The writing life – the secret of getting that novel published!

Publishing a novel? Well, it’s easy. Anyone can publish a novel these days. You write it, then you put it on the Internet. You do it yourself through a blog, serving it out of a Dropbox account, or use the likes of Smashwords, Wattpad, FreeEbooks, Amazon, and sundry others I’ve yet to make the acquaintance of, who serve it out for you. Your work gets published for free and people will read it. Guaranteed. Simple. Amazon and Smashwords even let you set a fee, so you can actually make money at it. The downside? Unless you go viral, don’t expect to make more than pocket-money, and your chances of going viral are about the same as coming up on the lottery. People come up on the lottery all the time, but the chances are it won’t be you, so don’t bank on it. Most likely you’ll make nothing at all.

I can feel your disappointment right there, because money’s the thing, isn’t it? What you really want to know is how to make serious money at it, or maybe even just enough to quit the day job and write full time. So, let’s go there. You write your novel and, if you don’t fancy online self-publishing, or it just doesn’t seem real to you, then send it to a traditional publisher or a literary agent. But this route is even more like a lottery. Someone always wins, but the chances are you won’t. In fact, the odds are so stacked against you doing it this way, it makes more sense not to bother, and only a fool would waste years filling out their ticket anyway.

There are exceptions, not to be cynical, but you need an edge. Your name needs to be widely known for some other reason, either by fair means or foul, because publishing’s about selling and names sell. Or you need an influential contact in the industry, someone who can sing your praises to a commissioning editor. Or you can enter your novel for a prestigious literary prize, but that’s an even bigger lottery. Either way, without your invite to the party, you’re not getting in, and that’s just the way it is. Always has been.

Persistence pays? Yes, I’ve heard that too, mostly from published literary types selling tips to writers who can’t get published, and maybe it’s true, worth a dabble perhaps, but don’t waste your life trying . Don’t spend decades hawking that novel, constantly raking back over old ground with rewrites, moving commas this way and that and coming up with yet one more killer submission, then beating yourself up when it’s rejected. Again. Don’t lie awake at night grinding your teeth, wondering what’s wrong with you, wondering why no one wants to publish your story. Chances are you’ll never know. So let it go, it’s done. Now write another.

What is a writer for? Do they create purely in order to give pleasure to others? Or do they do it for the money? Do they crave critical acclaim? Or is it more simply to satisfy a need in themselves? Why does anyone create anything that serves no practical purpose? I mean, come on, it’s just a story after all.

In my own writing I explore things, ideas that interest me. I enjoy painting and drawing too, but it’s the writing that gets me down to the nitty gritty, writing that is the true melting pot of thought, the alchemists alembic through which I attempt a kind of self-sublimation, a transformation from older, less skilful ways of thinking, and through which I try to make sense of a largely unintelligible world. The finished product, the novel, the story, the poem or whatever, is almost incidental, but until it’s finished the conundrum, the puzzle I’ve set myself isn’t complete. Completion is the last piece of the jigsaw, the moment of “Aha!” – or more often a wordless understanding that signifies a shift in consciousness, hopefully one in the right direction.

I know this isn’t what writing’s about for others. But most likely those others are a good deal younger than I am, and not as well acquainted with the realities of hawking the written word in exchange for a living. I’ve been writing for fifty years, never made a bean, haven’t even tried since ’98.  This is just the way it’s evolved for me, but don’t let that put you off. You do what you want. You may get lucky, or die trying.

How to get a novel published? Other than giving it away online, who knows? It’s always been a mystery to me, but in one sense persistence does indeed pay, in that it eventually yields a little known secret about getting yourself published, and I’ll share it with you now: when it comes to the art of writing, getting yourself published isn’t really the most important thing.

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The Road From Langholm Avenue – a Quixotic quest for meaning in life

There are two major weaknesses of the spirit – well,… there are more than two but we’ll keep this simple. One is the misconception that change must be resisted at all costs, the second is our inability to move on when everything we believe in turns out to have been false, or when everything we have or hold dear is erased by what we perceive to be an adverse fate.

An early lesson is unrequited love. Part of the  psyche begins to break through and we project it with a terrifying vigour onto an unfortunate member of the opposite sex. We fall in love with them but, hampered by our own pathological reticence, we cannot make our feelings known. Instead we believe the other party must know we love them, because how can they not? This love we feel is so elemental, so visceral, so spiritual, it’s like a sickness we cannot shake. Surely, it’s inevitable they will pick up on it somehow and, as is the way of all true love stories, we will have our happy ending?

