How to piss off friends and alienate fellow writers

As chick lit writer Claudia Pattison offers some, er, choice advice for would-be writers:

Author Claudia Pattison, author of Wow! and Fame Game, believes we all have potential. And she should know. Claudia wrote Wow! – a satire on the world of celebrity journalism – in eight months, was taken on by the second agent she met and started a manic bidding war between rival publishers for her very first book.

It’s a sign of her potential that the winners, Pan Macmillan, offered a six-figure sum for a two-book deal – the average a debut author can usually expect is between £5,000 and £10,000.

‘I do think everybody has a book in them, I really believe that,’ says Claudia, who describes her genre as ‘chick lit’. ‘I think the hardest thing is starting. Everybody’s certainly got enough experience. You can have the most humdrum job in the world, but if you’ve got family or you’ve ever been in love or worked in an office, you’ve got enough experience to write a book. You don’t have to have a mad life or incredible experiences. You just need to be able to make different scenarios interesting.’

And writing doesn’t have to be a lifelong dream. A writer on OK! for four years, Claudia never had a burning ambition to pen a novel. However, she’d always fancied the lifestyle that went with it. She says: ‘I had this vision of me getting up at 9am, wafting around in my pyjamas until midday then taking to the chaise-long to write a few hundred words or so.’

To be fair, the advice Ms. Pattison offers isn’t much different than the party lines espoused here–work hard, research your market, etc.etc–but we’re not the only ones gritting our teeth and taking to the sickbed.

It’s also interesting to note that the aforementioned two book deal has come and gone and there’s been nothing new from Pattison since 2002. Perhaps she’ll be imparting a different sort of “advice for writers” in the near-future…