Thank-you again, the range of advice & different opinions has been fascinating and up-lifting, even though rejection is rather a miserable subject.

I was particularly struck by what Daisy and Emma had to say as I have been wondering if one of my problems is that I am floundering somewhere in the middle of the commercial/literary axis (and we all know how the fashionable world looks on 'middleness' - middle-class, middle-aged, middle-England, none of them used as completely positive descriptors) although I often think there must be an un-tapped market there.

I completely understand what people are saying about carrying on for the love of it but as I explained in my earlier message, I have been writing since I was a little girl. I was one of those kids who kept her half-used exercise books at the end of each term so that I could write stories in the back of them. I can see what people are saying about continuing to write in order to craft any skills I may have but this is where I have got to by myself. I have written lots of things over the years, it was just that the novel in question is the first thing I felt I could show anyone. I am also 30,000 words into another novel at the moment. However, scribbling away on my own doesn't feel 'enough' any more -I feel I need help help so that I can move forward.

Several of you mentioned Arvon courses, has anyone been on one and if so what would you say are their strengths & weaknesses? I tried a local authority course a while ago and was very disappointed by the skills and the experience of the person taking the class (basically an ordinary English teacher with creative leanings). As I mentioned, I have a full-time job, a part-time job and all the daft domestic responsibilities that go with family life so time is precious. It is difficult enough to say my writing is important enough to be given time, so wasting time in a dodgy writing class felt terrible, it was like watching someone pour a good bottle of red wine down the sink!

Anyway, if anyone has any recommendations for courses or other practical steps I can take to get myself out of this cul-de-sac I would be very glad to hear them.

Thanks again.

I'm asking myself exactly the same question, Saturday, so you're not alone. And, yes, it is exhausting – especially when it seems like every other writer on the planet is getting a publishing deal.

It might not be much consolation to you at the moment but, as others have said, two years and 24 rejections aren’t too much in the overall scheme of things. How much feedback have you had, other than from family, friends, agents, etc? Can I suggest you join one of the groups here and upload some of your work? You’ll get honest, considered feedback from other writers which might help you decide what to do next. Have a browse through the archive for a while and see what it’s like. You're in the best place here for support and encouragement.

Good luck

Dee

Hi Saturday and welcome. Anotherthing you might like to consider is a mentoring programme. This would be more tailored to your specific needs and some place eg Arts Training Central, offer the few places they have annually for free. Good luck and don't give up, even though clearly you're juggling a lot of balls at the moment.
Cheers,
Antarctic

I can heartily recommend Arvon courses, Saturday. I know several people who've done them and each of them has found them inspiring. You need to choose fairly carefully, though, based on who's teaching. Try and pick someone who is on the same sort of writing wave length as yourself.

Kate Long (Lammi on here) had her writing career kick-started by an Arvon course and is now teaching on them. I know she's teaching on one this year and I feel she'd be very empathetic to your plight and understanding of the kind of fiction you're writing.

I really do sympathise, as I'm also in a similar place writing-wise. You're right, middle-class, middle-aged, middle-England isn't very fashionable at the moment (but it has been) yet it's what I know best. On the other hand, writers are published who write within that niche, such as Joanne Trollope, Elizabeth Buchan and Mavis Cheek. And to some extent the phenomenally bestselling Anne Tyler is a sort of American equivalent.

As I said in my previous post, it's about coming up with the right book. I have a feeling your writing is fine, so it's not writing craft you need to learn. What an Arvon course provides is a week to immerse yourself in writing, talk writing with others, and have someone experienced to bounce ideas off. I think you'd find it highly motivating.

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"Middle-class, middle-aged, middle-England" IS a huge market, for the simple reason that middle-class, middle-aged women account for a huge percentage of fiction sales. I sometimes think the publishing industry is in danger of forgetting this.

Saturday, it's totally up to you. You could give up writing and never ever have a chance of getting anywhere, or you could keep going and getting better and maybe get somewhere. At the risk of being hated by half my fellow members, why do you want an MA in creative writing anyway? Look for experiences, talk to as many people as you can about their lives and read good books.
I look forward to reading your published work soon...best of luck (yeah a bit of that can help too...)

"Middle-class, middle-aged, middle-England" IS a huge market, for the simple reason that middle-class, middle-aged women account for a huge percentage of fiction sales. I sometimes think the publishing industry is in danger of forgetting this.

Yeh, like Marks & Spencers, and look where that got them.

I don't think the publishing industry forgets for one moment that middle-aged middle-class women are the key demographic - my agent's said as much, a propos the age of one of my MCs. But they don't say it very loud, and they do pay us the compliment of assuming that we don't necessarily want to read books crudely aimed at what some might assume are our concerns. Though what's mum lit, though, or other swathes of Women's Fiction? Having said that, Transita are doing very nicely with authors who've been de-listed, as it were, by the big publishers, aiming at exactly that market.

