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Neal Ascherson

Neal Ascherson is an Eton scholar, born in Edinburgh. He was a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines during National Service in 42 Commando, Malaya, got a 1st in History at Cambridge University, and then worked for the Uganda National Congress in 1956/7 in Kampala. He was boursier du gouvernement Francais at the University of Aix-Marseille, and later became a celebrated foreign correspondent for The Observer, winning a "Journalist of the Year" award. Publications: The King Incorporated; Polish August; Struggles for Poland; Games with Shadows; Black Sea; Stone Voices. He lives in London and is married with one son and three daughters.

1. Study the market. You may have something you always wanted to write about. If not, look at the papers and choose a topic: a biography which will be topical not just now but in a year's time.

2. Don't rely on the internet only. Libraries are crucial -- because they let you browse and follow ideas and themes which look like digressions but turn out to be full of fascinating material.

3. Write the book YOU want to read, not the book you think others expect from you or which will please a readership you imagine. Write to please and interest yourself.

4. If you can, get to original sources -- documents, people's letters and diaries. They hold many more surprises than the books other people have written. Almost all sources, primary or secondary, are written for somebody else to read, so you have to work out what effect the writer is trying to make and on whom, and for what purpose. Everyone's dream is that trunk of forgotten papers in the attic. But there are not that many of those treasures to be found, and archives are the next best thing.

5. Start by makng a rough plan: even an A4 notebook with one page for each chapter is helpful. Get a preliminary idea of what each chapter will be about and scribble in a few notes on each page. This will help to clear your head, and give you a sense of where you are going and what your plan of work will look like. As you go on you will find some chapters seem to wither and not have much point, while others swell with notes and ideas and have to be divided into two.

6. At the same time, open an alphabetical card-index or its computer equivalent. This should be for facts, individuals, events -- with references so that you can look them up again. I also keep an index notebook for writing down books consulted, indexed by author if possible, with details of publishers, year, etc.

7. Try to write something every day, however little. Ideas get stale very fast, and it's hard to pick up the thread of a chapter you have stopped writing two weeks before.

8. Avoid "meanwhilism". If there is a strong and important sub-plot running parallel to the narrative you are telling, don't keep breaking off the main story to say "meanwhile" something else was going on. If necessary, tell the sub-plot in a separate section or chapter.

9. Avoid the danger, inherent in research, of being permanently pulled off the main subject down ever more fascinating side-tracks. As in (2), be open to unexpected temptations to digress in research. But some writers -- it's a personality thing -- get so overwhelmed by finding more and more stuff that is somehow relevant, that they get lost in a vast thicket of choices and never finish at all. You have to be ruthless and stick to your main project. You have to ask yourself regularly: "Why am I here. Where is this getting me?"

10. Be careful about "quest" books. They were very fashionable a few years back, as writers produced work in which they presented a piece of historical research as "a journey to discover myself". Yourself has to be pretty damned interesting to get away with this, without irritating the reader.

11. Publishers will try to get away with as few illustrations and maps as possible You have to be tough with them about this, and watch them like a hawk in the final stages of the book production or they will drop maps/diagrams etc without telling you.

12. These days you have to pay for your own quotations from other people's books or poems or (especially expensive) songs. A few words usually don't get charged. Copyright for a longer passage (100 words or more) can be expensive. You can also save a few hundred quid by doing your own index, but that is a special skill (most publishers have leaflets on how to do it).

13. If you write about history or politics, always get somebody else who knows the subject to read your work and check it. It's incredible what factual mistakes creep in.