Finishing and Beginning Again

A friend sent me a link to a podcast the other day, an episode of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lessons, a show about creating and writing. In this particular episode (#207 if you’re interested), Gilbert helps a Dutch author who is struggling with her second novel after publishing a first to some success. Gilbert has various pieces of advice to offer – some tips on process and craft and ways to get the author back into the swing of writing again. It’s all good stuff, but what struck me were two observations, one by Gilbert and one by Neil Gaiman who appears as a guest on the show.

Gilbert’s was this (I’m paraphrasing): in response to the author’s concern at how long writing her second book was taking to write, Gilbert pointed out that it had taken much longer to write her first. Even though the author had written it in less than a year, really she had been writing it for all of the years leading up to that as well. She’d been thinking of being a writer and of her first book for decades while stuck in a job that was demanding but not fulfilling. The first thing that any artist makes, Gilbert says, is born out of a private communication between you and your inspiration. The second is a much more public, and much more pressured, project. Especially if the first work has had some success. When Gaiman joins the show, he expands on this idea. Your first book is written in isolation, no-one has any expectations of you, no-one is looking over your shoulder as you write. But writing your second (assuming your first has been published, more on that later) is a much more public event. Your publisher, your agent, your readership are expecting something of you and from that point on it becomes harder and harder to ignore that pressure.

More than that, Gaiman says, your second book is more about craft than inspiration, and that resonated with me too. He recounts telling an author friend that, after completing his third book, he had finally figured out how to write a novel. His friend had looked at him pityingly and told him that no, he hadn’t. He’d figured out how to write the novel he had just written, which is all anyone ever really does (unless perhaps, they are writing the same book again and again). But nevertheless you do learn how to write as you write, and the more you write, the more these lessons come to the fore.

But let’s go back a bit. The discussion between Gaiman and Gilbert is predicated on a first published book, as it’s in response to the author they’re trying to help. But what if the first book you write isn’t published? What if the second and third aren’t published either? I guess this means the pressure of expectation isn’t there, it’s still you at your desk alone. That doesn’t make it easy (I talked about this in my post about keeping going) but it does mean different pressures are at play.

A few years back I was in a YA writing course taught by the late (and much missed) writer Mal Peet. Mal was a generous and enthusiastic teacher and a lovely writer. During one workshop we were discussing a story I’d written, and the general consensus was that one paragraph wasn’t really working. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong about it, it just didn’t ‘earn its place’ as Mal said, so we agreed to cut it. But he also said I shouldn’t junk it completely, maybe it could be re-used somewhere else someday? I’d told Mal I’d already begun using a folder in which I stored paragraphs and pages that I’d cut from stories, labelling it ‘deleted scenes’. Mal told me – with a very Mal twinkle in his eye – that he had the same folder on his computer, except his was labelled ‘crap’. I love that memory because it reminds me of how Mal was always ready to take the mickey out of himself and out of writing. But also because it reminds me cutting something or putting it aside shouldn’t feel like a defeat. It’s good and necessary to do that sometimes, whether with a sentence or a paragraph or an entire book. The very act of doing that is part of learning how to write the thing you’re writing.

On the podcast, Gilbert asks Gaiman if he has books in his attic that have never seen the light of day. He admits to having a few, but also mentions one that he’d put aside for many years and then bought out again to read to his daughter. While doing that, he figured out how to make the book work. Is that because Gaiman had become a better writer in the interim? Yes, probably. But also it was maybe because the time away from the story had given him enough distance to see what sort of story it wanted to be. I’m in the midst of this now, rewriting a book after some advice from my agent. The book has always been a little confused as to what sort of book it was, even what sort of book I wanted it to be. But my agent has a clear view of what market it could appeal to, and that’s immensely helpful. It’s given me a destination to make for as I rewrite, while still keeping the parts of the book I love. Another friend explained this recently as a ‘push and pull’ kind of relationship, a tension between ‘the form the book takes as you write it and the form you want it to be in’. This seems dead right to me.