Eventually we wise up to the fact the object of our desire is not in love with us, never was and never will be, and worse, that we might have wasted years in sad lament for this one love that was not reciprocated, nor even guessed at by the other party. What we earnestly believed in was one thing, the truth of the matter quite another. We look back wondering what the hell it was all for, and the truth is, actually,… nothing. Worse, unless we can overcome the void it leaves behind, it will cast a shadow over our potential for future happiness, future love.

Another lesson some of us encounter is when we invest several decades in a particular profession, say as an engineer working for a vast organisation manufacturing something we think is important, something we love doing. Then the economic plug is pulled, the era of de-industrialisation is born and our profession goes through a decade of decline – year on year friends and colleagues are handed their redundancy notices. And then maybe we’re made redundant ourselves, coming up on our middle years, having apparently wasted most of our lives establishing and perfecting skills that are now useless.

The shock of change, the shattering of long held beliefs leaves us naked before that ultimate of all existential questions: what am I doing here? And what the Hell was all that about if everything and everyone we ever loved can so easily and arbitrarily taken from us?

The protagonist of The Road From Langholm Avenue, Tom, a designer of marine engines, is facing the closure of the factory where he’s worked all his life, the prospect of long term unemployment and he’s about to go through a messy divorce, so the whole bedrock of his life has crumbled. He’s also haunted by memories of an unrequited affair from his schooldays with a girl called Rachel, as if in calling him back to his past, Rachel holds the key to his future. Powerless in all other respects, Tom sets out to do the one thing he feels capable of physically doing, and that’s finding Rachel and, regardless of her circumstances after a quarter of a century, asking her on a date.

The story of the unravelling of Tom’s life is contrasted by this Quixotic quest through which we learn of a woman, Rachel, who, unlike Tom, has dealt with tumultuous change throughout her life, reinventing herself at every turn. It takes spirit and a certain ruthlessness to avoid getting buried in the wreckage of the past, and Rachel is an expert, still fighting, still making something of herself every day while Tom is imprisoned, overwhelmed by a cloying sense of stagnation and decay.

Only when we’ve untangled ourselves do we see the opportunities in the present clearly enough and realise our purpose is not defined by anything in our past, be they objects or mind-constructed things, or group loyalties, or past loves. More, the one thing we fear to lose as a result of sweeping change, our sense of self, is the one thing we cannot lose. What we do risk though is holding our selves hostage to the past, by our inability to let it go.

Tom has his denouement with Rachel, and rejects his dying profession, sees his past bulldozed to make way for a housing estate, and he steps out into the wilderness of a post industrial, post millennial Britain.

In simple terms the existential quandary boils down to the fact that every time we wake up, we know our life is not over and, to paraphrase a famous movie quote, we can then ‘either get busy living, or get busy dying’. We needn’t take dying literally here, we can read it metaphorically. And most of us, if we’re honest, risk dying a little each day, poisoned by stuff we know to be toxic yet can’t seem to let go of.

 

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Breasting boobily – men writing about women.

For a male writer, it’s perhaps safer to write only as a man, and about men, that all the characters in our stories should be men, and the women no more than cardboard cutouts in the background labelled loosely: mother, sister, wife, love/sexual interest. Except that by doing so we eliminate half the population from our stories, and that would be silly because – you know – women can be interesting too!

But when we include women, and particularly when we try to write women characters, and especially in the first person, we risk making ourselves look ridiculous – especially to women – and that’s half our potential readership right there, laughing at us. It’s a terrifying prospect for any male writer who wants to be taken seriously! But knowing how women think is something men have been debating for millennia without coming to any satisfactory conclusions, so it would seem even the most diligent research on the subject is pointless. As for actually passing ourselves off as a female writer, with a female pseudonym, it would be a very brave man indeed who hoped to get away with that!

Apart from the monks among us, most men have at least some experience of women, so if we’re writing from experience, how come we’re prone to making such a hash of it? Don’t we take any notice of women at all – even the one’s we’re with? Could it be there’s something simplistic about the way we relate to women? For example how about this:

“She breasted boobily to the stairs and titted downwards.”

