What it's like to: Wolverhampton writer Mark Edwards says it’s a dream to publish novels

I was always good at English – it was pretty much the only subject I excelled at – and I began to fantasise about having my name on the cover of a book.

My ambition was to make other people feel the way I felt when I read a great novel, one that makes the real world disappear. That’s still my ambition now, 30 years later, when there are now 12 books with my name on the cover.

The challenge when I start a new book is not coming up with an idea – like most authors, I have new ideas all the time – but figuring out which idea is good enough to fill a 100,000 word book that I will enjoy writing and that readers will want to pick up. There are so many books published every week that you have to come up with an incredibly strong premise to make it stand out.

Some of my books, like The Magpies, were inspired by my own experiences – having neighbours from hell, for example. My latest novel, The Retreat, came from an image that came to me out of the blue: a couple out walking by a river on a winter’s day with their daughter; she disappears from sight but then they spot her cuddly toy floating in the water… From there, I had to figure out the story. Who were they? What happened to her? What was the central mystery that would power the book?

The next step was to sit down with my agent to discuss the idea, which is something I also do with my wife. Talking about it helps me decide if it’s a strong story. Sometimes, hearing myself describe it will make me realise it’s a terrible idea.

Characters

But if it’s a good one, scenes from the book will start to creep in to my head. For example, I had an image of an abandoned church deep in the woods, and knew that my main character would discover something in this spooky place. I didn’t know what they would find, but it got me excited and made me want to write the book.

The characters came quickly. The mother who is convinced her little girl is still alive, and the eight-year-old daughter herself, partly based on my own daughter, who helped me formulate parts of the plot.

My central characters are often like me. They share my way of looking at the world. I’m not interested in writing about macho action heroes. I want my protagonists to be like real people, with flaws and insecurities and problems, along with inner strength and intelligence. I think that makes them easier to identify with. My books are about scary things happening to ordinary people.

There are two types of writer: plotters, who figure the whole narrative out before they start, and pantsers, who make it up as they go along (flying by the seat of their pants). I’m a pantser. I never know how my books are going to end when I start. I only have a vague idea of what’s going on. I prefer to set myself a puzzle which I solve by writing the book. If I plotted a book out before I started I wouldn’t want to write it. I’d be bored if I knew what was going to happen. And there’s nothing quite like that Eureka! moment that comes when you’re deep into writing a book, when you suddenly figure it all out. That moment of dancing around the house makes up for all the hours spent rolling on the carpet in agony, trying to figure out how on earth I’m going to untangle the mess I’ve created.

The first draft usually takes around three to four months. That’s the fun part. I try to write between 2,000-3,000 words a day, Monday to Friday. I have a young family and rarely work weekends. Because I’m lucky enough to be a full-time writer these days, I keep office hours. In fact, I write between school runs. The house is too noisy when the children get home! Also, I find that I can only work for four or five hours a day. My energy flags after that and it shows in the writing. When I started writing I had a full-time job and wrote on my commute: an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening. It trained me to write in short, fast bursts.

The second and third drafts take about a month between them. Then the book goes to my editor, who pulls it apart and tells me all the ways I can make things better. This could include some radical surgery: losing characters, introducing or ditching sub-plots, re-writing whole chapters. I once had to delete and rewrite 60,000 words during an edit.

After that, it goes to a copy-editor, who looks for inconsistencies, word repetition, etc. And, finally, it goes to a proof-reader who checks for typos and errors. The whole process takes around six to seven months, and then it’s usually another six months before the book is published, sometimes more. But at the end of it, I experience that dream moment, of holding my own book in my hands. It’s a sensation that never gets old.

l A Murder of Magpies is out on Tuesday on ebook only and is £1. The Retreat is out on May 10, published by Thomas & Mercer in ebook, paperback and audiobook. It’s available to pre-order from Amazon now. The ebook is £3.98 and the paperback is £4.99.