I recently came across the image below, detailing
things that writers hate hearing
people say to them. It reminded me of some other things that I’ve known people
say to writers – things like “Hurry up writing!”, which naturally goes
hand-in-hand with point three, and “Can I read your book?” as if it isn’t a
very personal thing that I haven’t even shown to my closest friends and family
yet (I wrote a full blog post about that a while ago). 
It occurred to me that the reason people say things like this is because they have misconceptions about what writing a book actually involves. So rather than just reminding people that writers find being told these things incredibly annoying, I thought I’d write a bit about what novel writers actually do. Hopefully this should help people understand that writing a book is ridiculously time-consuming and difficult, and even more so to do it well. Then you can go forth into the world safe in the knowledge that you’re not going to offend your writer friends, and can actively support them!
