A long and winding road
From the party that broke out on the Cloud yesterday, you would think I was a published author, but The Blackbird Effect does still have a journey to travel. What has been great for me is the support of so many people who know just how hard it is to get a book this far. At every stage, there have been people who have kept me going, and while writing is by nature a solitary profession, I think those other people are vital, and not just for support.
A story is just words without a reader, and to truly write, we need also to listen. Something that makes sense to me may be nonsense to Harry or Skylark or Whisks. While I can’t claim to have been inside those three remarkable heads, I have had quality feedback from them and from many more people.
I’m going to try and outline the journey the book has taken to give you an idea of just how many people have been involved so far.
The Blackbird Effect grew out of the ashes of two previous novels in 2007, retaining two characters who became the narrators, after an Arvon course showed me that those novels were my apprenticeship. I needed more of a challenge, and focussed on the relationship between two sisters.
In 2008, another Arvon course with the novelist Kamila Shamsie confirmed that I was onto something, but that the problems I had set myself were immense: two first-person narrators, unreliable in different ways, one past-tense, one present tense, and a cyclical structure that borrowed more from musical form than anything resembling a traditional plot.
That summer, after years of cuts in the service we could provide for adults with learning disabilities through the county council, I finally decided that enough was enough, and after 24 years, I couldn’t be part of such a service. I left, and gave myself, optimistically, a year to write my book. It was great fun: I did a lot of research and went through three drafts in the year. Key advice came from workshops with poet Glyn Maxwell and two workshops with the lovely Tiffany Murray. For the first time, I began to believe that this wasn’t just me following my dream, but a book with a serious chance of success. However.
That was the however moment. To stand any chance of getting published, I would have to stop playing around with an experimental novel, and give it a traditional structure. I looked around for help and found a friendly inviting website called The Writers’ Workshop offering a self-editing workshop in the Oxford Union in February 2009 - not as an add-on to a literary festival, but as an intensive day’s work.
I booked up, and found two extraordinary tutors, Harry Bingham and Emma Darwin. They sent my confidence sky-high by loving the voices I had created. But voices have never been my problem, and I left knowing that I still had a long way to go with structure and plot. I had a string of great scenes that didn’t have much cumulative effect when added together.
I felt I needed more specific help, and was slightly surprised when my wife agreed to me paying for a full WW critique.
The result was a bit of a shock, because for the first time I met an editor who didn’t really ‘get’ my main characters. But that didn’t matter: Daren King gave me some very helpful guidance on creating a progressive plot through the book. Maybe it was a bit much to ask a young contemporary novelist to enjoy my purposely insecure and ‘soft’ characters. His review and many further comments from Harry helped me shape the material in a completely different way. Essentially, this was a new book.
2009 was the year when I launched myself as a professional storyteller, and so much less writing got done, but I had wonderful encouragement from something new: this very Cloud on which we all sit. Here were a bunch of writers going through the same agonies as me!
2010 was the year of the first York festival. Putting faces and voices to a cupcake, a Derbyshire fell and various other mysterious icons was great fun. And it was the first time I met a fiery-haired writer called Debi Alper who had been a source of wisdom and encouragement long before we actually met. Late in the festival, I read a passage to a big, slightly sozzled audience in a literary death match that included Harry taking black humour into a morgue, amongst others.
Meetings with agents suggested that yes, I was a good writer, but my ‘son of’ book wasn’t yet polished enough.
I left York with a plan of action for a project that had stagnated for a year or so. Later that year was Harry’s Getting Published day, to celebrate the launch of the book that told me everything I needed to know about the interview I’ve just had this week. Another ten-minute session with Debi confirmed that now The Blackbird Effect was really getting there, with a much-improved opening chapter. “Be ultra persistent,” she said.
I sent that draft out to agents, with a mixed response: one positive, helpful rejection, six refusals and several no-replies.
I let it lie for a few months while I began a new writing project, taking the manuscript to York 2011 with the intention of focussing on small publishers and forgetting any grand designs. But everyone still liked it. Julie Cohen gave me some great advice on pacing. In my attempts to make my project into something like a conventional novel, I had given my narrators alternating chapters to avoid confusion. But my writing had evolved, and she suggested I go back to my original plan of intercutting the voices, and see if it worked. Bingo! What I couldn’t manage before was now easy. The icing on the cake was winning a free editorial review as one of the most promising manuscripts at the festival.
