Write-Off with Francesca Steele

I find this interview so inspiring. Matt Cain is a successful arts journalist and at the time of his first book submission he was Culture Editor for Channel 4, praised in particular for his coverage of the Woman’s Prize for Fiction. But 2010, the semi-autobiographical book Matt had been working on about a child growing up -like himself - gay in the north of England - was rejected in part for being what he says were coded ways of saying it was “too gay”. Matt’s book was put up for submission three times over the next decade and rejected by more than 50 agents and editors. Matt didn't give up though and today that book is published as the wonderful The Madonna of Bolton with the crowdfunding publisher Unbound. We talk about how he really tried to learn from the feedback on early submissions, how creative rejection changed him - almost more than homophobic bullying did - and how his therapist made it into his book.

Don’t forget that I list my guest’s books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews! You can also find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele

The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk

This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.

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Welcome back! Clare Chambers is kicking off this season. Clare has written nine published novels - her first when she was just 26 and her latest, Small Pleasures, a wonderful book long-listed for the Woman’s Prize last year. But just before Small Pleasures there was a failed novel that nearly caused Clare to give up on writing altogether. It took her five years to write and then no one wanted to buy it.

We talked about her feeling her career was over aged 50, working as an editor herself for the legendary publisher Diana Athill, how she switched from being a pantser to being a committed plotter and being given permission not to be funny.  

Don’t forget that I list my guest’s books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews! You can also find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele

The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk

This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to  www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you do when you've written an entire book you hate?

Martha, the narrator or Sorrow and Bliss, is intelligent, critical, loving, cruel: an incredibly nuanced unforgettable character. She suffers from an undiagnosed mental health condition and when we meet her she has just split up with her husband Patrick. It's a very wise, sad funny book, with a unique, dry tone. I absolutely loved it.

I love it perhaps even more now that i know it was born of failure. Meg Mason is a journalist, originally from New Zealand now living with her family in Australia, who had previously published two books: a memoir about young motherhood called Say It Again In Nice Voice and a novel, also about young motherhood, called You Be Mother. Under contract to write a third book, Meg laboured over a project she loathed for a year before handing it in and feeling so wretched that she declared that she was done with fiction altogether. Until suddenly she found herself sneaking back out to her writing she’d and writing secretly just for her own pleasure about two characters called Martha and Patrick and how their marriage had failed.

Meg is very gentle, self-deprecating, insightful and very surprised and curious herself about this extraordinary U-turn. We talked about how Martha and Patrick actually existed in her failed novel in a different form, banning thesaurus.com and how to tell the difference between a difficult project that's worth pushing on with, and one that isn’t.

You can buy Sorrow and Bliss and books by all my guests here, along with the excellent George Saunders book and the Ann Patchett essay collection Meg mentions in this episode: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

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What a year the Booker prize winning author Douglas Stuart has had. Born on a housing estate in Glasgow Douglas and his siblings were raised by a single mum who died of alcoholism when he was 16. In his 30s, by this time working in fashion in New York, fouglas started writing a book about a little boy similar to him - Shuggie Bain, a kind, resilient, gay child struggling to fit in to his working class Thatcherite community and trying to take care of gregarious, well-meaning, alcoholic mother. Ten years later, the novel finally finished, it was rejected first by agents, then by 32 editors in the US alone. some of them even told his agent that the book was likely to win a big prize but that they didn’t know quite how to sell it. Then last year at the age of 44, Douglas won the £50,000 Booker prize, the second Scot ever to do so. Judges said itwas destined “to be a classic”.

It’s a remarkable reminder of how even the most accomplished books still have to find the right desk at the right time.

You can buy Shuggie Bain – and books by all my guests – here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

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The Booker longlisted, Women’s Prize shortlisted Michèle Roberts is, like her books, wonderfully erudite, perceptive and expressive. Michèle has been writing professionally for more than 40 years and has published 17 novels, 2 memoirs and has contributed to many poetry and essay collections too. She was once poetry editor at the feminist magazine Spare Rib and her 2007 memoir Paper Houses is a vivid account of her involvement is 70s socialism and feminism. Her new novel Cut Out, about the women who helped Matisse create his art, is out in August. She is by any metric a literary success.

But it is her second memoir that we discuss in this interview. Negative Capability, which came out last year, kicks off with a series of personal and professional rejections - including her publisher saying no to her latest manuscript - and which sent Michèle into a spiral of self doubt and panic where she initially thought she was having a breakdown. Negative Capability is the story of her recovery and it is a joyful, amusing account of a rich everyday life, but also an honest, clear-eyed view of what it feels like to fail at something that, 16 books in, you think you’ve become pretty adept at doing. I found Michèle a funny and fascinating guest - and particularly enjoyed her advice about how to make a friend of your inner critic.

