“What readers need,” a portly editor from a major publishing company told me many years ago as he confidently struck a pen through great swathes of my manuscript, “is peril.  Plenty of peril. A lot less of all this ‘character and emotion’ nonsense. Ideally, it’s a woman in peril. All the drama you need in just those three words – woman in peril. Saves readers having to believe in a character, see?”

The truth was, I didn’t ‘see’.

“How about,” he suggested, scribbling over the first line of the manuscript, “we start it with – ‘She woke up to a knife at her throat’?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, gathering the remains of my work before asking, “Do you think Gulliver’s Travels would have been published today?”

He blinked back, confused. “The bloke who gets tied up on a beach by some dwarves? No chance. Where’s the peril in…