Self-Distrust: The Killer of Creativity

Tuesday, June 14th, 2016

By Charlotte Green

Ted Solotaroff, editor of the New American Review, once wrote that rejection is as much a part of a writer’s life as snow and cold are of an Eskimo’s. He’s right. If the British Library’s new online collection Discovering Literature shows us anything, it is that even the greatest writers are rejected. TS Elliot once rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm, writing that it needed ‘more public-spirited pigs’.

To an inexperienced writer, a year or two of regular rejection letters can lead to what is known as self-distrust, that is a lack of self confidence; an inability to trust your writing and editing skills; a lack of faith in the writing process. Essentially, those writers who suffer from self-distrust will not allow themselves to write badly.

In any other profession it would be expected that the early stages of a task would be messy, so why do writers expect beautiful prose from the outset? Ernest Hemingway’s famous line The first draft is always shit is pinned to most writer’s corkboards, but why do so few believe it? It is because on finishing their first draft, the inexperienced writer moves immediately from creating to judging. They do not allow time to edit. Instead, they read and judge, inevitably feeling disheartened and eventually pressing delete, rejecting every word they have written. If they do value something of their work, enough to send it out to an agent, the inevitable rejection letter only leads to an added sense of self-distrust. For those writers, self distrust becomes so crippling that it leads to anxiety and depression. From there the writer becomes defensive and rather than being excited come a writing session, they are instead afraid of the blank, white computer screen, seeing in it a reflection of their own limitations. After a time they won’t switch their computer on at all.

Experienced writers learn to separate the rejection of their writing and the rejection of themselves. They don’t allow criticism of the work to turn into self-criticism or self-distrust. In fact they use it. The anger and disappointment they feel at each rejection letter becomes a source of energy, forcing them on to improve their writing. They use their sorrow and self pity to improve their sense of empathy, deepening their character portrayals. And that wounded innocence they now possess? They convert it into irony, adding an element of tragi-comedy to their prose.

It is no exaggeration that how a writer copes with rejection determines whether or not they will go on to have a successful writing career. Rejection can so easily be turned into self-hatred. The best defence, therefore, is self-objectivity, an interest in the outside world, and a faith in the process. Write on. Write through the all-consuming doubts. And use that rejection to power yourself forwards towards your ultimate goal: the writing of perfection.

BBC to feature our very own Dexter Petley

Saturday, June 11th, 2016

BBC Radio 4 have been out in France all last week following Dexter around for a programme on him that is due to go out in July. We will keep you posted.

Love Madness Fishing, by Dexter Petley,

Published by Little Toller Books.

Dexter’s blog for waterstones:
https://www.waterstones.com/blog/love-madness-fishing

Publisher link:
http://littletoller.co.uk/bookshop/caught-by-the-river/love-madness-fishing/

Publishing Without Boundaries

Thursday, June 2nd, 2016

Publishing Without Boundaries

One-day conference on 14th June 2016 at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

The conference has a line-up of very high-profile speakers: Joanne Harris, author of ‘Chocolat’ and many otherbooks, Baroness Gail Rebuck, Chair of Penguin Random House in conversation with journalist and presenter Mariella Frostrup, and Nigel Newton, CEO of Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury. There are also breakout sessions, including one run by Euan Hirst of Blackwells, called ‘Understanding Your Book Buyer’.

The cost of the day conference is £85, including a three course sit-down meal and a wine reception at the end of the day.

http://shop.brookes.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&deptid=25&catid=245&prodid=2313

Sophie King: Romance comes in many forms and sizes …

Sunday, May 29th, 2016

Monday, May 2nd, 2016

By Sophie King (and others)

When I first started writing novels (long before I was published), I didn’t intend to write romance. I simply wanted to write a story. In fact, I’d been writing stories ever since I’d picked up a pencil at the age of two. But this time, I wanted to write one that ended up on a bookshelf.

At the same time, I was earning my living as a magazine journalist. My job consisted of interviewing famous celebrities including Julie Walters at the start of her career. I also wrote about Barbara Cartland : the ‘Queen’ of romantic fiction at the time. But although I admired her (not least for her insistence on reading journalists’ copy and taking out all apostrophes that were not of the possessive variety!), I knew I didn’t want to write like her.

Pink lace love affairs were not my thing…..

Yes. That’s right. In those days, I thought romantic fiction consisted of froth and underwear; satin quilts and cupid bow lips. How wrong I was!

Back to my first novel, which I entitled ‘Amersham Wives’, partly because we lived in the area at the time. My characters consisted of a bored housewife who swapped places with an exhausted journalist. Before I knew it, the journalist fell in love with the housewife’s husband; and the housewife fell in love with the journalist’s editor.

