Invisible Fictions (And Non-Fictions Too)

‘Many women complain the moment they turned 50, people stopped seeing them. People push past them in queues, men look through them, and shop assistants ignore them.’ 

I came across this excellent post only the other day. It’s well worth reading in full. 

I’ve blogged about this phenomenon before – you can read my most recent post here – but at that time, I concluded that I wasn’t (yet) invisible. Just able to be ignored, like a piece of furniture. Now, I’ve changed my mind, bowed to the inevitable. I am invisible.

50 was certainly when the process started. A bit like that wonderful Tove Jansson story, the Invisible Child, except in reverse. In Jansson’s story the child starts off invisible and gradually becomes visible when she is treated kindly.

For older women, it works the other way. You just grow ever fainter, until people ignore you altogether. Men certainly notice you when they want to tell you that you’re wrong, but in the publishing industry, many young women also tend to ignore older female writers as far as possible. I sometimes feel that there's a weird sense of embarrassment on their part, as though they have no idea what to make of you and would rather you didn’t exist at all.

Writers are so afraid of repercussions that we tend to keep quiet about our experiences. But since, professionally at least, I have now achieved almost complete invisibility, I may as well shout into the void.

Here’s what happened just this year.

In February, I had a new book published. It’s called The Last Lancer and it was very close to my heart, a companion to my previous book about a murder in the poverty stricken Leeds Irish side of my family: A Proper Person to be Detained. 

This one is about my grandfather’s eccentric and tragic family history in Poland and Ukraine. I’d researched most of it throughout lockdown although my late father had also written down some of his memories. The story would – I hoped – be entertaining, harrowing and informative. But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it suddenly became all too horribly relevant as well. Or so I thought.

Dad was born into the szlachta – the Polish nobility, more Mitford than Downton, I always think. After an idyllic country childhood in what was then Polish Galicia, but which is now Western Ukraine, he lost everything in the war (although he was luckier than his father who lost his life as well.) My father arrived in England as an unwelcome ‘refugee alien’ at the end of WW2, with nothing but a handful of photographs, a tiny silver mirror that had belonged to his mother, and his army identity papers, on which, under ‘next of kin’ he had written the Polish phrase meaning ‘closest family to nobody.’ He literally had nobody and nothing.

You would think, given Ukraine's current fight for existence, alongside our preoccupation with migrants, that the book might have received a modicum of attention. It was praised by no less a person than Neal Ascherson, who has forgotten more than most of us will ever know about Poland and Ukraine and the complex, troubled history of that region.

Well, you’d be wrong.

On publication day, back in February, nothing happened. No reviews, not so much as a postcard to mark the day.

In fact, if a couple of Polish friends hadn’t turned up with chocolates and flowers, whereupon we opened a bottle of cava and ‘wetted the book’s head’, there would have been nothing to make the day special at all.

I had launched a number of previous books in our local Waterstones, so I was hoping for another launch there, because lots of friends and acquaintances always turn out and buy books, but no word came from my publisher, who had organised previous launches. To be fair, if I’d known, I would have organised my own launch party - almost certainly in this village. But I didn’t know, because I had made assumptions based on past experience. Silly me.

Meanwhile, I was doing my best to promote the Last Lancer online. I did a long interview for one of Emma Cox's excellent genealogy podcasts, which you can listen to here. The book is only tangentially about genealogy, although the podcast is certainly interesting for anyone researching their Eastern European family history. I wrote blog posts and shared them. I posted photographs and links on social media.

Spring and the brilliant Boswell Festival came along. Like Brigadoon, I became happily visible. I spoke about my father’s experience, sharing the stage with a young Ukrainian woman, a refugee as my father had been. She related her heartrending escape from her home, under Russian bombardment, with her five year old daughter. The event was well attended, well received and very moving indeed. Afterwards, somebody said to me ‘I could listen to you speak all day.’ Which was a relief, because I had begun to wonder if I had become boring as well as old. But I think we could have listened to the Ukrainian woman all day too. And wept with her.

After that came silence except for another all too brief period of visibility on stage at the excellent Tidelines festival in Irvine.

I tried contacting my local libraries, offering to do talks. No response. Not one. I sent out a great many copies of the book, at my own expense, including some that should have gone as advance copies to people who would have reviewed it. So much so that I’ve almost run out of my own copies, and now – hilariously, if it wasn’t so irritating – my book orders have been ignored as well. Emails and phone-calls remain unanswered.

I had high hopes when my publisher went to the London Book Fair, but when she reported that the focus there was all on Ukraine, I wondered if anyone had pointed out what the book is actually about: the terrible, troubled history of - you know - Ukraine, as experienced through the eyes of one family.

I’m told it’s a ‘niche market’ but a Polish diaspora of 20 million people worldwide is a pretty big niche. You'd think somebody might want to publish a Polish language version, but apparently not. 

This is just the tip of the invisibility iceberg. There are so many examples of my current invisibility that it would become monotonous to continue to relate them. So I won’t. Like a passing comet, or a blue supermoon, I may become briefly visible again at some point in the future, but I can't say when. 

