All I want for Christmas...

Most writers have a pretty standard Christmas list that reads something like this:
- More Twitter followers, FB likes, blog readers and website visitors. (I've grouped them together because it's all the same fairy dust.)
- To be on the best seller list for their genre in Amazon (step forward Martin Bodenham).
- A contract with an agent or a publishing house. Dora Bryan might have settled for a Beatle, but that just won't do any more.

For one of my fellow contributors to Beyond the Horizon (Bamboccioni Books), Christmas has come early. Chloe Banks, a first time novelist, has signed a contract with David Haviland of The Andrew Lownie Literary Agency. I picked her brains to find out where others - including me - might have been going wrong!

1. I have to start with many congratulations, Chloe. It's every novelist's dream - has it sunk in?

I think so! The first couple of days after getting the offer I was unable to concentrate on anything – I was so excited but also overwhelmed by the speed it all happened. I was expecting months of rejections but I had an agent within about five weeks of finishing writing, after only one rejection. I sent my book to David one Tuesday and he made an offer on Friday. Once we started talking about everything that needs to be done to the book now, it made everything feel more normal. I still sometimes have to pinch myself though.


2. Have you met the agent in person yet? Is it true that they are surrounded by humming birds and creatures of the forest? (I might be confusing the words 'agent' and 'Disney cartoon' here.)

No humming birds, just thousands of Londoners rushing to get places! I travelled to London to see David. It wasn’t strictly necessary but I thought it was better to have met in person and I’m so glad I did. I think agents had always been mythical creatures to me until then. But he was a normal person (he actually recognised me in the street – rather than me spotting him by the glow of sheer agently awesomeness surrounding him) and very lovely. If all goes well, an agent could work with you for your whole career, potentially over several decades, so it’s good to get off on the right foot. We did a very unglamorous and unceremonious signing of the contract in a basement café, but I liked the workmanlike feel to it – writing is a job not an “experience”.


3. What led you to the original premise for your novel and did it change much along the way? (Tell us about the book)

TheArt of Letting Go started in the least sophisticated way possible. I wanted to do NaNoWriMo (the annual event where participants try to write 50 000 words of a novel in a month) in 2011 as I had nothing else on my writing horizon. I had three or four short stories that hadn’t worked at all, but that contained an idea or two that I still loved – an abstract artist, a man in a coma, a missing god. So I decided to try to mash them together as an experiment!

At the end of the month, I had the world’s worst book – my draft zero. I decided to do one “real” draft to see if it had potential. I almost gave up after that as it was still awful. But the characters had trapped me. A year after I started and two more drafts later it was unrecognisable, but I thought I had something.

The book is about lies and art, secrets and madness. It tells the story of physics professor Rosemary Blunt who is leading a double life, split between respectable retirement in a seaside village and secret visits to see a comatose man lying in a nearby hospital. It’s her decision whether he lives or dies and nobody in the village has any idea he even exists. When Ben – an abstract artist – turns up, his attempt to paint a picture of God disturbs Rosemary more than it should. Despite this, an unlikely friendship develops and begins to threaten the security of her secret. But she’s not the only one with a past she’d rather forget. As summer passes they have to decide whether they can trust each other enough to set themselves free, or whether their secrets are just too terrible to be told.

The story is told from four points of view. Interwoven with the action, Ben tells the reader a very potted history of abstract art – leaving the reader to draw their own parallels between the deceptions practised by the characters, and the deceptions practised by abstract artists. I suppose if I was to pick one theme it would be that of ‘things not looking like what they are meant to be’!

4. A tricky question, but what do you think it was about your novel that attracted the agent?

I think David liked the position it holds on the novel spectrum. It’s not literary, but it’s also not a family saga or romance – and definitely not chick lit. It’s at that cross-over point between the two and therefore (hopefully!) is quite commercial. Good writing and commercial potential are the two most important things to an agent. I seem to have managed to do enough of the former – though there’s loads more work to do – and I was lucky that it happens to have the latter too! I think the use of multiple first-person viewpoints worked in my favour, which I’m very glad of as it was a gamble for a first novel. I was worried it would seem pretentious rather than interesting! But you have to find the voice that works for the story you’re telling – no point trying to imitate another book or author. I didn’t feel like I could write it any other way.


