a gallimaufry

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

Golden Egg Academy

Once again I have been ignoring this blog… Increasingly, I wonder what it’s for, maybe it will just peter out… 

My latest excuse is that my free time is being hoovered up by the Golden Egg Academy’s 12-week course Write Your Successful Children’s Novel. An embarrassingly long time ago now I actually completed a children’s book which was, in retrospect, objectively terrible on pretty much every level. But I did finish it, which is something! Anyway, I sent it to a few agents and unsurprisingly none expressed the tiniest amount of interest.

I didn’t give up, and started writing another book which I think has more promise – at least this one has some dramatic tension, for a start. However, I kept changing my mind about fundamental aspects of it and starting again and faffing. Eventually I conceded that I really didn’t have much idea what I was doing and if I wanted ever to produce something a child might want to read, I would have to pull myself together, inject some discipline and get some help.

The Golden Egg Academy was set up by Imogen Cooper, who used to be Editorial Director at Chicken House. She felt frustrated that she received many interesting submissions which had promise but needed much more work and guidance than a publisher could give. In particular, there were talented writers who did not understand the craft of writing, or how writing for children differs from writing for adults. The Academy offers courses and workshops for picture book writers as well as novel writers, of different lengths and for writers at different stage of their writing process. It is unusual in that it is specifically for children’s books and the team is made up of industry professionals rather than writers or academics.

I am really enjoying the course I’m following. There’s one module per week, with videos, slides and tasks, and at the moment we are grappling with my great bugbear, structure. (One of my great bugbears, should I say.) Although there are live Zoom and FaceBook sessions (yes I have finally joined FaceBook but only for this course!), plus feedback on the beginning of your novel, you can do most of it at your own pace and the materials remain accessible for the duration of the universe. This is a terrific bonus if you have a job, a family or other demands on your time. There’s also a FaceBook group for everyone on the course where we can talk shop, which is fun. Everyone is lovely and friendly. I mean, if my novel would just write itself now I would be in heaven.

So for now I am going to go back to my post-it notes and my 32,000 flabby words. I will also try and write a bit more here, and I have two books to review for Shiny New Books which both look exciting. But you’ll have to wait for those...

 

September again

Hello! Remember me?

Over this long, hot summer I have occasionally contemplated posting something here. But I have not.

Reader, I have mainly been lying on the sofa grumbling about the weather.

I have not even read very much, because I have joined Twitter and I cannot cope. There is so much information! I have to spend eight hours a day just reading updates from people I don’t know and watching important films of animals doing amusing things! Fortunately, I have no friends except for a bot, so I don’t have to write anything interesting myself.

I am at @hejparry should you wish to say hello because I am far too weedy to introduce myself to anyone.

Although I did read Barchester Towers which I unreservedly recommend to you all despite my being on Team Slope the whole time and thus doomed to disappointment.

(How I spent the summer in my imagination: Claude Monet, La Liseuse (The Reader), 1872; oil on canvas; Walters Art Collection, found here)

I have written some more of my second novel. The first one was objectively bad in every way. This one I hope is going to be an improvement on that low bar. I am now on about draft number five and when I have finished it, it will be akin to most people’s first drafts i.e. still a baggy mess. I keep changing my mind about significant elements and then have to start again. When people describe Important Qualities for a Writer, they don’t usually mention Decisiveness and yet it should be there. I am mostly enjoying the experience and would do more if I could let go of the worry: will this ever be any good? Ultimately, of course, I want it to be read and loved by actual children and so it has to be extremely good.

(I did also bake some cakes with my daughter for her party)

And finally, although I do not watch much television, I did watch Marriage, and I am here to tell you all that all the people who disliked it are Wrong. It is often uncomfortable, but brilliant.

What have you been doing? What can you recommend?

 

is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?

In the comments on last Monday’s post on The Flint Anchor, Lory asked this excellent question:

‘Is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?’

I have many Thoughts about this, which I couldn’t really cram into a reply to her there; instead, I’ll bore you with them here. As Sir Humphrey might say, ‘Well, yes and no.’

(Constantin Hansen, The Artist’s Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book, 1826; Statens Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Denmark; found here)

A writer is of course not obliged to anyone in their writing, they are completely free. I am still pottering about writing my second attempt at a children’s book and I am doing whatever I please. I cannot say, however, that the results so far are anything I’d want anyone else to read. The characters are weak and keep shifting about, they mess up the vague plot I am trying to follow, or I change my mind, or I realise there’s a massive hole in it, or it gets just dreadfully boring. If a reader bought it from a bookshop or borrowed it from a library, they would be appalled.