Most people in the book trade will tell scathing tales about ‘needy writers’. Very few will admit that there are invisible writers. Well reviewed writers. Older female writers. Angry writers. But it’s OK to be angry when you’re invisible, because nobody at all will notice. 

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Facebook for Writers

Dreaming of a white Christmas - or maybe not.

Over the past year, I've attended a few professional Zoom meetings with my fellow writers, and the subject of social media comes up fairly regularly. Some of us are happy to wade in and engage with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc, and others aren't. Some think that Facebook is the work of the devil. It may be, and you will need a long spoon to sup with it. It is also a huge time suck. A veritable sink hole of time suckery. 

But it's still a useful tool for writers. And there are some very nice people on there. I've made contact with many old 'friends in real life' as well as making some new ones. 

The truth is that, much like real life, all these sites are a mixture of the good, the bad, and the truly ugly, but if you want to sell books, or help your publisher to sell your books, (as well as keeping sane during a pandemic) you are going to have to learn how to do a little interacting and Facebook is probably the easiest place to start.

What surprises me is how many writers still claim to know nothing at all about using social media and are quite nervous about it in general. 

So here are a few pointers about Facebook in particular. And since I don't claim to be an expert, do feel free to add your own comments and recommendations below. This is an ever changing world, so if you are reading this in some hypothetical future, it may all be very different! 

1 Practical matters. There is no point in my reinventing the wheel, so if you want to set up a Facebook profile, go to the site, press the buttons, and follow the instructions. They make it pretty clear and I'm not going to be able to add very much that's useful to it. 

There are a couple of provisos though. When you are setting up your Facebook profile, you can search for - or Facebook will show you - potential friends. You can send friend requests. Don't send too many at once, (the Facebook Gods don't like it) and begin with people who are friends in real life. People will also send you friend requests. You don't need to click on them all at once. Or at all. You're in charge. Gradually, you will build up a circle of people who know you, on and offline. Or people with mutual friends. You will even meet some lovely, interesting new people.

Look at the tab marked 'Privacy'. You can make your account quite private. For example, I don't let anyone else post stuff on my pages. By which I mean that they can comment on my posts all they like, but I don't want them dumping unwanted stuff straight on my page. It's why I have comment moderation on my blog. You might be surprised by how much spam crops up on here, but never makes it onto the blog, because I just report it and delete it.  I relax my privacy settings in time for my birthday though! You can post things only to your friends, or you can make them public. Facebook explains all this much more clearly than I can, so again, do read the instructions. 

2 Once you have a Facebook account, you can also set up a dedicated author page. Or you can just focus on that, if you want to. Again, Facebook will tell you how and give you options for the kind of page you want. I'll come clean here. I use my private Facebook profile - with some privacy settings tweaked - far more than I use my author page. But I do still use it. I post links to blog posts such as this one, and other professional news, and information about the book I may be working on at any given time. That also links in to Goodreads, which I find a difficult site to 'work' so at least it keeps my profile current on there as well.  It also gives me the facility to set up details of events. In a normal year I would probably use it more than in a Covid year. 

3 Groups are where it's at with Facebook - increasingly so. If your books are set in ancient Rome or 19th century London, you can be sure to find a group of like minded individuals - not writers, but just people who are interested in that time and place. Join them. Join in. There are many writers' groups out there as well but remember that you are more likely to find your readers in special interest groups. Writers read a lot, it's true - but they also work a lot, and find themselves reading for work. I for one don't read very much new fiction when I'm deep into a book, although I often reread old, much loved fiction, Dickens and the like, mostly as a means of escape from the intensity of my own work. 

4 Probably the most important point of this whole post - be generous. Much like in the real world, you have to interact with other people. One thing that stands out to me is how many beginners will join a Facebook group and instantly dump a 'buy my book' post on there. No interaction, no chat, no likes, no sympathy, nothing. I attended a professional Zoom meeting earlier this year and while the speaker was speaking, there were people in the chat facility posting 'buy my book' links. Not sure if they would have got any takers, but for most of us, it's a bit irritating. Some groups don't allow it. There are people on Facebook who I never see or hear of from from one year's end to the next, unless they have a book to sell. Then it's 'oh, look, here's my book, you have to buy it.' No. No I don't. 

There is, to be fair, a whole spectrum of engagement. I'm on there a lot - too much probably. But I blog a lot as well. And I'm interested in what other people are doing and thinking and saying, whether it's online or out in the real world. 

In summary, Facebook can be good for writers. But if you put very little in, you'll get very little out. Much like computers, it's a case of garbage in, garbage out. We've all been to those parties where you meet somebody and try to talk to them, only to find them peering over your shoulder, in case somebody more interesting or useful comes along. Social media is much the same. You don't have to like everyone, but you do have to be interested in human nature in all its many manifestations. 

After all, isn't that what being a writer is all about? 

What Your Bookshelves Say About You

I don't even know what my bookshelves say about me, but it seemed like a good title, especially in the light of those lockdown interviews, in which the celebrity or politician is carefully positioned in front of a shelf full of significant books.

