How to write a novel

There are so many books dedicated to telling would-be authors how to find the inspiration and organisation needed to write an entire novel and the advice is almost always the same: ‘different things work for different people’.
Here’s how I wrote mine.
My starting point was my experience in London. Like Sarah and Paul, my wife and I packed up our lives in Sydney and headed to the UK in December 2004. We’d been to London a few times before and always imagined that our new lives would be taking place in the parts of the city we already knew: nice tourist areas like South Kensington and Chelsea.
But also like Sarah and Paul we found ourselves in Camberwell – three miles south of London but a million miles away from what we knew.
My time in Camberwell gave me all the inspiration I needed for setting. By using two main characters with similar backgrounds to my wife and me, albeit with very different personalities, I also had my starting point for the characters.
I just needed to make them do something.
I figured it was going to be easiest to come up with a plot if I based the story around a tried and tested structure. So I built the action in the novel around the structure of an Elizabethan tragedy, or more precisely, a tragicomedy.
This actually gave me a whole stack of things to start with before I even put pen to paper: the idea of a flawed but ultimately likeable main character, five acts which led to a catastrophe brought on by that character’s flaws, a blend of comedy and seriousness, the idea that something’s not quite right at the start of the work (Paul’s dad’s death) and even the idea of a play within a play (well, if that’s what you can call Celebrity Love Chains).
I took some liberties with the structure. Unlike a true tragedy I couldn’t find it in myself to kill Paul off at the end of the book. Besides, he was narrating the whole thing and it seemed pretty lame to have him telling his story from beyond the grave. So I modified the structure of Page Three just a bit. Then I started mapping out my plot to fit in with that structure before I began writing.
Once I got writing I found that instead of five acts, the story worked better as seven books as well as a prologue and epilogue. Then I threw in a whole lot of chapter headings which I thought kind of mimicked the chorus in a Greek tragedy, giving a summary of the dramatic action and saying some of the things the characters couldn’t.
Once I had this overall structure to stick to, I found that piecing together the first draft didn’t take too long – probably six months of on again, off again writing. It was the editing, re-drafting, cutting and developing characters which really took time: probably another two and a half years.
I was really quite fortunate that pretty much every word as read by my wife as I went. She would read pages and pages of manuscript in bed beside me at night while I got to read proper books. But she did laugh a lot as she went, which was reassuring, even if the mountains of red ink and suggestions she covered my manuscript in weren’t.
I also managed to get a good friend who worked in publishing to read through an early draft, which gave me a whole lot of food for thought as well as new ideas.
You can buy Page Three from all leading online retailers including Amazon, Smashwords, Apple iBooks and Kobo.