Showing posts with label literary agents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary agents. Show all posts

Wouldn't it be Great?

 


The picture is only there because I like it a lot, my husband Alan Lees painted it, it reminds me of some very happy winters spent working in the Canaries - and it's also going to be used as the cover image for one of a pair of novels, coming soon. Watch this space! 

Meanwhile, back in the real world ...

Many writer friends seem to be in the process of trying to secure the services of an agent, a process that involves sending out the dreaded 'query letters'. Dozens of them. It's a hideous process that involves browsing agency websites and how-to posts, trying to draft out the right letter, sending it out in whatever form the agency demands, keeping records and waiting. It's demoralising not least because, although it's a bit like job hunting, getting an agent doesn't necessarily mean you'll get a publishing deal, and getting a publishing deal doesn't necessarily mean you'll make any money ...

I've posted quite a lot about the hunt for an agent already on this blog, especially in 2021, with a post titled Disappearing Agents, and a follow up post here, a week later. 

A quick Google of that term 'query letters' throws up - I kid you not - 87 million results. That's a lot more than the entire population of the UK. Vast numbers of people are busy telling other people how to write query letters. On the other hand, a search for 'how to be a good literary agent' results in 23 million results, and of those, the vast majority are still about how to get an agent, or where to find an agent, with the rest focusing on simply 'becoming' an agent.

Anyway, in contrary mood, I thought, wouldn't it be great to find pieces online with titles such as:

You're claiming to be an agent? Why is your website such a mess?

How to design an agency website that wows your potential clients.

Five essential elements of a good agency.

How to be a darn good literary agent.

The essential traits of agents that work.

What not to do as a literary agent.

Five things that make a competent agent.

Ten marks of a poor agency.

Highly effective agencies and how they do it.

How to become the perfect literary agent. 

and in view of my own past experiences

Agents: how not to disappear. 


Well, we can but dream, can't we? 

 


Disappearing Agents

 
'Just an old man, telling his story.'

As I've posted on here before, I've given up looking for an agent. I've done better without one over the past decade or more since last I had one. Although if somebody came along asking if they might try to sell my foreign and/or translation rights for me, I'd give it a go. 

It pains me when I see writers just starting out on their careers, firmly believing that once they've secured an agent, success will be practically guaranteed. The only people I know who continue to propagate this myth are agents. And in the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies, they would, wouldn't they? 

However, a recent online conversation with a friend prompted me to remember my 'disappearing agents'. Because I had three of them. I had more agents than that, and a couple of them were good. But I changed what and how I wrote over a long career, which meant that a change of agent wasn't entirely out of the question. 

Disappearing Agent Number One

My first disappearing agent head-hunted me from a previous agency, by promising me the earth. Actually, not quite the earth. But she did promise to kick start my career as a playwright all over again. I was doing rather well with stage plays at the time and with some television and plenty of radio thrown in for good measure. My previous agent, although very efficient in terms of increasing my rates of pay, was London based (as are most agencies). This new one had travelled from London to open an office in Glasgow, and promised to liaise with various theatres south of the border, facilitate introductions, find opportunities and so on. 

I liked my previous agent a lot, but the relationship seemed to have grown a bit stale. I think the tipping point was when I spent the best part of a year working on a proposal for and with a large Scottish media company, only to have them reject the project entirely. This wasn't an unsolicited submission. I had worked for them before, they had expressed interest in it, and had me working with a (paid) script editor for months on end. But they had paid me no development money at all, not a bean, and no kill fee either. It struck me quite forcefully that a new agent might at least widen my horizons. So I left my old agent, amicably enough, and waited.

She disappeared. So did the office. She wrote to me later to apologise. I sometimes think I have had more apologies for incompetence than rejection slips.

