★ The Amber Rooms: Thoughts on the First Draft

Yesterday even­ing, I expor­ted the first draft of The Amber Rooms — Saskia Brandt novel three — to my Kindle with a plan to read it quickly and estab­lish how much work it needs prior to pub­lic­a­tion. I have, delib­er­ately, com­mit­ted myself to a 2012 pub­lic­a­tion date for the book. This gives me space to re-draft three (maybe four) times, on the assump­tion that a single draft­ing takes three or four months. (I’ll have the energy to work about half an hour, per­haps an hour, when I come home from the day job.)

What is a first draft? Hell, what’s a draft? Back in the day, when writers pro­duced long-hand manu­scripts and had them typed up peri­od­ic­ally, it made sense to think of each draft as a com­plete revi­sion of the last. Some writers — Ken Follett, I know, did this — would not even look at the pre­vi­ous draft when writ­ing the new.

We’re more advanced these days, of course. Our type­writers have Apple logos.

The Amber Rooms. Hmm.

I note that I aban­doned the novel, with a heavy heart at the indif­fer­ence of pub­lish­ers’ reac­tions to books one and two, in September 2008. Even then I had the idea that I was going to retire from writing.

The draft I’m read­ing is quite tightly writ­ten. The first half, I remem­ber, was revised when I came up with a cooler idea for a begin­ning about two thirds of the way through. I could prob­ably release it for the Kindle tomor­row and it would be work­able as a story. However, it has the poten­tial to be a much bet­ter novel than either Déjà Vu or Flashback.

So what’s good about it?

First, the lan­guage passes muster. There are no clichés and each sen­tence deserves to be there. I’m get­ting on for hav­ing writ­ten a mil­lion or so words of pub­lish­able fic­tion. By this point, Hemingway, Chandler et al. are now con­struct­ive rather than crit­ical ghosts. I find it easier to cre­ate and manip­u­late tone. I know when a slow­ing down of the nar­rat­ive works as a rest for the reader without sac­ri­fi­cing over­all pace — or, at least, I think I do.

Second, the story is reas­on­ably com­pel­ling. There are nuts and bolts to be tightened here and there, but each scene is a scene — that is, it advances the story — and the research (which is some­what more osten­ta­tious in this novel, as it is set in Russia, 1908) con­trib­utes to the milieu without dis­tract­ing from it.

So what’s bad?

Right now, the book is some­what ema­ci­ated. I’ve pared it down to essen­tial con­nect­ive tis­sue. While this gives it pace for the most part, there are one or two points — in par­tic­u­lar, an escape scene at the begin­ning of the novel — that are far too brief. It works too much like a mont­age, or notes for a novel.

Talking of mont­ages, I’m head­but­ting the ceil­ing of my tal­ent again: I find it dif­fi­cult to con­ceive of story bey­ond the con­fines of the medium that I’m most com­fort­able with. That medium is, para­dox­ic­ally, cinema, not lit­er­at­ure. Too often, I’m present­ing the story as shots and describ­ing beats with the eye of a cine­ma­to­grapher. I have to get away from this. It does make the story very read­able but I need to remem­ber the par­tic­u­lar advant­ages of the novel as a form. (I will be doing this later in the draft, as I settle down.)

One example is where our heroine, Saskia Brandt, arrives in St Petersburg pur­sued by three ‘watch­ers’ from the Tsarist secret police. She travels quickly from horse bus to trol­ley rather too much like Jason Bourne. And when I describe the moment she loses the last of her three watch­ers, whom she leaves hand­cuffed to a rail on the trol­ley, the fram­ing reads like a story­board. It’s effect­ive, prob­ably, but there is too much sleight of hand about the whole thing. Hemingway could do this without being super­fi­cial; I should be able to do it too, given time and thought.

Let’s get geeky: metaphor.

