1. Don’t Bore Yourself

When I’m starting a writing class, I usually emphasise that the most important thing in a first draft isn’t the idea, it isn’t the atmosphere, and it certainly isn’t the individual sentences.

The most important thing in the first draft is excitement.

If you write what you know are in-between bits, they will read as in-between bits.

You need to be excited by what you’re writing, so that the reader gets excited by it.

This isn’t dependent on genre. For a romance writer, they can be romantically thrilled; for an experimental writer, they can be experimentally stoked.

If you write something that’s flat to begin with, pumping it up will just leave you something obviously hollow.

When faced with a choice in plotting, you need to overdo, overcomplicate and overwhelm yourself with possibilities, rather than timidly get something down you know you can safely finish.

Leave tidying up for December…