Don't think about tomorrow ... Planning ahead. Photograph: Linda Nylind
We now know that noxious fumes are a formidable foe in the battle to produce great literature. Rob Jones, chairman of innovative independent publisher Snowbooks, thinks he's uncovered another enemy: lack of preparation.
I would have thought it was the other way round. Doesn't planning kill creativity? When it comes to fiction, sitting down and hammering out a step-by-step plan just seems so John Grisham, so Jordan's ghostwriter - a writing-by-numbers technique that produces plot-heavy bestsellers. But a little investigation seems to prove Jones right. Stephen King states in On Writing that he never sets out his stories in advance. Orhan Pamuk, by contrast, reveals himself to be a veritable boy scout of literature, saying that he plans his books down to the last detail, to the point of plotting each chapter in advance. So on the side of planning ahead we have a Nobel prizewinner, and fighting the spontaneity corner is a bestseller-list fixture and goremeister. And then in comes David Mitchell to batter me over the head with Cloud Atlas, the tightly controlled structure of which is the very element that gives rise to its genre-busting originality.
Nevertheless, there's something troubling about the idea of a novelist doggedly sticking to a detailed plan. Pamuk aside, it smacks of creative writing workshops and how-to books for aspiring writers with exclamation points in their titles. Type "planning novel" into any search engine and you'll find a whole host of methods for designing your masterpiece. Some of these methods even have disturbing names. As William Faulkner said in a Paris Review interview: "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique." My English teacher used to make us spend whole double periods crafting essay plans; I simply couldn't believe that the books we were dissecting were the product of a similar process. The emphasis on design leaves me cold.
According to Nietzsche, there are two distinct artistic impulses: the Apollonian, with its emphasis on rationality and order, and the Dionysian, a celebration of instinct, spontaneity and exhilarating freedom from boundaries. In The Birth of Tragedy he insists that the decline of modern culture is due to an over-reliance on the Appollonian. Sound familiar?
The UK book market is currently saturated with production line literature; contemporary fiction has become safe and cosy. What the publishing industry needs is an injection of Dionysus - and that may mean chucking the meticulous plan out of the window. Even Jones, a novelist in his spare time, admits later in his blog that he enjoys the freedom of writing without a plan. Peter Carey once described starting a novel as "standing on the edge of a cliff". That's more like it.