This little gem went viral on social media a while back and, yes, it’s a fair description of how a man might describe a woman in his story – what she looks like, what she did and how she did it. It’s exaggerated of course, but it drives the point home nicely. We do tend to relate on a physical level, eyes glued to bosoms and bums. All right, maybe as a man, what makes us notice a woman is what we find sexually attractive about her, or not, but if we’re introducing her as a character there must be something else about her that others – i.e. women – can relate to.

A woman might notice what the character is wearing and what that says about the person’s social, income and even moral standing – is she casually dressed, smart, frumpy, tarty? Does she look happy, sad, pensive? How does her appearance, her demeanour make you feel?

The fact she has bosoms probably wouldn’t be mentioned by a woman writer, any more than a man would write about another man having elbows – it’s simply a given that all human beings come equipped that way – unless the lady’s bosoms are the reason a guy got distracted, tripped over his feet and crashed into the water-cooler. Then it would be reasonable to mention them.

Altogether it would appear a lighter brush is needed when us chaps are writing women into our stories. We mustn’t get hung up doodling extra goggle-eyed detail into those erogenous zones – it’s all a bit adolescent. Yes, we’re programmed to respond that way, but we have to somehow transcend that level of thinking as writers of stories, realise there’s more to women than whatever it is that gets us going in the trouser department, unless of course, it’s a woman our male protagonist is interested in sexually. But even then, is it purely her physical appearance that attracts him? If it is, then say so, but accept that also says something about your guy, and is that really what you’re trying to flag to others?

What else is there? There must be something? The way she looks at him? The fact she bites her nails, taps her toe, fiddles with her hair. Why does she do that? The fact she likes re-runs of Mork and Mindy – what does that say about her? And why does he like that about her?

Now for the hard part: try imagining you’re a woman, writing as a woman, and what it is that attracts you to a man. Do you imagine it’s simply the bulge in the trouser department, or  the enormous, rippling gym-honed torso? If that’s all there is to it then fine, we can assume women are wired the same way as men – only the other way around. Except, that can’t be the case can it? Because why do you see so many good looking women hanging out with such defiantly unhealthy looking guys? Is there, after all, something fundamentally different about the way women relate to men? I mean why would they waste a body like that on such an unreformed slob? Could it be women see bodies differently – both men’s and their own?

You could have a stab along those lines: that it’s more something in his smile perhaps, or his eyes, or maybe it’s that a woman can tell a lot about a guy simply by the way he smells, and not so much by the things he says, as the things he doesn’t say. And if you’re really, really struggling, then try reading some books written by women. And if you want to know how they relate to others in an erotic way, then read some female erotica, but make sure it’s erotica written for women by women, not by men pretending to be women for men.

I’ve written ten novels now, so I’m sure I’ve come a cropper several times, had the girls breasting boobily all over the damned place. I suppose in one sense it doesn’t really matter if you get it wrong, because we’re all just amateurs writing online, aren’t we? But if you’re a big shot writer making millions, priding yourself on your authenticity, and you have your girls breasting boobily,… well, shame on you!

Of course the other argument is you’re wasting your time writing if you’re a man anyway, or at least flagging yourself as male with a male pseudonym, because an oft quoted and very discouraging statistic tells us 80% of readers these days are women and most of them prefer books by women, at least when it comes to genre stuff. About the only place left for men to write as men is  literature, but since no one’s reading much of that anyway these days no one’s going to notice, or care, if we’re breasting boobily or not.

How to write a woman into your story? There are no rules. Just do it,… but think about it, and in the process you might learn something.

 

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The Singing Loch and the Spirits of place

An occasional series looking back at my novels, and the themes I’ve explored in them.

Do your local beauty spots still do it for you?. Mine have been robbed of something, or rather something vital in them has died as the result of an unwholesome symbiosis, one in which the parasite kills the host rather like the ivy eventually strangles the tree. This is illustrated no more forcibly than by a bag of dog excrement hanging in a bush.

I don’t know why people do this, no more than I understand why they scatter beercans and fast food cartons. But this is at the level of detail and isn’t really important as details in themselves, but if we take it from a wider perspective all these things can be viewed more simply as manifestations of an urban sickness. The bag of excrement hanging from the tree, the empty drinks carton squashed and left to rot by the kissing gate, the beer-cans in the ditch, these are the focal points, the weapons of the urban terrorist, the blind hoards brain-washed into perpetrating their various atrocities, the release points for a particular kind of toxin that targets the spirits of place, causing them to shrink back, to flee, to seek out those remaining enclaves where such subtle entities as spirits can still survive in this our modern and increasingly insensitive world.

