Tag: City University Certificate in Novel Writing

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It Happens!

I’m able to mention a bit of news about a friend which has the moral that talent combined with self-belief and hard-work eventually gets its reward.

A major advantage of taking creative writing courses, if not the principal benefit, is becoming part of a group of like-minded writers in a similar position. If the course is selective in its entry requirements then you should expect to be in the company of other students who are capable of producing pretty good writing — and know their metaphors from their onomatopoeia.

Another important criterion for selection is an individual’s preparedness to comment on other students’ work and also to be capable of receiving comment on their own writing. The ability to be generous with feedback on others’ writing and to make criticism constructively is probably rarer than the innate ability to write well. The best courses are typified by the amount of interaction between the students – especially if that continues beyond the course.

The City University Certificate in Novel Writing course – now rebranded as The Novel Studio – was extraordinarily effective in that respect. Not a single student dropped out of the course over the ten months that it ran – despite a demanding schedule of two evenings (or one evening and alternate Saturday) a week. Over three years after our year group of fourteen students finished the course, the large majority of us are still in regular contact.

The Novel Studio’s strapline is ‘We spot the talent, you develop your potential’ — which is pretty accurate in my experience. Much credit must be given in retrospect to Alison Burns, who was the course director. She selected a cohort of very capable writers with very differing but complementary styles and interests . Moreover, the feedback sessions were intense and lively – people regularly ran out of time to give verbal comments and we all left the sessions with sheaves of invaluable notes that we’d scribbled on each other’s manuscripts.

The Cafe in Exmouth Market Where the City University Novel Writing Students Enjoyed Literary Saturday All Day Breakfasts, March 2010
The Cafe in Exmouth Market Where the City University Novel Writing Students Enjoyed Literary Saturday All Day Breakfasts, March 2010

As mentioned in previous blog posts, I’ve been part of a group who have met up every month with Emily Pedder, who’s now in charge of the shorter writing courses at City, to continue workshopping extracts from each others’ novels-in-progress.

People have left and rejoined the group – sometimes for practical reasons like having a baby or workload from taking other courses and also, in a couple of cases, because their writing has been picked up by agents or publishers who’ve set exacting deadlines. Jennifer Gray’s children’s books have been very successful – with the Guinea Pigs series for Quercus and Atticus Claw for Faber and Faber. I spotted that she had a session for the books at the Hay Festival earlier this summer and would liked to have gone along. I’ll have to catch up when I next meet Jennifer for a drink.

Partly because we’ve formed a group that’s been supportive and encouraging of each others’ efforts, I’ve hoped that as many of us as possible will go on to achieve success with our novels and build writing careers. There are certainly some excellent novels in the works and nearing completion – and they’re all the better for having received detailed feedback from other members of the group.

Imho all the other students on that course were very capable of producing novels that would be an asset to the shelves of any Waterstones (as have been plenty of other writers I’ve met on the MA course and other courses at the Open University and Lancaster University). However, after observing from the fringes of the publishing industry, it’s sobering to learn that just because a novel is very good there’s no guarantee that it will be published, let alone be a success. Like other creative industries, as far as predicting what’s going to be a big success in the market then, in William Goldman’s words, ‘nobody knows anything’.

I’ve been at question and answer sessions where agents have been asked ‘Can you tell me what to write about from a commercial perspective so I don’t spend three years writing a novel no-one wants to publish or read?’ The question almost answers itself — putting in those three years shows belief in both your idea and yourself as an author — and your writing ought to improve along the way too.  And that time and effort is put in without any guarantee of a reward — if you’re lucky enough to get published the chances are you’re not going to be able to live comfortably off the proceeds, at least straight away.

Maybe the second most sobering thing to learn from meeting writers is that it’s a hell of a lot of hard work for a small chance of a reward that is, in all likelihood, to be rather modest. Calculate all the time required to write, edit, revise and polish a novel begun on a creative writing course and divide it by the reported revenue generated by a debut novel and it’s very likely to come out well under the minimum wage (and, for most people, the time is effectively overtime, because it’s fitted around work, family or other responsibilities). However, the figures for average earnings are an example of the infamous long-tail — a small number of  writers have very healthy incomes, whereas there’s a large number of published writers who aren’t so fortunate.

Even to make it through an intense course like the City course, it was clear that everyone loved writing with a passion. But I can understand why some very talented writers might have decided it’s not the right time in their lives to make the enormous commitment to complete that novel.

