On Writing - A Sneak Peek!
Sample A Preview Of My New Book On Writing HERE - Published Thursday 15th June
This week marks a milestone in my career - my first book on the craft of writing.
As a thank you for subscribing, I would like to share with you all a sneak peek of what you can expect from my book ‘Yes! No! But Wait! The One Thing You Need to Know to Write a Novel’. If you’d like to support me further and see the full post before the book hits the shelves, you can upgrade to paid to find the full Preface reproduced.
I do hope it will be of use to you - because everyone who has participated in my teaching programs, including on Substack, has also taught me, over the years, how to bring out the best in writers.
Here’s the Preface - hope you enjoy it.
Yes! No! But Wait!
The One Thing You Need to Know To Write A Novel
Tim Lott
“What do we wish for in the prefect game? Do we wish for Our Team to take the field and thrash the opposition from the first moment, rolling up a walkover sore at the final gun?
“No, we wish for a closely fought match that contains many satisfying reversals, but which can be seen, retroactively, to have always tended toward a satisfying and inevitable conclusion
“We wish in effect for a Three-Act structure in which each act of the game recapitulates the game …following the parading: “Yes! No! But wait!)
… In other words – we seek dramatic shape and meaning in everything”
- David Mamet, ‘Three Uses of the Knife’
Preface: The One Thing You Need to Know
When I originally had the idea for ‘The One Thing You Need to Know to Write a Novel’ I wanted it to be the most straightforward and accessible book on writing a work of fiction ever published.
I was also determined to make it the most honest.
That immediately presented me with a problem.
Because then I had no choice but to confess that the book I wanted to write wouldn’t teach anyone how to write a novel.
No-one can do that.
Not even people who know how to write novels know how to write novels.
That’s why promising young novelists often run out of steam after one or two books. And why very good novelists sometimes write mediocre or bad novels.
I know - because I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to teach people how to write fiction ( while actually writing novels, ten at the last count, in the time left in between ).
I’ve read and critiqued hundreds of manuscripts by would-be authors.
The results have all pointed towards the same conclusion.
Which is that writing a novel- at least, a good novel - is really hard.
( Although it should be borne in mind that there is a considerable market for bad novels)
You can read all the ‘How To’ books you like, go on all the courses you want, but if you don’t have a respectable quantity of talent, a prodigious amount of willpower, great reserves of self-discipline and the ability to sit alone in a room for very long periods, you are unlikely to go the full stretch.
All the same – I hope this is the most useful book on the subject you will ever read.
Because it calls out the dream factory of the highly profitable and ever-hungry creative writing industry - which stretches from the universities, to the halls of publishing and literary agency to innumerable mentoring services and websites. Then there are countless video courses, lectures and evening classes in draughty town halls.
Many of these individual sites and courses are perfectly good, sometimes excellent, at what they do. I wouldn’t teach for Guardian Masterclasses if I didn’t believe it to be an outstanding example of what the teaching industry can achieve. Or have spent my years with the Faber Academy.
The trouble is, taken all together, they achieve less than the sum of their parts.
In a way that is not quite duplicitous, but is definitely questionable.
The creative writing industry, as a whole, sprawls like a cuddly, beckoning parasite over would-be writers everywhere in the Anglosphere and beyond.
Without ever stating the case baldly, it tells all the hopefuls out there, dreaming of being the new J.K. Rowling or Jonathan Franzen or Bernardine Evaristo, that anyone can write a novel - and then pockets their money for the privilege of being sold a glittering, but usually unrealisable chimera.
These courses are often a great source of fun and camaraderie. They certainly offer a huge range of information and advice.
Far too much in my view.
Because there is only one thing you really need to know.
One thing that towers over all rest of the creative writing landscape like a behemoth - but which is all too often obscured, at least partially, by the sheer volume of choice and possibility offered by colleges, universities and private organisations.
What is that one thing?
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