Disappearing Agent Number Two 

This involves a situation far too complicated and boring to go into in a blog post. In short, there was a great schism in the agenting world and a plaintive request to stick with her personally as she moved on. So I did. Unfortunately, within months, her situation changed to the extent that she inherited a number of starry (and lucrative) clients and guess who fell off the bottom of her list? My last submission to her was The Physic Garden, which an intern read and dismissed out of hand as 'just an old man, telling his story'. After that, as the saying goes here in Scotland, my bum was well and truly 'oot the windae'. 

Disappearing Agent Number Three

This one really did disappear. I signed up to a reputable small agency where he worked, only to have him leave to set up on his own account within the year. Nobody asked me if I wanted to leave with him. They just assumed I would. Eventually, he set up an office in Glasgow (Is Glasgow a sort of black hole for agencies, I wonder?) and I went along to a laughably named launch event, which involved a plastic cup of warm white wine in a chaotic little room, with one other person. Soon after that, he went completely incommunicado. There was no response to phonecalls or emails. Since the office was part of a complex of offices for rent, I eventually managed to call the main desk where somebody confirmed that nobody had been in for weeks, and the mail was piling up. I still have no idea what became of him. 

Going It Alone

After that, I decided to go it alone, and guess what? With a mixture of traditional and self publishing, I started to do rather well. The excellent Saraband published the 'old man telling his story' aka the Physic Garden, and went on to publish more of my fiction and non-fiction. 

Surprisingly enough, I have very occasionally thought it might be nice to have an agent. I even went so far as to send a couple of query letters. I got one or two nibbles, but nothing more. I'm too old for them now - they don't think they'll make enough money out of me and that's understandable. But in any case, perhaps because I am so much older and wiser, I'd want a different kind of relationship. A business partnership which doesn't cast me in the role of humble supplicant. Which is why I still think it might be good to find somebody who would undertake the specialised business of trying to sell the foreign and translation rights to the work I already have out there. I'm not holding my breath. 

Finally - why am I writing this? 

I remember chatting to another client of one of these disappearing agents, a new, young writer, whose hopes had been raised by all the promises, only to have them dashed by the grim reality. What really bugged me was that she was strung along for a couple of years. I was in touch with her and advised her to cut her losses, send a formal letter dispensing with the agent's (non existent) services,  and get on with writing something new. I don't know if she ever did it, but I do remember her disappointment. I was fine. I had a body of work, and options. But she had been counting on promises that were never going to be fulfilled. 

I only hope she picked herself up, dusted herself off, and carried on writing. 

Writing Classes, Rainbows and Pots of Gold.

 

 

I've just finished reading a book called Negative Capability by Michele Roberts - a memoir of a difficult year in her life. Among the memorable passages was one dealing with writing classes. 

She points out that 'most of the students equated novels with producing marketable commodities. They were obsessed with writing correctly to certain agent identified, agent approved agendas.' A little further on she points out that 'they trusted literature less than self help writing manuals.' Roberts goes on to remark that she can't stop herself from bursting out in 'defence of making art' which cuts no ice with the students.

I found myself highlighting these passages and going back to them with sympathy and recognition. I too have taught writing classes and workshops. Over the years, I've seen the balance shift from the desire to learn about the craft of writing to an obsession with commodity and some hypothetical market - the pot of gold at the end of the writing rainbow. 

I used to teach creative writing for the Workers Educational Association. We lost funding, but eventually, because I was working in what was termed an 'area of social deprivation' (it was certainly that, but the people were the nicest, funniest, most talented bunch I've ever worked with) - the local council offered to supply the deficit. Except that suddenly they wanted an end product. It wasn't enough to encourage people to write in different ways, whether it was prose or poetry or drama - and we had people working on all of these within the group. No, there had to be an outcome. A thing at the end of it. Hence a great many funding applications that involved the production of box ticking anthologies. 

It marked a shift from a perception of the value of doing something for itself alone, to doing something only if there was a tangible result. When the relative impossibility of that tangible outcome became obvious, they decided that health and wellbeing was enough of a thing, so you had to demonstrate that you were prepared to be a cut price and largely untrained mental health professional as well. This is an attitude that is now so deeply and disastrously embedded in the bodies set up to support the creative industries that I doubt if we will ever manage to switch back to valuing participating in the arts purely for its own sake. 

