Tag: writing

March: The longest month

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Anyone else just waiting for this month to end or is it just me? I am very definitely NOT a winter person, so this final slog towards spring always leaves me bad tempered and emotional and desperate for company while being fully, one hundred percent aware that I’m the person you least want to call for a good time. It’s also my least productive time of year to write, which is what makes it the perfect time for editing, an admittedly self-loathing task where, for the non-writers amongst you, you basically take all the work you did that you thought was great a few weeks or months previous, rip it to pieces at the behest of your agent/publisher/self and try to put it back together again without losing the plot (in both senses of the word). I actually enjoy editing for the first two thirds of a book but by the final furlong the doubt that I have written anything of worth always creeps in and by the end I always assume I’ve made everything ten times worse than it was before. Fortunately this is rarely the case. Editing – especially the final edit before submission – is a vital part of writing where you get to reshape and refine your work. It’s an opportunity to really take a good look at your characters and make sure they make sense and are consistent as well as ensuring they have room to grow. For crime writers, it’s a chance to add or remove red herrings, find places where suspense needs to increase and check that you don’t accidentally reveal how your book is going to end somewhere around chapter eight. For comedy writers, it’s an opportunity to cut gags that aren’t funny but maybe add more humour in places where the ebb and flow of writing requires it. If a book were a piece of music, the final edit before submission is that final dress rehearsal: making sure you aren’t just playing the notes in all the right places, but that you’ve thought about dynamics, ornaments, emotion and nuance, that you know your work back to front and upside down; that you’ll never be more ready to throw it out into the world that you are right now. Of course, this is where the comparison ends… being an author on submission is like playing the concert and then waiting six to eight weeks for applause, if indeed there is any to be had at all!

MARCH BOOK CHOICE:

Two books for this month, because they both deserve celebrating! The winner and runners up of the Comedy Women in Print Prize for 2021, Rebecca Rogers and Hannah Dolby have released two contrasting but equally fun books this month which deserve to go on your TBR pile!

If you like a bit of Terry Pratchett or Hitchhiker’s Guide, then The Purgatory Poisoning could be right up your street. A crime caper set in the afterlife finds Dave having to solve his own murder from his own personal purgatory, St Ives’ youth hostel c. 1992.

No Life For A Lady is a quirky Victorian mystery, centred around a young woman named Viola, who decides she would rather become a detective than marry any one of the young bachelors her father sends her way.

As one of the judges for the CWIP Prize in 2021, I’m extremely proud and excited for Hannah and Rebecca and wish them lots of luck now their book babies are out in the world! Have fun, you witty women!

MARCH TV CHOICE:

Okay – I admit it, my month has been a series of questionable indulgences when it comes to TV viewing. Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19 returned, meaning a happy withdrawal into the comforting world of Shondaland predictability. Chicago Fire is back as well, giving me the opportunity to wonder for the eleventh season in a row how on earth it is still being commissioned (and why I continue to tune in). I binged three series of Jack Ryan which left me befuddled as to whether John Krasinski is a really good actor or dead inside, and also whether anyone, CIA or no, would really be allowed to board a nuclear warship and have a chat to the captain while he prepared to start a war. I feel like this is exactly the sort of thing editors would never let an author get away with, even if it was convenient to the plot. After watching this, I feel fairly strongly that editors of TV shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it either.

Daisy Jones and the Six, currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is far from perfect either. But it’s fun, frothy, drug fuelled nostalgia for the 1970s and a ‘fictional’ (but uncannily reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac) story of the rise and fall of a world famous rock band makes for some serious ‘guilty pleasure’ viewing. I don’t think it’s brilliant: you can’t easily manufacture the magic of the Mac for TV and the whole ‘documentary’ style of the series is spoilt by the lack of any real effort to show the passing of time except for a few terrible wigs. But it has made for a pleasing watch and if you fancy kicking back with something not too awful and not too taxing either, this would be my recommendation.

MY MONTH AHEAD:

Well, mainly I’m celebrating it not being winter anymore! But my main excitement for this month is attending the Comedy Women in Print Awards, which I’m very much looking forward to. Fortunately, I’m off on holiday the week before, which means I will be able to read the shortlist of published novels before I hit up the party! Bring it on, April….

