Rose Tremain: Life should be embraced like a lover.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

Rose Tremain

stuff writing firsts

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Rose Tremain

understanding writing world

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

Rose Tremain

data dream writing

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Rose Tremain

planning stage book

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

Rose Tremain

dream writing two

Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

Rose Tremain

preference criticism firsts

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free.

Rose Tremain

unexpected way moving

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

Rose Tremain

details writing people

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Rose Tremain

dream character believe

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

Rose Tremain

pages may character

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock.

Rose Tremain

hammocks sleep fall

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

Rose Tremain

surroundings research real

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

Rose Tremain

difficult character way

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

Rose Tremain

mad unique thinking

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

Rose Tremain

journey writing moving

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

Rose Tremain

ungrateful imagination mind

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Rose Tremain

rewriting existentialism panic

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

Rose Tremain

affair pieces kind

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

Rose Tremain

territory research thinking

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

Rose Tremain

writing book ideas