Many of the group – and other writers I’ve met in other ways – are now at a point where their work stands on a boundary. It’s poised to transform from an endeavour that’s been personal, shared privately with friends, and becoming a commercial proposition, something to which rights can be sold to agents and publishers.  The wheels of the literary industry can turn very slowly, with decisions taking an agonisingly long time which means that I often hear hints of promising news in the pipeline but is subject to confidences which mean it can’t be mentioned publicly, let alone on a blog.

However, last week we heard some great news from an ex-City student that can be publicly shared. The collective thrill of receiving the news shows that despite all the above, when someone you know is recognised and gets a deserved break the feeling is almost euphoric and makes all the effort seem very worthwhile. Rick Kellum announced that he’d signed as a client of Juliet Mushens at The Agency Group. Rick, one of our three North Americans, has been working hard on his fantasy novel since we finished the City course – he was posting up his word count daily on Facebook at certain stages.

As well as putting in the hours, Rick is a gripping and imaginative writer. He was also one of the students on the course who was most open with his feedback on the course – no-one could nail a lazy adverb more quickly. His scrutiny and attention to detail certainly helped me so I’m particularly pleased about the news.

Rick is also an excellent and entertaining reader of his writing. I imagine he’d go down a storm at author events — which won’t harm his chances of developing a successful writing career. I’ve also met his agent, Juliet, on a couple of occasions and she leaves the impression that she’s very ambitious and will work hard to get the best for her clients. Her Twitter feed is both entertaining and very informative (with regular #askagent sessions held, often on Sunday evenings). I look forward to hearing further good news from both of them.

For anyone wondering why this blog’s been a little more quiet than usual, it’s because I’ve been on holiday and, for the first time in a while, I spent a decent amount of time in the home country of Kim, one of my novel’s principal characters. Some photos of Germany and Berlin may follow.

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A Most Critical Two Weeks?

Anyone who read the post from a couple of weeks ago ‘Out of the Chaos — A Manuscript’ might be wondering, in the style of a minor cliffhanger, what was the verdict on the 174,000 words that I believed I’d pieced together in a somewhat desperate and incoherent dash to meet my reader’s deadline.

The verdict has now been delivered and, to my surprise, it appears I’ve been overdoing the  mental self-flagellation. I received a report on the manuscript, followed up with a face-to-face meeting, that was, overall, very encouraging.

In fact, it was my professional reader’s opinion that with about two weeks of solid work I could craft the whole novel into a shape that would be of a standard to send out to agents – which is fantastic. This ought to certainly silence my inner-critic — the one that must have been responsible for the post dwelling on the manuscript’s shortcomings.

Of course, those two weeks are full-time writing work. This doesn’t include my current day-job, nor the hours sitting on a train I use to travel to it (as I’m doing now) – or family or social life. But, then again, I suppose it’s only seven solid weekends.

Before going into a little more detail I should reveal (now she’s said fairly nice things about it) that it was Emma Sweeney, who ploughed through the huge Word file and reported her findings.

Emma taught us at the very end of the City University Certificate in Novel Writing when Emily had left a few weeks before the end of term on maternity leave.

(As an aside, the Certificate in Novel Writing has now been revised and relaunched as ‘The Novel Studio’ with its first incarnation in this form starting in the autumn — Emily, who’s now Course Director is taking applications now and I know she’s made changes partly based on feedback from alumni so promises to be a great experience. Emma Sweeney is part of the teaching team on the new course.)

Emma also works individually with writers (see link to Emma’s blog). I know a couple of course-mates from City University have used her services as a mentor since the end of the course — Bren Gosling has mentioned this in his blog (see link on sidebar) and his first novel, ‘Sweeping Up The Village’, was recently short-listed for a literary award, the Harry Bowling Prize.

Emma’s blog also mentions that she performs manuscript appraisals.  For me, an unavoidable side-effect of having workshopped the novel in and out of various courses over the past two years meant that most people I knew who might cast an eye over the coalescing manuscript (course-mates, tutors and other very helpful readers) would already have more knowledge of it than they might ever have wanted — and would remember the history of its development.

What I needed was someone to read it with a fresh eye — which Emma was able to do but also with some prior knowledge of my writing (see Onwards and Upwards).

So, after a few delays and postponements, I finally sent Emma the novel as it stood, with all its imperfections. She turned it round very quickly — in just over 6 working days — which is impressive for a manuscript of that length.