Fx

February: Old friends, new friends, no friends

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My feet have just about touched the ground again after four weeks of mayhem, starting with jetting off to Dubai for the wonderful Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature at the start of the month, which I was lucky enough to be invited to as a speaker and workshop facilitator. I don’t think there is any point in pretending that it wasn’t THE coolest thing I have done as a published author, because you’d all know I was lying. Highlights were many but included:

  • Delivering a workshop on being inspired to write and writing comedy to a sold out room!
  • Talking books and publishing and everything in between with readers, other authors, agents & generally bookish people for a whole week!
  • Being on a panel with Sudha Murty and the utterly lovely Alexander McCall Smith, and having the most fun and fascinating conversation about letter writing. You can find the transcript of my letter to Dubai here.
  • (Much later…) Discussing the merits (or not) of toilets with glass walls with Alexander and his wife.
  • Meeting a bunch of amazingly creative people and being surrounded by multi disciplinary artists from so many different places and cultures.
  • Seeing a bunch of old friends and making some new ones too. The theme for this year was ‘Old Friends’ and it couldn’t have been more perfect.
  • Sunshine and warm weather… working by the pool made for a nice change of pace!

Talking of working, I’ve been going at it like a dog. I’ve barely left the house since I arrived back and I’ve forgotten how to talk to people but my latest manuscript is now nearly ready to go out to the world and there’s another one hot on its heels that I’m two thirds of the way through already! I’m really enjoying being at the end of the process for my second novel, and excited at the ideas I’ve had for the third one, to really make it zip. Putting an extra spring in my step this month has been the fabulous news that my agent, Davinia Andrew-Lynch, has joined Curtis Brown Books and taken me with her as a client! I am very much looking forward to stepping out on this new adventure with her.

FEBRUARY BOOK CHOICE:

Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano was a recommendation by Davinia, actually. The premise is simple but irresistible: a author and mom of two who’s husband has run off with the estate agent is mistakenly hired as a contract killer. If you like Stephanie Plum, you’ll love this. It’s fast paced, murderously good fun with lots of funny and familiar scenarios for the mums out there. A great palette cleanser if you’ve been getting too serious with your literature lately. I bought the audio book and it’s read pretty well – not sure about the ‘guy’ voices but it’s not as annoying as most!

FEBRUARY TV CHOICE:

There is nothing better than deliciously dark television that offers plenty of sass alongside – and Bad Sisters more than delivers. Nicknamed ‘The Prick’ by his sisters in law, JP really is the gold standard: his apparent playfulness towards his wife, daughter, mother, the neighbour and the sisters is in turns threatening, frightening, patronising, dangerous and downright evil. The sisters decide they’ve had enough and plot to kill him, but he proves a slippery fish to nail – and here is where the wonderful comedic turns can be had as the assassination attempts get more and more outrageous, with disastrous consequences. The story, in essence a ‘whodunnit’, moves forwards and backwards in time to finally reveal the who, what, where of the murder.  The only thing I didn’t think was utterly brilliant was the slightly annoying subplot of two hapless insurance agents trying to prove the women killed him to save their business from bankruptcy and a criminal action lawsuit. Yes, it was necessary to have someone investigate to create the motivation for the cover up, but I think the plot stretched a little thin at times in terms of the believability of these characters. However, it didn’t really take too much away from what was a brilliant story, beautifully shot, subtly acted and wonderfully written to keep us guessing most, if not all of the way.  

MY MONTH AHEAD:

Well it’s a quiet month for me after the storm that was February so I’ll mainly be focused on final tweaks for submission and cracking on with the next manuscript. But there’s a couple of things going on in the CWIP motherland that I should draw your attention to…. firstly, the shortlist is out and it’s fantastic! Very much looking forward to reading some of this stack that hasn’t already found it’s way to me.

Secondly… and admittedly, you don’t have long with this bit of information… but the Comedy Women in Print Prize is running a ‘Febulously Funny’ fundraiser, where if you donate, like, TODAY, you’ll be put in the prize draw to win lots of books and swag from the authors of the unpublished-but-now-published CWIP Prize books. The Prize relies purely on donations and Helen Lederer’s caffeine intake, and does great things for unpublished authors as well as championing funny female fiction – so if you’re a fan, please consider donating here. You can, of course, give generously after today, with absolutely no chance of winning anything except the adoration of all involved with CWIP!

See you next month,

Fx

The subjectivity of comedy

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Last week I made an off the cuff remark on Twitter about teenagers being worse than toddlers and it got more hits than almost anything else I’ve ever posted. Some people laughed in recognition, some mothers of toddlers were horrified at this window onto the future, some people told me off for stereotyping and one lady kindly noted ‘you reap what you sew’. Her reaction reminded me that the pressure put on women by other women is alive and well, but more than that, that comedy is always subjective (especially on Twitter).

When you’re writing comedy, it’s important to grow a thick skin, preferably right over the one you already had to grow as a writer anyway. Not everyone is going to find you funny, not everyone is going to laugh at the things that had you cackling into your laptop. For reasons I still can’t fathom, some readers consider it their civic duty to criticise comedy writers, loudly, warning others in brutal online reviews that You. Aren’t. Funny. As hard as it can be not to take it personally, you have to ignore them. Because what they mean, whether they realise it or not, is that it’s not funny to them.

