I have been invited by Michael Hibbard to join in the Great Minds blog tour of writer/bloggers. And thank you, Mr Hibbard for the kind words.

Before I answer the questions before me, I should like to tag Mr Paddy Kelly , author of Erotic Refugees. I’ve recently finished reading his latest manuscript that is, frankly, incredible-it will appeal hugely to fans of Neil Gaiman. It has that YA/adult cross-over appeal, as well. Very inventive and wonderful. We just need to find the man a publisher. He’ll be the next stop on the Great Mind’s blog tour, so be sure to check out his blog next Monday.

On to the questions:

1. What am I working on?

Just last week I started making notes for a novel about an woman who is invited to join a centuries-old intellectual organisation for people who do not excel at learning in a structured environment but who are encouraged to pursue their interests as fervently as they wish. But there are always prices to pay for getting what you most wish for.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not sure I would say that it does-much of my writing is literary fiction along the lines of Patricia Highsmith. Where normal people appear to be going about their lives but things aren’t always what they seem. Or they’re pushed to the point of behaving like animals, which I think all people are capable of. The trick is to get the reader to identify with the characters completely throughout the situation to see how they would behave similarly. Very rarely do I write characters who start out evil, which is popular in media-people like black and white characters.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I’ve always had lots of things going on in my head-conversations, ideas, places, characters. I often write to play with those things-to see if I can make characters fit together. Or, like this novel I’m about to begin, it has several characters from different stories that either didn’t quite work or I didn’t start yet and it has two different organisations I’ve had ideas about for years. Suddenly, very recently, all of these things have coalesced and it’s so obvious they belong together. I feel like I’m about to bring all of these people into a room and have them do a read-through together like a play.

4. How does my writing process work?

Carrying on from the previous question, I think about characters and situations a great deal-whatever presents itself-but I’ve always had loads of imaginary friends. So I live with all of these invisible people talking around me and I listen to them and get to know them and eventually I’ll have an idea for a story they could be involved in. It always starts with the characters.

I make notes about plot, and characters-physical attributes and such. Then when I start writing I often write dialogue first, because my characters talk a lot. I write it like a play. Character One: whatever they say. Character Two: response, etc. Then I fill in their actions during the conversation. And work outward from there to descriptions and those sorts of things.

This particular novel is going to be interesting because it’s going to have a bunch of characters I’ve known for years but who’ve never ‘met’ each other. I did theatre for years growing up so writing has often felt like directing an improv group. I don’t tell them what to say or what to do-I just say, ‘This is where we’re starting and this is what needs to have happened by the end of the scene.’ And see what they do.

I suppose in response to the previous question-I write because I want to see what my characters are going to do. Readers probably think writers know exactly what’s going to happen, and writers do, to some degree, but I don’t know how these people, who are very much fully-formed people to me, are going to go about it. Or what is going to come out of their mouths.