Wordcount = 86,116

Welcome to the latest in this continuing series of instructional guides to the sandwich-making art. Today's recipe, the Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Grill for Novelists, was learned during a six-month study tour of the finest sandwicheries of Paris, from a traditional French sandwichier whose great-great-grandfather claimed to have received the recipe from Victor Hugo in 1831 after a particularly messy bender during the early drafts of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Step one: As early as possible, preferably when you are eight, decide to become a novelist.

Step two: Buy bread. You'll be toasting, so ask for thick slices.

Step three: Make your first attempt at novel writing at twelve, no later, or the lettuce will sag.

Step four: Hone your craft. Spend much of your teenage years reading instead of running around outisde or making friends. At this stage, any subject matter will do: cheap detective fiction is fine, although remember, if you wouldn't read it, don't cook with it. Hint: wizards and dragons are to be avoided, as they tend to result in a lonely, introverted sandwich.

Step five: If you've been reading under a single forty-watt globe or sub-blanket torch, you should be ready for your first optician's prescription by now. Feel free to choose bold, colourful frames - if you've followed the recipe closely you will have no significant cool to lose.

Now is also a good time to start making friends with the local pig-farmers.

Step six: Choose your seasonings and an directionless university course to occupy the next four years. I've found that sea salt, toasted cumin seeds and almost any of the humanities are a nice match.

Step seven: Once your innate creativity and exuberant writing style have been comprehensively crushed by academic life, drop out and take a menial job at the campus bookshop, serving first-years in the course you've just graduated. Note: if you have a gas oven, you may need to retrieve significant family members from inside it at this point.

Step eight: Make your second attempt at novel writing, a sprawling philosophical discourse set on the bus from Shepparton, in your mid-twenties. Fail.

Step nine: Travel, relocate, marry and allow to settle for one year. Don't forget to send the traditional Christmas bottle of retsina to the pig-farmers.

Step ten: Suddenly find yourself in possession of three really good ideas, and completely balls them up as short stories, before finally coming to your senses and combining them into a longer piece, thereby starting your third attempt at novel writing without realising you're doing it.

Step eleven: Waste five years.

Step twelve: Waste another year. Purchase a tomato.

Step twelve: 80,000 words in, finally realise that the novel is actually quite good and take it up full-time. Don't wait any longer to remind your favourite pig-farmer of that time you gave him a lift home from the cinema - now is the time to get that bacon!

Step thirteen: The ideal day on which to actually make your sandwich is one where the ideas dry up about ten thirty, and you've disallowed yourself any more trips to Office Works until the damn chapter is finished. Go into the kitchen, collect your bread, bacon, tomato and seasonings, remember the lettuce and traipse out to the car in paroxysms of delight for a long, unscheduled stroll through Coles.

Step fourteen: While in Coles, have the exact idea required to finish the damn chapter. Since you don't have a pen, repeat it to yourself out loud while blissfully strolling the aisles, filling your trolley with things you haven't even looked at.

Step fifteen: Return to the house and microwave one of the numerous amorphous objects in perforated plastic sacks which you brought home from Coles.

Step sixteen: Sit down before the computer with several steaming objects on a plate and strain to remember the idea you had at Coles, which you can now only recall was born in the cereal aisle and may have had something to do with toucans.

Step seventeen: Bite into one of the objects. Vow to spend much more time on lunch tomorrow.