The meta­phor­ical lan­guage of the novel is often wonky in a first draft. When the book is fin­ished, and I have an idea of its iden­tity, I know which meta­phors are cor­rect and which are not. For instance, there is a meta­phor early on in the novel in which Saskia thinks of time passing through her hands like a rope, too fast to grip. I don’t know why this is a good meta­phor for this point; but it is. Other meta­phors are com­pletely wrong. An inab­il­ity to choose the cor­rect meta­phor is the hall­mark of a bad writer (or at least a writer who has sub­mit­ted a draft too early). One of the dif­fi­culties with select­ing the right meta­phor is that it can­not be done con­sciously (for me, any­way). It must be done ran­domly, a bit like Arthur Dent pulling out let­ters from the neo­lithic Scrabble bag in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They’ll get stead­ily more appropriate.

Looking back, the meta­phor­ical lan­guage of Déjà Vu and Flashback seems to revolve around mir­rors, blood, old wounds reopen­ing, iden­tity, and the con­nec­tion between help­ing someone and the phys­ical cost of that help (ampu­ta­tion; “Take my hand,” and so on).

As you can tell, I’m prob­ably more inter­ested in this stuff than the mech­an­ics of hav­ing the story work as a thriller. However, it must work as a thriller first or the meta­phor­ical brick­work will fall. That’s the job of the second draft — to get the plot work­ing. Third draft — plot plus meta­phor equals story. Four draft — finesse.

Maybe.

And, always there is the chance that the book doesn’t work at all; that it will die on stage. In a way, that makes it more excit­ing. Everything, abso­lutely everything, is on the line.

So I signed up to a Russian evening class, Comrade

Like you do.

Or rather, like I did. I’ve stopped going now because I was excep­tion­ally poor at form­ing even the simplest sentences.

Aliya Whiteley is — apart from being a great comedo-tagico-Ilfracombo nov­elista — study­ing for an MSc in Library and Information Management. As part of this, she inter­viewed me about the resources I used to help me research the third Saskia Brandt novel. (For those who aren’t keep­ing up, which often includes me, that’s the third one; Flashback is the second; Déjà Vu is the first.)

Can I ask — in the case of your last novel, where did you look to find the inform­a­tion you needed? So where did you go to learn a bit of Russian, read oral his­tor­ies, etc? How did you decide that was what you’d need to know?

For the Russian, I signed up for a local even­ing class. I stud­ied Russian for two years. I didn’t expect to learn it very well, but I felt ridicu­lous writ­ing a novel set in Russia without know­ing any­thing about the lan­guage. The oral his­tor­ies showed up on Amazon. The book was out of print — ‘Women Against the Tsar’, I believe it’s called — and described the lives of sev­eral women anarcho-bolsheviks in the lat­ter part of the nine­teenth cen­tury. Another source of inform­a­tion was the writer Roger Morris, who was in the pro­cess of writ­ing nov­els set in the same period of his­tory (though a little earlier). I spoke to him about oral his­tor­ies and sent him links to some websites…which reminds me, the web was a very use­ful sources of inform­a­tion. I popped into one or two for­ums related to Tsarist Russian mil­it­ary uni­forms to ask the experts ques­tions about mater­i­als, col­ours, etc. I also looked on mem­or­ab­ilia sites for clothes that had been owned by people in the time period of interest — these were very good qual­ity pic­tures with lav­ish descrip­tions includ­ing the cor­rect ter­min­o­logy (some­times in Russian as well as English), which is quite import­ant when writ­ing prose.

Is it ridicu­lous writ­ing about Russia without speak­ing the lan­guage? Try writ­ing about Russia without hav­ing set foot on Russian soil.

Feel free to check out the full inter­view. This is part one.

★ The End of the Beginning

My, hasn’t time flown? I sat down to update my blog this after­noon cer­tain in the know­ledge that my last entry was about a month ago. It turns out I pub­lished my retire­ment speech in mid August.

