Henry Miller was the first to compose the ten commandments of writing (with typical perversity he wrote eleven) and, since then, a raft of writers has followed suit. Ten commandments might sound portentous but, as we writers are the self-appointed deities of our own written worlds, it fits us perfectly.

Read dangerous writers. There are as many writers in Ireland as there are pubs, so it’s vital to stand out. Read the edgiest books possible like de Sade’s Justine or Nabokov’s Lolita. Anne Enright may have called the latter ‘repugnant’, but the book is divinely written and devilishly true. Choose books that are proscribed, not prescribed.

Play the diversity card: age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, illness, addiction. Whatever marks you out as different, flaunt it and vaunt it. I’ve happily written articles about being a woman and being a Protestant, and in this confessional era you can never go too far – be addicted, afflicted and conflicted. Use it, but don’t let it define or confine you. As Dorothy Parker said, ‘It’s a terrible thing to say but I can’t think of good women writers. Of course, calling them women writers is their ruin; they begin to think of themselves that way.’

Don’t take yourself too seriously. A friend hilariously told me that my book of short stories was perfect for the toilet. She wasn’t actually referring to the content as faecal; it was simply that she could finish a story at one sitting. At least we were able to laugh at becoming Number Two on the Bestseller List or aiming for posteriority rather than posterity. John Banville recently said that when he’s in danger of getting carried away with his own brilliance, all he does is imagine the reader reading his work on the toilet.

Keep writing. ‘Get your worthless ass out of the piazza and back to the typewriter’, wrote Hunter S. Thompson to Anthony Burgess. It’s a worthy sentiment. There’s practical advice from Edna O’Brien too: ‘You can’t work on a book one day a week. It’s like a toddler off out into the street; you can’t find it again’. I personally find a book more like an alcoholic who disappears on a bender - or am I talking about myself - but I know exactly what she means. Anne Enright said she had to learn to be selfish to write and sacrifice cleaning the car. Cleaning the car, what about cleaning the whole house? With writing, you barely get time to wash your hair!

Don’t be jealous. Sometimes it feels like all the other Irish writers are on a superhighway to a champagne reception while you’re meandering on the scenic route with a flaccid cheese sandwich, but know you will get there. You’re probably sick to death of hearing about writers whose novels go to twenty-way auctions and convinced that in your lifetime the only plaque you’ll ever be graced with is on your teeth, but commercialism will never outlive quality. Try not to provoke jealousy either, although that’s difficult considering the amount of self-promotion required. The smaller your publisher, the louder you have to shout.

Develop your own style. George Orwell said, ‘Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane,’ but transparency isn’t true of all window panes and Hilary Mantel joked about having some ‘nice net curtains’. The windows in my pigeon-infested district are so often streaked with bird shit it might explain my predilection for scatological prose. A less than generous theatre reviewer once called me ‘a self-styled satirist’, but always remember this - being self-styled is infinitely better than having no style at all.

Immortalise your own city. Most writers do this as a means to immortalise themselves and, with a city like Belfast, it’s crying out for a few tourist-book quotes. Outsiders have been far from complimentary; Dickens called our denizens ‘a rough people’ and V. S. Pritchett labelled Belfast ‘detestable’. While Belfast people have a healthy love of ‘slagging’, Pritchett definitely took it too far. Nowadays, it’s almost a public duty for us Belfastians to write about our city and, if we do it well, we’ll attain fame and our own special burial plot just like Seamus Heaney. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, all you need is a tomb of your own.

Sound as Irish as you can. I often wish I’d hibernicised my name in order to have more success. If you’re aiming for the literary big-time, an Irish surname is a must although there’s much more flexibility with Christian names as in Anna Burns, Edna O’Brien, Sally Rooney etc. Name has a huge bearing on your career. Look at Seamus Justin Heaney and imagine if those names were transposed. Do you think Justin Heaney would have been a son of the soil writing about ‘the squelch and slap Of soggy peat’? Not one bit of it; he’d be writing about parmesan tuiles and sexual contretemps in the hallowed halls of Trinity.

Be imperfect but write the perfect sentence. Colum McCann’s advice to writers is ‘don’t be a dick’, but where’s the fun in that? Oscar Wilde was a total dick, rocking the precious aesthete stereotype all across America and was roundly satirized for it in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience and condemned as a ‘tenth-rate cad’ by Henry James, but he cleverly knew it was better to become famous to write than to write to become famous, and booked his place in history as the GWOAT with his peerless prose. Writing the perfect sentence may not have exempted him from his two-year sentence, but it still made him a genius. And, in the end, who cares about morality? As everyone knows, bad art is made by the good; good art is made by the bad.