5. What happens next in the process?

I’ve got a fair bit of re-writing to do now that I have David’s notes (I’m doubly blessed that he is a very experienced editor and writer as well as an agent). Once that’s done – hopefully in a month or so – we’ll put together a proposal for publishers and then David will do his stuff, sending it out to editors seeing if he can get anyone to bite! I’ll be glad to hand it all over to him and get started on the next novel.


6. I know that you have had significant success with short stories. How did you apply that experience to writing longer fiction?

My short story successes aren’t really that significant – it’s all been in small, low-key competitions. But it has been significant to my development – both the times I’ve won and the times I’ve got it horribly wrong. Short stories and novels are such different skills, once you know how to write I’m not sure they really help each other much. But when you are just starting out, as I was three or four years ago, all writing teaches you so much, and short fiction is great because you can get it wrong 20 times over and learn 20 times as much in the time it takes you to get your first novel wrong! Short stories taught me how to build characters and plots, carry tension and create satisfying endings. They also gave me a confidence boost and a handy couple of sentences to put in my cover letter to agents!


7. How will you balance any rewriting with working on your next book?

Oh, I am itching to get on with the next book. But I’m not very good at writing two things at once. So I am compromising by concentrating on the re-writing for now, and just allowing myself the occasional hour to jot down some planning notes for the next one. I’m so excited by my initial idea, I can’t wait to get going! But I’m also not completely bored by The Art of Letting Go yet so it shouldn’t be too much of a chore. I’ll be interested to see whether writing a novel feels different when you know you already have an agent for it.


8. Does your success change how you see yourself as a writer and how you interact with other writers?

I never expected to be a writer so it’s all been a bit crazy. I have a first-class science degree, nothing more! I was only playing with writing as a hobby until – and I know how much this can make me sound like a crank – I felt like God was telling me to write. I’m a Christian and my faith is the most important part of my life (even though I don’t write Christian books). I tried to ignore God for about 18 months, and only took it semi-seriously. Then one day a visiting pastor came to speak at our church. He’d never met me and knew nothing about me and yet, as I left after we’d chatted, he told me, “God wants you to keep writing. You’ve got what it takes.” So I’ve spent the last two years trying to have what it takes. We moved to Devon and I started to tell people I was a writer – however embarrassed I felt by it.

At times I’ve stepped back and thought, ‘Seriously? Your whole life is based around the hope that you heard God right when he told you to get writing?!’ But I kept going and God was faithful even when I wasn’t. My husband is amazing too. He trusted that it was what God wanted and never put pressure on me to get a “proper job”. Now, of course, he says I’m his pension plan for the future when I’m selling Hollywood rights to all my books!

Even though I know the most crucial factor in getting an agent is writing a good book, I still find it hard to believe that I “deserve” to have got one. I felt a bit guilty that my book was recommended to David by a friend of mine, rather than having been discovered on the slush pile. There was another agency who were interested in my novel, and they did find it on the slush pile, so that helped me get over the guilt, but I don’t think of myself as a better writer now particularly – just a very blessed one! And, I suppose a bit more of a confident one. The quality of my writing didn’t suddenly change because somebody thought it was good. Getting an agent is great but it doesn’t mean a lot unless I also find a publisher. Success – whatever that is – is made up of thousands of steps and this is just one of them.

I find in this early stage I’m very wary of how I come across to people who have been reading my blog for ages. I’m worried if I say anything encouraging that I’ll sound patronising now, whereas I wouldn’t have thought twice before – we writers need all the encouragement we can get! I know I’ll still need it. In the space of a couple of weeks I posted on my blog about getting my first rejection and about getting an agent, and both times I was so glad of the encouragement of other writers. There will be writers who I know who will never get an agent or publisher – some because they just won’t ever be good enough (just like I will never be picked for the Olympic athletics team despite spending my whole youth running round a track), but others just because. That sucks; that’s life. I’m so aware that writing requires luck as well as talent. But we can get hung up on the luck part and worry about the submissions process and wearing our lucky pants when we post our manuscript and all sorts of silly stuff, when really the bit we can control is writing a good book in the first place.

I'd be delighted if people want to come and say hello on my blog, chat on Twitter or find out more about me and the book on the agency website.

