How to write

Tap in a few sentences that begin to convey some sense of what you are thinking or feeling or trying to describe. Read over them a couple of times, correcting the spelling and grammar and knocking out words that don't need to be there. Read over them again, deleting phrases and clauses that aren't working. Read over them again to refine the structure so that it hangs together better. Repeat the steps described until very few words are left: if you are lucky, you might have an idea worth preserving, a fragment of bone. If your luck and your nerve and your patience hold and if you keep reiterating the process, you might eventually have enough bone for a finger joint and then, days, weeks, months or years later (and possibly - no, probably - never), sufficient for a hand or a foot. And if you persist still, you will begin to assemble the parts of a skeleton, with lots of little heaps of bone lying around in the work space inside your head. The time may come when these start to make sense and you can set out the skull and the neck and the spine, the arms, legs, ribs, hands, feet, fingers, toes. Maybe the bones will turn out to be your scenes and you will soon need some sinew - would that be the plot, the story? - to lock them together.

So, in however long it has taken, you've gone from fragments to a structure. Now you have to start again, fashioning the insides and outside, the nerves and the blood vessels and the organs, the layers of muscle, with changes in tone and texture. What is it that you are writing about? What do you need to devise, manufacture or synthesise? Is it a good idea to write bits borrowed from reality and then invent the rest? If it is, you could work on different levels by turns, building some bone here and some flesh there. If it isn't, is this because what you are writing is too close to reality and you can't get yourself out of the picture?

And maybe you will panic or become frightened by the scale of the task or forget where you put down the handful of ideas and images that you need this very second to cover some hole which has opened up to expose your suddenly extremely rickety skeleton. Just make sure every day, when you're done with writing and reading and writing and reading and writing and reading, that you read over your stuff one more time and junk most of it, if not all of it. Better yet, leave it for a fortnight before re-reading it: you'll chuck it all out then for sure and resolve to give up the whole thing and stick to blogging or keeping a diary.

You should try to daydream for a moment, hold the thought and see how far you can take it. If you were a smoker, you might think of it as getting a longer and longer bit of ash - a quarter of an inch, half an inch... any more? You would finish up standing each fag on its end and letting it burn away until just a column of ash remained on the filter. Now, collect the columns, without breaking any of them or letting them blow away, and put them together in a line long enough to make a hand rail for the QE2 or the Great Wall of China. Easy, child's play, any fool can do this.

It is also worth considering what lies beyond the piles of bones and columns of ash, what it might actually be like to be published. Would it be enough just to be published, or would the desire to be swept immediately by the critics into the inner circle of literary greatness be so compelling that mere sales and shelf space would mean nothing? How terribly unsatisfying to be pigeonholed with the pulp fictionists and exponents of chick lit. How galling to be told that, although a recognised author, you write "like someone doing self-help books" or the person who has to compose cooking instructions for packets of fish fingers. What multi-layered irony - you have a three-book deal, enough by way of an advance to sink the navy and the time and imagination to generate ideas and yet still you aren't happy.

The downside would be the publicity - you have a name and an ISBN number and can be Googled. But the real nightmare is actually becoming popular and having to endure the newspapers writing about you after raking though police records, school records, work records and the divorce statistics and giving bundles of money for exclusive access to so-called "friends" and former lovers. "Oh, so he stole from his infant children's building society accounts, did something beastly to the woman next door over the wash house sink and had a poo in the daffodils, did he? How shocking. And that was all on the Monday before Woman's Hour, you say? My word, Middle England will have to be told." There would be the inevitable questions over the telephone or on the doorstep. "Mr So-and-So, a former partner has made certain allegations about your conduct. Have you anything to say?" It would be good at this point to pretend that you hadn't been born or, at the very least, to wish for nothing so much as to be in a hole in the ground. So far as replying to the question, you would be well advised to have nothing to say, except possibly: "It's all in my book, so why don't you run along and write something really horrible so that lots of people will buy it and make up their own minds as to whether it's true."