By John Cairns

Writers lurk everywhere, but talented storytellers seldom appear. “Storytelling is a rare gift,” bestselling British author Jeffrey Archer recently told a crowd of several hundred people at the University of Hong Kong.

“Every audience I come across has people who’ve written books, and sometimes won’t even admit it. They hide them in drawers,” said Jeffrey. He’s touring to promote his new novel, A Prisoner of Birth (2008, Macmillan, 531 pages).

“Almost everyone believes they can write a book. You’ve heard the expression: there’s a book in everyone. Rubbish! Maybe there’s a short story in everyone. Probably something happens in every life, an incident so amazing that its entrails would give real storytellers a piece of magic.

“Authors should write about the experiences they’ve had in real life,” Jeffrey said. “Don’t write a spy story or a ghost story because it’s fashionable. Write about what you know because then readers will feel that it’s real. They’ll know when it’s not.

“What better example than Jane Austen, who wrote some of the greatest novels by a middle-class woman living in an English village. It’s genius. She used the experiences she had and turned them into gold with a God-given gift to make you turn the pages.”

Brilliant storytellers come in varied shapes and sizes. “They can be fat or thin. They can be six-feet-four or five-feet-one. They can be male or female. They can be Muslim or Jew,” Jeffrey said.

The stories differ too. Some classic novels, like The Count of Monte Cristo, exceed 1,500 pages. A great short story may fill one page. “The storytelling gift” always prevails.

“Everyone wanting to write a book will have a different style and way of doing it,” Jeffrey said. “Here’s how I do it.”

Rising daily at 5 a.m., he starts to write at 6 and works in two-hour sessions, followed by two-hour breaks. “I go to bed at 9:30 p.m. and I’m asleep by 10.”

Oddly, Jeffrey shuns keyboards for pens and paper. “My ability with anything mechanical is nearly zero,” he said. “I handwrite every word with a felt-tipped pen on lined paper.

“On my desk are six pencils, two erasers, two pencil sharpeners, a picture of my wife, an Indian-god carving, a picture of my two sons and an hour-glass that I turn over to make sure that I work right through every two-hour session. When I walk in each morning, everything’s ready. I want no excuses for not starting.”

Surprisingly, Jeffrey rarely knows the endings of novels before writing them. “If I knew how it’d end, you’d know,” he said. “Bright people who love an author can follow what he’s up to and where he’s going. I never let myself know what will happen at the end. I can work through a third of a book and know where I’m going, but after that, I haven’t got a clue. With each novel, I’m in agony all the way through – how will it end? If I have no clue, then you’ll have no clue. That’s the way I want it.”

Writing a first draft takes Jeffrey 300-400 hours over 40-50 days. “That gets the story down on paper – the beginning, middle and end,” he said. Then he enjoys a six-week break before assailing the pages again.

Each book needs many rewrites. For A Prisoner of Birth, Jeffrey did 17 drafts. “It’s a long process” and continues “until you’re only doing a comma, a word, a sentence in each chapter. Then you know you’re there.”

“I spend the most hours on the first and last pages,” Jeffrey said. “On the first page, you’ve got to catch readers by the throat and hold them. At the end, you need to have people gasping. On those pages, I can spend hours on each word, each sentence. I’ll wake up at night and change one word or a comma.”

Sales of Jeffrey’s books exceed 135 million copies. His 14 novels include: Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less; Kane and Abel; The Prodigal Daughter; First Among Equals; The Fourth Estate; and False Impression.

Sometimes the most magical sentences are short and simple. “Stretching out isn’t clever,” Jeffrey said. “More people write to me and mention one sentence than anything else I’ve written. In Kane and Abel, Kane has a friend with cancer. We know the character’s dying, but what should I do with him? Just like that it came to me, but only because I’d done 15 drafts. Just the simple sentence: ‘He died on a Thursday, 60 pages still to read of Gone With the Wind.’ ”

Jeffrey didn’t say if he rates himself among the world’s best storytellers, and his Hong Kong University audience didn’t ask. Skilled communicators deliver messages in subtle ways.


Focused on the page, Jeffrey signs a book.

ARCHIVES