Before I knew it, I had a romance on my hands. But it didn’t get published (although it did get me an agent and some nice ‘not quite for us’ letters from publishers). I then went onto write one book a year for the next ten years. Two got to editorial conferences, which is when editors sit round a table and discuss manuscripts which have potential.

But to my disappointment, it turned out that the other editors – apart from the one championing my cause – had manuscripts with similar romance themes. I later found out that this was a very common reason for rejections.

My experience made me wonder what a writer had to do, in order to be different. I was beginning to realise that you couldn’t have a story without love. But you had to inject other elements as well, in order to make that love story have a unique selling point all of its own.

Enter The School Run. I wrote this under my Sophie King name on my agent’s advice because I used my real name (Jane Bidder) for my journalism. The School Run was about seven characters , all involved in the same school route. Two were friends who shared a run. Another was a teacher. A fourth was a single dad. The fifth was a much older mother. A sixth was a stepmother….and so on.

The important part was that each one of them had experienced a different type of love. This included love between friends; between parents and child; between characters who were alive but still loved the dead; and between children and pets.

It became, for a while, a best-seller. After that, I wrote four more books: all in the same kind of school run territory with mothers and neighbours and lovers and teachers. I then changed publishers and wrote under the same kind of books under the name Janey Fraser, including ‘AFTER THE HONEYMOON’ which was published by Arrow this year and was shortlisted for a Festival of Romance award.

But my lesson in love had not finished. My first marriage had ended between my Sophie King and Janey Fraser books and I took a job as a writer in residence of a high security male prison. Yes – I WAS scared at first but then I found that words could be a great leveller. Once I started to help men write their life stories and poems and short stories and novels, I stopped thinking about the headline crimes that had put them there.

Instead, I began thinking about love behind bars.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t fall for a criminal – although there are some staff in prisons who do just that. But I did realise how important love is in places where you might not expect to find it. Many of ‘my’ men wrote about broken relationships because it’s not easy to keep a marriage going when one half is Inside. Several wrote about love for their children. And a few wrote about their remorse for their victims and the loved ones which had consequently been left behind.

All this gave me another idea for a different kind of romance. GUILTY tells the story of a middle aged solicitor who has just got married again. He offers to take some drunken guests home but picks up a mobile phone call from his stepson as he is driving. There is a terrible accident and his beautiful passenger dies. Simon is then sent to prison where he is haunted by the voice of the dead victim who acts as his guide.. The reader doesn’t know until the end if the voice is his guilty conscience or a real ghost.

But at the heart of the novel is a love story: that between Simon and his wife Claire on the outside. GUILTY is told from two viewpoints: his and hers. Can their marriage survive, even when Simon is eventually released?

One reviewer, who gave it five stars, said it was a ‘modern love story which could happen to anyone making a split-second wrong decision’.

That’s very true. But already, another kind of love story had come into my head. THE WITNESS, a follow up to GUILTY, tells the tale of a woman who witnesses a young couple ‘making out’ in the park. She walks on, not wanting to intrude. But then a policeman knocks on her door. The man in question was a drugs dealer. The girl was under age. My woman is the only witness. If she doesn’t take the stand, the dealer will strike again. But if she does, her past will come out under cross-examining and her ‘respectable’ life – not to mention her marriage – will disintegrate.

Without meaning to, I have strayed into the territory of psychological suspense with a love story. It’s also, I ought to say, partly based on a true experience.

Talking of true experiences, I have always wanted to write an historical novel, partly based on my grandmother’s life. She met her husband when visiting his brother who had been wounded in the First World War. My grandmother’s father was a doctor and had encouraged his daughter to ‘cheer up the patients’. It was love at first sight. After the war, my grandfather swept up his new bride and took her to Borneo where he had been working his way up in a rubber plantation.

Hooked? Five publishers in Germany were, when my agent took it to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The result is THE PEARLS, which is coming out in the UK next year but has already been a best seller in Germany and Italy. It’s a very different romance from my prison book and my Sophie King/Janey Frasers because it’s more of a literary novel with greater emphasis on setting and period features.

I also write lots of romantic fiction for women’s magazines and recently, a friend of mine (Linda Mitchelmore) and I published our own Kindle collection called CHRISTMAS LOVE STORIES (see below).

What tips do you have on writing romantic fiction, enquired one of my uni students only this morning. Most of the answers are in my new HOW TO WRITE ROMANTIC FICTION which has just been published by Constable & Robinson. But here are some tasters:

Always accept an invitation. It might take you into a new setting with fresh faces – and act as inspiration for a love story you didn’t know you had inside you

Don’t assume that a novel has to be a traditional love story from the word go. Write about a situation that excites you and you’ll find that romance creeps in without you realising.

