“It’s all about chipping away. There’s no bricklayer in the world who just lays down one big brick and says, ‘There you go – there’s your wall, Mister.’ There is no painter who claims a masterpiece with a single stroke, no matter how masterful, of his brush. And so it is in writing. Turn on your computer, press a key – any key – and become connected once again to whatever your composition may be. One new letter typed is the beginning of the rest of the story.”

This fits with a metaphor I’ve used in the past: that writing is like building a dry stone wall across a deserted moorland, one rock at a time.

It’s Not What You Think is published by HarperCollins.

1) Write as clearly as you can. Don’t give your readers a hard time with obscure or unpronounceable words, vague descriptions and convoluted sentences. Say what you mean to say, and give the readers enough information for them to picture the scene and follow the action.

2) Write first, edit later. The important thing is to tell the story. If you spend all your time trying to perfect the first scene or the first line, you’ll never get the thing finished. Accept that the first draft will be rough, and press on. You can fix it up later.

3) Show, don’t tell. This rule wins no prizes for originality; it’s one of the most common pieces of advice given to new writers; and yet, it’s still one of the most vital. Too many explanatory sentences can leave a scene flat. Encoding the information in action and dialogue allows the readers to infer it for themselves. For instance, in this scene taken from my short story The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns, Natalie is worried about her friend Ed, and Alejandro is becoming impatient with her, but rather than state either of those facts outright, I communicate them through the things characters say and do:

“I feel kind of bad about Ed,” she says. “I shouldn’t have left him like that.”

Alejandro rubs a sleepy palm across his face. Although bare-chested, he’s still wearing his jeans, and his hair’s flattened on one side, damp with sweat.

“You don’t have to worry about him anymore,” he says. “You have me now.” He lights a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table. Natalie sits up and hugs her knees.

“Do you think he’ll be all right?” There are steel drums playing in the street. She gets up and pulls back the net curtain, looks down at the crowd. She says: “It was just a stupid argument.”

Her shoes are lying on the floor by the door. In the orange half-light, Alejandro holds the cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He takes a small, tight drag and curses in Portuguese.

“Come to bed,” he says.

4) Use small details to suggest the bigger picture. Describing each and every character and setting in meticulous detail isn’t always possible, or desirable, and to do so will severely hamper the pace of the story you are trying to tell. Better to pick a few telling details which suggest the rest – as in this example, also taken from The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns, in which we first meet Natalie and I use half a dozen small details to give you the sense of her as a whole person.

Ed stops at a lonely roadside café on a hot autumn night. He drums his fingers on the counter.

“Hey, how about a coffee?” he says. It’s late and he’s the only customer. The waitress comes over. She’s eighteen or nineteen, with long hair and black eyeliner.

“I’m waiting for the water to heat up,” she says. She’s got a black t-shirt and there’s a biro behind her right ear. She looks over Ed’s shoulder. “Is that your car?”

He turns in his seat. He’s left the Dodge across two handicapped spaces in the empty car park.

“Isn’t it a beauty?” he says.

She looks at the sweeping tailfins and scratches her chin. There’s dried egg on her sleeve.

“It looks old,” she says. “Is it American?”

5) Make use of all five senses. Our senses have a powerful connection to our memories and imaginations, and invoking them can really bring a scene to life in the reader’s mind. In this following excerpt, where Ed is taking photographs of a crashed spaceship, I have italicised the sensory descriptions:

It’s midnight. Ed opens his door and climbs out, camera in hand. He can smell the heather. He walks over to the nearest fragment. The metal’s smooth and warm to the touch. With a dry mouth and sweaty palms, he starts snapping; knowing the pictures he’s taking will make his reputation.

Back in the car, Natalie lights a cigarette. She puts her feet up on the dashboard and lets her long hair fall over the back of the seat. She knows there are armed helicopters patrolling the main crash site to the north. But here in the valley, all she can hear is the click of Ed’s camera in the hot night air.

Of course, there are exceptions to all these rules. What do you think? Do you have any hard and fast writing rules? Please feel free to join the discussion.

Such first-hand experience can add verisimilitude to your fiction; but what happens if you’re trying to write genre fiction? What if you’re trying to write about a future society so far removed in time that they barely remember the present day? What if you’re trying to write about a supernatural horror preying on a group of cave divers, or a lone warrior on a quest across a mythic fantasy kingdom? In science fiction, fantasy and horror, characters are routinely put in situations in which it would be impossible for the writer to gain any direct experience. How then can you convincingly fill in these scenes using only your imagination?

1. Identify the parts of the scene you do know.

People for example. Your characters should be recognisably human, each with their own distinct personalities and foibles. No matter how fantastical the situation, you can base your characters on your own experiences of people and the way they interact with one another.

