Judge Me

Whenever I share my ambition to become a writer, I get the same reaction. Raised eyebrows and sneering lips communicate a belief that I am deluded and that I have little chance of success. Writing is, indeed, a difficult career. Law and medicine are, too, but I’ve never seen a law student get that reaction. So what is the difference between a wannabe lawyer and a wannabe writer?

To become a barrister, you must be selected for the Bar Professional Course, pass some pretty tough exams, find a law firm willing to take you on for a pupillage and one willing to offer you a job. Writers become writers when they get published. They then remain writers, a mostly undifferentiated mass including those who struggle on with a full time job and a pile of rejected second novels, and those who could retire on their earnings from speaking engagements their fame has brought. Only those at the very pinnacle of the profession, the J.K Rowlings and Margaret Atwoods of this world, are visibly different.

I’m sure that wannabe writers have asked their friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances to comment on their work. My friends are terribly nice about my scribblings, I’m sure theirs are, too. Writers don’t have to jump the hurdles and hoops of professions like law, so the first nay-sayer is likely to be an agent or editor.

I had an excruciating dinner with an editor once. She wanted to hear about my career plans. I couldn’t tell her that I wanted to be a writer. Listening to her stories, she seemed to be besieged by amateur writers proffering manuscripts, taxi drivers reciting their synopsis as they drove her through London and dinner party guests saying “let me tell you what happened to me, I’m sure it would make a great novel.” Her area was children’s books. I didn’t want anything from her, except possibly for her to cough up for the expensive bottle of wine she had ordered. But would she know that? I told her I didn’t know what to do next, and maintained the position throughout some fairly intensive interrogation. She gave me the number of a life coach who may be able to help.

The reason my editor friend feels besieged is that she is the first (or possibly the second, counting agents) hurdle for the aspiring writer. We haven’t been weeded out, like the law students, and sent off to do other things because we got bad GCSEs or A Levels. There’s a girl in my writing class who doesn’t know that she should capitalise “I” (as in myself). How would you feel if you were on the receiving end of her manuscript? How many more are there like that one? In many ways this system promotes equality. I was shocked, on going to a law graduation at Lincoln’s Inn, to find that while most of the graduates were female and Asian, the people handing out certificates were male and white. Writing isn’t free of discrimination, but judgement based on a manuscript provides fewer opportunities for it. On the other hand, sitting alone at your desk, you don’t get much encouragement, either.

So there are hordes of wannabe writers at the publisher’s gates. Some don’t have the basic rules of grammar pinned down; some have postgraduate degrees in Creative Writing. All of them think they have something unique to contribute, otherwise they wouldn’t persevere. The problem is that some of them can’t write. Or they haven’t yet. The only thing that will vindicate any of us is a book deal. With a book deal, we will ascend to the ranks of Real Writers, and we will be able to write snooty articles like this one http://www.spectator.co.uk/susanhill/5714598/no-amateurs-are-not-just-as-good-as.thtml from our elevated position. No longer will we be lumped together with the people who don’t capitalise “I” or think that the hallmark of good prose is a preponderance of adjectives. It will make the hours of work and the RSI worthwhile. Thus is becomes a kind of Holy Grail for writers. They obsess over the perfect covering letter, the layout of a manuscript, the colour of envelopes and the right number of Hail Marys. Jane Wenham-Jones pretended that she’d been invited to send her manuscript to an agent she met at a non-existent party. She writes of another who sent her first three chapters inside a cardboard cactus.

The problem, of course, is that publishers aren’t litmus testers for artistic merit (of literature or cacti), they are businesses trying to make money. They will buy your book if they think they can sell it. Some of them are better than others. Some of them are good at some of it, and aren’t interested in books about unicorns, even if they could win the Booker. Some of them just make silly mistakes. So not only is the colour of your envelopes unlikely to make a difference, the impact of brilliant writing is mitigated, too.