And that’s okay. The golden rule when I’m writing a funny scene, or inserting a bit of witty dialogue, is that if it makes me smile while I’m writing it, there’s a good chance there’ll be other people who will find it amusing too. They might even find it funnier than I do. Or they won’t think it funny at all. At the end of the day, it actually doesn’t matter, as long your writing is good. If you produce a quality story, with strong characters and snappy dialogue, being funny is just the icing on the cake. John Hodgman is quoted as saying “don’t concentrate on becoming a better humour writer, just concentrate on being the best writer you can be. If you’re funny, the work will end up being funny. And if you’re not, the work will still end up being good.” I think that’s a good rule to write by.

JANUARY BOOK CHOICE:

The book I’ve just finished up reading is actually pretty in keeping with the story at the start of this post. Other Parents by Sarah Stovell is set in the world of competitive parenting, PTA horror, secrets and small minded mentalities. I bought it for the title and the zippy front cover and because I assumed it would have protagonists who were over the age of 30 – still a rarity in the publishing world, despite there being a huge audience of middle aged book buyers out there who might like to read about themselves occasionally. I’ll dive into this another time, but suffice to say it’s something I base a lot of book choices around – plus I’m a sucker for a pretty front cover… so I admit I didn’t read the blurb and made several assumptions about the content. As a result I kept waiting for a murder to happen… spoiler: there is no murder! But there is plenty of action. It followed a few different storylines from multiple points of view that challenged and provided enough twists and turns to keep me interested. An enjoyable, sometimes dark, sometimes witty, horribly familiar-in-places story that’s perfect as a book club/holiday read.

JANUARY TV CHOICE:

I just finished up the third and final season of Dead to Me (Netflix), starring more wonderful middle aged women Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, supported by Prince Charming himself, James Marden. I have simply loved this oh-so-dark comedy, and was sad to see it end, although it was definitely the right time. A masterclass in getting your characters into trouble, and then really leaning into that, I have really enjoyed the way the writing shifted from comedy to tragedy with such grace and presence of mind. It’s a study in female friendship and grief that I thought was beautifully, madly, deeply done, with thrash metal, copious swearing and high farce brilliantly executed by the cast.  

MY MONTH AHEAD:

January is half gone already but the rest of it is busy! On Tuesday 17th I’ll be joining Jo Good on BBC London as one of three guests on her ‘Chewing the Fat’ segment. I’m on at 11pm if you fancy tuning in.

At the end of the month I’m getting on a plane to Dubai to take part in the Emirates Festival of Literature, which I’m pretty sure is going to be a highlight of the year! I’m running a masterclass in comedy writing and appearing on a panel with Cecilia Ahern and Alexander McCall-Smith, amongst others – plus catching up with some other writers from the region, who I haven’t seen in a really long time. I really can’t wait to devote the week to all things books, and, having lived there for nearly a decade, spend some time in my old home with dear friends too. It will be wonderful to go back to where my writing journey began, and hopefully spark some new ideas for new stories as well.

See you next month,

Fx

How it started… how it’s going…

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Someone asked me last week, what it was like to be a debut author. It’s weird, because to be honest, I don’t feel very debut-like anymore, although as far as the glacial timelines of the publishing industry go, it’s entirely possible I could be considered ‘new’ for another 23 years. But the initial excitement and sense of achievement of publishing a novel is certainly in the past; and while I’m still learning a lot about my role as a published writer, it’s quite an interesting question to answer, six months in, with the benefit of quite a bit of hindsight. Now the euphoria has worn off, what does it really feel like to be a debut author?

Well, firstly, I’m a bit knackered. Every debut author will know (or very quickly find out) that the lion’s share of day in-day out marketing and publicity comes down to you; publishers simply don’t/can’t invest the same amount of time and energy in debuts by unknown authors as they do if you’re, say, Richard Osman or Dawn French. Trying to get noticed or stand out from the crowd is incredibly difficult; longer tail ‘reach’ feels like the holy grail. I can’t even begin to calculate how many hours I have spent campaigning to get into bookshops, do signings, appear in the local news or on the occasional radio show in the hope of selling a few more copies; social media is easier, but even so, to get followers up in the thousands could send you mad or die trying. And, after the initial few months, I’m possibly not alone in having the niggling thought that no matter how hard you work, it might not be gaining you any traction at all in terms of book sales. Not that you know one way or the other; there’s no way of knowing how your book is selling for at least six months so you are pretty much working in an informational void, with no idea if anything you are doing is paying off at all. Still, you can’t stop; you have to keep pushing, and hoping, and praying that it does.

