Ten Tips for Aspiring Novelists

I gave a talk last week to a delightful group of creative writing students at the University of Northampton. The focus of the session was publishing, and the students got into the spirit of things with a role play “fantasy commissioning meeting” where they were given a lump of money to spend and a variety of book proposals to choose from, from sure fire bestsellers to more risky projects. The right answer was of course that there are no right answers but it did serve to show what kind of commercial considerations underpin a publisher’s decision making.

I also shared my top tips for aspiring novelists, which I reproduce here:

1. Novels are not real life. What happens in a novel must make sense.

2. “Show not tell”, although you might occasionally want to “tell” don’t until you’ve learned this rule.

3. Think cinema, watch television, for storytelling ideas and techniques.

4. Always include emotion. Up the emotion. Push it beyond your comfort zone.

5. Accept informed criticism. From peers and professionals.

6. Write from character point of view.

7. Use active tenses.

8. Third person simple past tense is easiest. Write a third person novel first, and then write a first person novel. First person might seem easy but it can be restrictive.

9. Make it interesting. This is fiction, not real life.

10. Consider the money. Don’t be dictated by the market, but keep your eye on it.

What if “computer says no”?

Rejection is bad enough, but what about if you’ve sent your work out to numerous agents/editors with no joy?

This was the question asked by a writer listening to my radio interview last week (see previous post).

The most frustrating is, I think, when the rejections are merely form rejections, offering no feedback or clues as to why the work isn’t of interest. The most likely answer is “wrong place, wrong time” but then again, it could be something in the writing craft that is letting you down. Here’s a short checklist of questions to ask yourself:

• Have you actually “learned to write”? If you’ve never read a book about creative writing, never taken a course or joined a writer’s circle to share feedback, and just dashed your novel off on the computer as it came into your head it is most likely structurally unsound! Novel writing is a craft – you wouldn’t employ a builder who didn’t know how to lay a brick, would you?
• Is your story unique enough? Don’t try and be a poor copy of another author. Your work has to be driven by the strong, compelling voice of you, the writer.
• Have you self-edited? Once finished, put your manuscript away for a while so you’ve had the space and time to be able to look at it critically again.
• Do you know your market? Plenty of people tell you never to write for the market. They have good intentions, they don’t want your story to lose its uniqueness (see above). But write with an eye on the market. If you’re writing in the style of something that was big news 20 years ago, forget it. Look at the trends in the last 6-7 years only.

Festival of Writing

As a writer you know the thrill when something that was once just a figment of imagination becomes real? April 9 – 11 in York, something terribly exciting is happening. It is the Festival of Writing, which will be the UK’s best creative writing event.

The chief idea behind the Festival is to give writers insight into how publishing works so they are better informed and better able to get published, and the opportunity to meet and mingle with literary editors and agents face to face.

I will be there giving a talk and one-to-ones but I’m also keen to meet writers in the bar. If you are coming, please do come and say hello.

The full programme, which is fantastic, is on the Festival website: www.festivalofwriting.com