Therefore, I would argue that a writer does have to fulfil a few obligations if they expect readers to read their work. And I termed those obligations as ‘pleasures’ – not perhaps the best word to use. However, I do believe that a novel, like any work of art, should provide a form of pleasure to at least some of its readers; and by ‘pleasure’ I mean it should provide some sort of aesthetic, emotional, intellectual or even educational satisfaction. And when you slide a book off a shelf and open it, you do so in expectation of one of those forms of satisfaction.

That satisfaction might take the form of characters who feel ‘real’ to you, it might be a delight in the language the writer has used, it might be in the recognition that the writer has expressed something true about the world, it might be an eagerness to find out what happens next, it might be learning about life in sixteenth-century Florence... When you read a novel that provides you with no form of satisfaction on any of these levels, you feel that the novel is ‘bad’ or ‘poorly written’. And this is what I mean by ‘pleasure’, ill-chosen as the word is.

Some of these pleasures – the emotional ones, I’d say – are more easily evoked in the reader. Bestsellers tend to provide them: excitement, fear, identification with the characters. Others are harder to discern or are those that many readers don’t enjoy. We might here think of the difference between Riders and The Waves, both of which offer pleasure to readers but of different sorts, reflected in their respective sales figures.

The ‘expectation’ of such a pleasure is not unreasonable in a reader, and so to that extent I would answer, yes, the writer does have an obligation here. But this is one interpretation of Lory’s question and it’s not I think what she meant by it. (I could be wrong! Lory – tell me!) She is, I believe, thinking of readers’ expectations in terms of dictating how that pleasure is delivered. And to that I would answer, with her, ‘No’.

Does a novel have to have characters who feel ‘real’ to you? No. Nor does it have to have characters who are likeable or admirable. It doesn’t have to be moral or tell you how to live. It doesn’t have to have a compelling plot, or beautiful writing, or strike you at a deep emotional level. A reader might expect or hope for or want these elements, and might be annoyed if they didn’t find them in a novel – but that might well be a failure of reading. We don’t read Agatha Christie for complex characterisation; we don’t read James Joyce for unicorns; we don’t read Tolstoy for laughs.

There are plenty of writers, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, who choose to subvert expectations in their work. This may upset some readers. It can lead to novels which are challenging, not easy to read, but it can create exciting fiction. A ‘good’ writer does this while retaining some element of pleasure, even if some or perhaps many readers do not notice it: a ‘bad’ writer makes a mess. A ‘good’ reader, in my opinion, tries to approach every book with an open mind and let the book show them how to read it. (This doesn’t mean we should all ‘enjoy’ every novel published but if we want to pass an informed judgement on it we should be alert to ‘pleasures’ that we may not personally enjoy.)

Here’s an example of the difference between the expectations a writer should satisfy and the expectations a writer should not. You want to read a detective novel, you’re in the mood for it. Detective novels have certain conventions, the most obvious being: there’s a crime and the detective solves it. You, an avid reader of detective fiction, understand these conventions.

The novel proceeds in the usual way, crime, detective, but then, at the end – the author doesn’t tell you who the murderer was! You’re outraged! But that’s the point. Now you’re thinking about why you’re outraged, you’re re-evaluating what you’ve just read... The novelist has subverted your expectations but in a way that causes you to question them, to re-categorise the novel not as a whodunnit but as something else... It’s a form of satisfaction.

Now you pick up a second detective novel. The writing is ridden with clichés, the characters are stereotypes and the reason for the crime implausible – the whole thing is silly. On no level are you satisfied. This book has abided by the conventions, the expectations of a detective novel, but it has failed to deliver any form of satisfaction.

What do you think? How would you answer the question?

And many thanks to Lory, for posing it.

on how i spend my time now

I haven’t written about a book I’ve read this week because I have hardly been reading. Instead, I am completely addicted to the television series Line of Duty.

I had decided to watch the latest series, Series 6, as it’s shown on BBC1 because my friends are watching it. I thought the first episode was so compelling that I then rushed to the library to borrow the DVDs of the previous series. And for the last week, every moment when I haven’t been preparing lessons, teaching, cleaning, being nice to my family or waiting on the whims of the cats and the hens, I have been glued to series 1 and 2.

