Humorously – at least I find it funny – now I’ve been writing solidly for a few days, I’ve begun to narrate everything I do in my head. Craig breathed deeply as he emptied the contents of the curry sachet into the simmering pan of chicken things. Craig swirled water around the empty can of beer before placing it, carefully, in the recycling bin, etc. It’s odd to have narration accompanying everyday things, but I guess it’s not surprising. Storytelling has always provoked more storytelling in my head.

When I first read The Lord of The Rings as a teenager, I’d spend most nights imagining myself in that world as I fell asleep. I was afraid of the dark and after a kiss goodnight from one of my parents, I would usually burrow deep under the covers as they left my room, hoping nothing would know I was there. Even now I like the sheet or duvet to be over my neck when I drift off. An exposed neck is just asking for trouble, after all. But as a kid, putting myself in the world of LOTR was the best sort of safety blanket. It wasn’t that I was imagining myself as part of the story. I was just there, riding a horse (I can’t ride a horse) or walking through an old forest, or sitting with my feet up in a small house in Buckland. That was all I wanted. The safe, the unexpected. Inhabiting that place in my head felt unassailable because I made it myself, and no one else was allowed in.

The book I’m writing now has a lot of the everyday in it. It’s different for me because I’m not writing an imagined world, or one that is set decades ago, but something far more recent and familiar. That makes it easier in a lot of ways. There’s not so much research (when did they invent parachutes? was a question I had to answer recently for another story) and there’s far less world-building, at least of the sort that requires you to understand intimately how a place works if you want your characters to move around in it. Also, some of it is roughly autobiographical, which is something I’ve avoided since I tried to write a (very bad) novel when I was at university. But I think it’s possible now, because I’ve written enough to realise that, obviously, all novels have world-building, all novels have research. It doesn’t matter if the source material you are mining is your own memories rather than an old newspaper. It doesn’t matter if the world you are making is Auckland in the eighties rather than a metropolis at the edge of some imagined continent. You still have to make alive the place your story inhabits, you still have to animate the people that live and move in it. It’s still, when it comes down to it, making little monsters rise and walk. But if they turn out to really be monsters, well, it’s still better they don’t come out at night.

Late to post this because the day got away from me at the end.

            At the end of every episode of the British game show Task Master – a family favourite at our place – the host Greg Davies says ‘So, what have we learned today?’ and then adds some clever quip about a particularly odd part of the show. So what did I learn today? Well, something I already knew but was surprised to learn again – writing something completely new from scratch is a completely different discipline to re-drafting. So much, so obvious, right? Except it’s been a long while since I’ve had the time and head, calendar and physical space to write something totally new. And its hard. Because the level of faith in the new thing needs to be high for you to push through all the questions in your head and actually get some words down. Where is this going? What does that sentence mean? Who is this person that just walked into the room? You need to answer some questions like this on the fly to keep going, but you also need to swat a lot of them away to keep writing. So, redrafting feels to me like walking a clear path, secure in the parts of the story that you’ve already made. Writing the new thing has no security. What Neil Gaiman (yes I’ve been watching The Sandman in the evenings) describes as ‘driving through the fog with one headlight out’. This seems particularly apt to me as I’m still fighting off the lingering brain-fog post covid. Doesn’t mean you stop driving though, the road will be there somewhere.

p.s. Some may have noticed that I originally numbered this post incorrectly, brain fog is real people.

The first proper day at the Centre. It’s such a warm welcoming place and people, and so well set up. I still can’t quite shake off the imposter syndrome from yesterday, but nearly. One of the great things about being here for me is that it is in Devonport. I used to come here all the time with friends when I was at school and university. We liked the tunnels at North Head, the beach at Cheltenham and the good ice cream shop nearby. There’s a spot around the far side of North Head that I want to find again, somewhere down one of those tracks that wind past the caves near the sea, where the water and the wet rock and the sun makes the world feel right.

            I’d already decided before I came that I’d try and split my time between two projects. A second draft of an almost complete book, and a first draft of something completely new. The second draft took up most time today, the new one is so new I really don’t know what it is yet, other than a series of images in my head that I want to try and understand. But it’s good to have those two slightly different things going on when you have a whole day to write. I know where one story is going, all of the big moments and the characters are in place, it’s a matter of refining them and fixing all the repetitions and clunkiness of any first draft. The other is quite different, takes more thinking time and less writing time. But the luxury of having that thinking time is still very present in my head, and I get to do it all again tomorrow, and the day after, and next week. Maybe tomorrow I’ll accept that this is all real.