But as time passes and people move onto the ‘next big thing’, it’s hard to keep the momentum going. And here’s where it gets tricky, as a debut author, to remain sane and grounded about your work. You have A LOT of other debut authors to compare yourself to and with each passing day you watch more and more of them launch into the world. We’re all making out like we’re so popular and successful and supportive in order to try and convince readers to give us a spin, but deep down in places we don’t like to talk about at parties, we’re all still really wondering if our books are shit in comparison to everyone else’s and that’s why we’ve only got 573 followers on Twitter and no one will answer our emails about appearing at book festivals. I’m not going to sugar coat how difficult that can be sometimes – I think it’s important to be honest with myself and a good thing, to check my ego and say, wow, you did an amazing thing but other people do it better, or got luckier than you, or both. But I recognise that in comparison to a lot of other authors whose books never see the light of day, I’m very lucky too, and I’m not saying I’ve been hard done by – I’m just saying it’s hard.

There’s a lot to celebrate, of course. Reviews, for one thing. Fan mail, too. I’ve had some amazing messages from complete strangers who felt compelled to write and tell me how much they loved the book. That I inspired someone to do that, to actually reach out, is a massive compliment and incredibly meaningful. I’ve been very fortunate to have a stonking set of reviews and actually only a few negative ones (my top three favourite 3* reviews, btw, are: 1. awarded for ‘ an unnecessary sex scene’, 2. ‘it’s not as good as Motherland’, and 3. ‘I’m going back to Ken Follett’). The variety of these comments will tell you that what readers like or want is very subjective so you can’t set too much store by them – and anyway, reviews aren’t really about feeding your ego – they’re more about feeding algorithms; still, it’s comforting to read what people are saying and know you didn’t write a complete load of rubbish. But ultimately, it IS about algorithms… so it’s hard to remain relentlessly upbeat about a product that you believe in and have invested so much of yourself in that almost everyone says is great when they read it, when you’re watching your Amazon sales nosedive because you haven’t hit the number of reviews that would propel you to be ‘noticed’ by a computer. That’s the other thing I’ve learned – don’t be shy about asking people to leave reviews!

Although I might sound a bit jaded I should point out that there’s still a boat load of things that make me buzz, that I don’t think I’ll ever tire of. Seeing my book on the shelves in a book shop. Friends messaging me to tell me they’ve seen my book on the shelves in a book shop. Getting on ‘the table’ in Waterstones. Being asked to talk about my book, the writing process, and yes, about being a debut author. God, I love the talking. I could do it all day long. When I’m not busy writing, of course (just in case my agent is reading this, I am actually writing too, I promise).

As I move from being debut author to an author with a debut novel (and I do think there is a distinction to be made) it’s great to take the time and consider all the stuff I’ve learned so far – which is A LOT. Next time – and there will be a next time, I am determined of that – my expectations will be set. I will know how to do a book launch, who to call, I’ll know what the publisher does and what my agent does and what I have to do and I’ll know a whole bunch of hugely supportive bookshops, radio stations, magazines and social media pals who will help me to get my book out into the world. I will reap the benefits of the hard work I put in this time around and cross my fingers and hope for that tiny little bit of luck that will get me on the shelves of Waterstones without having to go in and ask, appear on the supermarket top 10 or get me an invitation to a book festival where I can share all the things I’ve learned with other new authors too.

What’s it really like to be a debut author? Exhilarating, exhausting, joyous, tough… but most of all, memorable. But I have the sneaky feeling it’s like that every time; and that’s why I’m hoping to do it all over again.

Mad (wo)men

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With just under two months left to go until publication day, I thought I’d reflect on the journey so far. It hardly seems real, still, that my book will be in the actual shops in eight weeks’ time. The creative process has been relatively smooth sailing, if I’m honest. The hard stuff is all the rest of it!

Being published for the first time is a strange situation: you go from lolling about in your writing bubble bath to being thrown into the publishing equivalent of a lazy river, constantly wondering whether you should kick your legs a bit to influence the outcome or just go with the flow. Throughout the past six months I have been constantly second guessing whether I should be more or less assertive with my publisher, or more or less proactive; not wanting to appear a control freak or tread on any toes, and at the same time trying to prove myself a competent, commercially savvy and enthusiastic individual who wants to work hard to sell my books. As an author, you have to be calm, patient and understanding that while your book matters to your publisher, they have a million things to juggle; and accept the fact that you’re a long way from the top of the pile, and that to get that vital airspace with bookshops and bloggers and influencers to propel you a little further up the food chain means pitching yourself against authors who are better, faster, more experienced, more known, with bigger budgets and better relationships with which to gain traction. It’s not easy. And I’ve found negotiating the choppy waters is all the more difficult because, like a lot of writers out there with their first book deal, I have absolutely no idea who does what.