Crossover is a different thing, though. It's not about middle ground, so much as about having a foot in each of two different categories which are normally thought to be mutually exclusive. Only of course they're not. You just have to do it really well, which isn't easy, and the wider the straddle, as it were, the harder. But it can be done.

MAs are certainly not for everyone, and I speak as an MPhil (which is even less for everyone, as it's much less structured). But they do vary hugely, in content and quality - the good ones can be life changing and (occasionally) deal-getting, while the bad ones are worse than useless, because they can do damage. Saturday, if you do think of trying another one, do mention it on WW because there's quite a lot of experience and hearsay about them.

Emma

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One last thought - you could think about sending the novel that's been rejected to an editorial service. Writers usually think of doing that for that final polish before they submit, but any service worth its salt should be able to find you an editor to talk more along the lines of what you're thinking about: 'Is this worth pursuing, am I any good, can you see what direction I should be aiming in, will my kind of work ever sell?'

I recently did exactly this, for a wonderfully off-the-wall first third of a novel which was amazingly hard to categorise or see who would buy it, and the writer wanted to know if it was worth going on. I focussed entirely on the huge strengths and huge weaknesses of his writing/structure/ideas and so on.

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Sorry! Keep adding things. If you did think of going the editorial service route, you might want to think about trying one where you can talk to the editor about what they've said - even more than once. The kinds of things that are worrying you may need a conversation rather than marks-out-of-ten-for-publishability, as it were.

I like your self have "tried" or "attempted" to put into writing numerous subjects that have crossed through my mind over the years, like your self have worked constantly all of my life, providing a living for my family whilst attempting to pursue another sides of that life, obviously one should concentrate more to one side than the other, but is that responsible or just desire, I have again like your self expanded my education beyond my beliefs, can actually sit for over 8 hours daily producing written material for companies who employ me, making changes and scence out of these writings, yet when I return to again pick up the threads of "items" storeies find it "difficult" to regain momentum, always in the back of my mind is am I doing it correct/right or am I missing the plot.

Hi Saturday - I run Snowbooks, an indie publisher, and this is an open rejection letter we provide for authors who we decide not to publish. I'm posting it here because it gives an insight into the idea that authors are writing from the heart whereas publishers are running a business. Hope it helps a bit to show that, if you're interested in genuine feedback on the quality of your writing, you should ignore what agents and publisher's think.


"The bad news, I'm sorry to say, is that Snowbooks isn't planning to publish the manuscript that you submitted to us. For many people, a letter like this is a big let-down, so it's probably a good idea to explain something about how we make the decision to reject a book so that you realise that it isn't necessarily a criticism of you or your writing.

When setting up Snowbooks, we didn't like the idea of having quotas of books to publish and we also didn't like the idea that one department acquires new manuscripts but then hands them on to other departments to market them or to turn the manuscripts into finished books (although that's the way most conventional publishers do things).

Instead, we wanted the person who said 'we should publish this' to be the same person who followed the book all the way through to publication and beyond. Obviously, if someone knows they are going to be working on all aspects of a single book for at least six months, they'll only champion books that they love. So the fact that you were rejected by Snowbooks means that your book didn't become an instant all-time favourite with a member of our very small team - but it doesn't necessarily mean anything more.

This is an open letter and so there's a chance, if we're being absolutely honest, that we did reject your book because it was awful. We get a lot of manuscripts where the use of language is so awkward or clichéd or error-filled, and the story so strange or difficult to follow or unsatisfying, that we can't imagine anyone publishing it. But we also have books submitted to us that we like, that we think are at least as good as many titles currently in the bookshops. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean we'll publish them. They have to be personal favourites of ours before one of us will devote half a year of our working life to bringing it to market. In other words, a rejection from Snowbooks is hardly a rejection at all.

Other things you might like to know about the people choosing not to publish your work are that several of us have hated nearly every Booker-prize-winning book that we've read. These are titles which have not only been commercial successes, but have been held up for special commendation by a panel of expert judges - and yet we didn't like them and if they'd been submitted to us, we probably wouldn't have published them. So again, you can see that a rejection from us is not necessarily a bad sign.

You probably also know the stories about authors such as Joanna Rowling and John Grisham being rejected by more than a dozen publishers - before going on to make some lucky company heaps and heaps of money. It certainly makes you wonder whether there are other authors who would have delighted millions if they hadn't given up after ten rejections.

What it comes down to is that publishing companies aren't really the people you want reviewing your work. If you think about it, we have a financial incentive to put as little thought and effort into sifting through submissions as possible. We've got a lot of submissions to get through and not enough time. Plus, many publishers aren't looking to take any chances with new material; they want obvious, commercial successes, ideally from authors with a track record.