Moreover, it was clear, both from her report and from our subsequent discussion, that Emma had read the novel carefully — which isn’t always the case with creative writing classes and tutors. Of course, this reading was a professional arrangement, which has a not insignificant cost to the writer, although this isn’t surprising if one considers the time taken to attentively reading that many pages. It’s very unusual to get more than 5,000 words read at one time by a tutor, even on advertised novel-writing courses.

As mentioned, I was amazed that Emma thought the manuscript itself was in much better shape than my doom-laden forewarnings had suggested. While some of the material was  hastily cut and pasted as rough drafts were re-arranged and intercut and sections that had heretofore only existed in my head were written down in skeletal, first-draft form, the combined whole was adequate (in conjunction with the more polished bulk of the novel) to give a decent account of the plot and characters at least.

But — did Emma think it was any good? Well, yes she did — and said some very positive things which I won’t dwell on here — but she added some significant caveats about issues that have to be addressed in those two weeks of revision. Issues like:

  • Some work making a character a lot more sympathetic (any ideas gratefully received — what about bringing in a 3-legged dog or something?)
  • Aspects of the plot need revising and some sub-plots need killing or fleshing out
  • Characters’ motivations require better development in places
  • Evidence of my tendency (as blog readers will no doubt recognise) to slip into rambling, abstract, academic style prose needs ruthlessly cutting out — this is good because the word count is too high and if this can be lost without abandoning the reader then it’s good news for me
  • Various amounts of copy editing to do in the sections I haven’t buffed up for workshops, etc.

But all the above are within the realms of the fixable and the Emma said she enjoyed the few days that she spent with my characters in the novel’s world. In fact, when we met face-to-face, Emma said she was automatically discussing the characters’ options and decisions with me as if they were real people — which was a very good sign.

Emma also said she enjoyed the humour and the psychological side to the characters and plot — sometimes I’ve mulled over the characters’ dilemmas for hours myself and still not resolved them. She also found some of the sensuous writing to be one of the novel’s strengths, which is very re-assuring. Emma is the first person to have read a lot of the sex scenes. I was in too much of a hurry while editing to think about losing my nerve and coyly dilute them. (There’s a particular scene she thought must have been very hard to write but that she thought I got right. If, dear reader, you ever have a copy of the finished novel in your hand, you’ll probably be able to identify it.)

One of the most encouraging observations was that she thought the nature of the writing — a fair amount of dialogue plus the way the story is told from the perspective of the characters — doesn’t make the novel seem as long as it actually is. She thought it read like a novel about two-thirds of its actual length. This is particularly comforting as I erred on the side of caution and put in the manuscript several sections that I’m probably 80% certain to cut – I wanted a second opinion.

I realise that because someone with a respected reputation has said she lies the novel (pending fixes) that there’s no guarantee that anybody else will who might progress it to publication. There are loads of well-written, unpublished books.

However, I may have a few thematic arrows in my quiver in terms of hitting the current Zeitgeist  — a novel about quitting the City pressure cooker in exchange for a hot pub kitchen with food, art and sex thrown into the recipe along with some interesting settings might have some commercial appeal.

But, that’s all idle speculation without a polished, complete coherent draft. So now I’ve got to go and chisel out that two weeks of writing time and then, perhaps, bite the bullet.

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Spooked at City University

I was watching Spooks last night and jumped up off the sofa, not at any cliff-hanging drama, but because the terrorist from ‘Azakstan’ who was after a deadly nerve agent that could kill everyone in London in a week, was walking up the stairs at the entrance of City University in Northampton Square. He wandered off down the long corridor towards the small snack bar in the direction of the lecture room in the Drysdale Building we used with Emily in the spring term!

Then the Section D cavalry charged in after him and the action had transferred to the Tait building where I’d had my Intermediate Fiction class with Heidi James in summer 2009. A shootout then followed around the long corridors that we had to walk around to find the toilets when we turned up on alternate Saturdays between January and March this year for our workshops with Alison. In fact, in one scene Sophia Myles looks like she’s about to burst through the door of the gents, which would have been interesting. The bad guy eventually finds the scientist he’s looking for in the actual room where we had our tutorials — or at least an identical one on a lower floor!