Google ‘how to get an agent’ or ‘how to get a book deal’ and you’ll get a million articles. Try searching ‘who does what when you publish a book’ and the answers are less consistent. It’s quite a minefield, and from conversations with other authors, appears to vary from publisher to publisher, agent to agent, and author to author. Thankfully, I have an amazing, hands on agent who’s willing to steer a rather green debut author through the confusion of their first publication. But I’m sure it’s not the same for everyone.

One thing that’s very consistent though, is that authors need to market their own books. Although I was expecting to take on a lot of the responsibility to sell mine – I’ve read a million articles telling me as much – nothing really prepared me for how much there would be to learn and to do in order to make even the tiniest dent on the consciousness of the nation. Plus, I massively underestimated the sheer quantity of time it would take. Before this month, I thought doing social media was just a case of chucking a few tweets out a couple of times a week. Now I seem to be in a constant battle between being a writer who writes actual books and a marketeer promoting the one I’ve already written.

In truth, keeping up with the demands of social media admin in order to grow my online presence, generating book signings and organising launch events has become an almost full time job. To help me get some new ideas to help with promoting the book, I went on a marketing course for authors, which was great in terms of really focusing on my brand, but also made me aware of just how much there was to do. Today, I have a spangly website and several promises of book signings, and I’m feeling rather chuffed to have increased from 300 to a massive 434 Twitter followers (please do follow me, by the way, @Writerfaye – I’d quite like to make it 500 by the end of the week). But the amount of work that’s gone into it in the past four weeks or so feels faintly ridiculous and I have begun to wonder how anyone has the time to do this and write.

There’s a rumour that publishing a book in the good old days was vastly different. Allegedly, there was a time when the publisher did all of your marketing while you quaffed champagne and signed the occasional book. I’m not sure that’s entirely true. But I do know, that as a 21st Century debut author it’s very definitely not like that – and while confusing and fairly exhausting on occasions, that doesn’t always make it a bad thing. If I wasn’t before, I am super, super invested in my book now. I am not afraid to walk into a bookshop anymore and talk to them about stocking my book, or asking about an event. It’s yielded far better results than emailing, although taken about ten times the amount of time and effort. The @womenwritersnet and @debutsuk2021 groups on Twitter have really changed how I interact and I’ve learned a lot from other writers promoting their work too.

Whether it really makes a difference or not is quite impossibly to say, at this stage. But I keep telling myself it will! And honestly, after the last year and a half, I’m so excited to talk to strangers again I don’t really care. In talking to people and putting myself out there, on social media and in real life, I feel like I’ve tapped into a new community who really cares about books and writers.

Publishing a book is long, and crazy. I’m sure I’ll look back on this post in a few months and there will have been a whole other set of learning too. But to anyone reading this and wondering, is it really worth it, I would say yes. With bells on. Writers learn for a living: every edit is a lesson in how to be better. As I see it, the end part of the process is just an extension of this. So I embrace the next few months, and cross my fingers that it all pays off. If nothing else… WHAT a ride!

A New Chapter

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I don’t normally make resolutions but I’ll admit, 2019 has not been a prolific year and it might be time to start thinking about putting one or two out there. I look back with a certain amount of shame at the lack of new writing I’ve produced this year. I’ve been preoccupied, that’s true: In January I’d attracted an agent but wasn’t sure they were right for me; by March I’d decided to self publish; by May, I had found ‘the one’ and signed with her, but the ink wasn’t dry until July. Then followed another edit over the summer before my manuscript finally went out on submission at the end of September. A couple of (hugely positive) rejections later and suddenly it is Christmas again. In between times, I’ve had a couple of creative spurts and managed to pump out the first quarter fifth of a new novel, but mainly I’ve been focused on my copyediting business and since my brief period of productivity at the start of November, have managed to studiously ignore the first draft sat waiting patiently for me to finish it.

The start of another new year feels like the time to change all that. And I need to change if I want to be successful. I’ve got an editor who wants to see my next book even though this one wasn’t right for them. I’ve got an agent who believes in me and wants to get more of my work out there as quickly as possible. I’ve got the little voice in my head wondering if I really got a Masters degree in writing so I could spot typos in business reports, or whether I got it so I could write books and get published. The answer is obvious, and you’d think I’d be champing at the bit, but procrastination (and not a small amount of fear) surrounds me like a thick, cloying fog. It’s a little bit annoying, if I’m honest. I’ve never been a great completer-finisher but I thought I’d broken the cycle when I finished my first novel. I realise now that finishing the first book wasn’t the end, it was only the end of the beginning. And, if I’m serious about being an author, I have to treat the job seriously, believe that I can do it and, above all other things, make time for it.