From this afternoon and for the next two weeks I’m at the Michael King Writer’s Centre on a residency. It feels like I’ve won all the prizes at once – two weeks to think and write and plan new projects with no distractions. I’m going to write a short blog each day to help me record progress but also as a way of noting how bloody grateful I am for this time. Today is travel day, so not too much to say, except that in the weeks leading up to now I’ve been struck with imposter syndrome. It took me a while to figure this out, but I realised I was expecting – right up until the last minute – that someone would call and say sorry we’ve made a mistake, we meant to give the residency to that other Craig. This happens to writers a lot I know, or to to anyone involved in a creative endeavour. With any recognition of our work comes the accompanying self-doubt. But now the day is here, the residency is real, and it’s time to push that all aside and get down to some writing. I can’t wait.

I’ve heard variations on some writing advice many times now, it goes pretty much like this. Write a sentence, write another sentence, write a page. Get all the words down in whatever form you can, until you get to the end. After that you can revise and no one has to see your first draft. All it’s clunky dialogue, shallow characterisations and huge plot holes can be fixed in the second draft, or the third. You can make it look like (to paraphrase Neil Gaiman) you knew what you were doing all along.

Like a lot of advice about writing, this seems sensible and simple, but the reality of it can be quite different. For one thing, it’s not always that easy to finish that first draft. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of finding the time, or the right headspace, or finding out what the hell your story is about. Or perhaps the words come easily, but when you read them over at the end of the day, they seem dead on the page and you despair of having to make more of them.

But clearly, if you want to write, you need to keep going, and it’s there’s more to it than just persistence.

When I did my MA, I remember one class where the novelist Damien Wilkins sat in for our usual convener. We talked about (as I remember it) how to keep going, but more specifically about what to do when it felt like the writing had hit a wall. The possibilities in the story, so rich when you began it, had all somehow vanished. The temptation then was to give up on that work, and start on a new idea. An idea that, because it had yet to be written, seemed much more exciting – almost (as it glowed softly in your mind) a perfect idea. This temptation was made all the more alluring in a one year MA, when you felt the pressure of time, and worried about wasting even a little of it on an idea that didn’t seem to be working.

But Damien urged caution. How can you know, I remember him asking (sorry Damien if I’m misquoting you!), what a story is until you have finished writing it? How can you know what it’s really about, where the characters might go, what turns the plot might take? If you give up on a story, it will by definition stay incomplete and unsatisfying in your mind. And maybe even if the new story seems better the original story, with a little more time and work, could be better still.

One reason to keep going then is simply to find out what happens.

There’s another reason too, which is I think a common one that many beginning writers encounter. I’ve seen it myself in a few writing classes, or when assessing a manuscript in progress, but I didn’t really understand it until George Saunders wrote about it in his (essential) book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In it he’s taking the reader page by page through a Chekov story In the Cart, and talking about how Chekov has eschewed an easy route for the narrative. There’s a moment where the main character Marya encounters a rich but somewhat dissolute and unmarried landowner, Hanov. For a page or so, Chekov holds out the possibility that Hanov might be the answer both for Marya’s loneliness and also her poverty. But then he has Hanov leave, and that possibility is gone. By doing that, Chekov is practising what Saunders call ‘ritual banality avoidance’. By getting rid of the easy idea, using it up and moving on, Chekov opens up the possibilities of other, much better ideas.

Saunders urges writers to do the same thing. ‘If you know where the story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now.’ Give yourself the chance to have a new, better idea, don’t hold back. Surrendering the easy idea, as Saunders says, an act of faith. Both in the further possibilities in the story, and in you as the writer to realise those possibilities.

 Of course, if you stop writing the story, then you never get to take that leap.