I play the piano because I love doing it. I'm never going to be a concert pianist. I learn to play things because it gives me a bit of a buzz, and I suppose that's a wellbeing outcome of sorts, but frankly, I do it for the sheer enjoyment of playing and that's reason enough. I do it to do it. 



This is why, although I'm happy to give talks about my fiction, about the experience of writing and publishing, and also about the practicalities of research, I'm no longer keen to engage with the highly prescriptive aspects of a writing life, such as all those social media posts about the dos and don'ts of constructing query letters. And as for those agents who post scathing online take downs of terrible-query-letters-I-have-known for a bunch of sycophants to laugh at, in hopes of currying a bit of favour ... don't get me started! 

The harsh truth is that, even if you do manage to land an agent in the net of your perfect query letter, there is no guarantee at all that that agent will find you a publisher. But if you write to the specifications of a string of other people: the agent's reader, the agent, the publisher's reader, the publisher, the editor, I'm not at all sure that what will emerge will have done your development as a writer any good at all. Add to that a clutch of so called beta readers - a term from the video games industry that doesn't mean what people think it means -  before you even start on the long road to finding an agent, all with varied opinions about what you should and shouldn't be writing, and you'd be better to do a whole lot more reading and a whole lot more writing. As Roberts so succinctly puts it, find your own way into 'making art'. 

That's what Stephen King recommends here, and whether you like his books or not, I reckon he's right about this one. 

Which is not to say that a good editor isn't a wonderful thing: one who asks all the right, difficult questions and allows you, the writer, to rework and to learn a lot about your own craft in the process.  But that's a very definite professional skill, and not one usually possessed by an opinionated literature graduate intern working for peanuts for an agency or publishing house. 

The harsh truth is that the pot of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow is as elusive and mobile as the mythical one. And as William Goldman accurately states, in his Adventures in the Screen Trade, 'nobody knows anything'. Unless you're one of that growing band of celebrities in another field deciding that they've always wanted to write a book, the really big hits tend to come quite suddenly, out of left field, unpredicted by the industry itself. Not just unpredicted, but often rejected. Then they all want more of the same, until the next big hit comes along and takes them completely by surprise. If you're ready to ride that new wave - which tends to be a matter of coincidence and luck rather than anything else - good for you. 

Otherwise, write what you love, write what obsesses you - and to hell with the rest. If you don't, you may find yourself missing the beauty of the rainbow, in pursuit of an elusive pot of gold that will probably turn out to contain a few dried leaves. 

Fairy gold, you see. Just can't trust it. 





The Unexpectedly Long Life of an eBook

A beautiful cover image by artist Alison Bell
The Curiosity Cabinet started out as a trilogy of plays for  BBC Radio 4 back in the 1990s. Later, I rewrote it, with significant changes, as a novel but it took a very long time to find a publisher. It was some time in the late 90s, when I was looking for a new agent, that one of them called it ‘a library novel fit only for housewives.’ I wasn’t a newcomer in any sense. I had a long and occasionally award winning career as a playwright, as well as two published novels and plenty of non fiction behind me, so I could laugh it off.

But it still stung a bit.

Eventually, I secured representation at one of the bigger London agencies. My new agent told me that she liked the novel, but she thought it was ‘too quiet’ to sell.  Nevertheless, she sent it out to the big boys. I forget how many there were back then – certainly a few more than the current Big Five, but all the same, amalgamations were rife and the so called mid-list was definitely on the slide. Agents and publishers were already talking about the ‘decline of the mid-list’. One even cheerfully predicted the ‘death of the mid-list’. I knew in my sinking heart that I was a typical mid-lister. It was an invidious position to find yourself in. Back then, anyway. One of the acquisitions editors who responded pointed out that although she liked the book, they had ‘published something similar and it did less well than expected.’ Most of them said that although they liked the novel they 'couldn't carry sales and marketing with them.' Or they 'liked it but didn't love it.'

