On Trying and Trying and Trying Again

Or, on how being a writer isn't all about lightning bolts

Photo by Micah Tindell on Unsplash

In the last, lazy days of the 2022 summer holidays, I was sat on the sofa with my daughters, watching a CBBC adaptation of a book series I'd read as a child. No doubt I was half-watching, half-daydreaming; drifting between story plans and work plans and life plans. Whatever my particular thread of thought was at that moment, it was interrupted by the buzz of an email. Maybe I felt an answering buzz of anticipation when I reached for my phone, maybe I didn't. There may well be nothing quite so equally commonplace and heart-stopping as an email notification for a writer who is waiting for news.

I could probably list two dozen other moments like this; the arrival of an email interrupting a perfectly ordinary moment. That split second when you lift the phone and your brain registers it as something significant before the full message loads and you read the unfortunately. By the time that late summer day rolled around, I had been sending out queries to agents for a good few months and I was well used to the sting of disappointment. The form rejections were strangely numbing, the personalised ones cherished but almost worse. Not quite, they said. Not quite, not quite, not quite.

But the email that arrived that day wasn't a rejection. I carried it through to the room where my husband was working and waited in the doorway, eyes wide, until he could duck out of his Zoom call. That email (and the call, and the confirmation, and the contract that followed) felt like a bolt of lightning. It was something to shout about, something to be celebrated, something to hold up as proof that I was a good writer, that all my hard work had been worth it.

But, of course, it's human nature to want what comes next. And don't all writers want a book deal? (Or two, or three...) And so the lightning bolt excitement of agent representation quickly turned into planning, rewriting, editing. It glowed with some feedback, flickered with others. And on, and on.

Fourteen months later, and it doesn’t always feel like I’m all that much closer to a book deal. There have been high moments and low moments, moments when it feels like I can almost reach out and touch the next stage, and moments when it feels further away than ever. But through it all, through all the glowing and the flickering and the stepping back to tend to the embers… I keep trying.

Because isn’t that what it’s all about, really? About sitting down and typing one word after another in an attempt to edge a little closer to the story we want to tell? We have to keep trying, have to keep being brave enough to send out words to the publishing industry, even when all we get back are the little whispers of not quite, not quite.

For some writers, publishing success seems to come in a rush of lightning bolts all at once. An electric storm, even. It isn’t happening that way for me. Maybe it might’ve done, had the wind been blowing in a different direction. Maybe it might still; it’s easy to forget the long years of hard work that go into the making of an overnight success.

But whichever way it happens, however long it takes; the benefit of all the time spent trying is that it undoubtedly makes our work better. Each near miss teaches us things, strengthens our reserves, makes us confront our weakest areas.

Whatever stage of the publishing process you’re at, it can’t be all lightning bolts all the time. Sometimes the emails say what we want them to say, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes things come together just as we pictured them, sometimes we have to work harder to make our vision come to life. Sometimes we can enjoy the glow of glorious feedback, sometimes we have to give ourselves time to stew. Sometimes our stories are all-consuming, sometimes the horror of world events take over, and it feels like a nonsense to be giving so much of ourselves to imagined worlds at all.

But despite it all (because of it all?): we always come back to the blank page and try again and again and again.

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Since my last newsletter, I’ve loved:

• Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors (One of those very-much-worth-the-hype books, if you ask me.)

• Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga (Obviously not always an easy read, but, for me, reading it felt like putting back the parts of our history that have been omitted from the syllabus.)

• Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson (I loved this, but then, an author I love writing in a decade I love with little hints of a city I love couldn’t really go wrong.)

• Author Jess Pan’s Substack: It’ll be Fun, They Said (Beautifully human, slightly gossipy tales from an author working in an independent book shop. What’s not to like?)

• Laura Steven’s post ‘On brick walls, turning tides, and a life-changing book deal’ (On a true lightning strike of a book deal after a long fallow period.)