But whether you are writing your second book as a published author, or your second book as an unpublished one, you need to be both patient and persistent. Give the story time, even time away from you the writer, especially when it’s not working. Learn to write the thing you are writing, and remove what doesn’t earn its place. Also, it’s probably handy to have Neil Gaiman on the phone when you get stuck.

Show Me the Money

I wanted to write a post about how the money works in writing and publishing in New Zealand, but before I could really get going, what struck me was that it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t. It’s impossible for a writer here to make a living from their writing (there are exceptions, but they are rare). It’s also almost impossible for a publisher to make a profit (or break even) from their operations in New Zealand. Both these things happen largely because our market is very small, and also because some large online retailers have taken out a lot of value from it.

But that’s starting at the end. Here’s a breakdown of how the retail price of a book is broken up, and who gets what percentage. Of course, these percentages can vary from book to book and publisher to publisher, but the percentages I’ve used here are common in the industry here.

Let’s say a book sells for $30 over the counter, not an unusual price for a novel in New Zealand. The author’s share of that will typically be a royalty of 10% of the RRP, less GST, so 10% of $26.09 = $2.60. The bookseller will receive (typically) a 40% discount off the retail price, so they pay $15.65 (ex GST) for each copy, and keep the balance. This may seem like a lot, but remember that bookstores hold a huge amount of stock (they don’t get to cash in all that stock every day), often pay high rents, pay their staff, and cover innumerable other expenses just to have the book on the shelf. That balance gets eaten up pretty fast. The oldest joke I know in bookselling goes like this. How do you make a small fortune in bookselling? Start with a large one.

The $15.65 goes back to the publisher, which, at first glance, you might think is the lion’s share of the return. But let’s look at what the publisher has to pay for from that sum.

Obviously they need to pay the royalty to the author, that $2.60 a copy. To get the book into the store, the publisher also has to pay for distribution and representation. Distribution can sometimes be done by the publisher themselves if they have their own warehouse etc., but in NZ a lot of publishers can’t afford this sort of operation, so they use a third-party distributor. The cost of this can vary, but it wouldn’t be unusual for a distributor to take 11% of net sales. Representation means selling the book into bookstores. Again, some publishers do this themselves – they have their own sales reps – but also more typically they have a third party do it. Around 11% of net sales is often charged. So from the publisher’s $15.65, $2.60 goes to the author, $1.72 to distribution and $1.72 to representation. That leaves $9.61. (Just a note, publishers who have their own reps and warehouses don’t get those things for free; they’re simply calculated differently in their accounts.)

But then there are production costs. A paperback novel might cost around $3.20 a copy to print, in a print run of roughly 1000 copies. Print costs vary hugely depending on the book’s format (paperback or hardback), size, paper, interior colour etc., and especially the quantity printed. The more you print the cheaper the price, but the NZ market is small, so huge print runs aren’t economic.

We’re down to $6.41, but we’re not finished. Freelance designer to make the cover pretty? $1 a copy. Professional author photo? Another $1. Other costs can also come into play. An indexer perhaps, or buying image rights, or paying a freelance proof-reader. But let’s put those aside. What we definitely have to factor in is all the work that goes on inhouse for most publishers. Editing, typesetting, marketing and publicity all have staff that need to be paid. And what about running a website, making marketing material (catalogues and posters etc.), attending book fairs to sell the books, advertising, book launches, attendance at award ceremonies (for authors and staff). The list goes on and on, and that’s before just keeping the lights on. If we only take another $2 off the $6.41 the publisher has left (say to cover design and photography), that leaves $4.41 to pay for all of that – $4,410 for the whole 1000-copy print run, if the book sells out.

If we broaden this out to a medium-sized publisher, the problem becomes more obvious. Let’s say they publish 30 books a year. If they receive $4410 a year from each book, that’s $132,300. Of course some books will sell a lot more copies – a really big award like the Booker Prize can push sales into the 10,000s or 100,000s. But sales of this magnitude are very rare. Many, many books don’t sell their print runs. Even if we triple the income to $396,900 (say the publisher had a hot book on their hands, or even two), we’re barely covering the salaries of the staff you’d need to produce 30 books (I would estimate five staff members), as well as rent, utilities and other basic costs. I’m extrapolating a bit here I realise, but I hope you get the picture. Publishers love bestsellers, but often it’s because they make up for all the books which barely break even, or never do.

