Some writers appearing at Aye Write!

will refuse to take questions from the audience.

Getting things off to a more appropriate start, William Boyd embraces and encourages them, which is perhaps why Glasgow’s head of libraries Karen Cunningham introduced him as summing up the “spirit of the festival.”

In fact, Boyd pre-empts many queries with almost half an hour on the genesis and process of Ordinary Thunderstorms, his Tesco Bank Summer Read shortlisted novel, before he opens the book to read a grim passage.

Something more imaginative than the dreaded “Where do you get your ideas?” was required of a packed Mitchell Theatre.

Three-year intervals between his books were explained by the two years of invention and research that precede one year of composition, writing in long hand with a pen for two or three hours a day.

He described a religiously adhered to process of notebooks, filing cards and character dossiers. He has never abandoned a novel, he said, so there will be no fragments of incomplete Boyd to be unearthed in his study if he is run over by a bus.

However, since he described the contemporary London of his latest novel as a “more culturally diverse melting pot” than New York City, perhaps airport departure lounges are more his transport hell. Or heaven. An observant writer, he said, could realise three short stories from people-watching during a six hour flight delay.

Six hours, he revealed, was also the transmission time of this year’s television adaptation of his last big novel, Any Human Heart, which is about to begin shooting and will screen in the autumn.

Three actors will play the protagonist Logan Mountstuart: Jim Broadbent, Matthew MacFadyen and a younger man yet to be cast. Gasps of approval greeted the first two names, so the writer’s insistence that his screenplay is viewed as a “vivacious variant” of the much-loved book rather than a faithful adaptation was, perhaps, unnecessary.

Boyd also revealed he has twice turned down Desert Island Discs, claiming his eclectic listening preferences could not be contained in a mere eight choices.