::mslexia author method::

The Monica Ali Method
From Interview no. 24

• It’s 9.30 pm. The kids are in bed. Run a deep bath, submerge, and stay there for at least an hour. This is your time for thinking: not floaty musings, but active wrestling with motive and plot.

• Go to bed and let your unconscious continue the work while you sleep.

• A situation involving three or four characters will come to you. Because of your background, you are drawn to characters in transition: immigrants, runaways, asylum seekers. Because you are committed to justice, your characters’ personal dilemmas are political too: how women cope with arranged marriage; how men cope with loss of status.

• Start writing short stories to explore the themes you’re interested in.

• Your novel won’t catch fire until you can root it in a real-life context. You need to know: this is where they live; this is what they see; this is the work they do.

• You start to read. You’re looking for case studies and personal testimonies to add to the wealth of experiences from your own life and those of your family and friends.

• Your research leads you to a specific community in a specific part of London. Start talking to women’s groups and youth workers, people who work with drug abusers, to build up a picture of your characters’ lives.

• By now you should have two sets of notes: research notes, compiled and referenced in an orderly academic manner; and a notebook for your writing process.

• This notebook is your writing coach. Fill it with ideas and speculations, back-story and sub-plots, self-criticism and whinges about how difficult it is. Never read what you’ve written in this book.

• It’s time to start writing. This is your day job: hunched over a laptop, with ear-plugs, at the top of the house between 9.30 (when the kids have been delivered to school/nursery) and 2.30 (when it’s time to fetch them).

• Start at the beginning and work forwards systematically through your plot at the rate of around 1,000 words a day. Acclimatise yourself to your imaginative world by spending two hours editing yesterday’s work. Then press on, steadily crafting sentences, stopping regularly to press Word Count.

• At the end of each chapter, go back to the start and edit everything again. By the time your book’s finished you will have gone over every sentence at least 40 times.

Your novel won’t catch fire until you can root it in a real-life context. You need to know: this is where they live; this is what they see; this is the work they do.