I was at a party.

That, in itself, makes the whole thing unusual. I write best early in the morning. That means I’m generally in bed by nine-thirty, tucked up with a glass of wine, Husband and a book. 

It was a literary gathering, so it was something to do with my day job – I’m a lecturer on Bath Spa University’s highly successful Creative Writing courses. Anyway, at this party, a commissioning editor from Walker books spoke to me about what she really wanted. She wanted, she said, a stand alone fiction book, a real, old fashioned story for 8-11s, with a little bit of magic.

Now, if I was another kind of person, I would have remembered her name. I would have come up with a killer idea and pitched it to her within a fortnight.

Unfortunately, I’m not that kind of a person. I’m the kind of person who forgets all about it until a year later when she finds herself writing…an 8-11 narrative with just a little bit of magic in it. That’s why I have Sophie, my gorgeous and clever agent. She’s good at remembering things like that. I’m good at imagining clumsy school caretakers.

Sophie is her own person, she’s not me doing a different job.  She doesn’t do exactly what I want. But then, I’m sure I don’t write exactly how she’d like. We have enough in common to understand each other, and that’s the important thing. And we quite like each other, and that’s even more important. It’s a long relationship, a bit like a marriage. You will mess up and so will your agent. You have to be able to forgive each other and get on with the job. That takes goodwill and good communication.

At some point, editors also come into the equation. I know how important a good editor is to me and my writing, because I’ve had bad editors. Twice, I went with a certain publisher so I could work with a certain editor, only to have that editor leave the employment of that publisher (they hop around like bunnies). Now, I am wary. I will only do a one-book deal. We’ll see how we get on and take it from there.

The fact is, writers need help. We can’t do it all. Yes, it’s a good idea to have some concept about what’s going on in the publishing world of your chosen genre. Yes, it doesn’t hurt to get out every once in a while to prove that you can, indeed, talk to people sensibly. Publishers want to know you could be taken to fairs and festivals without disgracing the entire imprint. But writers usually can’t keep up with everything that’s published or who is now working where or why so and so’s book didn’t get into Asda. We can’t talk to Waterstones about how brilliant own book is or… well, it never ends… We can’t do everything.

Even most of the great ebook successes have been due to teamwork.  At some point, if you want to write, you’ll have to work with other people.  In films, you just sit in a room and then are discovered and immediately become a best seller and a millionaire…but it doesn’t really work that way in the real world. In the real world, you have to negotiate what you want from your book with what your agent wants from your book and your editor wants from your book and their sales and marketing team wants from your book. And when you are in the middle of all that, trust me – you’ll have enough to do without reading Bookseller or Publishing Weekly cover to cover. If you can blog, tweet and remember what you were trying to write, all at the same time, you’ll be doing better than most of us.  

The fact is, any time you spend trying to read the market so you can do without your agent, trying to second guess or supplement your publicity department with some grand, splashy scheme…that’s time you are not writing. And the writing bit is what only you can do. The writing bit is the whole point of you being in the business.

Heck, if I just read all the ‘how to market your book’ blogs that were tweeted at me last week, I wouldn’t have any time to write at all. And anyway, the bestsellers and prizewinners I know don’t do any of that stuff. They just write really good books and people do the rest for them.

My job is to tell stories. Although maybe, just to help Sophie a little bit, I’ll go onto the Walker website and stare at editors’ pictures for a while. She had a nice handbag…I remember that…and shiny hair…

It was hot and loud and my glass was warm in my hand. Someone next to me wore too much Chanel no5. There was a lot of that kind of trying too hard, the desperate energy of people looking for money and fame. Then the door opened and, for a moment, you could smell the rain.  She looked at me and I could tell she wanted to go out in the cool air. She looked for somewhere to put down her empty glass, and I took it for her. She smiled back over her shoulder and ducked under someone’s arm to get outside…

I’m sure her name will come to me. Eventually.

 

Today’s journey is from the University of Derby to my in-laws house in Yorkshire. Today, my bike is a pain. I have twisted my knee, kneeling on the bed yesterday and rotating the poor thing in a way nobody over 40 should attempt. My bike wouldn’t fit on the lift at the uni, which meant I had to lug saddle, helmet, battery and panniers up to the third floor. When I was finally ready to ride back to the station, it started to rain. You know, that kind of experience.

 But I have an anorak I actually like wearing and the brick of the pedestrianised centre of Derby makes a very nice sound under my wheels and I got to ride through a park and past some lovely medieval buildings and a really beautiful old wisteria vine… for a moment I felt sorry for people who were trapped in their cars.

