Introduction

Georges Simenon wrote each of his Maigret novels in just eleven days. If he hadn’t finished one in that time, he threw it away and started another one. In contrast, Joyce Carey took twenty years, and endless re-writes, to produce a version of “The Horse’s Mouth” that he considered good enough for submission to a publisher.

James Joyce would sometimes spend a whole day looking for the right order of words in a single sentence of “Ulysses”. My former philosophy advisor Adam Morton, on the other hand, once wrote a whole book in just three days.

Faced with such examples, how should an aspiring writer proceed? It is something that we all want to know when we start out, but useful information is perilously hard to come by. That is why I am writing this blog – not to advise others, but at least to provide some information on how one writer goes about his task. Maybe it will even help me to improve if I ever have the courage to look back at it.

I began writing seriously some twelve years ago. It took five of those years, and endless rewrites and new starts, to produce a synopsis and first chapter good enough to interest an agent (who has turned out to be marvellous). Once I got a contract with a publisher, things changed. With a deadline in view, I could allow myself just three weeks to produce an acceptable version of each chapter. “Depend upon it, Sir” said Samuel Johnson “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It certainly concentrated mine.

Now I am back where I started. After my first two books, it took me three years, and another series of endless rewrites, to produce an acceptable synopsis and sample chapter for my third book, which my agent is now trying to sell to publishers. I can’t reveal the theme yet, in case someone poaches the idea. I will keep readers posted, though, with how it is progressing, and of course readers of my blog will the first to know what it is about when it gets to publication stage. Wish me luck!