My thanks to Chloe for being so open and honest. There you are folks - it can happen the way we've always wanted to believe. Time to get writing!

Life Lessons from Social Media

Andy Social always used an alias
online so people took him seriously. 

Whether you love it or loathe it, social media is here to stay. Yes, it can suck the time out of your day like a chrono-vacuum; and yes, there are those who swear by it (opposed to at it) for promoting their wares and bringing home the bacon. However, there is another side to social media - it can teach us about life (by which I mean 'real life' away from the screen).

Here are my social media life lessons, distilled from literally minutes of contemplation.

1. You cannot please everyone. Get used to it. Once you adjust to the statistical probability of being on the receiving end of someone else's disapproval, life becomes a lot easier.

2. Everyone has an opinion and they'll happily use up oxygen to share it with you. You're not obliged to take it seriously and what you do with it afterwards is entirely up to you.

3. People only tell you what they want you to know. And it's a good policy to adopt.

4. You're not obliged to be friends with anyone just bceause they want you to. You're not in school any more, so don't allow yourself to be swayed by peer pressure.

5. Sometimes it's good to sit back and think before you act. Knee-jerk communications rarely come out well - count to thirty-seven.

6. Everyone is selling something - a product, a service, an idea or a worldview. That's what communication is - a desire to express something so that it is understood.

7. People who say, "I'm not like other people," generally are. "I'm so zany, pick me." Erm...no thanks.

8. Other poeple's conversations can be addictive, but that doesn't make them beneficial to you. Dip in. Dip out. Jog on.

9. The friend of a friend is not necessarily going to make a good friend for you. Which is just some friendly advice.

10. Social media is just a tool. You don't have to play, but if you choose to do so then see it for what it is.

And my three cardinal Twitter sins, from the gospel of Derek?

1. Begging for retweets. It's like seeing a whiny Labrador craving more biscuits.

2. Auto-tweeting someone who's just followed you to visit their page or buy their book.

3. A follow from someone who has no interest in you (based on their tweet history), and who is blatantly just trying to build up numbers. (End of civilisation peeps, you know who you are.)

Twitter for Writers - use your tweets wisely!

I’m a huge Twitter fan. I probably spend more time than is healthy scrolling through my newsfeeds – I use it as a source of information and entertainment, as well as a nice way to waste time when I should be doing something more productive. But I’ve also found that it’s an enormously helpful marketing tool (I’ve had several gigs off the back of it, sold some books and made some useful contacts). But many writers are either scared of using Twitter at all, or use it badly. Here are some tips on making the most of your Twitter feed… so get tweeting (and come say hi! – I’m @thriftygal)

Avoid the hard sell: one of the biggest mistakes writers make is to use their Twitter feed as a stream of self-promotion. Nobody minds you promoting stuff – after all, that’s the purpose behind a lot of feeds, whether they are theatres, brands or artists. But if that’s all you do, it gets boring very quickly. I unfollowed one author recently because all he did was tweet quotes from his own books; I’ve read his books, so what’s the point? People want a person they can connect with – so tweet about what interests you, what you are working on, etc. Create an online persona that reflects who you really are, and people are much more likely to engage with it. (Aim for no more than 20% of your tweets to be ‘plugs’.)

Build relationships: to get the best out of Twitter, use it as a conversation. If someone tweets something you like, tell them! If someone asks a question and you can help, answer it. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you attract like-minded people. While you shouldn’t just think of them as potential customers, obviously this is widening your potential readership. It’s also fun: I have a whole batch of people I interact with regularly, none of whom I know in ‘real’ life, but it makes for some great exchanges.

Support other users: Retweet posts that you think are clever, or funny, or thought-provoking (or where people are asking for help/information); use Follow Friday (#FF) to promote tweeters who you like or who you think your followers would be interested in.

NEVER troll! Remember, your tweets are public and identifiable. Don’t ever tweet anything abusive, and try to be measured if you are stating a negative opinion. Be aware that some people follow thousands of users so won’t see every tweet, so don’t think it’s OK to tweet something then ‘contextualise’ it (eg, tweet something inflammatory/racist/homophobic that you mean ironically, then follow up with something like ‘obviously I’m joking’ – I’ve seen it done! What tends to happen is people will see the first tweet then think, hell, I’m not following this nutter any more…)

Clueless as to how to get started? I’m assuming a basic knowledge of what Twitter is and how to use it, but if you’re completely in the dark, do check out an earlier post I did on Twitter for Business which is aimed at absolute beginners.

