Very soon—just after Christmas, I would imagine—I’m going to start doing something which is weird. I am going spend hours grilling a complete stranger so they reveal the most intimate facts of their life. At the end of the process I will almost certainly know more about them than virtually everybody else . I will get them delving into events that happened long ago, reviewing relationships they hadn’t thought about in years, press them on what they felt at the time and how they feel about things now.

I will interview them for hours, endlessly recording their answers to my questions. This
sounds like torture, doesn’t it? I certainly wouldn’t want to undergo it. But I am not an
interrogator for MI5. Indeed, my prey will have volunteered for the ordeal.

But why? What are they hoping to get out of it?

A book, of course. And, of course, it will be a book written by me. It’s a journey we will take together. It may be therapeutic—I hope it is. But I am not a shrink of any kind. My aim throughout is to glean as much information as I can and then shape it into an excitingly structured story.

All lives start with a birth—and as I spent yesterday celebrating the arrival of my first
grandchild, I am keenly aware of the riveting excitement of the starting event. I have no idea what the lovely little man will do in life (though there’s a strong possibility he will play cricket—hopefully for Yorkshire—and support Liverpool FC). But if he climbs mountains, or tops the charts, rules the country or invents a breakthrough cure for a terrible disease, a future ghostwriter might think starting with an explosive episode from his rise to fame might be the best way to get the reader interested enough to want to read more.

In medias res—starting in the middle—has been a brilliant way of beginning a story since ancient times, and it’s almost always the way a film starts. Sometimes you can start at the very end. Lawrence of Arabia’ s opening scene shows the hero dying in a motorbike accident caused by couple of boys messing around on their bicycles on a narrow country lane. Rather an extreme start, but it’s there in the background to remind us over the next two or three hours of camel charges and passionate speeches that Lawrence always lived dangerously and selflessly.

The most important thing, however you tell a story, is to work out the narrative arc. You
have to know where you’re trying to get to, and then work out the best way to get there.

It will almost always be obvious what the book is about—lad leaves school in mining
community at 14 and is a millionaire by the age of 20, ending up one of the richest men in the UK. But amazing though that story is, you can’t just load the pages with success after success. What makes it a good read are all the challenges overcome, the unlikely diversions that lead to huge amounts of wealth, enabling our protagonist to make waves in politics, resulting in a history-making campaign which affects us all to this day.

‘Who could that be?’ I hear you thinking. Of course, I couldn’t possibly say. But it was a
great project. How will the new one work out? I look forward to finding out!

Simon Rae – Website