One other thing about writing advice is that, in the midst of writing something, it’s so easy to not remember it. Or to think there must be another solution, one that is unique to the thing that you are writing, and so of course you’ll have to think of it yourself, alone. I came across this very thing the other day, when writing a new scene for a work in progress. I knew where the story was and where it was going next, I knew the obstacles that had to be overcome by one of the main characters, and I knew the struggles he might find along the way. But still the pages seemed dull and mechanical. The character was in danger, there was a lot at stake, but he moved through the pages like a robot. Somehow I couldn’t find the emotional charge to bring the scenes to life, to make the reader (or even myself) care all that much. The answer was, of course, that I was holding something back.

The book twists and turns around two main characters who meet and separate throughout the narrative, and I’d been keeping a scene at the back of my mind that I thought would be the climax of all those intersections. But I realised that if I used that now, inserted it just before the scene I was writing, then the energy from that idea would permeate all the pages that followed it. The stakes, both emotional and physical, were immediately much higher, the dangers much more real. The sense the character might not survive much more present.

Naturally, then I had to come up with a new idea for the climax. But as I rewrote the pages and went on into the next chapter after it. As I kept writing, letting the story go forward sometimes as I’d planned it, and sometimes in a new direction – well, it was the darndest thing…

        

          

           

A couple of weeks ago I got some bad news. A submission I’d made – and which I’d pretty much convinced myself was going to lead to my first book being published – was rejected. More fool me, you might say, and you’d be right.

There’d been some really positive feedback. People who’s judgement about writing is respected by more people than just me had said encouraging things (things I know were genuine, and that I’m genuinely grateful for). These people are still supportive – they are my writing allies and confidants – and I don’t know where I’d be without them. The rejection itself was both wise and kind, patient in its explanations and ultimately, if I’m brutally honest with myself, correct.

But it still hurt like hell. I lost faith in my current work in process. I lost faith in writing anything at all, in even wanting to be part of the writing, publishing, bookselling community. In the depths of the hurt was a realisation  that writing – discussing it, assessing it and most importantly doing it – is at the heart of why I want to be in this industry. If my writing only exists as a folder in Dropbox, only seen by a few friends, what’s the point of it. I thought about walking away from everything to do with writing. You can see that I was feeling quite sorry for myself.

I’ve written about the pain of submitting on this blog before. Elizabeth Strout has said ‘Probably no one will ever read this – oh well, just write it’ when describing her own struggles with being published. There are a thousand stories – you know the ones – of writers being rejected dozens, sometimes hundreds, of times before finally going on to fame and fortune. Or even just going on to publication, which is all I ever reasonably hoped for. I’ve read and been inspired by many of these stories myself, but it strikes me that most of them are written after the fact, after the writer has been published or won a prize or had some other success. By and large this is a good thing. Reading about writers who failed would I suspect not be helpful or popular! But I would like to know, through the use of a homemade time machine perhaps, how a writer who is now successful really got through those endless setbacks. How did they handle it in the immediate moment of rejection, when the pain still bit deep?

Part of the answer may be life outside your writing life. A wise friend reminded me ‘you’re not just your writing’ and she was right. Other aspects of any writer’s life define them equally as much, probably more. Writing failure doesn’t mean a failed life, of course. And yet – the small animal part of myself, still licking its wounds, protests – the writing is still large and vocal and demands attention. It’s also something you really have to open up to, commit to. Pulling the story line by line out of your brain and your being through sheer hard work and bloody mindedness, while simultaneously fighting off all the inner critics telling you to stop. It’s no wonder  rejection can hurt so much, especially if the experience is repeated many times over the course of years. You’d be mad to keep doing it, and yet…

Another part is of course the people in your writing community who urge you to keep going, even though they’ve felt the same sting. Often their advice is to just stop for a while, let it all go. I remember a visiting author at a Writer’s Week talking about his struggles to get words on the page. He said there are days he would rather stick a sharpened pencil in his eyes than write another word, and yet he would persist. The urgent stabbing motion he used to accompany these words has stayed with me. At the time I was annoyed by the masochism of that statement –  why do something that brought so much heartache? I’m more sympathetic now but not wholly so. Sure, part of writing is doing the work even when the words aren’t flowing and the sentences you make are dull and lifeless, but sometimes it’s better to put down the sharp pencil and walk away from your desk. Let things lie, let the rest of the world come into your head and fill it up.

