Back in 2015 I asked this question of my fellow writers. I added a few more in 2019, too.

1. David Hewson
   Stay off the internet when they invent it.
2. Isabelle Grey
   If, when you hit a dead end, you make your characters more complex, then plot solutions will follow.
3. Denise Mina
   You will be expected to generate your own publicity content.
4. Fergus McNeil
   Ensure each book has a compelling hook. 2. Don’t care too much about your characters. 3. Have lots of book-blogger friends.
5. Jane Lythell
   [responding to Fergus] But you have to care about your #characters so that the reader believes in them. Agree it makes it harder to kill them off…
6. Laura Wilson
   Choose a surname with a mid-alphabet first letter.
7. Elizabeth Haynes
   It sounds inane but how about ‘you can do this’?
8. Cath Staincliffe
   Read your work aloud.
9. Jon Courtney Grimwood
   Experts are always surprisingly helpful.
10. MD Viliers
    Finish the 2nd book before your 1st is published. I wish I’d done that!
11. Rebecca Whitney
    Concentrate on the story first, then the genre.
12. Tamar Cohen
    [Agreeing with Rebecca] Yes! And if yours doesn’t lend itself to genre don’t try to squish it into one. Oh, and take more risks.
13. Jane Casey
    Seek out fellow crime writers; you can learn a lot.
14. Marnie Riches
    My gem would be learn how to wait patiently.
15. Anya Lipska
    Research is never a waste of time: it’s great material.
16. Adrian McKinty
    Don’t quit your day job
17. Vanessa O’Loughlin/Sam Blake
    Don’t let the words get in the way of the story.
18. Steve Cavanagh
    Rejection is part of the game.
19. Martin Waites/Tania Carver
    Don’t expect to become known overnight… or even after twenty years.
20. Claire McGowan
    … the importance of hook and concept, I think.
21. Frances Brody
    Don’t ask for advice till you’ve written it.
22. Neil White
    Don’t order the yacht just yet.
23. John Rickards/Sean Creegan
    If you’re going to back into a story, you’d better have a great-looking ass.<
24. Alison Joseph
    That bit about two thirds through where you think – this is rubbish. It happens with every book. And every time it passes.
25. C. L. Taylor
    Trust your gut instinct. If something about the story feels wrong it probably is.
26. David Mark
    Put some money away for Tax! It saves a difficult conversation when your debut does well. “Tax? Why? I wrote it. No! But…. that’s not fair! I’ve spent it!”
27. Mel Sherratt
    Always think the one you are writing is going to be the best book you’ve written. I learn with every new book.
28. Steven Dunne
    The quality of your writing is as important as the quality of your plot.
29. Emlyn Rees
    Read more Ira Levin and other 50s masters/mistresses.
30. William Shaw
    People throughout the publishing work mostly for love rather than money and deserve respect. Don’t take your frustrations at not being an instant best-seller out on them. It’s not all their fault. Only some of it.
31. Melanie McGrath
    Complex good, convoluted bad. Applies equally to plot and characters.
32. Susan Wilkins
    Whatever story problem you have, stop thinking, go for a walk/do housework and your subconscious mind will solve it.
33. Simon Toyne
    Turn up. That’s all you need to do – turn up and keep turning up. Everything else will eventually follow.
34. Sinéad Crowley
    Don’t tell anyone you’re writing it until it’s finished.
35. P D Viner
    Take yourself seriously. Be ambitious, plan to give up the day job and live by your imagination. Don’t self-censor or give in to the fears.
36. Jessie Keane
    That you will need the hide of a rhino, the staying power of a Fell pony, and a ton of self-belief.
37. John Lincoln (aka John Williams)
    Take time to enjoy the hell out of the new experience and don’t obsess about what happens next.
38. Roz Watkins
    Can I have two? Never underestimate the power of a cat on your keyboard, and, Don’t get obsessed with word count – thinking can be as valuable as writing.
39. June Taylor
    Write for yourself. And remember you can’t please everyone, but try not to bore anyone!
40. Ashley Dyer
    It’s not enough to write a good book, you have to be lucky, too.
41. Anna Mazzola
    Do. Not. Go. On. Goodreads.
42. Julia Crouch
    They hype you for your first book. Don’t believe any of it. 