The series is what I would term at the macho end of the artistic scale: guns, police raids, brutality, corruption, crazy plot twists, no time to sniff the roses. Characters trot out jargon and standard phrases but the quality of the acting means that their expressions, their eyes, are often telling us more than their words. The phrase ‘line of duty’ takes on a metaphorical quality pretty early on. What and where is that line? Who crosses it (practically everyone) and why? Is it fixed? Loyalty to your colleagues is the highest virtue; how far can you let that take you before you cross the line? Line of Duty doesn’t provide any easy answers to this, everyone gets dirty one way or the other.

The two series I’ve watched so far feature the same central characters, who work for AC-12, an anti-corruption unit that investigates bent coppers. In the first series we watch the trajectory of a successful and popular detective inspector who, in order to cover up his ‘weak spot’, is drawn further and further into a web of criminality and corruption. The actor who plays him, and the writing, are so good that even as we are revolted by his actions we feel his anguish, his conviction that this is not who he is. His struggles form the core of the story. He is a classical tragic hero.

In the second series, the central character under investigation is more ambiguous. Hitherto an exemplary detective who has impoverished herself paying for her mother’s care in a home, she is (eventually) the sole survivor of an ambush on a protected witness and three police officers. Did she knowingly lead them into the ambush or has she been set up as the fall guy? Has she just been trying to do the right thing? As the series develops, we see the officers investigating her also make bad choices, commit adultery, hide their financial problems and lie about connections to the investigation in order to protect themselves or their friends. The series asks: are some actions acceptable in some circumstances and not in others? Why?

I am now impatiently waiting for the library to re-open tomorrow so that I can borrow the third series. I am also amazed that anyone remains in the police force since so many officers end up dead or compromised!

(Quentin Blake, illustration for ‘The Pig’ in Dirty Beasts by Roald Dahl, ink and watercolour, from here)

Meanwhile... I am trying to write a second children’s book. So far I have written one full draft. Then I started typing this up and got halfway through when I realised that my Cunning Plan for switching viewpoints in alternate chapters was actually a Terrible Idea. Now I have started again although with bits of the First Draft, telling the story just from one viewpoint – which has necessitated quite a bit of moving things around and changing things. I’ve also cut a sub-plot.

At the moment I have two major problems. One is trying to keep organised as I rewrite, but maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about that and hope that Future Helen sorts it out at the next stage. The other is that I now have a narrator who is a servant in an alternate nineteenth-century northern England. Obviously, her words will be read, not spoken, but I sort-of don’t want her to sound terribly middle-class while at the same time I don’t want her to end up either like Joseph in Wuthering Heights (unreadable!) or like a patronising stereotype (‘Oo arrh madam I do be heartily sorry’). My present solution is to get her to use a lot of idioms but I am not sure how well that’s working.

Anyway – I recommend Line of Duty. All of those years when people were saying it was good – they were right! Surprise! Is anyone else out there a fan?

a late start

Hello and a happy new year!

(Virginia Lee, clay sculpture and drawing; from her blog here)

I suppose I’ve been hibernating, in a way, these past few months. It turns out that December was quite a difficult month for me and by the time we reached the holidays all I wanted to do was hide and read. And then the transition period for Brexit ended, and there we were, me here in Belgium and my fellow countrymen in Britain, and even though I was completely prepared for it and knew what to expect, I suddenly felt excluded and rejected by my own country. Which was irrational, but there we are.

Anyway, after that massive whinge I can assure you I am feeling a lot better now. ‘What’s happening in Belgium?’ I hear you cry. Well, like everyone else we are mainly avoiding other people and most things – museums, galleries, theatres, cafés – are closed. Schools are not, although secondary schools and adult education centres are providing a mixture of online and in-school lessons. Hairdressers have just re-opened! People all across the land fluffed their grey roots and danced for joy. (Not me, as I’m a home-haircut person.) We’ve just had a verrrry cold week, which displeased the hens. We were warned by experts that icicles Can Be Dangerous. I played in the snow and never knowingly wore fewer than three pairs of socks.

(Boris Zvorykin, illustration for Snegurochka, 1925; gouache and ink; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

I’ve read a lot of good books and I will write about some of them here. I might change some things about this blog, I might not. I’ve been practising driving the car (I had about eleventy billion lessons in the summer and autumn, and now I have a special learner’s licence which means I can drive alone without my husband!!!!). The driving part is not so bad and I can now do this without turning into a trembling wreck, but I’m not terribly accurate at parking. Yet.