Make your story different by including a male viewpoint. Heroes need a say too.

The villain is more interesting if he/she starts out good and then turns bad. Or vice versa.

You don’t need to spell out the nuts and bolts when it comes to the physical side. Some scenes are best written behind closed doors.

Look up the Romantic Novelists Association. Members include published and unpublished writers. The RNA holds lots of events, including an annual conference, where you can meet publishers and agents. www.rna-uk.org

www.sophieking.info

www.janeyfraser.co.uk

www.janebidder.com

Paul Maunder: How to not write a novel about cycling

Sunday, May 29th, 2016

How to not write a novel about cycling

Perhaps it was the tapas, or the Spanish beer, but one night during a family holiday in Andalusia, I dreamt a whole novel. Fully-formed and ready to write. In almost twenty years of writing fiction this had never happened to me. Indeed I’d written off as delusional the idea that one could dream an idea for a novel.
I rushed downstairs to find a pen and paper, though I needn’t have bothered because the idea had lodged itself firmly in my mind. Even more surprising, this was a book with road racing at its heart. Two brothers are growing up in a Northern mining town during the eighties. The oldest is trapped and his resentment becomes channeled into football hooliganism. The younger brother makes a bid for freedom as a professional racing cyclist in France. I’m being a little coy with the full story because, well, novelists are a furtive bunch, but basically it’s Billy Elliott on bikes.

I was excited. The story seemed to have lots of opportunity for family conflict, it was clearly positioned in time and landscape and politics, and the contrast between cycling and football seemed interesting. And I knew a lot about cycling. I knew less about football violence, but that’s what Youtube is for.
Sitting down to write a book is much like training for a bike race. You have to commit to a routine, you have to put in the hours, you have to push through the hard bits. And the daily rituals are similar too. The first step is to put the coffee on. Then there’s a period of prevarication before you have to confront the fact that you’ve just got to get on with the bloody thing. Once you’ve started, hopefully, it will flow smoothly and if you’re lucky you’ll get a few words/miles under your belt before the brain softens and an injection of sugar, caffeine or red wine is required. That’s probably where the analogy ends.

I could picture my first scene. The hero of the story is sixteen and has just received some terrible exam results. He knows that his only way out of this small town is through bike racing. He gets changed and storms up onto the open moorland. The horizon opens up in front of him. The road glistens. He feels free and he rides and rides…

So, pot of coffee made, special writing mug warmed, Jelly Babies poised for the feedzone, I sharpened my pencil (yes I do write long-hand) and faced the empty page. But the air underneath my pencil seemed particularly dense. I couldn’t find the words to start. I sat there for some time, staring into space. Then I got up and began tidying the house. A writer tidying their house is a worrying sign.

For the first time in my career as a writer I was blocked. It was as if my two great passions – cycling and writing – had met and taken an instant dislike to each other. I was stumped. Why? Cycling is full of stories – heroes, villains, suspense, great rivalries – it’s what the media thrive on. And yet I couldn’t tune into the frequency of this idea. I turned to the solace that all writers fall back on – reading. Surely there were other writers who had managed to pen a novel about cycle racing? All I needed was a clue, a lodestar to navigate by.
First I discounted all books that contained bicycles but weren’t about cycle racing. Bicycles are a cultural and technological artefact, rightly celebrated in books by HG Wells, Flannery O’Connor and many others. But it was the much more specific experience of being a racing cyclist that was proving beyond my novelistic powers. The field started to narrow.

I started with a giant of literature. Wearing a generously-sized American national team jersey but really riding for his Spanish trade team, Ernest Hemingway. During the years he spent in Europe Hemingway became well-acquainted with cycling, and in The Sun Also Rises, the narrator Jake Barnes comes across a bike race whilst staying in San Sebastian. “The next morning at five o’clock the race resumed with the last lap, San Sebastian-Bilbao. The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the racing seriously except among themselves. They had raced among themselves so often that it did not make much difference who won. Especially in a foreign country. The money could be arranged. The Spaniards, they said, did not know how to pedal.”

This is really only a mention in passing, and has something of the tourist’s mild curiosity about it. The Sun Also Rises is a book about the disillusionment of a generation. At best Jake’s encounter with cycle racing is part of his exploration of European culture. At worst it’s incidental, and slightly indulgent of Hemingway. It is not central to the story. Unless you’re a fan, long stretches of description about a bike race are only going to be interesting for a couple of pages at most. Hemingway knew that. And here lies the crux of the problem. To hold the attention a novel has to have a lot at stake. Someone’s life must be on the line, physically or spiritually. Winning or losing a bike race simply isn’t enough. Cycling, like any other sport, can only ever be a background. Was there really no way to bring it front and centre?

