This friend is actually the brother of another good friend of mine. We’d met in London during the year I lived there, and we’d hit it off immediately – we were both writers. He’d been writing for longer than I have, and more consistently too no doubt – breaks between writing for me are often measured in years. He’s delved further into the publishing industry than I ever have, rewritten one of his novels countless times, so as far as I’m concerned, this is someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to fiction writing.

I thought I’d share some of the advice he gave me – you never know who else might find it interesting:

1. Understand how you write – my writing style is not something I give a lot of thought. I just tend to write stuff, and if it comes together with decent grammar, I’m satisfied. Maybe I do have a style of my own, but it’s just unconscious and I don’t recognise it. But as is often the case, once I started thinking about this, I realised that my style is very … proper. My grammar is often probably too good. One of the things that I always find myself doing is correctly those red squiggly underlines that MS Word uses to make you feel bad about yourself. Anyone Most people can create a grammatically correct sentence. But the more I learn about it, a writer’s style can often come from how they break the rules, not how perfectly they follow them.
2. Avoid cardboard-cutout characters – my friend did qualify this point by saying that my characters were pretty developed in this regard, but I know that this is the weakest part of my own writing. This has come from my own analysis of what I write, as well as from other peer feedback and professional appraisals. I think that my faults in this area result from:
   1. Not knowing enough about the characters – I tend to balk at delving too deeply into a character’s past and/or psychology. It’s not hard – you can make up whatever you want about them. But without this, you end up…
   2. Not knowing enough about their motivations – Writing a character’s past will give you clues about how they will behave in the context of your story. It will give you hints about what drives them, what’s important to them, what will make them laugh, cry, shout, etc. And if you don’t know any of that, you can’t help…
   3. Creating stereotyped or similar characters – I started reading a book last year where the two main characters spoke in the same cynical tones and told the same jokes. I didn’t make it through the book, it annoyed me that much. But my own writing suffers in the same way. I’ve never mastered how to make each character’s dialog sound different, and characters of the same gender share very similar behaviours at times. Someone told me once that all my female characters tend to cry at the slightest provocation.
3. Know why each chapter is there – the advice was pretty much this: justify the existence of each and every chapter – and hell, every scene for that matter. He suggested asking two questions:
   1. Why is this chapter here?
   2. What do I want from this chapter?

   To answer these questions, as a writer you’ve really got to think about why you wrote the scene in the first place. We writers often get attached to particular scenes – maybe they were fun to write, or we used lots of flowery language that we think sounds great – but a writer should always be prepared to delete a scene if it’s not serving a purpose for the story.The second question is a gem. I’d never thought to think what I – as the writer – wanted from a chapter. This uncovers a lot of bad reasons for the chapter being there. If it’s there merely so you can have one character tell another character what the reader needs to know – ie. exposition – then you have a serious problem, and you seriously need to rethink the first question. But you answer that you want the chapter to reveal a mystery, characterise your hero, or even just be a damn entertaining interlude, then at least you know consciously what you purpose is when writing the chapter, and this will surely show.