I thought it would be worth­while provid­ing an update on my books. Several people have been kind enough to ask after them. As you know, I’m intend­ing to release them as free ebooks, but one or two prob­lems have cropped up in the course of mak­ing this hap­pen. The main issue is that releas­ing Deja Vu (orFlashback, or The Amber Rooms) for the Kindle — my pre­ferred ebook reader — seems to require a US bank account. That is, it requires a US bank account if I want the book to be the ebook store, which I do. Stephen J Sweeney has poin­ted me in the dir­ec­tion of a pos­sible ser­vice that might let me do this and keep the books free; I’ll get round to look­ing at that in the New Year.

One option is to leave the ebook files as naked links, here on my webpage, but I doubt most people would find their way here and have the tech­nical know-how to trans­fer the con­tent to their device. The store is still the best way to go.

Meanwhile, there are some­what irrit­at­ing defi­cien­cies in the file formats used by ebook read­ers and the vari­ous tools that a user can use to cre­ate them. To take one example, I used Apple Pages to cre­ate an ebook of Deja Vu and it rendered fine on the iBook applic­a­tion for the Apple iPad. Then Apple released an update to the applic­a­tion and sud­denly the ebook has extra line spaces. Go figure.

Am I writ­ing fic­tion? That would be telling. I cer­tainly have more time for blues gui­tar, learn­ing a bit of pro­gram­ming, and con­cen­trat­ing on my aca­demic career. Happy New Year to one — and, indeed, all.

★ And In The End

What fol­lows is a very per­sonal post, for which I do not apo­lo­gise. It is likely to be the last post I make to this blog (though per­haps not; see below). I hope that it will not be sen­ti­mental. That said, it will be hon­est. I will write about some­thing that has been very import­ant to me since I was a wee scamp.

A long time ago — when I was an under­gradu­ate, fif­teen years back — I read an inter­view with Stephen King in which he described the moment his novel, Carrie, was picked up by New England Library. He was liv­ing in a trailer and had so little money that the tele­phone was dis­con­nec­ted. The ori­ginal news about the pub­lic­a­tion of Carrie came via tele­gram. King wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He went into town and found the only thing he could he ima­gine she wanted: a hair dryer.

Fifteen years ago, read­ing the inter­view with King, I already had two nov­els under my belt. They were awful. Since then, I’ve writ­ten four more. These last — Déjà Vu, Proper Job, Flashback and The Amber Rooms — are quite good. Déjà Vu has been pub­lished and the other three have been with my agent, John Jarrold, for some years. Four, I think. A long time.

Someone wrote — King again, I think — that a writer is a per­son who will write no mat­ter what. In other words, if you lock them up in a cell without pen or pen­cil, they’ll write on the wall in their own blood. I didn’t believe that when I read it and I don’t believe it now. Even Stephen King comes to a point when the blood dries up. Writers are people. We — they — would want to play foot­ball if they were foot­ballers, not sit on the subs bench; they would want to have a work­shop, tools, and cus­tom­ers if they made fur­niture for a liv­ing; writers want to be read.

Fifteen years is a fair crack of the whip. As of now, I am no longer a writer of fiction.

For my part, I can­not write fic­tion these days. There are too many words unpub­lished behind me. To write a novel is to com­mit years of your life. Nobody wants to com­mit them in vain. They will do this, of course, in the begin­ning, with a cer­tain faith that if the end product is any good, then it will be pub­lished. Right now I do believe the books I’ve writ­ten are good. I believe that sec­tions, ele­ments, moments of them are very good. My agent is an excel­lent one and he would not be wast­ing his time with me oth­er­wise. The real­ity is that the pub­lish­ing industry is small. Only so many doors are open to a writer of sci­ence fic­tion thrillers, and, when you’ve been round the doors once, it’s the same people open­ing them next time.

What is to be gained by retire­ment? Why not take a break? These are ques­tions that my agent — who has been very sup­port­ive of my decision — has asked.

