Character, in any sense in which we can get it, is action, and action is plot. Henry James.

I have written about this question before in various posts (use the search tool at the top of the page to find them).

But I thought the story of how George Eliot came across and developed the story of Adam Bede, might be instructive.

The story was suggested by an event in the life of Eliot’s aunt, Mrs Evans, a Methodist preacher. Mrs Evens had spent a night in prison with a convicted child-murderer, a mere girl. Evans had sought to make the girl recognize her guilt, and had then accompanied her to the hangman.

George Lewes, with whom Eliot lived in an open-marriage, suggested that the night in prison would make a good scene in a novel – and Adam Bede was conceived with that scene as its centerpiece.

Eliot created a seducer – obviously necessary to the plot – who was a young officer, heir to the local squire. But as well as her seducer, the girl, Hetty, is blessed with a true lover of her own class; Adam Bede.

George Lewes suggested that the novel should end with Adam’s marriage to the woman preacher, and that there should be a clash of some kind between Adam Bede and the young officer.

Leslie Stephen tells how, while she was listening to Wilhelm Tell at the Munich opera, George Eliot was inspired to make the two rivals fight.

The aunt’s story is softened considerably, in that Hetty is not guilty of murder, but only of temporary desertion of her baby. And neither is Hetty hanged, but instead transported to Botany Bay.

I find it both amusing and instructive to have the ability to follow the mind of a great novelist and to glimpse how different people and influences impinge on the development of her story.

She wore a coat that may have been different from the coat I’d first seen her in but had the same effect, namely to make it seem as if she’d just been rescued from a river and blanketed. My own get-up was shabby – bare feet, T-shirt, decaying track-suit bottoms – and while I changed, Danielle wandered round my apartment, as was her privilege: people in New York are authorised by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they’re invited to step into. In addition to the generous ceiling heights and the wood floors and the built-in closets, she undoubtably took in the family photographs and the bachelor disarray and the second bedroom with its ironing board and its child bed covered by a mound of wrinkled office shirts. I imagine this answered some questions she had about my situation, and not in an especially disheartening way. Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.

Hans van den Broek’s wife has taken his son and left for another country. Alone in post 9/11 New York, the Dutchman finds some answers through his involvement in the rough version of American cricket played by immigrants and other marginalized groups.

Towards the end of the novel one of these characters reminds Hans, “There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.”

The Novel has no real plot, but it has the compelling voice of the narrator and a haunting quality, the ability to put you into a kind of trance, to which you wish to return frequently.

O’Neill recollects writing “a first draft of Netherland and essentially abandoning the second half of it because the book was fatally undermined by a preoccupation with plot. I found that whenever I tried to write towards plot points it completely deflated the central power of the narrative.”

The Great Gatsby is referenced in the novel and O’Neill clearly owes a lot to Scott Fitzgerald. But sport has also been a great motif in American literature, as has the quest for identity. And although all three are present in Netherland, the author is quite clear that he has written a post-American novel. By the end of Netherland, Hans van den Broek has moved on, packed up and left the country behind him.

Does a story’s power and resonance come from the author, as if in a vacuum? Or does it come from the relationship between the story and the reader? And if a writer works in an area to which he knows the reader brings baggage, isn’t it wise to use that baggage to his own advantage? I thought this is what I was doing, playing with the reader’s expectations and having fun by subverting them. But Abbot’s reader disagreed, saying I was bringing a very specific audience to the story – and then doing precisely the thing that would most efficiently bore and disappoint it.

1. Tragedy. This usually involves a hero with a fatal flaw meeting a tragic end. Macbeth or Madame Bovary are obvious candidates. Others might be The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar and Anna Karenina. Tragedy illustrates the consequences of human overreaching and egotism.

2. Comedy. This is not always synonymous with humour but it does come with a happy ending, typically of romantic fulfilment as in Jane Austen. Other examples would include Shakespeare’s comedies, The Marriage of Figaro, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and maybe War and Peace. Confusion reigns until at last the hero and heroine are united in love.

3. Overcoming the Monster. As in Frankenstein, Beowulf and Jaws, The Epic of Gilgamesh and Little Red Riding Hood and the James Bond films such as Dr. No. These tales of conflict usually recount the hero’s ordeals, an escape from death, and end with a community or the world itself saved from evil. The psychological appeal of this plot is obvious and eternal.