Hot Gossip

I don't know about everyone else but I've been fascinated by the whole super-injunction v Twitter saga that's been playing out this week.

On the one hand I can see that if it were me I wouldn't want the details of my sex life splattered over the red tops. On the other hand, I really can't see why it was necessary.

Footballer Has Affair...is hardly so shocking that the man in question could consider himself in threat of excommunication or losing his free-weekly-boots contract.

To be honest, I'm really not mithered about what anyone gets up to between the sheets but what really did grip me was the way that the law was circumvented by the virtual world. The creativity and humour on display was, for me a writer, quite awe inspiring.

One corker worth mentioning here was on Mumsnet: a thread entitled 'Isn't It A Huge Coincidence How Much Imogen Thomas Looks Like Ryan Giggs' Wife?'
Hundreds of people posted replies, almost, but not quite, breaking the terms of the injunction.

Then, on Twitter, tweeters actually started to break the injunction and like the nasties escaping Pandora's Box, there really wasn't any putting them back in. It felt like a rear guard action, defending freedom of speech. I was almsot sorry when John Hemming MP ended it all by using parliamentary privilege to name the footballer in question. When the grown ups got involved, somehow all the fun was taken out of it. By the time the BBC had dared entered the arena everyone had lost interest.

Like I say, I found the whole thing fascinating and as I don't actually think that Ryan Giggs' rep will be shattered by the 'revelation' that he's been shagging an attractive brunette...I just enjoyed the ride. But there is of course a serious point to all this - how far should we the public seek protect our right to freedom of speech?

As a writer, I'm instinctively against any attempts to keep me in check. I react badly to gagging orders and bans and the like. The State is just a bunch of people we voted in to run our hospitals and wotnot...its job isn't to tell me what to think or what I am or am not entitled to know.

Clearly 70,000 people on Twitter felt the same.

Then again, if we are entitled to free speech, surely we also have a responsibilty to use it wisely?
I feel I should be allowed to say exactly what I want in my books without fear of supression...but then again, there are some things I wouldn't say, wouldn't feel it was right to say. While I will depict, for instance rape in my books, I won't write it in any way that might be sexually stimulating. There are, I think, lines that one wouldn't want to cross.

I had a dilemma in book four, Blood Rush, in the scenes depicting the manufacture of crystal meth and also the scenes depicting gang violence. I decided it was right to make them graphic, but I was aware that others may find these scenes upsetting. It took me a long time to find a balance I was happy with. Certainly not an overnight decision. I wonder whether any of the tweeters gave much thought to their own expressions of freedom of speech. I hope so.
Or I hope they would if the information at stake was something more important.

Someone's illness perhaps? Or a story about a child?

I guess the question is whether we should each look to our moral compasses or whether the powers that be should do it for us...

As the Chinese say 'May you live in interesting times.'

Guest post: From frustration to self-expression by means of a little light blogging

Today's guest blogger, Stephen (a.k.a. BillyGottaJob) writes the excellent At-Long-Last-I've-Got-a-Job Blog. Here he explains his reasons for starting to blog - and why it's worth continuing.

I’ve never had any trouble “finding my voice”, as anyone who’s had the misfortune to share a management team meeting with me will testify. I’m not a great talker socially, but get me started on stimulating cultural change in an organisation, and you’ll almost certainly wish you hadn’t. On the other hand, if you are obliged to read one of my written reports at work at least it will have a bit of style, a reasonable grasp of when a comma, or even a semi-colon, would be a good idea, and a dearth of unlovely management-speak. No, it’s not lack of voice that’s my problem; it’s a lack of an audience that has chosen to be such, rather than the work ones for whom discretion is the better part of pissing me right off.

My blog first began as a way of allowing me to get the frustrations of unemployment off my chest. Even with the limitations of a work-based audience that I’ve described, at least it is one of a sort. When you’re out of a job, and your wife is evading her wedding vows to provide you with an audience on demand, you’re in danger of rampant schizophrenia when you try and operate as both voice and audience. So The Still-Jobless Blog, as it then was, fulfilled its purposes admirably and, to my delight, even seemed to entertain total strangers.

