Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined.The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. I’ve often read manuscripts – including my own – where I’ve got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: “This is where the novel should actually start.” A huge amount of information about character and back story can be conveyed through small detail. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. It’s worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices.Visit her website: Sarah Waters’ 10 Rules For Writers Her novels are Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith, The Night Watch, The Little Stranger, and The Paying Guests, which was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2015.Īdaptations of her work include Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, and The Night Watch for BBC. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society. Sarah Waters is an award-winning, bestselling Welsh novelist who was born 21 July 1966. In this post, we’ve shared Welsh novelist, Sarah Waters’ 10 rules for writers. Writers Write is a comprehensive writing resource.

Tipping the velvet by sarah waters