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| The Kinsella Method From Interview no. 34 • Listen to the voices in your head. Don’t be afraid to (temporarily) abandon a successful series for a standalone novel that you are itching to write. • Don’t be afraid to return to your serial character after that standalone if you miss her and keep thinking about her. • Allow a kernal of an idea to build up until it emerges as a story about someone doing something or experiencing something that you want to write about. • Write the stories that come to you • Plan. Always think ahead one book – or two – into the future. Don’t panic yourself with a complete blank, without knowing what you’re going to do next. • Go around coffee shops and think about whatever you’re doing next. Read someone else’s book (but stop if it gets in the way). • Plan and plan and plan. Start on a book by planning – that often gets done out of the house. Take a notebook and return to the coffee shop. Just sit there all morning and think about the book and make notes. Plan the structure of the book, try to plan out how the chapters are going to go. It may all change a million times, but give yourself an initial framework to work from. • When you know the gist of what you want to do, write down things your characters might say or funny things they might do. • Avoid things like writing ‘Her favourite colour is pink. When she was a child she once burned her hand and this has shaped her.’ If you know your characters those details are irrelevant because they are already in your head. • Think about what they are like, how they behave in a certain situation, like what it would be like meeting them. Avoid building them up in a scientific way, just think them into existence, feel them into existence. • Try to capture them in dialogue. Dialogue is really indicative of what your characters are like. What they choose to say or what they don’t say gives away so much. And that speaks more than a whole paragraph of ‘He was the kind of man that...la la la....’ • Wander around the streets until you have the first line of your book – and preferably until you know the first scene – in your head. (Avoid the full stop of the blank page). Then get back home and start writing. • Write in the morning until two or three in the afternoon, then stop. Make time to take a step back. • After supper, start to edit what you’ve been writing that day. • Spend time with your family and friends.  |
'Dialogue is really indicative of what your characters are like.' |
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