New Year's Resolutions and Stephen King

So here it is, January 4^th, time to start putting my New Year’s Resolutions into practice. Like many people, I have eaten and drunk far too much over the Christmas period, so it’s going to be a dry January. I will cut out all cakes and biscuits, chocolate etc until my profile in the bathroom mirror of a morning no longer disgusts me.

2015 was a horrible year, probably the worst of my life. My mother died in early February and my brother was an arse during her last weeks and thereafter, as the sole executor. Two of my kids ended up in hospital for prolonged stays, which involved travelling the length of the country and spending a small fortune on train and cab fares, but I worked my way through a stack of postcards and wrote them uplifting anecdotes through bleary eyes. (One will be home soon, the other remains a difficult question mark.)

As far as my other writing is concerned, much was promised by several agents, but then either silence descended and emails remained unanswered or an assistant was deputised to say that X absolutely loved the rest of the manuscript, which was so clever and powerfully written, but in the end it didn’t quite fit with their list.

My resolution this year- apart from the no-longer-disgusting- myself part- is to find an agent and a publisher. To this end I have begun to read the much recommended Stephen King book `On Writing- A memoir of the Craft’. It's brilliant.

The choicest nuggets so far:

·       `We (his rock and roll band of fellow writers) never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.

·       He recommends `The Elements of Style’ by William Strunk Jr and E.B. White, particularly rule 17: `Omit needless words.’

·       `In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.’

·       I was pleased to note that I am akin to what King refers to as a `fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.’ My mum didn’t get a telly till I was 11.

·       Finally, he says (again) that `good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.’

I’ve had an idea for a new thriller which I shall begin writing in the spring. It arrived as an image: a woman sitting in a long corridor, watching another woman coming slowly towards her, as she mops the stone floor. The woman is in pain, puts a hand to her stomach and realises she is bleeding...