5 Mistakes I’ve Made As A Writer: #1

I Subbed Before I Was Ready

If only I’d made just five mistakes in total. I picked five as the structure for a list because five is small enough to digest and broad enough that at least one mistake will touch a nerve with other writers out there. To meet Mistake Number 1 we’ll go back to 2003. I’m living by the River Thames with my partner and another couple, friends of his who have a one-eyed cat called Primo. Our address is Providence Square and the novel-like details don’t stop there.

View from Providence Square, Shad Thames, London SE1

I haven’t known my Australian partner for very long, it’s been a whirlwind. I’ve quit my job as an in-house editor, given up my comically small but beloved studio flat in north London, and embarked on a life of freelance editing. I’m finally doing the thing I’ve talked about for my whole life: writing. And I’m a quarter of the way into a contemporary novel. Oh, I’m also in the early stages of pregnancy but we are not going to call this mistake baby-brain because this is me then, now and always - acting on impulse. 

Mistake 1: I Subbed Before I Was Ready

It’s embarrassing to admit to this one because I had a few years of in-house experience as a children’s book editor by this point. I knew better. But that’s the thing about a career of several hats — early on, especially, a hat may turn you into a completely different person, making you forget about every experience you’ve had wearing one of the others.

This was the first time I’d made progress on something of my own: 25k words. That seems like nothing to me now but twenty years ago I was giddy with it. I had to know if it was any good. So I somehow cobbled together a synopsis from the woolly thoughts I’d had about how the story was going to pan out, I composed a covering letter and compiled the first three chapters. In those days, this went into an envelope accompanied by another folded brown stamped-addressed one for its return from the slushpile. (Later, I would become very familiar with this process of receiving my chapters in an envelope written in my own hand.)

A fortnight later, a message arrived from Ali Gunn’s assistant. At the time, Ali Gunn was a major player in the literary world. (Tragically, she died of a brain haemorrhage in 2014 at the age of 45.) The message simply said: Ali liked your chapters very much and would like to read the rest.

*insert the sound of a resounding gong*

This was the first time I’d sent work out and the response was a request for a full, as we say. I was in delighted shock. Obviously this was one of the two possible outcomes but it wasn’t the one I was braced for. Now I was in the embarrassing position of having to admit — to a leading literary agent, her assistant, and myself — that I was miles and miles away from having a finished, polished manuscript.

In a panic, I wondered if I could simply ignore the message for now, complete the story in a month and send it off without admitting to any gun-jumping. Given the pace and size of an average slushpile, it may well have gone unnoticed and would merely characterise me as the archetypal deadline-missing but charming author who had become distracted by something in the meantime but was now presenting them, a month later, with precisely what they’d asked for.

Instead, I wrote to that assistant, thanking them for their time and apologising for wasting it. And then I abandoned the novel completely. Truly, I never wrote another word of it.

The request, rather than giving me confidence, had overwhelmed me. It had shown me the size of the task ahead and I no longer had faith that I could meet that task. I kept it to myself because who’d believe that someone who’d been inside the industry could make such an outsider’s error, or ever take me seriously again?

So here we are, twenty years later, and this humiliating little anecdote is ready to be a gift to any emerging writer out there who is itching for that recognition of a literary agent or a publishing contract: wait, wait until the work is ready, wait until it is not just written but rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. 

Find other ways to keep you going. Shortly after this, I joined an online writing community. We critiqued each other’s work and kept each other motivated until many of us had finished manuscripts. A significant number from that writing community went on to be published authors and many are still publishing today.

The happy ending for me is that two years after this mistake I signed with another high-profile literary agent . . . but that is a story for another time.

Thank you for reading Voracious.