What Kind of Writer is Dave?

Dave has sent me the opening couple of chapters of The Bromley Boys for some early comments. They’re an advance on the material I bought the book on, though I do have some thoughts (of course) which I’ll post up here. I always find it interesting how authors respond to initial comments: they tend to fall into two categories in my experience – the ones who want to tinker with the opening chapters until they are perfect, and the ones who want to finish a complete first draft before even thinking about rewriting. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches: the danger with the former is that you spend so long fine-tuning, you never get the whole thing finished; the danger with the latter is that if you start with bad habits, they can run throughout the book and take longer to unpick. In this case, my advice to Dave here would be to carry on – the writing is in more than good enough nick here to do that – though if he feels he’d rather take stock, I’d more than understand.