And nine months later… there was a book.

I say nine months but, truth be told, it was nine years and nine months.

In January 2012, I started a creative writing course called, ‘Get started, keep going.’ I had already been writing blogs about my life and traveling and I decided to try my hand at fiction for the first time. It was a great course and my teacher even suggested I enter the Daphne du Maurier short story competition, offering to edit the story for me. We were given the title, ‘Rendezvous,’ by the organisers, and I sent off a mysterious story involving a surfer, an abandoned wife, and an ice cream man, set on the cliffs of the north Cornish coast. A month later I heard I’d won, and slightly dumbstruck, I went down to Cornwall to attend the festival, give a speech, receive my prize, and have my story recorded for radio. My teacher immediately told me to start writing my novel in order to keep the interested parties, well… interested. So I did what I was told and started writing.

I always knew what my book was going to be called, I knew who the characters were and what the story was about, I even knew exactly how the book would end; all I had to do was write it. I imagined being like J.K. Rowling, sitting in a café, writing whenever I had a spare moment. I knew that time would be my biggest obstacle because I needed to keep earning money as a freelance designer while writing on the side. I made a plan to write before work, and write after work, I would write every weekend and I would write every holiday. I knew it would be exhausting and it would take longer to finish my book, but it was just the way it had to be.

I started writing longhand at first, taking an A4 journal with me on the tube every morning, but I soon discovered just how nosy people could be. Anyone in my proximity would invariably try to disguise they’re growing curiosity as I scribbled away next to them, peering over my shoulder and then turning away suddenly as I caught their eye. The braver ones, the ones that kept looking, would ask me what I was writing and when I replied, ‘A novel,’ the second question would always come, without fail, ‘Oh, what’s it about?’ People say Brits don’t talk on public transport, but my neighbours proved those people wrong.

I soon found out that my brain was not cut out for writing in the evenings. As soon as I was back from work, between 7 and 7:30pm, and I’d made dinner and eaten it, the only energy I had left was to plant myself in front of the TV. I kept writing in the mornings for a while but even that got difficult when I was bumped and jostled by fellow commuters in the packed rush-hour trains. Writing was reduced to snapshots of time, a weekend here, a week off there, a writing retreat each year, and every time I picked up the story, I would have to familiarise myself with what I’d previously written for it to make sense. It was really frustrating, my family and friends stopped asking about it, and I stopped caring about it. I also hated myself for not caring.

When I had major surgery on my knee and thigh in 2015 and moved out of London to live with my parents, I actually thought, weehee, 3 months in bed, 6 months rehab, I can write my book, but I hadn’t considered how the pain would mess with my concentration, or how the medication would numb my brain. It took all my energy and willpower to simply do the physio four times a day, let alone string words together to form sentences and paragraphs.

Fast forward to 2017, and all it took was a couple of writing holidays on my own, in Wales and the Lake District respectively, to discover a new-found joy and excitement for what was happening on the page. I was then diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, and of all the places it could have chosen to invade, it chose my hands and wrists. For nearly six months, I couldn’t hold a pen, I couldn’t type, and therefore, I couldn’t write.

And then the pandemic came in March 2020. Doom and utter gloom. For those of us that had jobs, we felt incredibly lucky. For those of us that could work from home, we were even more grateful. The world around me was terrifying but at least I could concentrate on work, that was, until September, when the work stopped. Instead of trying to find new work straight away, I decided to go away, clear my head and re-set. Traveling was still allowed at that point, if you were careful, and all I wanted to do was go somewhere cheap, somewhere isolated, and not think about work. All I wanted to do was write.

So, I did. I went to a remote island off the coast of Rhodes for most of October and I wrote. I woke at eight most mornings, went for a swim, had breakfast, and then wrote until two or three in the afternoon. I then walked to a beach and met up with some crazy ladies I’d met the first few days, then had supper, then went to bed. I did the same thing every day for 23 days; wake, swim, eat, write, beach, eat, sleep. I felt so happy because I was giving my writing the time it needed, the time I needed, and once I got back home, I decided to keep going.

It was risky because it meant relying on my savings, but I knew the only way my writing worked was to devote all my time and passion to it, and not try and juggle it with other things. It also was the silver lining of the pandemic for me; being single and critically vulnerable meant I couldn’t do anything but stay inside anyway, so I might as well use the alone time to my advantage. I initially gave myself three months and told my family I was taking a sabbatical until the new year. I had hoped that by January 2021 the book would be finished, and I’d be able to start working again, but January soon turned into March, and March slowly crept into June. I had never thought it would take nine months to write my book, but I soon realised I’m a perfectionist. I would not let a page go if I didn’t like it, and much of the stuff I’d written from 2012 to 2017, dipping in and out of the story, suddenly felt disconnected so I re-wrote them. I pretty much started from scratch.

