Talking about Nathan Bransford's Worst Advice a friend - a published children's writer - said this:
I know certain people locally, who are writing children's books. Some of these people have got 4 blogs and websites each. But they don't have the published work to back it up. They put masses and masses of effort into networking and publicity but they treat the book itself as secondary. One of them had a bullet-pointed to-do list for the year which went something like: 'Approach agent. Get agent. Approach publisher. Get publisher. Get book translated. Sell European rights.' I've read her book and it needs an awful lot of work before she's close enough to send it out. These are also people who 'don't have time' to read children's books. I find this terribly depressing. It's as if they think they deserve publication just because they're so determined to get it - not because they've taken the time to make the actual book good, or because they've bothered to find out what they don't know about the publishing process (such as if you get an agent, they'll sell the rights for you) and fill in the gaps in the knowledge. Maybe they've had some bad advice in their time - I don't know.
I suspect they have had some bad advice, but I also suspect it's a cultural thing, which stems from the combination of the Protestant work ethic - that hard work is always rewarded - and the conviction that you don't get anywhere unless you set yourself a goal and then work towards it. Of course, the conviction that you can get whatever you want, be whoever you want to be, if you're only prepared to work hard enough and believe in yourself is enormously empowering. Writing in the hope of publication takes courage, because you're claiming some ground, asserting that what you say is worth hearing. The confidence that you're entitled to claim that ground isn't easily won, but it's essential. And I passionately believe that hard work, long-term, is a huge part of what makes a novelist: even if some of your best writing comes easily it does so on a bedrock of long-established thinking and technical skill. And most writing teachers would agree that the biggest marker among writing students of who will make it isn't talent, but persistence.
But the conviction that hard work and self-belief and practical goals is all it takes is also disastrous, because quite a lot of what controls whether you get published, and how, and how successfully, is not directly in your control. It's not just that if what you write best is unfashionable, or doesn't fit book trade categories, you have to write it much, much better before it becomes irresistible to agents and editors. It's also not in your control at a much earlier stage of the whole process. From the beginning, and in the end, we have to realise that we don't know where our writing comes from. As Rose Tremain was saying yesterday in a wonderful reading at Goldsmiths, after the initial idea, the second piece of the jigsaw (for her, an image) must arrive. But "You can't force it; it either comes, or it doesn't." In other words, you can only create the conditions which usually do enable it to arrive, and wait. It's a state of what Philip Gross, poet, novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan, calls "Not knowing", and we must learn to live in it. Yes, we can think, read, listen, do writing exercises, make writing friends and find mentors, set goals for things we can control like a number of hours work a day, or a number of submissions, or a list of possible agents: all these activities have their value, are even essential. But as Philip says, in the centre of this is "the un-formed, un-formulated moment, the zero which is not nothing, but without which the rest of the thinking would be... well, just words.'
Assuming that my friend's writing friends aren't such beginners that they have yet to learn to be bad, I suspect that the reason for their upside-down values is partly a misunderstanding of just how bloomin' good a book has yet to be, before it gets over the bar into publication. But I wonder if it's also about avoiding, or misunderstanding, or resisting, that zero which is not nothing. Voids, blanks, abysses, Keat's Negative Capability... there are lots of words for something - somewhere - we can't name, but is often an uncomfortable, even frightening places to be. For a convinced and brilliantly rational Christian like Dorothy L. Sayers what we experience, in what Gestalt therapy calls the fertile void, is the place in which, as exactly as the words suggest, humans come closest to the Creator, who has, after all, made us creators in his own image. Free-writing is one way of getting into the void, and it's the most controlled and controlling writers I know who resist it with a determination which sounds suspiciously like fear. Things like yoga can do it, too, and other meditations in action, which sideline controlling, coping, organising, rational day-to-day thinking and leave the mind open to other things. But it's frightening, and it doesn't seem to have much to do with bagging a book contract: what if you write something from deep in the void, and the world doesn't want it? What if you get there, and there's nothing there? What if writing does emerge and it's most truly you - your best, your truest, your most individual - and it's rejected? It's easier, isn't it, to set up your stall in the market for ropes.
