The comic novelist runs through the long slog before a big competition win changed everything
I wracked my brains to think of what PP-me (pre-publication me) would want to get from an article like this. I’m very sorry, PP-me, but it’s not necessarily what you want to hear: there is no shortcut to getting published. Every author’s road to publication is different. You’ll have heard about the direct route – write a novel, find an agent, agent finds a publisher, reader finds your book – but, as they say, the road is long with many a winding turn. And diversions and dead ends!
I have wanted to write for as long as I can remember, ever since I worked out someone had to think up the stories. The magical thing back then was that almost as soon as I decided to be a writer, I was one! Children don’t give any thought to being published, only to having written it down (good) and – judging by a quick review of my ‘juvenilia’ – they don’t care too much for editing either (bad).
It was only after I had grown up and grown older that I thought about being a published author. I’d kept writing but mainly in the form of business letters, instruction manuals and annual reports. I went back to writing fiction but it felt like a dirty secret, something to be conducted in private, not to be shared until it was ‘ready’, in case it turned out to be rubbish.
I’ve met many writers who talk about the importance of that first time someone in the profession says to them ‘you’re a good writer, you could do something with this, you know?’ This happened for me when I was shortlisted for the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition and we three finalists were invited to attend a writing workshop at an actual London publisher’s HQ. It was such an amazing experience to be shown how to wrangle your untrained instincts into an actual logical process that you could hope to repeat someday.
It would have been great to carry on working on my writing as a craft but, short of giving up my life for a year to be close to a big town or city to embark on a creative writing qualification, there was nothing to do except go back to writing on my own.
Then in 2012, the Faber Academy launched its online Writing a Novel course and I was selected for its inaugural intake – another tick on the ‘you’re a good writer, you could do something with this, you know?’ checklist. I was able to e-meet other writers. We were invited to write to deadlines and submit work for each other to critique. It was both terrifying and w
