Many years ago I met a man who was, I think, the strangest person I have ever encountered. I will call him Sam. Scary Sam, we called him. He even called himself that, with a chilling chuckle and a dangerous stare.

I met him at a seminar on writing. He sat quietly a few seats down from me, a bemused expression on his face. Afterwards, as I was discussing the process of writing with an acquaintance, Sam approached me. “I want to write,” he said. “How do I start?” Thus began one of the most frustrating and confusing periods of my writing career.

Sam had never written anything. More to the point, he had never read a novel, watched a movie or a play. He’d never watched a television programme, not even the news. The only things that he had ever engaged with was non-fiction, and even there his knowledge and understanding were tainted with conspiracy theories and his own peculiar brand of religion. He had, I discovered, experienced a strange and closeted childhood. He knew no fairy tales, no nursery rhymes. His world was purely black and white.

You’re probably asking yourself, as I did many times after I met him, why such a man would want to write.

“To tell the story of my life,” he said. I was later to discover that this was code for sharing his religion “with millions,” as he optimistically pronounced.

Take a moment, if you will, to imagine how useless I felt during that initial encounter. A blind man asking to learn how to paint would be nothing compared with this. How can a man with no imagination, no willingness to develop one, learn how to write? It didn’t help that Sam had been home-schooled, thus his relationship even with facts was dubious.

I had suggested that he read some short stories. Easy things. Stories that would give him an understanding of how to craft a work of words. He claimed that he couldn’t get on with stories. Stories were a fiction, and only the truth matters. I tried explaining that fiction can be as truthful as any non-fiction work. More so, in fact. Sam wasn’t having it. Stories, he told me, are just things someone made up. In other words, they were a waste of his time.

At that point, I suggested that he turn his attention to autobiographies. I reminded him that I am not a biographer, and recommended some classes on the topic that might suit him better. I wasn’t merely out of my depth, I was hovering over the Mariana Trench and sinking fast.

For a while, I heard nothing from him. Then he showed up one afternoon to show me some opening chapters he had written with some help from a ‘few’ biography teachers.

It took me a week to read those three, thin chapters. They were, what’s the word?

Bad.

Really bad.

The chapters contained little but contempt for his abusive father, for his spoiled sister, and for his weak mother. These were his descriptors; there were no scenes to clarify what he meant by these adjectives. There were no scenes, period. Indeed, ‘periods’ were infrequent, and paragraphs non existent. Chapter One read as an interminable, ghastly sentence. Chapters Two and Three were more of the same.

I tried to explain to him the importance of some action, even in an autobiography. I loaned him some books about grammar, scenes, and how to engage with readers. He seemed baffled.

“Are you saying it’s no good?” he said.

“I’m saying it’s a first draft. It will get better if you keep working on it.” He stared at me, his face blank. “It takes time to produce the sort of work that people will want to read,” I said.

He still didn’t get it.

At that point, and to my unutterable relief, he decided I could do nothing for him and he vanished into the haze that consumes all talentless hacks.

Despite everything, I still think of Sam as one of my failures. I often ask myself what I could have done differently, but I’m as confused as ever. In my wiser moments, I realise that I wasn’t the problem. It was Sam and his refusal to budge from his indoctrination. From his failings, I offer these insights:

If you approach a writer and say you want to write, don’t waste their time. Listen to what they tell you and try to take their advice.

Being a writer isn’t easy. It involves hard work and preparation. What sort of preparation? Learning the tools of the trade: grammar, spelling, the meaning of words and the subtle differences between synonyms. For instance, when to use child and when kid is better. Or whether miniscule or tiny fit the story and characters better. You don’t have to memorise a lexicon to grasp these differences, just read plenty of fiction. Think about what you’re reading; what works and what doesn’t. See the words the author uses and ask yourself if another one might have worked better. Look at how sentences are constructed, and what makes a paragraph.

In other words, do your homework.

Take constructive criticism. If you disagree with it, ask questions. If you’re still in doubt, get a second opinion, but be open to the possibility that you are wrong.

Learn from your mistakes. We all make them, and there’s no shame in it. Just pay attention and do better the next time. The biggest mistake is assuming you know better than everyone else, especially when they are very experienced and you are just a novice.

Most important of all is to develop your imagination. Read fantasy, science fiction, and books that challenge your sense of reality. Read all kinds of books, short stories, articles, essays and plays. The more widely read you are, the stronger your imagination will become.

Play with children. Watch how they engage with model trains, dolls, and other toys. Kids think nothing of a train travelling through the sky. Watch and learn.

Make up stories about people you see on the train or in the supermarket. Write down the really good ones: you may be able to insert them into a story.

Rewrite (mentally) plots of famous movies. Re-work endings. Create sequels. Imaging: Huckleberry Finn in middle age; Scarlet O’Hara married to Ashley Wilkes; Hawkeye Pierce at a medical convention twenty years after the Korean War ended. Perhaps he meets an old M*A*S*H* friend. What was that reunion like? Even great novels leave stories untold. Find them and tell them.

Writing is hard work, but imagination isn’t. Take yours out for a spin. You never know where you may end up.

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