How not to write a novel
Here is a salutory tale.
I have written one novel. I can't get it published.
I am writing number two - which is a slow business.
As i was so desolate with my rejections and as the second one was slightly blocked -I decided to write something that I very boorishly, snobbishly, pompously thought would be a 'populist ' novel - and to enter it for the Writers News Completed Novel competition.
It was a modern 'take' of Sense and Sensibility - a three daughters and a widowed mother story - it started well and I was chugging along quite nicely with it - when I saw an intersting thread on here - "worst opening line of a novel" and posted my Sense and Sensibility novel's first line .
And it came to pass that this thread turned into a competition
and at some stage my first line - written in all seriousness - won this damn competirion.
But my point was that a lot of what you can buy in WHSmiths is 'bad' by my estimation - and yet its published - it sells - presumably because the books are easy to read - have compelling story lines, sympathetic characters - so therefore they aren't 'bad'?
Why was my worst line the worst?
What was so awful about it - because I really am a total no hoper or because I was being arrogant?
And how many difficult emotions have you bustled like a spare sock into the back drawer of your emotions lately missus?
I bet you do it all the time.
