Creating & Compromise (pt 2)

The last post was a bit of a brain-dump, I know.

I was also worried it ended so abruptly a reader might get the impression I… don’t want to be traditionally published, and clearly, that’s not true at all. If it was true, I wouldn’t care about about downsides and difficulties of this particular creative ambition, namely getting published.

The reason I think it’s important to talk about it is because sometimes it feels like a secret. And I don’t think it should be.

I’ve mentioned my day job a few times in this blog. I love my job, fortunately, partly because I get to work with incredibly clever, creative students sparkling with enthusiasm. I love that. I don’t think I’d change that even if I did shockingly well with writing, somehow.

But in my last job, I worked with Creative Writing and Literature students. Hell, I’ve been a Creative Writing student, twice over! And the thing is, it always felt like a taboo to point out the realities of publishing to them.

In the classroom, there are very rarely any statistics bandied about. We don’t get told how far the odds are stacked against us. And as a careers advisor, I don’t want to ever tell someone they can’t do something. I don’t know that. Anyone else remember the anecdote about the careers advisor who told Gary Lineker he’d never make it in football? I’m never going to be that careers person.

But we’re not doing anyone any favours when we pretend everything’s peachy either, or when we leave it vague, so that every generation of writers after us has to solve that maze all by themselves. What’s the point?

I think this is especially true for working class writers, or writers from other backgrounds where they can’t just rely on family money to support them until the publishing contracts roll in. In my case, for instance, I’m very open about the fact that between 16 and about 25, I was more or less destitute for large swathes of my life. I slept on friends’ sofas during the summers between university. When I graduated I took very low-paid jobs and supported myself in gross flats and houses that were all I could afford and even then on barely.

I wanted to write through most of that time. I did my degree, and then I did a Masters, but those things teach you to understand literature, they teach you to write beautiful sentences but they don’t necessarily train you to write a whole novel and then self-edit it. They definitely don’t teach you how to do that when you’re working in excess of 40 hours every week, the bailiffs keep knocking and you’re constantly exhausted from a diet of pasta and tinned tomatoes. With no laptop, because you can’t afford it.

I’m not looking for sympathy; I now have a well-paid London job and a mortgage. I’m fine. But there are people way worse off than I am, who have incredible stories to tell but who simply don’t have the time in the day to write a novel. No, Molly Mae, we don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day, not when mums have kids to look after and the majority of us are working long hours and there’s a cost of living crisis.

For those people, it’s particularly unfair to just say “get up 30 minutes earlier each morning and write 500 words”. It’s cruel, honestly, especially when even once the bloody thing’s written they have to educate themselves on how to edit the thing (an entirely different skill!!), let alone research agents, competitions, anything that might get their work out there.

Back to my experience: I wrote my novel after accepting a good job that meant I only had to work 4 days a week. Oh, and I don’t have kids.

You could go it alone, though, right?

Yeah, yeah, you could self-publish!

And you can. That’s a great option - an option that’s even starting to appeal to already established authors. What else was Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter if not a self-pub exercise?

But it’s not like it’s an easy option.

Sure, you can do away with all the agent letters, the agonised waiting, but… who’s paying for your editing to get done? Cover design? Typsetting? Proofreading? Printing? Storing all those books? Also - are you going to only publish via Amazon (there are possibly ethics to consider there, but it is in many ways a genuinely fantastic resource for self-pub authors…) or are you going to “go wide”? How are you going to get your book in bookshops? Where are you going to market and advertise it?

It’s a massive operation, and if you’re going to do it well, do it right, it’s going to take just as much work if not more than traditional publishing will.

The thing is, I don’t begrudge any of this.

Not… exactly.

I just… can’t help thinking about it. A lot.

It’s why, for example, when a writer friend of mine gave me some feedback that would have required a full rewrite of my novel I elected not to take that advice.

Don’t get me wrong - that novel has been to various readers, and no-one else had this same feedback, so if I had accepted the advice it would have been on one person’s say so, a person who may well be right but also may not be, and frankly, who isn’t paying me to do this work.

The book has had a professional development edit, and has been re-drafted roughly six times. So it’s not like I’m not prepared to Do The Work.

However, what hit me was this: I could spend twenty years tweaking this book, trying to perfect it, and there would still be no guarantee it would get me anywhere. I believe in this book, I think it’s great - and more importantly, I loved writing it. I’m so proud of myself that I wrote an 85,000 word YA novel where a homeless teenager saves the world!!

I also think the current version of my book gives a good indication of my abilities as a writer. I think it shows I am capable of writing big emotion, tense action and that I am imaginative and engaged with both contemporary YA but also classic literature. I frankly think it shows that I can write at a professional level. That’s not to say I wouldn’t make further edits - I definitely would. If my agent asked me to. Or a publisher. But until I have one of those working on this book with me, I’m not doing more to it.

Now, this book may not get me an agent.

But it also may not get me an agent if I do another rewrite. Or another. Or another.

So my compromise right now is this: I’m querying with a book I love. And I’m about to start writing another, which I also intend to love, because if it isn’t my first book, I want to know I have something else coming.