Dreaming of penning your debut novel this year? According to an author with over three decades of teaching experience, the first step is to tear up the rulebook. In a refreshing counter to conventional wisdom, she argues that the most powerful fiction often comes from abandoning absolutes and embracing your own unique voice and obsessions.
Forget the Rules, Find Your Voice
The author, who has taught creative writing for 35 years—longer than she has been publishing—rejects rigid doctrines. She views typical writing commandments, such as maintaining a single point of view or using the present tense for immediacy, as mere "training wheels" to be discarded. The only rule she staunchly believes in? Don't use a gothic font to make your work feel spooky.
This philosophy extends to the very first line of your book. She champions an opening sentence that is beautiful, mysterious, funny, or cryptic—anything but generic. "A generic first line is a failure of nerve," she insists, arguing that a powerful beginning is an invitation into a unique world, not a bland statement of weather or date.
Embrace Ambition and Your Own Oddness
Central to her advice is a call for unbridled ambition. Unlike physical pursuits, fiction has an infinite budget for characters, sets, and effects. "Ambition in fiction is merely the willingness to make mistakes," she notes, encouraging writers to attempt technically difficult scenes that excite them, without delay.
Perhaps more importantly, she urges writers to embrace their particular oddness and obsessions. These personal fascinations are the engine of originality. "What the writer isn't interested in will never interest a reader," she warns, criticising writers who choose material at random just to have a frame for their sentences.
She also tackles the ubiquitous advice to write every day. While acknowledging it works for some, she firmly states it is not universally useful. Life, health, and other responsibilities can intervene, and forcing a daily habit can sometimes lead to bad writing or a sense of shame when you stop. "You can start again, from the exact place you left off or somewhere even better," she assures. The time away may even make you a more interesting writer.
Crafting Your World: From Plot to Dialogue
Her guidance gets practical on the nuts and bolts of storytelling. She distinguishes between "needful" and "needless" mysteries. Withholding facts known to the author and characters merely frustrates the reader. True, needful mysteries are those that puzzle the characters themselves, reflecting life's genuine complexities.
On dialogue, she advises against making it too generic or purely informational. "Actual people are always saying the strangest things," she observes, noting that dialogue is action and a powerful tool for characterisation and unblocking stalled plots.
Finally, she re-examines the oldest adage: "write what you know." Her take is nuanced. You should be deeply, personally interested in your material—puzzled and intrigued by it—but it doesn't have to be your lived experience. "You don't need to write what you (already) know... you can make yourself know a great deal" through research and will. If you already fully understand it, where's the creative spark?
Ultimately, her 35 years of wisdom boil down to a permission slip: be bold, be strange, be interested, and find the process that unlocks the story only you can tell.
