…Madame Bovary…?

I can’t decide if this is an act of genius or madness, but kudos to Waterstones for the…unorthodox…marketing decision.

It has been harder than I thought it would be to start the next book. It has been so long since I started with an empty page, I forgot the terror of it. There is terror in redrafting and editing as well, of course, but it is a different kind of fear. Horror films have taught us that it is what is unseen that has the greatest capacity to cause fear. What is written may be good or bad, but it can be confronted. The unwritten book lives in a nightmare, and you have to pluck it out of that nightmare one fearful word at a time.

I made all the excuses I could – the need to do more planning, more reading. To get all my marking and other work out of the way, to wait until my flu had passed. The excuses went on for a few weeks, until I realised what was going on. That I was simply afraid. Eight years of writing and a book deal, and I’m still scared. I got angry then, and just in time. Anger is the easiest cure for cowardice that I know.

And when I began again, I felt that familiar, weary relief descend. Not the sense that this is what I am meant or destined to do, for there is no such thing. But it is what I want to do, and what I love to do, the action that makes the world make sense to me. I remember the first time I felt that relief, out in a bookshop in Greece, where I knew that I couldn’t give it up, that I wanted to write no matter what did or did not come of it. I don’t know if that was the happiest day of my life, but it was certainly the one when I felt most at peace.

The writing comes slow and sure for now, but I know that won’t last. The first month is fun and easy. The second month is fun and hard. Then the third is boring and hard, the fourth it is boring, hard, and I will be convinced that it is irredeemably terrible. By month five, I will get the screaming horrors and want to throw it all away. By month six, it will have become habit, like brushing my teeth or cereal for breakfast. It will not be a question of whether or not I can do it. It will be the thing that I do everyday, and all questions of good and bad will be left aside for another time.

When it gets hard, which it will soon, I will try to find comfort in what one of my old tutors, David Morley, once said. Every time you start a novel, you have to learn how to write all over again. Because no one has written this book before, and you have to teach yourself how to do it. There shouldn’t be comfort in being a perpetual beginner, but there is. It keeps you humble, and curious.

Just before I began again, perhaps knowing that I was going to need a spur of some kind, I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It was a lucky choice, and one of the most quietly joyful and soulful books about writing that I have read. I’ll leave you with one of my favourite passages, about writing, and beginning again.

“It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”

The Bad Sex Awards should be required reading for any writer pondering just what kind of metaphor or adjective will best capture the physical act of love, but if you are still tempted by graphic sex in your writing, perhaps these words will dissuade you, as expressed by good old Mary Renault…

“If characters have come to life, one should know how they will make love; if not it doesn’t matter. Inch-by-inch physical descriptions are the ketchup of the literary cuisine, only required by the insipid dish or by the diner without a palate.”

I recently did a rather fun Q&A session over at Reddit (though the first question, “Is your book good?” had me stumped for a while.) Interestingly, the most upvoted question was not about drafting or editing or planning, but about the initial query letter to an agent.

It makes sense, I suppose, in that it is the most obvious and direct first hurdle to taking your writing forward professionally, and so the one that is worried about the most.

Below is the query letter I wrote that lead to me getting an agent. Some of the letter was later used to pitch to publishers, and has been used yet again by the publishers in their press releases, so something, evidently, went right. I’ve included a ‘director’s commentary’ in bold on some of the things to consider when writing it – be sure to drop me a line in the comments if you’ve got any further questions about writing a query letter.

Whilst getting some shelving done at after a few days away from the shop, it brought me great joy to be sorting out the Music section and to find this little number nestled up next to the violin and piano how to guides…

Genius.

Your agent calls. She’s set up a meeting with the editor.

You may have met already when the deal was being negotiated, but this is the first time you’ve seen each other since the contract has been inked. The previous meeting may have been tense but understandable – you knew then what was at stake. Now you realise, suddenly and rather embarrassingly, that you have only the vaguest idea of how a manuscript becomes a published novel. This meeting is a step out into the unknown.

You’ll ask your agent something professional sounding about contracts or process, to buy time. Your pride will probably prevent you from actually asking the questions you want to, which are “What the hell am I supposed to do at this meeting?” and “Will you please come with me?”. You may try a more neutral “Will you be there?”, trying not to sound too pathetic, only to be politely, firmly rebuffed.

You realise, with a certain sadness, that you won’t be working with the agent on this book any more. Her job has been done, and it is only proper that she hands over to the editor, but she’s been a part of your creative landscape for so long that it is painful to have her leave it. You console yourself with the thought of working with her on the next book, and ready yourself to meet your new creative partner in crime.

You will dither over what to wear, so save yourself some time and just wear jeans and a blazer, like every other aspiring writer who thinks they invented smart casual. No, don’t put on a tie. Of course you’re much too early to the publisher’s office, like you are for an interview. It’s an association that instantly makes you twice as nervous, as you go for a few half hearted victory laps around the block to kill some time.

