Valuable Lessons from a Master of the Craft...

I thought I'd share a few writing pointers, like all other writers do. Apart from the jealous, secretive ones who want you to fail. I'm not one of those. I'm one of the good guys.  

1) Write what you love. 

Write what you love. Write what you're passionate about. Readers will pick up on that passion and find your writing zesty and thrilling. And you may even finish the damn book if you love the subject you're writing about! Equally though, and I can't stress this enough, ensure what you love is what everybody else also loves. Otherwise you'll be completely wasting your time. You might feel people who write only to ape current best sellers are passionless hacks, but you're wrong. They're the fearless entrepreneurs of literature, paid-by-the-word pragmatists. They are the future. 

The Writer Reflects - just to prove he isn't a vampire. 

I like sixties films and Greek mythology, so I thought it might be a jolly wheeze to write "Dixon of Dock Green", but Dixon was Hephaestus, the Greek God of the forge. What a good idea, John. I loved writing it. It was funny, fresh and a ruddy big romp. It was also too much - no one would touch it. As my mother said at the time "You can have a detective story, or you can have Greek Gods. You can't have both, John." How right she was. To this day no one has published that book. Sometimes, I whip the manuscript out and flick through a few pages and, despite the bizarre placing of semi-colons, I think its very good. I am alone in thinking this. 

So, write a police procedural or a romance or something about the special forces that men might like. If you're a retired sportsman just cobble together any old shit - people WILL buy it. But don't write a comic thriller about a Greek God investigating crimes in sixties London. I recently wrote an entire book of short stories about unpopular songs. It's almost like I don't want to be published. 

I do, though. I really do. 

2) Join a writing community. 

Join a writing community. People like them. They feel less alone. You can swap stories, support one another, salve those rejection wounds and pool technical resources. There are whole communities of writers supporting one another. If nothing else, its a room full of beta readers on tap. I mean, its not for me. Like Jesus Christ, I'm not much of a joiner. I'm an uneasy comrade and I tend to tell the truth, nicely, but persistently. And I don't want to read bad writing about things I'm not interested in. Or bad writing about things I am interested in, for that matter. I don't want to read fantasy fiction that lends an amulet and a magic sword to what is clearly the author's romantic aspirations. And please no meticulously researched, dry as a bone "histfic". I don't care for the nasty neologism  "histfic". It sounds like something uncomfortable bulging out of your anus. "I'm sorry, Mr Higgins, you have a distended histfic. It's going to require surgery and a lot of wet wipes. Have you been sitting on a dry stone wall?" 

I'm too selfish for writing communities. I'm just not interested. I currently read for just one other writer and he's so stupendously good that I often forget to seethe. Not always. 

But if you play well with others you should join a writing community. It'll be fun. A  book club plus. 

3) Read. 

Read. Read a lot. The best possible writing class you can take is reading authors you love and studying what they do and how they do it. Don't plagiarise. Authors are very litigious. They will come after you for your children's shoes. A.S. Byatt, she's the worst. And Len Deighton, he's a bugger for it. He'd have the fillings out of your teeth. He's got a drawer in his sideboard full of just fillings. Sometimes he opens that drawer and stares, stares at his drawer full of fillings. Odd man. But immerse yourself in literature, read and read and read and read. I cannot stress that enough: read. Read so much that you have no time for writing. Honestly, you'll be doing us all a favour. 

I say this, and I mean it, but I'm not sure I actually do it. I read far less fiction than I used to. Most of it is research now. Currently I'm looking up the the history of dentistry. It's great, far more rewarding than the latest Jo Nesbo. It's full of fascinating facts and strange insights into distant minds, peculiar human varieties. 

4) Kill Your Darlings. 

If you think that something you have written is good, it isn't. Burn it. And sow the ashes with salt. 

5) Show Don't Tell. 

This is a writing technique that allows the reader to experience expository details of the story through actions, sensory details or the expression of character's emotions, rather than through the author's description of events. 

I mean, yeah, sure it makes things more immediate and vivid for the reader. But if you had a really droll and interesting narrator, someone helpfully guiding you through the story with a carefully honed bon mot dropping at precisely the right moment, adding colour and shade to the rather boring protagonists, wouldn't that be better? 

No. Just make the characters more interesting. Obviously. The book's not about you, John. It's about them. You're not fictional. You're all too sadly real. 

