Begin afresh, afresh, afresh

May 2023 be a year of new starts and triumphant revivals, whenever your writing needs them.

Paying subscribers can listen to this newsletter in audio form here or on any podcast app.

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Welcome to the new subscribers (500 of you and counting, as I write this) who signed up after seeing In Writing featured on Substack’s homepage. Do come and introduce yourself. I hope you’ll find the newsletter comforting, interesting, motivating or whatever you need it to be, and the community supportive.

With that in mind, I’ve created something new: a community thread. This will be a resource for paying subscribers, but for a short period I’m leaving it open to everyone for free. It’s where you can seek cheerleading, sympathy, or help when the writing’s not going so well; celebrate your successes when it is (whether that’s writing your first thousand words, or selling your fifth novel); share useful links, book recommendations and articles, and help other In Writers who need a boost.

I’m not going to interfere a lot because this space is for you – but I’ll be dipping in and out. Have a look now:

In Writers write in

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Anyway, happy new year (though on 5 January, I feel we’re pushing the limits of acceptability for saying that). I’ve had a rough few days for reasons I won’t dwell on here. Life parcels out good and bad events and doesn’t care whether it’s New Year’s Eve or some average Tuesday.

Writing helps. In the upcoming series of the In Writing podcast (which you can subscribe to on any podcast app, or listen here online), one of my guests is a confessional writer who has offered the most colourful moments of her life for her readers’ enjoyment. She talks about the trouble that her personal writing has brought her from time to time – but also about how therapeutic she finds it.

Words are what I reach for first when something painful or confusing happens – I imagine you are the same. I have to work out an explanation for something in words, even if that’s via text message rather than in a more formal setting, before I feel I really understand it. Maybe that’s not ‘explaining’ or ‘understanding’ in the sense of arriving at the truth, but just in the sense of coming up with a satisfying theory that will allow for some peace. The theory might be wrong, but if the shoe fits… you know, go out dancing in it.

Waking up on 1 January with an emotional hangover is not ideal, but it is a reminder that beginnings come round again and again, and that nothing, positive or negative, persists forever. This might mean that you start the year in the toilet, but find yourself on a mountaintop by March (and then back in the toilet in June).

Let’s apply this to writing, since that’s what we’re here to talk about. If you feel like your project ‘failed’ in 2022 – or even worse, if it failed this week, in January, thus undermining your hopeful new-year mentality – nothing is final. What is especially unfixed and filled with possibility is the verdict on who you are as a writer or person.

Many of the novelists I’ve interviewed for In Writing have told me that their ‘debut novel’, in terms of the first one published, was not their debut at all. They wrote another book before it – sweated over 80,000 words or so, polished it up, did edits and restructuring, worked on it for years – but readers never saw it because it didn’t find a publisher. And then bravely they wrote another, and this one had more luck.

Before she was a professional writer, Anna Hope was a professional actress. She spent her twenties feeling increasingly beaten down by auditions, the long waits for answers (if the answers ever came at all), and the feeling that her work was out of her control. Then she turned to writing, and felt she’d found the antidote: something she loved to do, and could do whenever she wanted, without anyone’s permission.

Her first novel, however, was never published. Here’s what she told me about it:

The experience of writing it was joyous, and there was a lovely editor at Faber who was really interested in buying it, but it didn’t get through acquisitions. And that was really hard. In retrospect I can see what was wrong with it, but at the time I was really living in it, and I felt like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? Here was a place of joy and pleasure and creative expansion, and I’ve brought it to the marketplace and been rejected – having spent all these years being rejected as an actor. Now what? This is the pattern of my life. I should go and retrain as a teacher.’ It was pretty devastating. And I did consider doing a PGCE, but then I had an idea for another novel: Wake.

That was not an easy process either. I mean, I would write draft after draft that didn’t work, and my agent, who is phenomenally rigorous and brilliantly insightful, would read them and say, ‘Hmm, there’s something that’s still not working.’ It was right to the wire with that book. Then she read a draft and phoned me and said, ‘Yeah, it’s ready to go out.’

It was high stakes! It went out on a Tuesday. I was working in a call centre, and I saw a missed call from her and thought, ‘Oh my god.’ She said, ‘There’s a pre-empt from a publisher but it looks like it’s going to go to auction.’

There was a seven-way auction, and that was just… my life changed.

By sharing this, I’m not saying all rejected first novels are followed by very successful second novels. I’m saying that the thing that goes wrong isn’t who you are. There’s always the possibility of something different happening tomorrow.

I read Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’ today, which helped me, even though it’s about May rather than January. The month is arbitrary – it’s the hope, and the never-ceasing procession of life, that’s important. Like the trees, we don’t give up. Read it here.

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That’s all until next Thursday. Good luck with your writing this week!