The next time your better half leaves the toilet seat up, or talks through your favourite programme, or arranges themselves in the bed so as to pointedly illustrate their huff, spare a thought for Mil Millington. If his celebrated litany of tiffs with German girlfriend Margret are anything to go by, it's less vive le difference and more mein kampf.

But then again, Mil's trouble and strife has been a smorgasboard of inspiration, springboarding him from IT helpdesker to literary success. His website, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (TMGAIHAA), caught the eye of a souse of publishers, consequently forming the basis (and the title) of his first novel. That was swiftly followed by a number of writing gigs, most notably the Wait Till Your Mother Gets Home column in The Guardian. And then a second novel, A Certain Chemistry, cemented his place on the lad-lit shelf. Not that his readership is exclusively male, nor that his work conforms to the usual 'male-confessionals' of Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons. And not that you'd put cement on a shelf. He's already been published in five languages, and is currently ploughing through the third book.

Mil's tone has been described by Newsweek as "a bawdy P.G. Wodehouse as the head writer for Friends", whatever that means. Certainly he has a dry and cynical wit, and masterfully breaks new ground in onomatopoeia, adding words like 'Fff', 'meh' and 'pheeeeeeeeeeeeee' to the lexicon of exasperated sighs. He remains remarkably accessible to his audience, usually laying bare the latest episodes of his life in print or via his regular emails to fans. We chatted to Mil about the hectic, eclectic dialectic that inspires his work, and y'know, stuff.

Great Writing: How did we get from man-on-the-street-Mil to published-novelist-Mil?

Mil Millington: Your chosen subject is yourself. You are a git, and your time starts... now. The actual chronology was this:

1. Mil puts up Webpage for his own idle amusement never imagining anyone will visit.
2. Several years pass, during which - increasingly - people do visit.
3. Mil does another website, The Weekly, with Mr Nash (a few others contribute, but it's 99% Millington and Nash). It's hugely popular with physicists and university linguistics departments, but is not remotely A Leap Into Professional Writing: it just about covers the cost of paying for the server to host it. A labour of love, really: Millington and Nash writing what the hell they like, for the joy of it.
4. Eventually, a publisher turns up (unbidden, out of the blue) at the TMGAIHAA page and asks Mil if he's thought about doing a novel ever.
5. The next day another publisher turns up asking the same thing.
6. Etc.
7. Mil meets people, and decides it's down to Hodder or Penguin. Both have made written offers, and he's considering which publisher it's best to go with.
8. The Mail on Sunday (knowing nothing about the publishers) ask to use the page. Mil says, 'No.' They use it anyway.
9. Media kerfuffle
10. Media kerfuffle ends.
11. Mil decides to go with Hodder.
12. Mil starts to write TMGAIHAA.
13. Guardian Weekend launches and Mil does col for it, weeping with misery.
14. TMGAIHAA comes out.

The only interesting thing about this is that most people (naturally) assume that the offer of a book deal came from having the column in The Guardian. But, in fact, the deal was offered before anyone knew there would even be a column. It also means that many, many people thought (and still think) that the novel is actually just a collection of the columns, which is something I often think about whenever I need a quick reason to bury my face in my hands and sob.

GW: What approach do you use when planning a novel? Is meticulous planning involved?

MM: Lord, I could write 50,000 words about this. With vicious brevity, yes, they're planned out in some detail. I'm always driven by wanting to say something or explore an idea. I'm not usually driven by plots, which for me are merely ways of conveying the core notion. A Certain Chemistry (ACC) is about the slippery notion of freewill and what it - really, disturbingly - means to be human: I used a romantic plot simply because love is always put forward as the most random, ineffable and personal thing there is. Showing how that was predictable, I hoped (vainly), would demonstrate the point.

I plan my novels out scene by scene (I sometimes amend, adapt, etc. as I go along, but the bulk of it is there before I start). However, each scene is there for a reason; to display a character trait, add a plot point, or whatever. So, my plan states the reason for the scene, possibly with line or two about the what that actual scene might feature - it's not a detailed sketch of what will go on: I make up the details mostly on the hoof.

The Wanking Scene in ACC, for example, was there because I wanted to bring out how unnervingly malleable even something as seemingly fundamentally 'You' as sexual attraction is - it was a lead-in to the section afterwards where this is explained by the celestial chorus. It might read like a comic set-piece, but it was invented when I got there, with just its purpose as the guide. Mostly, that's what I do. It means, by the way, that I always know the endings of books before I start - because the ending is the place where I make the point most finally. The irony is, I'm sometimes accused of 'having no ending', but it's because the ending for me is to do with the idea behind the book, not a plot thing.

I'd advise anyone to plan out their book before they start. It really helps you to get a better overall view (aside: TMGAIHAA deliberately broke nearly all the golden rules of Story - it was quite consciously done, and had to be done with that book, I feel, but it still means ACC, which has a more conventional structure/character arcs/etc., reads as the better 'book'). You can see the shape with five pages of scene far more easily than you can with 100,000 words of text.

GW: Was writing the 'second novel' as fraught a process as writers often claim?

MM: It was very easy for me. But that was because of the point above: TMGAIHAA was fighting convention all the way. ACC didn't have that burden, so it flew down.

GW: There's a lot of cynicism in your writing. Is it a dissatisfaction with your world that drives you to write, or are you putting it on for comic effect?

MM: Probably both. As I say, it's the 'idea' that makes me want to sit down with 100,000 words ahead of me, and I am certainly partly driven by irk. I'm not, um, bitter and angry, though. It's simply, well... we're all meaningless specks flashing painfully briefly in a dying universe. Given that situation, I'm pretty much doing stand-up on the Titanic so - hell - I'm not 'cynical', I'm 'plucky'.

