I'm moving into an intense writing period next week, because I have some time available. I don't have to be in the mood to write. I write myself into a mood by just sitting down and typing- quite often it's just not much good, but I keep going and then usually something better arrives and then, once I'm into my story, I sustain it for as many hours as I can. I do not stop writing once I'm away. Food and friends can wait. This way, like Simenon (who wrote his, albeit, very short, Maigret novels in six days, and then was violently sick! And went to find a woman, apparently.) I can finish the first draft of a novel in a matter of weeks. Say, two or three. I'm not as quick as that Belgium maestro. Then, of course, there is re-writing and addings etcetera. I never begin writing, however, until I have all the characters names and what they look like and where they live and what their interests/hang-ups are and my whodunnit murder plot thoroughly worked out. This is not necessarily a synopsis, because it would probably only make sense to me, if you looked at my notes, which I write in long hand in a notebook- never on my computer. The notebook has to go with me everywhere (usually stuffed in my back pocket, so that I can jot down anything that occurs to me. And then when I think I've got enough and feel confident, I plunge into the narrative- and hopefully everything falls into place. This way I leave plenty of scope for ideas and that freshness and pace one can only achieve, I believe (and what I believe is peculiar to my way of writing) from writing very very quickly. I have only ever had one book turned down by a publisher and that was a very derivitive thing I am too embarrassed to even describe here. But it's in the trunk along with several other completed MSS I have never sent off to anyone. The trunk is what writers call those works they keep back from the public, because they hate them but spent too much time writing them to throw them away. Trunk work can come in handy sometimes, for titles and ideas and characters, so it's never a good idea to throw it away. IMHO. Actually I'm not that humble, but I am a nice person to everyone I meet, because you never know when you might be meeting an angel in disguise, do you?

A word about synopses or outlines. Publishers and lecturers are very fond of these. But writers don't really need them. Just prepare the notes you need and leave something for your imagination to fill in along the way. Obviously, you have to plot out a whodunnit, but you don't need reams of the stuff. Too long thought over projects, or talked about, do not get written!  Anyway you can always write the synopsis up after you've written the thing. By the way, we writers call our work many things, but the favourite expression is the "piece of @?£%". At least that's what I always call mine, until it's finished. And then I usually call it my love-child!

Seriously, I always experience an intense day or so of doubt when I'm about a third of the way through the POS. And then I do much pen-sucking and notebook reading amd music listening- and then there is always a moment of revelation when you see a connection that pulls the whole narrative together. It's an almost ephiphanic (is that a word?) moment. If I never sold another damn book, I would not give up writing, because I want to experience those moments all my life. Orgasmic is the word I'm looking for. Unfortunately, I cannot share any of them with you (you'll no doubt be pleased to hear!), because it would spoil the plots. I deliberately chose the whodunnit format to keep my writing disciplined. I would be quite happy to write about characters living in the period I like the most (late Elizabethan/early Stuart), but the whodunnit form gives me a sense of purpose and order. There's enough spontaneity and wildness in me- to be curbed is good, in my case.