We’ve all seen those arrests on screen, where the accused is read their rights. ‘Anything you say may be taken down and used against you,’ and so on.

Writers should be required to read out a similar disclaimer to anyone new with whom they interact. Perhaps it could be an app on their phone. The person being addressed has to click OK on a box that says, ‘I accept that this person has no regard whatsoever for my privacy, and that anything I say can and will be taken down and used in a book.’

All my life I have been a hoarder of experiences. Nothing is so sacred it can’t be filed away and reused. Every new thing that has happened to me, from earliest childhood onwards, I have tucked away at the back of my head, then taken out again and reused in my own fantasised scenarios. Sequences of events are reworked for greater effect; conversations are rewritten for greater impact.

And then I started to write, and the experiences were no longer confined to little mental sketches but used for the first time in more involved and original stories. Everything is grist for the mill. Even the two times I’ve seen a dead body – and the one time I’ve touched one – are not sacrosanct. Heartbreaking and horrible though those days were, they went into the experience repertoire. Somewhere at the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘I can use this.’

(I feel no guilt about the bodies, incidentally, because they knew me and it’s what they would expect.)

It’s the icy splinter in the writer’s heart that was identified by Graham Greene. In his case, he witnessed the death of a child in hospital, and the aftermath as the grieving family gathered round. And even though he felt like anyone would at hearing the heartbroken sobs of a bereaved mother, he also listened, because he knew that ‘This was something which one day I might need: the woman speaking, uttering the banalities she must have remembered from some woman’s magazine, a genuine grief that could communicate only in clichés.’ (Being Graham Greene, he manages to be both insightful and unbearable, but the principle remains the same.)

And where I don’t have direct experience, I can riff on what I do know. I’ve never worn a spacesuit – but I have scuba dived, so I have the experience of my life being utterly dependent upon some specialised kit in a hostile environment that could kill me in seconds. I’ve never piloted an aeroplane – but I have piloted a glider, and driven a car, so I know the experience of having a machine at my fingertips, responding to my touch. I’ve never parachuted or climbed a mountain, but I have parascended – where you’re strapped into a deployed ‘chute and towed up behind a speeding vehicle – and abseiled, both once, which was enough and also ticked the ‘experienced abject terror’ box.

I often then make the experience as hard and unpleasant as possible. Characters who achieve things effortlessly aren’t nearly as interesting as those who have to fight for it.

If you’re trying to write a novel but finding it just… doesn’t, this may be your problem. You have no problem with what happens, and when, and why. Maybe you need to address how it happens. In which case, look around you. Observe. Take note. Find that splinter and freeze it.

Or talk to one of us, of course.