When I was a kid we had these Dungeons & Dragons role-playing books. Sounds a bit geeky now, but everyone had them back then. In the books you're in a dungeon or something and it says: "If you want to kill the other prisoner, go to page 27... If you want to try and kick the door down, go to page 155... If you want to scratch your ass, go to page 199." And then when you get to page 199 it says: "You forgot to take off your razor-clawed gauntlet. The claws cut deeply into your ass cheeks. You are incapacitated, and will die soon if unaided. Roll a dice to see if you survive."

Writing is still like that, for me. It's a journey, and I don't know where I'm going. I'm sitting on my ass (now healed) in front of a computer, but I'm also walking down a dark street, or into a dodgy pub. I don't know what's going to happen (to my character) in there, but I know he's got do it. It's the next step - the obstacle he must overcome to reach whatever goal he thinks is at the end.

The only forward knowledge I have when I start a novel is that there will be some sort of conflict, somewhere down the line. (If there were none, I might as well stop writing.) I don't know what the conflict will be, nor how my character will overcome it... and that's the beauty. That's the bit I love, but sometimes the love is strained. Sometimes things are not going well, and the relationship between me and the page gets rocky. We row. We throw things at each other. We go out and buy firearms and take potshots at each other. It gets like that every time, with each novel I write. And it always happens for the same reason:

I have opened the wrong door.

I went to scratch my ass, when I should have killed the other prisoner.

It happened that way with FAGS AND LAGER, my latest novel. We were sailing for 60-odd pages, me and Royston Blake (the first-person protagonist). Shit was going down but it was going down well, and it kept coming. When the shit keeps on coming, and you can type it down fast enough, you're doing well as a writer. But when the shit stops - and you find yourself just typing - you're fucked. You sweat. You feel nauseous. You go out and buy firearms... And you don't know why. You don't know what's wrong because you're still writing, even though you're not progressing. If you're getting down a couple of pages a day, everything's good, right? Wrong.

You went through the wrong door.

And you don't even know it yet. You're like a decapitated chicken going on his last run. Dead, but you don't know it.

I went through the wrong door. Or, rather, I did the typing while Royston Blake went through the wrong door. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It involved an interesting little turn of events, that "wrong door". But those events ended up with him in a mental hospital. Just like that. He wakes up and he doesn't know where he is, and it's a mental hospital. I won't go into the details. Let's just say he got a bit "damaged", and the mental hospital was where he washed up. "Great," I thought. "I've always wanted to write about an asylum, so now I get the chance."

So I explored.

I explored with Blake's eyes, from his bed. When he could walk again, I got him up and exploring the corridors. I thought I was having a great time, too. I was treading in the footsteps of William Franklin Bardin, whose protagonist went the same way about a third of the way into THE DEADLY PERCHERON. I was also following the great Charles Willeford, who had his hero sectioned in the second half of PICK UP. Both of those are favourite books of mine, so I knew I must be doing OK. I smiled and cracked on. I tried to ignore the sweating.

Truth be told, I knew after only 5,000 words that I was up a blind alley. But, you know, it seems a shame to waste 5,000 words. We'll press on and see where it goes. (This is a journey, right? We travel blindfolded. And if it's good enough for Willeford and Bardin, it'll do for me.) So I pressed on. For 30,000 long, sweating, increasingly nauseous words. And then I ground to a halt.

No one can help you in this situation. It's between you and the novel-in-progress, and no one else gets a look-in (if you're like me, and you don't show your stuff until it's done). You've got to do it yourself. And it's hard. The first step is the hardest. "My name is Charlie Williams," you must say, standing up in a roomful of plastic chairs at Lost Authors Anonymous (if they don't have a branch near you, just imagine this bit). "My name is Charlie Williams, and I'm a lost author." It's tough, but you've go to do it. So go on, say it...

Feels better already, right?

But the work's not over. Now you must go back. You don't know you're 30,000 words off course yet because you don't know where you went wrong. All you know is that you've been lost, and now you're found. You read it all again, from the start, and you pinpoint that moment when your protagonist scratched his ass with a razor-clawed gauntlet. You select pages and pages of text (the bulk of the novel, I'm afraid), shed a quick tear, and then press delete.

Then you start again, from where you left off. And you go through the right door.

In retrospect I can see why it happened. I moved house, roughly around the time Blake went through that door. If your life is in upheaval, your writing will probably also be. My brain wasn't right. It wasn't able to cut loose and go on the journey. And if my brain wasn't right, Blake's brain wasn't right. So he put himself in a mental hospital.

And after 30,000 words of very expensive therapy, he got out again