You Too Can be Like Johnboy...

I remember watching as John Walton Junior struggled to become a published author.

'I've had so many rejection slips,' he remonstrated, 'that I could paper my room with them.'

Now considering that Johnboy grew up during the Great Depression, using rejection slips in this way sounds like a great enrepreneurial idea. So, as we face recession, here is how you too can cut down on the cost of decorating.

Firstly- you need the 'Writers' and Artists' Yearbook.' There's a new one out every year, and its articles do reflect changing trends. I'm still using the 2007 edition. I have a pact with it: when it helps me to sell my book, I will use some of the money to buy another one- and not before.

Writers and Artists has articles not only advising you on how to submit your work to agents and publishers, but also contains information on alternative forms of publishing such as self-publishing and print on demand.

But if we're honest, I suppose the overriding attraction is the information and addresses of agents and publishers.

It is generally recommended that you get an agent. Avoid anyone who asks for payment before you publish because real agents never do this. They will cream off about 15% of what your book earns, but because they live and breathe the world of publishing they will negotiate for far more than you ever could and save you from the pitfalls.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? The downside is that agents and publishers' prime concern is not purely to promote quality- it is to promote what will sell.
There is a clear preference these days for the single genre high concept novel, typified by Dan Brown, and a whole range of clones.

But... people get published- why shouldn't it be you?

Agents requirements vary. They will ask for about two chapters, a synopsis, and a covering letter- I won't go into any more detail here because the Year Book covers that. Just make sure that you give exactly what each agent asks for- not a page more or a page less.

Don't be fooled like I was into sending your submissions out one at a time. It can take weeks to return. I always send them in threes now. And you're better assuming that 'it' (that is your A4 stamped, self- addressed envelope) will return. It stops your heart from sinking too far when you hear it land on your mat- your returned extract, and more wallpaper.

The annoying thing about agents' letters is that they are standard. You don't know if your work just isn't what they are looking for, if it's almost good enough- or if it's irredeamable slush.
One agent's letter said that they received 300 submissions per week and only took on three writers... PER YEAR.

But they do take them on. So why shoudn't it be you?

One of the key characteristics at this point is tenacity. Believe in your work. Never give up. And remember-



a book is not just for bedtime: it's for life.




And if it takes you years to get published, just think of all that free wallpaper.

Top Stories

Coming Out

So you are sure of who you are, and what you want to do. You know there's nothing wrong with it- you've been doing it for years for God's sake. All you have to do now is to tell someone.

You go over the scene so many times. You are in that familiar living room but the walls seem to press in and each breath feels like you are aspirating in a pool of warm sweat.

You practice the words, imagining the gasps, the incredulity... the laughter.

'Mum... Dad... Sweetheart... I've something to tell you: I'm... I'm... AN AUTHOR!

It's time to unleash your creation upon your first readership- your friends and family, which is not an easy thing to. You have laboured long and hard on this, it is your baby, you've grown attached, and will be upset if anyone tells you it's ugly. But be brave- better a friend tells you than a publisher.

So ask them to be honest, and to make any marks on the manuscript in a different colour to what has been used by previous readers. Ask them to comment on the plot, characters, anything they liked or didn't like. Ask them if they feel that it reads like something they would buy from a book shop, and if it doesn't, why not.

You will be surprised, regardless of how thoroughly you have revised and proof read your work, just how many typos and spelling mistakes will still be found. A spell checker will pass 'there' or 'their' as correct, regardless of its context.

I even say to people that if they get so far in and think that it's drivel to stop and give it back. LIFE IS TOO SHORT.

Fortunately, so far, no one has done that. Remarks have tended to be very encouraging. As I sat watching a football match at the city of Manchester Stadium I got a series of texts from someone who just had to know that her favourite character would survive. As it turned out, Manchester City lost and the texts turned out to be the most enjoyable part of the afternoon.

(Here's an old football joke for you:
Football fan 1: City lost today.
Football fan 2: How do you know?
Football fan 1: It's Saturday...)

Don't feel obliged to make every change suggested by your readers. They, like you, bring their own presuppositions to the piece. But if several people make the same point this probably is a big indication that you need to rethink.

So go through it, making the alterations you agree with, remembering that each one may be keeping you that little bit further away from a publisher's rejection pile. If you think this sounds tedious, how must it have been before the invenion of the word processor?

When you eventually get published (oh yes, positive thinking is essential,) you might want to give the people who helped you a credit.

My book is a thriller, of sorts, so I made a point at first of only asking people who I knew read that genre. After all, they were doing me a service, so I wanted them to at least get some enjoyment out of it.I asked my Wife, my Father and Brother to read it, but not my Mother, as she wouldn't have got past the (necessary and appropriate) strong language. Which brings me onto another difficulty which you might find in sharing your work with people who know you...

What you consider to be your well-written and objective exploration of a neglected corner of the human condition may to someone who knows you come as an appalling revelation that you are a disgusting pervert with a mind like Satan's sewer.Don't laugh- it came as a great shock to Iris Murdoch's nearest and dearest that some of her subject matter was in her head, so it does happen, even to the best of them. I once told a colleague who had read my novel that a great deal of it was based upon real events. She laughed and asked me if I was referring to the scene in the factory toilet (at the beginning of Chapter 3, which you can hear on YouTube.)

