I did it all wrong: one day I just decided that I wanted to write novels and started to write them. Strangely enough I’d barely read more than a few books before this, and didn’t consider that to be a disadvantage. Subsequently, like most beginners, I had no idea that it would be years until I had any kind of idea what I was doing, or what I was doing wrong. One advantage of this naivety, of course, is that I had nothing to fear, which meant I could produce work quickly and easily, completely clueless to how far I needed to go and what I would need to do to eventually arrive there.

One thing I had no idea about when I started writing was that there are short story writers and novelist’s, and these two types of writing—different in every aspect—are very rarely occupied by the same person. Why is that so? Well, each requires a completely different set of attributes: short story writers are able to fit a very large amount of information and plot into a very small amount of space, whereas novelists require many hundreds of pages to do the same and would find writing many short stories very difficult; while it could be said that novel writing is more difficult—as it is obviously more time-consuming and requires possibly greater over-all patience—that’s not to say that short story writers are any less gifted and determined; so the first thing you need to decide, before you even consider writing that epic novel, is which one are you? Deciding this consciously will enable you to move forward at a greater pace. Of course, there’s nothing to say that a beginner novelist can’t start his writing practice by writing short stories—to find out if he or she is actually capable of writing a book—but in truth the only way to know if you can really do it is to do it, no matter how bad the outcome.

Speaking of writing I have just been hired to write 3000 words on red diesel prices, I don’t even know where to begin!