Much more haphazardly than you’d think. I do like a good plot; I love thrillers. I love complication. I love getting my characters into a mess and then trying to find a way out of it for them, against all the odds – but I don’t always know how to do it, and I often get into a terrible mess. This has made me slightly fanatical about story structure, and I always try to plan my novels – but they always seem to get out of hand. I don’t mind this, because I find that the further they veer away from the original plan, the more I’m on to something. I like not to know where something's going; I love the element of surprise, in the writing process. But I do like a happy ending – I have a weird and probably illogical feeling that it’s sort of rude to depress your reader with a very bleak ending. So I’ll do an ending that’s happy, but with a sad twist, or sad, but with a note of hope – because I would hate to finish a book on a downer. Those aren’t the kind of stories I want to read and they’re not the kind of stories I want to write. Because my concerns are primarily about society, and the way we live, and the ethical choices we make, my novels are inevitably in the ‘what-if’ genre. I hope they have a thrillerish feel, because to me it’s crucial to stay gripped, as a reader. I try to make sure my stories have a strong page-turning element. I think stories are a bit like cooking – you have the ingredients, you put them together – and if it doesn’t work the way you thought it might, you end up with something that’s not in the recipe book. It might taste and look a bit weird, but at least it’s original, and it’s yours.