GW: Now that you're commercially published, do you feel any less inclined to publish work under your own auspices?

MM: Arf. No - everything I do is entirely for myself. I never think, 'Oh, this would be a financially better thing to do,' or 'Right, I'll do so-and-so because it's more commercial and what people and publishers/producers/etc. want.' Tragically the opposite, in fact. The problem is time. When we updated The Weekly daily it nearly sent us mad (remember that perhaps only one idea in ten results in a finished thing you're satisfied with). At the time, I wasn't doing much other writing. Now, I'm tinkering with the last book, writing the next one, doing a draft of a TV script, working on another script with Mr Nash, and lots and lots of smaller things in the spaces in between. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to do everything. And the new things are more attractive, obviously - you're always more fired up about doing something new (the next novel, say) than continuing to add to something you've been doing for ages.

GW: You're working on a screenplay for TMGAIHAA for Working Title. How does writing for the screen compare to novel writing? Will the screenplay deviate from the novel (which itself is a substantial deviation from the source website)?

MM: I regard - and have always regarded - the TMGAIHAA screenplay as Working Title's thing, not mine. That's pure realism. A writer can completely own a novel: a screen writer isn't even third in command of a film.

Anyway, my approach was to 'write a film': that is, rather than trying to 'adapt a novel'. A great deal of a novel - especially a comic novel written in the first person - goes on in the protagonist's head. Without resorting to a cheating voice-over; one can't do that in a movie, and - as is often said - film is a visual medium: you need to tell the story with pictures, not just words.

With TMGAIHAA specifically, there's a real 'problem' in that the model ought to be, for example, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, not a rom-com formula. It simply doesn't work as a conventional rom-com - for a start, it's not about two characters falling in love, it's about two characters being in love. It doesn't really fit into the Working Title mould, and it's up to them whether they ultimately decide to accept this, try to force it in anyway, or give up and run to the hills. There are the general things one must do moving from a novel to a film too, obviously. You don't have the space: the audio book of TMGAIHAA is something over 11 hours. In a film you have 90 minutes. So, something subtly and gradually introduced over 40 pages has to be replaced by, 'There's a phone call and someone says,' or the like. Also, two, three or even four characters have to merge into one sometimes. A lot of the work is essentially streamlining. The upside is I got the chance to add quite a few scenes that are pure visual comedy; things that you can do in a film but not in a book.

Personally, though, I far prefer doing scripts that were conceived as scripts. Adaptation is an interesting technical exercise, but hardly whooping fun.

GW: You're still quite active online, what with your mailing list and all. Are you using the internet as a marketing machine?

MM: No, I don't think so. The joy of online is that you can write precisely what you want. A Mailing List is something I write: perhaps something of the same length as a newspaper/magazine piece, but without it having gone through the butchering hands of six copy editors.

GW: Is the Internet a good place for a writer to 'break out'?

MM: No, no, no. There are Web-book crossovers, but far less than, say, there are with journalists moving into novels. For a start, the Web demands very different things to a novel. The upshot of this is that a 'successful' Website will generally be very sound-bite, quick fix and staccato. It might be fun, but won't sell you to publishers: it's like trying to catch the eye of the person who's choosing Olympic marathon runners by standing in front of him hopping about on one foot.

Depressingly, the best way to a book deal remains the age-old route of three chapters and a synopsis to an agent. Also, the Web audience is not the book-buying audience. If 1,000 people love your Website, that might - if you're lucky - translate into a single sale of one of your books. A million Net hits, in book-selling terms, isn't worth anything at all compared to being in a 3-for-2 promotion in Waterstone's.

GW: Do you think that the rise in blogging culture will spawn a new wave of novelists, or even affect modern prose style?

MM: Tricky to answer. I think it may influence novels in the sense that more will (or, indeed, are) now be written in the first person rather than the third. Would-be writers will often have blogs or Webpages, and the vast majority will be written in the first person, because that's the way - the Web's idiom, almost. When they come to write their novels, they'll have grown accustomed to writing like that, and so they'll instinctively carry on.

But perhaps even that is post hoc reasoning. Tropic of Cancer, if it appeared now, might easily be labelled an obvious result of blogging style, for example.

GW: You're a family man; two children and a well-documented girlfriend. What would you say to those who complain that they are too busy/cramped with domestic life to focus on their writing?

MM: Stop having any sleep, that's what I've done. Hmmm... it depends on how you are as a person. What I would say is that 'needing inspiration' is often merely a mask for copping out. Start writing - writing anything: gibberish if needs be - and you'll generally get into the flow: don't sit there saying, 'I need to think up the perfect situation before I even start.' To be brutally frank, that's how you have to be if you want to become a professional writer. It's your job, not something you can do if you're in the right mood. The difference between a stand-up comic and someone who's really funny down the pub is that the former can't be reactive (making funny comments on what's presented by others) nor does s/he have the luxury of choice. The stand-up has to sit down, tired, fed up, with a cold, on a miserable Tuesday morning with nothing but air in front of him/her and write a comic routine, and then perform it, on cue, as required. If you can't write that first novel because of the distractions and attrition of everyday life, then how will you get on if it's taken up? When you have to do a second, and life is still there, but now there's a deadline and a publisher tapping his big, corporate foot as well. I know it's hard, but all you can do is accept that it's hard and decide to do it anyway; it's not really about finding wily tricks and techniques, it's about biting bullets.

Terrifying but, I'm afraid, true.

Mil Millington's novels, Things My Girlfriend and I have Argued About and A Certain Chemistry are available from the shops. There's also a third one on the way. For an introduction to Millington, you should visit Mil's website.