Nobody wanted it.

Eventually, my agent suggested that while I got on with something a bit less quiet, I should submit the novel to a newish competition: the Dundee Book Prize. It seemed like a good idea. I wasn't doing anything else with it, after all. Some time after the closing date for entries, I got a phone call. My novel had been shortlisted. Would I come to an event aboard The Discovery in Dundee, when an announcement would be made? The reception and dinner aboard Captain Scott's polar exploration ship was very pleasant. We soon realised that the shortlist consisted of only three books, three authors. And at the dinner, we were happy to discover that all three of us would be offered a publishing contract although only one novel would win the big cash prize.

The Curiosity Cabinet didn’t, in fact, win that overall prize but it was published. That was in 2005. I seem to remember that the print run involved only 1000 trade paperback copies, albeit nicely done. There were one or two speaking engagements including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and a three for two offer in a big chain bookstore. I remember all the excitement of seeing my book in several shop windows. But because the publisher was marketing these completely different novels and their authors as a threesome, we didn't get much publicity. I sent a review copy to a popular Scottish TV presenter who gave me a ringing endorsement for the cover. 'How did you do that?' my publisher asked. The truth was that I had simply asked nicely, but I got the sense that their approval of the publicity was warring just a wee bit with their disapproval of such populism. A Scottish women's magazine serialised it. They made an excellent job of the abridgement and paid handsomely.

The run sold out within the year and ... that was that. There was no sign of a reprint. My agent told me that (to her surprise as well as mine because the relationship to that point had been friendly) the publisher had declined to look at anything else from me. My work didn’t fit in with the way they saw the company progressing. Eventually, I reclaimed my rights – a process which, to give them credit, they made remarkably easy. But I soon found out that in the world of traditional publishing it is far better to be a new discovery than to be a writer who has been rejected by her publisher.

An attractive 'islandman' hero.
I was now damaged goods. My agent became cautious. 'If I submit a novel to one of the big publishers, and they reject it, they might not look at anything else from you again,' she said. We needed a sure fire winner. But who ever knows what that will be? Somebody told me that my fiction was 'too well written to be really popular but not experimental enough to be really literary.' Quite apart from the disrespect for readers implied by that statement, it placed me firmly in the despised mid-list again.

Some time in the new millennium, I found myself minus agent, minus any kind of publishing deal except for a couple of my plays and minus the commissions for radio or the stage that had previously kept the wolf from the door. 'But, Catherine,' said an inspirational Canadian friend to whom I was having a quiet whinge on a transatlantic phone line. 'You have inventory. A lot of inventory.'

She was right. I had been doing plenty of writing. I had several edited, unpublished and far-from-quiet novels in which none of the gatekeepers was remotely interested.  I sent my new novels out to various Scottish and other small publishers where they disappeared without trace, never to be heard of again. Sometimes I amused myself by jettisoning the humble supplicant role in favour of the polite but brisk business enquiry. That didn't go down at all well.  One charming individual told me that if I could come to his office, he ‘might be able to spare me five minutes.’ I declined his kind offer. Most didn't even give me the courtesy of a reply.

I think what really kept me going through that dark time was the response of readers. I was still being invited to give talks and readings, and people were always asking me how they could get hold of my books, where they might find more of my work. The problem was that they couldn’t. It was in computer files and printouts and a handful of out-of-print copies. There was a lot of it. I still remember the mingled pleasure and pain of hearing a friend – an enthusiastic reader – say to me, ‘You know, we don’t understand how this could happen. We love your writing, we want to read more of it and we think you’ve been treated very shabbily.’ Pity is never easy to accept but the emails I got from other readers, complete strangers, said much the same thing. 'Haven't you written any more fiction and why can't we read it?'