Publishers here do have other sources of income, it’s true. Creative New Zealand provides grants for some types of publication, and there are other grants available too. But they don’t come near to covering the production costs of a typical book. And ebooks are not the answer. Sales of ebooks have largely plateaued overseas, and in New Zealand have only ever been a tiny percentage of the total copies sold of a book. Sure, an ebook negates the need for printing and distribution costs, but all the other inhouse work still needs to be done if the publisher cares about quality, and if they have any hope of their book being noticed among the hundreds of titles published every month. For a bookseller, ebooks don’t come near to generating the revenues they need to keep the doors open.

The author is hardly getting rich either. Even if our author sells 2000 copies of the novel above (if it’s reprinted), that’s still only $5200 for what is probably years of work. Again there are grants, but these barely ever equate to an average salary for a year, let alone the many it might take to write a book. Inevitably most authors here also have a day job. This is no bad thing in a lot of ways (the subject for another post), but it doesn’t make being a writer any easier.

So, is the system fundamentally broken in some way? Well, things didn’t used to be this bad. When I began in publishing, print runs of 5-7000 copies for a novel weren’t uncommon, print prices were cheaper, and discounts demanded by some retailers weren’t as steep. But the market has been squeezed. Some big chain books stores have pulled out and contracted the market. Big on-line retailers have slashed margins, demanded huge discounts and sometimes run at a loss for years in order to grab market share, shrinking the overall market as they do (and as we now know, exploiting workers along the way). There are many more demands on people’s disposable income than there used to be, many other entertainments.

Some authors have had success with self-publishing, especially in genres like horror, romance and crime. But the percentage of those that actually make money this way is tiny compared to the number of titles self-published. It’s damn hard to get your book noticed, to get reviews, and to get it on the bestseller charts to get more reviews. It’s also damn hard producing the book to a high standard yourself. You need time, a lot of work, and quite a bit of luck.

I think the truth is that there are lots of other good reasons that we work with books besides making money, and this is true if you are a bookseller or a publisher, and especially so if you are an author. Having our own literature, our own books and stories, is immensely valuable. Publishers take risks and publish new authors and spend endless hours making books as good as they can be because they believe that’s true. Booksellers curate their stock and promote book reading and hand sell to thousands of book buyers because they believe it’s valuable work to do (it really is). Authors spend years honing their craft and their stories, and then put themselves through the hell of submitting because they want to be part of that, want to reach an audience, and want to make something good. All of us appreciate the rewards we do get. Some financial return is great (and for a publisher or bookseller, essential), some recognition or acclaim, grateful customers or readers or authors. We celebrate the big successes hard when they come along, because they are so rare. We all need money to keep doing what we are doing. But it’s not the major motivation, it’s not even close.

Keep a Going

Many publishers have a story about the one that got away. One I know turned down the late Bryce Courtenay before he went on to sell a gazillion copies of The Power of One. Another turned down a first book by English novelist Jeanette Winterson (recently shortlisted for The Booker Prize). I’m sure you’ve heard the story of how JK Rowling was turned down by many publishers before Bloomsbury finally accepted the first Harry Potter book. In a 2016 Guardian interview with journalist Hermione Hoby, Pulitzer prize winning American novelist Elizabeth Strout talks about being rejected for 15 years before getting a yes. ‘I sent out stories and I didn’t even get, “Try us again,” I just got the basic “No.”’ Bryce Courtenay’s not-publisher above has no regrets, though I suspect whoever turned down Harry Potter might have a few. But perhaps JK Rowling approached them with the architecture for the whole seven Harry books already mapped out (she’s said she always knew what would happen at the end of the series). It would have been a huge leap of faith for a publisher to say yes to this from a totally unproven writer. But whatever the reason for a publisher saying no, rejection sucks. So why, and how, does a writer keep going?