City University provided a good 5 or 10 minutes of locations for the programme, including a number of sinister looking stairwells and fire escapes (that are normally used to access the library!). In the end the suspect climbs out on to the university roof.  It was quite a novel experience to see such familiar surroundings used in a plot that involved Russians, chemical weapons, separatists and as much else as is normally crammed in. It can be seen on the iPlayer for the time being. The City University locations appear at just over 22 minutes in.

It underlines the point in an earlier post that fast-paced editing can make almost any location appear intriguing or exciting.

I thought the episode used a few devices which were the wrong side of implausible. The power of the resident computer geek to rescue the plot from impractical dead-ends and to keep it speeding along has often been pretty unbelievable but a separatist from a ex-Soviet state got off a Eurostar unnoticed (of course French intelligence were far too slow off the mark) and all Tariq needed to do find him in central London was to run some sort of ‘probabilty algorithm’ and then some face-recognition software against hundreds of live CCTV cameras to locate him within a few seconds.

This begs the question that if it’s so easy to identify and locate the bad guys then why do they keep popping up and threatening world civilisation in episode after episode — surely they could run a few algorithms and feed a few intelligence photos into their face recognition software and they’d be able to pick them all of the streets at will?

I doubt whether there’s enough computing power in the world to carry out the identification that tracked down the suspect immediately to Charing Cross tube station — which apparently has 6 platforms. I thought this was an error because it only two lines serve the station (Bakerloo and Northern) but I forgot about the disused Jubilee Line that terminated there until the extension was routed via Westminster in 2000. However, seeing as they’re closed off from the public (and you’d guess from Azakstani terrorists too) then it seems likely that this line in the script was probably just thrown in from a tube reference book without much thought.

According to Wikipedia these very platforms are likely to have been the ones used in this episode for filming the tube train scenes (quite handy as they wouldn’t have even needed to alter the signs!).

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Visit from Kirstan Hawkins

On Wednesday evening we had a visit from an author who has just had her first novel published — Kirstan Hawkins whose book is ‘Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’. What was particularly special about this author visit is that Kirstan is an ex-student from the course, having been on the course two years ago. (I think this is correct as she said her novel was published 18 months after it was finished.) I guess that most of us chose to do this course because of its focus on the novel form and because of its links with the publishing industry (which will be concentrated on next term). Kirstan, therefore, was an ideal person for us to talk to because she’d been in exactly our position a couple of years ago and had gone on to do extremely well once the course had finished.

It was an absolutely fascinating and engaging hour in which Kirstan started by giving us some very relevant information about her own experiences and then answered some of our questions. I can’t possibly note down all the useful and thought-provoking answers that were discussed but a few points stood out from my own perspective.

One interesting point was that Kirstan said she’d never really set out to write a novel at first or overtly tried to set out on a career as a writer. Instead, she’d suddenly been grabbed by a series of ideas that were to later develop into the novel. While working on these ideas she’d enrolled in various creative writing courses, including a couple of Arvon foundation residential ones,  and had spent about five years through courses and writers’ groups developing her craft, so to speak, before using the opportunities at the end of the City course to submit the novel for publication. I particularly noted her advice to let publishers and agents know what courses you’ve done as a writer. I guess I’d had a misconception myself that publishers had a masochistically romantic notion about fantastic writing being honed more by enduring the privations of some freezing, rat-infested squat and not venturing into the outside world for six months. I now realise what rubbish this is (mind you, this sort of exaggeration is probably routinely used to hype authors) — an agent or publisher is much more likely to realise an author is serious if he or she has spent several years and thousands of pounds on courses interacting with other writers and tutors, reading other quality fiction out there in the market and learning from criticism and being aware of theory. So doing courses like the first presentation of the OU Advanced Creative Writing course is more of an asset than I previously realised.

We focused quite a bit on agents as Kirstan managed to get signed up by hers remarkably quickly after the reading event for her year. (From looking on the internet her agent is Judith Murray at Greene and Heaton.) It sounds as if Kirstan found a really good agent and they have a very amicable and supportive relationship. However, Kirstan was careful to point out that the agent is principally someone who believes in the author and the novel with a passion — but that passion has to be passed on to a publisher (and not just a commissioning editor but various people like a marketing director) before a novel will stand a chance of publication. (There can be circumstances when editors leave publishers through redundancy and similar when a book in progress might be dropped if the new editor is not so keen on it.) So getting an agent is a vital step — but an agent can never guarantee anything to the new author. In financial terms both the agent and author are working out of love of the novel, rather than any monetary reward until an advance is paid — and, for a new author, that might cover some expenses but it’s not likely to be anything to swing from the chandeliers over.

