Following his graduation, Gary forged a career in Hollywood acquiring film, video and TV rights for the territory of South Korea before returning to mid-Sussex and taking up copywriting.

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

Any time that something funny happens write it down.

When you are 25, you quickly forget what it is like to be 24. The memory is very false.

Remember the five senses

What do things feel like?

What do they look like?

What do they smell like?

It lifts the prose.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Keep a diary

Otherwise you won’t remember ideas and details.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

Kurt Vonnegut on Creative Writing

First rule: Do not use semicolons.

They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

Quantity produces quality.

If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write.

Simple as that.

He also wrote a book about writing.

An analogy drawn by a simile

• The structure of an atom is like a solar system. The nucleus is the sun and electrons are the planets revolving around their sun.

The same analogy now drawn by a metaphor

• An atom is a solar system. Nucleus is the sun, with its electron planets revolving around it.

Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.