Showing posts with label On Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label On Writing. Show all posts

We Need to Talk About Hierarchies

Riding the waves ... 

Over lockdown, I've been having some online conversations with fellow creatives about what we want from our work, and how that changes as we grow older. How we manage our expectations. How we deal with disappointment. How we navigate the line between working at what we love and getting reasonable payment for that work. 

The real trigger for this post, though, may have been somebody referring to 'writers lower down the ladder'. It is a common enough expression and one that we often find ourselves using or implying. I've probably used it myself.  But the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that the hierarchical model is useless where creative careers are concerned. If you see your career progression in terms of some hypothetical hierarchy, where you're aiming for status, authority, celebrity and massive remuneration, you will almost certainly be doomed to disappointment. 

Worse than that, you may waste good writing time hoping for your big breakthrough, when you should be getting on with writing. This isn't a counsel of despair. Nor does it underestimate the skills required, skills that you'll mostly acquire by practising every day. Reading a lot and writing a lot. 

The truth is that there is no single ladder. For the vast majority of people, a creative career is a giant game of snakes and ladders, with most of the ladders turning out to be more like step stools - and a whole lot of snakes of varying lengths, some more deadly than others. 

There are exceptions. There are wildly successful people. Some are fine writers. Some, not so much, but they have tapped into something in the popular imagination, and good for them. I may envy their success, but I don't begrudge it. But they are all outliers. You may as well go and buy a lottery ticket. The odds of mega success are pretty much the same. Somebody will win big every week just as somebody will achieve genuine, enduring, multi million pound worldwide best seller status. But if you do the lottery, the most you stand to lose is a couple of quid a week. If you waste a lifetime pursuing mythical best seller status as a writer, you may well lose a whole lot more: the joy of writing, of loving what you do, of honing your craft, of - yes - making as much of a living as possible along the way, but of not letting the pursuit of somebody else's expectations or fashions impinge too much on what you feel in your bones you should be writing. 

Besides, as the wonderful William Goldman says in his Adventures in the Screen Trade, 'nobody knows anything' - so you're just as likely to make it big following your heart as you are following somebody else's 'how to' prescription. Or last year's fashion.

The myth of the ladder to success - if you try hard enough and climb long enough you'll make it - is such a powerful one that all writers seem to subscribe to it when they're starting out. Me too. But it's demonstrably untrue - a tale usually told by those who have already made it big, often more by good luck than good management. 

With experience comes the harsh but liberating truth. Experienced writers often make judgments based on all kinds of things, often conflicting things that we would do well to acknowledge. Do we want to get this book or play or other piece of work out there? Do we want to communicate? Are we working on something for ourselves alone? Do we trust this person with this project? Do we believe in the project? How much are we prepared to sacrifice? Do we feel exploited or are we - as is so often the case - partners in some worthwhile but not very lucrative exploration. 

Everything is a negotiation between what we want and what is possible. Which in turn makes us think about how we can manage a career and how our aspirations can change over a lifetime. There is no ascending curve that you can plot your position on at any one time. We are, lets face it, all at sea, almost all the time. Sometimes our little craft is riding the waves beautifully. Sometimes we're rowing like mad and getting nowhere. Sometimes we're clinging to the wreckage and praying for help. Just occasionally, the million pound yacht looms on the horizon and we dream of climbing on board but more often than not, it motors on by. And sometimes, in the words of a very fine poet indeed, we're not waving, but drowning. And even then, we'll probably write about it. 


Writing Classes, Rainbows and Pots of Gold.

 

 

I've just finished reading a book called Negative Capability by Michele Roberts - a memoir of a difficult year in her life. Among the memorable passages was one dealing with writing classes. 

She points out that 'most of the students equated novels with producing marketable commodities. They were obsessed with writing correctly to certain agent identified, agent approved agendas.' A little further on she points out that 'they trusted literature less than self help writing manuals.' Roberts goes on to remark that she can't stop herself from bursting out in 'defence of making art' which cuts no ice with the students.

I found myself highlighting these passages and going back to them with sympathy and recognition. I too have taught writing classes and workshops. Over the years, I've seen the balance shift from the desire to learn about the craft of writing to an obsession with commodity and some hypothetical market - the pot of gold at the end of the writing rainbow. 