I’d looked at self publishing in the past, but all I could find were unscrupulous vanity publishers who still wanted to wrest control from my hands and charge me lots of money for the privilege.

And then, along came Jeff Bezos and Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing.

It wasn’t at all hard to decide to take my career into my own hands. In fact it seemed ridiculously easy. I had nothing at all to lose. My only regret was that it hadn’t happened sooner. I had been searching for something like this for years and had never been able to find it: a business partner who would facilitate distribution and let me get on with it, leaving the control of it in my own hands. I started small, with a couple of mini collections of previously published short stories, but eventually decided to take the plunge with The Curiosity Cabinet. An artist friend, Alison Bell, who loved the book, made me a new and very beautiful cover image. This was only the first of a number of novels that I’ve published independently in eBook form, some historical, some contemporary. If I was asked to define exactly what I write, I'd say 'grown up love stories'. But I've tackled issues as serious as child abuse in Bird of Passage and Ice Dancing, I've written a massive historical saga in The Amber Heart, and I often find myself writing about obsession and betrayal within adult relationships. Not that quiet, then, and they don't all end happily ever after either - although some do. I often work on a couple of projects at the same time, letting one lie fallow while I do something completely different. It's a way of working that suits me, but it also suits indie publishing.

So what happened after I began my self publishing venture? Well, since 2011 when I published it as an eBook, The Curiosity Cabinet has sold more copies than I would have believed possible. And it just keeps rolling along. I'm not making any fortunes from this and my other books - yet. But they add a small but healthy sum to my income every month. As I write this, the Curiosity Cabinet has undergone another spike in sales and in its category on Amazon here in the UK is sitting at #9. Sales go up and down. Sometimes I run a promotion and the sales spike again. I reckon the Outlander books have helped. People who like Outlander seem to like The Curiosity Cabinet as well. I'm told my novel is nothing like Outlander and I haven’t even read the series, although I have heard very good things about it. I suspect the only thing we have in common is an attractive highland hero or two. Or ‘islandman’ hero in my case. Two books inspired The Curiosity Cabinet: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped - I dramatised it for radio years ago and it remains one of my favourite novels of all time - and a wonderful old novel by Elizabeth Goudge called the Middle Window. I read it in my teens and never, ever forgot it.

The landscape of the novel. 
Most of all, for me, the Curiosity Cabinet illustrates the potential long life of an eBook. For my publisher at the time, it was over and done within the year (as was the writer!) It seems they must always be moving on to the next project and their next project didn’t involve my kind of novel at all. I'm forced to the conclusion that it was, for them, a sound business decision. But it wasn't my decision and as it turns out, it wasn’t right for me or for this book either.

The fact remains that there are readers out there who still seem to want to read it. Lots of them. I’m planning to release it as a POD paperback, early in 2015. And all while working on a couple of new projects at the same time, with another one simmering away in the background.

The cheering news is that eBooks can have an unexpectedly long life. You never know what's around the corner, what might influence sales. As writers and readers too,  I think that’s something to celebrate.

Visit my website at www.wordarts.co.uk
And if you're reading this in the US, you can find my novels by clicking on the links to the right of this post. 

Buried Treasure



As you can see from the picture above, if you look closely, even my doll's house has books in it! I'm seriously considering making some tiny, bound manuscripts and stacking them on shelves in various other rooms. Maybe the lady of the house - which is my current pride and joy and refuge from all things online - could be a writer in her spare time. This idea occurred to me because I spent a couple of days last week climbing up and down a real stepladder in my real house, my upstairs study to be precise, with a nice view of the garden and the woods beyond. I've been storing folders and box files on a high shelf that runs the length of the whole room for years now, and I decided I needed to investigate and take stock of exactly what I had in the way of material.

