Sadie Jones “I know I’m writing badly if I’m making it up on the page…. It’s going well if it’s a thing I am reporting. So I’ll imagine [the scene] and let it play; try to hear it and see it, and then I’ll be describing that. If I’m thinking, ‘Oh, that’s quite a nice sentence’, then I know it won’t do.”
[in an interview with ‘The Bookseller’ magazine on January 11, 2019]

[photo: theguardian.com]
Two things in her quote above struck a chord with me. One, she doesn’t make it up on the page. She plans first. Second, it is fatal to stop and admire your own prose.
Jones’ first novel, The Outcast, won the Costa First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club and adapted for the BBC. Three more novels followed; Small Wars, The Uninvited Guests and Fallout.
See how these other authors write:-
Jill Alexander Essbaum, on listening to the sound of the words
Hanya Yanagihara, on trusting the reader
JoJo Moyes, on using the detail of real life
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
Why @ThatSadieJones doesn’t stop to admire her own sentences #amwriting https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3MU via @SandraDanby
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