A Moment With…Rob Sinclair

We are now into the last week of National Novel Writing Month. I can’t believe we are almost at the end already. If you’re having a month like me, it’s going to be a marathon to the end or if you’re near the end or have finished already, I applaud you. Today, we chat with author Rob Sinclair about the challenges of writing his debut novel.

For Dance with the Enemy, the biggest challenge for me was that I when I first started writing it I hadn’t really learned the craft properly. Writing was something entirely new to me. I’d never been on any courses or anything like that. I’m certainly no expert now even, with only three books under my belt, but I know I’ve learnt a lot on the way already. So Dance with the Enemy was a really steep learning curve for me – there were things I tried which didn’t work, mistakes I made in terms of my approach to writing including style, plotting, structure etc. All those have been ironed out over time but it meant that Dance with the Enemy was really quite a belaboured project by the end. I think, too, that every writer has the challenge of writer’s block. That certainly was the case for me. There’s always going to be good days and bad days and you just have to keep pushing through. And actually, one of my favourite parts of writing are those eureka moments when you’ve been sat with your brain at a complete block for hours or days over a particular plot hole or dead-end in the story. When you overthink these things you very rarely find the answer. But then it just seems to come to you when you’re doing something random; washing or cleaning or shopping or trying to sleep! Those moments are great because they nearly always come when you’re away from your computer and it gives you a real impetus to get back in front of your screen and get working again. It’s like an adrenaline rush, but it can last for hours or days and all of sudden you might have thrown out 10,000 words or so just like that, all from that one brainwave. Really, there’s a lot about writing that I get real satisfaction from – I guess that’s why I’ve stuck at it! I love the process of weaving together a plot, thinking up characters (the baddies in particular are great because you can just make them as horrible as you want), and writing out a dramatic scene that you hope is going to have people’s pulses racing.   Rob Sinclair’s novel, Dance With The Enemy is the first book in the Enemy series about agent Carl Logan. To find out more about Carl and his book, you can visit his website: http://www.robsinclairauthor.com/ Rob is also on Twitter. Click here to view Dance With The Enemy on Amazon.

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Novel Kicks

About Novel Kicks/Laura...
Novel Kicks was founded in 2009 and is run by Laura who is currently living in Hampshire, and lives with husband, Chris and her cat, Buddy. She would love to be a writer. She’s trying to write the novel she thinks so much about. She’s loved reading and writing since ‘Creative Writing’ classes in primary school. When not trying to write the novel or writing snippets of stories on anything she can get her hands on, she loves reading, dancing like a loon, and watching Project Runway and Ugly Betty (her two TV guilty pleasures.) She also has an obsession with chocolate and Jammie Dodgers.