10 Christmas presents to make writers happy

If you're the writer, you may want to leave this page casually open on every screen in the house. If you've found this page left casually open, your writer is hinting that they'd like one of these presents. It's very important to keep writers happy.

What To Do When Professional Jealousy Bites

When I was about 21, a family friend of my cousin's, also 21, published his first novel and it soared: gleaming reviews, radio art programmes, vast billboards in Victoria station, everything. That was Richard Mason with The Drowning People. Of course to family and friends, I joined in the "Isn't it wonderful" and "Isn't it brilliant." Inside, to my shock and shame, I seethed.

I had one friend, also a committed writer, to whom I dared expose my real feelings. We met up for coffee in the grungy-chic quarter of Cape Town and vented a witty and spiteful stream of bile, jealousy, resentment, and envy. That sounds like a rash of synonyms, but each has its precise shade of emotion and we were vivid with all four. We knew our feelings were ugly and repeatedly agreed that what we said in the coffee shop stayed in the coffee shop. I don't think we denigrated Richard himself or insulted his book, but I might be remembering my 21-year-old self too generously. We both realised that logically, our jealousy was absurd - neither of us had even written a book yet! - but it stung. It even burned, quite literally, like the feeling of too much coffee on an empty stomach.

Professional jealousy is ugly and we're not supposed to feel it. The quick-fire ego-self-defence responses are crude, unhelpful, and unworthy: I don't even want that! It's not even that good! I could do better than that! They only got that because [insert reason unrelated to their talent or the worth of what they did]. Putting an emotion off-limits doesn't help resolve it either, though. So what does one do, when jealousy bites?

Jealousy is a map

In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron talks about jealousy as a map. Instead of churning over resentment, treat it like a map which shows you what you really want. Unpick the different aspects of that success and look at it: what precisely about that do you want?

When I was younger, I couldn't say "I want to be a writer" because that implied there was a role, Writer, that I wanted to play, when actually I just wanted to write. Saying "I want to write" made no sense - "Well, write then," would be the obvious retort, and I already did. So why be jealous of Richard's success? I wanted to write and I already did. I realised gradually that I wanted to be published because I wanted readers. I wanted acclaim because I wanted to really, genuinely, be that good. I wanted the high advances, the two-book deals, because I wanted to write all the time.

Under the ugly jealousy was a more sincere self dating back to the three-year-old who discovered reading: a writer who just wants to write all the time, as well as she can and better, and have other people read and enjoy it. The jealousy gave me nothing to do but bitch. Underneath it, was something genuine I could act on.

Doing your own work

At my most blocked and frustrated, I'd switch off Radio 4 when the arts programmes turned to the latest dazzling new author. Surely that's insane? I love books! Hearing an author my own age interviewed on Woman's Hour made me feel sick. Beneath that jealousy was a kind of despair: why aren't I there, yet? An unanswerable, paralysing question.

When I was working hard on my own novel, though, those programmes didn't bother me and I could once again enjoy hearing about new books and other authors' writing experiences. Hey, she writes better in the evenings, like me! Ooh, what a lovely knotty problem to set out to solve. I stopped feeling jealous of their novels, because I had my own to work on and loved it, even when it challenged and frustrated me. The question, "Why aren't I there yet?" had clear, definite answers. Because my book isn't finished. Because I need to find a way to imagine, tangibly, a five-dimensional world. Because this plot arc here, ooh, what if I tried this... and the answers led me back into my work, the joy of it and the doing of it. This applies just as much to submitting work as it does to writing it (though you should always keep on writing while you submit).

When you're doing your own work, you don't need to be jealous of other people's. Your own work absorbs you and excites you.

We have colleagues, not competitors

Freelancing taught me to see colleagues instead of competitors, because when you freelance, you don't have colleagues. The only people who can share the intricacies of what you do are your "competitors". They aren't even necessarily competitors. As I make friends with them, on email or in person, we always find enough points of difference that we can swap work that doesn't suit us, cross-refer each other's skills, and share insights.

