Today marks a major milestone in my writing career the launch of my first book unlocking the craft of writing a novel.
To celebrate this milestone with you all, and go one step beyond reading my novel about writing, I’d like to extend an exclusive offer to receive 10% off my mentorship program - for one week only. That’s up to £275. Please reach out to me directly if you’re interested, timlott@me.com - or share this with someone you know who might be interested in taking their writing further.
Also, there is a 20% discount on my annual subscriptions for this week only so if you can support me and my Boot Camp please consider upgrading to paid.
Finally, the first five subscribers who upgrade to paid will be sent a signed and dedicated copy of the book! (UK only)
About the book:
It took me years, and many disappointments and rejections from publishers and agents to arrive at this moment ( it’s not only the unpublished who suffer frustrations in getting their books out there.)
I first wrote a ( much longer) version of this book three or four years ago. My agent rejected it. As usual, she was right to reject it. I got carried away with all the things I wanted to say, so the book often became incoherent and verbose. As usual, the problem to be solved was one concerning concision and brevity ( this is the problem for most writers - to cut out the blather.)
I pretty much gave up at that point, but years later, a friend of mine who was also an agent, Ruth Cairns, became excited by the idea of the book. With her help and enthusiasm, I designed a new pitch for publishers. Most of them turned it down, although a few meetings came out of it. Finally, a small but influential publisher, Swift, signed up for it. The tiny advance wasn’t going to buy me a yacht, or even a worn-out motorbike, but the thing was, I was in the game, and once you are in the game, anything can happen ( for instance, a novel I wrote 20 years ago and had more or less forgotten about was subject to an offer from Hollywood for TV rights last week..)
It was not an easy book to write. But my passion for writing it came from the sense that most ‘how to’ books on novel writing were either inadequate or plain useless. Even books by very famous authors seem to lack insight into basic dramatic techniques - they were much more exercised by their own method - which, being largely subconscious , they themselves didn’t fully grasp. In my library of maybe 100 or so books on the craft of writing, no more than half a dozen struck me as truly useful - and most of those were written by film makers, producers and journalists - not novelists ( George Saunders;s ‘ A Swim In A Pond In The Rain’ is a notable exception, as is ‘Monkeys With Typewriters’ by Scarlett Thomas).
The key moment for me in starting to write this book came from seeing a lecture by Robert McKee in London five or six years ago. He mesmerised me - I never understood before how story works. Fiction writers tend not to understand generally because nowadays they ( or at least literary ones ) are much more concerned with style, theme and voice than they are with plot and character. Whereas I love a STORY - not simply an exploration of the possibilities of the form. The trouble was, most stories, in the classic sense, were written by genre writers, who I considered in the main not to have enough depth to interest me. My project was to get serious non-genre writers to write books that also had a propulsive narrative - a vanishingly rare beast in my view.
Also, like my early draft of the book, I felt that there was SO MUCH material out there, that would be writers were swamped , and not seeing the wood for the trees. There were tens of thousands of brands of advice. You could drown in that. I just wanted to write a book that focused on the essentials - the ONE THING that propels storytelling ( which is made up , superficially, of two things - plot and character)
Now the book is out in the shops I will just have to wait and see if anybody buys it. I hope that they do - but in a sense, as with all real writers, sales are welcome but somewhat beside the point. I had something to say, and I found a way of saying it, and a publisher was prepared to back me. If it doesn’t sell a dozen copies, I will still be satisfied.
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