one of the important things about writing fiction: it's all lies.

Even jokes are lies: for example, there's the joke about the cowboy's dog in the Old West, who limps into the sheriff's office and says, "Ah'm lookin' fer the man who shot muh paw."

We know that joke cannot possibly be true, because it contains something that just could not happen in real life: How did the dog open the door?

Anyway, where was I? Ideas... Ideas come from everywhere, from everything that happens to me, everything I see, everything I hear. And it's not just me: everybody gets ideas. We've all done that thing where we walk into the kitchen and open the fridge and then realise that we can't remember what we're looking for... Well, to some people, that's just annoying, but an author might think, "A-ha! What if..." - because all good ideas begin with a "What if..." - "What if the fridge is haunted, say, by the ghost of a bit of old cheese, and it somehow makes me hungry for cheese, and then when the fridge light comes on, the cheese ghost gets frightened and makes me forget?"

Actually, now that I think about it, that's probably one of the stupidest ideas I've ever had! A lot of ideas are like that: they just won't work. But some of them will, so the trick is to remember the good ideas, and store them up in the back of your mind, so that they can be used later.

All day long, ideas appear in my head. Most of them just rattle around a bit and never make a return appearance, but every now and then a really good idea will show up and refuse to leave until I've put it into a story. The worst thing is when this happens in the middle of the night, because then I have to either try and ignore the idea and go to sleep, or get up and write it down. Once it's written down, the idea is happy and leaves me alone. The only problem is that I often lose the piece of paper on which the idea is written, so I no longer use a pen and paper: I've got a great big blackboard on the wall of the bedroom. Unfortunately, this means that the squeaky chalk keeps waking my wife up. And it doesn't help that sometimes I have to wake her up myself to ask her where the duster is. By an amazing coincidence, every time I get an idea in the middle of the night, my wife is in a bad mood the next day. I don't think I'll ever understand women.

That's not a good thing, because a lot of the books I write are romance novels published under a female pen-name.

These books are interesting to write, because I have to look at everything from a woman's point of view. A lot of people I know think that's strange, but in fact that's what most writers do: if I was writing a crime novel, I'd have to approach the story from the detective's point of view, and I know even less about detectives than I know about women.

When I was writing my ghost novel She Fades Away, I had to try to think like a ghost... Why does the ghost haunt this old house? What does it do all day when there's no one around to scare? How old is the ghost? Does it meet up with other ghosts, and do they complain about the younger ghosts? "Call that a blood-curdling scream? Hah! When I was a young ghost, I was able to frighten the pants of people two villages away!" Do the younger ghosts then get into a sulk and float up the stairs to their bedroom and have a hard time trying to slam the door because their hands keep going through the doorknob?

Strangely enough, it's sometimes easier to write a ghost story than a more down-to-earth story. This is because ghosts aren't real, so you can make everything up. But detectives - and women - are real, so the story has to be more believable.

Apart from romance novels and ghost novels, I also write science fiction books. Most of these are for younger people, but a few are for adults. The only real difference between the two types is the size. A book for kids might be about 40,000 words, but an adult book will be around 100,000 words.

I'm often asked how long it takes to write a book, but there's no standard answer. I spend a lot of time preparing each book before I write it. That's the hard part: I have to figure out what happens in the book and who the characters are. For an adult book, this takes about eight months. Then I have to actually write it. This usually takes about three weeks, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

After that, I sit down and read through the whole book in one go. This is necessary because after 100,000 words there's bound to be a few mistakes. For example, I once had a character drive from one place to another, and come home on the train. But the next day, he drove somewhere else. I remember reading this and thinking, "How many cars does this guy have?" In the end, of course, it was a simple thing to fix: he had one of those new fold-up cars and he brought it home in his pocket.

I spend about a week fixing up small things like that... Then I go through the book once more, and make notes about all the important things that need to be changed. Usually, these changes mean that a lot of the book has to be rewritten. After that, I send the book to my editor, who will eventually get back to me with another list of changes.

Once those changes are done, I absolutely hate the book and never want to have anything to do with it ever again. I usually deliver the finished book to the publisher eighteen months before it's due to be published. That means the whole process - from the day I start to the day the book is published - takes about two and a half years.

I started writing when I was about eighteen, and I'm thirty-six now, so that means I've been writing for half my life! However, it's only in the past three years that I've been making a living from writing. Before that, I was a computer programmer for fourteen years, and before that, I was a postman.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was about five years old. "Ah!" I imagine that I hear you ask. "In that case, why did you wait until you were eighteen before you started to write?"

That's a good question, and the answer is that I never quite got around to writing anything. You see, I was lazy: it was easier to want to be a writer than to actually be one.

I discovered, the hard way, that "wanting" is useless if there's no "doing": you can't get by on dreams alone.

Which is a real shame, because I have some great dreams. Last night, for example, I had a dream about a detective who gets killed and his ghost has to try and solve his own murder... And that gives me an idea for a new book...

2002