Other writing blogs (yes, I've glanced at them, I know they
exist!) make much of offering advice about how to get published. Although it would be easy to give you a lot
of blah di blah about how you should approach an agent first and send them a
synopsis and your first three chapters double-spaced and printed only on one
side of A4 paper, I feel reluctant to do that.
I hope it's not that I'm sore
because my Arts Council Award-winning novel has yet to find a publisher, although it has made me aware of how very,
very difficult it is to get into print at the moment, but more than that I
don't want to be passing you off with snake oil.
Publication can be a useful goal, but it
shouldn't be an end in itself. It's
certainly not a route to fame and fortune, which is what I suspect a lot of
people think when they first pick up a pen or start tapping away at a keyboard. The best motivation for writing should be the
urge to tell a story in order to make sense of the world for yourself, coupled
with an obsession with the nuances and inflections of the music of words and
the subtleties of meaning. In my
experience, the greatest fulfilment comes from the creative process itself;
everything else is a means to sustaining this end.
I know that part of the reason for writing is to find some
kind of affirmation, and I don't think you should underestimate the value of a
constructive and vibrant writers’ group.
If there isn't one near you, think about setting one up. And
then there's the Internet… it costs nothing to create a blog, and with a
little diligence and flair and time, you can build an audience for yourself
that exists beyond the sphere of the big publishing houses, where the
connection is more direct and the potential unconfined.
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