9 Bits Of Writing Advice From Naomi Alderman
We’re writing about the award-winning author of The Power, Naomi Alderman. In this post, we feature 9 bits of writing advice from Naomi Alderman.
About Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman (born 23 October 1974) is an English author, game writer, and television producer. She studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist. She was mentored by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Arts Initiative.
She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017. It has since been adapted into a television series for Amazon. She also wrote the Doctor Who novel, Borrowed Time. Other works include The Lessons, The Liars’ Gospel, and her latest novel, The Future, which is a dystopian novel about a near-future exploring inequality and climate change.
She is also the co-creator of the popular fitness game and audio adventure Zombies, Run! She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.
9 Bits Of Writing Advice From Naomi Alderman
1. Trick Yourself Into Writing
‘Write a lot. Seriously, writing is like anything else, you get better the more you do it. In fact, “writing” is mostly “tricks for keeping yourself writing” and if you keep at it you’ll get better. You just will.’ (Medium)
2. Write 500 Words For Two Years
‘I’d say: unless you’re a poet, (I have no advice for poets) try to write somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words in your chosen discipline (fiction, memoir, scripts, whatever) almost every day for about two years. If at the end of that you haven’t improved at all, try something else.’ (Medium)
‘My writing process changes quite often. It’s been different for each novel. Some common elements are: I do better when I write every day, even a tiny bit; I like to leave the house to write fairly often; it’s good to have a wordcount I’m aiming for and to get it done early in the day.’ (New Writing)
3. Write Anywhere
‘I write in all sorts of places! The critical thing for me is to keep the book flowing by working on it (at least a little bit) *every day*. So if I’m travelling, I work in the hotel room. I love working in libraries, actually. ‘ (Where I Write: Naomi Alderman)
4. Watch More TV
‘Movies are like a short story; you consume one in a single sitting. TV is like a novel: there are chapters and you expect people to go away and come back, go away and comeback, and it becomes part of the fabric of your life for a few days or weeks or even months.’ (Literary Hub)
5. Think A Lot
‘If you are a novelist, your job is thinking really—because only part of it is writing; the other part of it is thinking—so you want to make sure that you’re putting new, unusual stuff in your brain, and you don’t want to be looking in the same direction as everybody else.’ (Literary Hub)
6. Do Some Research
‘I talk to people. I read. I go for visits. I imagine. The imagination is the anthropological tool of the novelist.’ (New Writing)
7. Write Before You Wake Up
‘I write as the very first thing I do in the morning. Yes, in bed, yes the laptop stored next to the bed. I wake up, I write before I let myself know I’m awake. My resistance is low. Whatever comes out comes out. I try to be done with my day’s wordcount on a novel by lunchtime.’ (PBS)
8. Be Courageous
‘The job is courage. The job can also be entertainment and there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you are writing about real things, you’ve got to be as honest as you possibly can.’ (The Guardian)
9. Manage Your Writing Life
‘One of the things [Margaret Atwood} represents, of course, is the idea that a writing hero, a brilliant novelist, thought that there was merit in my idea for this book. That was a huge thing to keep me moving and writing. We talked a lot about the book, but some of the best advice was about how to make and manage a writing life. She’s very firm about the importance of saying no to things… Margaret advised me to turn down a lot of those little things people ask you to do, so that I could focus on the major work I want to accomplish.’ (Naomi Alderman FAQs]
Source for image: Naomi Alderman Website
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