It’s only a week now until Castle of Dreams is published by Allen & Unwin. I have a Norwegian publisher, Cappelen Damm, and my Norwegian editor is Jorid Mathiassen who wrote to me:
‘I am your Norwegian editor and I love your book, it’s such a wonderful story!’
Wonderful, that one day I will hold a copy of my novel translated into Norwegian.
To be a storyteller is magical. I’m often asked about the process of writing and the simplest answer I can give you is to read. When I was four years old I read picture books with text to my younger cousins and because I couldn’t understand many of the words I made them up to match the story. The art of storytelling is a long one in history. Think of Scheherazade, a legendary Arabic queen and the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights and of times past when before the written word stories were told around fires at night.
Have you heard the maxim ‘read everything’? I don’t agree. Read only what interests you and read good writers of fiction. How else will you learn to write? If you read everything you certainly won’t have time write a novel. If you read rubbish it will creep into your narrative. Join a library if you can’t afford to buy new books and study the structure of the novels you read.
Stop watching television if you don’t have time to write a novel. It’s amazing how many hours can be spent watching television each week; enough time in which to write a novel.
If you work during the day perhaps get up an hour earlier. A page a day is a novel in a year. Time to write should be a right and not a privilege.
Don’t treat writing like a hobby but rather as the job you love best in all the world.
Have a lovely day,
Elise
what elise wrote 