So think carefully- is your work a processing of reality through your imagination, or is it a confession of your warped psyche and a series of clues about where the bodies are buried?

Depending on your answer, your next step will be to send a sample of your work to an agent (in the first case literary, in the second, government.)

And you though it had been hard getting to this point...

revijhion... revizeon... revision!

So, you've got something which looks like a novel. Well it's a big bulky wad of paper with words on it

(should be no less than 80,000 of those.)

Once you've worked out that what you're waving around isn't a phonebook, chances are you've got the first draft of your novel. But is it literature? And... will it sell?

Although you will be itching to get your masterpiece into the hands of a publisher, it can pay to put your work away in a drawer for a while before you commence revision. This way you can come to it with fresh eyes.

Approach it like it's someone else's work and be brutal.

This scene which took you months to write, does it move the story on, or develop your characters? If it wasn't there would anyone notice? You may just need to ditch it and not look back.

Is a passage economical?


Sometimes it helps to slow down the pace, to have a brief meditation or 'set piece.' Sometimes the information imparted could be passed on in a line of dialogue.

Does your prose flow? Does it have a natural rhythm? When characters speak,

is it believable that someone would talk like that?

Read your work out aloud. If you find you get tongue tied over a phrase, maybe it needs changing, shortening, or to have the order of words altered. Any sections about which you have doubts, try recording them, or get someone else to look. (Not that I could do that- I can never show my work to anyone until it's as good as I can get it.)

How many times do you revise? I'm with Hemingway on that one-


you revise until the day you go through it and you can find nothing else to change.


I think that this is a common trait of all successful writers, but how they approach this can vary from one to another. Rather than writing a novel then going through it and through it, Dean Koontz writes one page at a time. He will then revise that page thirty or forty times, before he is happy to move on.

I found a real difficulty with my revisions in that some chapters just didn't work in the person in which I had written them. I once turned the entire book from a first to a third person narrative. It didn't work, because my aim in having a first person was for him to be an everyman with whom the reader could identify in an unfamiliar world. I eventually decided to mix the voices. A common criticism of this is that it 'jars.' But several people have now read my text and not one of them- even the most critical readers- has even mentioned this.

A good example of the use of multiple voices is 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin.' There the change of voice is well indicated by section headings. If you are not going to do this you need to

make sure that the voices are sufficiently distinct,

so that from the first line of the new passage or chapter the reader is left in no doubt as to who is speaking.


In 'Tasting the Wind' I have attempted to do this by making Martin's narration a little more colloquial, and having him always speak in the present tense. Have a listen to the Prologue, which I added to the first posting on this blog, followed by the opening of Chapter One (below) and judge for yourself whether or not it works.

Structure: a beginning, a muddle, and an end.

At the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence not only can you see 'David' but also several of Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures.

An assumption I had always held about sculpture was shattered the day I visited that gallery: I had always assumed that a sculptor would chip away at the front of his slab of marble, then gradually move round it, whittling it down to a figure. Not so Michelangelo- He worked from front to back- and the unfinished pieces look as if all you have to do is to break the remainder of the 'cocoon' from aroud them to reveal a complete statue.

Some writers work that way. Stephen King, for instance, starts at the beginning and writes until he gets to the end, developing characters and situations naturally as they emerge.

I don't think that I could write that way as long as I'd got a hole in my **** (or, for any American readers, ***.) I'm more of a potterer around the marble with my chisel sort of writer- I may start at the beginning, but in my mind I have scenes from the end or half way, and I need some sort of structure- loose as it may be- to hang the story on- a plan, an idea of major themes and significant scenes.

I don't mean anything too complicated, and it doesn't even have to be written- especially not on stone, so that once the characters start to find their feet they can run if they want to.

Having a structure can help when you hit the block- you might be getting bogged down with an earlier part of the story, but feel inspired by a theme which has flashed into your mind from further on. I would recommend that you go for that, write it (In these days of Word Processing it will hang around for you below the earlier pages until you catch up with it) then return to where you got stuck, refreshed with a dip into your creativity. Usually I go back to the sticking point after this and find that it is so below the level of what I've just been writing that I just delete it and start again.



And what about chapters and where to end them? Remember: each chapter MUST add something to the story- either in moving the story on or revealing something new about a character. If it doesn't, you might as well get rid of it. And try to end your chapters with 'page turners.' Although my last posting was partly a bit of fun, there is something to be learned from an aspect of Dan Brown's writing which is shamelessly parodied there. You get to the end of a Dan Brown chapter and there is always something there you didn't expect, or which makes you ask 'what happens next?' or 'how do they get out of that?'

To my mind, a lot of Brown's page turners draw too much attention to themselves for what they are, and I think that he produces tiny chapters in order to do this (Look at chapters 53-59 of 'Deception Point' for example.) But who am I to knock this? I have read and enjoyed all of Dan Brown's novels (with reservations about the DaVinci Code because I am a qualified theologian and know just how much he twisted the 'evidence'- but hey, this is entertainment, and his sales figures speak for themselves.)

The point is, if you want to know what a page turner is, just go through a Dan Brown novel and simply read the last line of every chapter.

And when you've done that, if you are a writer, go through the last lines of each chapter of your novel. Do they just fizzle out, or do they make the reader want to read on?

This is your homework until next time.