Sometimes when writing fiction, it’s hard to keep a consistent mental image of all the characters involved, and mistakes start to creep in. You get muddled and describe your hero as having blue eyes in chapter two and green ones in chapter six. To get around this problem, I suggest casting your story in the same way you’d cast a movie. Go through magazines and pick out photos of actors, celebrities, models, or “real” people to represent your characters, and stick them on the wall behind your computer monitor. Not only will this help you keep their physical descriptions consistent as you write, it’ll also help you visualise your scenes better, and you may even find the pictures suggest things you can work into the story to give your characters added depth, such as facial tics, a preference for a particular style of clothes, or an unusual mannerism, such as a raised eyebrow or twisted smile.

2. Draw on incidents from your own life and try to map them onto the situations in which your characters find themselves.

I’ve never been involved in a gun battle, for instance, but I have been paintballing. I know what it’s like to hunker down uncomfortably behind a tree stump with gravel digging into my knees, to run out of ammo at a crucial moment, and to take a high-velocity pellet to the stomach, head or leg.

It’s easier to write about characters in extreme situations if you’ve had a few adventures of your own. In my time, I’ve also flown a light aircraft; been punched in the face; crawled through potholes; kayaked down white water rapids; jumped off a bridge; taken fencing and shooting lessons; had my heart broken; swum in Loch Ness; and climbed a number of mountains. I know what it’s like to be tired and wet and cold; I know what it’s like to lose someone; and what it feels like to break a bone. Drawing on these experiences can add authenticity to the most fantastical situations, by providing the small details and observations that really bring a scene to life.

3. Know your setting.

In genre writing, it helps if you know your setting inside out. If it’s the flight deck of a space shuttle, research all you can; find images online; try to find a simulator, or at least set foot on the flight deck of an airliner. If it’s an invented city, then make sure you know everything there is to know about it. Visit London or Amsterdam or Barcelona and look at the old buildings. Use Google Maps to “walk” through the streets of cities in Japan, America and Europe. Get the flavour of as many cities as possible, and take the bits you like to furnish your creation. Draw maps. Immerse yourself to the point where you can see your city in your mind’s eye and hear, smell, and feel its hustle and bustle around you.

As my first novel, Silversands, was set a distant planet, I spent months assembling notes about the planet’s climate, orbit, geography and seasons. I researched anaerobic bacteria, magnetic weaponry and weird terrestrial sea life. I got to know the characters, their back stories and personalities. I even based the craggy landscape on my childhood memories of Pembrokeshire, with its plunging rocky cliffs and yellow-tipped gorse bushes. By the time I finished writing the novel, I had an entire box full of background notes, sketches and maps. Most of that information didn’t make it into the finished story, but it played a vital part in helping me convincingly visualise and communicate the setting.

Of course, I’m not downplaying the importance of imagination. A strong imagination is one of the genre writer’s most essential tools, and without it, you may as well be writing nonfiction. In order to write genre fiction, you need the audacity to make bold leaps into the unknown and turn the everyday world on its head. My argument is that if you want to lend authenticity to your flights of fancy, you need to do your research, observe the people around you, and have your own adventures.

NB: I wrote this article back in July 2010 and it appeared on the website Write To Done in that same month. I’m reposting it here as a back-up. Click here to visit Write To Done.

Thankfully, there is a trick you can use, and it’s this: just start writing. It doesn’t matter if the first sentence you write isn’t a classic. It doesn’t matter if the whole first page sucks. Just get your fingers on the keyboard and start typing. Accept before you start that you’re going to write the worst opening scene you’ve ever seen.

But therein lies the trick. That awful first scene will get you moving. It may be clumsy and unsubtle but like a solid rocket booster, it’ll blast you off the launch pad; and once you’ve written it, you’re underway. You can move on to the next scene, and the one after that. You’ve overcome the inertia holding you down, and you’re writing.

Don’t worry about looking back and tidying up those opening sentences. The important thing is to keep going. There’ll be plenty of time to come back and edit once you’ve finished the first draft. Write first, edit later. Those rough words have served their purpose, by propelling you into the story. Now it’s up to you to keep up that momentum, and keep writing until you reach the end.

• Planning a novel is like planning a hike: too detailed and you lose the fun of finding your way; too vague and you risk getting lost.

• The trick is not to avoid distractions. You can’t avoid them. The trick is to know they’re there and not let them distract you.

• Rewrites are like glasses of wine: sometimes you only need one or two, other times a hundred’s not enough.

• Getting knocked down makes you tougher, and setbacks are opportunities in disguse.

• Forget all the other bullshit. When it comes to writing, it’s just you and the keyboard in a fight to the death.