Since writ­ing the first draft of The Amber Rooms, I’ve felt a deep­en­ing dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the craft of writ­ing. This dis­il­lu­sion­ment is almost cer­tainly super­fi­cial. Much as I hate to write this, the feel­ing is prob­ably based on some­thing akin to jeal­ousy. It is not jeal­ousy per se. Rather, it is the feel­ing expressed by the sen­tence ‘I could do bet­ter than that’. Not an easy thing to admit. But with each instance of shoddy, clichéd, or gen­er­ally below par pub­lished writ­ing that I read, my faith that my own long years of effort will ever count for some­thing (that is: read­ers) dimin­ishes to the point where I am barely pick­ing up a book. The pro­cess has become pain­ful. As a child, books were like fuel, crack cocaine, and world trav­el­ling rolled into one. My writ­ing has taken me to the point where I am in danger of pois­on­ing the well from which, it seems, the greater part of my mind has sprung. Given a choice between the two — lit­er­at­ure and the stuff on my hard drive — I choose literature.

My fifteen-year crack at a writ­ing career has had other con­sequences. We all know what it’s like to be served at a super­mar­ket by a sulky teen­ager who might well work in Lidl but, you know: it isn’t what she *does*. Her mind is on greater things. So too has my mind been on greater things. Not all of it, not all the time, and I’ve tried not to be too rude. But many sac­ri­fices have been made by me and the people who love me in order that I have the time and space to write. There is a cost to this; they deserve the bene­fit of see­ing that the cost was not wasted and, as far as I can see, this is not going to happen.

This post is not meant to be a dol­lop of ‘poor Ian’ schmaltz. I had enough of that in one glance when I bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook around the turn of the cen­tury. As I gave it to the middle-aged, friendly cash­ier in Exeter Waterstone’s, she sighed at the cover and said, ‘Aw, you want to be a writer,’ as though I were Grandpa announ­cing my wish to take tiffin with the Maharajah. The empir­ical evid­ence sug­gests that very few people who write fic­tion ser­i­ously ever ‘make it’ in the accep­ted sense. We only hear the stor­ies of the suc­cesses. But in these days of Web 2.0, and blogs, the pro­cess is more public.

A col­league said some­thing to me a couple of weeks back. We had read psy­cho­logy at the same uni­ver­sity, though his was the year below mine. This col­league is now a world-renowned researcher and someone I look up to. I remarked that I was glad he had made such a suc­cess of it. He looked at me, blinked, and said, “Well, I’m sur­prised it turned out like this. You were always the golden boy.”

That startled me. Then I recalled sit­ting in Dave Earle’s advanced stat­ist­ics class and skim­ming over page after page of equa­tions, barely tak­ing them in, because I didn’t really *do* psy­cho­logy. I was a writer. Meanwhile, there were hard-working friends who had not made it onto the MSc or, if they had, could not afford to take up a place. I was sit­ting pretty with a full-time com­pet­it­ive schol­ar­ship keep­ing me in pen and ink, not to men­tion another schol­ar­ship lined up to carry me through my PhD — and as the Chi-square con­trasts flowed before my eyes, I was more con­cerned with the open­ing para­graph to Déjà Vu. In my defence, I did work hard on the book, and the book was good.

Several years later, how­ever, it’s time to *do* psychology.

So now we come to the end of this post, and this blog. It is likely that I’ll con­tinue to tinker with my extant manu­scripts (not least to incor­por­ate some notes kindly provided by writer friends). When these are com­plete, I’ll make them avail­able as print-on-demand books, prob­ably via Lulu, and then archive the site.

