What advice would you give your 30-year-old self about writing?

Jeffrey's answer

I am eighty-six. I am not sure my thirty-year-old self would have listened to me. He thought he was about to be Prime Minister.

In 1974 — when I was thirty-four, four years past your question — my life performed a particularly spectacular somersault, and I landed flat on my face. I had invested every penny I owned in a Canadian venture called Aquablast, which collapsed. I lost my house. I stood down from Parliament. I was bankrupt. And it was at that low point — when I had been advised that there was no money in books, that writing was a luxury few could afford — I sat down and wrote Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, partly out of anger and partly because I could not think what else to do.

So if I could go back to my thirty-year-old self, what would I say?

I would say this. Marcel Proust said something I did not understand until I was sixty: we always end up doing the thing we are second-best at. You think you know what your life is for. You do not. The accident, the disaster, the swindle, the wrong turn — these are very often the events that point you towards what you were actually going to do. Do not be too certain. Be ready to begin again.

I would say: marry well. Mary, my wife, did what needed to be done in 1974 without complaint and without theatrics. She took a teaching post in Cambridge so we had a roof. My sister Liz moved in to help. Without those two women I do not think I would have made it. The novelist who has someone at home who believes in the work is twice the novelist of one who does not.

I would say: write every day. Do not wait for inspiration. Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for the right moment. There is no right moment. There is only the page, and the pen, and the hourglass, and the discipline.

And I would say one last thing — the line I have earned, after fifty years. I am not a ballet dancer. I am not a countertenor. I cannot play the violin. I tell stories.

You will, too. Sit down. Begin.

A few practical notes

• Start sooner. The writer at 30 who has been writing daily since 25 has 5 years of practice on the writer who ‘will start when life calms down’.
• Read across genres, not just within. Most writers narrow into their own genre and lose the broader rhythms.
• Find the one or two readers who tell you the truth. Not your spouse. Not your mother. Find writers at your level or just above.
• Don’t quit your day job until your writing income covers your bills for two consecutive years. Not one good year. Two.
• Save half of every advance. Royalties arrive years late, if at all. The writer with a financial cushion writes better books than the writer with the bailiff at the door.
• Avoid writing courses that promise success. Anyone who tells you they have a formula for a bestseller is selling something. A singular formula does not exist – there as so many different paths to success – see my Top Tips on Writing Article.

Keep going. More novelists fail by stopping than by being unpublishable. The 10th rejection often arrives just before the yes.