Gold7:

Golden Rule No. 7

Write about what you know

You will find writing a book comes much easier if you lay the foundation with a subject with which you are familiar. You are giving yourself an unnecessary mountain to climb if you are, for instance, writing a novel in which the main character is a doctor when you have no medical knowledge.

Consider a profession and/or a subject about which you have sound knowledge and paint your characters into this background. It can save you hours in research. If you choose to write about an area in which you have limited experience you need to prove yourself a master researcher (see Golden Rule No 10).

Or, if you have a deep pocket, you may want to hire a researcher. Irving Wallace, for instance, commissioned a Swede to give him a full word picture of the Stockholm hotel that he featured in his powerful novel about the Nobel Prize awards ceremony, The Prize. That's a perfectionist at work.

Back in the 1960s I worked in the same Daily/Sunday Express office as a retired jump jockey called Dick Francis. Dick was a racing columnist for the Sunday Express and, encouraged by his wife, he started writing thrillers based around characters he had met and situations he had experienced during his distinguished racing career. Thirty-plus years on Dick is one of the most popular thriller writers in the world, but he has rarely left the world of racing that he knows inside out and back to front.

His books ooze authority to go with the clever plots and powerful characters. I tried to help turning soccer master Jimmy Greaves into the Dick Francis of football novelists. Two successful novels (The Boss and The Second Half) mixed a football background with Jimmy's nightmare experiences as an alcoholic. Two others, starring an allegedly fictitious character called Jackie Groves, The Final and The Ball Game, made us money but were quite rightly ripped to shreds by the critics for being stereotyped and commercial.

The Boss and The Second Half were both written in the third-person, and The Final and The Ball Game in the first person. The reader could not separate the real Jimmy from the fictional Jackie Groves in the first-person books and we stretched their credulity to breaking point.

We were much more comfortable writing in the third-person, and the football and alcoholic backgrounds were one hundred per cent accurate. While it is important to know your subject, be careful not to cram in too many facts to show off your knowledge. Be authoritative but never ever boring.

Many authors like to write to an in-depth outline, having worked out in advance the plot and the processional order of events. I am from the school that prefers a loose story line, and the freedom to go where the imagination takes you as you compose at the keyboard (or on the writing pad).

It was word master Somerset Maugham who said: "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are."

There are as many different ways of approaching the writing of a book as there are of finding your way out of a maze. The only thing that all authors, the good, the bad and the average, have in common is that they have the discipline and the drive necessary to get their words down on paper (or screen). So don't just sit there. Get writing, but not before you have considered buying me a meal in return for picking my brains.

Golden Rule No 8, coming up next, tells you why you must write and not talk.

Golden rule No 7 is to write about what you know, particularly if it is your first book. The more comfortable you feel about your subject the easier your writing will flow.