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Lots of people think writing is easy, or should be easy. If you have an imagination, you can tell a story – right? But that’s like saying if you can imagine a house, you should be able to build one. Surely there’s nothing too involved there? Dig a foundation, lay down some bricks, build four walls, throw a roof on top – what could possibly go wrong? It annoys me (I’m easily annoyed) that people think that writing is easy, like writers can sit at the computer and hammer out 9,000 words in a single sitting. No problem. Unfortunately not. Writing is painstaking. Whatever’s in your imagination has to be…
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To write a novel, you need to write regularly – again, as I wrote last week, everybody has to devise their own methodology. The only qualifier is that it has to be productive. How do you know if your schedule is productive? Well, I think certain symptoms appear when you don’t write enough: you lose interest in your story you struggle to remember what you were going to do next you have to go back over what you have done to remember what you’ve written it feels like some indecipherable mess it all seems too hard. Writing a novel is like rehabbing an injury – when you don’t rehab it,…