Read, write and keep going

Are you basking in the warmth and blue skies that have finally decided to join us in the UK?

Please reassure me it’s warm and sunny where you are too? It’s the small things I love, like feeling the warmth when I open the kitchen to let the dog out in the morning. The shedding of layers and relaxing of shoulders, unfurling like the ferns on the moor.

I was going to write about our Ilkley writers group Spoken Word event which was equal parts nerve wracking and fun. As in the words on a page versus speaking them out loud to an audience but then I watched a live Podcast recording with Maggie O’Farrell on Wednesday (with a few hundred others thanks to Arvon and LWS ) and listened to Reshma Ruia talk at an in-person event last night and it sparked a few other thoughts.

Because listening to writers talk about their work, their path to publication is probably one of my favourite social activities right now. If it’s in-person like last night at our local bookshop it tends to start at 7pm, there’s a glass of wine, friendly faces and we sit and listen to lovely people talk openly and honestly about their writing. The audience asks a few questions, buy a signed book, a bit of chit chat and home by 9pm. Perfect.

It's never not uplifting, even, especially if it’s an author I’ve never heard of or maybe a genre I’m less familiar with. The thing with writing folk – as I’ve learned – is that we're obsessed with how others write and how people are published, often a fascinating story in its own right.

Because talk about playing the long game. You hear stories of rejection after rejection and stubborn perseverance. Dogged determination to write the story, nurture it, bring it back to life after long periods of hibernation as life (and rejections) get in the way.

It’s not unusual to hear published authors say it’s taken them years, decades sometimes, for their words to be published.

In Reshma’s case it was also because publishers had (and arguably still have) a very fixed view of what a South Asian woman should write about, and it wasn’t what was in her manuscript. Linda Green shared that she had 102 rejections before her ‘first’ novel was accepted (it’s rarely the first novel written, just the first that’s been accepted), and she’s gone on to sell something like 1.4 million books.

'You learn so much with each book, but it’s what you teach yourself by writing your own books and by reading good books written by other people – that’s the key. You don’t want to worry too much about other people’s responses to your work, not during the writing and not after. You just need to read and write, and keep going.'

Maggie O'Farrell

Universal themes often crop up that are relevant whether you write or not. Resilience, vulnerability, creating habits, practicing the craft, finding your voice. These are the thoughts swirling around my head from this week's talks as I sit and write to you.

• Keep going. Don’t worry, don’t even think about where the words might go after you’ve written them. Because they won't go anywhere if you don't actually write them.
  

• Put yourself in the picture so that you can paint it for the reader. O’Farrell said she learned to fly kestrels, planted all manner of medicinal herbs and walked the pavements of Stratford on Avon when writing Hamnet. Show, not tell is the mantra you’ll hear trip from many a writer’s lips, describe the scene, the memory, the feeling. 
  

• Most of the writing doesn’t happen at the desk, it happens when you’re washing up, putting the kettle on, having a shower, walking the kids to school, standing in the queue at Tesco. Getting up and walking away from the desk is where you untangle the knots and give space for ideas to float to the surface.
  

• Relish the writing challenges, embrace unknotting the knots because it’s all part of the writing process. It’s how you peel away the layers and get to the good stuff. Stick at it in other words.
  

So let's keep going and learn to love the process. And here’s to many more days of warmth and sun, and here’s to anyone supporting a young person through exams right now. Our middle child is in A-Level season. This isn’t our first A level rodeo but as ever, different child, different experience, different levels of tip toeing around the house.

Thanks for reading, Harriet