It isn’t often that I feel I’m in a position to give advice to the aspiring authors of the world. It isn’t often that I feel I’m in a position to dispense advice to anyone, come to that.

This time, however, I have to admit that I’m not all that badly placed for the dispensing of advice to others. You see, I’m having to remind myself of something quite a lot at the moment and the thought has occurred to me that I could do worse than to tell some other people that need reminding of the same thing from time to time.

So here it is:

No matter what you might think, regardless of what your family, friends, or worst of all that little voice that speaks to you in the space between closing your eyes and falling asleep, say, you are a better writer than you give yourself credit for.

Go to the nearest bookshelf. Go now before any usefulness that this message may have wears off. Pull down a book. Not a book written by one of the authors that you really, really admire and envy, just a book by one of the ones that you quite enjoy but can take or leave if you’re not in the mood.

Now open it. Any page; it doesn’t matter. Read a few lines. Get a taste for the narrative, the dialogue.

Now re-read it. Put your writer’s glasses on (or, if you’re like me, screw up one eye and put your writer’s monocle in).

See how the text doesn’t always flow quite right? Notice how the dialogue always seems to be trying to tell you too much, as though the author has take "show, don’t tell" too far and is putting what should really be in the narrative in speech marks instead?

What about the narrative itself? Is it sparse and dry, a series of he did, she did, exit stage left instructions? Maybe its the opposite: full of unnecessary and long-winded verbiage that just serves to obfuscate the true purpose of the text, for example showing us someone making a cup of coffee.

My point is this: You can do better than this.

It might not always come with the first draft, and sometimes not even with the second or third. Neil Gaiman, wise and knowledgeable as he is, once compared writing to making a pot: sometimes you get a pot, sometimes you get something that only a grandmother could love.

So the next time you sit down to write, whatever it is that comes out of your pen or keyboard, remind yourself that you are good enough to be doing this. If you need to, take down that book, or another, and remind yourself just how much better than that you can do.

The aim of course is to one day take down one of the works of genius and say "I’m this good," or maybe even "I’m better than this."

So endeth the lesson. G’night all.