In the same interview, Strout tells Hoby of ‘…hearing the writer and critic Francine du Plessix Gray say it takes 10 years of solid writing to get good at a time when Strout had already put in a good 15. “I was very slow at getting up to that ability to have the sentences do what I needed them to do. I probably was too careful for a long time.”’ But by the time she did get accepted, she felt like she could write the sentences she wanted to, and the years of rejection had given her a ‘to hell with it’ attitude – ‘I thought, “Probably no one will ever read this – oh well, just write it.”’

Being bloody-minded enough to say ‘oh well, just write it’ is an enviable attitude, one I frequently wish I could adopt. But Strout is also talking here about learning her craft, and that’s perhaps an even better attitude to have. Everyone – the old saw goes – has a book in them. And some of them should stay there, publishers might add when feeling tired and emotional (it happens). That’s because lots of books submitted clearly need more time for the story and the writing to develop. But I get it, once you’ve actually finished a book, it’s painful to put it in the bottom draw and treat it as a learning exercise. You want it out in the world. I’ve been in this position, even if I now recognise earlier work as not being good enough. Developing the patience to believe you can get better can be hard won, but it’s worth it. None of the time you invest is lost, even if the book never sees daylight.

I’m hardly the first person to have this thought, but the above does point to one of the contradictions of being a writer, or any sort of creative person. You have to be tough enough to persevere in the face of rejection, and you need a certain stubbornness to block out the resulting negativity. But at the same time, you need to be very open to your feelings and thoughts, as well as vulnerable and sensitive to the world. Otherwise, where will your material come from? I think any book, even one set in a completely fantastical world, is informed by the life that goes on around the writer. If nothing else, it’s informed by the books they’ve read (or the movies they’ve seen or music they’ve listened to etc.). Strout again – ‘Her five novels have begun “always, always” with a person, and her eyes and ears are forever open to these small but striking human moments, squirrelling them away for future use’.

Balancing these two demands is not straightforward. But it’s here that a writing class or degree can be invaluable. Before I did the MA, an acquaintance told me I didn’t need a writing course to write a book. True in a way, but I wasn’t looking for any type of permission from the MA, and I know that the book I wrote during it and the one I’ve written since were much better books because of it. The idea of somehow being restricted or programmed by a degree is tosh. The MA gives you freedom to experiment, to learn, to try new forms and voices. It gives you, ultimately, the confidence to keep going. It also, I think, gives you the belief that you can write the book you really want to write, even if you haven’t yet learnt everything you need to do that. ‘You can’t write fiction and be careful. You just can’t.’ says Strout ‘You have to do something that’s going to say something, and if you’re careful it’s just not going to work.’ But getting to that point takes confidence and skill.

Keeping going is a success in itself. Keeping open to the world and willing to learn even more so. How many years are you willing to put in to your apprenticeship? How many more before a publisher rewards you for it? 10 years? 15? Sadly there’s no set term. Oh well, just write it.

Revisionist

Three times now I’ve reached the end of a book, and by that I mean a first complete draft, not the final version. If you’re anything like me you have drafts labelled things like ‘Final Revised Version’ or ‘Final Draft Version A’ or even ‘Final Final Complete Draft.1’. But still, I felt like I had all the elements of a book in place. I’d reached the end, it was time to revise.

Writers I talk to have very different relationships to revising. Some relish it, many loathe it. No writer I’ve spoken to refuses to do it, though there are famous examples of writers who do (or say they do, I don’t believe them). This is also true when books go through the editorial process. What makes that process different from revisions of course is that you are working hand in hand with an experienced and invested editor who wants the book to work as much as you do (at least if the publishing house is any good). But still, the same range of reactions are there – some writers embrace and thrive within the editorial process. Others find it painful, fighting for every sentence, comma and full-stop. I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

I love revision. At least, I love the first and second times through a book. By the third and fourth time, it’s getting a bit old. But the first time can be glorious because you get to fix your mistakes and you get to revel in the fact that you’ve finished a book. I think you should revel – it’s a big deal to get to that stage and is worth a pause and a bit of self-congratulation. The pause, the time away from the book, is useful too.