Having managed to get back into employment (although I write as Mr Osborne’s public not-spending fetish is only just beginning, so watch this space) I’ve found that the weaknesses of the obligated work audience have been amplified by the luxury of having established a voluntary electronic one. It's not just the involuntary nature of a work audience that's a problem, it's also the stiflingly narrow range of topics available to write about. But a blog has no such restrictions; so I’ve broadened my writing beyond angst-filled tirades about unemployment to include similarly angst-filled tirades about a whole lot of other things too. The freedom to range from the scarily scatological (Should I raise my obscenity quotient?) to the philosophically speculative (It's almost as if God exists...) via the whimsically sentimental (Valentine's Day massacre...) is liberating and stimulating in equal measure.

Thus now re-named as The At-Long-last-I’ve-Got-a-Job Blog my writing has become an indispensable part of my tool-kit of self-expression. I have established a small but loyal following and whilst, in audiences as in willies, it would be nice to have a bigger one I’m genuinely more interested in satisfaction than in size.

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The At-Long-Last-I've-Got-a-Job Blog
Follow BillyGottaJob on Twitter

Why bother with Twitter?

Some say Twitter is essential for writers; others sneer at it as a time-wasting exercise in vanity. I wouldn't say it's essential (which for me means stuff like oxygen and water), but I do find Twitter useful and, what's more, fun.

I've only been on Twitter a couple of months, having resisted joining for ages because it seemed pointless. Like many people who have never looked at it, I thought it would consist of morons informing the world that they're about to eat a doughnut, or that their baby is a genius because it just did a poo.

I was finding, however, that most people I knew elsewhere on the net were other writers, and could not necessarily be expected to have an interest in my history blog. I wanted to find people with shared non-writing-related interests and - dare I say it - I wanted a change from the kind of tortured writerly discussions that always include the phrase 'oh God that's so depressing'. I joined Twitter mainly to promote my blog, but was pleasantly surprised to find there's a lot of interesting, intelligent and funny tweeting going on.

I am certainly no social media guru, but from my limited experience, the advantages of Twitter are:

• You can tweet your blog posts to a wide audience. My blog stats have more than doubled since I've been on Twitter. I also use it to catch up with other people's posts and now don't bother much with RSS.
• If you already have a book out, chatting to people on Twitter encourages them to check it out – but this is all about talking with others because they are interesting, not about constantly begging everyone to buy your masterpiece.
• If you don't have a book out, gathering a crowd of relevant followers who get to know and like you will be useful if you ever do get published.
• Many agents, publishers and book trade news sources are on Twitter, so you can get an insight into what they're doing and what they're looking for.
• Some famous authors are also on there, and if they're using it properly they'll engage with their readers – you can actually find yourself chatting to your literary hero or heroine as if they were a normal person, which usually they are. (Certain ones just broadcast and won't respond to anyone, but this doesn't do them much good.)
• It's a useful exercise in brevity – you have to choose words carefully to keep to the 140-character limit.
• People post interesting links – brilliant for finding research sources, writing advice, short story markets, book recommendations etc.
• You don't have to talk about writing all the time. Well, you can talk about nothing but writing if you want to, but there are lots of other people out there too.

So, is it worth a published writer joining Twitter to publicise their book, or for an unpublished writer to build up a following ready for when that six-figure deal comes along?

Well, yes and no. It's worth it if you will enjoy it anyway. Joining purely to promote yourself or your work could backfire – either people will get bored with your egotism or you'll get bored because your heart's not really in it. And if you aren't published as yet, there is the possibility that you never will be, so being on Twitter under sufferance purely to prepare for a deal that might never happen is a bit sad. If you don't want to join Twitter, don't. You and your writing will survive without it.

If, however, you plan to enjoy it for its own sake and are prepared to join in the conversation and appreciate what other people are saying, then give it a go - it could have a lot of benefits for your writing career.

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www.carolinerance.co.uk

twitter.com/quackwriter

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UPDATE: Nicola Morgan at Help! I Need a Publisher! has a great post today about how to get started on Twitter - click here for her excellent advice.

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Thank you to Crystal Church for the picture.