I used to teach creative writing for the Workers Educational Association. We lost funding, but eventually, because I was working in what was termed an 'area of social deprivation' (it was certainly that, but the people were the nicest, funniest, most talented bunch I've ever worked with) - the local council offered to supply the deficit. Except that suddenly they wanted an end product. It wasn't enough to encourage people to write in different ways, whether it was prose or poetry or drama - and we had people working on all of these within the group. No, there had to be an outcome. A thing at the end of it. Hence a great many funding applications that involved the production of box ticking anthologies. 

It marked a shift from a perception of the value of doing something for itself alone, to doing something only if there was a tangible result. When the relative impossibility of that tangible outcome became obvious, they decided that health and wellbeing was enough of a thing, so you had to demonstrate that you were prepared to be a cut price and largely untrained mental health professional as well. This is an attitude that is now so deeply and disastrously embedded in the bodies set up to support the creative industries that I doubt if we will ever manage to switch back to valuing participating in the arts purely for its own sake. 

I play the piano because I love doing it. I'm never going to be a concert pianist. I learn to play things because it gives me a bit of a buzz, and I suppose that's a wellbeing outcome of sorts, but frankly, I do it for the sheer enjoyment of playing and that's reason enough. I do it to do it. 



This is why, although I'm happy to give talks about my fiction, about the experience of writing and publishing, and also about the practicalities of research, I'm no longer keen to engage with the highly prescriptive aspects of a writing life, such as all those social media posts about the dos and don'ts of constructing query letters. And as for those agents who post scathing online take downs of terrible-query-letters-I-have-known for a bunch of sycophants to laugh at, in hopes of currying a bit of favour ... don't get me started! 

The harsh truth is that, even if you do manage to land an agent in the net of your perfect query letter, there is no guarantee at all that that agent will find you a publisher. But if you write to the specifications of a string of other people: the agent's reader, the agent, the publisher's reader, the publisher, the editor, I'm not at all sure that what will emerge will have done your development as a writer any good at all. Add to that a clutch of so called beta readers - a term from the video games industry that doesn't mean what people think it means -  before you even start on the long road to finding an agent, all with varied opinions about what you should and shouldn't be writing, and you'd be better to do a whole lot more reading and a whole lot more writing. As Roberts so succinctly puts it, find your own way into 'making art'. 

That's what Stephen King recommends here, and whether you like his books or not, I reckon he's right about this one. 

Which is not to say that a good editor isn't a wonderful thing: one who asks all the right, difficult questions and allows you, the writer, to rework and to learn a lot about your own craft in the process.  But that's a very definite professional skill, and not one usually possessed by an opinionated literature graduate intern working for peanuts for an agency or publishing house. 

The harsh truth is that the pot of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow is as elusive and mobile as the mythical one. And as William Goldman accurately states, in his Adventures in the Screen Trade, 'nobody knows anything'. Unless you're one of that growing band of celebrities in another field deciding that they've always wanted to write a book, the really big hits tend to come quite suddenly, out of left field, unpredicted by the industry itself. Not just unpredicted, but often rejected. Then they all want more of the same, until the next big hit comes along and takes them completely by surprise. If you're ready to ride that new wave - which tends to be a matter of coincidence and luck rather than anything else - good for you. 

Otherwise, write what you love, write what obsesses you - and to hell with the rest. If you don't, you may find yourself missing the beauty of the rainbow, in pursuit of an elusive pot of gold that will probably turn out to contain a few dried leaves. 

Fairy gold, you see. Just can't trust it. 





Digging into Family History: My Great Grandmother Anna Brudzewska

 

Over the past few weeks, I've started work on a new book, although I'm still very much at the ferreting about and following bits and pieces of information down the wonderful rabbit holes of family history stage. 

This is something I've been thinking about writing for a very long time - a piece of narrative non-fiction about my Polish grandfather who had what you might call an eventful life. I'll probably tackle it in the same way as I researched and wrote A Proper Person to be Detained. Except that you couldn't get much further from my forebears in that book if you tried.

Anyway, I thought I'd blog a bit about it here - not to pre-empt the book, because I'm still not quite sure where that will take me and it will be about more than just family history. Nevertheless, I'm happy to blog occasionally about the process of researching it and the feelings it inspires. I did quite a lot of research on this topic many years ago, long before the internet, and I have a big box full of paperwork: letters, pictures, notebooks and photocopies from that time. It's invaluable. But now, there's so much more online and I'm only just beginning to realise how much there is still to be discovered. 