In her essay What Stories Teach Their Writers: The Purpose and Practice of Revision (collected in Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway) Jane Smiley writes ‘Your first duty, if you want to become a writer, is to become teachable, that is, to become receptive.’ Receptive not just to what others are saying about your writing, but to your writing itself. ‘What your rough draft contains is the whole system of the story you have been thinking about, the choices you’ve made and the other possible choices, too. It contains this because you have had more thoughts about the story than you have put down on the paper’.

This idea appeals to me both because it reinforces the idea that finishing your first draft is a bigger accomplishment than what you might have on the page, but also because it chimes so well with my own writing experience. Many times working on a second or third draft I’ve come up against a hole in the plot or a character flaw or some obvious insufficiency. But frequently the solution is already there in the story – maybe not there on the page (though that happens too), but in a note somewhere, or in an idea I’ve had and discarded. The most recent example was, when reaching the end of a first draft, I realised I needed a murderer. I thought I knew who it was, but at the end of the book exposing them felt unsatisfying. It was like I’d been hiding them just offstage, only to trundle them on at the end to a melodramatic screech of violins and a gasp from the audience. I wanted the revelation to give the reader a satisfying ‘aha’ moment. Or, if perceptive, an ‘I knew it’ moment. I went backwards and forwards, considering and discarding a variety of suspects, fretting about big rewrites and diminishing word counts. Until finally I made a chart, character names along the top, a list of questions down the side. What do they want? What do they regret? What are they afraid of? etc. That process revealed a huge amount of new information about the characters, much more than I’d written down in the draft. Details of their childhood, quirks in the way they dressed, skills and incompetencies. It also found the murderer – somebody who not only had the temperament to be a murderer, but who had by far the best motivation.

Revelations like this sometimes feel like fortunate coincidences that solve the problem you’re working on. But it’s not really luck. It’s because, as Smiley says, you’ve already made a large number of connections and possibilities in your mind while you wrote.

Smiley also talks about writers, especially new writers, having a sense of ownership and protection of their first drafts. The writing classes I’ve been in all illustrate this. It takes a while for class members (myself included) to trust one another enough to let go of this protective feeling, to listen and be receptive to what others have to say or how they respond emotionally. This doesn’t mean you have to take everyone’s ideas and incorporate them into your story. But even the act of considering and rejecting someone’s ideas will teach you something, perhaps reinforce your understanding of why you’ve written the piece the way you have. And I think that’s the state of mind you need to be in when you revise. Give yourself the chance to entertain new ideas, even if you do reject them (and try not to panic about the word count).

Remember Banville’s Making Little Monsters Walk from my introductory post? Smiley seems to contradict him here. She says ‘On a basic level, every fiction writer attests to the experience of having a character come to life in an unexpected way…. Almost all seasoned fiction writers welcome such experiences precisely because when a character takes on a life of his own, he is more interesting to write about and he is making a promise that the story or novel is coming alive.’ Somewhere, perhaps, Banville is snorting at this. But Smiley is right. Characters don’t have an existence except that inside your mind (or in your readers mind), and yet they can surprise you. Or to put it another way, they can do or say something you recognise as being more right, as being better than what you’ve had them say or do before. As you revise, they begin to feel more themselves, less part of you. As Smiley puts it ‘The art of revision lies in not pressing your self upon the story. The story has now made the first step in separating itself from you. It will not live unless it separates itself from you entirely, and it can’t do that unless you are receptive to what it is trying to be.’

Not that it’s easy. Likely my old friends inner critic and imposter syndrome will turn up at some point and derail me. But hopefully they won’t keep me too long from the draft I can label ‘Final Final Draft.Final’.

Submission Hell

Submissions are hell, there’s no point trying to pretend otherwise. They’re a stinking wasteland of rejection and disappointment. At least, until someone says yes.

