Matt Haig

1) Stare out of the window.

2) Feel a bit hungover.

3) Wonder if you had enough love as a child.

4) Make toast.

5) Sleep badly.

6) Have trust issues.

7) Resist physical contact.

8) Fight anxiety with Merlot.

9) Eat peanut butter.

10) Speak to geese.

11) Stare at a Word document until nothing happens. Hold that moment for seventeen minutes. Then go on Twitter and annoy people.

12) Write some words.

13) Look at the words.

14) Delete the words.

15) Sigh.

16) Get drunk.

21) Sit in front of a Word document for 7 hrs. Write 860 words. Delete 920 words. Then drink half a bottle of gin.

22) Watch unfunny Youtube videos.

23) Google illnesses you might have.

24) Forget to call your parents.

25) Eat stale pretzels.

26) Turn up at an event where only one person shows up. Have her be a friend of your mother.

27) Feel tired.

28) And grumpy.

29) Take an hour and a half to sort the recycling.

30) Wish you were Neil Gaiman/Stephen King/Jonathan fucking Franzen.

31) Think about dying a lot.

32) Ignore deadlines.

33) Stare at rain.

34) Write another pointless blog.

35) Silently recite the author’s mantra: I’m a genius. I’m useless. I’m a genius. I’m useless. I’m a genius. I’m useless. I’m a genius. I’m useless. I want some toast.

36) Wonder why your agent hasn’t called in a while. Wonder if you actually have an agent.

37) Be a liability on white wine.

38) Be wrapped up in yourself.

39) Look at your royalty statement. Keep looking.

40) Consider every book you read to be a little bit overrated.

41) Feel the melancholy wonder of train stations.

42) Phone your mother.

43) Imagine what it would be like to win the Booker Prize. Give a little imaginary acceptance speech.

44)  Wear a dressing gown at all times.

45) Think about writing more of your book.

46) Be scared of pylons.

47) Tense up when someone hugs you.

48) Be slightly bipolar.

49) Eat peanut butter.

50) Want to be a cat.

51) Be terrible with money.

52) Hide from window cleaners.

53) Forget to eat breakfast.

54) Be generally quite worried.

56) Create awkward vibes.

57) Stare at people without realising.

58) Have back pain.

59) Eat  some more toast.

60) Write.

Writing tips are fucking everywhere. Every fucker from Elmore Leonard down has written the fuckers. If Shakespeare was alive now he’d be blogging about where to place a fucking apostrophe. Even I’ve written some. They drive me fucking mad, but they are easier than getting on with my next fucking novel. So here’s some fucking more.

1. Don’t ever start a novel with the fucking weather. Unless you want to start a novel with the fucking weather. In which case, fucking do it.

2. ‘Adverbs are fucking shit. Except when they’re not,’ he said, un-fucking-helpfully.

3. Don’t be fucking boring. Ever. Most books are 100 pages too fucking long.

4. Pretend your mother will never fucking read it. (Sorry Mum, I’m having a sweary day.)

5. All genres are fucking fake. Especially the genre of literary fucking fiction.

6. Don’t write to get laid. Unless you’re already James fucking Franco.

7. Be a thin-skinned fucking weirdo when you write your book. And a thick-skinned fucking bastard when it gets published.

8. If you’re hungover, don’t even fucking try.

9. Don’t fall in fucking love with yourself. (If you write ten words, delete fucking five.)

10. If you are only writing for fucking money you probably won’t make any. Don’t write for the market.  Books aren’t fucking corn flakes. Write for fucking you. Write because you fucking have to. Write because the whole world is conspiring to kill our imaginations and only books can save them. Write because in a world where governments and corporations don’t want us to fucking think, writing is a revolutionary fucking act.

(11. Just fucking write.)

I have been a published writer for twelve years this month. Here are some things I have learnt in that time.

1. Agents know the best restaurants.

2. E-books didn’t exist 12 years ago. They do now. No biggie.

3. Social media is the best thing that has ever happened to writers. (See point 10.)

4. I will never write more than one 90,000 word book a year. Twelve years = ten books.

5. The word ‘philosophical’ can be used as an insult, providing you are an Amazon reviewer.

6. If you write what people want you to write your career will be a lot shorter that if you write what you KNOW you should write.

7. If you can get yourself readers – and get them to like your work – you have yourself a career. It’s not about knowing the right people. It’s about knowing yourself.

8. They say that to be a writer you need a thick skin. This is true. But the bummer is that to write well you need to be a hypersensitive freak.

9.You will never write more than one 90,000 word book a year.You will never write more than one 90,000 word book a year.

10.Social media is the worst thing that has ever happened to writers. (See point 3.)

