Engaging polemic about the fate of women writers once the publishing trade gets their hands on them. None of it my experience, but it is a cautionary tale. Thanks to Grumpy Old Bookman for the link.

http://www2.bookgirl.org/index.php?page=women_in_publishing

Emma

Wow, heavy stuff.

Many commercial publishers will buy a manuscript with a view to reworking it extensively after the contracts have been signed. Romantic, and ‘happy’ endings are often tacked on only after the editorial letter has arrived. I spoke to one author who had to fight to keep an adoption sub-plot that was deemed too ‘depressing’. Once you start talking to these authors you realise that most of them don’t want to write formulaic fiction at all, but once they sign their contract, they find that this is what they are required to do. Another editor I interviewed said, ‘Just as there’s a place for five-star restaurants, there’s a place for McDonald’s.’ But do the authors know they’re supposed to be the equivalent of McDonald’s?, I asked. ‘Not always,’ admitted the editor. It would seem that far from being a representation of ‘real’ women’s experience - which is how they defend it, by the way - chick lit is an exercise in suppressing it. And I do wonder if a similar thing is happening in women’s literary fiction; that if you send in a manuscript to a publisher that isn’t a contemporary saga, or a novel about relationships, it goes on the ‘no’ pile. After all, what would they tell the sales department? Originality? No, thanks.

echoes of prisoner-guards in this!!!! sounds horrible.

Z

She's very, very cross, and with some cause.

But while I wholly recognise the driving desire to be published, and how weak you feel in the face of the industry, I do think as writers we have to take some responsibility for what happens to us and our work.

They say they want a book a year. You need to say, you can have a bad book in a year, or a good book in two. They say, more this, less that. You know it's not your book any more. It is brave, but possible, to say 'No'. You'd take your child away from a school whose ethos was as wrong for you as that - why stick with a publisher? Bide your time, home-school your novel, and when you're writing what you were put on this earth to write (as opposed to what you hope will sell) then you'll have the real success. I think it's significant that the novel-sequence she got trapped in wasn't actually the novel she really, really wanted to write in the first place.

I do wonder if some of this - as she hints - is to do with having the wrong agent. If your agent sees your work very differently from how you do, she'll send it to the wrong people, who will spend all their time trying to make it into what they really want.

For what it's worth, and no doubt I've been lucky, but none of what she describes do I recognise in my own experience.

Emma

Interesting quote about "chick-lit", in the passage Zooter quoted. I've always found the term a little bothersome, because it's one of those phrases that sounds as if it is pejorative but pretending to be ironic. How many serious female writers (or women wanting to be taken seriously in any profession, for that matter) would choose to refer to themselves as "chicks"?

Alex

Not me

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But, on the other hand, it seems to be used with a sense of humour these days, and possibly affectionately. But I have to admit, the phrase puts me off reading any of it, as I imagine it will largely be about women feeling unfulfilled because they don't have men, which really, I think is a travesty in this day and age. Bridget Jones set women back years.

Oh, God. Now everyone will hate me.

But what I REALLY hate is when people refer to Jane Austen as chick lit. But then, if she is chick lit, I like chick lit, so it's just another example of how pigeonholing can be dangerous.





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Oh, God. Now I've just read the first paragraph of Emma's link. 'I am so clever, but really I shouldn't be because I grew up on a council estate.'

Oh, so what? I find it irksome when people who live stereotypically middle-class lives feel the need to remind evryone of their origins. People exceed the expectations of
their backgrounds. It's a fact of life, and now very common.

Sorry. I am making myself very unpopular here, I'm sure.

Not with me, I can assure you. I'm as anti-pigeonholing as you can get. But then, I grew up in a working class environment, so what would I know

You're right; people can be very set in their stereotyping ways. I'm on the side of anyone who is anti-genre, anti-pigeonholing or anti-stereotyping.

Alex

Me too. I'm resigned to the need for the booktrade to think in genres to some extent, but it's so reductive when talking about writing.