This is both a writing and a publishing post, because I come at submissions from both sides. As a writer I’ve sent off dozens of submissions to agents and publishers. Working in publishing, I’ve considered and discussed and written rejections for dozens, probably hundreds, of submissions. Neither thing is fun.

My first serious encounter with submissions as a writer followed on from the end of my MA. I had a newly re-written manuscript (incorporating advice from my assessors), some excellent comments from my convenor, and I’d recently won the Adam Prize. I’d also done lots of research. Using sites like Agent Hunter (now Jericho Writers) I’d put together a spreadsheet of likely agents in the UK and USA (with help from my partner and others). I’d studied their requirements, found agents open to YA novels and written a synopsis and a punchy covering letter. I was ready, or thought I was. I knew the odds were against me – landing an agent overseas takes a lot of perseverance and luck. An agent needs to read your submission, be convinced enough to request the whole book and stay convinced enough to take you on. And if you get that far, the agent has in turn to convince a publisher to actually offer you a publishing contract. I knew all this, years in publishing had made me very aware of how many submissions never make it past the first hurdle, let alone are published. But I was optimistic. I believed in my ms, and it felt like with the prize and the judges’ comments I might have a bit of momentum behind me.

In the first few weeks things went along slowly but smoothly. My submissions went out and I got back some polite thanks and also two or three requests for the whole book. Almost universally the agents said they received hundreds of submissions and pleaded for patience. We will get back to you, they said, it just might take a while. So I waited.

Weeks passed, months passed. The few who has asked for the whole ms eventually said no thanks. Some kindly, some perfunctorily. I tried a few publishers directly, ones who I knew through the industry or friends, but had the same results.

Eventually I gave up, deciding the time wasn’t right for the book. One of the comments I got more than once was that agents liked it but had no hope of selling a new YA dystopia. Dystopia was over, and my book had come along too late (the lovely writer Frances Hardinge, who was kind enough to have a coffee with me one day, completely disagreed with this thesis, but that’s another story). After a year had gone by with no positive bites I rewrote the entire second half of the book, making it more focused, more intimate. Better, I thought, and out it went again to the agents. New agents but eventually, the same results.

Being rejected like that is no fun. Having to wait for weeks and weeks and then being rejected is really no fun. This is a very common story, which I’m sure some of you have read many times before (and apologies, it doesn’t have a happy ending, not yet anyway).

But then, in part as a result of this experience, I decided to try and come up with a new system of handling submissions at my day job. I found a system that was cloud based, easy to update and could track submissions. It could also store comments and thoughts from colleagues, provide alerts and deadlines and of course store the manuscripts themselves. It’s the system we still use, and I think it’s changed the way we do things. Everyone can look at submissions collaboratively, they can see where a submission is up to, how long it’s been with us, what the author has said in their covering letter etc. All that information in one place. It worked, but it didn’t really make submissions any easier.

Because, from the other side of the fence, there are just so many submissions! Some days it feels like some great, collective nudge has been given out in the world, and everyone’s decided to submit their book at the same moment. It’s true that some of these are rejected fairly quickly and for obvious reasons. They’re in areas where we don’t publish (children’s books, for example). They’re not finished, or too short, or from authors based overseas and about subjects with little connection to here. It’s true too that some just aren’t ready. But even handling these easy ones takes time – you need to write a reply, perhaps answer a follow up email, maybe suggest a different publisher. Did I mention there are hundreds?

But it’s the books that have potential that really take the time. Those you have to put proper effort into – discuss with your colleagues (usually at a submissions meeting), get someone else to make some notes, read and re-read. The closer a book gets to being accepted but still doesn’t quite make it, the more time it takes. You want to be encouraging, you want to offer more than a polite no thank you. Sometimes, you want the writer to re-write and submit again because there is something really good there, if only they can get it clear. It would often be a lot easier just to say yes, but then, what about all those other books you’ve already said yes to? The lists get full very quickly, and there just isn’t any more room.

