Christmas presents: the latest word

In the spirit of Christmas, and in hopes of freeing our hearts and souls under renewed restrictions, I’m offering you two gifts. Well, it’s really one present divided into two and delivered in two separate windows, this week and next.

After mentioning award-winning author Angela Levy in my last post, I have trawled the internet for gems of advice from literary geniuses to pass on to you. You need to remember that the advice of successful authors can be read and then ignored if they don’t suit you. And your writing will work only when you find your own voice, style and audience, as Andrea Levy did.

While these personal tips come from novelists, their creative processes may be just as useful to copywriters.

The best marketing copy often comes in the form of a story.

In the next two newsletters I will give you tips from some bestselling authors. Five tips in each issue. Here goes:

• “A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.”
  Michael Morpurgo, author of Warhorse and several dozen other books, and a former Children’s Laureate.

• “When we create stories for movies or just stories that we tell each other when we meet, this is something very, very fundamental.”
  Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winner for Remains of the Day in 1989 and Nobel Literary prize winner in 2017, in The Washington Post.

• “You ought never to use an unfamiliar word unless you’ve had to search for it to express a delicate shade–where in effect you have recreated it. This is a damn good prose rule I think….Exceptions: (a) need to avoid repetition (b) need of rhythm”.
  F Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, surely one of the best novels of all time.

• “So much of a novelist’s writing takes place in the unconscious; in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper.”
  Graham Greene, in The End of the Affair.

• “I love going to real places to research them. I love writing about the actual physical world. It’s such a contrast to this indented society.”
  J K Rowling, interviewed by Graham Norton on Radio 2 in 1918 about a Cormoran Strike detective novel written as Robert Galbraith.