A chatter of monkeys

Mostly, as you know (you know, you know), 

These emails are long (too long! too long!), 

But then again (and again and again), 

At least they’re fresh (So fresh! So fresh!) 

But this one isn’t. It’s a reprint of something I wrote five years back. I came across it at random, and I liked it, and I thought you might too. It goes – with some teeny-weeny adjustments – like as follows. 

(Well, almost. I just wanted to call your attention to the ABSURDLY low price we’ve put on our Ultimate Novel Writing Programme mentoring taster sessions. In a nutshell, for £20 you get to have a twenty-minute mentoring session with one of the tutors from the Programme. If you’re halfway interested in doing the UNWP, then this is a brilliant option for you to explain where you are in your writing journey, what you want next – and to ask any questions you may have. But the offer isn’t restricted to UNWP-ers, so if the idea of chatting with a book expert is interesting to you, then jump on it. More info here.) 

OK. Here’s the email proper…

***

Into my inbox, crept this little beauty from Cameron: 

Hi Harry,

Inspired by your own recent releases, I thought it would be a fruitful exercise to compile a list of things I wish I had known before embarking on a writing journey. 

It has been quite liberating and given me great perspective on how far I’ve truly come as a writer. 

But I am curious: Of the many hard-fought lessons you’ve learned throughout your career, could you identify one as the single most important? Or, phrased another way, which one do you wish you would have learned first? 

The short answer, of course, is that I don’t know and can’t quite engage with the question.

Most writing wisdom is born of experience and interlocks with every other piece of wisdom. So a question of characterisation is also one of plotting which is also one of theme which is also to do with sense of place, and so forth. 

So mostly I come out with some stupid line that gets me away from the question and we move onto the next thing. 

Only – 

Actually – 

It did occur to me that there is one big piece of writing wisdom that I don’t talk about as much as I ought to. It’s simply this: 

You are many writers. You aren’t just one. 

I started out writing books in the same broad vein as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer. I hope there was a little more to my books than those comparisons suggest, but they were big, old-fashioned, non-violent romps, with plenty of family drama. They were fun to write. 

My first two books were contemporary dramas, but then, for no especial reason, I turned to a historical theme. The books were still in the same broad mould, but they had an extra richness because of the early twentieth century backgrounds. 

And then –  

Well, fashions changed and sales dwindled. My publisher would have been happy for more of the same, but not at the kind of advances I wanted. So I moved on again. 

I wrote popular non-fiction. 

I wrote niche non-fiction. 

I did some ghostwriting work. One of those projects was a really lovely one which hit the hardback and paperback bestseller lists. Another one sold in plenty of territories, made me a big fat bundle of money, and was just a joy to work on. 

And then, I changed again. I came back to fiction, to crime fiction this time, and found a character and niche I loved. 

I do still love that niche, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve also had time to update some old how-to books and republish those. And I’ve turned a bundle of these emails into a whole new book. Oh yes, and I have a mad-as-a-box-of-snakes literary project on the back-burner. And I get a glitter in my eye when I think of some new non-fiction work I’d love to write. 

I’ve also been traditionally published, self-published and am half-minded to flirt with digital-first publishing via a specialist firm.

Almost none of that was in the game plan when I started out, and I’m not unusual. 

Yes, you have a few careers like John Grisham’s. His first book did OK. His second book (published in 1991) spent almost a year on the NYT bestseller list and sold a bazillion copies. After that, he’s bashed out a book a year, pretty much. His name has become almost synonymous with legal thrillers. 

And even so – Grisham has written non-legal novels. He’s written kids’ books. He’s written non-fiction. He’s written short stories. 

All those things are side dishes to the main thrust of his work – the raita to the tikka marsala – but I bet when he was writing those other things, he was fully engaged by them too. Even when you’re a hugely productive author who dominates your particular genre, it turns out you are multiple writers too. More than you ever imagined at the outset. 

So my answer to Cameron is simply: 

Be multiple. 

Find other stories, other genres, other wings. 

You can’t know yet what will work for you and what won’t. Life, it turns out, is not that interested in game plans. 

And look, I don’t know your exact position. But I do sometimes see writers working for seven years, ten years, some huge stretch of time, in order to bring one piece of work to publication. 

And sometimes that’ll be the right thing to do. But mostly it won’t. Mostly you try one thing – learn lots – see if it works – and if it doesn’t, put it down. Try a new thing. Something else in the same broad genre or something totally unrelated. 

Your passions are like a pack of monkeys. They want to skip chattering across the jungle. 

So let them. Chase them with your notebook. Catch the fruit they fling down from the trees. Watch them in the rain and in their nests at night. 

You may not be the writer you think you have to be. That a frightening thought, but it’s also a liberating one. It liberated me, not once, but repeatedly. 

My guess? My guess is, that if your writing career has any longevity, you’ll find the same is true of you too. 

***

There you go. Not quite that fresh-baked smell, that warm-from-the-oven, butter-me-now, golden-flakes-on-the-chin sort of freshness that you’re used to. But still toothsome, no?

I mean – if you had a choice between that email and being thumped with a very small ruler, or having a bad-tempered copy-editor repetitively criticise your use of semi-colons, you’d take the email every time, right? 

Me too, old buddy, me too. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Go on. Tell me. What monkeys chatter in your jungle? What book are you writing now? What others have you written or have started? What other books are in contemplation?

This isn’t quite a feedback-type exercise, I guess, except that there’s something about putting these things out into public that changes you a bit. So: put it out there – by which I mean, log into Townhouse and share it in this forum.

And that idea that you’re not yet really to mention to anyone? Tell us about that too. Let’s enlarge ourselves. Let’s multiply. 

Til soon. 

Harry