On a sultry evening in 1997 in Dublin, I showed a couple of people a short story I had written. Frank was a playwright and his friend had just started out as an actor. I valued their opinion, and for the first time I knew I had written something different, something that did not bear the hallmarks of the deep introspective and poetic style of the previous books I had written and published.
I’d written the short story over the space of a week, and I made the decision to show it to someone, rather than just push on with the next piece of work. For me, after that first week, I was done with it. I’d already completed my first novel, Academy, an Orwellian historical work with shades of Robbe-Grillet. I was stumbling around like my protagonist at the end of Academy, scrambling around on his hands and knees, looking to where the light was coming from. I knew I wanted to write something beyond surrealism and not just choose to explore the world through the gloves of the past and the microcosm of the metaphor alone.
I unfolded the eight sheets of A4 paper that represented a shift in my perspective – dared to embrace the reader – and laid it bare on the table in front of Frank and his friend. I knew I had written something that did not confine my prospective reader to the shadows I was writing about. For me, I wasn’t just tossing eight sheets of paper on a table for the casual passer-by; I was casting a life buoy out to the reader.
Even from conversation, Frank knew the kind of stuff I had written over many years. He knew this was a surprising departure for me before he even reached out for the pages on the table. Within a couple of minutes of attentive reading, he looked up from under his straw trilby hat and asked:
“What the f**k is this?”
“I was half-hoping you could tell me, Frank!”
“This is definitely written by you, right?”
“It is.”
With that, he spent the next twenty minutes reading it, and when he finished, pushed the pages awkwardly onto the lap of his friend next to him.
“Read that and tell me what you think.”
Frank’s friend took up the sheets and began to read them. I knew Frank enough to know that he was only looking for a second opinion to validate what he already thought. I expected a short evening and an early bus home.
Finally, when Frank’s friend finished reading, and looked a tad uncomfortable, still clutching the sheets of paper, and wondering where he should deposit my opus – table, floor or into my hands – Frank snatched them back and handed them to me.
“Well,” said Frank, looking at his friend.
“It’s beautifully written, but I’m not getting enough from it – too many questions at the end – like it’s not finished.”
There was a pregnant pause as I folded the sheets up and pressed them back inside my jacket pocket. Frank glared at me.
“He’s right. You need to explain a lot more.”
A week later they read the re-write – praised it for its completeness – and announced:
“Now it’s better, it really isn’t finished.”
And so began two further short stories leading to what would become The Memory of Trees. The writing of the book spanned 1997 through to 2004, before a more rewrites followed. How every writer writes a book is beyond generalisation. Some writers cram, set aside a month or two every year, and write their opus. I’ve never written like that. Books become projects, and I can work on them for ten years or more, switching back and forth over several months at a time to each project. At any one time, I’ve probably got at least two to three books on the hotplate. I began my first novel, Academy, in 1990. When I write, I generally don’t read fiction. Instead,I read book after book of research pertaining to the subject matter of what I am writing at that moment. I only read fiction when I am not writing. I finished Academy in 1993, rewrote it twice over the ten years, and it was finally published in 2008! Filigree & Shadow, begun in 1989, spans fifteen years before it saw publication, also in 2008.
It’s my own personal opinion – the way I work and write – that too many writers, new and established kingpins, are too quick to cow-tow to the perceived publishing bus. The result is formulaic books published to placate an agent, publisher, or marketing window created entirely on the reaction of readers in ‘a moment’. The traditional publishing machine just isn’t geared toward that kind of trend cycle. With lead in times for a book of anything up to twelve months or more with larger publishers, the reader has long moved out of the ‘moment’ before a book ever sees the light of day.
There are a lot of detractors of commercial publishing who feel the ‘gatekeeping’ culture has been its downfall. I disagree to some degree, while it hasn’t helped, and has led to publishers moving and adopting financial models of business over the traditional literary model; the biggest downfall of commercial publishing has been how it deals with an author and book after the acquisition – not before it. Self-publishing and ebook publishing has exploded, not necessarily because it offers more quality or something different, but because it has found ways through viral and direct marketing, multiple sales channels, competitive price pointing and speed to connect with the reader far better than any corporate machine can adapt to and switch their footing easily.
If I have learned one thing from writing, reading and working with authors as a publishing consultant; feed a continual literary habit as an author, and it leads to overload and eventual suspicion from the readership. Few authors and publishers together rarely achieve the level of global branding that’s earns financial comfort and surety. Patterson, Rowling, Scanlon and genre specific authors have done it, but not without huge commercial investment from their publishers. As a writer, I have always believed that you should create and originate every new book as if it were your last. For all authors, we are in tough times. A publisher and agent want more of the same – the series, the sequel, the franchise, the doll…
I never lived in that world, nor ever wanted to. Why would I ever want to write about the same story or character, over and over again, but just in a different way? Yes, the adage says that every author tells their story, book after book, but just in a different way, and that is true, so long as the author understands the art of reinvention. I spent a lot of time during the 1990’s working in both music retail and band management and promotion, and I quickly learned the successes and survivors in that business were the ones who understood the art of reinvention. I respect authors who can work a singular theme and genre, and be energised by building a character in a series of novels, but for me, every book needs to be something new – few are, and yet the whole future of books and publishing is built on this precarious and fragile idea.
In my novel, Academy, Leonardo dies at the end – or so it seems! In Filigree & Shadow, all the characters exist and traverse in a spectral and metaphysical world. There is nothing to grasp onto there for Universal or Paramount!! Carlos, in The Memory of Trees, challenged all that! I had a little upstart teenager, who walked the road to Damascus, and now, the little shit wants to go off to Cuba (well , excuse me!) and study a bit while meeting girls!! I sensed at the end of editing The Memory of Trees another novel coming on, and my main character seemed to be calling the shots. I was my character’s father. We’d been to Cyprus and the Middle East in the last book on an amazing adventure together, and now, this ungrateful ‘son’ wanted to abandon me and my plots and ideas and travel to Cuba on my watch!
I was exasperated, not by the circumstances of trying to get a book published, but by the demands of the book’s primary character! Like all teenagers, you are there for them through every written waking word, and then they decide they want to do their own thing! Like all children, Carlos, my protagonist in The Memory of Trees didn’t lick it off the stones!
The Memory of Trees began its real life in late 2007, when I decided the time was right to begin submitting it to publishers. In the next post I’ll tell you how it finally found its home after 30 submissions; the re-editing and the close calls; that independent publishers and small presses are the way to go; what publishing houses really want and how they treat your manuscript, whether submitted solo or through an agent; and how as an author and publishing consultant, I discovered some dirty little secrets the publishing industry would rather keep firmly under their collective hats, but you probably already had your suspicions.
