Advice for new writers

Yet again, I'm here with an apology for not blogging more often...

Things have been busy, and at the moment I'm ferreting away at my short stories, trying to get them all to behave themselves. Soon, I'll have enough for a collection. And after that, I'll go on holiday.

A couple of weeks ago, I taught a short story writing class. I was asked what advice I'd give to young people who want to become writers. I will share the advice I gave then, again on here. And just for the record, this advice applies whatever age you are.

It's really pretty simple. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. Some people manage to make a living from writing, usually by taking on paid commissions, some people don't. (I'm the second type: I support my writing with a day job.) Either way, the answer is still the same. If you want to be a writer, you have to write!

So my advice to anybody who wants to write is, find a way to do it. Try to get yourself into a position where you can work compressed hours, or part time, so that you have a day or two a week that you can devote to writing. If you can't work as few hours as you'd like, maybe devote a day at the weekend to writing, too. It might mean that you have to give up other things, like doing fun things with your friends, or spending time with your family. This choice is not a fun one to make, but unless you're in the luxurious position of not having to earn money, and having the freedom to write full time, sometimes you have to make sacrifices in other areas. Also, it will help a lot if your other half is supportive. One thing I did a lot when I was starting out, was that I cut down on doing things that were taking up a lot of my time. I stopped doing volunteer work and didn't socialise so much. It was rubbish, and sometimes I slightly resented it, but it also meant that I manage to write a novel, and get it published. So there's that.

On your writing days, make sure you write. Don't make excuses for yourself. If you're on a writing day, and you don't feel like writing, write anyway. Just write one sentence, and then another one. Then another one after that. It won't be long before you've got started, and you'll soon wonder what all the fuss was about when you got up that morning and didn't feel like doing it. Whatever you do, don't go on the internet. Just get to work.

My other big tip (it's no secret) is to keep at it. Writing is horrible sometimes, especially at first. But it gets easier the more you do it. Writing and imagination are both muscles that get stronger with use. Cultivate them. Make them do 50+ reps every time you sit down at your desk. Also, try to surround yourself with writer- and artists-friends who are going through the same thing, and who will be able to cheer you on a bit. And keep going!

Good luck!

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Fishnet Kirstin Innes

"How do you get a novel published?"

Wowzers! 

Next month, (June 7th to be exact), I have a novel coming out. It's called Brick Mother and it is being released by an independent press called Dead Ink. 

This is the realisation of a lifelong dream for me. Ever since being a little girl, I've always dreamed of being a writer. And now, at last I am! (Although I never make any money from it - but that's another story.) 

Here's a Fun Fact for you: Brick Mother is not the first novel I have ever written. Prior to writing it, I had written two other novels, one of which is literally Not Very Good, and another which Could Be Good If I Spent About Another Two Years Working On It. 

Because, here's the thing about getting a novel published. It is hard - very, very hard. Publishers - even the small independent ones, like Dead Ink - have slush piles numbering into the hundreds. It's hard to stand out amongst that kind of competition. Agents and editors get hundreds of queries a week, and most don't read their slush piles during work hours - they don't have time. Reading the slush is what they do in their free time. 

Given that the competition to get noticed amongst the slush is so hard, what do you do? 

Well, I'll tell you what worked for me, and it is this. (Brace yourselves.) I worked like a mountain donkey. When I realised my second novel probably wasn't good enough to get published, I started work on a third - Brick Mother. I started declining overtime and extra hours at work, so that I could have more time to concentrate on writing. I stopped going out; didn't see friends, didn't go to parties - hell, there were some weeks when I ate cereal for dinner every night, just because it saved time on cooking. It was hard, and not much fun for quite a long time. It might be that other, more talented writers, would be able to achieve more than I did without having to work so hard. For me, that wasn't the case - what I found, eventually, was that I had to work roughly two or three times harder than I had initially thought, to write stories good enough to make it into print. 

So, not only did I start work on Brick Mother, but in between drafts of that, short stories too. I read contemporary anthologies to see what other writers were up to, and how high the standards were. That was another difficult moment. Realising my work wasn't up to scratch, and that I needed to work harder still. I don't mind telling you that I had a few little cries at that point. Then after having a bit of a cry, I started working a bit harder. Because - and this is not much fun either, so I apologise - the standard in published anthologies and debut novels is ridiculously high, and if you want to get published you have to make your work be at least as good or preferably even better, than those currently appearing in print. 

Short story writing was a way of improving my own practise, and also a way of trying to get things published. 

Publications came slowly. I had one or two every year from 2010 onwards, and these little moments of encouragement were enough to persuade me to keep on going with the novel, even when things were difficult. 

