A short email from me today, with a single thought in it. Here it is:<\/p>\n
Creative writers and, really, creators of almost any sort,<\/em><\/strong> No financial support: you have to write and edit and perfect an entire damn novel before you get to find out whether anyone wants it or has a use for it. For most us, that\u2019s like asking us to do one year\u2019s worth of work before finding out if we\u2019re going to get paid anything at all.<\/p>\n No institutional support: you\u2019ll be doing your work alone. There\u2019s no big surrounding environment to say, \u201cYes, we\u2019ve asked you to do this difficult thing, but don\u2019t worry, there are career structures for people like you, here is a team which is made up of people like you, and here\u2019s a canteen that offers cheap lattes because we know you like them.\u201d<\/p>\n No tech or knowhow support: If you\u2019re self-publishing, there are quite a few tech dashboards to deal with. If you\u2019re not, you still have to grapple with the intricacies of agent-hunting, which involves a certain knowhow, a knowledge of what to do and how to do it. Either way, there\u2019s a whole lot of technical knowledge which you don\u2019t have, and other people do, and which you will need to master in order to succeed.<\/p>\n And often the support of our loved ones is passive rather than active. \u201cOh, Joan? Yeah, she loves writing. She\u2019s upstairs now tapping away. I think it\u2019s something about orcs this time? Or is it medieval sailors? Or something to do with tsetse flies? Anyway, yeah, I\u2019m sure it\u2019s great.\u201d I don\u2019t want to knock that kind of support, because that\u2019s necessary too, but there\u2019s a big gap between that and the sort that really sees your project and understands and endorses your passion for it.<\/p>\n And \u2013 jeepers. That\u2019s a big ask, right?<\/p>\n In any well-run office, we recognise the need to bring new members of staff onto the team with care. An introduction to the job, to the team, to the tech, to the staff parties and the in-jokes and all the rest of it. Mess that stuff up and you very likely won\u2019t get the best from that newbie \u2013 and the newbie, very likely, will be wondering whether to look around for a different job.<\/p>\n And at one level, that basic isolation doesn\u2019t change. I\u2019m playing around on a new project at the moment \u2013 very literary, very quirky \u2013 and it\u2019s completely unclear whether anyone at all will want to buy it. So am I writing for myself or an audience? For free or for pay? I don\u2019t know. The process of finding out is still months away.<\/p>\n And in the end, Jericho Writers can\u2019t solve that problem for you. No one can. The essence of it is hard-wired into our industry.<\/p>\n But we will do what we can. We ask our Writer Support people to be friends and guides first. We ask them to be absolutely honest with anyone who rings up or emails in. We set them absolutely no sales targets. They aren\u2019t there to sell; they\u2019re there to help.<\/p>\n We also want to enrich our community \u2013 and will have a lot more to share later this year. Membership of that community will remain free to all. I know that plenty of writers have come to depend deeply on friendships and relationships first formed in that community.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the matter of ethos too. Of course, we aim to work with professional editors, and professional tutors, and so on. We demand a high standard of work and are constantly monitoring it. But do our editor-tutor-mentors just deliver the work and move on? Or do they actually care? Are they invested in the work and the people whose work they nourish? In the end, we don\u2019t ask for mere professionalism. We also want to work with people of genuine passion.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s the thought. This writing game of ours is tough. It\u2019s isolated. It\u2019s probably doubly hard in the context of a global pandemic. Plenty of people have struggled.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t change that basic struggle. Writing is tough because it\u2019s competitive and difficult. It\u2019s tough making the Olympics too, and for essentially the same reason. But we can recognise the challenge. And many of us know what it\u2019s like from our own experience. We\u2019re on your side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A short email from me today, with a single thought in it. Here it is: Creative writers and, really, creators of almost any sort,are often asked to perform their best work without any kind of support. No financial support: you have to write and edit and perfect an entire damn novel before you get to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
are often asked to perform their best work without any kind of support.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n