This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
This is my first novel but I have a couple of previous manuscripts in my drawer and a past life as a playwright…
After the birth of my second child in 2001, I turned from drama to prose and was lucky enough to get a highly respected agent after sending off 30 pages of my first novel manuscript. That makes it sound easy but it wasn’t plain sailing …
I am a huge advocate of the usefulness of rejection – after unsuccessful efforts to secure a publishing deal for my first, second and third novel manuscripts I began to feel a bit of a loser. Even so, I knew that regardless of publishing success I would carry on writing and this – as well as loving support from my partner – was crucial to my sense of self as a writing person.
Since she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Eimear McBride has spoken about this: “I had to go through the process of accepting that I might be a failed, unpublishable writer, and would I continue if that was the case? And the answer was yes, I would, because that's who I am.” (Guardian interview 06.06.14)
I stopped apologising for writing, declared it as my profession on my passport and in answer to people at parties who asked what I did.
Many of the positive comments I received from publishers during that time came with caveats that often included that word ‘market’. In a bid to improve the quality of my writing so as to distract industry readers from this idea of the ‘market’, I enrolled on the MA Creative Writing at Kingston.
Sharing work and gaining the confidence to read my writing aloud in writing workshops and readings was instructive – a painter can leave their work on an easel and assume others will see it but unless a prose writer is reading at such events our words remain unheard.Meanwhile, I was sending off material to Myriad’s Writers Retreat Competition every year. I was shortlisted a number of times and never won it though Myriad’s fiction editor, Vicky Blunden was encouraging, so when I completed my Alarm Girl manuscript I sent it to her. She passed my first draft to Myriad’s MD Candida Lacey and I was invited in it to have a chat. I fully expected the meeting might be of the ‘we like your work, why don’t you send us the next draft’ variety so when Candida said "we’d love to publish this", I nearly fell off my chair. I feel very fortunate in having a publisher attentive to making my book the strongest book it can be, whose consideration about where to ‘place’ it in the ‘market’ is led by the book rather than the other way around. This seems appropriate, and all too rare. Myriad put me under no pressure to punctuate Indy’s sections more conventionally or make it longer or shorter or fatter or thinner. I found their attitude incredibly refreshing.
Now the book is out in the world and the stunningness of having other people read my words and respond warmly to them is as wonderful as I hoped.
Hannah's book, Alarm Girl, is out now.