How wise is it to follow unsolicited professional advice? I’ve done it once or twice. My mother said it would be harrowing for me to go to stage school, and she was probably right. I hoped it would be wall-to-wall silver top hats and bursting into song in the lunch queue, a pair of lilac jazz pumps slung casually over my shoulder at all times. She thought it would be endless castings for commercials, brutal honesty, constant diets. I saw Ethel Merman’s pneumatic cheer luring me like a siren. She saw shipwrecks. And rehab...

Sitting in a rented holiday villa in the hills south of Lisbon, I happened upon a slim volume written for the benefit of novelists keen to take their fiction to the “next level” – a specialist tome, you’ll agree. The author of the book was quite severe. You may believe your career is coasting along nicely, with nice reviews and good coverage in what they call the mid-list, but be warned, she wrote. This is a numbers game. If you don’t deliver in this most basic way, some day soon it will be off with your head. Sorry guys!

It was a badly timed meeting between this book and me, for I had just begun to feel slightly holidayish, a sensation that often eludes me for the whole summer no matter what I try. I knew I had achieved this high benchmark of vacation success, for sure, because as we had sat down to eat at noon I heard myself singing, to the tune of a famous Christmas song, “It’s beginning to look a lot like lunchtime!” How delighted the rest of my party became. There were practically tears of relief in their eyes.

So I cursed the arrival of the novelists’ self-help manual. Of all the bookshelves in all the holiday rentals in all the world ... I don’t think there could have been a single other work guaranteed to make me less relaxed, unless it was one that proved beyond doubt the lethal properties of soya milk, or whistling, or hot baths. (I wouldn’t be seen dead drinking soya milk, but it is a favourite of those I love.)

While destroying my career in its very introduction, the book went on to offer a way out. Indeed, it virtually promised that if I did a great many things, most of which I’d rather be eaten by a shark than countenance, I might just pull through. I took a deep breath. In the background other members of the party were behaving in a sensible fashion, laughing and splashing, whacking shuttlecocks that the baby called babbing-cockers, or picking green figs off a wise-looking tree into a basket.

I read on. When it comes to your characters, the author advised, you need to be almost sadistic. Put them through Hell. Make things bad, then make it worse, then worse again. Build the idea of failure into any outcome. Invest every page with tension.

I sniffed. Just reading the list I felt rather like a character in a book written by this chap. What will you do to me next? I quaked, my holiday mood shot to pieces. Murder all my relatives?

. . .

I have always felt madly loyal to the characters I’ve created. I can put them through so much and no more. I couldn’t, for example, kill a child in fiction any more than I could in real life, I think. For me, it would be a cheap trick, a sort of insult to any child that had been killed, or any parent who had lost one.

In fact, it means a great deal to me, daft as it may sound, that I leave the characters I create in a stronger position than the one in which I find them. Perhaps this is because my experience of life has been that things, on the whole, always improve. As a child I knew myself unequal to the dilemmas and complexities of adult life, and so I feared them terribly. But I made a mistake in this. I thought I would be addressing adult difficulties with a child’s powers and resources; I did not realise I would be more resilient by the time I broached the adult world.

A later chapter suggested I make my characters behave as outrageously as possible at all times. Don’t just be alive, be larger than life. Real life is full of esprit d’escalier, unfulfilled desires, lost opportunities, that’s why it is so lacklustre and dull. In your novels you have the chance to make up for it all.

I chewed on my lip for a while. If you genuinely think real life is dull, surely you have no business writing novels in the first place, I reprimanded my new guru. Shame on you!

Finally the author informed me that readers respond best to characters who exhibit a capacity for forgiveness and to those who are altruistic. I tried to imagine the search methods employed in this research. I do see that people who have these traits in real life are good to know.

My peaceful afternoon ruined, there was nothing for it but to drag my nearly-finished novel out of its crumpled brown envelope and give it a thorough going-over. Expect guns and nuns. And shipwrecks.

susie.boyt@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt