My Best Writing Tip

As recited over the phone today from a Tesco car park

This morning, while driving from Fort William to Edinburgh (3.5-ish hours) I pulled in at a tiny Tesco in a charming little town called Callander, which has an all-year-round Christmas shop and is positively begging to feature in a Hallmark movie called Advent Callander at some point.

It’d probably be about a ruthless oil baroness, Cynthia, from Aberdeen, whose car breaks down in the town while she’s driving home to her flashy, but ultimately soulless bachelorette pad in one of the Granite city’s leafier suburbs. She’s probably just flown into Glasgow Airport from, I don’t know, Texas, or Saudi Arabia or somewhere. That’s not important.

She’d break down, and/or get snowed in a couple of days before Christmas, and would end up having to stay in a sustainable cabin owned by Mark, a damned hippie loony lefty eco-warrior type, who’d once glued himself to the M6 motorway to protest against climate change, and then shat on the Mona Lisa.

We might not go into detail on that bit.

He would also, of course, run the local bakery—a much-loved business established by his great-grandfather, after he’d returned from the war. Don’t know which war. Doesn’t matter. It’s where ol’ Mark Senior Senior Senior met his wife, and began the lifetime of frantic copulation that would eventually lead to the birth of his handsome, square-jawed great grandson, with flapping great goalkeeper hands, but surprisingly nimble fingers.

Unfortunately, the bakery is directly above a vast underground oil… what? Plantation? What is it called? Oil hole? There’s a lot of oil underneath it, anyway. Cynthia can fucking smell the stuff from a mile away—it’s why they pay her the big bucks—and a recent downturn in the bakery’s fortunes means she can swoop in and buy it at a discount, then knock the whole thing down and plunder the black gold beneath it.

Something something bakery contest.

Oh, and Mark has adorable daughter who desperately want a new Mummy for Christmas after hers died in a boating accident that Mark definitely wasn’t involved in or responsible for, so I don’t know why you even thought that.

Something something Christmas tree decorating.

Something something was that old man really Santa?!

They kiss. The end.

So, yeah. That’s Callander.

As I was saying, I stopped at the Tesco to buy a drink (Irn Bru Extra, naturally - and not Ian Bro Extra, like autocorrect just attempted to insist) and was about to drive off again when the phone rang.

It was a mobile number that I didn’t recognise. Normally, I’d send it to voicemail, but I had an appointment booked in that afternoon for someone to come and do some work, so I thought it might be them calling to update me with the time.

Instead, it was a journalist from Scottish Field Magazine, who I’d agreed to do an interview with, and then immediately forgot all about.

Anyway, the interview went fine, despite being done in a Tesco car park. At least, my end of the conversation was. It’s unlikely she was also in a Tesco car park. Though not, I suppose, impossible.

Most of the questions were ones I’ve heard before (although “Do you believe in ghosts?” came a bit out of left field.)

Near the end of the interview, I was asked what my most useful piece of advice was for writers. As it happens, I was asked this same question at the London Book Fair last week, so I was ready with it on the tip of my tongue. I thought I’d share it here, too.

My Number One Tip for Writers Everywhere Is…

Ask yourself why the hell you’re doing this.

There are loads of reasons for writing a book. You have a story you desperately need to get out of your head. You want to chronicle your fascinating life. You want to write something that will entertain your grandchildren.

Those are all very valid. But it’s just as valid to say you want to be the new Dan Brown, or JK Rowling, or James Patterson, earning millions every year.

They’re all perfectly legitimate answers, but how you would go about them is very different. The strategies required are not the same. There’s no point trying to become a global publishing phenomenon by writing a 12 page book about your grandchild using the potty. Similarly, said grandchild is likely to connect to a dense courtroom thriller, or whatever the fuck it is that James Patterson writes.

I’m probably thinking of John Grisham.

The point is, before you take your first step on your author journey, at least have an idea of which direction you’re headed in. It’ll save a lot of unnecessary wandering around and doubling back.

Also, bonus tip, always carry a pen.

By the way, if you want to get a lot more in the way of writing and self-publishing advice from me, you can check out my Bookstrapping course.

In other news, I pasted the plot of Advent Callander into ChatGPT and asked it to design the poster, and these dead-eyed monsters is what it came up with. I don’t know what Cynthia is planning to do with that glove, but it’s nice that AI can at least work out how many fingers there are on a human hand these days.

I don’t want to know what Mark has got in those jars, though.

I’m not quite sure who it is that Cynthia reminds me of. A young Joan Rivers, maybe? Let me know in the comments if you work out who she looks like.

And that’s what? Day three of Substacks done? Day four? I’m so mentally drained by the effort of it all I’ve lost count.

EDIT: What the hell are those things on the rack next to AI Joan Rivers? Christmas Scotch Eggs? Breadcrumbed bull testicles? I need to know.