Thumbspikes and crazy drafts: how fiction evolves into story

It doesn���t take me 65 billion years to write a novel (though there are Monday mornings when my characters won���t behave and the bottom���s fallen out of my plot, when it feels like it), but thinking about how stories get written in terms of evolution really is helpful. The first thing to recognise is that evolution is inseparable from time, and that's true of writing too, and reading: there are many kinds of time involved. (And if you're wondering why I'm riffing on evolution, click here.) Survival of the fittest is what's going on in my writing of a crazy...