And for the first time in nine years, I put everything I had into it, my time, my passion, my imagination. And I worked hard, harder than I’ve ever worked at anything, giving myself a punishing schedule of writing six days a week, from 9am to 3:30 or 4pm every day, without stopping. By late afternoon it was almost as if someone had powered down my battery and switched off my brain, so even if I had pushed myself on and worked for more hours, the resulting writing would have been rubbish. I would then take myself off for a swim or a walk, have dinner at six, be in bed by 10, and start the whole process again the following day. In December I had a fall which resulted in my knee being locked at 65 degrees, and it was so painful, I ended up having to write in bed. I had three cushions supporting my knee, several others in the small of my back and supporting my head, and a couple more underneath the computer on my lap, bringing it to face height. It was so comfortable that I continued to write like that, even after I had the surgery in March. So yes, if anyone ever asks, my first novel was written in bed.

I finished writing my novel last Saturday, June 19^th 2021, at 1:51pm. As soon as I typed the last full stop and made the first phone calls to friends and family, the same question was on everyone’s lips; what happens next? I tried to not think about it and focused on feeling euphoric, revelling in the momentous achievement, but 48 hours later, I came back to reality and started asking myself the same question. To be honest, writing a book is easy, what happens next is the hard part.

The consensus is to step away from your book for at least a week, try not to think about it and definitely don’t read it. Give yourself time to detach from the story before you pick it up again. Then read it, cover to cover, in one sitting if possible and take notes (some say to read the whole thing out loud, but I know I would try to act out the scenes and try different voices for my characters, which would ultimately defeat the purpose of the exercise). And as you’re reading you see what works and what doesn’t, if the story flows, and are your characters believable? You then begin the 2^nd draft, and once the 2^nd draft is done, you ask a chosen few to read the book and give their feedback (this is scary because it will be the first time anyone has read what I have poured my heart and soul into, and if they don’t like my characters for instance, it will be like my friends saying they don’t like my boyfriend!) Once you have taken the reader’s critique on board, your write the 3^rd draft, and once that’s finished, and you don’t think you can improve the book in any other way, you send it out into the world.

If you are going down the traditional publishing route (which I am), then you have to, almost always, secure an agent before you can send it to a publishing house. Most publishers will not take unsolicited manuscripts from first-time authors; they will only accept them when they are put forward by an agent. To be frank, even getting an agent to read it is an ordeal. You are required to write a submission letter, basically selling yourself and your book, and if it piques their interest enough, they might ask you for a synopsis. Writing a one-page synopsis of 500-page novel might seem like torture, but again, if it hooks them, then they could ask for the first three chapters. And if they like the first three chapters, then they could ask for the whole thing, and if they read the whole thing, then… God, I’m actually boring myself. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it’s a long process. Most literary agents say they get sent between 80 and 100 manuscripts every single day, so you can imagine how many of those go straight in the bin (the digital bin nowadays.) The statistics from publishing houses are appalling too, only 1-2% of authors ever get their books printed. Needle in a haystack? More like needle in a whole bloody field. 

So, wish me luck with the next stages because I imagine there will be a lot of stress and many disappointments. The only glimmer of light is that rejection, no matter how many times it happens, doesn’t necessarily mean failure. Some of our most brilliant novelists have been rejected over and over again (J.K. Rowling herself was famously rejected more than 20 times) and although I’m not suggesting I’m in the same league as the following great writers, some of their rejection letters are worth a mention. 

Herman Melville’s manuscript for Moby Dick was rejected dozens of times, with one publisher commenting: ‘First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale? Could not the captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?’

Ernest Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises: ‘If I may be frank, I found your efforts to be both tedious and offensive. You really are a man’s man, aren’t you? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you had penned this entire story locked up at the club, ink in one hand, brandy in the other. Your bombastic, dipsomaniac, where-to-now characters had me reaching for my own glass of brandy.’

Louisa May Alcott’s, Little Women: ‘Stick to teaching.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby: ‘You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.’

And one of my favourites, even though it is an anonymous author: ‘Dear Sir, no, you may not send us another manuscript, and we will not give you the name of another publisher. We hate no rival publisher sufficiently to ask you to inflict them on him. The specimen writing is simply awful. In fact, we have never seen worse.’

Honestly, the list goes on and on. Even one of my favourite books from 2010, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, was rejected 60 times! She said in an interview recently, ‘Can you imagine if I gave up after the 59^th rejection?’

I can only hope that my rejections aren’t quite so brutal!