When I first set out to write my synopsis for The Recollection, I found many contradictory articles on the subject. Some said it should be a single page, others that it could be up to ten. The only points they all seemed to agree on were:

• The synopsis should be written in the present tense. No matter which tense you use in the book, write the synopsis as if you’re commentating on events that are transpiring as you write them: “He goes to the back door and sees the zombies…”

• The synopsis should be written by an omniscient narrator. Even if your novel is written from a first person viewpoint, you should still write the synopsis in the third person.

• The synopsis should tell the prospective publisher (or agent) what happens in the book. It should be a complete account of the plot, from start to finish, including any twists or denouments.

• Don’t hold anything back and don’t try to tease. If you end your synopsis halfway through the plot, the publisher (or agent) isn’t going to be intrigued, they’re going to be irritated. This isn’t a cover blurb you’re writing, it’s a book proposal, and in order to judge whether this is the book in which they want to invest their time and effort, the agent (or publisher) needs to get a picture of it in its entirety.

This wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start. So one evening I sat down at my word processor and started writing, trying to turn a box full of scribbled notes and ideas into a coherent narrative outline. I typed out the main points of the plot, using a separate paragraph for each key scene or chapter, and this came to 2500 words and covered just over five pages. To it, I added:

• A couple of introductory sentences describing the novel, giving details of its genre and expected length.

• A 100-word cover blurb. Like an executive summary on a briefing document, I hoped the inclusion of a blurb at the top of the synopsis would snag the publisher’s attention, and give them an idea of how I was envisioning this novel as a commercial product.

• A bullet-point list of the major themes. To put the story in context, I included a very short list of the major themes I wanted to address in the book, as some of these wouldn’t come across in the simple plot description of the synopsis itself. Not only does this help sell the book as a concept, it also forces you to really consider that it is that your book is about – something you really need to know before you try explaining it to anyone else!

• A short biography giving details of my previous publications, to show that I had the experience needed to write and complete this book.

• A bullet-point list of USPs. Like it or not, publishing is a commercial business, and I had heard stories of other writers having books turned down because the publisher (or agent) thought they were too similar to another book they’d recently handled. To avoid this, I jotted down a list of five Unique Selling Points: five things that (in my opinion) made this book stand out from the competition. These included my particular writing style, and two of the unusual technologies included in the story. I could also have included any relevant life experience or details of any ready-made following that I had.

The first page now looked like this:

The Recollection

A science fiction novel

Planned length: 80,000 words

By Gareth L Powell

The Recollection is a character-driven science fiction novel placing modern twenty-first century men and women into a far-future, action-packed space opera setting. The story has two interwoven strands: one set in contemporary London and the other in space, on board the trading starship Ameline, four hundred years hence:

I followed this with the cover blurb, my bio, and the list of themes. Then came the main body of the sysnopsis: the five pages of plot description; and the USPs came last.

The final touch was to add my address, phone number and email to the top of the first page and the bottom of the last.

This left me with a seven-page document of approximately 3000 words. I submitted it to Solaris Books along with the first fifty pages of the novel and, a couple of months later, the Editor-in-chief came back to say he wanted to commission the book.

Now, I’m not suggesting you slavishly copy my example. The main point I want you to take away from this is that I followed as many rules and conventions as I could find. I wrote the outline in the present tense, from a third person perspective – but I let it be as long as it needed to be in order to get across the main events of the book, and I added my own touches, such as the blurb and the list of themes.

A lot of authors moan about the need to write a synopsis. The thing to remember is that this is YOUR book, and you have to sell both it and yourself. You have to find a way to inject your personality and professionalism into the document.

(But please bear in mind that some editors have very strict guidelines that they want you to follow, so it’s worth checking their requirements in advance.)

I’m not saying that what I’ve described here is the only way to write a synopsis; it’s just the way that’s worked for me.

At the end of the day, if you have what it takes to be a writer, you should be able to sum up the plot of your novel in a handful of pages. Learning to write a synopsis is just like learning to write short stories or poems: it’s another discipline you need to master.

And if (like me) you haven’t finished writing the book yet, you’ll find the synopsis serves another purpose: you can use it as a plan, keeping you on target as you work towards the final chapter.

Now, get out of here and get typing!

If you have any tips of your own, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below…

Part time

You may consider part time work, in order to have as much free time as possible to devote to your next novel. But can you afford to work part time, or do you have a mortgage and four kids to support?

Freelance

You may decide to try working freelance, but beware: finding clients and completing projects will eat into your free time and, if you’re not careful, you may find yourself working longer hours than you would in an office.