And all of a sudden I had two editors! Jill Foulson carried out my winnings: a rigorous critique, instructed to look at it clinically as a commercial proposition. And I also began exchanging manuscripts with Skylark, finding the sharing of material with a trusted friend incredibly valuable. The two editorial processes dovetailed. Skylark’s many smiley faces on passages that worked for her - not to mention her rude comments when my character simply couldn’t see that she was hopelessly in love, or trust her own feelings, were an amazing confidence booster. And Jill’s comments were easy to work with. Again, I didn’t take them all at face value, but took the criticism and found solutions that worked for me.
I felt quite smug when I showed the manuscript to Harry in December. Until it came back with three points to look for in the easiest edit I have ever done. It took less than three weeks and trimmed 5,000 words-worth of baggage off the book.
Harry suggested that Juliet Mushens at PFD might like to see it a week ago today. She read the book cover-to-cover (not that it has covers yet) in one evening, and now I have an agent. But still, as ever, there is just a little more work to do to the manuscript…
All those people named above have contributed to The Blackbird Effect, and so have many others. Today, I had a storytelling session with my friend Hayley. Hayley can’t read, but if this book gets as far as publication, her name will be on the dedication page, and she and her friends give me plenty of reasons to keep on writing. If you have a manuscript that seems to be taking a long and winding road, I would suggest that it could just be the one that works for you.
27 Comments
You've had fabulous help from people who believed in you and who could see your talent, which is why this site is so amazing. There's always someone around to pick you up and point you in the right direction.
I hope that this proves to be the start of many more journeys for you.
Congratulations again x
My own journey has been a long and winding one, although not quite in the same way as yours and this blog has given me further encouragement. I intend to reach my destination!
I have always written, creatively and academically and my first writing course was way back in 1980, if I remember correctly!
So far, I have not been able to attend the York or London events, but have future ones in mind. I did have a comprehensive critique from a WW editor quite a few years ago and intend to use their services again. Meanwhile, I have received advice from a professional author on Cloud about my main work and have received encouragement from a professional critique in respect of my poetry and good feedback from some Cloud members.
I think we are all in agreement - WW and Cloud are excellent!
And I also recognise the way that sometimes technical skill lags behind what you want to do. Rejections may not mean abandoning the project: it may just mean that you can't yet do it justice, and you need to wait, working, for your craft to catch up. "I don't know how to do this yet, but I shall," is the decision of a true writer-in-the-making.
(PS - I'd forgotten it was that one-day workshop I did with Harry, where we met, not a Debi 'n Emma one. Because so many stories of success on the Cloud name-check Debi's support and feedback, I tend to think she was involved even when she wasn't... yet!)
Congratulations again. xxx
Plenty of first books serve as a way to teach their authors technique, rigour, structure and pacing, and all those other good things - but then fail, because ultimately the result is competent but bland. The wonderful thing about this book has always been its total non-blandness. Juliet won't have a problem pitching it, because she's got something tremendously distinctive to sell. An editor won't have difficulty pitching it at an acquisition committee. A sales guy knows what to tell a retail buyer.
That's a quality you can't engineer into something later. It has to be baked in from the start or it'll never be there at all. Fingers crossed that this book goes all the way. Me, I think it will.
Various of you have picked out the point that early on, I was trying to achieve something that I just didn't have the technical skill to pull off. Do I regret it? Not a bit. I love my early version for what it was - the result of a year I gave myself to write until I was silly. Only when I had written all that out of my system could I stand back and look at the book with a bit more distance. I was very pleased when Julie and Debi at York 2011 encouraged me to bring a bit more daring back into the book - and even more please when I found that I had acquired the skill to do it. A lot of that is down to great tutors.
Stand-outs on the skill side have been the 'Emma and Debi show' mini-courses at both York festivals, Debi on breaking the rules (keeping to them is more of a problem for me!), Julie on pacing, and Emma's blog, 'This itch of writing.' For a sheer confidence boost, co-editing with Skylark was wonderful last summer. Finding another author who has real sympathy with the way my mind works was a wonderful discovery.
I think if any other of you are thinking of co-editing, try finding someone who approaches their work in the same way as you do. Genre and tastes don't matter so much as how you relate to your characters and themes. I could trust Skylark's comments because I knew she had the same way of feeling into the characters and situations that I had. Thank you for that,Skylark :-)
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