6) It Wasn't All A Dream

I once wrote a screenplay and sent it off to the local funding entity.  They duly read it and sent back very good, rigorous notes that showed that they'd understood it, appreciated my many amusing jokes and confirmed my worst fears about my grasp of film structure. I was grateful for this genuinely thoughtful and sanguine appreciation of my writing, until right at the end they suggested "maybe it would have been better if it were all a dream."

No. That would not have been better. That would have been worse. Much, much worse. 

The only time you can get away with the "it was all a dream" gambit, is if you are a child, and you are obliged to write a story, and you have no intention of ever picking up a pen again once you've left school, unless it is to fill out one of those little chits you get in Argos. That's the only time. Or if you're a one shot writer doing a hacky Tharg's Future Shock in a 2000AD annual in 1980. Then, and only then. There are probably examples of fantasy writers who have pulled this off with aplomb. But I can't think of any, and any way, they're not you, and you are not going to get away with it.  

I don't even like dream sequences in films. They're a cheat. 

That doesn't mean I haven't put one in practically every screenplay I've written. I'm a cheat. 

7) Don't Use Semi-Colons. 

No one ever taught me grammar. I'm not sure why. I'm quite old but I don't predate grammar. What's worse, though, is that while copies of English Grammar for Dummies, Really Simple English Grammar and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style are in this room with me RIGHT NOW, I can still barely produce a proper sentence. It's laziness. I could learn, if for instance, I was taking this writing lark seriously, but I don't. I mean The Elements of Style is less than 100 pages long and I've had it for over ten years, but...no. 

Okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll read The Elements of Style if you promise to never use a semi-colon if you aren't absolutely certain that there is no other way to construct that sentence. I mean it. 

8) Get Rid Of All The Thats. 

Read what you've written again. There are loads of "thats" in it. Get rid of them. Does the sentence still work without the that? Then you didn't need that that. 

9) Edit. 

Your first draft will be terrible. Write it again. Still terrible. Write it again. Am I mistaken or is this getting worse? Write it again. I wasn't mistaken - this is genuinely getting worse. How is it now this bad? Everything that was good about it has gone and all you're left with are the fudges where you attempted to correct the initial problems. You've ruined it. Put it in a drawer and come back to it in a week. Hey, this is actually pretty good. Chapter two...

10) Do Not Be Jealous of Other People's Success. 

Jealousy is poison in your veins. It will whittle you hollow. It will do you no good to obsess over the perceived successes of others. Writing is an excellent route to ritual humiliation. You are literally asking for it. As soon as you type that first "It was a dark and stormy night..." someone is going to say "Dark and stormy is a bit depressing, a bit route one. I've got twenty dark and stormies on my desk. Have you got anything in a light and sunny night?" The job of writing is managing rejection. People will queue up to reject you. They'll bus in. They'll book an early-bird two-for-one deal, in order to reject you twice. And you'll just have to suck it up. It's physics: the act of scratching ink into vellum creates rejection. Jabbing a computer keyboard with your fat thumbs not only creates immediate rejection but also saves it to the cloud, so you can enjoy that rejection at your leisure. Me time, with cosy old rejection. 

Other people will appear to be doing better than you. They'll humble-brag about their victories on social media. They will feign confusion and humility after being handed everything you've ever wanted without breaking a sweat or producing anything of value. They'll talk about finding their tribe, and tag a load of other smug twats as well. They'll be asked about their "process", they'll write articles about how "to do it" because someone has paid them to - they haven't just decided to do it on a whim, for free, for no reason. That would be insane. Haven't you got anything better to do? They will lose weight, their clothes will get better, their teeth shinier. 

You shouldn't envy them. If they're old they've already experienced a lifetime of rejection. If they're young they're in the foothills of a lengthy career in misery. What they are probably doing is accentuating the positive. A writer I know appears to be doing brilliantly. They are always announcing fresh successes, new honours, a series of creative milestones. What they don't announce are the defeats, the setbacks, the hardships and privations. Behind the scenes they're hustling and pitching and walking out of rooms thinking they'll never do anything again. They've seen their work destroyed by idiots, and they've had to paint on a smile and go at it again, because that's the territory. 

The actual writing, itself quite hard, is the easiest and best bit of being a writer. Its the only reason to do it, too. You are unlikely to become famous or rich doing this. But you'll have done the thing you want to do more than anything else, and perhaps someone somewhere has enjoyed it. Focus on that. You haven't got time to be bitter. You haven't got time to fret over someone else's "undeserved" success. You've got work to do. Do it.