Stephen King made me want to be a writer. Or, rather, his book The Stand had such an effect on me that the half-formed idea of writ­ing books for liv­ing became what I *did* for the next fif­teen or so years. When asked what I wanted to do as an adult, I would, instead of shrug­ging in a mor­ose teen­agery way, say, ‘A writer,’ and the response would be a nod of approval; no doubt it doesn’t hurt to encour­age this ambi­tion in a young man, par­tic­u­larly when good English is such a trans­fer­rable skill. The model of Stephen King was the one I aspired to: he wrote a thou­sand words a day, rain or shine, and pro­duced vivid, good qual­ity, character-driven stor­ies that I loved. At the end of each book, he would write his name, his loc­a­tion (usu­ally Maine, USA), and dates between which he had writ­ten the book. I looked at those dates and thought ‘That’s what I’ll be doing’ and I rel­ished the pro­spect of those years.

In 2005, I read a short, hand­some review of Déjà Vu in The Guardian as my friends in the Rashleigh pub at Charlestown har­bour slapped me on the back. The theme of the even­ing was that this review marked a mile­stone on the way to some great, lit­er­ary city. Outwardly, I whole­heartedly agreed. But I also knew there was a good chance that I was hold­ing the high-water mark of what would serve as a my lit­er­ary career. It did; that felt OK at the time, and, in the end, it’s still OK.

Thanks, Aliya, the UKA Press, UK Authors, Ken, Neil, the Exeter Writers’ Group, Debra, Scott, and, of course, my agent John Jarrold. John has been tire­less and fault­less in his efforts to get my work under the right noses. A top man. And not to for­get my part­ner, Britta: she put up with all man­ner of con­sequences while I spent time cre­at­ing altern­at­ive real­it­ies. I never did get her that hair dryer.

Ian Hocking
This Writing Life
Canterbury, UK
2003–2010

★ Thoughts on the Dramatic Structure of Doctor Who

A few minutes ago, I fin­ished watch­ing the final epis­ode in this season’s Doctor Who, star­ring Matt Smith. A sat­is­fy­ing and clever end to a great story.

The show is an inter­est­ing one from a dra­matic stand­point: good fic­tion will usu­ally chart the jour­ney of a char­ac­ter along a line describ­ing his devel­op­ment. There should be a fun­da­mental, irre­vers­ible change between the char­ac­ter at the begin­ning of the story and the char­ac­ter at the end. This does not work for the Doctor. How do writers get around this? They sub­ject his com­pan­ions to peril; and they have his com­pan­ions undergo ‘growth’ on his behalf.

Not only this, but the stor­ies often struggle with the prob­lem of the ‘deus ex mach­ina’ — solu­tions to story prob­lems that arrive seem­ingly from out­side the story itself. In today’s epis­ode, it turns out that a prison box happened to have the abil­ity to recre­ate the entire uni­verse. As did the brain of the Doctor’s assist­ant, Amy Pond. This hap­pens rather too much, but, inter­est­ingly, does not appear to wound the story fatally. Indeed, these inter­ven­tions have almost become a trade­mark of the show.

It’s also inter­est­ing to com­pare my own guesses about the dir­ec­tion of the show, pre-broadcast, to how the show turned out. This is fairly straight­for­ward because I wrote a spec­u­lat­ive script in January. Overall: pretty much on the money with regards Amy’s impend­ing mar­riage and the romantic rela­tion­ship between her and the Doctor; and wide of the mark in terms of her pro­fes­sion, which turned out to be a kisso­gram rather than a police officer (got that from a leaked set photo). Writing the script was an enjoy­able exer­cise, but some­thing I prob­ably won’t come back to, given that the plot of my story was very sim­ilar to The Beast Below.

★ Eastercon 2010 (And A Master Plan)

What is a sci­ence fic­tion con­ven­tion? It is a place for fans, writers, would-be writers and any­body else with an interest in sci­ence fic­tion to con­greg­ate and dis­cuss the geeky details of their ima­gin­a­tion. Yes, there are cos­tumes. Yes, many of the fans are sci­ent­ists. Nobody wore Spock ears, though I did look more like Captain Picard than I’d like.

