I’m constantly amazed by the number of authors, some of them quite famous who deny reading anything. I can’t find the quote now (of course) but I saw Patricia Cornwell in an interview recently where she stated, quite bluntly, something along the lines that she doesn’t read because she wouldn’t want to inadvertently ‘borrow’ someone else’s ideas. The simple arrogance of this astounds me. If you believe the old saw about there only being five, or seven, or ten, books out there, the idea that her work somehow is isolated from all the other fiction on the planet is somehow...

Sorry, but I appear to have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the subject of writing right now. Back to the issue of the blank page/screen. I know this can be daunting and I think a lot of author’s never get past this fear of the empty page. I’ll get onto how to get past this in a minute, just hang on. Ideas are never a problem for me — at any one time, I’ve got ideas for at least two other stories floating around in my head, percolating. Doesn’t everyone? Okay, not all of these ideas...

Starting this has got me thinking about the actual processes of writing, particularly with my own work and when I’m reading, other writer’s processes. I don’t think I’ve moved away from my position in the last post about writing — that point is still valid, these are just corollaries to the point that writing takes writing. I’ve met a few authors over the years and I have to say they all differ wildly in their approach. I love talking to Iain Banks about how he writes, because he claims he spends November and December writing, and then the rest of...

It’s interesting to see how verbose one can be on the web. A rough calculation based on some slightly out-of-date statistics suggests that the blogsphere is expanding at a rate that’s far faster than that of the universe; if people are ignoring blogs in the way they ignore the majority of webpages out there – somewhere around 98% of websites in the world get no visitors at all – then that would suggest it’s equally unexplored. Anyway, enough of that and on to writing. I was reminded that Elmore Leonard’s ‘guide’ to writing – 10 Rules of Writing – has...

I nearly called this whole thing “the Obligatory Blog”, because it seems like everyone’s got to have one these days. I don’t necessarily agree, as there’s an awful lot of crap on the interweb – for me, it’s like that saying about everyone having a novel in them: that may be, but I probably don’t want to read 99% of them due to any number of factors. And frankly, the ones who do garner attention and readership (more importantly) are the ‘professionals’ who treat it as a job and work at making it something worth reading, rather than some drunken...