With three full length novels, a couple of short story trios and a few plays already published and selling quite nicely on Amazon, I've been considering what I'm going to publish next and what my future publishing strategies might be.  It seemed to me that I had a lot of work just sitting there. Moreover, I suspected some of it might be good work, not just those early 'bottom drawer' novels you cut your teeth on and then hang onto out of sheer sentimentality, not because you think they're any good, but because it's hard to destroy something you've spent so much time on. So I thought it was time for an assessment.

I know that my PC has two (almost) completed but unpublished novels sitting on it. To be more accurate, the novels are on a PC, a laptop, various flash drives and stored in DropBox and on a Norton Cloud somewhere. So - I'm paranoid. There are also printouts. One, called The Physic Garden, is a historical novel set in Glasgow around the turn of the 1800s. It's related by an elderly bookseller who was once a gardener - although he's remembering the events of his youth - and it's a book about male friendship and extreme betrayal. I'm very fond of it. In fact, I think I'm probably more fond of it than anything else I've written. Oh, it definitely needs work. And it needs more words as well as less, additions as well as pruning. This novel was read (I assume) by a young intern at my previous agency. Her response was that it was 'just an old man telling his story.' Which is true. This casual, stupid remark so influenced me that I wasted several months trying to tell the story in the third person.

It didn't work.

There was no way that my narrator was going to allow his story to be told in anything except his own strong voice. Now, the possibility of publishing The Physic Garden as an eBook has allowed me to go back to my original plan and make this the book I intended it to be. It should be coming to a Kindle near you before the end of the year.

Also on my PC is a rather odd piece of contemporary fiction called Line Dancing, part romance, part literary fiction. I don't think anyone at any of my agencies ever wanted to read this, for the simple reason that it's about an older woman having a relationship with a younger man and none of the young women and men who inhabit agencies ever found anything to interest them in the proposal. But again, when I reread it now, I get that little kick of excitement that suggests the book is OK, probably worth publishing. And aren't there lots of older women out there who haven't quite given up on love?

That's just on the PC. It was when I started rummaging in all those old folders and files that a pattern began to emerge. I would climb the ladder and lift them down a couple of boxes at a time. Many of them hadn't been opened for years and there were not just cobwebs but dead spiders lurking inside. I had to use antihistamine for the sneezing and a vacuum cleaner for the spider skeletons.

Here's what I found:
First of all, there was a huge manuscript called Salt Sea Strawberries. Many years ago, I wrote a trilogy of dramas for BBC Radio 4, called The Peggers and the Creelers. It was about a Scottish fishing community and an inland boot and shoe making town, (not a million miles from Dunure and Maybole, in Ayrshire) and the plays constituted a densely woven series of dramas about the sometimes stormy relationships between the two communities and the demise of traditional industries. This was well before I ever had a PC. It had been written on an old electric typewriter, and now here it was, printed out on that flimsy old fashioned paper. A huge box of it. 130,000 words of it.

I read a few pages and remembered that the original radio series had elicited lots of fan mail. People had loved it. The novel isn't half bad either. Actually - like the plays - it probably amounts to a trilogy of novels, or it will, by the time I've rewritten it. I don't remember my agent - whichever agent I had at the time - reading this one either. She 'wasn't keen on family sagas. Nobody wants family sagas.'
And you know what? I had forgotten all about it! I hadn't forgotten the plays, just that I had actually spent a year or two of my life writing 130,000 words of a novel based on the plays that nobody then would even look at.

Another folder contained a novel called Snow Baby, a manuscript full of my own scrawled annotations. This is contemporary fiction, literary, lyrical, quite poetic. Extracts from it were published in Carl MacDougall's beautifully designed 'Words' magazine, way back in the 1970s. Which was a difficult magazine to get into. We're talking about a very youthful work here, written when I was supposed to be a 'literary' writer but in reality wasn't quite sure what kind of writer I was. I was a mid-list writer for sure - desperate to tell well written stories that would appeal to all kinds of people, but perhaps to women in particular. The problem with Snow Baby was that it was set in Finland and - you've guessed it - 'nobody wants to read anything set in Finland.'

