Following the finest writing advice that surrounds us all, I went on working. Straight after sealing the agent-addressed envelope containing my recently completed Big Project, I got to work on the second Big Project.

 The ideas in this project have been tramping around impatiently in my subconscious for over a year now, but they needed time to get incubated and formed. It's complicated, alright: if the last project was an episode of Seinfeld, this is an entire series of The Wire. The plot... er, plots, plural - is complicated and intertwined, one story entangling with another, the characters' lives and relationships crossing over and tangling with one another like a complex mess of vines. 

There are a lot of people in this book. It's set in a workplace (no, not like The Office), a large workplace, with lots of clients. I begun my notebook for this book almost a year ago, and now I'm starting with the character work, always with the character work. Ideas began popping through my mind as I made up their names, their faces, their backgrounds... as my pen squiggled across the page, smoke pouring out of the nib as it furiously scratched the paper, it became clearer how they related to one another. 

As I wrote, the structure of the book started to crystallise. It became clear how some of the relationships in the book mirror others, and how some relationships throw into sharp relief the shortcomings of others. It all made so much sense! But ideas were tumbling out of my mind faster than I could commit them to paper: what if I forgot? 

And that's where the diagrams came in. Not for me the approach of cutting out pictures from papers, nor the drawing of sketches of characters' faces. No, I sought refuge in the reassuring arms of the Venn Diagram. Circular, containing, overlapping, the beauty of the Venn Diagram is a joy to behold. It shows you how your characters interact, it shows you where their interests intersect, and where they meet. It shows you who is related to whom; it shows you what is known, and what is hidden. 

This is the first time I've used graphs as an adjunct to novel-writing, and I've got to tell you readers, I am sold on it. Pictorial representations make the ideas come to life, they illustrate so much more clearly what is going on between the characters, something I'm going to need in the planning stage here. 

There are so many things going on in this book, Lord only knows how many Venn Diagrams I am going to need. Maybe I'll draw a cheeky block graph or two, who knows?!