I think that’s where I am right now, in a holding pattern, though I’m not sure what I’m holding for. I don’t think it’s an idea for a new story – I have a bunch of those ready to go. Neither is it hoping for some sort of external validation. I mean, I’ll take what I can get, but it’s not so black and white. I think I’m waiting for something more nebulous. A collection of thoughts and feelings and impulses coming together in the right way, at the right moment, that impels me back to my desk. I’m hoping it might sneak up on me almost unnoticed, and I’ll find myself back here, writing sentences again. Perhaps I’ll go back to an earlier manuscript that’s lain idle for a few years, maybe I’ll start something new. I might even begin with a blog post…

I wrote a series of tweets a while back while sitting beside the pool while my daughter finished her swimming lesson. They were about the pleasure I get from giving feedback on someone’s manuscript, something I do for friends and for the people in my writing group, and also sometimes for people who submit books to the publisher I work for.           

I could copy those tweets here, but it feels more interesting to recreate them from memory, and maybe take them in a new direction. I do remember my basic thesis, which was how much I enjoy giving feedback now, and how much useful knowledge I get out of it for my own writing.

The process of reading and thinking about someone’s manuscript concentrates my writing mind hugely, bringing into focus the things I believe or value about writing and about fiction in particular. As an example, when I read I pay attention to the state my mind is in. If my attention wanders, or if there is a moment when I feel thrown out of the story, I go back and ask myself why. Sometimes it’s a sign that I need to sharpen my focus and pay more attention (and perhaps stop half listening to the conversation in the next room). But often it’s about something in the story that’s not quite working, or that’s working in a way that seems to contradict the rest of the story, or feels out of place. Perhaps the point of view suddenly shifts, without a clear reason why. Maybe a character says or does something that seems out of kilter with everything else they’ve said or done previously. Or it might be a sudden tonal shift. Whatever it is, it often has the effect of disconnecting me from the story, breaking my immersion in it.

Part of the pleasure I feel comes from identifying where these moments are in a manuscript, and finding out why they are there. But a bigger part comes from thinking of ways to address the problem. Sometimes a solution can be as simple as changing or deleting one or two words (it’s amazing how often deleting a sentence can help a paragraph). Other times the issue might be something larger, a matter of the writer needing to dig deeper or go further with the story or character. Only rarely is a manuscript in such a state that a total rewrite is needed. More often there are good things in it buried under other less good things. An often repeated phrase at the office is ‘there’s a book in there somewhere’.

My reading, assessing, feed-backing brain has been maxed out just recently as I’ve been editing an anthology of long stories. All the stories were around 10,000 words, and there were a lot of submissions, resulting in a giant pile of reading. After the selection was made, the stories went through a first round of editing. And when I say ‘I’ am editing the anthology, I should say ‘along with two’ of my colleagues. It’s a big job, and that’s before going through each story with the author line by line, a copy edit and proof read, and then typesetting etc. The usual rounds of work that need to be done to get a book ready for publication.

But all this work, and all the hours talking to my co-editors about the stories, have had one huge beneficial effect for my own understanding of what makes fiction work. The ideas I’ve developed while honing my own writing, and those I’ve absorbed from other writers and from publishing colleagues, have coalesced. Discussing them with my colleagues has given me confidence that, although I’m never going to learn everything about writing and fiction, I have learnt a lot already.

At the end of his recent book about story and writing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders generously talks about what he thinks the book might do for those who read it. He hopes some of the ideas – the mentoring – he provides in the book will be useful. But he doesn’t hesitate to admit that much of it might not be. In fact, he thinks the parts of the book people find useful might not be really from him at all. Instead, the reader might recognise things in it they already knew, and Saunders is just reminding them of those ideas.

Saunders is being a little too modest here, I think. The book is full of wise and wisely told ideas about writing and story-telling and readership. But this does get at the way I feel when I’m reading and assessing a manuscript. Through doing that work, I’m being reminded again of what I know about writing. The good and bad, effective an ineffective, beautiful and ugly. And the best part of that is it isn’t a constant. Every writer, through that to and fro they have with themselves as they work through a story, is continually coming up with answers to the problems they have set themselves. How to make the story work, how to convey what they want to convey and find meaning in it. How, ultimately, to connect with the reader, and take them along for the ride. They come up with new solutions in every story, and sometimes, I’m lucky enough to see how they do it.