And I’ve gritted my teeth and got back to work on novel #2. It had been languishing since April last year. I had written a first draft, and then made a proper plan, and got halfway through a second draft when I abandoned it. Blowing the dust off it, I’ve realised that narrating it from two alternating viewpoints wasn’t working so I have been changing and planning some more and pulling out a subplot that was a bit rubbish. (A lot rubbish.) And then the wonderful Golden Egg Academy ran a series of free seminars for aspiring children’s writers over one weekend. The seminars were great: inspiring but also very practical and full of tips you could take away and put to immediate use. Judging by them, Golden Egg’s creative writing courses are extremely good and worth every penny but even so sadly beyond the gallimaufry purse at present (and anyway my writing is still very much a self-indulgence and not really a serious pursuit). So this was truly an opportunity and a boon.

I found a tiny snowdrop in our front garden this morning. That seems as good a sign as any to wriggle out of my nest of dead leaves and moss and emerge blinking into 2021.

hello 2020!

Happy New Year (belatedly). I hope that you all had lovely holidays. I did!

I don’t usually make New Year’s Resolutions because in the past I tended to make a massive list which was a complete overhaul of all my foul habits and terrible personality traits, and then after two days I’d have failed massively and would spend the rest of January, generally my least favourite time of year, feeling depressed and frustrated at what a total LOSER I was. (In addition to all my other terrible personality traits.)

However, 2020 seems rather a special moment, perhaps it’s the pleasing rhythm of the digits. It may be counter-intuitive to be cheerful when the year has begun with climate apocalypse, Australia on fire, Iraq and the US squaring off and authoritarianism on the rise around the world, and yet I am. And in this cheerful mood I have made some Resolutions! My cunning plan: to keep them small and on the vague side.

1. give more attention to a gallimaufry

I am going to find more time for this blog. Writing book reviews is very time consuming and I find mine tend to plod rather, and in any case I like the conversational aspect of blogs. So I might change what I write about a bit. (All right, this is VERY vague but I think it’s something that will evolve rather than be imposed.)

I also intend to run Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week again – watch this space!

2. read more widely

To break out of my fiction addiction I am going to read one non-fiction book, one long poem or one play a month. (At least one – I can read more.) This month I finally opened Alan Clark’s Diaries, which has been sitting shrink-wrapped on my shelves since 1994. (Alan Clark was a Tory MP who served in Mrs Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments, during which time he kept diaries which he subsequently published, I wouldn’t say they were scandalous but they did ruffle a few feathers as I recall.) I intend to post about this.

Loosely associated with this plan is a resolution to go as long as possible without buying any new books! This is actually Chris’s idea, which I have filched. (I had already bought a book when I read his post, so I am starting now BUT I am not sure I shall publicly announce when I do buy my next book because it might just be too shaming. I am a very weak person.)

3. finish my novel

I’m going to finish writing my second book (I started it in the summer holidays but have had so much work to do I’ve been unable to touch it since). Perhaps it will be better than the first one!

4. have more fun

It occurred to me that I am turning into a boring humourless middle-aged git. Oh no! Therefore, I am going to spend less time obsessively reading and ranting about politics and more time having fun. To this end I have already got drunk on fancy beer (the cats were very lucky that I couldn’t find the Marmite when I got home as I intended to smear them with it, one of my friends told me it was a flea-deterrent, though since then I’ve discovered that the cats are supposed to eat it not wear it) and bought some sheet music so I can start playing the piano again. This has got off to a good start.

What about you? Do you ever make New Year’s Resolutions – or are you already perfect? Heheh. If you’ve made any this year, what are they (or the ones you’ll publicly confess to, anyway)?

writing progress

(Alas, this painting is untitled and uncredited but bears an uncanny resemblance to me in writing mode)

In February I wrote that I had revised the children’s book I wrote and, filled with hatred and loathing for it, submitted it for The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. The long list was released on the last day of May and my book was not on it. Frankly I was not surprised and had been telling myself it would not be listed since the moment I had submitted it. But still I was illogically a bit disappointed, I suppose I had hoped that it did actually have some merit I just hadn’t noticed.

I had also submitted it to a couple of agents but failed to garner the slightest interest. Two agents (or was it three?) aren’t that many but since I had lost faith in the book it seemed wrong to expect other people to slog through it.