I’ve been time-poor this year – or rather, I’ve been extremely poor at managing my time. It’s meant a lot of things have suffered, not just my writing. I’ve found myself increasingly running from pillar to post, always a few beats behind where I should be. It’s taken its toll on my sleeping, my mood, my creativity, my family and my home, and I know (because my self-conscious is screaming at me) that it’s time to put the brakes on and figure out a new strategy.

I cannot do it all. I cannot have it all. That was 2019: working from dawn til dusk and not really accomplishing anything very much. And I’ll admit, it’s not been a memorable or particularly enjoyable year from that perspective. Next year, I need to figure out how to utilise my time best so that I’m not sacrificing things I love for things I have to do, and so that I still have white space too. And in terms of writing, I’m going to have to be stricter and smarter about it than before, and bed down and put the work in without taking the joy away from this wonderful and precious thing I do.

My son is a extraordinarily talented musician but, as I’m fond of reminding him, he got extraordinary through talent, self belief and hard work. You can’t succeed at anything without working harder and smarter. But it needs to feel fun too. 2020 needs to bring about a bit of self discipline and a lot of positivity and change, in order to have a more creative, productive writing year and get out of the bad writing habits I’ve formed in 2019 (the principal one being not writing). But it also needs to be fun.

So that’s my resolution for 2020. Write harder, write smarter and have fun doing it. (And with a bit of luck, land a publishing deal). Happy New Year! Fx

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Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

That difficult second album

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It’s been a funny six months since I got my literary agent. Time seems to have slowed down, or is passing in larger chunks, I’m not sure which. I no longer speak about the process of writing in weeks, but in months, or years even. At a micro-level, things are happening. My first novel has been edited once more (with feeling!) and safely delivered to my agent. She loves it. I love it. It’s gone, out of the door, on submission to publishers; all I can do now is wait, anywhere between four weeks and four years, to find someone else who enjoys it enough to put it into print.

In the meantime, my agent asked me what I was going to do next.
‘The sequel’, I said. Easy. I have an outline of the next book in the series, and in my head, it seemed like the natural next step to start writing it. Just incase I get a two-book deal, my inner voice mutters hopefully. I am more subtle with my out loud voice. ‘That makes, sense, right?’
‘Do you have any other ideas to pitch?’ she replied, indicating it didn’t. I ran through my library of half-started/half-finished novels: a middle grade ghost story, a YA fantasy, a fully blown sci-fi novel that’s been in my head for about five years now. But I knew none of that would be useful to an agent that’s just signed me to write commercial women’s fiction.

‘I have one idea,’ I ventured. ‘But it’s literally a single sentence.’ And I pitched her a thought I’d had in a particularly dark, hormonally driven moment a few months ago that hasn’t gone away. A back of a fag packet idea that I had no notion of how to execute on.

Of course, she loved it. I mean, REALLY loved it. ‘I LOVE that idea,’ she said. ‘You have to write it. Now.’
‘But I don’t have a clue what it’s about. I literally have just that one idea.’
‘You’ll get there. Go away and think about it over summer. I can’t wait to read it.’

16uwxlSummer lasted quite a while as far as I was concerned. July and August were spent reading lots of commercial fiction, because the voice I wanted for this book, I knew, would be in stark contrast to my first novel. Not all women’s commercial fiction is created equal and there’s a startling range of writing styles, some of which I’d really rather never read again. But a few stood out as the sort of book I wanted to give a go; Elinor Oliphant, Three Things About Elsie plus half a back catalogue of Liane Moriaty later, I knew what I wanted my book to feel like, even if I didn’t have a story yet.

I waited, patiently, for inspiration to hit. The one idea played in my head like a broken record and I was sure that I had the rest of it tucked away somewhere, but August became September and still, I had nothing. The terror of putting pen to paper and coming up with anything close to meaningful began to overshadow my ability to write and by October, procrastination and self doubt had crept so far into my head that I’d given them house keys and a drawer. Since July, I’d written approximately 5000 words, with no direction or real sense of what the story was at all.

I don’t know why today was different. I’d been on Twitter, the writer’s equivalent of prozac, and got lost in a series of posts and articles that I could vaguely pass off as research. But then suddenly, an idea popped into my head. And it was so obvious, and so easy, that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. What sweet relief! Suddenly all the other ideas began to arrive and I began the glorious business of putting together a plot. By midday, I had a couple of A4 pages that were starting to look suspiciously like a story.

Writers talk a lot about their process. Articles – indeed, entire books – have been devoted to the subject of how to write. My MA peers, when we meet, represent the entire gamut of book writing methodology, from blow by blow post it note plotting, to 1000 words a day for the whole of November NO MATTER WHAT, to my rather less precise notion that I’ll write when I have time and the mood takes me and the ideas will happen when they happen.

