Amanda asked Jo Baker:

Hi Jo! How much planning and preparation goes into your novels before you start writing?

Jo Baker it does vary - i usually have an image or an idea hanging around for years before something else comes along and makes it start to fizz. if I didn't have the fizz, the work wouldn't happen at all. The plans get made as I go along - I think that's really important actually - to be flexible with your plans and realise that there is the platonic ideal of the book you were going to write, and then there is the book you are actually writing or have written. And the research (as I've mentioned below) is a shifting thing too - a layering of general and then very specific work, when I've discovered, through the process of writing, what I need to know.

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