4. Voyage and Return. Christopher Booker argues that stories as diverse as Alice in Wonderland and H G Wells’ The Time Machine and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner follow the same structure of personal development through leaving and returning home. Robinson Crusoe also comes to mind. The protagonist leaves every day experience to enter a strange and alien world, returning after what often amounts to a thrilling escape.

5. Quest. This could be the quest for a holy grail, a whale, or a kidnapped child. The quest plot links much popular fiction, featuring a hero, normally joined by friends, travelling the world and fighting to overcome evil and secure a priceless treasure, sometimes a girl. Obvious examples include Lord of the Rings, Moby Dick, The Odyssey and a thousand others.

6. Rags to Riches. These stories involve modest, generally virtuous but downtrodden characters, who achieve happiness or security when their special talent or true beauty is revealed. Includes any number of classic ‘dime’ novels. The riches in question can be literal or metaphoric. Better known examples include Cinderella, Pygmalion, The Ugly Duckling, and David Copperfield.

7. Rebirth. The central character finds a new reason for living , like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Frank Capra’s film, It’s a Wonderful Life, also has a ‘rebirth’ plot. Crime and Punishment, Snow White and Peer Gynt are further examples. All of these tales focus on a threatening shadow which is almost victorious until a sequence of fortuitous (or even miraculous) events lead to redemption and rebirth.

One minute before the end of the world, everyone gathers on the grounds of the Kunstmuseum. Men, women, and children for a giant circle and hold hands. No one moves. No one speaks. It is so absolutely quiet that each person can hear the heart-beat of the person to his right or his left. This is the last minute of the world. In the absolute silence a purple gentian in the garden catches the light on the underside of its blossom, glows for a moment, then dissolves among the other flowers. Behind the museum, the needles leaves of a larch gently shudder as a breeze moves through the tree. Farther back, through the forest, the Aare reflects sunlight, bends the light with each ripple on its skin. To the east, the tower of St. Vincent’s rises into sky, red and fragile, its stonework as delicate as veins of a leaf. And higher up, the Alps, snow-tipped, blending white and purple, large and silent. A cloud floats in the sky. A sparrow flutters. No one speaks.

In the space of the week or so that I’ve spent with this little book it has become a firm friend. Lightman is a teacher of physics and writing at MIT and Einstein’s Dreams is his first work of fiction. Ostensibly, technically a novel, it has little plot and concerns itself with the dreams about time Einstein may have had throughout 1905 when he was working as a patent clerk in Berne and formulating , privately, a theory of relativity.

The dreams, thirty of them, are about the possible or impossible shapes of time. We are offered worlds in which time is shifted or altered, skewed in one way or another, perhaps,in some of these vignettes aligning itself more readily with our experience.

We are led through worlds with or without timepieces, where time is a function of circularity, where it is possible to shift from the present to the past, or where time actually flows backwards rather than forwards. We meet characters who only live for one day and others who endure eternity and we share their experiences, their inner responses to the bizarre worlds which they inhabit.

We visit a place where time is frozen; another where time slows with altitude; and yet another where you can gain time by moving faster.

But, as you will have gathered from the extract printed above, Lightman doesn’t just have imagination and ideas. He is also a wordsmith and his book reads and sounds like the finest prose.

I don’t grade these reviews with stars, and books like this one remind me exactly why that is. I’d need a lot more than five stars to grade Einstein’s Dreams. Just go out and get a copy.

Consider the most striking literary canonisation of our times. Jane Austen has always been esteemed, and FR Leavis sanctified her as one of the bearers of the “great tradition,” a sort of doctor of his secular church. But in the past 15 years she has turned into the English novelist, an inescapable part of the public consciousness, more universally present than any other writer bar Shakespeare. Some people think she owes her current prominence to popular fantasies of tight breeches and bosoms heaving beneath empire-line dresses. This does not seem likely: if that is what people want, they can get it more readily from Georgette Heyer. Another view is that she has benefited from nostalgia for a safer, quieter and more decorous world; but the idea that the world of her novels is cosy and comfortable can hardly survive the reading of them. Most of her modern popularity is the result of her actual merits, and in a broad sense the highbrows and the lower-middlebrows are admiring the same things: well-made plots, perceptive depiction of character and the acute study of social interaction. It is a genuine popular canonisation.

