Literary injury

Last week I went to a publishing party in London hosted by Bloomsbury. Star-struck and unsober, I must admit that I didn’t see any of the following: Harry Potter, JK Rowling, Hagrid, quidditch, Hermione, dragons or wands.

My knee was, however, assaulted by a designer-handbag-yielding Sophie Dahl. I resisted crumbling to the ground like Michael Owen when she said “Sorry there”. She has a book out called Playing with the Grown-Ups, which I hear is rather good.

No Jumping: a short film

William Gilroy is "The Jumper"

Things I would change

When your book sits on shelves and other people thumb away at it, it’s beyond repair. There are parts which you want to tweak; other parts which could be slashed and burnt. But without re-entering the debate on whether you can ever really finish a book, here are a few things I would change.

1) Introduce a car-chase in the Chapter 1: All great stories begin with a car-chase.
2) Give the love-interest a name like Ingrid von Luvpump
3) Guns. Give ‘em all guns.
4) Remove the single mention of the C-word: My Mum has to read this.
5) Introduce one blatantly anachronistic American to get the thing to sell in the US
6) Change the final line to: And then he woke up and realised it was all a dream.
7) Make Schiele’s father a midget with a hump and a limp and a stump
8) More smells: Yes, I read Sueskind’s Perfume and envied it
9) Slip the titles of Wham! songs in the dialogue: e.g. “But, Egon, that’s just a careless whisper.”
10) Introduce an Italian secretary and rename it The Stenographer of Sienna