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Fancy yourself as the next Nobel Prize winner? 10 steps to writing that successful novel.
1. Find someone generous, in love with you and/or gullible to support you financially while you spend time writing.
2. Get depressed. It is remarkable how many artists are depressives – Samuel Johnson, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath. No one really knows whether it's the depression that causes the creativity or the other way round, but it has got to be worth a try. Start by not sleeping for a week.
3. Sit down at the empty computer screen, or a blank sheet of paper. Now fill it, with gibberish if you have to, but fill it you must. There is no other way to make writing something worthwhile seem less of a mammoth task. Remember what some of the experts say:
'You can't sit around and wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.' Jack London
'You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.' Antoine de Saint-Exupery
'It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.' Gerald Brenan
4. Get up to make a coffee, clean the table, wash your hair, buy a newspaper. This is called displacement activity. No matter how urgently you feel the need to do any of these activities, recognise that it is simply your unconscious mind trying to avoid starting the challenging task of writing. You are experiencing one of the most compelling factors in literature: inner conflict.
5. If anyone asks you to curtail your writing, ignore him or her. You are now experiencing another one of the most compelling factors in literature: character conflict. Your actions are colliding with the actions of people around you.
6. What will be your plot? Read Aristotle's Poetics. It will give you the basics on dramatic approach. Bearing this in mind, decide the time, place and action that you want for your opus.
7. The more struggles your characters can have with people and things around them the better. In Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, poor old Oliver has to suffer a procession of mishaps and foes, from violent Bill Sikes and gang leader Fagin to the drunken beak (magistrate), before he is lucky enough to discover his inheritance.
8. Characters. Decide on your characters' qualities. What is their age? What sex are they: female, gay male? What is their emotional type: cold, warm-hearted, generous, sexual, asexual? What is their personal history and how does this inform their emotions: rich, poor, bourgeois, aristocrat? Do not make the character have all qualities that match each other. This creates unrealistic, one-dimensional characters. Human beings are masses of conflicting emotions. Looking at literature, you'll find the most interesting heroes or heroines are those people who struggle with themselves as much as the society around them. John Updike's Rabbit series, for example, plots Harry Angstrom's struggles against his own internal feelings inside his unstable marriage, which is in turn buffeted by the external 1960s social and sexual turmoil.
9. Set yourself a target for how much you will write each day, say 1000 words.
10. Think of what EM Forster had to say: 'Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.' Then think of what George Orwell advised: 'The novel … is the product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual' – and forget everything you've just read.