I want to write about how to do deal with lack of criticism rather than ordinary straightforward criticism The sort of stuff which starts: ‘I should prefer to read the back of a cornflakes packet or the instructions on a toilet cleaner than another word written by that author’ is simply like water off a duck’s back

I want write more about style, just continuing from the last article and with next suggestion Suggestion 7: economy of style

In the last article, I had launched into the question of style and I want to continue on that line, picking up from where we left off at suggestion 3 Suggestion 4: Writers often use a special style – rather than just special words - in order to create an atmosphere

The most important thing about writing is structure You cannot just rush into a piece of writing without some feeling for the form of what you are going to write

A writer of fiction is simply a person who makes up stories He or she is just a perfectly normal human being who has found out that they can put stories down on paper that make other people really interested, excited and amused

When you write fiction, by what code are you held? What principles bind your work into a coherent whole? Do you need principles at all or can you write an anarchic story line governed by no other law except that it should be exciting to read? Should you analyze and agonize or should you just let your mind take its course along some route no matter how rough a track it may follow - a little like this sentence? I am writing here not of the great genius author but of the plodding novelist, 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration, whose chief concern is to get the work out on time to a publisher who may accept it, that is, an author who cannot afford to hear the lovely whooshing sound of a deadline racing by, as Douglas Adams put it.