Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Quotation(s) of the Week: Roddy Doyle

I've always advised my writing friends and students to title their works-in-progress. So I was happy to see this advice for fiction-writing:
4. Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

8. Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.

Source: Roddy Doyle, quoted in Ten Rules for Writing Fiction (which you've probably seen mentioned elsewhere online since posting last month).

Frankly, I also find this advice extremely reassuring because I have just retitled my story collection.

2 comments:

Theresa Milstein said...

I love naming my manuscripts first or by the end of chapter one. It's one of the easier aspects of writing.

Erika D. said...

Certainly one of the more pleasant!