When I was working in my old job of engineering and project management, continuous improvement was the mantra of quality management. In my new “job” of writing the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures, continuous improvement remains my goal. I posted recently about the ballpoint pen, which is a good example of Lazlo Biro improving on the invention of John J Loud. I doubt that Alexander Graham Bell could have imagined today’s smartphone. Think how many patents must have contributed to that.
I was watching a quiz show yesterday, I think it was Richard Osman’s House of Games, and The Grapes of Wrath came up. It was the third book in the Dustbowl Trilogy by John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men is the second book, but who has read the first book, In Dubious Battle? There’s a story of continuous improvement in writing. I looked at the statistics on Amazon last night. In Dubious Battle ranked at 415,548. Of Mice and Man was considerably higher at 16,027, and The Grapes of Wrath was at 3,728. My books rank considerably better than In Dubious Battle, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath won him the Pulitzer Prize.
I attended, and presented, a lot of courses in my old job aimed at continuous improvement. I take my new job just as seriously and attended a CWA zoom session recently called “How to be Lucky as a Writer” an interview with Lucie Whitehouse. Some of the gems I wrote down were:
- Artistic success comes to those who stay on the bus.
- Writing is a craft, and the more you write the better you’ll get
- Put yourself in the company of other writers. The joy of writing is the people you meet.
- Be a friend of your local bookshop. Don’t go in for the first time and say “I’m a local writer, love me!”
She also quoted Hilary Mantel as saying that there are two types of writing success: business success, and being satisfied with what you write. I think my writing is continuously improving. I’m not sure that I’m completely satisfied, but I enjoy it immensely. How else do you get to meet fascinating people like Galileo, Queen Elizabeth I, Cardinal Richelieu, or your 10th great-grandfather’s elder brother, Sir Anthony Standen?