David Lodge, CBE, FRSL is an award-winning novelist, playwright and screenwriter, and the author of many works of literary criticism. A graduate and Honorary Fellow of University College London, he is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. David’s first published novel was The Picturegoers (McGibbon & Kee 1960) and subsequent novels include Out of the Shelter (Macmillan 1970), his trilogy of campus novels, Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), Therapy (1995), Thinks... (2001) and Author, Author: A Novel (2004), all published by Secker & Warburg. How Far Can You Go? won the Whitbread Book of the Year 1980 and Small World and Nice Work were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. An acclaimed screenwriter, David has adapted his own and other writers’ novels for television. His adaptation of Nice Work as a four-part BBC serial won the Royal Television Society Award for Best Drama serial and he was awarded a Silver Nymph for his screenplay at the Monte Carlo International Television Festival in 1990. His other adaptations include a six-part BBC serial of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, first screened in 1993. David’s stage plays include The Writing Game and Home Truths. His latest novels are Deaf Sentence (Harvill Secker 2008), based on his own experience of deafness and A Man of Parts (H.G. Wells) (2011). Quite a Good Time To Be Born: A Memoir 1935–75 was published in 2015.
I am 82 years old at the time of writing this. I was about 16 when I conceived the ambition to be a writer, and 25 when my first novel was published in 1960. It was a very different world for aspiring writers from the one that they inhabit now. There were no personal computers with word-processing software that makes revision physically effortless; there was no internet, no Amazon for self-publishing and no Google for looking up things without moving from your desk; there were no creative writing courses in universities, very few literary prizes, and not very many literary agents. I did not think of acquiring an agent until after I had published my second novel. As I lived in London, I submitted the typescript of my first novel to publishers by hand to save the cost of postage, and the third one I tried accepted it. I got their addresses from the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.
The WAYB is just about the only thing that is common to that world and the world of the writer today. Unlike many once-respected reference books which have succumbed to competition from the internet, the WAYB remains an indispensable companion for anyone seriously committed to the profession of author, whether full-time or part-time; and as always it is particularly valued by those who are setting out hopefully on that vocational path. The current edition is twice as thick as the first one I bought in the early 1950s. There are far more publishers, agencies and media in existence than there were then; and more ways in which a writer’s words can be communicated to readers, many of which exploit the enormous reach and flexibility of the internet. The modern WAYB not only lists the institutions, organizations, companies, etc that operate between writers and the public; it gives practical advice on how to approach them and present work in an appropriate form.
But while there are far more opportunities for writers today than there were when I wrote my first novel, there are also many more people keen to take advantage of them. The struggle to succeed in any particular field, be it prose fiction or non-fiction or poetry or drama or any other form, is intense – much more so, I think, than it was when I started out. The digitalisation of information has made the production and circulation of writing easier and cheaper than ever before, but has also made it more competitive and less remunerative for most authors.
A writer must love the kind of writing that they pursue – and that can only come from immersion in the work of other writers, the great and the good of the past and present – in order to persist in the perennial task of finding something original and interesting to say, often in the face of rejection and indifference. Fortunately there are enough examples of writers who have achieved that to give every aspiring writer hope.
When I am asked for advice on how to write well I say, ‘Try to read your own work as if you didn’t write it – as if you are a reader coming to it for the first time.’ Sometimes it helps to read it aloud. It always helps to put it aside for a while and come back to it with a fresh eye and an alert inner ear. Then you notice the clichés, ambiguities, intrusive sound patterns, unmotivated repetitions of words, and similar flaws that will irritate your reader – sometimes only subliminally, but they disturb the illusion you are creating, or the continuity of a story you are telling, or of an argument you are presenting.
Basically, you must love your medium, language, and specifically the English language, some variety of which is the first or adopted language of most users of this book. Modern English is incomparable in the range of its vocabulary and the flexibility of its syntax. Historically it evolved from a fusion of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French and other Romance languages, and incorporated words derived from many other languages. This mix created many synonyms, or near synonyms, which have different tonal effects. The grammar of English also allows for a great variety of rhythm, in prose as well as verse, and a wide range of choice between rhetorical elaboration and colloquial simplicity. With a small adjustment, the same word can often act as a noun, a verb, an adjective or adverb, without the addition of other words. It is impossible to exaggerate what an expressive advantage this protean medium is to a writer. And if you are successful in getting your work published, you have a potential global audience whose first or second language is English.
David Lodge