For some reason, and in my experience, those 4 words, ‘what are you saying?’ seems to give a disproportionate number of writers a lot of trouble – once they go beyond the knee-jerk and instinctive: ’I don’t know’. How come? What’s happening to us? How can so many people have such a strong passion and desire to write, and yet have nothing to say?

The name is a fantastic resource to be drawn upon, like a deep, deep well of emotion, history, quirks of fate, travesties of justice, happy unions, psychology, status, class, education, aspiration, ethnicity……identity. It’s all in there – in your name – whether you know it, like it, recognise it, or not. It is inescapably so.

So how do you make things progressively complicated in your stories? And why….or more to the point, why not? Or to an even finer point: how do you complicate matters believably and with credibility?