Roads to Joy

I’ve borrowed a clipart image from the blog of fellow Canadian Mobashar Qureshi, who relates that two salient words of advice have kept him going: Keep Writing.

Indeed. Through all the tribulations of searching for an agent, hunting down independent publishers, after having ventured into the murky realm of self-publishing on the big platforms (Amazon/KDP), and then having moved into nurturing my ambition to achieve the imprimatur of ‘being published,’ I have often, very often, felt dejected, despondent and despairing.

But a delightfully frank and apparently honest column, How We Acquire New Books, presented by the renowned British independent publisher Salt, took my breath away, metaphorically, and helped to solidify my ambition to move into the next steps of the book trade. As I read the piece, extending on and on down the page, and realised that the sentences felt real, honest and true, I had to smile at myself: I’m at the beginning of embarking on the precise odyssey the Salt columnist describes.

Yes, certainly, I have to ‘keep writing.’ It turns out that I also have to get out and about; if not exactly to develop my own schmoozing capacity, then at least to begin exploring the interpersonal dynamic of interacting with other writers, agents, publishers’ representatives. This is all by way of finding an in to this often impenetrably dense world of the book biz. 

In my conscientious pursuit of this exercise, I feel incredibly blessed: just before the break for the festive season, an email arrived to tell me that I’d been successful in my application to the Wigtown Book Festival Trust Compass mentoring programme for 2024, as supported by Creative Scotland. Yesterday the Trust announced the mentees. I would need to develop my personal goals and objectives, in a more comprehensive fashion than I’d done for my application, and then work with the Compass coordinators to find a good fit with an established author who could mentor my work and my ambition. 

There’s a lot of advice out there about mentoring. In particular, the little book Mentoring: The essential handbook for emerging and established writers, is full of careful particulars about what a mentee should or should not expect from their experience. Primarily, of course, I need to learn some hard truths about my own writing and my capacity: is it ‘good enough?’ Or am I barking up a tree that’s far too vaunted for my talent? Are there strengths that I can burnish, weaknesses that I can bolster? And what of the effort I’ve already put into my fourth novel: does it sing well enough to keep pushing it?

Or, and perhaps this is the more likely scenario, how should I seek to develop my skills for the next project, the one I hadn’t even contemplated when I applied to be mentored. The one that’s just beginning to percolate within my fevered brain? These are likely and no doubt mutually comprehensible things to consider in the few months for which I shall be an eager student. But there’s also an intangible to this process, which relates directly back to the Salt column, I think.

Now the mentee dare not expect to grasp contacts and networks from their mentor. Sometimes, as Mobashar relates, a salient two-word admonition is the best one can hope. But if, ah the grand if, if I should develop as a writer, creating stories that move readers, that might deserve to reach a wide audience, and if I can move out of my writer’s isolated eyrie into the world of the fizzing Book Festival ambience, to chat with new colleagues who have faced the same issues, encouraged by my mentor on this frightening social prospect, if then, why then I’m still moving forward on the adventure to which I’d set my sail back in 2018. 

And meanwhile, of course, I’ve kept on writing, so far, through thick and thin, in the variety I’ve alluded to here in my regular search for joys: blogs; social histories; competitions; writing group responses; poetry; letters. Each finished piece does, in fact, contribute a little fillip of joy, and that, perhaps, is worth the effort, in and of itself.

But it’s such fun to be looking forward to some dedicated learning, and to hope, to hope realistically, that the readers out there waiting for my immortal words may not be just figments of my florid imagination.