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Guidelines

TEN TOP TIPS

How to BE LITERARY

1. Invent a long title

A Heartbreaking Work… The Curious Incident… The Girl With… Need we say more? A long title allows you to be witty and intriguing at the same time.

2. Make your name masculine

It worked for the Alisons (Smith and Kennedy). Shorten a girly Christian name (Ali), use initials (A L), or go the whole hog and choose a man’s moniker (Lionel).

3. Write in the present tense

Helps you focus on the moment, and gives prose (and poetry) the voguish, cinematic, fly-on-the-wall quality. Also adds a spurious air of modernity.

4. Convey information

Choose an unusual (historical, overseas, futuristic, ethnic minority) setting and lard your work with exotic detail. Include an arcane scientific theory. The idea is to make your reader feel intelligent.

5. Consider linked short stories

Think Hotel World or Cloud Atlas. Choose a single setting or theme and invent disparate tales with just this in common. The links can be as strong (a building) or subtle (a birthmark) as you like.

6. Choose unusual verbs

A hallmark literary signature. Outlaw adverbs. Replace tired so-what verbs with high-impact versions. But don’t go over the top. We’re talking ‘bark’, not ‘expostulate’.

7. Have a male protagonist

Unfortunately (infuriatingly) a female heroine shrieks ‘women’s fiction’ which shrieks ‘popular’. To compete with the boys, write about a man. If you must use a woman, make her under 16 or over 40.

8. Zig-zag in time

Linear plots are for dummies. Start at the end; better still, in the middle. Cheat by writing it forwards, then shuffling chapters. Or interleave plots set in different periods.

9. Develop an idiosyncratic voice

Useful for first-person narratives. Make your central character narrate in pidgin, Geordie, Bronx, 18th-Century English. If you’re writing in third person, experiment with knowing asides to the reader.

10. Use a sans serif typeface

A quick and dirty way to make your manuscript look sharp and contemporary. But bear in mind that it’ll be harder to read, so use wide margins and short chapters

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