A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about book titles and who chooses them. Many thanks to everyone who contacted me via my Maisie Thomas FB page, mainly to express their surprise that authors don’t necessarily get to choose their own titles.

This is a series based around popular misconceptions about authors, their writing and the publishing industry, and this week I’m going to take as my starting point something that all writers will immediately recognise…

“Of course, you only write when you feel like it… when you get inspiration…”

Grrr! We’ve all had this said to us, including by people we would have expected to know better(!). I don’t know how many times I’ve explained that it’s my job, it’s how I earn my living, and I have to work regular hours the same as anybody else who works for a living. Imagine if plumbers, teachers or heart surgeons only worked “when they felt like it”!

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

I would like to add to this famous quote from Somerset Maugham by saying:

There are indeed three rules for writing a novel.

1. There is no single rule that suits everyone.

2. There is one rule that applies to everyone.

3. Discipline!

Everyone has to find their own discipline. Here are some suggestions:

1. Don’t stop writing today unless you know exactly how you are going to start writing tomorrow.

2. Instead of saying, “I’ll do my other tasks first, and then all the remaining time will be for writing,” say, “I’ll write first, meet my target, and then do the other things afterwards.”

3. Set targets you can stick to – and then keep to them. The first target I set myself, years ago, was 500 words a day. I soon found that this was easily achieved and I upped it to 1,000 words, which was more of a challenge but still do-able alongside my full-time job. These days, I don't have word-count targets. Instead, my target is to write a certain number of scenes each day, and the number varies according to the likely length of the scenes.

4. Get your book written. Don’t be tempted to stop and edit as you go along. Worse still, don’t go back to the beginning and start again because the current version “isn’t good enough.” Finish the whole book and then, and only then, go back and do your editing.

5. Everything you write should earn its place on the page. Don’t include anything just to show off your knowledge. For example, I once read an historical novel in which the author knew all about a certain building. How do I know he knew? Because he spent a page and a half droning through its history and architecture, that’s how. It had nothing to do with the plot.

And I’m going to repeat point 1, because this is the piece of advice that people rave about the most when I say it:

Don’t stop writing today unless you know exactly how you are going to start writing tomorrow.

Good luck! Let me know if something I've said helps you. You can get in touch with me via Twitter (@Susanna Bavin) or via my FB page (Maisie Thomas Author).