The rather brilliant little BBC series Trade Secrets has recently invited experts from various walks of life – photography, antique-restoring, building, butlering – to reveal the tricks and short cuts that make their work easier. Because the craft of writing has yet to be included in the series – a surprising omission since there are few professions where trickery is more widely used – the Endpaper research team has been collecting some of our own best-kept trade secrets…
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Here’s a way of clearing the mind every morning. For 45 minutes, limber up for the day’s work by writing down the whatever pointless gibberish happens to drift into your mind. It is said that many of Jeffrey Archer’s short stories have been created in this way.
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When your publisher asks you to do a major rewrite on your manuscript, simply change the font you use on your computer. At the click of a mouse, the manuscript will come up fresh as a daisy, at a different page length and looking entirely different.
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A solution to the problem of bookshop returns. Always offer to sign any of your books that you may find on display. A signed copy is regarded as ‘spoilt’ by the publisher and cannot be returned by the bookseller.
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Here’s a tip on how to overcome writer’s block from Kingsley Amis. ‘Dredge up that dreaded first sentence not at the typewriter/word processor or anywhere near it. but while showering, dressing, shaving, etc.’
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Never visit your publisher empty-handed. Save on postage by taking in letters and parcels putting them in the nearest out-tray.
If you are a novelist and are having difficulty ‘getting into character’, try dressing up in the manner of one of your protagonists. It is said that Hilary Mantel would go shopping dressed up as Marie Antoinette during the writing of her great French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety.
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If your publisher never returns your calls, leave a message on his or her voice-mail purporting to come from a top-level executive recruitment agency. It works every time!
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A handy hint from Henrik Ibsen. Place a picture of a hated rival near your desk. Working under the infuriated gaze of August Strindberg, Ibsen commented, ‘He is my mortal enemy and shall hang there and watch while I write.’
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When invited to the smarter launch parties, remember to take a doggie-bag. A true professional can virtually live off the product of creative grazing at other authors’ parties.
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A practical tip from Isabel Allende. While writing, keep close to you the work of a great author whose writing you admire. Allende’s places a volume of the collected poems of Pablo Neruda beneath her computer ‘with the hope that they will inspire me by osmosis.’
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If you are the subject of a media profile, invite the journalist to sit in on the next meeting with your publisher. Mid-meeting, casually ask the publisher what promotion is planned for your next book. Some of the most generous publicity campaigns of recent years have been tricked out of publishers in this way.
Here’s one from Peter Ackroyd. Write, lying on the floor in a semi-stupor. An author’s best work is often created in this dreamlike state.
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Carry a writer’s notebook at all times and showily jot down thoughts, incidents and snatches of conversation. It will not make you a writer but it will make you feel like and look like a writer, which is almost as important.
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‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,’ said Philip Roth. If your writing is going badly, churn up a little unhappiness among those closest to you. Bear in mind that writing is all about suffering – preferably someone else’s.
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Including any kind of acknowledgement note in the opening pages of a novel is the sign of an amateur. The true writer is grateful only to himself.
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If you find that your manuscript looks a bit light on the scales, fill it out with short paragraphs and scenes of ‘crisp’ dialogue. If you have the same problem with column, extend any quoted material until you reach the required wordage.
At all costs, avoid reading anything by that season’s fashionable, highly-paid young writer. If it is good, it will depress you; if bad, it will irritate you.
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When on tour, make sure to include in any interview: 1) a soundbite summary of your work, 2) a striking incident from the work and 3) a droll anecdote from your own life revealing your essential modesty and lack of pretension.
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Not every writer is lucky enough to have a murder, suicide, drug addiction or incest in the immediate family. Check your family history to find a domestic tragedy, however minor, which you can usefully deploy in your work and interviews.
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A cat is a useful asset for you as a writer, not only revealing your caring side but, if well-trained, cutting down on heating bills.
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Finally, some enigmatic advice from Michael Crichton. Eat precisely the same meal and wear the same clothes while you are working on a book.
Winter 2000