Anyway, onwards and upwards and I’ve started on a new children’s book and am enjoying working on it. After the first chapter (not the first chapter any more) it progressed slowly as I was reading and thinking and planning some of it, but I had time in July to write down quite a lot of it, it really felt as if I was just slapping the words down on the page and much of it came more easily than the first book had done. This felt good. At the moment I am writing to find out what happens. I have some characters and a rough plot but I don’t know how it ends yet. I think about each chapter and then write it down and then think about where the next one will go. I don’t mind if it’s rough, but when something feels flat or boring, I don’t persevere with it I scrap it and try something different. This is a difference to the last book, in which I was quite wedded to the plot and I think it got dull in places but I didn’t want to change it. I am also trying to keep description to a minimum...

It’s strange and exposing writing about this here because I am shy of showing either of the books to anyone. I want them to be read but also never read. When it comes to writing books, if they are never published then it’s easy to consider yourself a failure and it’s very likely that these posts about my fiction writing are just going to turn into a very public account of my failure. But I think that’s important. Trying and failing are what most of creative work consists of, yet we prefer to speak publicly only of the successes.

I’d also like these posts to be a reminder to myself that I am writing for my own pleasure as much as anything else. And the more I think about how the story might go and what shape it might take, the more I notice and appreciate this in novels I read. Having studied English Literature at university, I am always to some extent aware of how a novel is working as I read it, but now I am stopping and analysing bits more consciously again, and going back and finding books I’ve read and looking at how they create certain effects, or move between scenes, or build up tension. And this is a good thing in itself to do. To look at the craft of the novel. It seems more physical than words in my head, on the page.

writing progress

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to enter my novel in The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. Before I could do this, I had to revise it. After I first owned up to having written it, both my mother and a kind but also very knowledgeable blogger offered to read and comment on it. Their feedback indicated revisions and I got started on this. Alas, my teaching hours from September to the middle of January gave me no time to continue and it’s only in the last few weeks I’ve been able to get back to it. The deadline for submission is the end of February, not a great deal of time.

And I found, going back to it, that I had completely lost faith in it. It’s hard to judge your own work, I think; at times I thought it was all right, at least in places, but now I think that it just isn’t any good not all the way through, like a stick of rock with ‘this isn’t very good’ written all the way through it. I’ve revised it but not enough really, even if the original idea were strong enough the rest of it isn’t. The other day I just got really fed up and submitted it anyway (then instantly realised I’d forgotten to resolve something, only a very tiny detail but still, sloppy, oops). I suspect it isn’t terribly professional to submit something just because you hate it so much you don’t want to see it any more, but then the advantage the amateur has is that she is not professional. Then I stuffed the final draft and my notebooks into a box and closed it. Joy!

Now I am feeling very cheerful and free. I am having lots of ideas for the next book, maybe they’re better and stronger. One thing I have learnt from writing the first book is that no matter how much you want to fling yourself into your chair and start writing, it is much better to do some research (in this case, because it’s going to be a sort-of historical novel) and planning – the world you’re going to write about, the characters, where roughly the plot is going. Though not too much planning because that would kill it for me, and as long as I’m an amateur, writing as a hobby, the main point is for me to enjoy doing it as who knows if anyone else will ever read it anyway. So, onwards!

(Sadly this is not me writing but Christine de Pizan, an illustration in The Book of the Queen (c. 1410) in the British Library, BL MS Harley 4431, fol. 4r; from here)

i wrote a book but it's just the beginning

(H.M. Brock, detail of illustration to Mansfield Park, published by Dent in 1898, found here; this is what I look like when writing at my elegant escritoire)

A while ago I wrote that I had written a children’s novel – well, the first draft of one. Since then I have completely rewritten it once, typed it up with some revisions, revised it a further two or three times, to be honest I’ve forgotten how many, and grown to hate it. I have even started working on a sequel.

My original plan had been an experiment: could I write a novel rather than just giving up? As I worked on it, had flashes of excitement, enjoyed it, hated it and avoided having anything to do with it, I grew a bit more ambitious. What if it were worth publishing? The trouble is, I genuinely have no idea. I have never been any good at judging my own work – at school I would leave every exam glum and convinced I had failed, whether my result turned out to be a C or an A; I could not tell the difference in my performance. Was my book an A-grade book or a F-grade?

Feedback was of course required. I read it to my daughter yes yes she is biased and hates hurting people’s feelings, but she is an actual child. She told me she liked it but it would be better if the main character were called Astrid and she added that her favourite bits were the bits with the cats.

