Every now and then someone other than my psychiatrist asks me if I structure my novels. I can see why they ask. Looking back at my chaotic beginnings it's easy to see them as distorted reflections of my own rather turbulent mental state. It's not that I was mad, I was just at that awkward age when it's impossible to tell the difference between a thought and a hormone. Then I turned fifty.

In my defense, though, when I first dreamed of being a writer I was reading books by Huxley, Burroughs and Samuel R Delaney. No wonder I was confused. And in the finest tradition of Kerouac and Kesey I was doing so many drugs I was never quite sure which parallel dimension I coexisted in. In fact I was so busy living the Bohemian life, staggering through Spain in the hallowed footsteps of Lee and Orwell that I eventually lost my way. Ended up in Thailand and turned to crime.

I don't think Henry Miller had ever met me when he wrote that chaos is the score upon which reality is written, but when I returned from exile my reality was like one of those surreal Dali paintings in which the world he portrays and the people in it seem to disintegrate into flying shards, each a fragmented reflection of the atomic chaos from which we are fundamentally formed.

In words even my manicurist would understand, I didn't know who the fuck I was. In a material world I had no material, in a capitalist world I had no capital, and in the stultifying status quo I had no status. I was down and out in a city I'd once been proud to call my own, chained to a kitchen sink that never emptied of dishes as I tried to haul myself from the dystopian swamp of my own wintry myth. So I became a shop steward.

Somewhere in the dynamics of my reasoning this made absolute sense and conformed to some heroic narrative structure I was recreating for myself. I would stand shoulder to shoulder with kitchen porters around the world and together we would sing The Internationale as we united in solidarity against The Man, even if his representative in the hospital kitchens was a weasly little slimeball called Mackie whose pathetic frame and bifaceted approach to industrial relations became a focus for both my metaphysical and material violence. Somehow from that chaos emerged if not the body then the structure for my first crime novel, Nobody's Fool, in which coincidendentally the killer Dominic Bain works as a cook in a hospital kitchen.

So to finally answer the question, today as I prepare to step out onto the Antarctic ice in my fifth novel I use a simple 3 or 4 Act structure as a framework for plotting the broad strokes of the storyline. In my current scenario, Act 1 is set in Cape Town, Acts 2 and 3 are set in Antarctica, and Act 4 is set in Berlin. Then as I begin to plot the finer details, I zoom in on each Act and use a framework like this, where each block is a scene and each column a chapter. Zoom in again and each chapter in itself becomes a 3 or 4 Act structure, replete with its own beginning, middle and end. Am I really that anal when plotting my novels? Yes. But then I've never been good at telling the truth.