Graham Greene, in Ways of Escape, writes candidly about his early literary failures. His first published novel, The Man Within, was ‘the last throw of the dice in a game I had practically lost. Two novels had been refused by every publisher I tried. If this book failed too I was determined to abandon the stupid ambition of becoming a writer.’ He describes its conception as ‘interminable toil’ and declares that it would have been ‘so much easier to resign myself, to give up all idea of escape.’ Two books followed which the author later disowned, sold disastrously and, according to Greene, failed in every authorial aspect from plot to dialogue. They have never been reprinted.
Graham Greene, literary titan, with one successful book out of his first five attempts.
In a nutshell, this is why I persist.
Today, against all the odds (I’m temporarily a single parent in charge of two small children in the middle of a global pandemic; these last ten days have been the longest year of my life), I finished the first draft of my latest work in progress. Stephen King suggests that a first draft, no matter its size, should take no longer than three months to write. Stephen King is fucking insane. It took me nine months and the manuscript amounts to 121,236 words, probably the longest first draft I’ve written. If I compare it to previous initial drafts of mine, even the ones that went on to become published books, it’s more like a second or third draft. I feel like I might actually know what I’m doing this time. That doesn’t mean the editing will be easy, but I’d like to think the hard part is out of the way.
This is my *checks notes* eighth full length manuscript. Sometimes I get that number wrong, either unconsciously or consciously, but it’s now definitely eight. Blame was the fourth book I wrote and The Art Teacher the fifth. A confluence of factors have kept books six and seven from seeing the halogen lights of modern bookshops but I have no doubt they will appear one day, in some form. I’ve got too far, and invested too much, to give up on my writing now.
The thing is, that’s how it’s done. You don’t strike gold on the first - or even every - attempt, and anyone who claims they do is either lying or spectacularly lucky.
Some authors find publication and then seem to skulk off, never to be heard from again, and in many ways I envy these one hit wonders, if they really did waltz off into the sunset. But I suspect they didn’t, and are still out there, toiling under lightning and awaiting that second lucky strike. Graham Greene claimed he would have canned his ambitions if his third attempt failed but I don’t believe him for one moment (I’ve read every one of his thirty-plus available books and can legitimately say that I know him too well). He understood the game better than anyone and didn’t let poor sales or reviews put him off.
When I was younger, I was a big fan of the rock band U2. This is a band who absolutely would not have made it in today’s cutthroat marketplace. They put out a debut album in 1980 that did pretty well and then a troubled second that tanked and almost split up the group. It’s highly doubtful a modern label would risk a third album. And that would have been their career. Done. No War, Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby. The suits would have looked at the sales figures after their sophomore flop and cut off supply to their investment. Next band, please.
The publishing industry is not the recording industry, but there are parallels. Changing technologies and buying habits and the lack of live events in the unwelcome era of coronavirus are causing headaches in buyer’s rooms across the globe. Against this uncertain backdrop, imprints still crave a guaranteed hit or the next best thing.
And yet some artists hit that buried gold on their third or eighth or eighteenth attempt and, whenever it happens, it should never be too late.
David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, claims that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ‘changed my life and put me on bare-knuckle terms with my abilities’, whatever the fudge that means. It was his third book and had been rejected by a commissioning editor with the charming words, ‘You’re welcome to le Carré - He hasn’t got a future.’ The aforementioned and infuriatingly ubiquitous Stephen King, as we all know, has a library of unpublished books and Carrie was literally retrieved from the wastepaper bin before being rejected by thirty publishers. Margaret Mitchell is famous for Gone with the Wind (rejected by publishers almost forty times) and this was long assumed to have been her only novel until, after her premature death, it was revealed that she had destroyed several other manuscripts, including a 400-page novel and various novelettes that displeased her. Marcel Proust, at forty-two, was so sick of being rejected that he paid for the publication of Swann’s Way himself.
Keep on keeping on.
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