Novels are impossible

Writing a novel is impossible
Writing a chapter is hard
Writing a paragraph easier
Easier still is a word

That’s just a little rhyme I made up to stave off the despair of facing the prospect of churning out another entire book. I find it helps. Sometimes.

The Green Knight's rules

Three principles of writing that I try to live by:

1. It’s all about the people, stupid.
2. Always entertain.
3. Fiction is memory.

What does the third one mean? Hard to say. But I think it means, ‘Only write those things that you would remember.’ In other words, the most interesting, dramatic or unusual bits. Those are things that live in the memory and in the pages of books.

Why thank you auntie, what a lovely diary

What can an author blog about? I use up all my words writing books. Or rather, in writing sentences that may or may not end up in books. Writing an entire book, I firmly believe, is impossible. The fact that so many people have nonetheless done it is a testament to human endeavour, or bloody-mindedness, one of the two.

I also use up all my spare time writing, which means I have nothing else to blog about. There isn’t actually a lot of this spare time sloshing around, since I also have a full time job in London, a lengthy commute, a two-year-old son with a Lazytown and Balamory obsession and a rubbish lawnmower (the lawnmower is mine, I should clarify, not his, otherwise there would be another ‘and’ clause there, and there isn’t).

I only really got this blog so that I could post on other, far more interesting blogs that required registration. But now that I’ve got it (rather like being given a diary for Christmas by a well-meaning aunt) I suppose I had better put something in it.

For now, I will use it as a dumping-ground for all the little bits of writing wisdom that I pick up or dream up along the long, lonely road. Please, under no circumstances, take any of this as advice on how to write, or even as a description of how I write. It’s a notebook, nothing more. And if there are a few pearls among all the seaweed, I can’t take responsibility for them either. Chance are I nicked ‘em anyway.