-adverbs: Stephen King v. George Orwell
-rules of grammar
-introverts’ and extraverts’ leanings towards reading and writing different types of books
-Write Great Fiction
-arguments for preferring self-publishing over being published
-Vernon Coleman: a role model for self-publishers
-marketable writers
-Tom McNab and Flanagan’s Run
I’m a Bob Dylan fan, but if you’re not one yourself you may be relieved to learn that there are only two Bob Dylan quotations in this book, and you’ve now read both of them. Let’s consider the motivations that lay behind writing.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
Quentin Crisp 1908–99 English writer: The Naked Civil Servant (1968)
Learn as much by writing as by reading.
Lord Acton 1834–1902 British historian
These two quotations capture my prime motivations for writing. But I have two more. Firstly, I find writing very fulfilling and I increasingly resent anything that takes me away from reading and writing. As a happily divorced man who has taken early retirement and whose children have left home, I have plenty of free time in which to read, write, and self-publish. Joy.
I suspect that writers who claim to hate the writing process – and there are many of them, some of the finest writers included – are extraverts. The solitude that is such an important part of the writing process must be hell for them. But that solitude can be heaven for introverts, especially in the modern era with the availability through the internet of so much information at no cost.
The second motivation occurred to me after a friend, the author Andrew Heslop, made an insightful comment about my travelogue Two Men in a Car. He said that in 100 years’ time someone would read it and laugh at the exploits and attitudes of two wildly different men on holiday in France. This, he pointed out, was more than could be said for the innovative fork lift truck buying strategy I’d devised for Exel Logistics in the 1990s, which was no doubt superseded years ago. He’d hit upon a motivation which hadn’t occurred to me previously, but I think it had been in me all the same. I was writing with an eye on posterity.
Andrew is a published author himself – Kogan Page published his bestseller How to Value and Sell Your Business – and I am hoping to publish a book of his short stories one day. He could be the next Somerset Maugham. His story about nuns playing football is possibly my favourite. Or maybe the reminiscences of the wartime fighter pilot with whom he had worked as a young man. The book will surely become another international bestseller for LPS publishing.
I recommend you spend time honestly working out your motivation(s) in writing books. Dogged persistence is one of the factors behind the success stories of many successful writers: read Joanna Trollope’s article (Appendix 7) if you have any doubts on the matter. What if she’d given up writing books after her tenth commercially unsuccessful book in 20 years? We should never have heard of her. Are you prepared to be that persistent? Can you afford to be? What are you prepared to sacrifice?
If your prime motivation is to write commercially successful books you might like to read Chapter 3. If you’re like me, you might prefer instead to focus on writing about what you’re interested in – even if you’re not very knowledgeable about the topic of the proposed book at the outset – and hope for commercial success too. If you’re intellectually curious the journey of discovery will in itself prove rewarding, regardless of whether or not the book sells well.
Of course you can combine the motivation of selling lots of books with the motivation of writing about something you’re interested in. I did exactly that when selecting the topic for this book. I knew more and more writers were self-publishing, but many books on the topic were hopelessly out-of-date, particularly with respect to book production options, and some of the books were downright poor. I also suspected that many writers were using vanity publishers because they simply weren’t aware that true self-publishing had become a highly viable option.
I also wanted to better understand a number of aspects of self-publishing that I hadn’t explored before, such as ebooks. I thought I could present some perspectives on writing with the objective of informing and inspiring the reader, not of terrifying him – all served up with a dash of humour that you’d struggle to find in the existing books on the subject of self-publishing.
The Marriage Delusion was the result of my lengthy exploration to better understand my unhappiness in my two marriages. As a twice divorced third generation divorcee I knew a thing or two about marriage and unhappiness. I read numerous books in the ‘how to improve your marriage’ genre but none explained my own unhappy experiences of marriage.
After reading many books on relationships, psychology, religion and more besides I finally understood the factors that were making me unhappy. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the realisation that they were factors I shared with most married and divorced people. This led me to write the book which has received strong positive reviews from readers – both male and female – and testimonials from psychologists and bestselling writers Oliver James and Professor Alan Carr.
After his well-publicised marital difficulties I mailed a complimentary copy of The Marriage Delusion to Tiger Woods, who was then playing in the British Open golf tournament at St Andrews. The poor man looked like he could do with a copy.
We move on to the tricky area of taking advice as a writer and as a self-publisher. As a writer every piece of advice you take on board – including advice on grammar – will inevitably make you less distinctive, especially if you’re taking heed of the same advice as other writers, such as that in Stephen King’s On Writing. How on earth can you develop distinctiveness as a writer if your brain is full of rules dictating to you all the time?
Among my favourite quotations on advice are the following:
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
GK Chesterton 1874–1936 English essayist, novelist, and poet
I once complained to my father that I didn’t seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad’s advice? ‘Margo, don’t be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.’
Margo Kaufman American writer
My advice is to read books giving advice on the craft of writing, with a view to you supplying the art when you settle down to the task of writing your books. I have yet to embark on my first work of fiction, possibly because I’m not a big reader of fiction and I always have plans to write more non-fiction books. I read the four books in the Write Great Fiction series which gave me plenty of insights into the craft of writing fiction, but few about the art. And that is surely how it should be if you’re going to bring your own creative spark to writing fiction – or non-fiction, come to that.
If I ever write fiction I want my first or second books to be as good as my favourite work of fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four, thereby winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. I do like to set the bar high when it comes
