A friend’s advice to cut my tortured prose unlocked my career as a novelist | Andrew Martin

What he said was simple, but it achieved a kind of sorcery. For the first time, my dream of becoming a writer seemed possibleIn 1984, towards the end of my time at university, I drafted a letter applying for a job as an advertising copywriter. I was a history student, so I showed it to a languid friend who was reading English. He read it while lying on a sofa one sunny morning. “Well,” he said, wafting it back to me, “there’s too many words in it.”I picked it up off the floor and read the opening: “Dear sir or madam, I wonder whether, by any chance, I might prevail on you …”Andrew Martin is a writer. His latest novel, The Night in Venice, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson Continue reading...

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