Wordy advice Archives - Page 3 of 3

In his book A Week at the Airport Alain De Botton confirmed something writers have always known: we don’t need the perfect study with the perfect view to do good work.

It makes sense. How many times have you written a surprisingly good scene, despite lying in bed with a hangover? Or completed that painful chapter in a noisy cafe with screaming babies all around? Alternatively, ever sat down, having had ten hours sleep – with a clear head and chore-free day on the horizon – only to be freaked out by it all?

When it’s going well, run with it. The story won’t care where it’s written.

Brilliant. Among Roddy Doyle’s ten rules for writers :

Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph

Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.

Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven’t written yet.

Okay, everyone apart from J.K Rowling’s – but you get the idea. In every career there will ups/downs, broke publishers and deals gone bad. Accept it and write the next sentence. Have fun, that’s the reason you do this, remember?

This is Lee and I in the green room at the Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland. I was emceeing and he was the main attraction. That’s a new suit he’s wearing, one of two he bought that day. His story of being fired at forty and going on to write one of the bestselling series ever was inspiring. He told me his real name (Jim Grant) and the reason he chose a surname starting with ‘C.’ (‘Because buyers don’t generally go for the surname ‘A’ in the bookstore and ‘Z’ is too far to reach.’) He was fine company, had a healthy, cynical British wit and welcomed the Chuck Norris jokes I had switched for Jack Reacher. ‘Write fiction,’ he said, as he lit a smoke and walked to his car at the end of the night. We interviewed him on our radio show recently and I told him my new novel was coming out. ‘That is great news,’ he said. ‘Please send me a copy.’

Charles Dickens never had the distraction of Twitter or youtube. How can anyone get any serious writing done when there’s FB to check, online bills to pay, news sites to scour, and Nigerian spam to see to. Not to mention Amazon, CNN, and craigslist to buy the book ‘How to write a bestseller while surfing nothing but rubbish.’ My suggestion, if you’re anything like me, is to grab the Freedom app, which locks you out from online until next time you reboot your computer. No, we shouldn’t need it. Yes, some of us do.

Some great advice I was given about characters – keep the story simple, make the characters complex. Motivate your characters to make hard choices. Impossible choices. Compelling choices make classic moments. Stephen King goes by the mantra ‘Kill your darlings’ but that’s another kettle of fish. He seems to like killing people (in his books that is.)

Justin Brown

Distract me one more time…and I’ll probably thank you

Do not search Amazon for the book you haven’t written yet

What every writer’s career looks like

Never meet your heroes – unless it’s Lee Child

What was I doing?

Make them suffer!