Dubai: Passion alone is not enough to become a writer and aspiring writers have to be really driven by their passion and ready to invest lots of time before they can hone the art, Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project, said at the seventh Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

The festival, which concludes on Saturday, has hosted an array of authors from around the world attending book signings and lecture sessions. This year, there have been over 130 authors participating in the festival.

Simsion revealed that he initially studied physics and only developed an interest in the literary world in his forties. According to Simsion, the turning point was when he read a book titled Unkindest Cut by Joe Queenan.

“So at the age of 50 I went back to school and studied screenwriting,” he said. “Over the five years of studying was when I wrote The Rosie Project, so it was initially a screenplay.”

Simsion was told that his screenplay would require a very high budget and was difficult to turn into a movie. He then decided to turn the screenplay into a novel.

“So I studied physics, I’m a technical guy, I come from a sort of technical background and my character in the book, Don Tillman, is quite the same, a socially awkward professor,” he said.

Simsion explained that much of his writing was done based on what he knows best, implementing the traits most familiar to him in his character.

Alexander McCall Smith, the Scottish author known for his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series set in Botswana, recalled how he too had writeen about a setting he was most familiar with after teaching law in that country.

“The main character, Mma Ramotswe, achieves the resolution for people through forgiveness, which is one of the themes in my books — kindness and forgiveness,” he said.

The author, who spends his time touring the world, speaking to readers, attending literary festivals, manages to write around four to five novels a year.

“It involves, I suppose, trying to make sense of the world,” said Smith. “A writer tries to order his or her experience and say something about the world in which we live.”

He added that, through writing, an author engages with the reader and explores the world of ideas.

“Writing provides you with an opportunity for reflection and that can remove you from the constraints of day-to-day life and there’s a certain exhilaration in creating a fictional universe,” Smith said.

Through writing, he said, an author can create a world that one might not find in reality.

Both authors have managed to get their books made into movies and TV shows because of their engaging storylines. Although Simsion and Smith are not currently residing in the UAE, they expressed a keen desire to continue attending future editions of the Emirates literature festival to celebrate literary works.

— Maria Botros is a trainee at Gulf News.