I am a self-employed writer, which means I’m working for an idiot who doesn’t pay me enough – but the holidays are great.
I’m ex many occupations, from the respectable ‘career-ladder’ to disreputable “somebody’s- got-to-do-it”. All a good way of seeing someone else’s point-of-view. Best job, apart from writing, was dispatch-riding on a motorcycle in the 70s, though I’ve also enjoyed teaching, librarianship, counselling and helping to run a community-centre. Sometimes I’ve looked respectable in a suit, other times a bit more wild and woolly (though still stylish) as a biker. It’s strange how differently people treat you, depending on what you’re wearing. A suit means I’m sometimes addressed as ‘sir’, but in motorcycle leathers I’m always referred to as ‘mate.’
The worst job that I’ve done ? You really don’t want to know, but it was in a processed food manufacturer’s factory – put me off bacon, sausages and quiches for a long time, and made me look at pet food in a new way. I’m very glad that I don’t have any pictures.
I’ve been writing since I was eight, when I penned a story about a desert island and attempted to compile a dictionary – as Clarissa does in my short story ‘The Moon Is Out Tonight’. I’ve written for magazines under a variety of pen-names, ghost-written a couple of biographies and had a column in a local newspaper.
I used to concentrate on non-fiction of an informative, how-to instructional nature, as I’m a firm believer in the dissemination of knowledge to enable people to do things for themselves. Knowledge is power, and in these troubled times of economic downturn and increased intrusion into our lives by government agencies, its vital to know how to get through. My fictional stories also show people coping and finding ways to survive.
I’m based in a Celtic nation, the county of Cornwall or Kernow. I’ve been here for twenty years, and have lived all over the country, as well as abroad in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the U.S.A.
Monkey Mind describes random thoughts that come to us unbidden, as if our brains have gone onto zap selection, throwing memories at us. These are rarely positive in nature and are more likely to be irrelevant, unhelpful or self-destructive.
I would suggest that you spank your monkey, should it misbehave, but this could be misconstrued! What I do, when the monkeys in my mind intrude, is to take them by the paws and sit them down at a keyboard, following the notion propounded in the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
Thisstates that a monkey hitting keys at randomon a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Personally, I think they’re more likely to produce a novel comparable to the output of James Patterson, or, if the simians doing the typing were horny Bonobos, then maybe E. L. James at her best!
I used to get perplexed and annoyed at the daft thoughts that monkey mind gave me, but I’ve taken to giving my mischievous relatives the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’re trying to help me, in some obscure way. After all, my brain keeps working on my WIP, even though I’m not consciously thinking about writing, offering me ideas out of the blue and also as I sleep. It could be that when monkey mind reminds me of the pain I experienced after breaking my wrist in 1982, that I could use some of that personal agony in an upcoming scene where my protagonist is assaulted.
It’s said, that when writing a story, nothing should be written that doesn’t advance the plot or add to the characterisation of the protagonist and antagonist, but sometimes not a lot happens!
We’re also advised to make the opening of a novel as attention-grabbing as possible, but however energetic our story begins, there comes a time when the pace slows, while our hero recharges his strength with a meal. How to make that interlude interesting?
With my last novel, I reached a point 20,000 words in, with the good guys reintroduced (it’s the fifth story in a series) and the baddies and their crimes described. My detective protagonist knows what’s gone awry, but not who perpetrated the murders and thefts. He and the reader (and me), are at a point where some quiet contemplation of the facts needed to occur, to decide where to go next. I threw in a couple of red herrings to send readers in the wrong direction.
My protagonist often revisits crime scenes after he’s finished work, attempting to blend in as a civilian. This is helped by him looking like the farmer he once was, and by riding a chopper motorcycle which is at odds with the traditional image of a reactionary copper. He attempts to see the situation through the eyes of a civilian. He’s still working as a detective, but these intervals allow me space to portray who he is as a man.
There are times when your protagonist needs to take time out to eat or go to the bathroom or sleep—they can’t be ‘on’ all of the time.
Non-stop action, of whatever variety, be it fighting, good humour, arguments or sexual shenanigans, soon becomes tedious without a break. We can only stand so much stimulation! Too much of a good thing becomes boring itself.
I love the crime writing of Walter Mosley, who I revisit regularly, and he handles longueurs very well. His private investigators are men of culture, who were raised to question dogma and who’ve continued their education by reading widely, as well as enjoying music, movies and art. This helps them to reflect upon what’s happening to the people they encounter in their sleuthing. They’re street tough, but while sitting in a seedy bar watching a potential witness, they might recall a scene from a Dostoevsky novel.
