Creating a masterpiece

Looking for something to do during your coronavirus confinement? Why not try writing a book, says author and Somerset Life contributor Ewen MacDonald

- Ewen MacDonald

‘I ’d like to write a book’. As a writer, it’s a sentence I hear fairly often when revealing my job, usually with the added caveat: ‘if I ever get the time’. Well its beginning to look like for many of us, time is all we have, so why not make a start?

The current lockdown is expected to increase our reading time: before it closed Waterstone’s booksellers were reporting a 17 per cent increase in sales. And with the popularity of ebooks, it has never been so easy to curl up with a book. And this means a rise in demand for books - and for writers.

‘American writer Elmore Leonard once famously said never begin a book with the weather, but anyone who has ever read George Orwell’s 1984 will know it’s all in the skill of the writer’