Craft Notes
A weekly column on the craft of fiction writing — published every Thursday at 8am. Drawing on four decades of published work across multiple series, these posts cover the practicalities of the writer’s life: structure, voice, character, dialogue, point of view, and the daily realities of long-form storytelling. Not a writing school. Not a course. Just one working novelist’s hard-won observations, offered in the hope that some of them are useful.
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Don’t Show Anyone Your Book Until It’s Done
When I wrote my first real book I did so in secret. Told no one — no friends, no colleagues, not even my wife. This was primarily because I didn’t want to admit to anyone it had failed, as fail it must, because every other attempt I’d made at writing a novel had wound up…
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Why an AI Audiobook Won’t Make You Rich
Audiobooks are big these days. But what if you’re not in audio, either because your book didn’t sell or you’re self-published? Are you out of the loop? Well, not necessarily thanks to AI which is popping up everywhere right now. Yes, you can use AI to turn your work into an audiobook. But is that…
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Titles, Titles, Titles: What Actually Works
Hallelujah… you’ve finished your first draft. A complete book. Well done. And from the outside you’ve probably had a working title in mind. And now — probably — you know it isn’t going to work. Working titles are useful because they give you something to call the thing while you write it, a handle to…
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What kind of writer do you want to be?
Robert Louis Stevenson was a remarkable man. Not only did he produce some wonderful books but he was allowed a degree of freedom few of us can enjoy today. Stevenson wrote a children’s adventure classic Treasure Island and the dark gothic horror of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He penned the historical novel Kidnapped and…
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No, you don’t need to write every day (unless you want)
I once heard a fellow author say out loud at a book event that a daily bout of writing is essential for anyone who wants to be an author, as if it were jogging or some other muscular exercise. If it works for you, fine. It doesn’t work for me. Not only do I not…
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On Writing, with Jim Fusilli
I had the chance to talk about writing with my old friend Jim Fusilli, celebrated author and onetime rock music critic of the Wall Street Journal, for his podcast Writers at Work. You can listen to our musings below. It’s well worth browsing Jim’s backlist of previous interviews too. There are some fascinating figures in…
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What does it take to become a writer?
Any book is a massive undertaking requiring commitment, skill, determination and an extraordinary amount of perspiration. Most people with half a feel for language and fiction can write a thousand words or so to kick off a story. Many can make it to some kind of mid-point. A few get to the end, and a…
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To write books you need to read books
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.…
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Why writers shouldn’t give up on AI
I’ve never been terribly interested in flavours of the month. AI being one of them. None of us can avoid AI, of course. If you’ve searched for something on Google you’re using it already. There are things about it I hate, naturally. The idea of using technology to create actual scenes of a book is…
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Write About What You Don’t Know
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…