In my experience, wannabe authors respond to this truth about the publishing industry in one of two ways: denial or anger (do some of them move on to bargaining or depression? Absolutely). Those in denial continue sending out their multi-genre epic parody of a little known Slovakian writer, sure that, given its obvious merit, it will surely sell and its brilliance be confirmed. The angry ones curse the agents, the editors, and the whole evil system which has not regard for Art, only celebrity names and big tits. Quite seriously, I told someone recently that I wanted to be a writer, and she said “well, it will be easy for you.” I asked why. “You’re young and pretty,” she said, “they don’t want someone like me on the dustcover.”

Why won’t we accept it? I think it has something to do with the amount of ourselves that we pour onto the paper. Most professions create a distance between the professional self and the personal. We have power suits and uniforms to tell us that we are in a role, offices to remind us that we are in a public space. When companies try to manipulate our behaviour by introducing ‘fun time’ or dress-down Fridays, for example, or replacing every wall with a sheet of glass, as they did in my father’s office, they draw even more attention to the fact that you are expected to play your role. It isn’t like that for writers. Most writers are trying to say something that is important to them. Most writers are drawing on their own experiences. They don’t get to hide the experiences that make them look bad and they have to poke the places that hurt. Otherwise, we may as well go home and let Orwell’s Versificators do the work. Writing is in many ways an exercise in self-revelation. It is a confession. When we send it out, on some level it is not our work, but ourselves, that are being judged. No wonder we find it hard to cope with; who gets to put a price on me?

Augustine invited God’s judgement of his writing. Rousseau preferred to give that power to the general public. Who gets to judge mine? This week, the admissions tutors at the University of East Anglia. Wish me luck!

NaNoWriMo Day Eight: Literary Scrumping

There is something particularly thrilling about scrumping. Augustine scrumped pears, and declared it to be very wrong, which is surely an indication that it must be very pleasurable. Rousseau, too, was a pear scrumper, but unlike Augustine he felt the need to come up with excuses for his actions: hunger and pride. I don’t buy it; scrumping is done for badness.

I was once an accidental scrumper. Visiting a friend towards the end of the summer, her mother suggested that we pick the apples in their orchard. We were provided with several wicker baskets and a wooden ladder, and happily spent the a couple of hours picking, throwing and catching apples. We separated the bruised fruit from the storable, and set about making an apple crumble. Just as I was about to add ginger and raisins, my friend suggested that we check her mother’s allotment for berries. We took one of the smaller baskets down the road and filled it with blackberries from the overgrown side of the patch. They were large and ripe, they reddened our fingers as we picked them and added to the marks on my skirt sustained by slithering up and down apple trees. They tasted wonderful, at their best on the walk back as we sneaked them from their baskets. My friend’s mother was in the kitchen when we returned. “Where did you get those?” she asked.
“From your allotment” my friend replied.
“I gave that up two years ago” she said.

No crumble ever tasted as sweet as one with the stolen berries. I cannot argue innocence. We made no attempt to discover the allotment owner and make recompense. We just giggled and licked our fingers. Even if we were innocent criminals, that was no defence for the pair involved in the most famous scrumping incident of all time. Adam and Eve didn’t get away with it, why should anyone else?

I haven’t gained any illicit fruit recently, but I may not want to go into detail on the provenance of some of my characters and plots. In many cases, I have valid artistic or revengeful reasons for it, but I think that at least part of my motivation is that of scrumping: just for badness. Even scrumping changes with the times, though. I will take my inspiration from Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, not only because I’m sure it’s the most arousing lesbian poem never to mention sex. It tells of a girl who tastes enchanted fruit and pines away for want of more. When her sister tries to buy some from the goblins, they won’t sell, but they press it upon her, tempting her to taste it. She returns dripping fruit juices and her sister is able to slake her desire by licking them off. From this comes my new philosophy of literary scrumping: if they throw it at you, it’s yours.