Writing Processes – Part 8: Planning

If you've been following the blog interviews I've been doing on SUFFER THE CHILDREN, you will know that it started life as a short story called "Kiddiwinks". It was one of the first stories I put to the newly-formed T Party, in 1994, and from there I decided to turn it into a novel.

The novel took ten years to write, and the main reason was there was a huge chunk of time in that decade – years at a time, in fact, when I wasn't doing any work on it. I didn't do any planning. I took the...