I turned to Tim Krabbe, a Dutch novelist who was also an amateur road-racer. Amongst cyclists he is known for The Rider, which stands head and shoulders above any other book about cycle racing. But his 1984 novel, The Vanishing, and its feted film version, also has a cycling connection. The Vanishing tells the story of a sociopathic Frenchman who abducts a young woman at a motorway service station, then years later torments the boyfriend who is still trying to find her. In the novel the woman wears a yellow jersey. In the film, which Krabbe co-wrote, a detail is added that most viewers would not pick up on. As the boyfriend goes to the shop in the service station, leaving his girlfriend alone, a radio is broadcasting live coverage of the Tour de France. And as the commentator describes Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon battling it out for the yellow jersey, the Frenchman moves in on the girl. Two men using their wits to duel over this coveted prize. What a metaphorical flourish. So simple and so telling.

The Rider, however, is that rare creature – a novel about cycle racing, from the first to the last page. It tells the story of the one day Tour de Mont Aigoual, a semi-professional race in the Cevennes, South-West France. The narrator is a competitor, the novel an account of the race from his perspective, and as the kilometers tick away we are drawn into his psyche. He assesses his rivals, outlines possible strategies, shares his pain and his fears. We see the obsessive qualities of an elite cyclist, and some of the idiosyncrasies. The novel is true to cycle racing in that its structure and rhythms mirror the race itself. It is a cerebral novel, and that’s the point – it’s about how the mind and the body interact, but Krabbe, who in his youth was a distinguished chess player, seems to be saying that cycling is more mind than body.

“Lebusque is really only a body. In fact, he’s not a good racer. People are made up of two parts: a mind and a body. Of the two, the mind, of course, is the rider”.

The Rider is something of a hallowed work for cyclists, because it uses the unique ability of fiction to get inside its character’s head. No piece of journalism will ever access a rider’s deepest thoughts and motivations like this. But it also works as literature, and will endure because its meaning transcends its story, becomes universal; the examination of mind and body floats freely away from the hot tarmac of the Cevennes roads.
Paul Koechli, who coached Greg Lemond and Bernard Hinault at La Vie Claire, would no doubt approve. He considered cycling a game, played out in the minds of riders and their coaches, and was author to some of the more unorthodox tactical strategies seen in the modern peloton, not least the daft notion that on La Vie Claire everyone was a leader. Koechli formed a triangle with Hinault and Lemond, brilliantly told in Richard Moore’s book Slaying the Badger, and as such became a player in a version of the classic sporting story – the duel.
The duel is a perfect shape for a story, because there can only be one winner, even if the victory is moral rather than literal. In a duel the characters should be differentiated, light and dark. This is a rich seam for novels, particularly when there is an interesting, and often ambiguous, third character like Koechli to create a triangle. This is the structure that Chris Cleave used in his 2012 novel Gold, which tells the story of two woman sprinters on the British track team in the build-up to the London Olympics. The women are vying for the single spot on the Olympic team, and Cleave’s descriptions of training and racing sing like the velodrome boards. Yet ultimately what we engage with as readers is a deeper emotional journey for the two women and their families.

So the cycling novel has to be more than about cycling. It has to transcend the sport to be about human lives. Indeed if you think about cycling’s greatest stories, they correspond to recognizable story archetypes, and this is what makes them interesting. Usually they are tragedies. The young king whose insatiable ambition to conquer drags him into a spiral of moral corruption? Macbeth, or Lance Armstrong. The fragile hero who is the darling of his scene, but has a fatal flaw which brings him ultimately to a violent death? Gatsby, or Marco Pantani. What we find endlessly fascinating about cycling’s greatest stories is not that the heroes are superhuman but that they are human, with all the mess that entails.

Have any of these meanderings helped me with my own story? Well not quite. I still have writer’s block. My editor suggested I try another sport, tennis for example. I scowled at her. More helpful was the advice to make the cycling fit the story, rather than the other way round. The centre of my book, its heart, is the relationship between the two brothers and the conflict between duty to family and desire to escape. Cycling seemed to fit this story – after all, don’t we all feel free when we’re out on our bikes. But I was struggling because the research had been taking over. It doesn’t matter whether the boy is a puncheur or a grimpeur, or what kind of embrocation he uses, or whether he wears a casquette under his leather helmet. What matters is how he feels about his brother.

So now I have a plan. Story first, Campagnolo Super Record derailleurs later. But let’s not rush into anything. First, I need a pot of coffee. And the kitchen needs a good old tidy-up…