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To aspiring writers, Val would say the following:

Practise writing – do it! So many people put off starting until they’ve got such-and-such done, until they’ve got such-and-such a window of opportunity. But I think you should just write now – if it’s want you want to do, you should be doing it.

The best thing you can do to hone your skills is to read. It’s much nicer in life to have other people make the mistakes for you and you learn a lot more from reading other people’s mistakes and figuring out why a book doesn’t work, than you do from reading a book where everything does work perfectly. So read and learn from other people’s mistakes.

Carve out a space of time for your writing. It’s not good enough to say you’ll snatch 20 minutes here and there. That’s not commitment. And if you’re not prepared to commit to yourself then why should anybody else, like an editor or an agent, commit to you? And when you’re carving out that slot, make it manageable – set the time aside, make it realistic time and stick to it.

Read your work out loud. When you read a sentence out loud it’s amazingly different from looking at it on the page. When you read it out, you hear all the stumbles, all the clunks, all the unfortunate coincidences of syllables that don’t quite work when you put them together. And it allows you to feel the rhythm of your writing, and to hear the music of your writing.ÌýÌý