Then, I don’t quite know what possessed me, but I wrote an outline and submitted the book to two agents. I didn’t honestly think that they would dance about with excitement and offer to represent me, but I wanted to see if the first three chapters and the outline were interesting enough for them to ask to see the full book, and then I might perhaps get some ideas from them on how to improve my work. (Now I type that on the screen I realise how entitled that looks: agents! Please devote your time and energy to teaching me how to write a novel!)

Unsurprisingly, one agent has never replied (their site warnw that after eight weeks you should assume that they’re not interested); another replied very promptly to say it wasn’t for them. No feedback, although the second agent did send some useful links for companies specialising in editorial services and a forum where writers can give feedback on each other’s work. (The second agent also noted that they receive thousands of submissions every year and only request the full manuscript on a handful of occasions; this was both heartening and depressing.)

Friends, I felt downcast. Like many people who were moderately good at writing stories as a child, I dreamt of being a writer but put the idea out of my head as I grew older. I studied English Literature at university and if you’re spending all your time reading Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare it’s hard to believe that you have anything to say that’s worth the tree deaths. (But this is silly: every age needs their writers and their stories.) I had told myself that writing was for other, special people to do, not people like me. Now I felt as if my dream were dying a second time.

And then I remembered that pretty much all the writing advice I’ve ever seen has stipulated: persevere. Keep learning and keep on trying. I spent a chunk of Friday reading about writers who persevered for years and years and received hundreds of rejections before they finally succeeded in getting published. Some wrote three – three! – long novels which still languish somewhere in a bottom drawer before they produced anything publishable. And I also read some of the comments on the writers’ forum in which people said that they would always carry on writing whether they were published or not, because they enjoyed it.

I realised that I had indeed been extraordinarily arrogant in assuming the first book-length piece of writing I churned out – in fact, the only piece of fiction I had written since I was a teenager – would be good enough to publish or be read by any but my nearest and dearest. All of these writers had devoted many hours, years even, of their lives to honing their craft, analysing their own and others’ work, pushing themselves. Some had attended MA courses in creative writing, some hadn’t, but all of them had something valuable in common which I had not: they had taken their writing seriously, not as some sort of hobby. They were not amateurs in their mindset, as I had been.

On Friday, thus, I stood at a crossroads. I could either commit to my writing and say that this was worth doing, or I could give up and spend the time reading instead. I have to admit, the second option was pretty tempting: clearly I am not one of those people who would die if they weren’t writing, because for many years I have got on just fine without it. Or almost just fine: although writing fiction has been a struggle that hasn’t always been pleasant, it has given me something that nothing else in my life quite has.

Anyway, I decided to commit. Or to commit for a while anyway (no, I’m not very good at commitment!). The best next step would be to send my work to an editorial service – not that the book itself is necessarily salvageable, but I need to know its weaknesses and work on them, and I don’t seem very good at identifying them myself. However, commitment or no commitment I cannot afford to do this. I considered joining the writer’s forum but at the moment I feel a bit scared of them all. I think I’ll lurk for a bit and when I’m feeling braver I’ll sign up and offer some of them some feedback and then maybe post a bit of mine... Then, luckily, I remembered my mother! I know that it’s not a terribly good idea to ask your nearest and dearest for their opinions on your work, but my mother used to be an editor, and of children’s books, as it happens. This was a long time ago and tastes have changed, but still, she is smart and honest and I feel quite certain she will have some useful comments for me.

I may not be able to afford an editorial services or an MA in creative writing, but I can read some books about writing and educate myself. I have a couple already and have ordered a couple more. Maybe I’ll write about some of them here?

Meanwhile, another important piece of advice for new writers which I’ve read a lot is: put the book away and get on with something new. I am a bit stuck on the sequel and anyway, there doesn’t seem a great deal of point in killing myself over the sequel to a book no one may ever read (apart from my mum!) but I have lots of ideas for something completely different which I am excited about.

Why am I writing all of this here? Well, on Friday, reading what other writers had written about their failures as well as successes made an enormous difference to me; they probably are the one reason I haven’t given up (yet). And I have also learnt a lot from reading the posts and articles of writers both at the beginning of their careers and further on. I decided, therefore, that I would occasionally write a bit about my adventures in writing here on this blog. Whether I ultimately become a professional writer or give up, what happens to me might interest another writer and cheer them up on a dank Friday when they’re thinking about giving up. And it might perk this blog up a bit...