How To Write – advice from one who has done it all
How To Write is a new blog about the business of writing.
This is not just about publishing, promoting, selling, editing, media plugging, or any other of a writer’s concerns. There are acres of stuff online for all that.
How To Write is a collection of brief single page posts about the extraordinary process of writing – novels, stage plays, film scripts and all other forms of the art, by a writer with HUGE experience in most of them (I am old!). It is for all those who aspire to make a go at what can be the most fulfilling pastime on the planet.
How To Write – more to it than you think
Writing is not just a process of having great thoughts and putting them down on paper/computer, as many novices think (my first play took 3 years to get right, first book longer!). Good writing in whatever medium has to be learned. It’s techniques are infinite. They are as difficult as learning to play the piano. As someone famously said, ‘genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration’ (unless you happen to be a genius from birth like Mozart)
Or as Oscar Wilde said – ‘I spent all morning deciding to take out a comma, and all afternoon putting it back in.’
I have not won any major prizes, but I have earned a very good living from writing, which has allowed me to live in some of the most beautiful places on earth (another advantage of being a writer). Some of my works have made a lot of money, some a moderate amount, and some none at all. But each has given me great satisfaction and added to my experience. (See Plays and Novels)
The aim of this blog
How To Write is aimed at all those who aspire to do the same. But without long examples and intense text analyses – you can get lots of those elsewhere. I will go for brief, on the nail observations on the myriad day-to-day issues which affect a writer’s task.
So if this intrigues you, and you have creative matters to discuss, send me a question on How To Write, and I will try to answer it for the benefit of you and all other readers.
Subscribe to Books & Stuff
Email Robin for a FREE online flip-book edition of 'Dinner With Churchill' (or his previous books, 'The Land, The Land' and 'Number Ten').