Above is a picture of my Polish great grandmother Anna Brudzewska. 

She figures in a wonderful and very detailed Polish genealogy, worked on by one M J Minakowski. Her full name before her marriage into the Czerkawski family was Anna Brudzewska von Brause and she was born circa 1870. Her father was Edward Brudzewski von Brause, born in 1838, and her mother was Zofia Katarzyna (that's my own name - Catherine) Moraczewska. 

Edward is intriguingly described as 'landowner and insurgent'. 

He served in the ranks of the Prussian cavalry and took part in the January uprising against the Austrian authorities. He was exiled to France, as were so many insurrectionary Poles, but when things settled down, he returned to Poland and became a friend of the playwright, painter and poet Stanislaw Wyspianski. For those who know nothing about Polish literature and art, it's a bit like finding out that your great great grandfather was bosom buddies with Ibsen or Chekhov or - since he was a brilliant artist - Renoir or Manet. Edward apparently features in one of Wyspianski's dramas called Liberation. He lived near Krakow at a place called Korabniki where Wyspianski was a frequent visitor.  And here it is. The original house was built in the mid 16th century, oddly enough by a remote relative of a different branch of the family. Edward bought it in the 1880s, so Anna would have been a girl here. 


The Brudzewski Manor House at Korabniki 

When I stopped salivating over such a very beautiful house, I started thinking about my great grandmother, Anna. You look at that slightly prim and proper picture of her - it was included in a book that one of my father's cousins wrote about yet another branch of the family - and what do you see? What would you expect from that firm mouth, that neat hair, that slightly hostile stare and withdrawn expression? Or - as a friend said - somebody who was saying 'Don't tell me how to live my life!'

I find myself browsing through Wyspianski's paintings and wondering if he painted her. 

I'll tell you what you wouldn't quite expect. That she gave birth to my grandfather Wladyslaw in winter, in a sleigh. And that as a widow, she scandalously married her estate manager, much against the wishes of her family, and gave birth to a daughter. 

So there you go. Today, I've been thinking about that a lot. Aren't photographs deceptive? Or, when you dig deeper, informative. Are you intrigued yet? I know I am! 




As A Writer: Five Things I Would Do Differently Now

Whether you are in the early stages or in the middle of a career in writing, but struggling, you may find this post helpful. It arose from a conversation I had recently with an artist friend. We often compare notes about our respective professions and it's always illuminating for both of us.

'Would you do anything differently?' she asked me. 'Knowing what you know now?' 

It struck a chord with me, because it's something I think about quite often these days - how I might have done things differently; how I might have approached things, so that I ended up struggling less and enjoying the process more. Opportunities are very different from when I was starting out: it was better in some ways, much worse in others, so I realise that hindsight is a great thing. Nevertheless, here are some thoughts on where I went wrong. 

1 I would pay a lot less attention to advice about what I should and shouldn't write
Practically every single piece of advice I've been given about what to write as opposed to how to write it, has turned out to be wrong. I don't mean technical development advice. All of us need some of that, and if you can find a good editor or mentor  - somebody who is willing to work with you and whose advice you know you can trust - then seize it with both hands.
We all need to learn our craft.
But I mean the casual, throwaway advice, often from people who are in 'the business' in some way.

Write this, don't write that. 
There's a market for this or this but not for that. 
Don't turn this radio play into a stage play. It won't work.  
Don't write non fiction. 
There's no market for the supernatural.
There's no market for ... just about anything you fancy writing.

When I felt in my bones that I wanted to write something, I was right and they were wrong. Often, I was simply ahead of the game.
Read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade and then write what you want because he was right. Nobody knows anything.  

2 I would do a postgraduate business studies or marketing course.
I've only learned about the business side of writing and publishing as the years have gone by. I'm still not great at it, if the truth be told, but I'm better than I was. The 'creative industries' are full of writers who don't know nearly enough about the business side of writing and publishing, about being self employed and running your own business.

This means knowing your responsibilities as well as your rights. Being professional. Meeting deadlines. Writing for love but publishing for money and treating it as a business at the same time. Knowing what the cost of running that business involves, even if you're working from home.