So, in about 2011, I started sending Brick Mother out to agents and publishers. Following the best advice, I thought about what kind of places might be interested in my writing - which, should you be interested, scores the amazing hat trick of being slightly unsettling, somewhat left-field, and not terribly commercially viable. (If that's not enough to get the big publishers falling all over each other to get to me with their cheque books, I don't know what is.) 

After giving it a bit of thought, I realised the people most likely to be sympathetic to the left field, the slightly odd, and not particularly commercially viable, HURRAH! - were small, 'artistic' independent presses. I put 'artistic' in quotes because I don't know exactly how best to describe the sensibility of these places, other than that I know it when I see it. 

Rejection from these places (and I had a lot of rejection for Brick Mother, especially given that I was sending it twice a month for several months, in my drive to get it published) came hard. What you have to realise about independent presses is that they're run by small groups of people, usually on a shoestring, and most often by people driven by the love of a particular kind of writing. If we didn't have presses like this, the literature world would be a very sad, and homogenous world indeed; it would be a place full of Jeremy Clarkson biographies, and not very much else.

So, when you as a writer find places like this, you sort of punch the air and go YESSS, THESE ARE MY PEOPLE, and you thank Thor (or whatever god you happen to worship) that people like this (odd, strange, driven by the desire to print weird and probably rather unpopular books) exist. 

Only often, because these independent presses are so small, and so shoestringy, that they can only publish two books a year. And when you hold such high hopes that they will love your novel, and want to publish it, it really comes like a punch in the gut that they don't, and they won't. Maybe there are only two people working at the press, both volunteers, and their list is already full for the next two years. Maybe they're so busy they didn't have time to read all of the submissions. Or maybe they just didn't like your book very much, for whatever reason. It just wasn't completely their thing. It didn't light their candle, it didn't chime their bell, it didn't make them want to give up even more of their evenings and weekends in the pursuit of putting out another book, because they just didn't love it enough. And that's fine, because independent publishing is driven by passion, not by duty - and that's how it should be. But it also meant that my poor little book kept on not getting accepted for publication, over and over again. 

All the same, I kept on looking for places, and competitions, and I kept on sending it out. I should mention, as well, that by the time it was finally accepted for publication - in July 2013 - I had redrafted it 5 times, sent it around a couple of trusted writer-friends for critique, and all in all likelihood spent well over 2000+ hours on it in total. 

In December 2012, after several years of spending hundreds of unpaid hours writing in all of my free time, having spent a lot of money on submission fees and postage, and still with no publisher interested in my book, I was pretty fed up, and close to stopping. But I still had two unpublished short stories on my hard drive, and I thought I should try to get them published before I stopped altogether. 

In February 2013, my story "Dance Class" (one of the unpublished short stories) was shortlisted for the Willesden Herald Short Story Prize. 

The month after that, encouraged by having been shortlisted, I wrote another short story, and sent it off to Wes Brown for consideration in an anthology he was putting together. Luckily, he liked it - and in June the same year, an editor called Nathan Connolly got in touch to say that he had read the story, and liked it so much, did I have a novel that I could send him? 

Reader, I was of course punching the air. I was at home by myself, dancing around the living room even though there was no music on. The cat looked at me askance; he was not impressed, even less so when I tried to get him to join in. Bradley, I said to myself, don't get carried away. You know the last time you got solicited for a story it turned out to be a scam. (That, too, is a story for another day.) My excitement was tempered by many months of disappointment, you could say.

I sent the novel off anyway, and not too long afterwards got another email back. They liked it! They loved it! They thought there were some serious problems in the third act of the book (er, what? More rewriting? Don't you know how much of that I've done already?!) - but these minor problems were not enough to stop me from doing a victory dance around the office at work (that's right, I was at work this time; good job there was nobody else around) and inventing a song called "Having a novel published, having a novel published" which works quite well if you sing it along to the tune of Let's All Do The Conga. 

The moment when Nathan wrote to say that he liked Brick Mother enough to want to publish it was one of the highest points of my writing career. There have been other points that have come near it, but nothing has beaten it yet.

There's been a lot of hard work since. Close edits, structural edits, drafts passing back and forth - I've done probably a hundred more hours on it since it was accepted for publication, or maybe more. But who's counting, right? When it comes out, I want it to be right - I want it to be the best beast it possibly can be - and by this point, I am certainly not shy of a bit of hard work. 

So my journey to publication has not been an easy one. It's been draining, exhausting, expensive, dreary at times, sometimes even depressing, but now that I'm on the eve of holding my novel in my hands for the first time, I consider every single minute of it worth it. Totally worth it. 

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Lazy Eye Donna Daley-Clarke