Back to Michael Baker's recent question... How do you try to weave characters into the narrative? Invisibly. Unconsciously. Without any great plan if I'm honest.

I never set out thinking, 'In this scene I will establish that Fred Nark is a coward and a bully'. I just get a growing feeling that this is how the character is, and watch for the signs that we've reached the right moment in which to make it plain. I write, I watch the story grow, I wait for those moments of revelation. My books aren't stage plays, produced from a pre-planned scripts. They're structured improvisations based around fixed ideas and narrative points I've thought out in advance. But it's up to the characters to produce the detail of how we get from point to point, and if they're to do that I need to listen to them carefully.

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Routine is important to me. If I have a fixed approach to each day it means I don't have to waste time thinking, 'So what do I do now?' Each morning I read the previous day's work before writing again. Sometimes I will see a missed opportunity to add a little dash of character, one that's usually dealt with through an extra paragraph or two. Sometimes I simply cut. I take a break mid-morning when I go for a walk with the dog and think about the new scene I've just started. It's very rare that I don't think of something that can add a little texture to the words I've written already. More evidence that you really don't need to have your nose in a computer to be working on your book.

Other ideas occur as a scene emerges in the afternoon before I wrap it up. I hate leaving scenes unfinished and will always try to bring them to some kind of resolution during the day, even if it's a raw and unfinished one. Then, finally, there's the big revise that happens once the first draft is finished and I think... 'No, we just don't know this person well enough.'

There's a lot of rubbish written about creating fictional characters. One of the big fallacies is that they need to be 'consistent'. Consistency is a good thing to expect of your doctor or car mechanic. But not of a character in a piece of fiction. You want them to surprise you, to have odd, quirky moments. Yes, perhaps ninety five per cent of the time they conform to picture you've come to expect. But it's the five per cent of non-conformity that makes them memorable.

For me characters need to be asymmetrical, imperfect, unpredictable, like real people. Nic Costa can get things horribly wrong sometimes, Falcone is often arrogant, and Teresa incredibly stubborn. But at the same time we know their hearts are unfailingly in the right place. They're good people trapped in a fractured world, trying to do the right thing and constantly asking themselves: but what is that really?

That makes them sympathetic (and yes those 'how to write' books are right on one thing: you do need sympathetic people). The trick is to bring out the sympathy subtly because human beings are a lot more complex than we sometimes seem. 'Sympathetic' is not the same as 'nice'.

Enough character for now. Let me return to the subject in single-shot instalments from time to time.