Part Two on Stephen King and the Writing Programme

The programme King advocates is 4 to 6 hours a day of reading and writing. Apparently, Anthony Trollope had a day job as a clerk in the Post Office (and our red mail boxes were his invention). He wrote for two and a half hours every morning before work.  If he was in mid-sentence at the end of the allotted period, he would leave the sentence unfinished until the next morning. I'm not sure I could ever reach such heights/depths of rigidity, but I suppose the principle is to create a routine and stick to it.

King himself writes every morning and admits that for him not working is `the real work'.  `When I'm writing, it's all the playground.'  I'm really looking forward to starting to play- the past few years certainly feel like there was too much drudgery and a marked absence of fun. He believes that the first draft of a book should take no more than 3 months to write. He likes to manage 2,000 words a day, but allows that beginners can start with only 1,000 a day and take off one day a week- but no more or you lose momentum.

It's important to shut the door, wherever you are writing and avoid all distractions- phones, the internet etc. He writes to hard-rock, but personally, I need absolute silence and can get easily distracted, even by a loudly ticking clock. No problem locking away my phone, however. It rarely seems to bring good news.

In terms of genre King says you should begin by writing what you love to read, which makes perfect sense. I've always distrusted people who feel they could write a Mills and Boon novel cynically, to make money. People often tell you to write what you know, but his advice is sounder: `Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex and work.'

He states that novels consist of 3 parts: `narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.'

It's here that he has a perhaps radical point to make, that stories `pretty much make themselves'. He feels that plot is `the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice.' He goes on to say, `I want to put a group of characters in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free.' He's not just the novel's creator, but its first reader. When he writes down the first few pages of an idea, a situation, he describes it as having `located the fossil; the rest, I knew, would consist of careful excavation.'

This chimes with my (somewhat vague) memory of Michelangelo's approach to creating a sculpture- that the sculpture was already imprisoned within the block of marble and it was the sculptor's job to carefully `reveal' it , chiselling away with his tools.

`A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot, which is fine with me. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a `What-if question.'

So here's one I've got: what if I give it my all and fail?