All those years ago, when I started out, a knowledge of business wasn't deemed important for people working in the arts, on the creative side at least. We left all that to the middle men and women. Silly us. Because suddenly, we found that we were working in something called the Creative Industries, while still being advised not to worry our little heads about such things. I suspect even now, many university creative writing courses do little to address the business and marketing side of creative practice.

Understanding the business side of things is vital for anyone hoping to build a career as a writer - and it would have been so much easier if I had known more about it earlier.


3 I would never work for any big company on the promise of exposure or jam tomorrow or a  future commission.  
This is closely linked to 2 , above. I've done this two or three times, mostly with television proposals. I don't mean a basic proposal or submission. Getting a foothold in any area of creative practice means actually doing it. When a fellow writer told me, a long time ago, that the only way to learn how to write was to write, he was absolutely right and most writers do an awful lot of writing on spec before publication or production.

This was something different. I already had a track record, but this involved months of unpaid work, encouraged by a script editor. When I look back on the waste of time, I could scream, and yet it was my fault. I was a willing volunteer. I went along with it in pursuit of all that lovely jam tomorrow. Eventually, it occurred to me that the script editor was being paid - not handsomely, but a whole lot more than me - to work with a number of different proposals, most of which would never be made. This would have been fine if they paid development money for the work involved. But they never did. There was 'no money in the budget'.

Whenever anyone says this to you, bear in mind that it means that there is, in fact, a budget. They have just never included the writer in it.  There should be a fee for this kind of speculative work that they are asking you to do. And if they decide not to use it after all, there should be a kill fee - a sum of money to give you some compensation for your time and effort. 

4 I wouldn't write radio drama at all. 
This is a big - and quite emotional - issue for me. I began my writing career as a poet and short story writer (with a decent publication record by the time I was thirty) and in parallel with that as a radio playwright. I loved the medium. But with hindsight, radio drama was a dead end for me.
I worked with some fine producers, people I still admire and they taught me plenty.
I used to say that radio taught me how to write dialogue, but I was pretty good at that anyway and I could have learned.

As a career pathway, it was useless.

After a while, radio drama that had once been exciting and experimental for me, became something of a treadmill, albeit an enticing one. It was hard work, but it was fun to do. It was difficult to turn down commissions, because it paid some of the bills, but it wasn't nearly as well paid as a 'proper' job would have been, and yet it was equally time consuming and tricky. While I was writing for radio - sometimes ten part serials for the Classic Serial slot - I wasn't writing other things. And yet I was always a single commission away from financial disaster.

There was only one real outlet for an experienced radio dramatist, and that was via the BBC. If the work dried up, as mine did, almost overnight, there was nowhere else to go, no other outlet for a very singular set of skills. Just at the point of commission, there was a change of personnel and the plug was pulled on a major series. I did a bit of audio work for various visitor attractions. I turned to theatre for a while, and enjoyed the experience, but eventually I returned to the work I should have been doing twenty years earlier: writing fiction and popular non-fiction. I'm glad I did, but I wish I'd done it much sooner. Radio allowed me to feel that I was making a living as a writer, but the reality was that I was going nowhere and had relinquished control over my future to a single editor.

5 I wouldn't be ever so humble.
The truth is that now, writers do have options, self publishing, blogging and podcasts to name a few. As I said at the start of this small rant, hindsight is a great thing and most of us find it hard to plan out a creative career. Life takes us where it will. Perhaps all of us should - with the provisos of being polite, businesslike and responsible - learn to be a little less accommodating.

As with every single area of life and work - and the creative industries are no exception - people will want to look after their own interests. This doesn't make them bad people. It just makes them human. But the 'creatives' working at the sharp end tend to get into the habit of seeing themselves as supplicants, of being scared to rock the boat, of assuming Uriah Heap levels of humility. Actually even this isn't always true, and I'm told by publisher friends that those with the least talent are invariably the most entitled and rude. So don't let's get carried away with ourselves!

All the same, what we are looking for is a modicum of professionalism in the way we are treated, with the proviso that we behave professionally in return.

To that end, we need to be aware of our own agency, aware that we are sole traders, navigating difficult and precarious waters for the sake of ourselves and the work that is so important to us. In the words of Bill and Ted, we should at least try to 'be excellent to each other.'

That shouldn't be too much to ask for, should it?


Starting out. 











