Chasing monkeys

This week, I had a plan. I had an actual plan for what to write to you about – a plan inspired by a publishing contract that happened to fly across my desk. (Or, OK, not fly, because those things are always overweight. It waddled. And panted. Then flopped.)

Ah well. It was a good enough plan and that email will come to you some other time. But then, 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. It’s not even a question of your ability to read the market. When my Fiona Griffiths series launched in the States, I had brilliant reviews from a ton of major outlets. Yay! My work was being published by the same editor who looked after Lee Child and Karin Slaughter. Yay! But my work bombed completely, because something to do with the cover or the marketing or the unknown something was wrong.

As it happened, in that instance, I just bought back the rights, and relaunched the books, very successfully, as an indie author. But that had never been the game plan.

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.

What’s your experience? Have you switched genres abruptly and what did it feel like when you did? Tell us more ….