You can find and buy books by Michèle and all my guests here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

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The British novelist Alex Wheatle has such an extraordinary backstory that when he was working in the writers’ room for Steve McQueen’s BAFTA winning film series Small Axe, McQueen ended up making one of the films about Alex’s own life. Alex was raised in a care home where he was abused. He emgered as teenager in Brixton under-educated and ill-prepared for adulthood, and in 1981 was sent to prison for a year for his involvement in the Brixton Riots. Prison though turned out to be Alex's salvation. There he met a man who encouraged him to revive his childhood love of reading – and from that came his writing.

He's now written 17 novels, has an MBE, and in 2016 won the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize for his YA novel Crongton Knights.

Alex defines himself as a survivor not a victim, and I found him an inspiring reminder of what can be achieved through perservance. We talked a lot about the difficulties for black authors in publishing both 20 years ago and now, and also about the extraordinary advantage a love of reading can give kids in even the direst circumstances.

Just a reminder that you can buy Alex's books – and those by my other authors – here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

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Ann Napolitano is the author of three novels, including Dear Edward, which spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and which is the heart-breaking story of a boy who loses his parents and brother in a plane crash, of which he is the only survivor. 

Ann wanted to be a writer from the age of ten, but after graduating from her MFA programme in her twenties had her first book rejected by 80 agents. Her second book found her an agent but then failed to sell. Ann was extremely honest about how tough that was, and so interesting too on how raw talent isn’t actually the most crucial thing when it comes to a writing career. 

You can buy Ann’s books and those by my other other guests here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

Here is the wonderful essay Ann mentions in the podcast about how she writes letters to her future self, to open every ten years. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/books/review/emily-of-new-moon-montgomery-letters-ann-napolitano.html

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Julian Fellowes is, of course, rather well known for creating a little TV series you might have heard of called Downton Abbey. And that wasn’t his first screen success either, having already won an Oscar for his screenplay for Gosford Park in 2002. Julian has had an eclectic career, appearing on the long-running series Monarch of the Glen and a Bond movie. His accent, his family background, the subjects of class that fascinate him - all of these have sometimes led to people accusing him of being a snob and perhaps assuming that everything has come easy to him. And yet. In the late 90s, despairing of an acting career that wasn’t going so well at that point, Julian wrote a novel called Snobs, a book that looks at the flailing British aristocracy of the late 20th century through the eyes of a sort of outsider. He sent it out - and no one wanted it. In fact, some people said some pretty mean things, Several years later, after the success of Gosford Park, a publisher took it on and it became a bestseller, as did Julian’s two later novels. Just as I was talking about last week with the writer and editor, Phoebe Morgan, sometimes it really is a matter of getting a book on the right desk at the right time.

Believe it or not Julian Fellowes found rejection as hard as the next person, although he is, I think, an optimist at heart. We talk about that, Downton Abbey, his upcoming show The Gilded Age, about how people have always told him every project of his was unlikely to work out and about the difference between putting something in the bin and putting it in a drawer. Here’s Julian.

You can find Julian's books, and those by all my guests, at my online bookshop here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

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My guest this week is Phoebe Morgan, the author of four books and Editorial Director at HarperCollins. Phoebe's first book, The Doll House, was published just five years after she left university, and quickly became a Kindle bestseller. Her books since then have been published in several languages and this year, she got her first US deal for The Wild Girls, a pacy thriller about friendship souring in Botswana (great for you summer holiday!).

Phoebe has written about how it felt to finally get that US deal in her blog, which is full of really honest and useful information about writing and publishing. You can find that here: https://phoebemorganauthor.com

We talk about how editors choose books to publish, how she handles rejection as both a writer and editor and how goal posts for success are always changing. You can find Phoebe's books, along with those of my other guests, at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

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My guest this week is Harry Parker, a writer and artist who had a very interesting route to becoming an author.

Harry is an army veteran who lost his legs following an IED explosion while on tour in Afghanistan. Several years later and back in the UK, Harry wrote a novel, Anatomy of a Solider, which tells the story of Sergeant Tom Barnes, who also loses his legs in an explosion, through the perspectives of 45 inanimate objects: a gun, a bag of fertiliser, a prosthetic leg, a grieving mother’s handbag and so on. It’s an extraordinary book, disorienting and incredibly moving, and in 2016 when it was published, Harry was featured as one of The Observer's new faces of fiction. the book got rave reviews and won the Waverton Good Read Award the following year. Overall, a pretty incredible experience for a debut novelist. 

But his second book did not go so well. It didn’t sell and Harry, who is clearly an extremely resilient guy, is nonetheless very candid here about how personal that rejection felt, and how hard it has been to get over. It’s a great reminder, I think, that writing success is not linear, even for established authors. You have to be prepared for bumps in the road and allow yourself time to accommodate them. Thank you so much to Harry for being so open about it all.

You can find Anatomy of a Soldier and books by my other guests at my online bookstore: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele

You can also find me on Twitter - @francescasteele. Do come along and let me know what you think of the podcast and the authors' experiences.

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