I write lots of different things, but I write books for the same reason we read them—to find out what happens next. As carefully as I plan it, I never know, going into a story, exactly how it will end, nor even what twists the plot may take away from what I’ve planned. This makes the entire process an exploration of uncharted territory, and a string of surprises. To me, writing is participatory reading. Writing asks me to do more responding, feeling, analysing, and predicting than reading someone else’s novel would, but these are nevertheless the jobs of any alert reader. Writing a novel, in other words, is just me reading that book a bit harder. 

This philosophy informs how I read. When I finish reading a book, I critique it as I would my own manuscript. I consider what I enjoyed or appreciated, and what didn’t work for me, and then I ask myself, how would I fix its problems? What dials would I twiddle; what would I change? Revision is a writer’s most potent weapon. And the most time-consuming part of the writing process. I find it both instructive and liberating to realise I can mentally revise anything, which means I can transform most of the books I read into satisfying experiences. 

What I hope readers will get out of my writing

I hope readers will get a book hangover in the morning because they stayed up way past bedtime, unable to put this book down. Or that their housework gets neglected rather till their house looks like mine. That’s always the bar I’m aiming for. 

If you cannot do great things, you can look forward to doing small things in a great way. Maybe it’s not about having a beautiful day, but about finding beautiful moments. Maybe a whole day is just too much to ask. I choose to believe that in every day, in all things, no matter how dark and ugly, there are shards of beauty if I look for them. And I like to share them.

Who says novels have to be educational? The story I am bringing to fruition right now has some very dark themes and potential triggering scenes, but between the lines and the scenes, there is entertainment. If ideas in the story speak to readers in other ways, great, but I’ve never understood why we look down our noses at a work of fiction’s entertainment value. In any case, theme has its weight in direct proportion to a story’s engrossing appeal.

I consider it an extraordinary privilege to be an entertainer. Many of the deepest happinesses I’ve found in life have come through the transportive pages of someone else’s books. If I can take you out of yourself for a few hours, I’m honoured. Life is a lifetime sentence; my job is to supply you with a temporary escape and be the driver of your getaway car. 

If I could humbly share one piece of advice with other writers, this is what would it be:

Write the book you’d really like to read, and write it as you, in your words, with your voice, even if you are writing through a character. We have one unique thing to offer the world, and only one. That’s us–our specific, individual brains which have been observing the world through our specific, individual experiences, and have developed their own specific, individual ways of describing what they’ve witnessed and how it made them feel. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got. Us. It’s more than enough to write a lifetime of literature. And that’s what the world craves most in a narrative: authenticity. So, why ever waste time trying to write like a carbon copy of someone else? 

This is not to say that writers can’t improve with time and practice, with study and even deliberate imitation as an exercise, but that improvement should ultimately make you write more like yourself—more like what’s irreducibly you about you, not more like other people.