1. Discipline yourself to read things that aren’t ‘easy’, particularly poetry – try AE Houseman and Louis McNeice. Buy tatty old Penguin Poets from the 1960s in charity shops and gulp down metaphors. Go outside and read it out loud, shouting perhaps at some cows. You learn a lot about language from good poetry.
2. Do try a residential writing course. Choose one with tutors whose writing you really love and admire, but not those who leave you so awestruck that you don’t learn anything.
3. Your business as a writer is people. Don’t close yourself off from them, however uncomfortable they can be. Open your heart and let it bleed. We are meant to grow thick skins to deal with all the rejections, but I don’t believe any writer with a thick skin can write authentically. Fake emotion, like fake sex, in books and films is so bloody obvious and a real turn off for me.
4. DON’T whatever you do, save up and take a year ‘off’ to get that novel written. That way madness lies.
5. If you are really young, plan to develop a career in a really interesting sector – join the police, be a paramedic, a funeral director or a model. All gorgeous material for your future career as a novelist – and you will earn a living while you build up to publication.
Sail Upon The Land by Josa Young is out now.