William Boyd is one of the best novelist, with 17 novels, a James Bond reboot, short stories and multiple screenplays under his writerly belt, he is no doubt a force to reckon with.
However, at a Guardian Live event for his latest book 'Sweet Caress', Boyd gives an insight on what it takes to become a great novelist.
While being a successful novelist “is not something you can buy or learn,” he said, and comes from “a combination of a gift and application, talent and luck” there are four questions you need to ask yourself before you set out on a career as a writer.
1. Can you write?
So far, so obvious. “You have to be able to write well,” Boyd said. “Not stylishly. You have to be able to express your thoughts in a manner other people can understand.
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2. Can you Plan?
How does one plot a whole life full of seemingly random moments? Organisation is key. “When you’re constructing a life you have to use a lot of artifice to make it seem artless, a lot of organisation to make it seem random – because life is random,” said Boyd.
3. Do you have great imagination?
Boyd believes this attribute is a gift that cannot be learnt. “You either have that or you don’t,” he said. “Now, most people can imagine what it is like to be burnt alive, for example, but do you have an imagination that works in subtle ways?” If you can imagine the mundane and take pleasure in everyday life, you may be suited to novel writing, he says.
“You should think: ‘Eight-hour delay in an airport? Fantastic!’ I can have three stories out of that. If you don’t take pleasure out of that texture and detail in your every day life, you can’t write novels.”
“I have never killed anyone, you’ll be glad to know, but I have in my novels,” Boyd said. “You have to be able to imagine situations you will never experience. Part of the process of writing is to imagine it and put it on the page, whether that is killing someone, being told you are sterile, or having sex with an obnoxious French journalist. You have to imagine what it is like and somehow make it real.”
4. Do you have stamina?
“There are rare examples of authors nailing it on novel one, but a whole creative career is a long haul. It takes so long to write a novel, so if you don’t have the stamina, don’t do it,” Boyd said. “I know a lot of poets who think about becoming novelists, but then say: ‘But I can write a poem in an afternoon.’ You can’t do that with novels.”
For Boyd, the whole process takes about three years – two years of which are taken up researching, reading and planning, filling notebooks and building a structure. While doing this, Boyd holds a Q&A with himself to clarify issues of character or plot.
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“In Sweet Caress, my main character is a woman photographer: that is my starting point. But the whole book is a 100,000 questions: what is her name, how tall is she, what colour are her eyes? And all of the questions begin to shape how she deals with people, situations and what makes up her life.” This process takes twice as long as it takes him to write and he only begins to write once he knows the end.”