I was really taken this week by an article on Avidly, an offshoot of the LA Review of Books. It was called Teaching as Therapy, written by Douglas Dowland, and was about just that – how teaching can be therapeutic.

Dowland writes partly in response to a Joseph Epstein article in The Wall Street Journal in which Epstein laments the loss of English professors who were ‘bad cops’. No more are classrooms a ‘place for fangs’, instead they are the ‘pedagogical equivalent of psychotherapy’ which according to Epstein is a very bad thing.

Dowland opposes this view and I largely agree with him. Therapy is not a very bad thing. Like Dowland, my personal experience of therapy has been quite the opposite. It’s been hugely beneficial, maybe even life-changing, and I agree that many of the things you strive for in therapy can have a valuable place in the classroom. And Dowland clearly understands depression, his description that depressives ‘often feel that they are unique in a particularly hellish way, locked away from others, perhaps even from the positive aspects of themselves.’ rings true of my own experience of depression. Both teaching and therapy, Dowland says, ‘are places where people practice the art of being people.’

But I say largely agree because the article started me thinking about something that happens in writing and publishing, and it’s something I’m still trying to work out.

There’s been a recent upsurge of readers and writers of books that, well, I’m not sure any of the terms we’ve applied to them – personal essay, lyric essay, etc. – really do a good job of describing what they are. The best of these books seem to me, whatever you want to call them, to reach beyond the personal or autobiographical. They are not asking necessarily for understanding or recognition (though people do recognise and understand things in them) but instead they want to discover a sort of internal understanding. As if by reaching further and further inside yourself, you can emerge into some new place.

This new genre has inspired a lot of submissions at the publishing house where I work, though there have always been submissions of this type even before we began using terms like ‘personal essay’. Some are very much in that sphere – where the author has taken a personal narrative and broadened it out into something more resonant. But others are less so. Some, often memoir but fiction too, are clearly very biographical and deeply personal. It’s clear the author has used writing as a way of dealing with very traumatic events in their life. These books are raw, and that rawness seems to come from how close the author is to what they are writing about. You sense that perhaps what the author really wants is to be seen, to have their story told and be recognised, and they are hoping publishing will help them achieve that.

I can understand the impulse. If the classroom, as Dowland says, can be a place of therapy, then why can’t a writing classroom? Why can’t writing? And the answer is, of course it can be. Writing something down can often be a powerful way of beginning to understand it, or accepting it, or moving beyond it.

But then, and this is where I still don’t have any firm answers, should having the book published be part of the same process? Reading some of these very personal submissions, I have a very strong urge to protect them from the harsh realities of publishing – the criticism, the misunderstanding, or simply the possibility of being ignored. Be careful, I want to say, of exposing so much to the world. Being published, especially for the first time, can be a rough ride. After the excitement and the buzz of the first copies and the launch have worn off, there can be a terrible sense of anti-climax, even before an unfavourable review or poor sales have raised their ugly heads.

Some stories of course aren’t ready to be published simply because the writing isn’t quite there yet, or the work isn’t complete, or it’s so personal it’s unlikely to find a wide enough readership to make it feasible. But that aside, I’m wary of the impulse to push all these stories out into the world. I don’t think publishing will give the author the recognition they seem to be asking for. Maybe there needs to be a greater distance between the author and the subject for the book to really succeed. Maybe some of the rawness, as powerful as it often is, needs to be worked through so the author can be in a different place with content before the book is published, rather than through publishing it.

None of this should stop people writing these stories of course. But perhaps, even if writing can be therapy, publishing shouldn’t be.

I wanted to write a post about doubt, about the endless battle as a writer (or any creative person) to convince yourself that you are good enough to keep going, especially in the face of inevitable disappointments and setbacks. But in the end I think this post is more about feedback, the giving and receiving of it, and what happens when it all comes at you in a big frightening rush.

