On completing a first draft

 

I’m there. A solid effort since September and I have a pile of paper filled with words for my end-of-March deadline. So how does it feel finally to send off a first draft? Nerve-wracking, that’s how. All those days, weeks and months at the desk trying to piece together a coherent story, trying to find original ways of expressing recognisable emotions and capturing landscapes, having moments of inspiration but mostly just pushing on, and now the result has to be revealed to the first readers.

Though some parts are better than I dared hope, there is also an uneasy feeling that there remain ideas in my head that never quite translated to words on the page. Private battles have yet to be revealed, but will remain unspoken so as not to prejudice a first reaction. The moment of truth will arrive with an email or phone call from my literary agents, whose job is to be brutally honest. I may not agree with all facets of their verdicts, but I know that this honesty is crucial, and also that it will come with the finest of motives: to make my novel the best it can be.

So, for a while, I feel free – like the first days of a long summer holiday when you relish the sense of not having to do anything – but then the ominous space between the date the manuscript was sent and the silence and empty in-box of the present begins to weigh heavier. The story starts to seem ridiculous, clunky, inept. The mind prepares for bad news: any criticism will already be pre-empted; I have already ripped my own work into a thousand shreds and will be able to say that I quite understand, I’d been thinking very much the same thing myself.

I read lots of writers’ blogs, most of which stream in through my Facebook page since I joined a site that puts writers in touch with writers. Many of these writers are young, more than most are American, and the confidence that blares from these pages is quite astounding to me. Good luck to them - I wish I had their self-belief. Older, wider (all that sitting down at the desk…) and bloody-well British about it all, I prefer to keep my trumpet firmly in the back of cupboard until I know there’s a reason to blow it.


Writing and waiting

Waiting…the worst part of a writer’s life. It’s been a month now since I sent a revised draft of my novella The Lavender Field to my literary agents, and so far not a word. Not that there’s anything unusual in that – “sooner rather than later” in publishing terms can mean months rather than weeks.

Over the years I’ve come to accept the slow pace though I have to admit that I’ve never been very good at waiting, in any context. When I worked for a national newspaper, sooner rather than later meant “in the next ten minutes, or else”, and I actually feel more comfortable with that. You know where you are with a news editor screaming at you, speed-reading your story and chucking it at a hapless sub-editor. Job done, speedy exit to the pub.

Waiting on reactions to the manuscript of a book requires not only a different timescale but a different mindset altogether, not least because there is so much more emotional investment in a book. I learned this – really learned this - some years ago with a novel I wrote called The Art of Falling.

The road to publication involved five years of waiting. The reason I’m writing this post now is because back then I would have given anything to know just how long it was going to take. How long was reasonable? How long was distinctly discouraging? How long was a disaster, from which there would be no recovery?

I longed to be able to ask someone. Even though I was already a published author (The Art of Falling was my fourth novel; it was a change of direction for me into more literary territory from my first journalistic-commercial efforts) there weren’t too many people I knew in the business I felt I could ask. My then-literary agent wasn’t convinced about this new novel. My personal approaches to my existing publishers were blanked. I hadn’t seen this coming at all, and I was both shocked and hurt.

At the time I had no idea this was a fairly common story for mid-list authors who’d been given a chance by a mainstream publisher but failed to sell well enough to light up the bestseller charts. Although we had the internet (on dial-up which took forever to load pages) there didn’t seem to be the contact and online discussion opportunities there are now with other writers.

So, for the benefit of anyone whose wait is giving way to despair, here’s what happened. I finished the first draft of the manuscript in early summer 2000. Bad news confirmed by September. By November, initial disappointment was tempered by being taken on by another top-notch London literary agent who loved the novel. A year of waiting passed before that agent gave up on it. The stumbling block with publishers seemed to be that it was difficult to market: was it a commercial or a literary novel? Now that made me angry: surely the cross-over appeal was an advantage!

By the beginning of 2002, I was well and truly on my own with it. I had it professionally edited (the editor loved it from the start too, which at the time was the only encouragement that stopped me giving up) and I spent the next eighteen months sending it out to agents and publishers. Not so much as a glimmer of interest.

In the summer of 2003, having asked trusted friends and family to give their honest opinion about the book, I made the momentous decision to publish it myself. This was before e-publishing, and involved a substantial investment in two thousand well-produced large format trade paperbacks. By September 2003 I had a room full of boxes and I worked my socks off to sell them. I used all my journalism and PR skills to market it, and hand-sold it into bookshops. Every morning I would call bookshops and ask to speak to the fiction buyer. Determination overruled natural shyness.

Stamp Publishing, 2003

Little by little, good things happened. A great review appeared in the Daily Mail (yes, I had once worked for the Mail, but they had never reviewed one of my books before). One branch of Ottakers in South London sold so many copies they gave me my own display – free of charge! Pushed by a friend, I sent a copy to the august William Morris Agency and struck super-lucky when the head literary agent Stephanie Cabot took me on.

Stephanie sold The Art of Falling to Random House in June 2004 when Arrow’s publishing director Kate Elton told her she was looking for novels on the commercial/literary cusp that would appeal to mainstream Ottaker’s customers. I had just heard (and passed on the news) that my book had been put on the main Ottaker's order list, across the chain nationwide.

The novel was finally published by Arrow in July 2005, and was a summer bestseller in the UK. Judging from the many personal responses to it I received, it seems to be a book that resonates. I still regularly get messages about it from readers through my website, many saying how it has touched them and chimed with experiences in their family.
 

Arrow, 2005

So I hope that someone somewhere finds that heartening. The waiting was worth it, even though it lasted far longer than I ever envisaged. But I’m grateful too, because along the way I learned a great deal about the nuts and bolts of bookselling and marketing that I might never have fully appreciated.

Publishing is tough – tougher than ever at the moment due to commercial pressures on the big companies – but there’s always a way if you want your work to be read. I’ve been writing here about mainstream publishing, of course, and hardly even mentioned e-books which are a far cheaper and more accessible alternative to self-publishing in print. You can’t give up.    

If your interest has been piqued in The Art of Falling, you can find out more here:

The Art of Falling