My own protagonist paints watercolours of the moors and the sea, for his own enjoyment and as a way of relaxing, but also as a form of meditation. By encouraging his brain to switch off, he gets insights into the case he’s investigating.
How do you handle the boring bits, where your character is out doing the grocery shopping or wiling away the evening after a hard day at the office?
Do your characters regularly take time out to indulge in some leisure activity, and is that a separate event, or do you feel compelled to weave in elements of the plot?
It’s a short book of fewer than 25,000 words, aimed at newbie authors, but any writer would benefit from his common sense advice. It has the welcome qualities of not only offering useful tips but being encouraging in an arm-around-the-shoulder way, as well as gently cajoling you to just get on with writing the words.
One section of the second chapter, The Elements of Fiction, startled me when I first read it until I realised how astute Mosley’s advice is:
the pedestrian in fiction
Maybe your character gets up out of bed and walks across the room to the mirror. You need her to see the bags under her eyes and lines on her aging face. That’s good. But in order to have us feel what it is to get up out of that bed, we might want to add a little more: the sound of the sheets falling to the floor; the urge to urinate, which the protagonist resists to see what time and life have wrought upon her visage; the grit beneath her bare feet on the floor; the pain in her left knee that has been with her since a time, years ago, when she twisted her ankle on a stone stairway while attending her mother’s funeral—the mother whom she now very much resembles. Every one of these details tells and also shows us something about our protagonist and/ or her world.
Most of these details are pedestrian. Why, you might ask, would we want to make the experiences of our characters ordinary? Because everyday experiences help the reader relate to the character, which sets up the reader’s acceptance of more extraordinary events that may unfold.
If your audience believes in the daily humdrum physical and emotional experiences of your characters, then your readers will believe in those character’s reality and thus can be taken further.
Even a rugged hero facing a confrontation with an evil mastermind will have everyday needs and preoccupations, which when mentioned make them three-dimensional, rather than a cardboard cutout representing the forces of justice.
As writers, we’re constantly advised to polish our sentences, paragraphs and chapters—and it’s always recommended that less is more—but, terse brilliance may mean eliminating, (or not even thinking of), the obvious. Even famous authors do this, so focused on the plot, that they forget to mention their protagonist needs to eat or sleep, and that he should have a few bruises after being beaten senseless in an alleyway in the previous chapter.
Sometimes, not a lot happensaction-wise, but your characters still have thoughts and interact with people. These situations allow for pedestrian writing that adds valuable elements to the story. In my Cornish Detective series, I always have a chapter where the protagonist detective meets with his best friend, a forensic pathologist, at an Indian restaurant. This device allows me to explore my hero’s private life, for his older friend has long offered him wise counsel and he opens up to her.
By letting readers into the mind of a multi-faceted copper, showing his strengths and weaknesses, I hope to engender loyalty. His doubts and dreams are similar to the readers; he’s an ordinary man doing an extraordinary job, and showing how he navigates through everyday tasks adds realism as well as offering opportunities for plot developments.
In one of my novels, the detective protagonist visited the supermarket, on his way back from searching for the corpse of a murder victim whose head had been placed atop a road sign. As he parked, he spotted a heavily-scarred thug he fancied for the killing, who was peacefully sat on a park bench watching a song thrush sing against the backdrop of purple storm clouds. He went across to chat with him—getting useful insights into how a violent man thinks.
My detective remembered to go and buy his chamomile tea, thus returning to a pedestrian activity after a frisson of excitement.
However, too much detail of the mundane can be a bad thing. I’ve just given up on reading a novel set in the world of art theft, as perpetrated by the Mafia, who use valuable paintings as currency and collateral. Located in Florence, which was described in painstaking detail as the private investigator trudged around when he wasn’t eating restaurant meals or consuming the contents of the mini-bar in his hotel room. All that happened in 200 pages was pedestrian writing and I lost interest. I started to despise the protagonist, who appeared to be lost in a tourist guide. While slogging through it, I was reminded of Mark Twain’s observation:
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
There should be a name for the sense of satisfaction that comes when a jaded reader gives up on a tiresome book.
Do you incorporate ordinary everyday events into your stories?
Are your characters fallible in little ways? Frailties are a good way of generating empathy from the reader.
