On Writing

The Power of Belief Why we don’t get what we want.

On Writing

I want to make money as a novelist. Someone has recently made a fortune from a series of grey novels that went global, but they were actually not very good novels. They appealed to a certain market. Writing to a formula, writing in a genre, seems to be the way to be published and popular.

I can’t do that. My creativity is mine. My book is what I want it to be, tells the story I want to tell and says what I want to say. It’s original. This means it is difficult to categorise and not attractive to publishers who want romantic fiction or the latest Vampire love story.

When I was at school I had a wonderful English teacher who encouraged us to be critical. His favourite saying was: ” The majority is always wrong.” He meant that if something was very popular it was probably not very good.

This does not always hold true. One of the best books ever written was voted the country’s most popular book around 5 years ago. However when I was at school in the 60s and I was talking about The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien most people had never heard of it. None of my school friends had read it. My English teacher had not read it. When I left school and went to college I found other people who had read and loved it and in 1973 the first Tolkien calendar was produced.

(I had one, I still have it, and several subsequent ones.)

It took a while for TLOTR to become an overnight success.

My novel, The Frankincense Statuette, has been self published. This is now so easy to do with Amazon, print to order & Kindle. It is an action adventure. It is a fantasy set in modern real places. The main protagonists are a pair of young men, friends from University days, who find themselves on a mission that they don’t quite believe in. It seems that a statue they have found is really an angelic being who has been trapped for 3000 years. They need to set her free. On their journey they discuss whether there is anything more than the material world we see, and they have experiences that prove that there is much more to life than the material. At the same time they are being followed by someone whose aim is to prevent them releasing the spirit from the statue, someone who is also much more than he seems.

Has this whetted your appetite? Pop along to Amazon.The book is available as a paperback or a Kindle download.