On Not Gettng Published (Playing the Glad Game!)

We are moored up somewhere near the Loire in a little village called Rogny Les Sept Ecluses, which derived its name from a flight of seven locks commissioned by the much-loved French King Henri 1V in 1604.  Yes, 1604, just after Shakespeare died.  It was an astonishing feat of engineering and served the community from more than two hundred years, when a new canal was built and re-routed around them.  The locks have all been drained and are filled with wildflowers and banked on either side by scorched earth, because it has been baking hot here.  In their empty state it is easy to appreciate the intricate brickwork and the unbelievable manual labour which went into building them.  Although they no longer have a function, they are a national monument and beautiful and atmospheric to visit.

The reason I'm mentioning them is that the labour of building them is a little bit like the literary equivalent of getting published, and even though they don't have a function any more, they still stand as a testament to ambition and vision.  So if you have an unpublished manuscript sitting in your drawer, I think you shouldn't feel despondent about it -- it's your own empty flight of locks, filled with aspiration and endeavour and maybe even a few wildflowers….

Selling Snake Oil

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.