Each story begins for me with an initial premise; a body found on the border, a born again ex-con, a gold mine in the Donegal hills. The premise will float about in my head for a while, during which time I build the layers around it; the main crime, a connected crime and so on. Then I consider the characters involved, try to see links between them or interesting places for them to go. Sometimes, I tease out plot points, or lines of dialogue whilst cutting the grass or driving to work, which I’ll jot down on the back of envelopes, bills, receipts in my pocket. Before I start writing properly, I gather all these scraps together in a notebook and draw up a general plan, a few lines per chapter, for the first third to half of the book, with a summary of the second half and ending. As I write the first section of the book, I revise as necessary and re-plan a little. I tend to write about 1000 words per day, when I can. I seem to hit a natural pause around a third of the way through a book, where I stop for a week or two, take stock of what has happened so far, and get fired up for the next section. Often the story will have gone in an unexpected direction, which makes it all the more interesting for me to write, but which requires some reworking of plot points. I tend to revise slightly as I’m going along (especially the first few chapters), then read and revise several times after the first draft is finished.

Brian McGilloway is the author of Borderlands. His website is called Brian McGilloway.com

Far too much mystique surrounds the Writer, as if she (in my case) were some sort of demigod who, with the proper offerings, can be induced to hand down a Sacred Text. In fact, it’s all very simple, a process that anyone with an IQ of 90, a mother tongue, and access to one of the fine how-to books on writing can manage with a little effort. Personally I favour John Scribbleman’s Twelve Steps to the Pulitzer Prize: How to Write a Novel in Six Months or Less. I always pick one of the basic plots he describes and print its pithy label in capital letters on the whiteboard mounted on my study wall. To avoid boredom, it’s best to vary your choice from novel to novel, though if you’re prolific there will eventually be repeats. Not to worry, there’s an entire chapter devoted to this very problem. Now I add a succinct statement of the theme in twenty words or less, but preferably under ten. Remember the golden rule of writing: less is more. I also like to set down the key event and no more than two or three other major scenes (a chase and a seduction are always serviceable). These notes will remain in full view till the novel is finished. Writers need to be reminded of what their work is about, since they have a decided habit of digressing. Too much imagination is harmful; counter-productive.

Next I make a list of characters, choosing one as the protagonist. It doesn’t actually matter which one, but it’s a good idea to be clear from the start whether he will lose his job, his wife, his children, and his silver Merc S 600 at the end of the novel, or she will murder her best friend. If I have any difficulty deciding, I write down each name on a separate index card – check out those terrific fluorescent-coloured ones – shuffle briskly, and select a card (eyes closed, no cheating now). Then I sketch out appearance, personality, and backstory, each bio on a different sheet of paper. Gel pens are great for colour-coding, and I like red and orange for nasty character traits – dishonesty, explosive temper, a secret indulgence in child porn, nose-picking, that sort of thing – and blue tones for family history, but you can work out your own system.

Since everyone wants plot-driven novels, the next stage involves writing a detailed outline of everything that is going to happen, the more action the better: reader interest! film options! I always have a large stack of poster paper available for this purpose, which is cheaper if bought in quantity. Mapping in colour is such fun, not to mention very impressive to the eye when you give an interview in your study or film one of those book trailers. (Also be sure to display large stacks of books and closely scribbled sheets of paper, some crumbled up on the floor, a few fetish objects like a desiccated finger – but claim it’s Poe’s, no one will believe you if you say Shakespeare – or stones from Chesil Beach, and enough general disorder to remind critics and potential readers of your Diligence and Creativity.) However, some authors prefer those perky little post-its, because you can move them around easily. In fact, when in doubt you can remove them all, put them in a sack, and shake – voilà, an instant second draft.

Now I’m ready to write. I don my granddad’s paisley waistcoat for luck, make a pot of unsweetened green tea for concentration, and turn on my computer. Chapter One, I type.

I wait for that sweet rush of words.

And wait.

Three weeks later I erase the bilge on the whiteboard, tear up all the sheets of paper, and begin again, one sentence at a time. No idea where I’m headed, and only the faintest where I’ve been. Once I’ve finished, this first draft becomes my outline. I lay the MS away for 3-6 months, take a break from writing by learning something completely new and different – this time round it’ll be algebraic topology or crewel embroidery – and only then am I ready to tackle my first major rewrite.

Not very efficient, but it’s the only way I can do it. However, I haven’t given up hope that one day it will get easier.

L. Lee Lowe is a writer who blogs at Lowebrow. Her YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost can be read online.