This talk of spirit is not religious, not pagan, not bonkers. The spirit of place is an imaginary concept, subjective, something both you and I might feel when we walk together through the forest at twilight, or mount the craggy fell-side in cloud dappled sunlight, yet we will visualise it, project it out into the world in different ways. It’s about imagination, and the personal story we lay upon the land. It’s a personal vision, yet one that unites us all, and nourishes us in something that is uniquely human.

Now, at the risk of offending most of the world’s population, which is by now gathered into cities and other blighted sprawling urban carbuncles, I see these as dead places and have shunned them all my life, except for quick forays when they cannot be avoided. But I always leave them feeling weakened, gasping for the quiet of trees and wild green where the story is not rendered unchanging and impersonal in cracked concrete, and crumbling for want of that essential imaginative overlay.

Cities kill something in us. Yes, they are supposed repositories of all our high art and culture, but they are also violent places, nurturing a culture of mistrust, of savvy street-smartness, teeming with the existential bacteria of scams and crime and all their futile countermeasures. The population density in such places may be many tens of thousands per square mile, yet no one knows one another. Paranoia is inevitable. They are grey places, void of any colour that is not artificial, and worse,… they spread.

When I was writing the Singing Loch in the eighties, I could still rely upon the occasional stretch of meadow, patch of woodland, or a twist of ancient pathway in and around my locale, here in the North West. But the builders were everywhere too, planting their flags like encamped armies. They were about the King of money’s business, colonisation of the otherwise “useless” green, turning it into labyrinths of brick and concrete and tar.

So I would flee north, to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. You could still find the spirits of place there, but there was also an appalling loneliness about them, as if the spirits were weeping, result of generations lost, cleared from their rented subsistence farms to make way for more profitable sheep. This is another aspect of the greyness, that it can leak out, manifest itself in far places to begin the process of corrosion, of corruption. I would return from the islands with sheep ticks attached to my elbows and back of knees, evidence the land was sick, and the spirits of place there quite possibly an illusion.

This is another aspect of the spirits of place; they border on the ancient lore of the Faery, need us as much as we need them, but they do not suffer fools gladly. This kind of thinking is very old, perhaps best expressed in the literature and the art of the Romantic period. It’s a much misunderstood philosophy, essentially a search for the sublime, literally something in us that dwells at a subliminal level, but which can be glimpsed by seeking its reflection in the natural world, the world as nature intended, or at the very least as the Daoists of old China would have it, most sympathetically crafted to the needs of mankind.

And when that vision is lost, when the Faery have fled, we are left with only the base animal in ourselves, and the very worst of mankind is manifested. Then the beer-cans in the hedge become the key that opens the door on less benign spirits, and all the shadow creatures that feed despair. Then the world becomes an empty place, a place of concrete and pollution, and money for the few, a world in which the butterflies are killed and pinned to be gawped at in glass cases, as if we could comprehend from such atrocity what it means to see these creatures alive in the wild on a warm summer’s day.

The environment can nurture that which is highest in human nature, or it can erode it, render it unconscious and entirely unfeeling and that we have largely lost sight of such a phenomenon bodes ill for all our futures. In my story the Singing Loch, the spirit of place is represented by the majestic titular loch, a place of renowned beauty, rich in sublime reflection, but a place that has been put out of bounds by corporate interests. In the story I tried to get at the importance of such places, and how their capture by monied interests threatens something vital in all of us. Yet such places are lost to us every day, carved up, quarried, mined, poisoned, the spirits evicted, the people left to rot in hovels, surrounded by piles of detritus, and the few remaining, sickly trees hung with bags of excrement.

The Singing Loch made not one jot of difference to any of this of course. Indeed things are a lot worse now than when I wrote it. But at least I managed to get it off my chest, and through the writing, come to understand a little better what it is I think and feel about such things. I’ve also become a little more philosophical, and sensitive I think to those rare places where the shy spirits still survive. It became long ago, very much part of the bedrock of my psyche, and in writing to understand what it is I think about it, I find I’m still very much in agreement with my former self.

 

 

 

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