Here are some of mine, even though I haven't done any interviews. The room where I'm lucky enough to work is full of books, and there is very little rhyme or reason to their arrangement - but I more or less know where everything is.

There's a loose subject matter theme to it all, and for a particular project, I'll gather lots of books together. So for a while, researching A Proper Person to be Detained, I was sitting among heaps of books and maps about nineteenth century Leeds, while the picture below shows the shelves that held - and still do hold - all the books about Robert Burns that I gradually amassed while I was researching The Jewel.

Burns among others.

On the rare occasions when I've been persuaded to sort everything out, I've needed a particular book almost immediately, gone looking for it in the old place and realised that I didn't have a scoobie where it was. So now, I weed out books I don't mind recycling, but I try to leave the rest more or less as they are.

All the same, the books don't stay in one place. They migrate. In fact I'm pretty sure they breed. So there are art and craft and antique books in my husband's office/studio, where I also keep most of my antique textiles (well out of the way of the paint), there's a shelf of novels in the living room, cookery books in the kitchen and heaps of our son's books in his room that has gradually become a comfortable spare room, although visitors are still treated to large tomes on Game Design and Discrete Mathematics.

Two things surprised me a bit about the celebrity books on display. One involved shelves full of 'colour coded' books that I'm told is an interior design thing. But no reader, surely, would do this? How on earth could you colour code a thousand books. Oh wait - most people don't have a thousand books.

I mostly read fiction on my Kindle now. I read in bed, in the dark, and I'm there, in the world of the book. But if I really love a book, or if it's written by a friend, I will often buy a paper copy as well.

The other thing that surprised me was people scoffing at writers actually having their own books on their shelves. Here are some of mine. Generally, nobody sees them but me. This is, after all, my workspace and few people are ever invited into it.

But why should people be surprised at writers having copies of their own books? Would you be surprised at Monty Don or Alan Titchmarsh having a garden? The fact is that on publication, we are given a handful of author copies. We give some away to close family or to people who have been helpful, but we generally have a few copies left. Then we often buy our own books to sell at various events because that's one of the ways in which we make our income. We may even sell signed copies online.

Also, on those days when we wonder why the hell we are doing this, we can at least look at them and figure that it might not have been a terrible waste of time. Most books are the product of many months of hard work and sleepless nights. We like to think that it hasn't all been in vain. Having something tangible is a good way of countering imposter syndrome. 

Writers and Notebooks - A Love Affair.

Some of the current collection

Today, a friend on Facebook posted about the way many notebooks are more expensive than actual printed books. She's right, of course. They are. But I still buy them.

I know lots of other writers who have a notebook habit. We accumulate them. Sometimes we sit and admire them without actually writing in them. The special ones are hoarded for some hypothetical future project that will be worthy of the perfect notebook.

I have very specific tastes in notebooks. First and foremost, the pages have to be blank. I hate lined paper. You'd be surprised how many shops seem to have stopped stocking blank paper notebooks altogether. Sometimes you have to hunt among the art materials to find them.

The paper has to be good quality, preferably off white or cream rather than bright white. I often write with italic or 'handwriting' pens, with broad nibs (yes, I know, but I was taught to write that way at school, a long long time ago and I can't help it!) and if the paper is nasty, the ink sinks in. It's so disappointing when you open a notebook with a beautiful cover to find that the paper inside is flimsy and impractical.

I quite like hard cover notebooks, especially brightly coloured hard cover notebooks: pink, turquoise, red, blue. Soft covers are OK though, especially for travelling. I have a couple of beautiful little notebooks I bought in Oxford last year, with Kraft paper covers, and ladybird designs, including an edge design like one of those wonderful old books that have a painting along the depth of the pages. I like them to be a decent size, although it's handy when they can also fit in my handbag. And if they have a little compartment into which I can slip notes for talks, train timetables etc, so much the better.

I have an ongoing love affair with Moleskine. I love these notebooks with a passion, which is a bit sad since they're not cheap. But they are the kings and queens among notebooks. Everything about them, including the quality of the paper, is wonderful. If any notebook might magically be able to make you into a better writer, these are the ones to try. (And no, they're not paying me to say this.)

I generally buy mine online, from Amazon or from T K Maxx, where you can find a good selection of notebooks and nice paper of all kinds. Although once you've discovered the Moleskine shop, you might well be enticed in. I use one every day, for lists of things to do. I've also been using one this year to keep track of the many events I've been asked to do, venues, contact details, train or bus times, hotel bookings  - and again, Moleskine provides the perfect notebook: robust, with a piece of elastic to keep it firmly shut, a bookmark and a wallet at the back.

Oddly enough, I use a Kindle for reading all the time, and although I love paper books and have too many of them, I can't say I feel excessively attached to them, can't say I miss them, especially when I'm reading fiction. I also write directly onto a PC and would never dream of writing a novel in longhand now. Too slow. It would drive me mad.

But when it comes to research, planning and plotting, or making my various lists, I prefer my notebooks. I really do love to use pen and paper.

I've a feeling that you can never have too many notebooks. I wonder what other people think. Do you have favourites, pet hates, perfect specimens?