Just start. If you wait until you "have the time" or your ideas are fully crystallised, you will be waiting for ever. Get that paper or screen in front of you and begin talking to it.
Wannabe a Writer?
Write what you know. At least to begin with. If you work in advertising, it will be much easier to make your heroine do the same, than to spend six months holed up in the library researching the habits of a 15th century moth-keeper. Having said that, check your facts. There's nothing more annoying that than a novel that gets the details wrong. Google is your friend.
Write every day. Yes, you can fit it in - everyone can find ten minutes. A sentence will do. If you write 200 or 300 words a day you'll have a first draft in a year's time. But once you get going, and get absorbed and excited, you'll turn out more than that.
Read. And read some more. Nobody can write a book without first seeing how other people do it. Take a novel you've loved and admired and analyse how it was structured. Note the ups and downs, the twists and turns. A fantastic story has texture - energy and calm, humour and pathos, reflection and excitement. If it's one long high-speed car chase or screaming match, it will be exhausting to read. If every page is light on the water and an internal monologue on the changing nature of love, the reader will lose the will to live.
Try different sorts of writing. If a whole 90,000 word manuscript seems daunting, start with short stories, or write a blog. It will all help limber you up and build your writing muscle for later
Don't expect it to be perfect. Don't give up in despair because you feel you're writing drivel. It's meant to look like that! It's a first draft that has all sorts of glitches and holes, repetitions and clumsy sentences ... Just get the story down. Everything can be cured in the edit
Exercise. Writers' Bottom is an occupational hazard of sitting for long periods at the computer. (So is Writers' Stomach, Thighs and Arms.) Remember you are using up far more emotional energy, than physical. So take breaks, walk about, do foot lifts at your desk. (For more tips on how to eat lots and still only need one airline seat see 100 Ways to Fight the Flab and still have Wine and Chocolate (Accent Press))
Consider everything material. From now on all your crises, traumas, embarrassments and failures can be put to good use and written about one day. Remembering this can help.
Don't stop at yourself. Your friends can be a good source of ideas too. One of the marvellous things about being a novelist is that you can now be thoroughly nosy and call it research.
Don't have truck with Writer's Block. It doesn't exist. Only Writer's Lack of Confidence and Writer's This is Too Much Like Hard Work (or 'Writer's Can't Be Arsed' as one of my friends succinctly put it!). If you don't know what to write next, just leave yourself a note in capitals or a different colour and jump on to the next bit you DO know. You can fill the gaps in later. The important thing is to keep going. Whoever first came up with the mantra about 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration, was absolutely right. It won't always be easy but it will be worth it.
Marry someone rich! :-)
Jane Wenham-Jones Biography
Jane is the author of six novels (Raising the Roof; Perfect Alibis; One Glass is Never Enough; Prime Time, Mum in the Middle and The Big Five O, two non-fiction writing guides (Wannabe a Writer? and Wannabe a Writer We’ve Heard Of) and a humorous diet book, 100 Ways to Fight the Flab and Still Have Wine and Chocolate. As a journalist she has written for the Guardian, The Bookseller, Booktime, Sunday Express, Daily Express, The Sun, The Times, Sunday Times and numerous women’s magazines.
She is a regular contributor to Woman’s Weekly, and has a monthly column in Writing Magazine, where she is an agony aunt.
Jane also broadcasts on radio, works the after-dinner circuit, talks to writers groups and conferences, and has worked as a celebrity speaker for P&O. She has hosted the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel Awards – the annual awards for the best in Romantic Fiction – for the last nine years, and presented hundreds of events at literary and book festivals in the UK and abroad.
Further information: www.janewenham-jones.com and http://janewenhamjones.wordpress.com
MORE: Jane Wenham-Jones discusses the inspiration for her new book Mum in the Middle