The Fumes of Hope

(how delusion fuels resilience)

This job is tough. When outsiders imagine our life, they probably do not realise how much STAMINA it takes to pick ourselves up again and again; to rewrite from scratch; to start a new project when nobody wanted the last one.

Where does this stamina come from? For me, it relies on the fumes of hope. A wispy puff of hope runs all the way through my work, from the creative side to the business side.

Creative Hope

First, I hope I get an idea. I hope that something floats into my head while I’m walking or watching TV or chatting with a friend. When I’ve just finished a book, my head often feels empty, like I really don’t want to write again. I have learned to let this feeling sit with me, and to do something else. At the moment I’ve just submitted a book to my agent, and I’m not writing. I have ideas but nothing so strong that I have to write it. I know one will come along, though, and it’ll be something I can’t not write. In the meantime, I’m doing admin and Society of Authors stuff; and I’m walking, painting and reading.

I’m messing about with bleach and ink

When I get my idea, I hope I can get it to work. Not all my ideas work so I can’t expect every one to turn out right (just like, if I were a potter, not all of my pots would work). There’s always a stage in my writing – maybe around halfway through? - where I look at what I’ve done and think ‘this is a load of bollocks. Nobody is going to read this. What’s the point?’ and I have to interrogate that feeling. Am I feeling it because the idea itself is rubbish? Or is it that I’ve gone about the idea in the wrong way? Sometimes I swap my work-in-progress with a writer pal who can be more objective.

When I feel overwhelmed with the book or drowning in its messiness, I have to keep going (‘just keep swimming, just keep swimming’ plays in my head) and trust that I’ll find a way through. I do roughly plot out my stories but it often takes me a lot of drafts to find what the book is really about. There can be a depressing number of word docs in my files. But this is my process, and somehow it works eventually, for SOME of my ideas.

Ahem .. just SOME of my drafts for what eventually became The Trapdoor Mysteries.

Feedback Hope

Once I’ve written something I like, there’s a chance my agent won’t like it in its current form. I’ll have to rewrite or change it and trust that she knows best (which she really does). There’s even a chance she’ll tell me to shelve the whole idea. That’s hard. If I’ve spent months on something, it’s tricky to set it aside.

Then, when the book goes out to publishers OMG this is the hardest stage. Refreshing my emails, pacing up and down unable to settle, panicking at the first ‘we liked this but it doesn’t sit with our list’. We ALL have to remember here that no author’s hit-rate is perfect. LOTS of books go out and, for one reason or another, do not find a publishing home. It doesn’t not mean we are terrible writers. It means that, in the commercial industry that is publishing, it was not the right time/market for our book.

If nobody wants my book at all – which happened on a chapter book series I really liked – my fumes of hope really have to do their magic: I hope that the market will change. I hope that I will somehow, someday be able to make use of the work I’ve done. I hope I will be able to come back to my story and make it right in the future. I hope that, even if I never can use it, all those months of doing my craft have taught me something useful. I hope that I can pick myself up and start all over again with a new idea.

Business Hope

When I said this job needed stamina, I meant it needs it at EVERY stage. Even when my book has been taken by a publisher and actually published, it sometimes feels like I’m pushing my tiny little rowboat out to sea and it’ll bob about there; alongside thousands of other rowboats, some big ferries and a few massive cruiseships. It feels like nobody will notice my story. It’ll just sink.

It’s disheartening to go to a bookshop and find your book is not in the window, not on a table and not even on the shelf. But that is quite common. Shelf space is really tight. Not every book goes into Waterstones.

I keep hoping that readers will find my story. That a parent will tell another parent ‘my kid loved this book’. That a teacher will find it and read it to a class. That someone will turn it into a blockbuster film.

Actually, my Fairytale Hairdresser DID become a Nickelodeon TV show so it CAN happen

Remember: there are many, many stories of books finding success long after they were published.

Hope of Joy

But even if my book isn’t a bestseller, even if publishers turn my manuscript down, even if my agent doesn’t like it, even if I can’t get my idea to work, there is the knowledge that I chose this creative life for a reason. There is the hope of JOY. I love my life and I love my job. I get such a thrill out of imagining a fantasy world, and I am never bored.

For me, success is staying in the game. And I’m super hopeful about that.