How to pounce on inspiration when it strikes.

If there’s one thing writers like writing about, it’s writing. It’s a topic that has attracted the attention of talents as diverse as Mr Ernest Hemingway and Mr Ezra Pound, Ms Zadie Smith and Ms Susan Sontag. It’s the subject of a long-running column in The New York Times (“Writers On Writing”), in which illustrious names including Mr David Mamet, Ms Joyce Carol Oates, Mr Kurt Vonnegut and Mr Saul Bellow have generously held forth. In fact, the philosophy and practice of writing have occupied some writers so much that they’ve published whole books on the topic, from Ms Ursula Le Guin’s Steering The Craft (1998) to Mr Stephen King’s On Writing (1999).

This month, a new addition to this sub-genre comes in the form of Letters To A Young Writer, from multi-award-winning Irish author Mr Colum McCann. Taking its title (and epistolary form) from Mr Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet (a series of letters Mr Rilke sent to a lesser poet, collected and published in 1929), Mr McCann’s book is a series of inspiring micro-essays on the craft of fiction writing, covering everything from creating characters (which, he says, “is like meeting someone you want to fall in love with”) and drafting plots to, ultimately, dealing with success, if it ever comes. (There’s an entire chapter called “Don’t be a dick”.)

Careening along at a refreshingly breakneck pace, the book reflects not only Mr McCann’s own incredible way with words, but his experience as a teacher at Hunter College, New York, where he oversees the MFA course in creative writing. At a slim 150-odd pages, it’s a quick read, but an inspiring one. It contains a wealth of motivational advice that will be music to the ears of aspiring writers, but also relevant to anyone in the throes of a herculean creative task. As an example of what we mean, scroll down to read a short excerpt from the book, in which Mr McCann discusses the nature of ideas – specifically where they come from and how to pounce upon them when the moment is right.

Letters To A Young Writer by Mr Colum McCann (Bloomsbury) is out now. Get it here

“It’s ridiculed as the most inane question, but still everyone asks it: where do they come from, these ideas of yours? Guess what? Much of the time a writer doesn’t actually know. They’re just there. They have arrived unbidden. You hit on something that grabs the muscle of your imagination and begins to tighten down upon you until you feel a cramp. This cramp is called obsession. This is what writers do: we write toward our obsessions. You will not be able to let it go until you find words to confront it. It is the only way you will free yourself.

“The trick is that you have to be open to the world. You have to be listening. And you have to be watching. You have to be alive to inspiration. The general idea may come from the newspaper, it may come from a line overhead on the subway, it may be the story that was sitting in the family attic. It could have come from a photograph, or another book, or it might have sideswiped you for no good reason that you can yet discern. It might even be the general desire to confront a larger issue – the rape of the environment, the root causes of jetliners flown into buildings, the endlessly awful election newsreels unfolding in front of our eyes. No matter. No one story towers over any other. All you know is that it has to be made new to the world and you must begin to investigate it.

“Careful, though. Ideas on their own may be fine, and they may make good politics, but they will not necessarily make good literature. You must find the human music first. The thing that outstrips the general idea. The quark of the theory. The grace note within.

“You begin with a small detail and you work outward toward your obsession. You are not here to represent cultures or grand philosophies. You don’t speak for people but with people. You are here to rip open the accepted world and create it new. Often a writer will not know the true reason for writing until long after the work is finished. It is when she gives it to others that its purpose becomes apparent.

“To not know exactly where your story is going is a good thing. It may drive you mad for a little while, but there are worse things than madness: try silence, for instance.”