The Author's Method with Mark Robson, Author, Imperial Spy

When I left the Royal Air Force (RAF), I bought a house with three stories. On the top floor is a wonderful room that I turned into a study/library with wall-to-wall bookcases, a lovely desk and a great view out over the Northamptonshire countryside. It was a great idea, but it didn’t work. I cannot concentrate there. I tried writing in the dining room, which offered fewer distractions, but my wife quickly despaired of my messy papers everywhere. I now go out to work. I write in local tearooms in the morning and a pub in the afternoon. I find I can block out noise and movement around me far more easily than I can the grass that needs mowing, or the mess that my two year old has created in the lounge, or the myriad of little jobs that are always lurking in the background.

I normally spend a couple of days producing a skeleton plot of the main events that must happen in order for the story to work. I reduce this to a single side of A4 in bullet point form. Then I set to work drafting each bullet point into a chapter, or part of a chapter, allowing the sub-plots and characters to grow organically as I progress. I find this great, as it leaves room for the characters to surprise me, whilst keeping them on an overall track towards a logical ending.

The writing style is most likely an amalgam formed from styles and stories that I’ve enjoyed reading over the years by a small host of other writers. I don’t consciously decide to write in a particular style. I’m not sure that I’m clever enough to do that.

How do you structure your writing day?

I’m not a morning person, so I tend to spend the first hour or two of my day answering emails, updating accounts, replying to posts on my website and online forum…general niff naff and trivia. Then I write for two hours, take a break for an hour and then write for another 4 hours. Six hours is about as much as I can stand on a day in, day out basis.

I’ve had days when I’ve hardly written anything, or I’ve written total rubbish that I’ve had to discard the following day. Everyone goes through lean creative patches. My solution is just to maintain the discipline of sitting at my computer trying to put words together in some sort of meaningful way. Even if I don’t manage to write much, by forcing myself to think about the story for a set amount of time every day, my sub-conscious then kicks in overnight and I find that by the next day many of the solutions to problems have worked themselves out.

Keep going! Two words. Perhaps they might not seem very inspiring, but if you follow the advice and keep at it on a consistent basis, then you not only write more, but the more you write, the better you get at it.