Less con­cerned with the geekery, I atten­ded Eastercon 2010 — the annual British sci­ence fic­tion con­ven­tion — primar­ily to meet-up with friends Paul Graham Raven, Gareth L Powell, Gareth D Jones, Neil Benyon, Jetse de Vries, Martin McGrath, and Stephen J Sweeney, in which regard I was per­fectly suc­cess­ful, and had delight­ful con­ver­sa­tions with all of them. The other goal was a meet­ing with my agent, John Jarrold.

John is a per­son­able chap, full of stor­ies about con­ven­tions in the mid-1970s where luminar­ies could be found in the bar at 2 a.m. dis­cuss­ing anti­grav­ity drives and the use of col­our in Powell and Pressburger films.

On the face of it, I haven’t been a very suc­cess­ful cli­ent for John, and he was kind enough to reas­sure me that pub­lish­ing is best seen in terms of the long haul. John is cur­rently try­ing to place two of my three Saskia Brandt books, which, des­pite good reviews for the first, small press run, have not been picked up. When a writer’s books con­sti­tute a loose series, it is, obvi­ously, essen­tially to have the first one pub­lished and at large before the sequels become viable.

Goal Number One for the rest of this year is to stop writ­ing Saskia Brandt books.

Goal Number Two is to man­age my time more effect­ively so that I have the men­tal space to write. (At the moment, my aca­demic work crowds out almost everything, which is no mean feat; I had the time to write Déjà Vu when I was com­plet­ing my PhD and hold­ing down a half-time teach­ing job.)

Goal Number Three is to write only parts of books. That is, I need to avoid writ­ing them com­pletely and work­ing on them for about five years, at the end of which pub­lish­ers say, ‘Meh’. I should switch to a model where I write a couple of chapters, then a syn­op­sis, and send the lot off to John and see what he thinks.

Some pro­jects, how­ever, are not novel-related fic­tion. I wrote a spec­u­lat­ive Eleventh Doctor script just after Christmas, and now that I’ve seen and enjoyed the first epis­ode of the new series, I’ll return to it and try to incor­por­ate what I’ve learned about Amy Pond and Matt Smith’s Doctor. This could well be point­less, given that (as far as I know), the pro­duc­tion team is not accept­ing spec­u­lat­ive scripts, but what the hell. Pointlessness never stopped me before and it won’t stop me now. Pointlessness is, and con­tin­ues to remain, Goal Number Four.

Roger Morris on Rejection

Roger Morris, guest­ing at Nik Perring’s blog, writes mov­ingly on rejection:

I’ve been writ­ing all my life, and des­per­ately try­ing to get pub­lished for over half of it. What this means is that I have been liv­ing with rejec­tion for years. And years. And years. You know, when you spend so long liv­ing with some­thing, you get used to it being around. When it’s gone, you kind of miss it, even though all it ever did was block out the light like a men­tal and emo­tional eyesore.

Something to think about.

► Nik’s Blog

Literary Life

The hil­ar­ity just doesn’t stop.

Consequently, a typ­ical writer appar­ently earns 33 per cent less than the national aver­age wage.

► Literary Life — Telegraph via Jon Courtenay Grimwood

★ Ten Rules for Writers

For this week’s Guardian Review, estab­lished authors were asked to pro­duce ten writ­ing ‘rules’. I agree with some of them and dis­agree with oth­ers. (For reas­ons best known to The Guardian, there is no web link at present for this fea­ture, des­pite links to every other art­icle in that sec­tion.) Update: James Viner points out that it is avail­able here.

Here’s one of my favour­ites from Richard Ford:

1. Marry someone you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
2. Don’t have chil­dren.
3. Don’t read your reviews.
4. Don’t write reviews. (Your judgement’s always tain­ted.)
5. Don’t have argu­ments with your wife in the morn­ing, or late at night.
6. Don’t drink and write at the same time.
7. Don’t write let­ters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8. Don’t wish ill on your col­leagues.
9. Try to think of oth­ers’ good luck as encour­age­ment to your­self.
10. Don’t take any shit if you can pos­sibly help it.