My partner has always made the point that first time authors often don’t seem to understand that writing, like any art form, gets better with practise. The example she uses is a musician who wants to perform in public (I’m paraphrasing). The musician, you’d expect, would learn their instrument, practise until they were at least sure they wouldn’t embarrass themselves. They might also get help from more experienced musicians, listen to masters in their field, perhaps even undertake a bit of formal instruction. And yet many writers will go ahead and submit their first work without spending any great time honing their  craft. Often too, it’s quickly obvious that they haven’t read widely in the genre they are writing in, let alone widely in general. Not that they should be criticised for writing, their motivations are probably as varied as there are people putting pen to paper or strokes on a keyboard. Some do it because they have a story that they just have to tell, or their own version of the type of book they love. Some do it because they are writing to expel something from their psyche, or writing towards health, or writing to come to terms with tragedy or trauma. And these are all good reason to write. I think writing something down can be almost miraculous in the way it gives greater insight. But that doesn’t necessarily mean, having written, the writer should seek publication for their work, even if that urge is completely understandable.

I was talking to a colleague the other day about some particularly knotty submissions that had come in to the office. The hardest submissions to respond to are always those that are close to being good enough, sometimes very close, but aren’t quite good enough yet. And this isn’t a simple judgement to make, because we know as editors and publishers there is always work to do. No book comes in as a perfect finished thing, even if some authors tell us they don’t need editing, or that they are 99.9% happy with the text. There is always greater clarity, depth or beauty to be found. We develop a sense of how much work there is to do and how much time that might take. But with some books the gap between the manuscript as submitted, and where it needs to be before it’s published, is just too large. In those cases it can take a while to figure out how to say this to the writer, while also trying to be encouraging. Other books are difficult because we can see something inside the work, some version of the story they are telling, that is interesting and original. ‘There’s a book in there somewhere’ we often say to each other. But the story is lost amongst other parts that aren’t as good, and we’re not totally convinced the author is yet capable of clearing away the interference. Our judgement isn’t always right, but we have to rely on our experience, and the knowledge of other books that have come in over many years.

As a writer I try and take feedback as openly as possible. I’m happy to hear anyone’s reaction to my work if it’s obvious they have engaged with it in some way, even if that hasn’t been a good experience for them. But if they take the time to say what’s not working, maybe even suggest a change, that’s all to the good. Probably it’s a matter of luck, or a reflection of the quality of the workshops I’ve been in, but I haven’t had the bald ‘I just don’t like it’ reaction. One of the things you learn as you go on writing is who to trust when it comes to seeking feedback, and how to take what you need from it, while rejecting what’s not helpful. If you’re lucky enough to have friends whose judgment you trust, who are willing and happy to engage with your writing and offer their insights, then you are definitely winning.

That doesn’t mean receiving negative feedback, or any type of rejection, isn’t disheartening. Of course it is. Sometimes even relatively positive feedback can feel like a massive let-down. Maybe, if the feedback is from a trusted source, some of that feeling is to do with the understanding that you still have work to do. You haven’t finished yet, and another re-write or reconsideration still needs to be done. The weight of that realisation coming down on you can feel crushing. And sometimes anything but immediate and wholehearted acceptance can feel demoralising, no matter how positively the criticism is offered. That’s where you need to hold on to the part of yourself that is bloody minded.

I think this may be the most schizophrenic post about writing and publishing that I written to date. Because as much as a publisher I might want writers to listen to criticism, to read widely and most of all to hone their crafty before submitting – as a writer I want them to not stop submitting, no matter how many times they are rejected. I want to believe that it’s possible to get better, to close the gap between the manuscript as written and the manuscript as published. That rejection or a criticism isn’t an ending. It’s just a reminder to keep going

It’s been a while, but I’m pleading a busy writing time with a few rounds of edits on my book, a new writing course and two weeks at the beach. OK, that last one was just a holiday. But now that we all have some time on our hands, I’ve been thinking about genre.

The book I wrote for my MA was Young Adult, and in many ways conformed to the expectations of that genre. It featured a group of friends confronting a corrupted adult world and having to surmount ever growing obstacles by discovering resilience within themselves. All of which I’m sure sounds fairly familiar. Many of the most popular books thought of as YA share some of these tropes. The discovery of oneself amidst often traumatic events, a collection of loyal but sometimes flawed friends, adults that are either absent, powerless to help or who actively hinder, and then ultimate success. This is by no means a criticism, I love stories like that and I wanted to write a fast paced, scary and plot-twisty version of that story myself. But one of the things I realised when writing the book was, even though my story was in many ways conventional, that didn’t mean YA had to be.