Snowbooks could hire a team of people whose job it is to give detailed constructive feedback to submitting authors and to point them in the direction of other publishers more attuned to their style, but there's no obvious way for us to make that idea profitable. We'd be spending money that other firms aren't and it wouldn't necessarily make us any more financially successful - and it's the same with any other publishers you'll deal with. We're like shoppers at a January sale: we grab the two or three things that catch our eye as quickly as we can and move on. We're not critics so much as opportunists.

Given that a submitted manuscript is inevitably an author's pride and joy, and that a book's acceptance and future fortunes are bound up with its author's own hopes and happiness, it's almost criminal that publishers get to accept or reject submissions with so little feedback or accountability. The best we can say at Snowbooks is that we think it's a bad situation, but we don't at the moment have a solution to it (although we have some ideas for the future which we think will help - see our new process, above).

In the meantime, all we can suggest is that you don't trust publishers. They're not your friends and they're not even that great at spotting what readers will like. If they reject your book it doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong with it and, perhaps even more importantly, if they accept it, it doesn't mean that they love it and are going to treat it with respect. Many unpublished authors have a picture of how they'll be treated once they have a book in print that's much rosier than the reality - they're often disappointed to learn that most publishing is, after all, just a business.

Obviously, we wouldn't be painting such a bleak picture of publishing if we didn't aim to be different; we do. But we're limited at the moment in that we're time-strapped and poor. So please accept our apologies for replying with an open letter to a submission that must have taken months or maybe years of effort and energy to produce - and let us wish you better luck in the future.

Snowbooks"


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I cannot believe I wrote "publisher's". Forgive me. Idiot fingers.

[Several of you mentioned Arvon courses, has anyone been on one and if so what would you say are their strengths & weaknesses?]

Hi Saturday, you're not on your own, is all I can offer. The best of writers have been here,too.

About Arvon, I found it encouraging. Maybe more affirming of my talent, even. Is that what you're after? I'd been on a few courses/night classes, but only at an Arvon course did I get the personal attention and affirmation I 'd been seeking. A couple of published writers looking you in the eye saying 'You've got it, you can do it' helps. It does not happen for everyone ( I know a few others who've been on them)and there's still a risk of feedback that feels like rejection. I really needed to hear it at the time, one way or the other and I feel this is what you need now, wherever you get it.

Hoping Life will bring you the encouragement you seek

Asking






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That was meant to be a quotation box...! I 'm still new -ish here.

I agree with all that's been written so far, especially waxlyrical's comment about writing for yourself and enjoying it.

You don't mention your age, but you must be relatively youthful if you have young children. Only two years to write a novel in the circumstances you describe sounds fast to me. Even experienced novelists take a year or so at least, and that's full-time, writing every day. Imagine what you'll achieve when the demands on your time ease up! You'll also be free to travel all over on publicity tours and book signings without worrying about what's happening at home.

Here's a link to an article in The Independent on Sunday, which may make you feel less lonely and discouraged. It's called 'There's life ( and a living) after rejection.

http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/news/article3312756.ece




Sheila


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That link doesn't seem to work, so you can try this and click on the link in the first item.

http://en.redtram.com/go/70388188/

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Oh, the first one's working now.

I have always heard that Arvon courses are the best of the lot. Never been on one myself, but I know a wide, wide range of people who have or who have taught on them, and found them extremely valuable.

I can't praise Arvon highly enough.

I've been on two of their courses. Not only were both extremely well-taught, but it was very helpful to be able to immerse myself utterly in writing without external distractions. And positive feedback from tutors boosts the confidence. I'm still in touch with one of my course tutors and he's been extremely supportive. I thoroughly recommend them.

Saturday,

Being an unpublished wannabe is a tough condition to live with, I know, I have a bad case of it myself. However, I can tolerate it these days because I sought professional advice.

I started with this website, a few years ago some of the good people on here (you know who you are - so I wont embarrass you now by naming names) encouraged me to carry on and fostered my determination to improve. I started attending writing conferences where you can meet agents and editors who volunteer to look at your work and tell you why it's not working. Lately I've employed the skills of our very own Mr Edge; he's too modest to blow his own trumpet, so I'll toot it for him. His editorial input has helped improve the quality of my writing. I now know I have a chance and what I'm writing would sell if it landed on the right desk, which is something.

I read once, that the primary difference between a published author and an unpublished writer is not talent or some X factor; the published author simply didn't give up.

Pay for professional advice, discover how good you really are, learn how to be better, and don't quit!

I hope this was of some use.

Cheers, Grinder

at least i have already read snowbooks rejection, so won't have to read it again when it pops into my inbox

but there's room in novel II, Saturday, if you want some peer to peer critique.

Juliet