 Then it rained a bit harder. And then it started to hail. Hail pinged off my helmet. Water dripped off my nose. My legs started getting wet. And I started to seriously feel sorry for myself. ‘Look,’ I thought miserably, ‘at all those people on foot who can just nip into a shop. I can’t nip into a shop…I have this big, stupid bike.’

 I forgot, you see. I forgot that I chose to ride my bike on this round of external examining. 

 My husband wants to buy the house down the street. So did I, before I figured what it would mean to the family finances. Now, I’m not so sure. He wants to have a house as nice as his colleagues have. He forgets that we spent our twenties – and a bit of our thirties – travelling the world and working itinerant short-term jobs. We chose not to work at jobs we didn’t like after university.

 And it’s the same with the writing life. Nobody told us that writing fiction would be easy.

Nobody said to us in high school, ‘This is a great career. You’ll be treated beautifully in this industry and have security and happiness to spare.’ Nobody said, ‘Writing fiction is great for your ego,’ or, ‘Everyone I know who writes fiction has a great standard of living.’

 We chose to become writers because, when we were young, it seemed like the most wonderful life of all. It still is…if you don’t feel sorry for yourself.

 

A graduate got in touch the other day, asking to interview me about genre. On the train, yesterday, I started to think.

 I was reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, and came across a short, dismissive allusion to the works published by the Minerva Press. The Minerva press specialised in gothic and romance novels and flourished at the end of the 18^th century. Although Ruth is (so far) about a young orphaned girl, apprenticed to a cruel and capricious dressmaker and seduced and abandoned by a wealthy young man, Gaskell warns us by this illusion that she is not writing Genre Fiction – she is writing Serious Literature.

 It’s a tricky thing.

 A writing friend and former student (I grow my own mates) has always wanted to straddle the lucrative but dangerous divide between Women’s Commercial Fiction and Literary Fiction. I’ve been there myself. No one knew what to do with  Welcome to Eudora. On the book tour, I found it stacked in Literature, Romance, Humour and, long after it should have been there, New Writing.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it exactly right. I had the same problem with The Saint Who Loved Me. Not funny enough for the chicklit brigade and not serious enough for the TLS. I don’t think I was as savvy as Gaskell – I don’t think I signalled how serious I was when I wrote those books.

 Like I said, it’s tricky.

 The fact is, genre is more of a marketing than a literary phenomenon. It belongs, truly, to the bookshop and before that, the magazine. The logic is simple: if a group of readers like Mystery or Romance or Sci Fi, make sure they can find it. Put a big sign on a shelf, a big spaceship on the cover. Assume they are not too bright and that their reading is about their class and culture. Also assume the reader will be limited in their literary tastes.

 Today, we may not be so limited by education or class, but we are limited by time. No one wants to pick up a book on the off chance they might like it. Most of us know what we like and want more of it. So genre classifications are alive and well and have even subdivided, hence the chicklit/ladlit/cosy mystery/medieval fantasy literary landscape we inhabit today.

 Although genre writers must, in some way, conform to their genres, they can write Literature as well. Literary authors often write genre – for example, Margaret Atwood writes Sci Fi (but we call it speculative fiction when we’re posh). What these writers do is mange to both fulfil and disappoint genre conventions.

 David Baddiel pointed out something interesting about Genre v Literary. He wrote that while genre fiction reaffirms what we think about something (ethically, or intellectually), literary fiction asks us to question our assumptions.

 I read a recent article about how music works in our brains that relates to this idea of expectation. Sequences of notes produce dopamine – the chemical of pleasure and delight – in our heads. What was particularly interesting to the researchers was that the anticipation of the sequence’s apex was as pleasurable to people as the actual moment of hearing the apex notes.  And when that apex – when what we thought was going to be the next in a sequence of notes – does not occur, and then occurs later, after perhaps several of these build ups to an apex, our pleasure is greater. I’m sure you’ve noticed the same thing with sex…

 Great genre fiction, as with great literature, or great sex, is about the tension between our expectations and what the artist provides us. Too little tension and the narrative lacks the aesthetic shock or intellectual challenge that we associate with great writing. Too much and we find it difficult to read. The more wedded you are to a particular readership, the more you have to cater for the ease of reading, and the less leeway you have for the shock/challenge.

Last night, I read a few chapters where Ruth is bettering herself through study and through association with the Dissenter preacher and his sister who rescued her when she was abandoned by her wealthy seducer. I think both of those chapters would have had a red line drawn through them by the editors of the Minerva Press.