The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More(69)

        ‘One last question,’ I said. ‘You keep calling him Henry Sugar. And yet you tell me that wasn’t his name. Don’t you want me to say who he really was when I do the story?’

        ‘No,’ John Winston said. ‘Max and I promised never to reveal it. Oh, it’ll probably leak out sooner or later. After all, he was from a fairly well-known English family. But I’d appreciate it if you don’t try to find out. Just call him plain Mr Henry Sugar.’

        And that is what I have done.





Lucky Break


                     How I became a writer

        A fiction writer is a person who invents stories.

        But how does one start out on a job like this? How does one become a full-time professional fiction writer?

        Charles Dickens found it easy. At the age of twenty-four, he simply sat down and wrote Pickwick Papers, which became an immediate best-seller. But Dickens was a genius, and geniuses are different from the rest of us.

        In this century (it was not always so in the last one), just about every single writer who has finally become successful in the world of fiction has started out in some other job – a schoolteacher, perhaps, or a doctor or a journalist or a lawyer. (Alice in Wonderland was written by a mathematician, and The Wind in the Willows by a civil servant.) The first attempts at writing have therefore always had to be done in spare time, usually at night.

        The reason for this is obvious. When you are adult, it is necessary to earn a living. To earn a living, you must get a job. You must if possible get a job that guarantees you so much money a week. But however much you may want to take up fiction writing as a career, it would be pointless to go along to a publisher and say, ‘I want a job as a fiction writer.’ If you did that, he would tell you to buzz off and write the book first. And even if you brought a finished book to him and he liked it well enough to publish it, he still wouldn’t give you a job. He would give you an advance of perhaps five hundred pounds, which he would get back again later by deducting it from your royalties. (A royalty, by the way, is the money that a writer gets from the publisher for each copy of his book that is sold. The average royalty a writer gets is ten per cent of the price of the book itself in the book shop.             Thus, for a book selling at four pounds, the writer would get forty pence. For a paperback selling at fifty pence, he would get five pence.)

        It is very common for a hopeful fiction writer to spend two years of his spare time writing a book which no publisher will publish. For that he gets nothing at all except a sense of frustration.

        If he is fortunate enough to have a book accepted by a publisher, the odds are that as a first novel it will in the end sell only about three thousand copies. That will earn him maybe a thousand pounds. Most novels take at least one year to write, and one thousand pounds a year is not enough to live on these days. So you can see why a budding fiction writer invariably has to start out in another job first of all. If he doesn’t, he will almost certainly starve.

        Here are some of the qualities you should possess or should try to acquire if you wish to become a fiction writer:

                     You should have a lively imagination.

            You should be able to write well. By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind. Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift, and you either have it or you don’t.

            You must have stamina. In other words, you must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week and month after month.

            You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.

            You must have strong self-discipline. You are working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to give you the sack if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off if you start slacking.