It’s a cliché to say that genre was invented by marketing and salespeople. There is some truth to that I suppose, and there are some sensible reasons for dividing books up into categories. If you’re a crime reader, then you don’t want to have to scan through the travel section to find your favourite author. Likewise if you’re the owner of a bookshop that has a big romance customer base, you don’t want to plough through pages of literary fiction in the catalogue first. So far so obvious. When I first encountered YA it was almost exclusively realist, concerned with some traumatic event in the life of a teenager (unwanted pregnancy, violence, death, etc.). Now, even though this type of realist YA hasn’t disappeared, it’s only one part of what might feature in any bookstore YA section.

YA doesn’t describe one sort of book any longer, if it ever did. Nor do I think it describes a certain readership. There’s a whole different argument out there about who should read YA, or maybe it’s who shouldn’t, but that’s so stupid a discussion I’m going to ignore it (read what you like, what you love, what you enjoy, what speaks to you – the end). Instead I wanted to talk about how having a genre to play in can act as a launching pad, rather than a set of rules or even a road map.

Back in 2014, at the first Young Adult Literature Convention in the UK (an annual event that’s part of the London Film and Comicon weekend), the subject of ‘what is YA’ was a hot topic. YA authors in attendance “agreed that the sine qua non of YA is an adolescent protagonist, who will probably face significant difficulties and crises, and grow and develop to some degree” (What are YA books? And who is reading them? By Imogen Russell Williams in The Guardian, July 31st, 2014). I like Patrick Ness’s quote from the same article, who described the above as “finding boundaries and crossing them and figuring out when you end, who you are and what shape you are.” Those things do seem to be touchstones of a lot of YA, and they gave me a lot of the basic architecture for my own book. Others at the conference said that one of the remarkable things about YA is it’s ability to blur the boundaries between different types of fiction, and it’s refusal to adhere to any one set of rules. Still others pointed out that although many YA books ended on a hopeful, optimistic note, others don’t, and that both types of endings were needed. But one thing that seemed to permeate all this was an idea of permission. So you want to write about a world where death has been eliminated and young people are trained to be merciful executioners to manage the population size? Sure! There’s a sense that originality and inclusiveness are also touchstones of YA – the genre for example is particularly rich in heroines (I’m sure you can think of more than a few). But it’s also unafraid to talk about sexual identity, abuse, illness, prejudice etc. and to do it plainly and forcefully. You could make an argument that if you wanted to read a literature that was radical in thought and execution, you should read YA (but read what you want, OK?).

It was another genre – crime – that gave me the freedom, the scaffolding, to find out what my most recent book was about. I’d struggled, not because I didn’t have a good idea about the book’s themes, but because I had a whole bucket load of them. My book was a coming of age story, a murder mystery, a book about the weird optimism between the ears, a love story, a horror story, a book about flying. All these themes were present in the final draft, but none of them was really dominant. That left the book feeling somehow unfinished, unsatisfying, perhaps even puzzling. But after lots of help from friends and mentors and many rewrites, it was good enough to send to agents and fortunately, one of them took it on. That was when the agent made a very simple but very telling suggestion, if I was going to write a crime book (I wasn’t sure I was going to do that, but it was definitely an option), then maybe I should have a few more murders in there? I’m simplifying it of course, there was a fair bit of rewriting and some detailed editorial suggestions and guidance. But that was the bit that really seemed to strike home. OK, I thought, let’s write a book about a series of murders. The murders had always been there, but by moving them front and centre, and by making the investigation of them the driving force of the narrative, suddenly the other pieces fell into place. It’s still a book about coming of age, flying, love and all the rest. But all these things happen around the essential structure of the murders and the attempts to find the killer. Instead of distracting and confusing, they add depth and fullness (at least I hope so). Funnily enough, by the time we’d finished this process, more murders weren’t needed after all, just a better focus on the ones already there.

I don’t think I’m saying anything revolutionary in this blog (it feels under the circumstances enough of a satisfaction to have actually finished it). But I guess what I’m saying is that using a genre as a starting point, or a lens to pull your story into focus, can be a very freeing exercise. If you understand what the tropes of any genre might be, then you’re much more at liberty to play with them, experiment with them or even simply ignore them. Oh, and read whatever the hell you want.