Recently, the very kind and immensely sympathetic
Irene of Irene’s Book Oasis (www.irenesbookoasis.com) asked me three interesting questions. Answering them proved a voyage of self-discovery.
1. Why did
you start writing?
One day (it was in 1974) I heard myself say to a
class of boys in a school in Hackney where I was Head of English: “Some of you are
writing better stories than I ever could.”
Then I thought “How do you know that’s true? You’ve never even tried since you left
school.” The thought stayed with me:
that I was teaching other people how to write better and better stories but
never trying to write any of my own…
Shortly after that another classroom situation
occurred that had a really significant effect on my decision to try one day to
write stories for children full-time. I
describe it in my blog: “Was that true?”
http://bit.ly/1n0bOur That year I wrote half a dozen stories for
children, sent them to Penguin and they published them.
Life was simpler in those days…
So why did I start writing again after a gap of
almost forty years? Well there’s nothing
like narrowly surviving a murder attempt to concentrate the mind. I describe that incident in my blog: “Don’t
Leave Things Too Late” http://bit.ly/1kXwcjc. I could easily have died that night without
ever having started what I hoped – and still hope – will be the major work I
leave behind.
2. What is
the hardest thing about writing?
Doing it well, I suppose. In the 1970s I lit the blue touch paper without
really knowing what I was doing…
Predictably the firework fizzled out; but that
initial success gave me the confidence to work at the craft of writing for the
ensuing 30 years, mainly by developing the talents of dozens of promising young
writers.
Finding the time and strength of purpose can also
be hard. My job as the Head of a big
coeducational comprehensive school in the most stressful social services area
in the country took 70+ hours a week for over fourteen years, and every ounce
of creative energy I possessed.
After that comes patience and self-belief... I was 69 before I found the time to write
again; but then, quite suddenly, I had all the time in the world. I wrote for 8-10 hours a day, 7 days a week
(give or take the odd day) for 3½ years.
I didn’t put the first 4 books in my “Myrddin’s Heir” series into the
kindle store until I had polished and re-polished them, and tried them out on
friends and family until I was reasonably sure they were as good as I could
make them. I published all four at once
on May 1st 2013. I have
revised them at least twice since.
That’s just one of the enormous advantages of self-publishing: you can
upgrade text and covers and have the latest version available within 12 hours.
But without doubt the hardest thing of all is
promoting what you have written. By and
large you have to find your readers and engage with them: because as sure as a
really sure thing they won’t find you on their own, no matter how good you are. I’ve been told I need to spend at least half
my time on marketing/promotion to have any hope of building a sizeable
reader-base. It isn’t enough to be a
great writer; you have to be a great salesperson as well.
Book 5 came out in April 2014…
Subsequent books in the series are likely to
appear once a year. At that rate it will
take another 15 years to finish the story of “Myrddin’s Heir”; by which time, I
will be 87.
3. What
kind of advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Learn from Ted Hughes: throw caution to the winds
and write, write, write; after which, put what you have written aside for at
least a week and then edit, edit, edit.
Be ruthless in cutting out anything that is superfluous to the primary task:
to drive the story on as powerfully and as meaningfully as you can.
Read, read, read: decide on the genre that calls
to you, find the best examples of writing in that genre and analyse it to
determine why it’s good. Learn the CRAFT
of writing: the effective use of punctuation, variation in the length of
sentences, the blending of effective descriptive detail with realistic dialogue…
Whatever your choice of genre, make your readers
laugh, and make them cry.
Avoid the continuous present like the plague,
except when one of your characters is recounting a story and it’s realistic to
write: “So I give her my steely glare and raise my voice a bit – you know – and
I says: ‘WHAT did you just say to me?’
and she goes ‘YOU heard…’ Cheeky cow…!”
Avoid subordinate clauses beginning with ‘as…’: it
is almost invariably better to put a full stop and let that clause have its own
sentence. It’s distressing how many
writers have an ‘as…’ clause in the first sentence, and another six of them on
page 1.
Send me a chunk of whatever you’ve written (myrddinsheir@hotmail.com ) and I’ll
give you my honest opinion and constructive advice, which you can profit from or
ignore – entirely up to you.
I’ve worked with aspiring writers for almost half
a century…
