The publishing business likes to focus more on the positive than the negative. So here’s a truth you hear rather too rarely. Agents everywhere are drowning in unsolicited manuscripts from hopeful writers that are so bad they make the poor souls who receive them want to weep.

Not bad in the sense that they’re sub-standard. Bad in the sense that they are pitiable, dreadful efforts that can only have come from the minds of people who simply don’t read books at all.

Are there really individuals out there who think you can be a writer without also being a reader? You bet. Anyone who has taught at a writing school has met them. Here’s a somewhat disguised conversation from recent memory.

Agent (to budding writer pushing an idea): So who do you read?

Budding writer: Read?

Agent:What others authors? Who do you think you might be compared to?

Pinter pause.

Budding writer: I read a Stephen King book a while back.

Agent: Which one?

Budding writer: The movie one with Jack Nicklaus.

Agent (sighing): I think you mean Jack Nicholson. The Shining.

Budding writer: Yeah. The Shining.

Agent: Book or movie?

Budding writer (hesitantly): Both, I think.

Agent: That was, what, thirty years ago? Anything since?

Budding writer: To be honest I don’t read fiction a lot.

Long Pinter pause.

Agent: Don’t you think that would be a good idea? I mean if you want to write fiction…

Budding writer: So to get back to my story. There’s this secret research facility, see. and some aliens. And a vampire. A really hot vampire . . .

I exaggerate. But only a little. If you’re about to start a book do yourself a favour: go back to something you really like – an old classic, a title from a few years ago, one that’s stuck in your memory for some reason.

Read it again, from beginning to end, carefully, making notes. Try to put your finger on what it is you like and what, on a fresh reading, doesn’t impress you so much. See if you can pinpoint the aspects of the story that made it memorable in the first place. The people? The concept? The location? It’s more likely a combination of all three. But in what kind of order?

Think about the characters in particular. Why have they stayed with you over the years? What makes you like the ones you sympathise with and recoil from those you don’t?

How did the writer handle these? What difference would it have made to the story if he’d written it differently, from another point of view, say changing a first-person story to a third?

When your idea catches fire you will soon have to try to evaluate and analyse your own work. You’ll find that a lot easier if you start trying to pick apart the books of others first.

Here’s a wonderful myth, one you’ll hear retold from writing class to university up and down the land: ‘Write about what you know.’

I almost fall off my chair laughing typing those words. Shakespeare never set foot in Denmark but he wrote Hamlet. He almost certainly never visited Italy, yet he wrote Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julius Caesar, and scattered Italian references throughout his work. Was he crippled by his ignorance? You tell me.

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You never walk into a supermarket and hear the person on the till say, ‘Sorry, I can’t serve you today. I’ve got checkout person’s block.’ Yet every day, every minute it seems, someone somewhere in the world dashes their hands to head and shrieks that the muse has mysteriously departed them. On social media naturally.

At events I get asked all the time, ‘What do you do when you get writer’s block?’ As if it’s a given, an ailment we all suffer from. Do I? No. There are times when I struggle for something to write. That’s not the same as being unable to work on a story at all. But the block thing is so commonly written about it must, in some sense anyway, be ‘real’ — in the way Father Christmas and Bigfoot are deemed to exist too. I’ve even seen published writers bewailing their block in public, which is odd indeed. A word of advice: public bewailing by writers on any subject is best avoided, not least because we’ve got a very cushy job compared to many.

What should you do if you can’t think of something to write? Anything but stare at the computer pleading for help. In case you haven’t noticed, it can’t hear you.

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