Epiphany

I've entered a novel writing competition just now. I've entered plenty before, and to be honest it always ends the same way. However this time I really thought it would be different. This time I actually thought I had a really good chance of getting on the long-list. As it turns out I was wrong. This led me to wonder if I've been doing it wrong from the start. I mean the people who are running the competition have Twitter; they were putting all their favourite lines from the submissions on their twitter feed. It didn't really bother me that I didn't see my own lines on the twitter feed, but at the same time I was really hoping, like everybody else, that I would see something I'd written on there. And then comes 12th July, which is their announcement today for the number of submissions who’ve made it onto their long-list. I'm not going to lie, I was really hopeful. But as it turns out yet again I was to be soul-crushingly disappointed, and I did not make it.

To say that I was devastated might be overstating it, but as it sank in that it was yet another rejection, yet another time when someone had read what I had written and decided it wasn't good enough, I felt the clouds close over the top of my head, as they so often do.

One of the hardest things I have done in my life, and believe me there have been many hard things in my life, is to congratulate everybody who made it onto the long-list whilst simultaneously pretending that I wasn’t trying not to cry. It’s odd; I don’t think I actually had an emotional response that caused me to cry. It wasn’t like I was frustrated or angry or sad. I think I was just resigned to the fact that this is how it’s always going to be. On the plus side this means that I’m an also-ran, so I am helping other people to win competitions. You cannot come first if you're the only one in the competition, after all. But at some point it would be nice not to be an also-ran, although I honestly don't know what I would do if I won something.

After I’d send a tweet to congratulate everybody on getting onto the long-list, I had an epiphany. Just because you don’t win or you’re not picked does not mean that your writing is not good. Just because you don't win all you’re not picked does not mean that the work you've done, all the words that you’ve strung together, are in any way substandard or lacking. The creative arts and novel writing in particular is very subjective. We all know this; a friend at work can recommend their favourite TV show for example. They might go on and on about how amazing the writing is, how good the actors are, or how fantastic the finale is. And then you sit down to watch it and after 30 minutes decide that it's the worst pile of camel shit you've ever had to struggle through.

There are also the people who, say, give a movie a rotten tomatoes rating of 10%. And out of curiosity you end up watching this movie, and find that you really really enjoy it. I guess my point is that it’s the most hit and miss industry I can think of. Sometimes it feels like you're trying to get into the club of really good writers and therefore if you can't get in you must be crap. Sometimes it feels like the amount of rejections you've had must have already been an indication of how bad your writing is, and therefore you should stop.

This is where the epiphany comes in.

I'm sure I don't need to remind anybody that 50 Shades of Grey is an international phenomenon with books, and movies, and tie-ins, and all kinds of crap. What it also is, is complete and utter shit. If you have a tumbler account you may know what I mean. People were sharing the worst paragraphs or phrases that they came across in the books. To begin with for me it was pretty funny. Some of the descriptions and some of the grammar was so bloody awful all you could do was laugh. Afterwards of course you think this just isn't fair. There is no justice in the universe if this complete and utter pile of badly plotted, pretentious, hastily slapdash re-written personal fan-fiction can get published, and yet people who sit down and write original works with the funniest lines and the best presentation get passed over again and again and again.

That's when I realised nobody should ever give up trying to get published if they believe the reason they’re not getting published is that they’re not any good. That is a lie. The reason you're not getting published is not because you’re crap. The reason you're not getting published is because everyone else is getting published. There are many reasons why other people get published over you. Some agents and some publishing houses need books that are “the next Harry Potter”, or the next 50 Shades of Grey. Therefore anything original that you have written is outside of their wheelhouse and they don't care. And that's okay, you know, because people have to focus on what they need and what they think they want. People are always asking me: Did you send it to the right agent? Well, Sherlock, I bother to read what the agent or publishing house wants before I decide whether to send my submission or not. First of all you have to start with an agency that wants fiction an not non-fiction. Then you narrow it down to people who want quirky or sci-fi. Then you narrow it down further to people who want first-time writers or female writers or character driven material. You see where I'm going with this.

Having sent my novel to many different agents I can say that it's always nice to get a response. It may be that they say something about the novel that may be helpful to you, for example “it was great and I enjoyed it but there was no sense of urgency”. That's when you just rewrite it and put more urgency in it. To be fair nearly 50% of the agents I have sent it to have had the time to get back to me with a response. If I don't get a response at all, I believe it's because the sheer number of submissions they must get, and have to read through, must make it nearly impossible to reply to every single one of us who send something in. And I'm okay with that.

The biggest thing I can take away from my epiphany today: maybe my work isn't shit. Maybe that's not the reason why I'm not getting published.

That, I have to say, is the most encouraging thing anyone could ever say about my writing.

I think that's it for today. I have drinking and partying and other things to do this weekend.

Peach and lube everyone. Soopytwist.

Image by Larisa Koshkina from Pixabay