(From Writer Magazine, June 2009)
Advice from a Master
Anthony Trollope, still popular 126 years after his death, has much to say to writers about making ends meet.
5 Guidelines on Creating Good Fiction
1. Get a day job. For most of his adult life. Trollope worked full time for the post office; he wrote some of his finest novels in the morning before work, in the evening, and on trains and ships during business trips.
2. Make a schedule and stick to it. Whenever he began a novel, Trollope drew up a diary specifying weekly goals; every day he wrote number of pages written. Usually he set a goal of 40 pages a week (250 words per page)
3. Don’t write what you know. Inventing characters were “the simple result of an effort of my moral consciousness.”
4. Don’t shy away from sensationalism. Trollope considers plot the most insignificant part of the tale but he realizes it’s crucial to popular fiction. The novel reaches full potential when it shows us men and women with flesh and blood caught up in great struggles and dramatic events.
5. Live with your characters. For Trollope, characters are unquestionably the most important element in fiction. The novelist must make his readers “so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creatures in his brain should be speaking, moving, living human creatures.”