William Nicholson's Winning Formula

He’s got a winning formula, this writer, and he’s sticking to it. Set the action over seven days, in and around the Sussex town of Lewes, with occasional day trips to London; write about what you know (Sussex, script-writing, being 54, long marriages, worrying about your post-university children as well as your aged parents with Alzheimer’s, career anxiety, dinner-party anxiety); keep the chapters short (never more than ten pages) and avoid slabs of prose, so the pages are broken up into highly readable short paragraphs and dialogue; write in the present tense; and, within each chapter, keep a strict observance of the Unity of Person, so that the reader steps inside the mind of one character and sees the world solely through his or her eyes.