Bestselling author Jeffery Deaver discusses his intricate plotting process:
No restless bouts of booze-fuelled creativity for this writer; he doesn't even tap out a word of narrative until he has sunk eight months into researching and planning his plot.
"You have to work very carefully on the book's structure and its pacing," he explains. "The clue has to appear at this point. And the solution has to appear at that point, and so on.
"The other reason is that some ideas just don't work. I had this great idea once about there being 206 bones in the human body - each one of them has a name, and I thought, well I'll have two hundred and something chapters and each one of them will be named after a bone. It sounded like a great idea. But it just didn't work. If I'd started to write without planning the structure carefully, I could have written half the book and then realised: this is stupid."
Deaver's latest Lincoln Rhyme novel is The Cold Moon (Simon and Schuster).