This article from the Guardian, written by Elena Ferrante, about the use of exclamation marks in writing, had me scurrying to my last novel to check how many I’d used in 84,000 words.
The answer is just one, and that was made by a dead forger who added an exclamation mark as an act of protest to her own signature in the corner of a spoiled painting she’d copied, which was found in her flat.
I’ve long known that exclamation marks are frowned upon by writing gurus. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said:
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
Usually, it’s possible to indicate shock, fear and anger by word choice.
I admit that I commonly use exclamation marks in emails to friends, which are more colloquially phrased…
It’s cynical of me to say so, but there’s money in misery. But, suffering is a part of life. As Woody Allen lamented:
Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering—and it’s all over much too soon.
I’ll never be a fan of misery memoirs, though perhaps I should write one, as this genre is said to be the most rapidly expanding. Many stories of suffering have been faked, though I was impressed by Jung Chang’sWild Swans.
I write in the crime genre, which enables me to tackle some contentious issues in society, as well as the vile behaviour of criminals and the deplorable attitude of the public who get a thrill out of being gawkers and trolls.
I’ve written about murder, kidnapping, poisoning, sexual assault, blackmail, prostitution, drug dealing, incest, violent assault, genocide and human trafficking. Some of these crimes were prompted by unpleasant human events, such as mental illness, bereavement, suicide and assisted suicide, long-term unemployment and debt, cancer, PTSD, and homelessness.
These are things that have happened to my friends, acquaintances and family members, though I never write so closely that they could be identified. Some crimes, accidents and tragedies are stuff I remembered from the news, going right back to my boyhood. For instance, my last novel includes a corpse being found incompletely embalmed, which is a newspaper story I recalled from the 1960s where a man attempted to preserve his wife in this way, living with her body for thirty years. This only came to light, after he died alone and his putrefying remains alerted neighbours that something was amiss. He was laying on the bed next to his beloved.
I also draw on first-hand knowledge, including violent confrontations and fights, (where I was sometimes on the losing end), meetings with career criminals and racists, a near-death experience, finding a corpse, being burgled and the ramifications of mistaken identity. I didn’t know it at the time, but my suffering has provided me with the perfect material for writing novels!
It’s said ‘To write what you know about’, but I have no way of telling whether the passages based on what actually happened to me read truer than those created by my imagination. In rough times, I certainly thought “This will make a great story one day,” which only goes to prove that my writerly brain was observant, even while dormant.
Have you ever written anything based on personal suffering, or of sadness that happened to those close to you?
Are there any books that make you howl with anguish? I recently read Plainsong, written by Kent Haruf, in which an abandoned pregnant girl is taken in by two farmer brothers. The kindness of these simple souls to her made me shed a tear—fortunately, I was on the loo at the time—so tissue paper was handy!
What do you think of misery lit?
Is there anything that you wouldn’t write about? I tackled paedophilia in my latest novel, The Dead Need Nobody, which made me uncomfortable, though I wrote about this most hideous of crimes partly as a plot device, to have my protagonist lose control of his temper to batter the offender so severely that he dies, meaning he gets suspended from duty. He was fighting for his life, stabbed with a sword and bleeding out, meaning he’s in a coma at the end. Quite what his fate will be in Book 6, I’ve yet to decide.
If reading can be therapeutic, I guess that writing about the dark side of life could be healing.
‘What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.’
Her observation is something that I’ve kept in the back of my mind when writing my own Cornish Detective series.
My protagonist detective is as much a healer as he is an avenger. But, he’s considerably more vengeful than his boss, the Chief Constable, who worries about the image of the force. He’s willing to cover up investigative failures if it prevents holidaymakers from being scared off from visiting Cornwall, which depends on tourism for much of its income.
I’ve been confident about the stance of my protagonist, who is an unusual character, while still fretting a bit that he’s too freaky and also that he’s a bit boring. I rationalised this, by remembering that villains, the antagonists, are always easier and more fun to write. Also, even if I’ve written a truly frightening fight scene, it’s not going to scare me as I know exactly what happens!
It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d created a protagonist who’s in good fictional company. The article is written by crime novelist Jason Webster, whose Spanish detective Max Cámara is an unorthodox character. Webster is a maverick author, at least so far as Fatal Sunset, the sixth story in his series goes, for he seemingly kills his hero on the last page—leaving a mystifying cliffhanger, which made me eager to read the next novel to see how he gets out of it. It’s a useful technique, for it made me remember the author’s name more than if all of the loose ends had been neatly tied.
