Big change, no change at all
My debut novel came out on Tuesday, and I’ve spent the week obsessively Googling it. I’ve an aversion to social media, but I’m back on Twitter, wondering how anyone writes books if they’re tweeting everything from the minutiae of their existence to their views on world affairs. Are people growing thicker-skinned? Some are, surely, to cope with the incessant abrasiveness of public discourse. No wonder my previous venture onto Twitter was confined to a diary of flowering plants.
I haven’t had a launch party for my novel yet – I’ve moved to Essex recently and most of my writing pals are in the north of England. Even so, by the end of the week I’m shattered. Entering the public domain is scary – fiction is so personal, so revealing. Even a story like A Pair of Sharp Eyes, which isn’t remotely autobiographical, allows perfect strangers (and worse still, friends) to peer into the recesses of my brain. My heroine, Corrie, isn’t based on me or anyone I know. The murders she investigates are purely fictional. The places she goes exist solely in my imagination – yet the book is a distillation of all I’ve ever read and all I’ve ever done. It draws on the years I spent as an academic, researching the eighteenth century. It takes me back to Bristol, where I spent my childhood. Corrie is only fourteen, which returns me to adolescence, when I was probably at my most vulnerable. Most of all, if the novel fails to entertain I’ll be deeply ashamed. One reviewer this week just doesn’t like the book. I suppress a crazy urge to email and apologise for boring her.
Thankfully, most people so far do like the book. Quite a few suggest they’re hoping for a sequel. After years trying, and failing, to get a previous novel published I can’t quite believe my luck. I hold my breath – I’ll be holding it for a while.
On the morning of publication I email my editor to thank her for her support. Her reply is swift and brutal: ‘The hard graft starts here.’ She’s right, but it’s not just the work of publicising this book while starting on the next. You’ve achieved what you set out to do, yet you’re still faced with a blank page every day, and now you have real readers you need to please.
A.L. Kennedy warns unpublished writers that success isn’t necessarily the transformation they expect, and I’d agree with her. That said, would I go back to being unpublished? Of course not. Everything’s the same – and yet everything’s different. Before you wrote in isolation. Now you have all the joy and worry that comes with having friends.