You’re in the office for just a moment, wandering around like a lost intern, before being whisked back out again to the nearest pub. You sit down with no small amount of trepidation. The relationship with the agent will have gotten so comfortably familiar that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to sit down with a stranger to talk about your work, how alarmingly intimate it feels to have them handling a portion of your brain and wondering what changes to make. When someone has read your book, it feels as though they know everything about you, and you know nothing about them, and the imbalance can be unsettling.

Luckily, there is going to be plenty to drink. Publishing is an engine that runs on gossip and is lubricated by expense accounted drinks, and, as you will fortunately discover, these drinks are distributed on a strict hierarchy that favours the writer. Agents buy for editors, and editors buy for authors. In fact, everyone buys for authors, because they have no money and always look like they need a drink. So just focus on getting the first pint or three down, and everything will go smoothly from there. Mind you, make sure you keep your drinks simple. Lager is good, gin and tonic even better. Straight whisky is a little posy, stout and bitter probably harmful to your exciting young writer image. Cocktails are right out.

You’ll spend about 90% of the time gossiping about other writers and listening to publishing scandal stories (don’t worry, they’re good stories) and 10% of your time actually talking about your book. Great affection will be expressed towards your work that you’ll pretend to bat away, mentally storing every word up to feast on later. Editorial changes will be mentioned vaguely, but you’re no stranger to changes by now, and so you can nod and smile and deal with them when they come through. You’ll get vague hints about timetables, what will happen when, but little concrete information, everything clouded in conditionals. Perhaps it is better this way. You aren’t quite ready for the dream to be made solid yet.

The whole thing rapidly becomes friendly, and reassuringly irreverent. You may have imagined your tender brainchild being brutalised at the hands of some corporate assassin, but you’ve got be daft to be in the book trade, it’s no place for a businessman these days. They’re just as mad as you are, you realise, a whole industry built out of slightly crazy people who are in love with books, lurching from one catastrophe to the next, somehow staying in business. You’re going to be at home here.

Afterwards, as you weave your way home, pleasantly drunk, you’ll reflect on the meeting. Something happened, but you aren’t really sure what. You imagine that there will be dozens of lunchtime chats and boozy afternoons like this where nothing seems to happen, and yet all the time your book is ricocheting from one meeting to another, slouching towards publication, waiting to be born.

So, at last, it has happened. The ambition of every aspiring writer. You have a book deal.

Even if you’ve tried to be sensible, you’ve dreamed of this moment for almost as long as you’ve been writing. The moment when you will be transformed, in the single stroke of a pen, from just another wannabe to being a contender, a published author.

And when it happens, at first you won’t believe it. You’ll check your phone log, to confirm that you have not just had a particularly vivid hallucination. Yes, your agent did call you that morning. No, you are not going mad.

The first moments are joyful and intense. There will be tears, and there may also be shouting, swearing, gleeful hand rubbing, and perhaps bad dancing depending on the content of your character.

After you’re done dancing around the flat and calling everyone you know, there is the perhaps inevitable anticlimax. The days that follow can take on the character of the phoney war. The contracts haven’t even been signed yet. There is no more money in your bank account – not yet at least, and even when it comes, it’ll come in bits and pieces. You’re still going to the same job, assuming you haven’t quit it in a bridge burning act of foolishness.

Nothing has changed, and it won’t for a while. It takes a year for a book to come out, and though the metaphor is overused, perhaps this moment is like seeing the blue line on a pregnancy test. A life changing event that is all future and no present. For weeks and months, you’ll be waiting for your new life to start.

Nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. The world is a different one to the one you were in a few hours before. The future remains uncertain, but it is a different breed of uncertainty to the one you’ve grown used to. Before, you wondered if you’d ever see your work in print, when and if and how it would come to pass, whether or not you were one of the many who would never make it, how long you’d be willing to try before giving it all up. Now you’ve had an upgrade in uncertainty – will the cover look horrible? Will it get a cutting review? Will it get any reviews? Will anyone even read it? But these are pleasurable things to worry about, especially if you keep your head and realise you are lucky to be worrying about them at all.

There is only one tangible change to your life in the present tense. It is small but pleasurable, and it is the warm, loving relief of those around you.

To your surprise, you realise they were holding their breath as much as you were, had almost as much at stake as you did. Because they could see how much you wanted it, and so they wanted it to. They knew the saddening and diminishing effect that failure would have on you, because they’d seen it before on the last thing you tried to write.

When you’re writing a book, it feels like the loneliest thing in the world. A long, difficult, entirely unsupported act of faith and madness. And yet as soon as it is taken on by a publisher, you realise just how many people you have depended on to help you write it. The tutor who told you ‘You’ve got it’, the friends who let you talk their ears off about your crazy little dream, the parents who supported you all the way through.

When you dream of that book deal, you dream of an instant and everlasting validation of your ambition, an advance that will buy you a house, the girl or boy of your dreams suddenly falling madly in love with you. These are things you do not get. What you do get instead is a sense of gratitude to all the people who you were leaning on without even realising it. And like any surprise gift, it is a feeling that is both unexpected, and quite wonderful.