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 that way.

Today not much has changed. When I’m working on a book it’s just me in there. I rarely show part-finished work to anyone. I don’t see the point. How does anyone know you’re going to finish it?

More than anything I do not seek opinions until there’s an actual manuscript, beginning to end, to be read, revised and judged. Lots of professional writers I know work this way. Lots of people who want to be writers don’t. They constantly share scraps of work with each other in writing groups or informally. Is this a good idea? Or is it a way of never finishing a book?

It depends, of course. But here is the risk. Every reader of a part-finished manuscript is judging something that is, by definition, not yet what it’s trying to be. They will respond to what’s there, not to what you intend to put there. Their notes — however well-meaning — will pull the work towards their vision of what it should be, not yours. Multiply this by four or five people in a writing group and you have a piece of work that has been argued over, second-guessed, and committee-edited before it’s even finished. That’s a hard thing to come back from. Most authors starting out are short of time to write. This is a foolproof way of eating into what little you have.

I learned to write by reading. Everything I needed to know was there already, readily available in a very obvious format — books — in a place I could find them for free, the library. The conversation with other writers happens at a later stage, when there is something solid to discuss.

Get it down first. All of it. Make it as good as you can on your own. Then, once it exists as a complete thing, ask for opinions if you really need them before seeking representation. Not, in my view, before.