What do you are you actually supposed to do when you’re a writer-in-residence? Apart from write, that is?

This week I’ve been lucky to be the writer-in-residence at West Dean College of Arts and Conservation in Sussex. It’s an extraordinary and beautiful place; a college of the arts run by a charitable trust, set in a rolling country estate and housed in a stately (mostly) Victorian manor house surrounded by immaculate gardens.

I was given a nice room in a lodge, just outside the immaculate wrought iron gates, and so I wrote. And did some quite good work, I think. Even better, I met students, who were all also trying to write at West Dean. In amongst all the other course, West Dean runs excellent writing courses, taught by Domenica De Rosa/Elly Griffith, Lesley Thomson, Mick Jackson and Mark Radcliffe.

But writing is strange. Most students go to West Dean because of its reputation for making things; glass, jewellery, furniture, painting, fabric… When these people work, you can see them doing it; they have materials to transform and something to show for it. They have lathes and chisels and kilns and they make stuff you can touch. I’m jealous.

We don’t much look like artists. Our raw material is intangible. We look like everyone else who sits in front of a computer for hours on end.

I realised by the Wednesday that maybe I should have asked for a desk, not in my lodge, but in the main hall, where visitors come and go. And I would have sat there, like a lemon, as an example of what writers look like.

In this grandiose hall, at the top of the marble steps, flanked on each side by the grisly heads of a lion and a lioness, hunted down and stuffed, I would have made an exhibition of myself, standing up, wandering around a bit, sitting down, getting up, wandering round a bit, getting distracted by Facebook.

I did do one thing though, that I couldn’t have done anywhere else. This grand house seemed like good place to do some research.

For writers most research is simple. You read other people’s books. Or you talk to people. It’s a privilege to be able to do that.

I also like the way artists research. I worked alongside amazing curators and artists for a short bit of my career on the RSA’s remarkable but sadly truncated Arts & Ecology project, and another project called Frame & Reference, a shared-space website which linked galleries like the Turner Contemporary, The Towner, the Jerwood and Pallant House. It was great being around real artists, who research in a very much more open-ended way, involving themselves in the world that they want to create stuff about. One of my favourite artists, Marcus Coates, who is interested in the natural world, once persuaded foresters to fasten him to the top of a tree so he could see the world as a hawk does. In trying to become close nature, his works often show how far from it we are. His piece Dawn Chorus is, I think, one of the most moving pieces of British contemporary art I’ve ever seen. As I was in this place where artists were at work, I thought I should do something equally open-ended.

I’m writing about badgers. In my book I want to write at least one chapter from the point of view of a badger. (It’s hard to explain why – in this blog, at least. I hope that will become clear in the summer of 2020, when the book I’m working on is published.) So I thought I’d try and find some badgers at West Dean.

After all, this is a prime spot for badgers. It has two of their favourite things; hillsides and woodlands. I chose Monday night for a badger watch.

The point was, the chance of spotting a badger in January in a place where you’re not really sure what their habits are is almost zero. The curious thing about badgers, is that though they’re all around us in the countryside, they’re very good at not being seen. Except, of course, when they’re dead.

I have been reading a great deal about badgers so it was good to go out at dusk and see various signs of badger life. I found setts in the hillside, as well as subsidiary setts, the ones where badges retreat to during long nights foraging. I found a long trail that snaked under a fence and down a hillside. And I found many signs of feeding, where they’d used their snouts to lift the turf and dig for worms.

One of the reasons I want to write about badgers is that they are stubborn and have a strong sense of place. Build a housing estate on top of a badger sett and you are asking for trouble. They carry on their live exactly as they have always done, churning their way through fences and gardens. We’re learning that badgers may have used the same setts and trails for hundreds of years. In an era which is all about change and stubborn resistance to change, they seem to exemplify something that I want to write about in my next book.

Darkness fell and I thought of Marcus Coates and tried to feel badger-like. They have poor eyesight, so I was at least seeing the world through their eyes. But I didn’t see any badgers even if they were there. As I expected. But I didn’t feel much like a badger, either.