All of these con­sti­tute advice of the very first water. I break these rules often; but I think they’re good ones.

So what would my ten rules be?

Ten Rules for Writers

1. Think of your­self as a writer

It doesn’t mat­ter if you aren’t pub­lished. It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re not sure that you’ll ever be pub­lished. By sit­ting in a chair (or stand­ing up, in my case) and tak­ing your craft ser­i­ously, you get the badge. The badge is not given to you by a pub­lisher or an agent. Nobody takes it away unless you want them to.

2. Don’t believe people who say that whether or not you can write well is determ­ined by forces out­side your control

Someone (acknow­ledge­ment to Harlan Ellison) once wrote that you can either hear the music or you can’t. This belittles the graft that goes into learn­ing to write fic­tion. Nobody is born to be a writer — unless you mean that a per­son can be born with the drive to be a great writer. It takes thou­sands of hours of effort.

3. Writing know­ledge is pre­dom­in­antly pro­ced­ural not declarative

In exper­i­mental psy­cho­logy, we make a dis­tinc­tion between memory that is pro­ced­ural — like the motor skills asso­ci­ated with play­ing the piano — and declar­at­ive — like the know­ledge of music the­ory. Writing fic­tion, I would argue, is char­ac­ter­ised by impli­cit (i.e. uncon­scious) learn­ing through the determ­ined attempt to write. That’s not to say that there are no rules to the con­struc­tion of story. It’s just that the use of those rules should be informed by a judge­ment which is itself sharpened through long hours of try­ing to get it right. Apply struc­tural rules ret­ro­act­ively, once the work is well in progress.

4. Don’t worry if you get depressed

For sev­eral reas­ons that draw on my psy­cho­logy back­ground, I would argue that, if you’re a writer, the prob­ab­il­ity of suf­fer­ing depres­sion at some point in your career is above aver­age. Do whatever you need to do to get through these periods.

5. Luck is a major factor in writ­ing success

It just is. I’ve never yet heard the suc­cess story of a writer who doesn’t start off with, ‘Well, I got lucky when…’

6. Determination is as import­ant as skill

Established writers typ­ic­ally remain estab­lished because they excel at the writ­ing pro­cess and dis­play fierce determ­in­a­tion in the face of long odds. To be good is not good enough if you want a career. Real Artists Ship. (‘Real’ means ‘pub­lished’ in this con­text; you can remain an artist without shipping.)

7. Rewrite more than you write

Get used to reheat­ing the stuff you got sick of eat­ing the day before.

8. Write true things

Fictional things are not false. They are usu­ally more true than things in real life.

9. Clichés exist at many levels; kill them all

It’s not just clichéd to write ‘The man had a face liked a smacked arse’. If the man does things that men tend to do all too often in aver­age stor­ies — avenge the death of his wife, struggle with the mundan­ity of his job — then the cliché can work its way up to higher levels. The trick to killing cliché is to con­cen­trate on the spe­cific. Never think of a char­ac­ter, or a story, as a type. Everything is a one-off.

10. Get feedback

If you learn to play ten­nis against one of those ball-firing machines instead of a part­ner, you’re not really learn­ing ten­nis, even if you’re wear­ing the McEnroe head­band and get­ting sweaty. In writ­ing, you need feed­back. But note that while feed­back on what works and what does not work should be taken ser­i­ously, com­ments about how these prob­lems can be cor­rec­ted should only be taken on board if the per­son mak­ing the com­ment is a writer. If the com­menter is a non-writer, there’s a good chance that tak­ing their advice will wound your story.

Scaling the Writing Mountain

Dani Shapiro on the ‘sell — or else’ mentality.

If they were enrolled in med­ical school, in all like­li­hood they would wind up doc­tors. If in law school, bet­ter than even odds, they’d become law­yers. But writ­ing school guar­an­tees them little other than debt.

► A writ­ing career becomes harder to scale — latimes.com