Talent is for Cheats – the 3 things a writer really needs

A wag once said that writing is 10% talent, 90% hard work. That’s a shocking over-statement of talent required. You can be a successful writer with just a modicum of talent, quite possibly with none at all. Here’s what you really need.

The ability to create

Imagination and invention - you were born with it, but you whipped it out of yourself as you grew up. Responsibility requires decisions, decisions require solutions built on workable answers - the adult world has no time for dreamers, for ‘what ifs’ - but as Socrates would tell you, the truth doesn’t lie in an answer, but in asking the right question.

Watch this space for further ideas on developing your imagination. You must train yourself to be a compulsive creator. NEVER block an idea – roll with it, let it develop, let it fester. Blocking is the death of creation, and will be the death of you. Capture as much as you can – most of it will be nonsense but some of it will be priceless.

The ability to craft

Learn how to write – there are plenty of writers who will present you with rules – learn them, master them, transcend them. This is at odds with the creative process, and indeed can stifle creativity if you mix the two – but as a writer you must be bi-polar – you must be a romantic and a realist. You must be able to produce ideas to the point of self-indulgent inanity, and yet you must be a brutal critic; you must be liberal in your creating, fascistic in your crafting – but you must be them at different times.

Read every book in the world, read all the books on writing you can, exercise your writing as much as you can – do it without restraint and without concern for its impact on your creativity – that’s a separate issue. Then apply everything you’ve learnt about the craft on that steaming pile of inane ideas you’ve come up with.

The ability to achieve critical distance

Give enough monkeys enough time and they will indeed come up with the works of Shakespeare, but without critical distance, those damn’ monkeys would never know it. You could be the crappiest writer in the whole world but if you kept at it long enough, you’d produce something publishable – that’s why critical distance is key, and arguably the most important skill a writer can develop.

Craft and experience will make you a better critic, but if you can’t take emotional detachment from your work it comes to nothing. Time is the best way of achieving it – remember that life-shattering first relationship break-up? It may have taken twenty years but now you can calmly deconstruct why it all went wrong – same situation with your writing.

Create, craft, critique - that's all there is to it. Leave talent for the cheats.

Rewriting - when to take the nuclear option – Part One

Perhaps it's taken a fistful of rejections for you to get to the point, or perhaps you just know it in your heart – it isn't right, and you need to get it right. The question is - is it just a tidy up that's needed, or a cleanse and burn?

The truth is, it's nearly always the latter, but here's how to be sure.

The first thing to remember is that there's more to your story than the words you've written, therefore you need to look beyond them and examine your story and your characters first.

Story

There's only one way to know if your story sucks, and that's to pare it right down to the bones and see if it stands up alone – yes, you need a synopsis – the shorter the better for the purposes of assessing the nuclear option. If the synopsis reads great, and everybody gasps when you relate it to them, then you can be confident that your story is strong. If the synopsis is poor, there are a number of reasons why it can be so -

1. the story of the novel is great, but the synopsis doesn't tell it well enough

2. the story of the novel is great, but the synopsis isn't actually telling the right story

3. the story of the novel sucks, and no amount of rewriting the synopsis will make it so

If you've pantsed your way through your novel, then there's every chance that producing the synopsis will be the first time you really get to know your story. There is also likely to be many stories within your novel that you could tell in the synopsis – make sure you're actually telling the main one. If the main story isn't the most interesting one - you already have one fix right there.

If you find yourself at point 3, then it's the novel that's at fault, not the synopsis.

Remember this, if the story of your novel is pulsating, then the synopsis will be easy and exhilarating to write. If the synopsis is a labour, it's most likely because you haven't understood the story of your novel. Or there isn't one.

It may be that the story in your head, or on your plot cards, or hinted at by your pantsed manuscript is actually very good, you're just not telling it in the most effective way. The positive thing is, a great story tells itself, once you understand it.

In summary – learn your story, assess it, then fix it – and give each one of those steps the time and effort they deserve. Don't just fiddle around changing words and restructuring sentences. It may seem like a huge task to change the story - but it isn't - a great story that needs work is always better than a highly polished turd.

Watch this space for Part Two – how to get nuclear on your characters.

How to write when the world's against you

Sometimes it feels like everybody's doing everything they can to stop you writing. Chances are that's exactly what they are doing – and why shouldn't they? Locking yourself away to tap at a keyboard or stare blankly at a screen is one step short of insanity. You've got one life to live, and your spending it doing what? It isn't healthy.

So who's going to blame your kids, your significant other, your family and friends from assuming that indulgent expression one adopts when dealing with deranged people when you say you've got to go and write; from vacuuming round your feet when you're wrestling with your inciting incident; from insisting you consider the shopping list while that fragile, once-in-a-lifetime bestselling idea eludes you and drops to the ground, crushed under the jackboots of your domestic demands.

Point is, you're doing this alone. No-one is going to help you. It's just you, and me.

So here's what to do when those situations arise that no-one but a writer could understand.

