When deciding what to write a story about, I suggest staying away from the inner ideas committee. Resist brainstorming, blue sky thinking, flip chart listing and above all setting out one’s objectives.

Committees appear to put together most BBC sitcoms, for example. Which is why they’re usually based around a family. This is good committee thinking: let’s appeal to the widest demographic. Everyone has a family. It’s universal.

It’s also a default universal. When student son has run out of socks and pants he takes a bag of laundry home to his mother. When teenage daughter brings her first boyfriend home, Dad is jealous and disapproving. When it’s Christmas everyone eats turkey and argues a lot. And because your characters are all acting by default, the writing is in danger of doing the same.

A non-blood family can be better to write about because then they need a reason to stay together; they won’t inevitably be drawn back into each other’s magnetic fields. The characters in ‘Red Dwarf’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ are non-blood families; therefore tensions that exist can actually be game-changing – someone might just walk out or join a new family. But won’t of course, because there’s another series on the way.

Default universals are everywhere: the office, the pub, funerals, weddings . . . none of which are bad ideas in themselves, just as long as they’re not made the reason for the story.

The point is, life itself is a series of default universals. We think we’re in control of where and how we spend our time and spirit but not really. Not unless we make special efforts to be, and are prepared to pay the price. Don’t want to do Christmas any more? Fine, stop sending cards, eating turkey, attending the office drinks party . . . But let’s just say that in one form or another, you’ll be explaining/defending your decision for the rest of your life. Much easier to just go with the default flow.

And you can do the same with your writing. A lot of fiction stays close to default universals, and it’s often popular. Presumably this is because it doesn’t poke at one’s spirit conscience. If you can read about the same default universals that govern your own life, and it’s officially endorsed by a publisher or TV company, then you can feel okay about sticking with it.

But good writing deals with true universals. What are they? Well, I don’t have a pat answer to this question. I’m writing this blog after reading a lot of short fiction and finding myself frequently mystified as to what the stories were actually about. Oh, they featured characters who did stuff and who suffered or rejoiced accordingly. But mostly they just travelled from A to Z in doing so. I couldn’t see why they’d bothered, in other words, other than to provide a set of actions for the reader to follow.

And I guess the obvious suspects as true universals are the things we all can not avoid: death, love, thirst, hunger, pain . . . instinctively, however, I think there needs to be more than those bare bones, at least for a good story to emerge.

So, perhaps one true universal is the death of oneself: the facing or avoiding thereof. Oneself being that comfortable collection of default universals we think is us but which is really just what everybody else tells us is us. Then, if you write a story about, say, a kidnapping, the surface point of it may be whether or not the victim escapes but the true point of it would be about how she reacts when the process of being taken shows her that her existing life is not nearly as solid as she thought it was.

Similarly, a good love story will never be just about whether or not the boy and the girl get together at the end. ‘Groundhog Day’ is such a good film because while on the surface it’s a will-they won’t-they love story, the true universal underpinning everything is the question of whether or not he’s prepared to change his existing self to be worthy of her love, and whether he has the means to do it.

True universals have to be disguised, I suspect, by default ones. This is because you can’t force people to face the truth. You have to let them choose to, when they’re ready, and they may never be ready. ‘Groundhog Day’s truth is disguised with a lot of humour and charm and novelty. The Bill Murray character is not a nice man at the start, so you can decide the film is really about how a nasty chap becomes a good egg; not that it’s about asking yourself how you might change to be worthy of the good people in your life.

I’m still thinking about this. But I suspect the difference between a great, memorable story and one that is just okay lies in the writer facing true universals in his own life then translating the process into a well-structured story full of resonance, even if the reader isn’t sure why exactly.