In fiction writing, this is even more true. No-one will get the joy of what you do like they will. And in this case, we really aren't competing, at all, even when it looks like we might be. In my writing courses, my students repeatedly discover how the exact same story becomes totally different in different writers' hands. No-one else is going to write your story; that's not possible. When someone arrives white-faced and tearful to announce their book's already been written, I tell them to buy it and read it. When they do, they discover it's not their book at all.

But what if it really is very similar? Jim Butcher, Kevin Hearne, Benedict Jacka, and Mike Carey all write series featuring a cocky, likeable paranormal detective-type man in a contemporary city fending off paranormal crime while navigating paranormal power-structures like a true renegade, most of them with an animal sidekick and / or a female assistant / mentee. That doesn't mean they stole each other's ideas and it definitely doesn't mean they're stealing each other's readers - they're cross-pollinating and widening the pool for all four of them. If you like The Dresden Files, The Iron Druid Chronicles, the Alex Verus series, or the Felix Castor novels, you'll want to check out the others, too. They boost each other's readership.

Similar books also make it far more likely that your novel will get published. Of course publishers want something new and exciting, but everyone finds something they can recognise easier to accept - because everyone finds innovation a bit scary. Slipstream novels like Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveller's Wife and Scarlett Thomas's End of Mr Y make it far more viable to publish my slipstream work.

What if the other person writes very different novels to you? Great! Read their books. You can learn masses about writing by reading outside your usual genres. What if it's very different, is selling by the truckload, and you hate it and think it's total rubbish? Fifty Shades of Grey is the obvious example and came in for a lot of flak, but it introduced a lot of people to a genre they thought couldn't ever be for them (cross-pollination) and it made a bucket-load for the publishers, which matters. Publishing houses are struggling and the hefty discounts that Amazon and big supermarkets demand from them (40% as standard) hurts them. We want publishers to do well, because we want them to feel able to take a punt on new and unestablished authors. If there's nothing else good that you can think about the latest bestselling book, think this: Your book is going to pay for my advance. Thanks! When I come to submit, that publishing house will still be doing well - thanks to you.

When we can look through our jealousy, these three remain: faith, hope, and love

If you want to return to the joy of doing your own work, or start doing it instead of just dreaming, and join a supportive community of writers who really are your colleagues, there's still time to join the Summer of Writing workshops in Oxford this August: Characters Unlike You (Saturday 17 August) will set your storytelling free in exciting new ways, Page Turners (Saturday 24 August) will give you the strong-as-a-mast narrative spine that will carry you and the reader through the story, plus all the ways the story plays out along that to keep the reader gripped, and Multiple Viewpoints (Saturday 31 August) will add new dimensions, resonance, and drama to your storytelling. 

On all of them, you'll get fresh inspiration, helpful new approaches, and meet wonderful people who also love writing. You'll also get to join The Writers' Greenhouse Community: ongoing support and encouragement through monthly Writing Boosts, help sending writing out to make your dreams come true, and an online community to share the highs and the lows with. See all the workshops and book your places here.

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Image: Lettering scratched through gold leaf by Lin Kerr of Limetrees Studio.

A bundle of ways to approach exposition

In last week's writing course, we were playing with exposition - and coined a new word, "to exposit".

5 questions to ask for your writing style

In my Dead Good Poets Radio interview, Ashley Lister asked me what I thought were the five most important things a writer should consider when putting pen to paper.

Decide when you're NOT writing, so you write more

You want to write your novel, so why aren't you? Facebook fills your feed with Gandalf, God, Dr Spock, whoever, saying bossily, "SHOULDN'T YOU BE WRITING?" It's easy to feel you should spend every evening and every weekend writing, which usually means you spend every evening and every weekend feeling low-level guilt and a growing resentment towards the guilt... and towards the writing. Try deciding when you don't write, and when you do.

