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From Friends to Publishers


Hilary Custance, Writewords Member and author of A Small Rain gives a personal account of the long and winding road to publication.

I have sometimes wondered if I am living my life in reverse; I never seem to do things in the same order as other people. The upside of this is that I have good friends in all age groups. In retrospect, I see that these friends were crucial to my learning to write process. My route to publication may differ from others, but as we are all headed in the same direction, perhaps the staging posts may be of some help.

Friends have helped at every stage of writing, especially the beginning. I started on my first novel with no writing qualifications whatsoever. I wrote two chapters and pressed them on a couple of blameless friends. One was my age and an avid reader; she could barely suppress her yawns as she handed the pages back to me. The other, a very senior academic, simply said 'go on'. Ten chapters and hundreds of embedded and dependent clauses later, she must have regretted this modest encouragement. By then I had reached a point where I had these two blokes in bed together and only the haziest idea of what might happen next. This 'practice' novel found its way into a dark drawer.

Next I started on the 'great plot' that had been simmering in my head for years. My wonderful friend now asked questions such as: 'What made Valerie lock herself in a telephone box in the first place?', 'Did all the character's parents die before the story started?', 'Do you really mean 'his eyebrows twinkled'?, 'Who is Sylvia, what is she?'. This is the kind of friend you need at this stage.

My next friend was my elder daughter. The manuscript had lain neglected for months, the ending unresolved, when she demanded to see it. She was then in her first year of English at UEA and she tackled this rookie text with enthusiasm. She went through it like a terrier shaking a rat, and the manuscript emerged littered with underlinings, fierce comments, ticks, yawns, eh?s and wow!s. The magic words 'show not tell' appeared - though it was another year before I understood them. Her enthusiasm refuelled me and the story began to grow again. I have depended on her warmth and her critical eye ever since.

I had to move out of this safe environment sometime. If you are cursed, like me, with both a cowardly nature and a competitive streak, I have a tip for you - dare yourself slowly. Way in advance, you say casually to friends, 'Oh, I'm having a go at a novel, makes a change from TV.' Then one day, a year or two later, you find yourself saying, 'Yes. Yes it is finished now. You really want to read it? Well OK.' And it is done. Scary, but too late to withdraw.

Friends are lovely; they intend to like your work before they start reading. They don't really expect too much and are invariably impressed. This is all very self-affirming. Listen for the subtext, though. Take note and act on phrases like, 'I did wonder if it was going to be a book about geology?' or 'I wish I knew someone as perfect as Owen?' or 'I rather took to Julia' when there is no Julia in your story.

Riding on these friend's approval, I sent the manuscript off to another friend. This one was in the business. Wham! 'It has some beautiful passages.' ('some'?). 'I think you need to decide if you are more interested in issues or characters?' (Uh?) 'Who have you in mind as your market?' (Umm?) 'The best thing would be to send it to a Literary Consultant. They will tell you what to do with it to make it publishable.' (Huh.)

I held out for a year. Agents weren't interested, but I found out what to send and began to learn how to write synopses. Still handing it out to friends, I also discovered that everyone reads a different book. My husband, reading it in bed beside me, chuckled and tutted. A friend in the village claimed she had cried from page thirteen onwards. Your plot, your characters, your landscapes are all putty in other's minds. Whatever you write, people read about themselves.

I gave in and applied for an in-depth report from Cornerstones Literary Consultants. This was an expensive but worthwhile venture. I received back a seventeen page report and an annotated manuscript. The diagnosis, softened by praise for the plot and some of the writing, was 'seriously unwell, but curable'. I needed to improve my punctuation, grammar and structure; to show and not tell, and to expand the length by a third. They also told me HOW to do this. Steaming with energy, I rewrote in five months.

I found I had crossed a hidden frontier. Two people at Hodder read a couple of chapters and made interested noises before turning it down. Three agents also turned it down, but Gillon Aitken loved the early chapters and then read the whole manuscript. They didn't take me on, but said things that will keep me warm at night for years. 'Next time' I said to myself.

A new significant friend was Bernie Ross, tutor of www.creativewritinglife.co.uk, and fiction editor for a small publisher. She approved. Someone I had never met, who was in the business, wanted my manuscript. Oh joy! So, with several qualms, I give up on mainstream publishing and went with Trevor Lockwood of Author Publishing Ltd and the modern Print on Demand route.

This route is not for the fainthearted; it is DIY (without the manual). Bernie held my hand, while Trevor zoomed round the Internet fixing a hundred projects and always as the last threads on the tow rope were snapping. He sort of published my novel, more or less when he said he would, but it was a white knuckle ride and I am still spitting out the occasional tooth.

And no, I had no blissful moment with my new baby, my book, wet and beautiful in my hands. My buzz has come instead in tiny, immensely satisfying snippets: emails, knocks on my office door, letters, encounters in the village street. These make it worth it. Now I can justify burying my head in my computer for another couple of years and produce something just that bit better than the first.



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