I write whenever I have time, sitting at a simple desk and working at a laptop in a spare room I use as an office. While writing, I distance myself from external distractions and get myself into the appropriate mood by listening to non-vocal music over noise-cancelling headphones. For this I usually choose soundtracks from movies or games that reflect the mood of the scene that I’m writing.

Apart from always having a mug of tea or decaf next to me, I avoid bringing snacks or having an easy source of drinks near my desk. This forces me to get up every so often to take a break. I find this particularly helpful when I am writing tense scenes, because I get so wrapped up in what I’m writing that I tend to be just as tense as my main character.

If I could, I would work overnight, which is when my imagination really comes alive. However my wife is very much a daytime person, so I make do with writing during the day.

I first began to think about writing while reading science fiction as a teenager back in the 1980s. In the subsequent decades, whenever I dabbled with writing science fiction, I focussed my efforts on coming up with novel ideas, fanciful creatures and exotic alien landscapes. However the results were always dry and boring, even to me. The big breakthrough came when I realized that these otherworldly environments were irrelevant. What mattered were the human stories within them, driven by colorful characters and their interactions. It’s obvious now, and much more fun, but it took me a long time to see this.

A second revelation came after I sent my first scifi novel to an assessment editor. He shocked me by telling me I shouldn’t have sprinkled almost every sentence with adverbs. After railing against this for a while, I did some research online and discovered how right he was. I then began to notice that the most compelling public talks and the most immersive stories were the ones with the fewest adverbs. With that evidence in hand, I spent over a year re-writing my novel from start to finish, using almost no -ly adverbs, except between speech marks, where they give emotional color to my characters’ speech. The result was very much worth the effort.

Right now, as I near the end of my second novel, my latest revelations have been reading about the problems with filter words, and about using free indirect speech to decrease the emotional distance between readers and characters. I am now wondering whether or not to switch to free indirect speech in the final book of my trilogy. In particular, I worry whether such a change in style would change people’s perceptions of the characters they’ve become familiar with.