If you read many contemporary literary novels today, you may notice that regardless of the subject matter there's a 'sameness' about them, the way in which thoughts are expressed and ideas, conveyed, the sometimes dogmatic application of what are, at best, useful maxims such as, 'less is more', the narrative techniques utilised, even the same, irritating, stylistic devices scattered like pepper all over the pages.

In everything I write, I seek out something which I term, 'the music'. This is an energy centre which I cannot define and which lies beyond the realm of obvious poetic technique.

When I was a child, I used to go wandering - disused railway-lines, old barns, dry-stone walls, strangely Pre-Raphaelite copses - it's much more fun to wander than to be guided, and you could do it in those days with freedom and without paranoia. In similar fashion, I try to allow the reader room to wander, even to meander, to almost lose themselves and their grip of the narrative.

Words become, 'product', so that it is as though you'd bought a 'hand-cooked' packet of crisps; there are different makes, various flavours, but in the end, they're all rather similar and while eating them while sipping white wine makes you feel posher than if you'd bought the bog-standard ones, afterwards you don't remember very much about them.

My motto is: write about anything you bloody well like; just make sure you do it effectively. We've all had all the emotions, the rest is research and that leap which some can do and others cannot - it's not really something you can learn, otherwise all academics of literature would be wonderful fiction writers.

I know people who've passed every creative writing course under the sun and who are more analytically intelligent and far better-read than I, but who just can't write either fiction or drama. It's like any art-form. In order for talent to be developed, crafted, it's got to be there in the first place.

Talk about burning books and burning bushes, I think that reading an effective novel can be like being immersed in fire and emerging as something a little different.