Not everyone plans their novel. There are planners and there are ‘pantsers’ (people who fly by the seat of their pants). I’m a planner.

I started with the Big Picture. Specifically, I started with an impossible premise, then figured out how to make it possible. The impossible premise was: let’s have some terrorists set out to crash hundreds of planes at once

I then came up with a very vague idea about how that might be done, before beginning my research. A lot of research.

Given some of the Google searches I was doing, I was quite surprised I didn’t have armed police carrying out a dawn raid on my place.

As my research continued, I checked out my ideas with a bunch of experts: an aircraft engineer, pilots, software developers and so on. Having a diverse group of friends helps a lot! My vague idea turned into a plausible one, and then it was time to turn it into a plan.

Stories are all about constant ups & downs, twists and turns, so my macro-level plan was literally a squiggly line on a piece of paper (ok, it’s me, I don’t do paper, so it was a squiggly line in Powerpoint) with some labels indicating what happens when.

The squiggly line went through a few different iterations before I was happy with the Big Picture, and it was then time to begin the detailed planning.

I literally planned the novel scene-by-scene, using a wonderful piece of software called Scrivener. You can check out my review at 9to5Mac, but the tl;dr version is that it allows planners to start by creating their novel in kit form on a set of virtual index cards, which can be shuffled around, stacked into groups and so on.Ben Lovejoy

Each scene had a sentence or two describing what needed to happen in it. Literary novelists start with characters and create stories, I unashamedly started with the story and figured out the characters that would be needed to make it happen. Pen portraits of these got added to the plan.

Planning it was enormous fun – and also meant that when I realised I needed to change part of the plot, doing so involved deleting a few notes, not thousands of words of copy.

Six weeks later, I was ready to write the opening line ...