Carry On Writing

Beware of the Bull 
A very long time ago, when I first started out on the long road to publication and production (but not writing. I had been doing that for a long time, writing stories and poems since I could write) somebody said to me 'the only way to learn how to write is to write.' At the time, because I was still in my teens and thought that instant solutions might be possible, it seemed a bit glib. But as time passed, I realised that it was nothing less than the truth. 
I thought about that advice earlier this year when I read Stephen King's excellent memoir On Writing for the first time and realised that he too was advocating intensive writing - and intensive reading, anything and everything, good, bad and indifferent - as the only way to find your own true voice. Practice makes perfect. 
Let's face it, there is a lot of advice out there not just for self publishers, but for all kinds of writers starting out on the same long road. And this blog is probably only adding to the confusion.
But I've felt recently - and uneasily - that some of the advice handed out doesn't just throw the baby out with the bathwater. It forgets to put the baby in the bath altogether. It concentrates on platforms and promotions, but seems curiously reluctant to talk about the need to - well, to do a lot of - you know - writing.
Here's a thing. When I first started to publish my novels on Kindle, backlist and new titles, I read all that 'how to promote your book' stuff myself and I did it a couple of times, posting here, there and everywhere. 
I had some success with Kindle Select which allows you give away your books for up to five days in any three month period in exchange for digital exclusivity for those months. This works well for some writers, hardly at all for others. For me - and I understand that this is perhaps because I have quite a lot of work out there, traditionally published too - it worked pretty well and certainly resulted in sales of other books. But I was also beginning to wonder if intensive promotion might not be counter productive. (It irritated me a bit when I came across it myself even though I fully understood why people were doing it.) 
So I decided to experiment with minimal promotion of a few free titles: putting a link on my Facebook page, doing the odd tweet (but not a steady stream of them!) adding one or two links to one or two groups. And guess what? People still downloaded the books. If anything, they did rather better. Which suggests that letting Amazon do what Amazon does best works at least as well as any other form of promotion. 
Which is not to say that you don't need to do anything. Because whether you go with the odd freebie or not, you do need to do something.
First and foremost, I think you need to concentrate more on the baby than the bathwater. Like my old correspondent said, you need to write. (And rewrite!) A lot. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. Most writers who achieve any measure of success do an awful lot of writing and they do it because it's what they do.  It's more important than anything else. If you find yourself routinely neglecting your writing in order to do promotion, you've got things the wrong way round. The best way to achieve sales as a 'writer as publisher' or to achieve a publishing 'deal' if that's what you want, is to carry on writing. 
It used to be a sad truth that writers would often find themselves sitting on a body of highly praised but unpublished material - unpublished because it was deemed to be 'unmarketable' for various reasons: too long, too short, too mid-list, too niche. That was the position I found myself in. Now, if you want to, you get get that work out there yourself and still carry on looking for a traditional deal if that's what you want to do. Or not, if you don't. But above all, in order to give yourself options, you have to write. And care about what you write. The more you write, the more material you will have to publish and the more you will sell. 
Promotion is important too.
In fact it's an essential part of treating yourself in a professional manner, treating some aspects of your writing as a business - and engaging with your readers, where and when you can. And whether you're traditionally published, or embarking on the 'independent writer as publisher' route, you had better start thinking like a business person, because either way, those waters are worryingly shark infested and the baby that is your precious work may be gobbled up whole. And don't let anybody fool you into thinking that you won't have to devote a lot of time to promotion if you're traditionally published because you will. 
The trick is in getting your priorities right. Managing the time available to you. 
I'm feeling my way towards something here, as I have been all year, and I think it's this. In my opinion, the best promotions are those which are not so much promotions as 'optional extras' to the sheer pleasure of writing. They add value or interest in some way to the contents of the book. You must be prepared to share something. It could be about the subject matter of the novel, the characters, the setting, the themes. Or it could be about the process of writing. It could be about a particular genre, or none at all.  It could be about some aspect of your research -  or it could go off at a complete tangent. It might well be a recommendation of somebody else's book. What inspired you? Who inspired you? But whatever it is, you're giving your readers something extra, sharing something and - often enough - getting something back in the process. That, too, is one of the joys of social media and blogging. Just make sure that you aren't shouting so loudly about your own work that you miss hearing somebody else's intriguing or moving or inspirational story along the way.