Adam Croft

Ol' Charlie knew how to write first lines

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

It’s one of the most famous opening lines in English fiction, and with good reason. The opening of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is instantly interesting, offering contrast and intrigue that makes you want to read more.

That’s one of the most crucial tasks for a writer: to write a first line so good, it makes readers carry on reading. A soggy first line can easily send your book straight back to the shelf, no matter how good the rest of it is.

It’s long been acknowledged that the first line matters – but in the twenty first century, when e-readers are so popular, it’s not just the first line that needs to be outrageously good. The ability to see a preview of the first part of someone’s book for free with a Kindle means that the first section of your book takes on more importance than ever before (samples are usually around 10% of the total book, although this can vary).

Of course, in some ways, all of this goes without saying. If you want people to read your book, it needs to be good and that’s the way it’s always been. Nothing has changed in that respect. However, knowing that the first 10% or so of your book could make the difference between a sale and a reader walking away helps to focus the writer’s attention on the opening sequence of their book.

In short, just as your first sentence needs to make people want to keep reading, so does the end of the free Kindle preview. The book as a whole will always be the most important thing, but keeping this in mind when you write your books definitely can’t hurt.

How much research do you do before you start to write a book? This is another of those topics that has the potential to divide writers, with some swearing by an extensive research process before even writing a single word, and others preferring to just plunge in and start writing.

It’s also another of those topics that mostly comes down to personal preference: just as some people are more prone to detailed planning than others, some people are more likely to do more research. However, it’s also a topic whose answer will depend significantly on the type of book you are writing.

If you are writing non-fiction, for instance, it’s highly likely you’ll need to do some research to back up whatever it is you’re writing about as your work is likely to depend more on facts than a work of fiction. Some types of fiction might also require more research than others – a historical novel, the success of which depends on the author’s knowledge and understand of the time period might require more research than a contemporary romance set in a place the author already knows well, for instance.

Also, if you’re writing about a plot where much of its credibility hangs on a certain topic – such as a murder mystery where the plot turns on a specific incident or process – that might also require research to make it believable. For instance, if your murder mystery is about a method of murder using drugs, you’ll probably need to research those drugs and their effect on the human body so you can make it plausible.

So as you can see, research can be hugely valuable. It helps to give your work credibility and lets readers know what you’re talking about – and, in a world where your readers can easily check your facts through a quick session on Google, it makes sense to ensure your work is accurate wherever possible.

However, I’d also argue that there’s such a thing as too much research. Just as you can end up getting bogged down in detail or making things more complicated for yourself than they need to be if you plan too extensively, there is a risk that if you do too much research, it will take over your work. Research can help you create a certain feel or give the impression of a certain time period in your book, but don’t forget that the main focus of your book should be the characters and the story itself. In a way, the research is there to back up what you’re doing, but particularly when you are writing fiction, it shouldn’t be the whole story.

This can be a tricky balancing act to get right, as it’s only natural for writers to want to write about what they’ve learnt and include research they find interesting in their story. Being able to step back and review your work critically to make sure you only include what’s absolutely necessary can be a hard process to learn, but being smart with your research can make all the difference to your book.

How do you go about researching your work? Do you like to do extensive research before you begin or do you prefer to just start writing and fill in the gaps later on?

It seems safe to say that all writers would love to be inspired to write all the time. The truth of it though, is that a lot of the time many of us aren’t in a magical state of inspiration but we have to do the work anyway.

In this way, writing is just like any other job. We might fantasise about sitting down, tapping into our inner genius and spilling forth with the next The Great Gatsby (or whatever your personal ‘book of genius’ might be), but this is something that rarely happens. Most of the time, writing is about putting a word on the page, and then the next word and so on until you have a sentence that you pray is at least vaguely readable.

If we all waited to be inspired, most people wouldn’t be writing very much at all. But since it’s so great when that feeling of inspiration does come, what can we do to try and make sure we’re inspired as often as possible? As so often with writing, this is something that’s intensely personal. For some people, inspiration might be a glass of wine or pint of beer. For others, it might be some treasured poetry or a walk in the woods, writing by hand to force themselves to think more deeply or simply just writing anything until they hit on something that works.