What Kirstan said was most valuable about her agent was the editorial support. Some agents will not get particularly involved in the development of the novel and will expend their efforts on selling to publishers whatever is delivered by the author. As a new author, Kirstan was able to draw on her agent for advice in revising the manuscript. I was particularly interested in whether the sort of editorial advice from an agent was similar to that given by participants in writers’ groups or course workshops. Kirstan said that largely it was — although the advice from the professionals tended to be more definitive and assertive. She thought that the City group tended to be a little too polite and nice to each other and when there was a change to be made, for example if the leading character was introduced too late, then the other students would suggest bringing it forward a chapter or two whereas the editor and agent would say it had to be on the first or second page. Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ is written in an extremely approachable and fluent prose style so I guess Kirstan wouldn’t find too much conflict with publishers in her genre but I’d be interested if writers who were on the more experimental end of the scale were ever pulled in opposite directions by peers who might love esoteric writing and perhaps agents who wanted something more commercial. I guess this is why choosing the right agent is so important. One point that certainly came over strongly is that Alison and Emily have very sound instincts in predicting what works and what doesn’t.

Kirstan told us about the huge amount of work that is involved with the publication of the novel — not just the various redrafts and proofs that need to be worked over but also the many different people in a publisher with whom a writer needs to meet. Then there’s also the expectation that a writer will self-generate at least some ideas for publicity (see other post mentioning Penny Rudge). All this work is done without any guarantee of financial reward, apart from the normally meagre advance, so the novelist also has to carry on as normal with the ‘day-job’. And then there’s the matter of trying to get round to writing a second novel. Kirstan came out with an amusing anecdote, saying that she’d been  in an interview with an agent about the content of her second novel, which she’d not really considered, and made up something on the spot. This spontaneous idea really did become the basis of the next novel — perhaps illustrating the suggestion that these ideas tend to stay just under the waterline in a writer’s subconscious but sometimes surface unexpectedly almost fully formed. Kirstan started to work on the second novel to relieve the moments of frustration and despair when the manuscript for Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ was considered and passed over by various publishers but, paradoxically, once the novel was accepted then time to work on the next novel became at a premium.

One thing I didn’t realise is that the current edition of Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ is what’s called a ‘trade paperback’ — which effectively seems to be a hardback sized paperback that’s relatively expensive. The idea is that trade paperbacks serve a similar purpose to hardbacks in terms of testing the market and being sent out for review. Fortunately Waterstone’s picked up on Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ and included it briefly in their 3 or 2 offers — which is great exposure for a first novel. It is planned to publish the novel in a traditional paperback version when the comments from reviews can be printed on the cover and the price will be lower. I guess the publishers in the case of this novel would be keen to get it in the promotion for holiday reading — for which it would be very suitable, being set in an exotic Latin American location.

Emily and Kirstan talked about the present difficulties in the UK book retailing market — with Borders having closed down then Waterstones is really the only specialist national bookseller and it’s vital for publishers to try and get their books on the tables near the entrance to the shops. If a book isn’t going to sell in volume then it won’t get into the shop — they tend not to stock the odd two or three copies on the alphabetical shelves just to see if it will sell. Everything needs an angle which will help its marketing.

What Kirstan didn’t make too big a play of, but which seemed apparent to me, was how much hard work it takes to get a novel published and into bookshops and I really admire her dedication in having achieved it. It helps, of course, to have written a very good book. I was one of the people who brought in our copies of the novel. I’ve not finished it so far but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read. What was most interesting, though, is that knowing she’d been on the same course as myself, I didn’t consider the text to be as inviolable as I normally would in a published book. I occasionally found myself in feedback mode thinking ‘I wonder why that exposition has gone there’ or ‘that’s a nice simile/metaphor’ or whatever.

So I think that meeting Kirstan and reading her book helps mentally bridge the conceptual gap between being the sort of creative writing student that she was herself and the prospect of seeing a book physically realised. However, there’s such a lot of work involved that all of us on the course must be a little mad for having this aspiration. I suppose that’s a test of having something you feel impelled to write about, even though it might make little logical sense, and that one’s belief in that may eventually manifest itself as a unique and original voice, which is what Emily emphasised agents and publishers are searching for and need to feel passionately about themselves.