wodehouse

Meticulous plotting was central to the Wodehouse method, and before writing each of his books he would work out its convolutions on a staggering scale. “I have done a twenty thousand word scenario of a new novel, and shall be starting it soon,” he wrote to his friend Denis Mackail, a novelist, in 1931. “I find that if one has the energy to make a long scenario, it makes the actual writing much easier.” More than four decades later, he told the Paris Review, “Before I start a book I’ve usually got four hundred pages of notes. Most of them are almost incoherent. But there’s always a moment when you feel you’ve got a novel started. You can more or less see how it’s going to work out. After that it’s just a question of detail.”

Sheer genius, incredible talent, meticulous planning...