Webster makes some wise observations about what function a detective serves:
‘If nothing else, he (and, later, she) is a problem-solver; someone who can restore order where there is chaos. Faced with the worst crime (what could be more existentially troubling than a murder?), the detective gives us answers to the most pressing and urgent questions: not only whodunit, but how and why and what it means. He does all this by taking us on a journey,discovering pieces of evidence, seeking out hints and clues. In the best examples of this game, we see everything that the detective sees, yet we are unable to solve the crime ourselves. Only the detective, in a final display of mastery, can reach the correct conclusion. We need him, with his special knowledge and abilities, to make sense of it all.
In other words, a detective is a kind of priest. Throughout history, priestly castes have boasted a unique capacity to answer the great riddles of existence….’
My detective hero is a very wealthy man, owing to an inheritance, and he’s also a son of a farmer locked into the moods of nature. His love of art, music, books and the countryside keeps him sane, but he’s definitely weird when compared to the typical drug and booze abusing detective or private investigator, who also gambles and womanises. My protagonist is left-wing or liberal, believes in a Green approach to living and is Bohemian in nature from his love of art. He doesn’t smoke, do drugs and rarely drinks alcohol. He was also celibate for eight years, following the death of his wife, though I gave him a sex life in the latest story.
I deliberately wanted to create a different type of detective, not that I dislike the hard-boiled tough guy coppers, but they’re better suited to city locations. My stories are set in Cornwall, featuring dark and dirty deeds—poisoning, cannibalism, human trafficking, BDSM, illegal abattoirs and murder as a roleplaying game—but my hero solves the crimes using his cunning and intelligence.
Inadvertently, I’ve written stories that fit into a subgenre of crime writing known as Country Noir or Rural Noir, which is alright with me, for I’d rather create tales that scare the reader, than pen comfortable cosies they can enjoy on the beach; there’s nothing cosy about murder!
Thinking about famous fictional detectives, characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey and private investigators like Philip Marlowe and Dick Tracy, they share the trait of being recognisable by their appearance, in the same way that founts of wisdom such as Gandhi, the Buddha, Confucius, Mother Teresa, Einstein, Steve Jobs and Stephen Hawking all have an appearance that lends itself to being instantly identifiable, even in silhouette.
It’s certainly something to consider when describing the looks of your own detective protagonist.
Even rough diamonds can take on the role of priest, healer and shaman. I read a dozen Walter Mosley detective novels last year, and the heroes of his two main series of books, Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill are both street tough brawlers, but they’re also well-educated and have a social conscience, going out of their way to help the downtrodden victims of the crimes they’re investigating. That’s not to say that they won’t take any casual sex that’s offered to them, or put a bullet in the head of a baddy, as that’s more justice than handing him over to the law.
They both remind me of the proverb quoted by Theodore Roosevelt when referring to American foreign policy: Speak softly and carry a big stick.
If you write crime stories, what kind of detective do they feature?
If you read crime novels, who are your favourite detectives?
At which point in your characters’ lives do you begin your story?
Should your protagonist be the first person a reader meets? Or, as often happens in my chosen genre of crime, should it be the victim who appears first, fearful that they’re in danger and trying to escape, or perhaps they’re long dead and their corpse is laying undiscovered.
It’s long been said, in a jokey way, that a story should have:‘A start a muddle and an end.’ Some famous novels use reverse chronology, beginning at the end of the story and working backwards to explain how the narrator got there. Martin Amis wrote Time’s Arrow through the eyes of a protagonist who can apparently bring people back to life, though it’s revealed that he’s actually a doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp who’s killing inmates in medical experiments.
Ambrose Bierce wrote a famous short story called An Occurrence At Owl Creek, which begins as the narrator is about to be hanged by the neck, but there are flashbacks and a twist ending.
Timing is all, and it can affect not just the start of a story, but each subsequent chapter.
William Goldman admitted:I never enter scenes until the last possible moment…and as soon as it’s done I get the hell out of there.
Blaise Pascal reckoned that: The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
I’ve rewritten all of my first chapters, after typing The End, to include foreshadowing that I wasn’t thinking of as I set out on a new writing adventure.
Poet Vickie Karp said: When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.
Looking at my own Cornish Detective novels, I see that I always begin my stories in the here and now, describing the crime victim as their body is found or as they die or as they are released from danger.
InWho Kills A Nudist? the titular murder victim was killed the night before the story starts
The Perfect Murderer begins on the day that the third victim of a serial killer is found, a murderer who took his first target two months before.
