5 things that turned my writing from a failure to a success
The weekend I won the Montegrappa first fiction prize at the Emirates Literature Festival was one of the luckiest in my life. Not only was my novel, My Best Friend’s Murder, chosen as the winner, I entered a Curtis Brown twitter competition on the way home from the ceremony and won a free place on one of their online courses. Within six months, I had an agent; within nine a publishing deal. I was almost the definition of an overnight success.
Except I’d entered the Montegrappa first fiction competition two years in a row and not even got so much as an honorable mention. Add that to the countless other competition attempts; Caledonia; Grindstone; Blue Pencil; Lucy Cavendish, and it all starts to look a bit different. I’m actually the opposite of an overnight success; I’m someone who’s slogged away for a couple of years, trying things out and getting them wrong countless times before finally getting them right. So what made the difference?
1. Know your market – before entering in 2019, I researched the types of books LBA agent Luigi Bonomi represented and read up what I could about the previous competition winners. Objectively, I could see the wartime romance I was laboring over for years 1 and 2 wasn’t the right type of novel for this competition. If I wanted to have a real shot, I needed something pacier with a much stronger hook.
It’s important to remember the flipside of this: if your novel doesn’t win anything, it’s not necessarily because it’s not any good. It could just be that the judges are looking for something completely different and that no matter how amazing what you write is, it’s not the genre for them. Keep going!
2. Get beta readers – there are plenty of ways to get feedback on your work. Friends, co-workers – you’d be surprised as to how many people are happy to help. I asked some honest friends with a wide range of reading tastes between them and even went the extra mile and paid for an editorial consultant. Her insights made such a difference. A word of advice here – if you’re going to ask friends to read for you, make sure they know – and can work to – what kind of timeframe you need. There’s nothing worse than sending a friend your pride and joy and then having to nag them about it every five minutes.
3. Write in your own voice – I think I’ve mentioned in a previous blog my deep and abiding passion for Maggie O’Farrell’s books. It turns out that just because you love someone’s books doesn’t mean you can write like them. Trying to write in her lyrical way felt jerky and effortful for me. I’m sure that came across in my work. It was only when I started working on something completely different, focusing on getting the story down, rather than obsessing over the words I was using, that my writing – and story – started to flow.
4. Don’t be discouraged – easier said that done but if you’re going to be a writer, you have to get used to more than your fair share of criticism and rejection. What aspiring author hasn’t heard the tale of JK Rowling. Her story of countless rejections is almost as famous as her books themselves. There are so many times where I’ve wanted to stamp my feet and give up but I kept going because I love writing (and I’m a masochist) and I’m now in a position where I’ve got the deal I always dreamed of.
5. Appreciate it all – it sounds bizarre but I genuinely wouldn’t change a step of my journey. Although my husband (and recipient of all the self-doubt induced tantrums and misery) might disagree, I think all of the bumps I hit in the road have made me significantly more appreciative of where I am now. Going repeatedly wrong has also helped me recognize when I’m going right.
Good luck with your process, wherever you are in it. I’d love to hear how you’re getting on.
Thanks for reading,