"Keep the writers you admire at the edge of your vision"

David Mitchell, author of the stunning Cloud Atlas, discusses writing, reveals that he is currently at work on "a long Japanese-Dutch historical novel set in the Napoleonic Era." Can't wait!

A maximum of one killer metaphor or simile per page should be ample, and watch out for the word "seem": it debases one's own currency, somehow. Think about how the writers who you love manage to make you love them. Prose that contains too many sentences beginning with the word "I" soon gets as tedious as people who begin too many sentences with the word "I".