I also think that to some extent she dropped herself in it. She had a rejection - it happens, and we've all gone mad for a while because of it. She wanted desperately to be published, so she wrote instead what she thought would be published, and it was. And then she didn't like the direction she was forced into... But it's not surprising, because she'd set off down the road she didn't want herself, and then found she was pushed further down it.

I can't help feeling that some of her troubles arose because she lost touch with her writerly self. If she'd insisted on writing what she really wanted to and was wired for, and when it was rejected she'd written more and better of that, in the end it would have been so good she would have got published, and on her own terms, at least as far as the writing was concerned.

Emma

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I suppose what I'm saying - conceitedly - is that she should have done what I did. It doesn't work for everyone, but at least the work I've got out there I'm proud of, and I'm not fighting my editor every inch of the way either.

Absolutely. You write the book that's inside you screaming to get out, not the one you hope will sell. And it's the one you put your soul into that will sell. Or not. But it's got a much better chance.

Okay, I've never been told to wear a dress (well, not yet anyhow) but I did have one editor suggest that if I cared to 'dumb down' my book (her phrase) it would be more likely to get published by her. I walked away from that one. What I mean is men and women writers can get pigeonholed and pressured, as well as trapped by success, to a certain extent (poor them, we think!).

I understand it might be hard once a contract has been signed, but it seems to me it was her over-riding desire to get a book published (she decided to write a mystery book, purely because she thought it would have more chance of publication, I think) that got her into this. Perhaps that is unfair.

Sounds like she's no one's push-over though, and she got out of it okay.

In passing, I think it's a bit rich to say that in her Guardian column Julie Birchill had '[carved] out a space at the Guardian where women could say what they wanted to say.' Err, Julie Birchill's column was really a space where Julie Birchill could say what she wanted to say; or when she went on holiday or was in rehab, the space was given over to some other invited hack, invariably female, yes, and probably feminist or post-feminist, but hardly 'women' in the broadest sense. The writer was lucky enough to get the gig once - think she's getting a bit carried away on the back of that.

Yes, I agree that she dropped herself in it to some extent, though the booktrade's a weird business, and perhaps it's not fair to be too hard on people who find themselves in unexpected situations. And yes, I haven't got much time for Julie Birchill. Rampant ego and disregard for logic is unattractive in either sex.

Roger, you might look rather fetching in a dress... And all power to you for walking away from an editor who was the wrong sort.

Writers have always wanted to be published - dammit, we want to be read, and we want to be solvent - but with the 'lit idol' culture (I don't mean the actual programme, which I haven't seen), I do wonder if aspiring writers these day rate being published higher than writing something they're proud of, and will do any amount of dumbing down or whatever to get that contract. I don't mean that it has to be 'lit'ry' as Grumpy Old Bookman would say, but only that you should be writing your book, not what an editor tells you to write. If you lose sight of your book too badly, or never had sight of it at all but just a vision of a contract, then you're easy meat for any editor who understands more about marketing than writing.

Emma

Many, many years ago, long before I even thought of trying to write publishable fiction, I had an idea for a book about programming languages. I mentioned it to a colleague who had once written a mathematics book for Spanish students (I move in the most interesting circles, don't I? ). His advice was to approach possible publishers before I got too far with it.

To cut a long and not very interesting story short, I ended up exchanging a few letters with Macmillan, having by then evolved the idea into a series of books. In the end, though, their idea of which book I should write first did not correspond with mine. As it turned out, they dropped the project before I did, but I had already decided that they were trying to push me in a direction I wasn't very happy with.

So I understand fully the way publishers can try to divert an author from their chosen path, and the kind of determination that is needed to keep true to one's own instincts.

Alex

From the website

But I did want to write books, very badly.

OK so am I the only one who can't read that line without thinking of the old punchline

"And now, she does." ?

I like her notes on how to set about writing a novel

http://www2.bookgirl.org/index.php?page=beginning_a_novel

Pete

Hey that is a nice essay, thanks for pointing it out.

You're right, Emma. I was a bit hard on her. The main thing is, she's singing to her own tune now, and that's admirable.