This summer meant a kind of hiatus for me in my truly creative writing. Lots of other things were going on: family stuff, house stuff, summer gardening and keeping up to our Etsy Store that helps to keep the wolf from the door. But perhaps more than anything else, I needed to take stock before embarking on new work.
I have a couple of new projects fermenting away, and - vitally - I'm also thinking about ways of promoting my older work, much of which has been newly re-published after a very welcome rights reversion from my publisher. (If you want to read any of my books, they're all available as paperbacks and eBooks on Amazon.)
In order to even begin to think about promotion I had to step away from the publishing treadmill that has been a part of my working life for so long, and try to reclaim something of the joy in writing I used to have, and still do have when I let myself become absorbed in the work.
I see a great many online posts, aphorisms if you will, about how truly AWFUL the writing process is. And I find myself thinking 'why do it then?' Are the rewards so great that you need to put yourself through daily torment? For most of us a writing career is not financially rewarding at all. But the work is.
Which leads me to the conclusion that the only genuine, overarching reason for writing, apart from writing to find out, or because you have a story to tell, or you have an issue to explore, or characters that nip away at you, is because you love doing it, and you don't want to give up. Not ever.
If it makes you miserable, stop. It isn't compulsory. Give yourself a break. Think about whether you really want to write, or if you just want to 'be a writer.'
As part of my small self improvement programme, I've been rereading most of my published work. Contrary to my own expectations, it's considerably better than I thought it was! I don't know why I should be so surprised about this. After all, most of it was well reviewed. Most of it found somebody who wanted to publish it, eventually, at least. Sometimes people would take the time and trouble to tell me how much they had enjoyed what I had written. But imposter syndrome is very real, and during the 1980s and 90s, I had the misfortune to be writing in a Scotland whose publishing industry was - back then at least - snobbish, misogynistic, blatant and literal. Subtlety was not appreciated. Back then, at least, it was easy enough to knock me off my writerly perch.
My novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the 2005 Dundee Book Prize, and first published by Polygon. I had an agent back then. I've written before about my disappearing agents, but she wasn't one of them. Instead she would go on to disappear me. Meanwhile, the book sold reasonably well, feedback was good but the publisher flatly refused to look at another book from me. The agent was as mystified as I was. We hadn't fallen out. All the signals had been good. The only difficulty had been the imposition of an English editor who tried to change all the speech patterns of my Scottish islander protagonist, changes I had resisted. I was already a professional playwright with a significant body of work, and I knew about dialogue. Those problems had been resolved. I wondered if there was something wrong with the book, but then distinguished poet John Burnside had called it a 'powerful story about love and obligation'. I was forced to the conclusion that the 'l' word was the problem. Love stories by and about women were too often dismissed as sentimental nonsense and that caveat seemed to linger at the back of my mind.
However, I may have been wrong about that, because I later found that the actual winner of the prize that year, with a Dundee set crime novel, had exactly the same weird experience. You've won a prize, think you've found a publisher, they publish your book - and then they ghost you.
We soldiered on, that agent and I, getting nowhere. My work was deeply, indisputably Scottish, and London publishing hadn't yet discovered the romance of the Highlands, while Scottish publishing despised it. As usual, I was ahead of my time.
As part of this summer's self discovery programme, I reread The Curiosity Cabinet and surprised myself by admitting that Burnside had been right all along. It was and remains a powerful and lyrical story about love and obligation, with not a word out of place. The 'sort of' sequel, The Posy Ring, works well too. More recently, I turned my attention to a book called The Physic Garden: a historical novel, set in very late 1700 and early 1800 Glasgow, the story of an unlikely friendship between a gardener, William Lang, and Thomas Brown, a lecturer in Botany at the Old College of Glasgow University, as well as a tale of the early days of surgery, and the joys of plant collecting.
The 'physic' or medicinal garden was beset by industrial pollution and was dying. That fact alone seemed to give the story a contemporary resonance. The young gardener was blamed. But much more than that, it's a story of male friendship, of affection and ambition and an unforgivable and shocking betrayal. It is narrated by William, from a perspective of age and wisdom. He has become a somewhat dry and sceptical old man. I can't help that. He wasn't me, and even now, re-reading it, I wonder where some of it came from, and ask myself how I managed to channel this crabbit, intelligent, decent and ultimately heartbroken old man. But I did. He came out of nowhere and I couldn't deny him. I couldn't have changed him if I had wanted to.
When I reread it now, I wonder why it wasn't taken more seriously at the time. Not everyone appreciates it, and that's fine. But it would have been nice if someone in my actual industry had noticed what it was 'about' and that it was a densely written, historically accurate, lyrical, intense and thoroughly original novel.
I still remember what happened when I sent an early draft to that agent. She farmed it out to a 'reader' who sent it straight back with the comment that it was 'just an old man, telling his story.'
Which, of course, it was.
Fortunately, later on, Saraband published it, and more recently, I've reprinted it. You can try it for yourself, here.