There were also some 70 pages of a novel called The Marigold Child. This was a novel with an intriguing Mary, Queen of Scots connection. I had done the research and although the premise on which it is based is outrageous, everything fits. My agent's eyes lit up when she heard about it. I wanted to write it as a historical novel, but 'nobody wants historical novels' - or they didn't back then, though they do now - so I spent a year wrestling with it to try to give it a contemporary framework. The 70 pages is set in the here and now. I read it through and thought it read pretty well, spooky, with a couple of engaging central characters, but I'm still not sure that it shouldn't be a straightforward historical novel. That may be what it wants to be. We'll see. The point is that now, I can do what I want with it, not what somebody else is telling me might be flavour of the month.



There are besides this, files full of single plays and series with detailed background material. All these were made and produced on BBC Radio 4 and well received. Among them there's a series of plays about a Scottish family of yacht builders, and another set in Roman Britain, all well researched, all vividly written, albeit in dramatic form. By the time these were written, even though I knew in my heart I had material for more novels, I had had enough of soldiering through thousands of words and hoping for the best. There are folders full of detailed ideas and plans for novels, whole plots, meticulously worked out. There are short stories and even some non-fiction pieces. There's a young adult novel - the publisher no longer exists although my television serial on which it is based is still available on YouTube. There's a backlist novel which I always felt was published in the wrong way. Now it seems horribly dated and needs extensive rewriting. But somewhere inside it is a good piece of contemporary fiction - and that too seems a bit like finding buried treasure.

'I wish', said my husband, wistfully, surveying the great heaps of manuscript, 'all this had happened twenty years ago.'
So do I.
But we can only work with what we have and, as of now, I think I just have to get my head down and get more work out there. Lots of it. Once I've whittled my way down the pile I can stop, take stock and decide what might be best to do next. CreateSpace is calling, for instance, since I can't deny that I'd love to have paperback copies of all these.
There's a lot more to come and much of it is already written in some form at least. Editing and polishing takes time - years, probably, but there's an excitement about it all and a freedom that I haven't known for a very long time.
Kindle, other platforms, CreateSpace  - all I can say is, watch this space.









Story Is King - How eBook Publishing Inspired Me To Hone My Storytelling Skills

Bird of Passage

At some point over the Christmas viewing marathon of the last few months, somewhat prolonged because of the appalling weather (Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice, Casablanca,  ET, Singin’ in the Rain – I was doing that alright -  Brief Encounter, thank God we didn’t have a power cut) I distinctly remember hearing Andrew Lloyd Webber say ‘story is king’ and although I have some reservations about the ALW bandwagon, I found myself in broad agreement with him. Which might have come as something of a surprise to the writer I thought I was, even five years ago.

I don’t know when this all began for me, but I suspect it was post millennium, when my previous literary agent was struggling to place a new novel with various publishers who were all telling her how it was ‘wonderfully written, but too quiet’ and no, they couldn’t possibly market it in the current difficult climate.’ That difficult climate, incidentally, seems to have been current for an awful long time and predates the recession by some years. I was lamenting my fate on a message board when a colleague pointed out (sympathetically) that publishers were always looking for the holy grail of wonderful writing allied to a stonking great story, but if they couldn’t have both in the same book, they would settle for the stonking great story any time.
 Back then, although I found my colleague’s observation to be accurate, I don’t think I learned my lesson. In fact I would say it is only over the past year or so that I have taken it on board. I have a close friend with New Age tendencies, who is always saying things like ‘the universe is trying to tell you something, Catherine.’ Well, now, I’m listening. And the fact is that I have become enchanted by story, as enchanted as I used to be when – as a very little girl – I listened to and then read for myself, the stories in the illustrated Wonder Books which had once belonged to one of my aunts, and had then been passed on to me.

