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| Courtesy of Daily Mail.com |
So the middle of October approached and I still hadn’t heard
from Mslexia, whose Women’s Novel competition I had entered. This was the one I
was pinning my hopes on, the one I mentioned when people said, ‘So how’s the
writing going?’ (into which I read, You’re
not STILL working on that same novel – how can it not be finished?)
Even in fantasies, I did not envisage winning the
competition: my ambition was to get long-listed which would mean that:
1)
My endless revisions were finally getting me
somewhere and had produced a good first 5,000 words and
2)
Someone would ACTUALLY READ the many thousands
of words after that and get to the really good bits.
Then an email arrived entitled ‘Sorry’. Sorry but the standard this year
was so high, blah blah, don’t be discouraged, blah blah, best of luck in your
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!
I had a few hours of
deep self pity. I saw all that hope and all that work coming to nothing. I pictured
people’s faith in me slumping. Alone in the car on the way home, I ranted about
how upsetting it was and asked God, ‘Why?!’
I emailed my writing mentor. Her answer was my first
consolation. She was sorry, and she knew how it felt. She said that getting
anywhere with Mslexia was tricky. However, entering the competition had
accelerated the final stages of composition and made me look at the novel with
a judicious eye. This would all help with further revision and submission. Finally,
what about the Exeter Novel Prize? You had to submit 10,000 words and a
synopsis. The deadline was in a few days.
But after such a knockback, how was I going to find the get-up-and-go
to revise the beginning in time? Well, failure, it turns out, has a bracing
effect. I now looked at the start with a totally new attitude. Previously I had
tinkered with it, but on the whole it had seemed carved in stone – because everything
else flowed from it. To change it would be to disrupt the whole. Now though, it
was totally up for grabs. It had failed. It wasn’t working. So start again!
I did start again. I reimagined it, as though it were a
scene from a new piece of writing, something infinitely malleable and full of
possibilities. I rewrote it. I quite liked it but left it to marinate for a bit,
and then I tried something else instead. That seemed good for a day or two, but
then I read it again and saw that it didn’t quite work. I reordered it so that
it flowed better. Now it was working.
Then I rewrote the rest up to the 10,000
word mark. I loved the way the 10,000 words ended on a good bit, a bit that
caused an intake of breath. Then I realised that I had to fit a 500 word synopsis
into the word allowance. Sigh of frustration. Swear words. Then back to work,
cutting and recrafting the sample and chopping back an old 900 word synopsis to
500 words, with just about recognisable syntax. And off it all went to Exeter
on the wings of an email.
Maybe it still won’t win a competition. Maybe it won’t even
get long-listed. But it is much better than it was. Failing freed my thinking
and boosted my creativity, which had subsided into tinkering because so much
work had gone into the novel that it had become like scripture in my head –
something holy and not to be tampered with.
But that’s not how writing works. Reading of my setback on
social media, some lovely, well-meaning people implied that I need to wait for
the world to wake up to my talent. In truth though, until I produce something
that makes people want to read on, my writing isn’t good enough to be
published. Until then - though it baffles people that it is taking so long -
the novel isn’t finished. But it will be! And it will be worth reading. And I’ll
be proud of it.
