I love Neil Gaiman’s work and so I was delighted to see he’d written 8 writing tips for The Guardian. I’m really enjoying reading tips and thoughts from other writers at the moment.  It’s helping me get words on the page and shape my ideas.  Number 6 is particularly helpful for the book I’m having to let go of now…

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

This is from The Guardian and it gives me lots to think about as I work on the edits of my next book.  Zadie Smith is a writer I admire – I have her essays ready to read with my coffee in the morning (if I could only get the baby to let me!)

What do you think of her golden rules?  Number 7 strikes me as pretty smart:

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Being really sick makes you stop for a moment.  Sure, it’s not the way I’d recommend getting your imagination working, but it did get me thinking as I lay there the last couple of days with flu.  See, I had my phone off, I didn’t check email, and I wasn’t watching TV.  I think sometimes it’s a good idea to just let your imagination have some time to itself – maybe give yourself an hour without phone/internet/TV/anything that distracts you.  Lie around.  Listen to music.  Stare at the ceiling.  Whatever.  Just let yourself be and see what travels through your mind.  Reacquaint yourself with your imagination.  I had to get sick to remind myself to slow down and take time off.  But, wow, did I get a great new idea for a book out of it…