Several things have contributed to this. That ‘stonking great story’ line has been working away in my head like yeast. The films I named above have one thing in common – they are all fine stories, and of course some of them are very fine novels too. It is through the medium  of those powerful tales that we are engaged, while in the sheer pleasure of our absorption, (even when the stories themselves are sad) we learn something about ourselves – and others - as human beings.  

On Christmas morning,  pottering about the kitchen, (as if I hadn’t had enough TV for one holiday) I found myself watching the Nativity,  the beautiful version with Andrew Buchan as a bewildered Joseph and Tatiana Maslany as a totally believable Mary, and becoming captivated all over again by a story which was as familiar to me as my own name, the drama and humanity of it, the way in which it engaged me on practically every level: intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and last but by no means least, purely as a piece of  entertainment.
Some years ago, as a reasonably well established playwright trying to break into television, I had struggled to please a string of script editors, until I realised that (a) the script editor earned his salary by stringing me along with endless unpaid rewrites and (b) television really wasn’t for me – although the money was an enticement. Unfortunately, it was more like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Just when you thought you might have got there, the whole thing shifted.

Recently, it struck me forcibly that all the gatekeepers I had ever encountered seemed to have quite different ideas about what they wanted from me but none of them had really taken on board who I was as a writer and – more importantly - who my potential readers might be. This realisation was both liberating and alarming, because so much of my focus had been on pleasing these same agents and editors who were - on the whole - nothing like my potential readers. The trouble was, I didn’t know who those readers were either.
Dealing in antique textiles - my lucky dragon - not for sale!

One of my other jobs involves dealing in antique and vintage textiles online and sometimes writing about them. I’ve been doing it for some years now and I could describe to you in great detail who my customers are, (many of them come back time and again and send me nice emails in between times) where they live, what kind of things they like, and why I’m so fond of them. But when it comes to identifying my readers, I’ve realised that - like so many writers – I’ve trusted other people to do that for me.
The other thing these gatekeepers had never stressed was the importance of story. They had talked about characterisation and pace and structure and plot. But the endless ‘rules’ of plotting are not the same thing as telling a good story. Not one of them had said ‘For God’s sake,  just go away, find out and then tell the story, from the bottom of your heart.’

Would it have made a difference if they had? Maybe.
When I was finishing the final edits for my most recent novel, Bird of Passage, (now doing quite well on Amazon Kindle)  I saw that what had started out as a piece of reasonably well written but rather wishy washy fiction, had actually – over several drafts, a few years and a lot more experience - turned into a real story.  I don’t know that it’s a stonking great story, (although I think my next novel, The Amber Heart, might well be) but it’s certainly a good story, a story of love, obsession, and cruelty, told from the bottom of my heart. And it's one that I hope a number of people will find moving and engaging.

It perplexes me that I had managed to go through an intensive arts education, with an honours degree in English Literature from Edinburgh University, followed by a postgraduate degree from Leeds University, followed by many years of writing, publication, production and  a certain amount of success, all the while receiving advice from artistic directors and script editors and book editors and agents – and nobody had ever pointed out the simple truth that story is king. At university, I specialised in Old English & Mediaeval Studies. This literature – spanning many centuries - is crammed with wonderful stories illustrating timeless truths about the human condition, but you’d never have known it from the way we studied it. The fact that Beowulf, Gawain and The Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales and The Icelandic sagas are as powerful and engaging now as they were when they were first written, was treated as a commonplace irrelevance. ‘If you like that kind of thing, that’s the kind of thing you like,’ said one of our tutors, looking down his academic nose at us.
Maybe I shouldn't have expected anything different. And maybe I should have known what I needed to do, all along. But the truth is that if you can't tell a good story, even if you are the most celebrated of experimental writers, with a deeply intellectual following, few people will want to listen. Robert McKee says that the essence of good story is unchanging and universal’.  Your first imperative, as a writer of fiction, should be to get your head down and tell a good story.
Now, I'm trying, and what a sheer pleasure that is turning out to be!