I walked back down the hillside, and then towards the grand house. But before I returned to my room, I decided to try one last place. I had noticed a well-groomed lawn to the north of the grand house which was gradually being wrecked by badgers, nosing up the grass. There were little holes everywhere, particularly in one corner. They must be driving the gardeners crazy. Badgers are a protected species. If they decide to be on your land, there is almost nothing you can do about it.

I walked slowly in the darkness towards this spot, planning to shine the light from my phone onto the lawn when I was close enough. I imagined seeing the startled creatures, eyes reflecting in the light.

I was lucky that the wind was coming from the north-west, so I could walk into it. Badgers have poor eyesight, but one of the most amazing sense of smells. It’s their main way of understanding the world around them.

Over several minutes, I crept forwards slowly, step by step, anxious to make no noise, phone at the ready.

And fell straight into an ornamental pond.

It is January. The water was cold. Any badgers that may – or may not – have been there, would have been startled off by my splashing and swearing.

I made my way back to my room soaked from the chest down. I have learned nothing. Or maybe I have; that inhabiting the dark world of a badger is not going to be easy.

On November 3 2018 I interviewed CJ Sansom at Norwich Cathedral. Chris is an old friend. We’ve known each other since before either of us had fiction published, so it was lovely to do this event together – surrounded by the city in which his seventh Shardlake novel Tombland is set.

CJ Sansom 03-11-18 Norwich Cathedral – PSE Live Stream from PSE Norwich Live Events on Vimeo.

CrimeFest is booking. People are already thinking about Theakston’s Crime. I’m putting my name down for Bloody Scotland in 2019. I’m definitely going back to Morecambe and Vice. Here is my list of things I’d say to any writer doing a panel for the first time:

1. Be interesting. Writers imagine that they are fascinating; very occasionally they are mistaken. You’re interesting if you have something interesting to say. Facts, anecdotes and jokes are good. Above all be yourself, but the interesting bit of yourself. Like books themselves, making this seem effortless can take a bit of preparation. 
2. You’re not the only person on the panel. A small number of writers see panels as a competitive sport in which the object is to do the most speaking. Even if you are extremely interesting, chances are the audience, who’ve probably come to hear the woman you’re talking over, just think you’re being a dick. 
3. With that in mind: Maybe know who your fellow panellists are. If you’ve time, read a book of theirs; at the very least take the time to find out what they’ve done. You might find you’ve got something you want to ask them yourself.
4. In fact, Don’t just say stuff, ask stuff. Turn to your fellow panellists and ask them questions. Ask the audience something. It’s nice.
5. Though nice is good, You don’t have to agree with everything. Three or four people nodding to everything each other says can be a bit dull. If you don’t agree with something that another writer – or the chair – says, speak up. A genuine discussion might actually start. You can almost feel the audience sit up a little straighter when that happens.
6. Be nice to the chair too. More often than not, they are good people who have given up their hours to read a large pile of books in order to make you look as shiny as possible. If they’re a writer themselves, why not ask them a question.  If you do it right, it won’t even sound that creepy.
7. Don’t be dispirited if no one comes. Every writer has a pocket full of stories about that. Book events are not as exciting as rock concerts or circuses. It’s really hard to persuade people to turn out. 
8. Don’t be dispirited, either, when nobody comes up to ask you to sign their book afterwards. However brilliant you are, building a readership is hard. Console yourself with the fantasy that someone shy at the back of the room has ordered the book on Amazon while you were talking. They’re going to read it and tell fifty friends it was amazing.
9. Check your flies. As I walked on stage recently to do a panel with Elly Griffiths and Isabelle Grey I noticed my flies were undone. There was no table either. 
10.  Enjoy it. The people you meet and are respectful to on panels will be your pals for life. 

On 17 April I’m launching my new book, Salt Lane. It’s a joint launch with books by two other amazing writers and friends, Elly Griffiths and Lesley Thomson.

It’ll be at Waterstones Brighton, 71-74 North St, Brighton BN1 1ZA, starting at 7.30 prompt. There will be wine and soft drinks.

Please come if you can. RSVP to jane@williamshaw.com