An Elegant Murderstarts in the present, but, in the mind of a deluded woman who is about to be murdered. Mentally, she is living forty years ago, having just escaped incarceration in the mental health system.
Sin Killers starts in the here and now, as seen through the eyes of a five-year-old boy who’s just been released by his kidnappers, who held him for two days.
The fifth story, written in 2018, The Dead Need Nobody begins a few minutes before a young painter is thrown to her death. The murder happened three weeks before the rest of the story starts.
I never reveal from Chapter One who the killer is, though he usually appears early on. In the two novels I’ve written from a multiple POV, the murderer gets his say. My crime stories are how-catch-’ems rather than who-dun-its. Although they begin in the present, all of the investigations involve delving back decades into the childhoods of the antagonists, to unravel the motivation for their crimes.
When do you begin your story?
Do you use a prologue describing the dim and distant past, when something significant occurred, with repercussions for your modern day characters?
Have any of you ever written a tale that begins at the end of the events that make up the bulk of the story?
Most of us are still in the unpublished manuscript stage of being an author unless we’ve self-published an ebook online.
I’m a member of The Colony, on the Litopia website, where we’re fortunate to be able to get our writing critiqued by fellow writers, including Agent Pete, in a calm, considerate and constructive way. But, nastier criticism may erupt should your book ever be published, to be reviewed by hired guns working for newspapers and journals, as well as by everyday readers posting their comments online.
Ambling around the internet recently, I came across this well-considered article on bad reviews.
(The link in the article to Alice Hoffman’s meltdown is broken, so try this one.)
Writer of the article, Canadian novelist Emily St John Mandel has previous form as an astute commentator on publishing trends.
I think that the best attitude to have with reviews is that of Joanna Smith-Rakoff, who doesn’t read any of them—good or bad.
I have a jaundiced attitude towards reviewers, born of experience and an enquiring suspicious mind. Recently, I was puzzled by a favourable review of a novel, which had been panned by other critics, and a bit of research showed that it was printed by the same publisher that handled the reviewer and that both were represented by the same literary agent!
As for reviews and comments left by members of the public on sites like Amazon and its book review arm Goodreads, some are thoughtful, while others are the demented rantings of trolls. I helped to manage a community centre for four years, which had a free computer suite. One of the regular users was a creepy dude who spent a lot of time posting inflammatory comments online—he hadn’t even read the thread concerned. Eventually, he was banned for trying to access prohibited sites. I could never work out how his mind worked, for he lived in a world of hate, trying to drag everyone down to his pitiful level.
Some brilliant observations of critics have been made over the years:
*Gene Fowler: Don’t be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.
*Anonymous:Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy.
*Channing Pollock: A critic is like a legless man who teaches running.
*Christopher Hampton: Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.
*Kenneth Tynan:A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.
*Erin Andrews: I think what I try to do with all of the naysayers, negative comments, or even people that think you can’t do it, is I’m trying very hard to use it as motivation and to add that chip on my shoulder.
I think, that if a book reviewer is also an author, then their opinion might have more validity, though there have been plenty of literary feuds.
My attitude towards self-doubt, while writing a novel, and towards any criticism that may come my way when it’s published, mirrors the advice given by Hilary Mantel:
The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence—arrogance if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.
I decided long ago, that there is zero point in beating myself up. Such an attitude is ideal for being a writer. In five years, I’ve been told “NO!” 650 times through rejected queries, so my already thick hide is now bulletproof!
It may be because I’ve gone through so much shit in my life, that I’ve developed a mindset where I really don’t give a toss what people think of me—apart from a few valued friends. I’m more concerned with pleasing myself, by producing stories that are of high quality. What I’m finding hard to come to terms with, is that I’ve actually entered a Popularity Game, in which I have to appeal to lots of people—agents, publishers, potential readers, actual readers who’ve bought the book + all of the attendant publicity twerps, like journalists and media reporters who I’m meant to cosy up to in an attempt at favourable publicity.
As for critics, I really don’t have the time for them. I’m reminded of something that Edgar Rice Burroughs had his hero Tarzan of the Apes say when he was criticised:
“Does a lion listen to the yapping of the jackals?”
What is your attitude to being criticised?
Does it destroy you, or do you use it as a basis for improving…or, do you dismiss it as jealousy?