I had begun to doubt my own process, believing, quite wrongly, that I should be ‘better’ second time around, about the structure and methodology of writing a novel. Turns out that I should trust my instincts. It took me 40 years to come up with the idea for the first book, and only six months to come up with second. I’m on a roll.

 

What I learned about pitching at the London Book Fair

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Being ready can take a long time
I started writing The PTA Assassin two and a half years ago. When it was done, I followed up with the first edit. Then a second one. Then a massive third edit took place last year when I paid someone professional to look at it. Since then it’s undergone a copy edit too, and after all that I’m confident it’s in a reasonably good state for submission.

I actually started submitting 18 months ago, sometime before the third edit, and I look back now and I’m not surprised I was rejected out of hand by everyone. It was horrible. POV was all over the map, my grammar was inexcusable in places and the climax at the end was about as dangerous as a Blue Peter advent calendar.

After a diligent manuscript review by my wonderful mentor at PWA, however, it was looking in much better shape. I got my synopsis together, brushed up my cover letter and started all over again with new agents. This time, I got some positive responses. Twice now, it’s made it off the slush pile, although not quite converted to a deal yet. Undaunted, I headed to the London Book Fair this week to meet with an agent face to face.

The Elevator Pitch
‘What’s your book about?’
So many other writers have asked me this at the LBF this week, and it’s been a brilliant way of polishing up my elevator pitch. By the time it came to meet an agent for my one-to-one session on Thursday, I could have told my 2-minute version of The PTA Assassin to her in my sleep. So instead of worrying about ‘knowing my subject’, I focused on preparing the other things an agent might be looking for when they met me – knowing around my subject.

Say it out loud before you go
I got on well with the agent I met, and she instantly warmed to the idea of the book. I have to say, that helped a lot. She asked me about the genre, the audience it’s aimed at, what books are most like the one I’ve written. Of course, nerves got the better of me at this point. I managed to a) forget Janet Evanovich’s name and then oh! the joy of remembering it, swiftly followed by b) not be able to say it properly the first five times I tried. Still, we got there in the end. I felt a bit of an idiot though. Note to self: Learn how to actually pronounce out loud the name of the person you’ve read books by since you were in your twenties and written repeatedly into your cover letter for the past two years.

Make a connection
The agent asked who my main character was, and what she was like. ‘She’s like Bridget Jones but with a gun,’ I said. ‘But more competent than Bridget.’ ‘So in a film, she’d have Melissa McCarthy playing her?’ the agent said. ‘No, I think she’s more of an Olivia Coleman,’ I replied. We laughed. ‘Got it,’ she said. It was a brilliantly fast way of getting on the same page and giving her a vision to work with. You don’t get that in an email submission.

Know what you want
She asked if there was a sequel and if I intended it to be a trilogy or a series. ‘It’s a series’ I said, although noted that there’s only a finite amount of research one can pick up on the internet about MI5 so there were limitations. We talked about where the PTA Assassin was set, how it ends, and where the next one picks up. ‘Don’t set it too far after the first one,’ said the agent, ‘or she’ll be 107 by the fifth book.’ I like the way she thinks. She asked what else I write, and what I do for a living currently. She asked briefly about another book I was writing but when I couldn’t describe it without stuttering, I asked if I could pitch that another time when I could remember what it was about and she laughed and agreed that might be best. She asked if I would be able/willing to write something at the suggestion of a publisher, rather than it being my own initial idea. We talked for 15 minutes and about half of that wasn’t about my book. It felt comfortable and not at all scary. Dare I say fun?

Please-Like-Me-Meme-Girl-FaceStay positive
She’s asked for my manuscript. Obviously I was totally cool about it and didn’t say ‘Really?’ in a high pitched squeak of excitement (honest). But even if she decides that ultimately it’s not for her, I learned a ton about pitching from that meeting. Getting face to face time was great for me. It wouldn’t suit everyone, I’m sure, but for me it was great to be able to express myself and convey my sense of humour – humour that the book contains, too. You just can’t do that on a cover letter without sounding like a total prat.

I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know yet, if I’ll ever get an agent or end up self publishing. But even if you self publish, you still have to pitch your book to people to get them to buy the damn thing. There will be signings and launches and PR to do and every time, you’ll need to convince people that your book is worth reading. So I would say to anyone out there who’s in the same position, to practice, practice, practice, and get good at telling people about what you wrote. You never know who might want to read it.

 

Conformity

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The brilliant Matt Haig posted on Twitter yesterday. Anyone who follows him will know this is hardly unusual, but this particular tweet stood up, grabbed the microphone and shouted ‘Faye! I’m talking to YOU.’