12. Bigger advances are just bigger reasons to be dropped next time around. If you get an advance of, say, £60,000, and that book sells 2000 you will get probably get dropped by that publisher, like I did for my third novel. When my agent found me a new publisher I actually said ‘I don’t want too high an advance. At first’.

13. For every new writer arriving on the conveyor belt, another one drops off it. You can’t just be good ONCE you have to stay good. Every book is a debut.

14. Learn to say ‘No’. I have only recently become good at this. I said ‘no’ when asked to do a Dr Who story because I am not a Dr Who fan. If you don’t want to do something, and you do it, it probably won’t be very good.

15. Said it before – ‘foreign rights = free money.’

16. Selling the film rights does not mean a film will be made. Just pray they ask you to write the screenplay, because screenplays are short.

17. People who work in publishing are generally very nice. I think this is because they read a lot of books. (Books make you better.)

18. After twelve years of making a living from your imagination, you are entirely useless for any other kind of employment. This is scary.

19. Being published makes you paranoid. Bookshops stop being bookshops and start being ‘Writers Doing Better Than Me Shops’.

20. Twelve years ago editors were essential. Now they are even more essential.

21. Quasimodo was just a man who sat down to write for twelve years. Do some yoga.

22. Twelve years ago there was no real way for me to get people to read my books. Now there are lots.

23. But even with Twitter, writing remains the loneliest job in the universe. But also the most magical. (‘I’m off to work.’ ‘Oh, where are you commuting to?’ ‘NARNIA!’)

24. Twelve years ago I was teetotal. Now I am not.

(12+12=24. Let’s end.)

Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol. It presses fast-forward on the whole experience.
You don’t have a second. You don’t have a single waking second outside of the fear. You crave a moment, a single second of not being terrified, but the moment never comes. The illness that you have isn’t the illness of a single body part, something you can think outside of. If you have a bad back you can say, ‘my back is killing me’, and there will be a kind of separation between the pain and the self. The pain is something other. It attacks and annoys and even eats away at the self but it is still not the self.
But with depression and anxiety the pain isn’t something you think about because it is thought. You are not your back but you are your thoughts. If your back hurts it might hurt more by sitting down. If your mind hurts it hurts by thinking. And there is no real easy equivalent of standing back up.

1. Write a really good book.

2. By good, I mean the book you actually want to write, written the way you want to write it. If that means writing War and Peace with talking squirrels, then do it. Just write the thing you are going to believe in the most, because that belief will be the wind in the sails of your words.

3. Expect rejections. Agents and publishers expect to reject you so, in turn, you should expect them to. If publishers published every single book that has been written we would all have to live in the sea because there would be no room because of all the books. We’d have to live on a big ship paid for by Lee Child.

4. Do not get jealous. Okay, this is hard. But do not assume that publishers/agents/readers are stupid. Do not automatically assume that if a book does well it is because they were best mates with the publisher or something. Sometimes, things succeed because they are good and people like them.

5. Look for doors, not walls. Stop blaming the system. Yes, prejudices exist. But if you are a) good enough and b) want it enough and c) stop trying to see walls instead of doors, your chances can be as good as anyone’s.

6.  It is entirely self-defeating – though quite easy – to say ‘Oh, I’m not published because my book is above people’s heads’, ‘I’m not published because I didn’t go to Oxbridge’, ‘I’m not published because I write fantasy/sci-fi/about talking squirrels’, ‘I’m too exotic’, ‘I’m not posh/exotically working class enough’, ‘It’s Amazon’s fault’, ‘I’m too ordinary,’ ‘I don’t write middlebrow reading group tat’, ‘I was born with the wrong genitals’, ‘I’m too northern’, ‘I’m not famous/a columnist’, ‘I’m not published because I’m not an alien lizard and everyone who runs the world is an alien lizard’.

7. Ignore the title of this article. Stop thinking about ‘how’ to get published, and start trying to be objective about ‘why’ your book should be.

8. Be persistent and determined and practical. I got 17 rejection letters for my first novel. I used to put them in to two categories -‘contains useful information’ and ‘contains paper that is flammable’.

9. Don’t take it personally. Okay, I admit this one is bullshit. If you have written something you care about, if you have put yourself in it, then having people reject or criticise it is personal.

10. Be realistic about what you are aiming for. Being published is great, but it is no wardrobe to Narnia. Your brain chemistry will not be altered for ever. You will still have to work exactly as hard on your next book too (for every new author, an old one falls off the other end of the conveyor belt). Writers are generally not rich. Except the rich ones. But they are all in therapy. And rejection letters don’t disappear, they just evolve into bad reviews. Oh, and remember, if you want a long-term career, with a predictable income, become a publisher. Actually, even better, invent Grand Theft Auto. And only write because you love it, because you have to do it even when it hurts, because you have a story inside you that you would genuinely want to read if it was written by you.

11. Good luck. You could always do with some of that.