My best writing tip by William Boyd, Jeanette Winterson, Amit Chaudhuri and more | Books | The Guardian

Ignore tips - Amit Chaudhuri

The one tip I give to students of writing is to disregard tips. These might have to do with arresting opening sentences, or they may simply concern the tools of the trade - character, setting, description, plot. The four words, chosen randomly, are vague descriptive categories once used in literary departments, where, with "tone", they've been abandoned, only to be repeatedly invoked in creative writing classes along with "craft", "sentence", and that nervous-making shibboleth, "point of view". I'm not sure what "character" means. Is it an aggregate of physical features - nose, eyes, hair - which add up to a bodily presence into which, as if it were a vessel, you pour psychological life: thoughts, memories, political views? Can you "fictionalise" a real person by adding a moustache to his face, or a stammer to his speech?