Between these books – which make up only a small percentage of all the books that come in – and the ones that are easy to reject are dozens of others that have more obvious flaws but that still need a longer time to consider and reply to. And the submissions never stop coming in, inevitably you get behind.

So, I can understand why publishers and agents take so long to reply sometimes. They are most likely struggling with many of the same things I do. Maybe they just don’t know how to say no. Maybe they’re swamped with other work (publishers and agents both have a million other things to do than read submissions). Maybe, if I’m feeling less charitable, they’re just being sluggards. Because I also deeply understand how torturous this can be if you are a writer, how demoralising it can be to wait and wait, only to be told no.

If I could (and if I would listen) my publishing self would tell my writing self, keep going! Even if we don’t want it, someone else might love it (this is quite often what we say in rejection letters, and it’s true). And also, because saying no is never fun, please don’t send us work we won’t ever publish. Finish the book, do the research, make sure you give yourself the best chance.

And in reply my writing self might say, please let me know as soon as you can. If it’s a no, I’d much prefer to hear quickly. If you say you’ll get back to me, then please do! And if you can spare the time, even a small amount of feedback can be invaluable.

But after all this, submissions remain a freakin’ nightmare. Until someone gets to say yes.

Making Little Monsters

The title of this blog comes from an essay by John Banville, collected in a book called The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explained edited by Clare Boylan. Banville’s contribution is called Making Little Monsters Walk, and he begins by talking about misconceptions of what novelists do and how they do it. ‘When I hear a writer talking earnestly of how the characters in his latest book “took over the action” I am inclined to laugh’ says Banville, and adds, ‘or, if I am in a good mood, acknowledge a colleague doing his best to get through another interview.’ Fictional characters do not have free will or exercise volition, they are ‘easily born, and as easily killed off.’ There is much more to his argument, but the sentence that I’ve always remembered is this: ‘Under the artist’s humid scrutiny the object grows warm, it stirs and shies, giving off the blush of verisimilitude; the flash of his relentless gaze strikes them and the little monsters rise and walk, their bandages unfurling.’

I agree with Banville, the author remains in charge of the story, they can at any point decide to make the character walk, talk, eat sleep or die. But I also realise he’s saying more than simply that. At a certain point in the writing of a story – at least this has been true for me – some type of life begins to stir inside it, to come out of it. At some ill-defined moment after 2000 words or 10,000 or 20,000, you write a sentence or a scene or a piece of dialogue that surprises you. It might just be a turn of phrase or an image or, as happened recently to me, a dog might show up. And when the writing is going well, your mind feels open to these suggestions of life, these little monsters. Part of your writing mind stays in charge, but it’s in the background, happy to let another part stumble off in an unexpected direction. Events suggest more events, actions have reactions. Sometimes a line of dialogue can become the crux of an entire novel around which everything else seems to revolve.

And that’s part of what this blog is going to be about. About writing and making things, and the moments of creation when something sparks into life. How and when and why that happens. Hopefully not just my own personal experiences, but those of other writers I meet and talk to and read. My day job is in publishing where I’ve worked for the last (gulp) twenty-five years or so. I meet a lot of writers, and a lot of writers who are being published for the first time, or are trying to be. They all have different experiences of writing their books, of submitting them and getting them published, of what happens next. I love all those stories and want to tell some of them (but won’t be sharing without explicit permission).

But it will also be about publishing itself. Because I think one of the things that publishers don’t do well is tell the story of what they do. What happens between the manuscript arriving and the book appearing in the bookshop? Even before that – how do submissions work? How do publishers decide what to go with and why? Who really makes the money? (short answer, nobody). All these things are largely a mystery to many people, even those that are deeply interested in books and writers (though there are some excellent blogs about publishing, and I’m hoping to find and share more). I won’t be gossiping about my workplace! But I do want to talk about how it all works, and when it doesn’t.

Whisky will make an appearance at some stage, and food of all sorts, and football, and technology and probably mental health. These things occupy me. I want to think about them by writing them down and in public because, well, because it feels like the right time. So here goes.