Writing Novels with Honesty

Restraint can be a good quality to have in everyday life, but when writing novels it is fatal.

• Imagine if we never held back from speaking the honest truth in our everyday lives, when the honest truth was sure to hurt or offend.



• Imagine if we always said precisely what was on our minds, or acted in any damn way we chose, regardless of what anyone else thought.

Restraint (call it good manners if you like) is crucial for oiling the machinery of society. But when writing novels? Forget about it.

Writing a novel is your one big chance in life to say exactly what you want to say, and in exactly the way you want to say it, so don't blow it.

If, instead of being true to yourself, you write what you think you should write, or what other people expect you to write, or write any kind of novel except for the one you truly want to write, you are letting yourself down right from the start.

• Suppose that you have always had a hankering to write romantic fiction. Trouble is, you're a man - and real men don't write girly romances, do they? What would your family say? What would your friends say? No, much better to write something manly, like a war novel, than risk people finding out you're in touch with your feminine side.