Dear Bernard, I grew up on your Sharpe books & you have been one of my favourite authors ever since. My favourite books of yours are the Warlord chronicles. I just love the fantastic characters you created & have carried an obsession for the King Arthur myth ever since I was given an Enid Blyton rendition of Le Morte d'Arthur as a young boy. It is so refreshing to read an Arthur story with characters so real you feel you were almost there. I especially love the portrayal of Lancelot as a coward- a stroke of genius. I am now 28 and one day I hope to be a writer too. If I may however I would like to ask you for some advice. I do try and write but I have two major problems- 1) I have several ideas for stories I would like to write, but can't seem to decide which one to write first. Do you have the same problem? I am constantly deciding one idea is better than the other and then moving on to another one.
How much do you plan your stories before you start writing? Some I have only a basic concept, but some I have gone as far as mapping out the entire plot, sometimes if I do this in too much detail however I seem to lose some enthusiasm for this story. Help!
2) Anything I write or have written I scrutinise every word. Sometimes I write something and I am happy with it, then when I return to it I hate every word! Other times it takes me hours to write a single sentence because I repeatedly change the words used or the sentence completely. How do you avoid this? I think sometimes I just need to try and tell the story in the plainest language I can, but I think this is one of the easiest things to say, but the hardest things to do! Thanks Bernard for inspiring me & providing me with half a lifetime of fantastic historical fiction so far. I heard a rumour that Azincourt may be adapted into a film? I wish that would come true, as well as the Warlord chronicles of course, but I say that with trepidation as I would be devastated if the film didn't live up to the books (which let's face it, they rarely do!) Thanks again, Andrew Weaver
I confess I don't have that problem, but nor do I think it should be a problem! I suspect it's an avoidance strategy? After all, if an idea excites you and you start writing it then the appeal of it should grow . . . my advice is to choose the one which most appeals and ignore the others!
I have a very broad idea of where I want the book to go, then just let the characters sort it out amongst themselves. I'm not saying this is the right way to do it - some writers plot very carefully, and their books are great, but others, like me, leave it to instinct.
I think this is very common, and it's also very debilitating. I remember feeling exactly the same when I wrote my first book - I thought the style was terrible and no one would ever accept it. What I did (and I recommend this) was to copy out three or four pages of a published novel that I liked - I typed them (back in those days I wrote on a typewriter) so that they would look exactly like my own work. I then shoved them in a drawer for a week, then took them out and read the pages and thought, omg, this is terrible! But it was published and successful, so it taught me that I was being far too critical. Besides, that first draft is meant to be rough - it's the undercoat, not the finish coat. The first draft is for getting the story right, most of the good stuff comes later (and is much more fun to write).