Nine follies to avoid when writing your first novel

With half of every bookstore customer polled bent on writing a book, here's how to beat the competition to your first book deal

Writer sitting at laptop

Feeling the pinch? Been kicked off your perch and into the gutter? Why not salvage your sad finances by writing a best-selling novel. One out of two people polled on leaving bookshops are reported to either be writing a book, to have written a book or to be planning to write one in the future. If you decide to have a go, beware the following follies.

1. The folly of the unattractive narrator The reader has to like your narrator's voice (not the narrator himself but his voice; they are connected but different) otherwise you don't care what happens. A novel is all about caring what happens. True, Jorge Luis Borges, in his collection of short stories, Labyrinths, does manage an unrepentant Nazi concentration camp boss as the narrator of Deutsches Requiem - but that only lasted four pages. Four pages of flagrant fascistic foulness is all a normal person can stand. Be likeable, be fascinating, be evil if you like - but don't be deeply unattractive.

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is the author of Angry White Pyjamas, a book about the year he spent training in martial arts in Japan, for which he won the Somerset Maugham award and the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year. He has also written about his three-year canoeing expedition across Canada, and a trip to find the world's largest snake in Indonesia. He has published several collections of poetry, including one with Doris Lessing. His new novel, Dr Ragab's Universal Language, is set in the seamy world of 1920s Cairo. More of his writing is at roberttwigger.com