“Congratulations on your debut,” people would say when my first book was published in 2012. I would nod appreciatively, not wanting to bore them with the fact that Shadow of the Rock was technically my fifth book, and that ten years had elapsed since I’d finished my first. So how did the breakthrough happen?
‘I put it down to the three Ps. First, plotting. I was always clear on how my book would start, but I was so keen to get cracking that I didn’t give much thought to how it would end. It’ll work itself out, I told myself. It didn’t. The first three chapters often seemed to grab an agent’s interest, but pretty soon they would discover that the rest of the book seemed to fizzle out. Even when I was signed up by an agent who encouraged me to write a new book, the same damp squib ensued. I needed to find the discipline to plot my books out to the end. So I invested the time to work out a detailed synopsis, and persuaded my wife to read it – and point out the holes. It was a fairly lengthy (and painful) process – Shadow of the Rock’s synopsis went through at least twenty iterations until the denouement finally clicked. Only then did I start to write – and this time it worked.