I’ve just finished reading Henning Mankell’s An Event In Autumn, a Kurt Wallander thriller. It includes a 14-page afterword, in which the author reflects on how he came to start writing novels about a Swedish detective.
I was pleased to see that he chose crime fiction, as a way of exploring the problems in society, which is one of the main reasons that I began my Cornish Detective series. He quotes a Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandmose, who said ‘The only things worth writing about are love and murder’, though, Mankell reckons that money should be added, to create a perfect trinity. After all, the old adage in criminal investigations, of ‘Follow the money,’often leads to the culprit.
Apparently, Mankell is frequently asked what books Kurt Wallander reads. In the eleven Wallander novels, he regularly listens to music, usually classical, but books are rarely mentioned. Mankell thinks his fictional detective would be a big fan of Sherlock Holmes.
It made me wonder about my own protagonist Chief Inspector Neil Kettle, who is a left-wing, Green and Bohemian copper. He’s unlike the normal rogue detective or private investigator, who are heavy drinkers, gamblers, and drug-takers with women problems; I’m bored with that old trope. My hero is eccentric, and though the son of a farmer, is rather cerebral, painting watercolour landscapes and reading books on art. I briefly mentioned in Book 1, Who Kills A Nudist?, that he prefers American crime novels (as do I), but perhaps I should say which authors he likes.
He could share my reading tastes—James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley and Lawrence Block—but, not Lee Child, James Patterson, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy or Stephenie Meyer.
In creating a rounded character for my protagonist, it’s important to include his preferences in music, art, clothing, food, vehicles, cinema and his attitude to the natural world. Interestingly, Mankell’s readership increased when he gave Wallander diabetes. My detective worries about going bald, went through two years of severe depression and needs to attend massage therapy to treat old injuries. It’s important to remember that readers bond with characters as much for their weaknesses as their strengths.
Fictional characters who read books include Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, Elizabeth Bennett from Pride & Prejudice, Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye, and Walter Mosley’s private investigator Leonid McGill is a real bibliophile.
Do your fictional characters read books?
Is their choice of reading matter a surprise, or does it fit their character and their profession?
There are a million writing advice sites online—actually, 436,000,000 if you search Google—everybody knows what you should be doing as a writer, (though, the easiest thing to do in the world is live someone else’s life!).
Here are three things that I’ve learned, and which I frequently remind myself of:
1) Do It! Your story won’t exist unless you write it.
Even if you don’t feel in the mood for reeling off pages of creative writing, do something: jot down ideas, edit what you’ve already written, research facts, especially those you’re sure are correct, and try looking at what you’ve penned from the point of view of another character—which may reveal something you’ve forgotten to mention.
Writing is always a long hard slog, but you’ll feel better about yourself if you’ve typed only a few words. Mind you, thinking about writing also qualifies as writing!
2) Don’t Beat Yourself Up! Everyone is a critic, including you, but be your own ally, rather than an enemy.
Writers can be self-defeating, not believing in themselves, which isn’t the way to get anything done. Face it, from the start, you’ve entered into a creative act that illiterate, disinterested non-readers will ignore, while others love books, but not yours! From literary agents, to book publishers, editors, publicists, marketers, book reviewers, bookshop owners, ebook websites, browsing readers and readers who actually pay for your title, your book will have nasty things said about it + courtesy of the internet, the insults may well be personal. That’s the battlefield: bring bandages, you’re going to get hurt!
Why inflict pain on oneself, when so many others are ready to save us the trouble?
George W. Pacaud
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
Haruki Murakami
3) Write Stuff Down! Sounds obvious, but recording ideas stimulates more ideas, and there’s evidence that the pen is mightier than the keyboard.
I can’t imagine writing an entire novel by hand, but I do jot down ideas on pieces of card and leave them sticking out from beneath my laptop, which subtly stimulates my brain into working on the word, phrase or plot twist—more so, than if I’d simply typed it into a document on-screen.
If you don’t write stuff down, there will come a time when your book is finished when you suddenly recall what you forgot to include, as the neglected detail flaps into sight like a vulture with greasy wings!
I’ve got dozens of folders containing notions, conversations and names for characters that may appear in future stories. It’s a great way of saving time and making yourself feel good about yourself if you rediscover a brainwave you had the year before.
Also, keep stuff! By that, I mean don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, when you’re editing a manuscript. You may decide to dispense with a conversation between two characters, as being overly fussy for the thrust of your narrative, but it could be ideal for a future project.
Who’s to say that great writers didn’t almost ditch some of their most famous words?
