Goodreads asked David Dyer:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

David Dyer My advice for aspiring writers is: have an interesting story to tell! Sounds simple, but I find it is often ignored by writers these days. Maybe it’s because of the proliferation of creative writing courses, but I seem to encounter a lot of Writing with a Capital W – that is, writerly writing. It’s as if writing is a substance, squeezed out of a machine, and the aim is to make it as High Quality as possible. I love Robert McKee’s book 'Story', and he says, ‘Literary talent is not enough. If you cannot tell a story, all those beautiful images and subtleties of dialogue that you spent months and months perfecting waste the paper they’re written on.’ He says 75% of a writer’s effort should go into designing story. And in Ian McEwan’s 'Atonement', his main character – an aspiring writer – receives a rejection letter from a literary magazine: ‘writing can become precious,’ the magazine says, ‘when there is no sense of forward movement…Simply put, you need the backbone of a story.’
Oh, and another piece of advice: read ‘Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.’ I was tempted to start my own novel with ‘It was a dark and stormy night….’ until read his first rule: NEVER start with the weather.

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