Waiting in the novelty igloo to see if I've been granted a William Boyd press ticket, I happen to meet someone from BBC Scotland who lived just a few kilometers from my hometown in Canada. As we expound on the hospitality and wild beauty of the Maritime provinces, I'm gifted with the golden ticket, and walk to the RBS Main Tent with a couple of minutes to spare.

Boyd reads from Ordinary Thunderstorms, where his protagonist Adam Kindred is rapidly shifting from an ordinary reality to something quite different, following an encounter with a man in a restaurant. The author reads well, with an excellent sense of pace and expression. His prose is full of detail, but this is presented with such skill that the audience, or reader, is not in danger of becoming bored. Each detail seems to stick effortlessly.

Boyd's new novel began with an article he read about the 60 or so bodies which wash up on the banks of the Thames every year, usually around the Isle of Dogs. We hear that this interest in the stories of these anonymous dead bodies was combined with the notion of London as a uniquely layered society, in culture and social class. Kindred loses everything which connects him to his social reality, and, Boyd tells us, falls through the layers of London. The story is his attempt to crawl out.

Of his methodology, Boyd tells us that he starts by constructing a detailed skeleton which then grows flesh. It strikes me as an unusually disciplined way of writing, which clearly works for this author, but his assertion that he discards most of his mistakes in the pre-writing stage is surely unusual amongst fiction writers.

Boyd rejects the auteur theory of film making. For the one film he directed, he refused the “film by” credit. He contrasts this with novelistic autonomy, which doesn't rely on technical arrangements or collaboration. The author asserts that this is what makes the two art forms distinct, though they are often lumped together. The similarities, we're told, are the cinematic qualities such as flashbacks which have always been present in the novel.

During questions, Boyd tells us that it's very difficult to write about crime, or to use techniques such as multi-character stories and omniscience without acknowledging the influence of Dickens. The subject of realist fiction arises, which Boyd asserts determined the shape of modern literature, and is essentially without moral. This is for the reader to find, or not.

Boyd tells us that he first began to construct women protagonists when writing Brazzaville Beach, after discovering that all the leading experts in primatology are women. His method for creating believable women characters has been to shed his notions of gender politics and focus on personality.

The combination of Boyd's urban prose, skillful reading and great questions from an alert audience make this one of the most satisfying events I've seen at the festival this year. The Nat Tate coffee table book is mentioned once; Boyd tells us that it was never intended to be a hoax. We totally believe him.