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Deep, huh? It immediately made me think about the past few years, of moving country and returning to London, and of my determination to ‘fit in’ with people I thought I had things in common with. On paper, fitting in should have made me happy, but instead I managed to accomplish a whole new level of invisible within the environment I’d placed myself, simply by attempting to conform. When Matt wrote ‘The moment you fit right in, you disappear’ I could immediately identify with it, and when I thought about it in the context of writing, I realised the conundrum was also true of books as well.

In fiction there are always trends coming and going – think unreliable narrators, vampires and, if my tween-radar is pointing in the right direction, llamas – and it would be fair to assume that the easiest way to get a publishing deal might be to write to a particular trend. For example, my Twitter feed has been overflowing for a while now with books displaying threatening titles in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS about women with revenge issues. There have been some chillingly great books written in this genre in the past few years. But the original thing we all liked about them was the twist at the end, the unexpected violence, the shocking revelation. Conformity to the genre has rendered invisible many of the books sitting within it. Now we all know what to expect when we pick up one of these books, and we look for it, which makes it less exciting and therefore less attractive to the reader who no longer feels the thrill these books once offered.

I’m not saying it’s not important to write within a genre. If you don’t conform to something then most people are going to struggle to identify what your book is about, whether they will like it, and most importantly, whether they will buy it. If a reader likes books about llamas, chances are they’ll buy more than one of them, too, which is why you generally want your book to sit on a shelf next to lots of other books about llamas. It’s why agents and publishers always look for books they can categorise, preferably one that’s right in the sweet spot of the ‘genre du jour’ so they can ride the wave and max their sales.

As an author, you need to conform to the genre you are writing in so that you can compete. But as soon as you do, you become invisible, so you have to make sure you have something extra to offer. You must write (and write extremely well) in a recognisable genre, whilst maintaining something different about your novel that makes it stand out from the crowd. As a new author in particular, that’s hard, because you’re also sitting in the slush pile – somewhere you definitely don’t want to ‘fit in’.

My novel, The PTA Assassin, sits squarely in the behemoth that is ‘Commercial women’s fiction’. Personally, I think this genre sounds as appealing as cold custard on broccoli, and when I’m submitting to agents, I like to emphasise other qualities of the book that make it different. It’s a spy novel. A middle-aged woman is the protagonist. It’s humorous. Actually, someone told me not to describe it as funny in case it wasn’t – comedy is notoriously hard to pitch – but the rebel in me refused to conform so for better or for worse, I left it in anyway.

Possibly for the better. At the moment my full manuscript is sitting with an agent. Whether the writing is good enough, whether the story holds up, whether the agent believes it will sell, remains to be seen. But it gives me hope that I got off the slush pile, that maybe the book was just different enough to be noticed without being out-and-out weird. Which come to think of it, is exactly how I’d like to be thought of, too.

 

 

The one about winning.

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Last month, I wrote about failure at some length on my business blog. I’m a big fan of failure. HUGE fan. I’ve done a lot of improv comedy in the past five years and it’s not something you can enjoy or get good at without accepting that you’re going to have some unfeasibly bad moments, usually in front of a lot of people. When I teach, I teach that failure is good, and I believe it. I get itchy when I see stuff like this, especially when it’s attached to a ‘Motivational Monday’ hashtag:Screen Shot 2018-06-27 at 09.11.25

because I don’t find it the least bit motivational, and don’t get how anyone else could either. What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? Not much, I imagine.

Failure is how we learn. It’s a way for us to understand how we can be better. If you never take a risk, if everything in life is handed to you on a silver platter, wanting, or needing success – striving for it in every possible way – would become unnecessary. Everything we said or did would be ‘safe’, and consequently, we’d probably say or do very little. A world where you couldn’t fail would be a very boring world indeed.

There are days, though, I think that boring might be quite nice. Days like yesterday, where I just seemed to fail over and over again, culminating in the fastest, most cut throat book rejection I’ve had to date. And I’m going to be honest and say that on top of an already shitty day, it hit me really hard.

Let’s get this into perspective: the sort of stuff I’m talking about isn’t the huge crushing blows of a shark body-slamming me. It was more like jack frost nibbling at my toes. I’m super aware there are people with far bigger problems. But yesterday, for whatever reason, my failures got to me. They made me wonder whether I’ll ever achieve anything past the level of mediocre, and getting past that to more familiar ‘fuck ’em’ territory has been unusually difficult. ‘I’m usually much better than this’, I think, and realise I’m failing at failing now, too.

But the life coach in my head (hey there, tough lady) keeps on telling me none of it’s worth getting upset over, that things will be better for finding the right people and paths to tread and these ‘failures’ were just things that weren’t meant to be. And whereas yesterday I was trying not to cry with frustration, today I am busy getting over myself and getting back to business. It’s not nearly the end of the world, and there are plenty more days to fill with successes and failures of all shapes and sizes. And that, in itself, sounds like winning.