Monthly Archives: August 2013

Q. How long does it take to get published

A. 10 years

Apparently. Or so a publishing friend of mine says.

Ten years is the average amount of time it takes a person to publish a novel after they first put pen to paper. Although it pains me to think I could have another seven years of writing, editing, more writing and more editing ahead of me, I also take on board the fact that in most professions you wouldn’t reach a decent professional status in less than five years, and often it takes many more. And so it should.

Still, when I first heard this statistic, I thought my friend was exaggerating somewhat. Or trying to prepare me for the worst. Or both. Then I sat down  and read through a few testimonies. There’s one from Joanna Trollope in this year’s version of the Writers and Artists Yearbook. It took her twenty years. TWENTY. But she’s sanguine about it. ‘The long haul suited me’, she says. I can see why. It takes a long time to get your head around everything which needs to be done to write a great novel, and even longer to get the hang of it in terms of output. Like anything, practice makes perfect, but practice means a lot of words -maybe books and books full of words- prior to the book which hits the spot.

Another writing acquaintance of mine took six years to publish his first book.

An article I read today in Red magazine talked of an author who took eleven years.

Far from being unusual, it seems the ‘long haul’ is the norm.

Oh well, c’est la vie. If you love writing, you’ll keep doing it because the writing itself sustains you,

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What you shouldn’t do in the first ten pages of your novel

Having just read another article about the biggest pitfalls to avoid in the opening pages of a story or a novel, I felt inspired to share my own list which I’ve been putting together during my novel redraft process. Most of these I’ve come across over and over again on agents’ blogs or writers’ communities. Some of them I was explicitly told not to do on my Faber Academy Writing a Novel course, which I completed earlier this year.

My top ten opening ‘no nos’

  1. No dream sequences. I did this one, as did a few of my writing course colleagues. We all – very hurriedly – rewrote after one article about agent pet hates went round our online forum
  2. No prologues. Yep, did this as well. Also now OUT
  3. Insufficient info about the main protagonist(s) (as in how old are they – my beta readers kept saying, ‘hmm thought she was about 40 but then I read on p.100 she was only 25′
  4. Too much backstory. VERY tricky to get this one right. My Faber tutor told me to put my ‘foot on the accelerator and don’t take it off for at least the first ten pages’ (so no backstory in the first chapter if possible)
  5. Protagonist looking in the mirror – BORING. And other such clichéd devices
  6. Not enough info about the story world – where, when, who, what, why. These are the basics but I was interested to see how few of them I had in the first few versions of my carefully crafted first ten pages. It seems that trying to be clever doesn’t quite work
  7. False suspense. This kind of falls into the ‘don’t start the story twice’ category. I do this a lot in my attempts to hook readers in different and intriguing ways. Whatever you do, the suspense must lead up to the main event somehow
  8. Too many points of view, especially if some of the povs are dropped early on.
  9. Misleading contract with the reader ie the first few pages indicate a different kind of a book in tone, genre or protagonist than you actually deliver. Kind of done this one too – busy rectifying
  10. Problems with pace. Also tricky.

On a fairly well-known author’s blog I read that some editors will automatically scrap the first chapter on a new manuscript and make them rewrite after the rest of the ms has been edited and worked over. This approach would work well for me. Once armed with the rules and techniques for writing great story-openings, it is easier to write the beginning with the end in mind.

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