This means that inspiration is something that’s a little bit fickle at the best of times and much of the time is intensely frustrating. If you are frustrated though, just remember how good it is when inspiration does visit. All those hours of plugging away at the keyboard, writing those sentences even though you’re not really feeling it, are what teach you about writing and the realities of being a writer.

It’s hard, and it can be boring and frustrating, but the minute it all starts to gel together is the moment it all becomes worthwhile and we remember why we do what we do, inspiration or not.

What inspires you to write, or do you just go with the flow and do what you can to get the words out?

Like any writer, I’m always interested in how other writers choose to write. In particular, one interesting ‘how to write’ debate centres around whether it’s best to write things out by hand or go straight for the keyboard and type it up.

There are arguments for and against each method. If you write by hand, it forces you to think more deeply about what you’re writing and the fact that the process is slower means you’re less likely to waste words. On the other hand, the process is slower and that can be frustrating if your brain is racing ahead of your hand. Plus, hand cramp often means that your initially neat script ends up practically illegible. This isn’t really all that practical when it comes to editing.

In terms of going straight to the computer, typing is a great way of getting your thoughts down quickly. It’s also convenient when you need to edit as you can delete and move things around really easily. However, typing quickly means that we often don’t think things through properly before writing them down, and since most computers today are connected to that thing called The Internet, this can be quite a distracting method of writing.

There are writers, such as Anne Tyler, who write out their manuscripts by hand before typing them up. There are others, like Jonathan Franzen, who go straight to the computer (he says he has disconnected his laptop from the internet to avoid distractions). It’s clearly a personal choice, but which do you think is better?

Do you write your work out by hand or do you type it up?

It’s probably one of the biggest dilemmas many of us face as writers: how much should we plan before starting to write a new story or project? I imagine we’ve all committed a planning folly at one time or another. Sometimes, you’ll be so excited about a new project that you launch straight in without any planning at all, only to get yourself into a major plot (or lack thereof) conundrum somewhere around halfway through and then stutter to a stop, never to find your way out again.

Other times, you spend so much time on the plan that by the time you sit down to write it up, you’re too fed up of it to do anything, all the spontaneity has gone and what seemed like a fantastic idea at the time ends up seeming like the worst thing you’ve ever thought of… ever.

So how much planning should you do before commencing a new project? Well, like so many other things with writing, I suspect that this is largely down to personal preference. Some people simply find planning more useful than others. Take crime novels, for instance. Authors such as Jeffery Deaver reportedly spend most of a year planning the story before writing the whole thing in a month. Others such as Minette Walters apparently don’t even know who the killer is before setting out to write a murder mystery story. More authors still, like Mark Billingham, suggest that they know who the killer is before they write the book, but it’s the reasons and motivations of the characters that make up most of the story, which are often discovered as the book is written.

So it would seem that the amount of planning you do will depend on the style of your writing and, at the end of it, how much planning you think you’ll be able to stomach doing. Plan too much and you may find yourself bored with the project ages before the end. Plan too little and you may never be able to figure out what the end should be. It seems that planning is a fine balancing act, one that is almost impossible to get right.

I think part of this is because authors always think they could be doing things better than they are, so even if a project is going to plan (so to speak), they’re always thinking about ways to improve what they’ve already got. Often, this leads to deviations from the plan, either in the form of minor meanderings in the narrative or in massive diversions that ultimately make it impossible to get back to where you’d originally intended to be. None of this is bad, though, as long as you get something out of it at the end of it all. It may well be that the book or story you planned to write isn’t actually the one you want to write, or need to write, and so you find yourself lurching off elsewhere at whim.

Whatever your preferred planning method for writing, I think it’s safe to say that no plan makes it to the end of the project entirely unscathed. Perhaps, then, we should all relax a little bit. As long as we’ve got a vague idea of where we’re going and the enthusiasm to see it through, we can then just sit back and enjoy the journey. After all, half the fun of writing is in the discovery, right?