When you say, "I'm a writer."

"What do you do?" he asks.
     I'm at the pub with my notebook, waiting for my partner, and have given up trying to write in the face of the next table's friendliness. So that's fine, I'll chat instead and it could be interesting.
     "I'm a writer," I say.
     "Are you successful?"
     Uh – whut? "I... don't know. What counts as a successful writer for you?"
     "I mean, is it just a hobby?"
     "No." My hobbies are cooking (in a farmhousey homely way), playing guitar (badly), painting vines on walls. They're things I do for fun, not things I build my existence on and my life around. Also, I have never yet met someone who, asked what they do, cites a hobby. "It's – my reason for living."
     "Do you actually do it full-time, though?"
     "No, I write two days a week."
     "So what do you do full-time?"
     "Um – there isn't actually full-time left. But I teach writing courses, and –"
     "Oh, right." A deeply sceptical, problem-solved oh-right. Unlike artists, who're allowed to pursue their art and teach it, writing classes are often seen as a dodgy pyramid scheme, a view which holds largely true if you discount any intrinsic value to the writing. "So you don't actually make any money from writing."
     "I make a little, but most of my earning comes from teaching fiction and..."
     I don't feel like explaining that for years my income came wholly from writing, but I quit that to have space to work on my main project. Novels take time to write, especially working part-time on them, and you don't get paid until a year or two after they're finished, if you're lucky. Something has to fill that financial gap, so the writer does other stuff, too. This has been the case for almost every contemporary writer you've ever read, including the pub-interrogator's go-to example, JK Rowling.
     "So you're not really a writer."
     I blink at the notion that I could teach fiction courses and help people write books without being a writer.
     "If you're a successful writer," he explains, "that's how you make your living."
     "So... TS Eliot wasn't a successful writer?" I could give a thousand examples here, but thinking about "proper jobs" makes me think of banks, which makes me think of Eliot.
     He laughs, because apparently I've made a joke, and I smile because I've had enough.
     "So what do you do?" I ask, to change the topic.
     "I'm an accountant."
     "Whereabouts?"
     "I'm actually job-hunting at the moment. You know... recession."

I could pursue that, very, very hard, but I don't want to. Being unemployed is bad enough without someone tearing strips off your identity about it to make a point. And contrary to everything the conversation suggests, this guy is not actually a dick. It's a bog-standard line of inquisition for anyone to whom one has the nerve to say, "I'm a writer." At least I can answer "Yes" to "Are you published?" though I'm damned if I can guess whether he'll have read anything I've written. There's a shedload of books out there and even lifetime-devoted readers can't get through each year's output, never mind the several hundred years of catch-up. As for "Should I have heard of you?" no, no-one should have heard of anyone. I might think you should've heard of Robin Hobb and AS Byatt, but they might not be your bag. You might think I should've heard of the Kardashians before last week, but I live under a rock.
    
However hostile the line of questioning feels, most people are honestly just trying to make conversation and I'm sure every profession comes with its Q&A horrors. A doctor or lawyer might be jealous that no-one asks me to dash off a quick story over drinks. A banker might envy how I'm not held personally responsibile for the economic crisis. Unlike an immunopathologist, I don't have to explain macrophages every time I meet someone new.
    
We're all really just trying to make conversation. So these are the best questions I know to ask a writer, and the best ways I know to avoid the Spanish inquisition.
    
Ask a writer: What kind of stuff do you write? What are you working on at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?
    
Deflect the inquisition: To any yes-but-are-you-really question, "It's the thing I care most about, and I'd love to get to the point where I can do that most of the time. [Assuming that's true.] What about you, do you like reading?" And if they don't, "And what do you do?" And then we can try not to ask the dick questions ourselves, and ask lots of interested questions, and listen really carefully to the answers, because a novelist always needs jobs for their characters, so other people's are a treasure trove. And it might be interesting.