Full time

A full time job will probably pay better than part time or freelance, and it’ll come with better benefits, such as health insurance and a pension. The regular salary will pay your bills and mean you won’t have to rely on your writing in order to make money, thereby taking some of the pressure off and giving you time to rewrite and edit your stories until you’re 100% happy with the, rather than rushing them out of the door because you’re desperate for whatever income they can generate. On the downside, long hours and a daily commute leave little time for actual writing, and if you want to start racking up serious word counts you may have to give up little luxuries such as watching TV and sleeping.

Level of engagement

Do you take a repetitive manual job that bores the pants off you, giving you time to think about your writing; or one that challenges you but leaves you too exhausted to pick up a pen in the evenings? Somehow, you need to find a balance. A boring job quickly becomes soul destroying, whereas a demanding job will drain your energy and creativity.

Some dos and don’ts

Assuming you find the right day job for your needs, you’re still going to have to find ways to juggle its demands with your desire to write. To help you, I present this list of dos and don’ts:

• Don’t write at work unless you’re really sure you can get away with it. And if you do, don’t use the PC on your office desk. Don’t leave any traces of your extra-curricular activity. Getting paid while you write may seem like a win-win situation, but its hard to mask the drop in productivity and concentration that will result; and if you get caught printing out your 400 page opus on the company’s printer, you’re going to find yourself in a whole heap of trouble.

• Do keep the story ticking over in the back of your mind. Think about it on the bus, or while you’re waiting for the photocopier. Let your unconcious mind pick away at the plot while your conscious mind gets on with putting bread on the table. Many writers will tell you that they have their best ideas while busy doing other things.

• Do keep a notebook handy. Keep one in your pocket or bag. If you have a sudden flash of inspiration, you can jot it down. If you hear a snatch of dialogue on the Tube, or want to record the way the sun shines in through the office window, you can scribble it down in note form and write it up properly in your lunch break.

• Don’t try to do too much. Accept the fact that you’ll be tired when you come home from work. Make sure you factor in some relaxation time, or you’re going to get too tired and your writing and work will both end up suffering. Not to mention your health.

• Do make time to write. In a previous post, I discussed my top 3 ways to make the most of your free time in order to increase the time you have available for writing. If you’d like to read the post (and I think you should), the link is here.

• Do keep plugging away. Stick to it and you’ll get there eventually. If you have a dream, work hard at it each and every day. Take small, positive steps. Don’t end up as one of those people who look back in later life and wish they’d tried harder.

1. Being an adult means taking responsibility for the safety of yourself, your family, and if needs be, your entire race.
2. As we experience different emotions, so we also feel time pass at different rates.
3. There are two kinds of courage. There’s the kind you get from knowing that what you’re doing is right. And there’s the kind you get from knowing its hopeless and wrong, and just not giving a damn.
4. Over long enough timescales, everything flows like water, even rock.
5. Punctuality is simply good manners.
6. A blank piece of paper has almost limitless potential.
7. All suffering is caused by denial – denial of basic human rights; denial of food; of love; of loved ones; of security; of health; of shelter; of money; of peace; of clean water; of justice.
8. All out myths are attempts to address three fundamental questions: 1) Where did we come from? 2) How do we behave now we’re here? 3) Where are we going?
9. Writing a novel is like building a dry stone wall across a windswept moor, one stone at a time.
10. Sometimes it is good to yodel like a crazy monkey person.
11. The only thing more terrifying than beginning to write is not to write at all.
12. People who are cynical about absolutely everything are often very dull company.
13. Stress results when there is a disconnection between the person we are and the person we want to be.
14. If you want people to read what you write, write about people.
15. You will be remembered for your actions, not your inactions.
16. There are no joys purer or sorrows keener than those felt by a child.
17. Writing is a constant struggle between inspiration and housework.
18. Everything in the universe came from gas and dust, and to gas and dust it will return.
19. Children are fearless because they haven’t experienced consequences. As we age, we become more fearful.
20. When writing, you have to confront the possibility of failure. You have to push beyond your comfort zone.
21. Some people live their lives as a perpetual sigh; others as a joyful whoop.
22. Life is short, and books take a long time to write.
23. Often, when someone says they want to talk about politics, what they really mean is that they want to talk about themselves.
24. Some dreams leave you upon waking with an incalculable sense of loss.
25. Few things are as contemptible as wilful ignorance.
26. Just as you climb a mountain one step at a time, so you have to keep following one word with another if you want to write a book.
27. A society civilised enough to have free speech should also be civilised enough to know when to use restraint.
28. Sometimes editing is like sculpting: you have to painstakingly chip away what isn’t needed in order to find the shape of the piece.
29. Some people don’t work well under pressure; others can’t work without it.
30. Future shock is a by-product of age. The young do not suffer from it.