5 Golden Rules of Being a Successful Novelist
Jules had started writing umpteen whodunits, a political thriller, a boy’s own war story, a family epic set in El Salvador, a haunted house mystery, and in a last vain attempt to complete any work — a collection of children’s stories. However, despite his best efforts, to date they were all to no avail. My downfall, amongst very many, he openly acknowledged — at least to himself, is that while I know the five golden rules to being an author, I can never follow them.
It was a Monday morning, and after a fun weekend partying, Jules was home alone. His girlfriend, Michelle had left for work four hours earlier. Jules was as ever left to his own devices, and which meant a few more hours of kipping. At 9:32am, earlier than usual, Jules surfaced. He went to the kitchen wearing Michelle’s Pink Panther dressing-gown, made a brew, and then went through the ritual of putting his laptop on the kitchen table and powering it up. This process would take an average of thirty minutes, during which time Jules would have ideas flowing through his grey matter, but as the blank Microsoft Word document opened, all motivation and inspiration vanished as quickly as a squirrel with a nut up a tree.
By 10:30am, Jules’s only productive output thus far was a quite reasonable blue pen sketch of an empty curry flavoured Pot Noddle carton with the complementary plastic fork poking out the top and the silver foil wrappers which had contained dried vegetables, curry powder and chilli sauce by the side; this had constituted his breakfast.
Let me have a drink to get my creativity flowing. Ha-ha, what a bad pun, he would derisively mock, as he went to the drinks cabinet in the living-room and poured a sherry. This had been his ritual for as many months as he could remember, indeed, the only deviation on this theme during the past seven years had been changing from Gonzalez Byass Elegante Fino dry sherry to Pedro Ximenez sweet sherry — both being available at the nearby Waitrose.
I know I shouldn’t drink and write at the same time. It does no favours for my liver, kidneys or pancreas, and my imagination starts to run so wild I never get anything done.
While other artists of the pen, can find a dram of Scotch, a pint of beer, a glass of wine, a shot of vodka, or for wealthier scribblers, a flute of champagne, to help lubricate their creative selves, Jules simply didn’t know when to stop. The first drop would take him into other worlds from which he would never return, or at least not until the next day when he would come crashing back with a bang in the form of a stinking hangover. It would normally be at that head-pounding stage, he would read the drunken gibberish he’d scrawled, typed or doodled the day before, and in a self-perpetuating downward spiral, start another day on the sauce.
And why don’t I put my many and varied thoughts in some sort of logical order?
This was the second rule that Jules had never mastered. He been unsuccessful in copying and pasting articles from the internet into a folder, or paper clippings into a file, from which he could at a later date use as inspiration for characters and/or plot. He hadn’t managed the art of indexing creative ideas, or indeed setting up any sort of system to collect and collate his many, quite often brilliant musings.
Maybe, if I was more disciplined and had a more structured day, I would be more productive? Maybe that would help me to be better organised and less attracted to the bottle?
Not having consistent timeslots in which to work, was Jules’s third failure. He didn’t wake as the sun rose and go for a run to clear the cobwebs, followed by shower, breakfast and by mid-morning, be done with emails and other administration so that he could concentrate on editing his work from the previous day or start producing creative output. Instead, he would wake when he fancied, and then go back to sleep for a few more hours. During winter months, it would not be particularly unusual if he didn’t see the light of day.
If I could only settle on a regular place of work and from which become God and create worlds, surely that would also help.
Such a place of peace, tranquillity and creative inspiration . . . had never been found. He didn’t have a shed, a favoured coffee shop, or even a corner in a room in his flat from which he could develop characters and order sentences.
Worse still Jules never followed the fifth rule, the so-called golden rule that all authors try to follow.
If I could consistently write 300, 400, 500 words each day, in time I would eventually have a first draft from which I could then start the process of editing, polishing and proofreading.
Instead, after a sentence that Jules was proud of, or even sometimes just a collection of words, he would often post said sentence on social media. This act would be excuse enough to make a congratulatory coffee, cheese sandwich or, have an alcoholic pick-me-up.
