"How Authors Are Being Influenced by their Fans"
And the first version of the article I wrote for The Guardian.
Hi friends!
Last week I contributed to a fascinating article in The Guardian, about the effect that the internet age has had on writers, now that there are more opportunities for authors to interact with their readers.
You can read the full article here. It’s well worth it — as well as my piece it has interesting contributions from authors Luke Jennings (whose books Killing Eve was based on), and Marie Lu.
I thought you might like to also read the first version of the piece I wrote for the article. It has a slightly different feel to it, and I'm a little bit less reserved about my opinion of the state the publishing world is in at the moment. Take a look!
Ever since my first novel, Before I Go to Sleep, exploded in 2011 I’ve tried to encourage aspiring writers in their ambitions. Perhaps paradoxically, that has frequently involved telling them to write badly.
Why is this? Writing comes from the free-associating part of the brain that sees tangential connections and forms unexpected links, that wanders off the beaten track to arrive somewhere quite unexpected. And this is not the same part as that which corrects typos and ensures sentences make sense and paragraphs flow.
It's often a far from happy situation for writers who want to stretch their wings and experiment with other ideas. We are increasingly faced with the challenge of balancing our creative instincts with the need to deliver books that our publishers are prepared to work on.