HARRIET TYCE
‘My next book is going to be published in April. It’s called It Ends At Midnight, and it’s about a New Year celebration that ends in tragedy, with a toxic friendship at its heart that’s lasted for decades. I wrote it during lockdown and I found great escapism in writing about teenage exploits in Edinburgh back in 1989 and 1990.
‘When I’m working on a first draft I try to write a minimum of 1,000 words a day, and to write every day until I’ve pushed through to the end. I’ve tried many different approaches to planning, but what I’ve invariably found is that regardless of how much detail into which I’ve gone, as soon as I start writing, the characters will always find their own way and make different decisions to those which I had hoped they would.
‘If the writing goes well, I can have written my 1,000 words before 8am, which frees up the rest of the day. But if it goes badly, and I allow myself to be distracted by Twitter, I can still be sitting in front of my computer screen at 4 or 5 in the afternoon, frustration steadily building against my lack of productivity. Every time I start a new book I tell myself that this time will be different, that this time I’m going to have the self-discipline to work for several hours and produce a better chunk of words, 2,000, or even 3,000. Every time, it ends up falling into the old pattern of displacement activity and procrastination, researching irrelevant details and doing deep dives into processes of body decomposition and the like. But as I’m moving onto my fourth novel, now, perhaps I should have more faith that even if my method is so shambolic it can’t even be called a method, it works for me.
‘There are two pieces of writing advice that I’ve found very useful. The first ties in to my non-method method above, which is to get to the end of the first draft. Everything can be fixed in later edits. I know this is not an approach that works for everyone but I need to work out the story first before I can fix any problems, and I can’t do this without a full draft in front of me.
‘The second piece of advice is not to be afraid to start again. Early in my writing life I had a near-complete draft of a novel to which I was very attached, but which was very flawed and I was considering reworking it again when I got a new writing mentor. She asked why I wasn’t taking the opportunity to start something new, and it’s as a result of that advice that I started a new book. This wasn’t published either, but it did show me that the genre I most enjoy writing is psychological thrillers.
‘That advice of not being afraid to start again leads to the advice I want to give to aspiring writers. Don’t be afraid of failure, either. You don’t ever only have one idea. Have faith in your creativity and your power to be able to generate a new idea if the old one hasn’t worked. To quote Beckett, fail again, fail better – it’s by that perseverance that you will improve and your success will eventually come.’