When technology fails you

Ever seen Terminator? If the technology isn't against you now, it will be. I couldn't tell you the amount of times I've been forced off the desktop computer by other family members with more legitimate claims, firing up my laptop only to find it needs to take 2 hours to download emails, 4 hours to update the operating system, and when I've finally managed to get it to synchronise with the writing files I've been working on elsewhere the thing needs to re-boot itself, by which time I've only got two hours left to sleep before I need to leave for the day job. Happy times. Solution? Unplug the evil thing and get the notebook out. Technology 0 – Writer 1.

When inspiration fails you

Stop working on what your supposed to be working on and write something else. Brainstorm the idea, drill down to the issue that's holding you up. There's no such thing as writers block, just lack of research – you can't write because you don't know your story or characters well enough – learn it or invent it. Write down the question that is at the heart of the issue, then write the answer.

When imagination fails you

Imagination is a muscle and if it isn't flexed, will wither and die. I've talked before about the reservoir of ideas available to a writer, you can stir these up by reading, research, listening to music or other means. As a writer you should be training your imagination all the time. Never block ideas, never rule them out, no matter how mundane or boring – if you allow them time to develop or work them hard enough, they could just give you enough for a whole novel.

When words fail you

Believe it or not, writing isn't just about words – they're just a means to the character and the story. Sure they can be stylish and poetic, but that's just icing on the cake. You can take pictures, draw diagrams, act out roles, try out accents, deal out cards, block a scene – all ways of working characters and stories without using words.

When you fail you

Sometimes you're so exhausted, so devoid of invention, so sick to death of it all, that you'd rather lie down and die than write.

Guess what? Sometimes it's ok to go and do something else. You are allowed a life.

Besides, it will give you something to write about.

Step Away from the Keyboard

Anyone can be in my gang. Seriously. My community of authors includes YA, Children's, Horror, Crime, Fantasy, Chick Lit, Erotica, Sci-Fi, Historical, Literary and Memoir, plus stuff that doesn't fit any documented genre – and that's just my Writers' Group. I'm pretty inclusive, and I like to think I'm pretty encouraging.

I've come across a couple of posts recently where authors have tried to help 'writers' who don't know what to write about. To paraphrase one of these would-be writers – I know this is what I want to do with my life, I just don't know what to write about.

Let's think about that for a moment.

There are writers out there who burn with a vision that they wrestle with daily to find words to express; writers who only glimpse the truth in rare moments of lucidity and it’s a race against time trying to capture that magic; writers who only hope to come close to the pulsating story they envisage in their head, writing draft after draft to get closer to it.

There are writers who only seek to entertain, to make their reader laugh, to make them cry. To titillate them, to excite them, to take them somewhere different. Writers who are so sickened by the real-world they feel they can only express themselves by inventing another, others so appalled they seek to document it, to highlight it – and despite all this, there are some who look for the good in it.

Writers who see the exceptional in the mundane - a father who grabs his child before she runs in front of a bus. A young boy helping an elderly gentleman across the road. A woman sacrificing her dreams to bring-up her children right. Unnoticed, unheralded heroism.

Kids starved to death by their parents, young children killing younger children, strung out soldiers committing atrocities I can't even bring myself to repeat. Wars fought in our name we don't have to experience or witness.

And these people don't know what to write about?

We're all hacking around in the jungle trying to find our truth, and I believe there's some value in holding up a lantern and saying, here's something I've found that may be of use to you - otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. Yet there are times when sitting here trying to offer advice on how to tell your stories doesn't sit comfortably.

But as for telling you what to write, I wouldn't dream of it.

Except in this case. I know precisely what to tell these 'writers' what to write about. I think we all do.

I'd tell them to write exactly what moves them to write. Absolutely nothing.

Alone with your talent

When things aren't going well, it helps to have instructions, a guide-book, a set of rules to get it right.

Thing is with fiction, there really isn't any right or wrong – the goal is unclear, the finish line uncertain.

You can devour the best writing books under the sun, you can know what constitutes good writing, you can recognise and understand exceptional work when you read it, you may even be able to critique and edit to help other peoples' writing shine; you may live wildly, have broadened your experience and developed your imagination but when faced with the blank page of your manuscript, all that means nothing - at that moment, and for every moment you face that screen, you stand alone with your inspiration and talent - these are the things that limit you, restrict you, that define the boundaries of your creativity.

Trouble is, inspiration and talent cannot have rules applied to them, you cannot learn them from books or buy them down the stationary store. If anything, all you've ever read or learned can stifle and restrict those things.

So what the hell do you do about it?

Transcend the Rules

Become so fluent in the mysteries of the craft you can dismiss them at will.

F*ck the Rules

Utterly ignore everything you've learned and read about writing, and just write the damned story.

Forget about the Reader

And write for yourself – write for therapy, write for your own excitement and titillation – write what floats your boat and turns you on. Chances are what works for you will work for others, and if it doesn't, you'll have written something truly unique.

Forget about the Publishing Deal

Who cares what the establishment gate-keepers like or will represent? Truth is, they don't really know what will sell – they understand the industry, but they know no more about the human condition than you do – in fact less, because that's your job.

Forget about Validation

You can write a best seller and still get slammed by the critics. You can write a critically acclaimed masterpiece that no-one wants to read. You can write the best novel you can possibly write and no-one wants to buy it. Or you can not write at all.

Writing isn't a living, it's a way of life, and you will do it no matter what. Once you accept that, the rest is easy.