Self-Care for Writers, Part One: A Bad Year

I’m going to start with two confessions. The first is that I have had a difficult year, writing-wise. And the second is that this is a difficult blog post to write, so please bear with me. It’s difficult to write about my difficult year because I don’t necessarily feel very comfortable talking about some of my personal struggles in public — and after all, it feels like the pressure from social media is always to talk big, think positive, get your game face on. Nevertheless, I want to do it — because one of the few things I found genuinely helpful while I was at my lowest ebb of confidence was reading about the struggles of other authors. I am particularly grateful to Zen Cho — writer of sparkling alternate-history-magical-regency novels Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen — for sharing on her blog the problems she had writing her second book. She’s one of the contemporary fantasy writers I most admire, and to hear that she too had struggled, and managed to overcome her struggles to produce a fantastic finished novel, was very heartening.

And so I write this, at least in part, in the hopes that it may help somebody else. Always pay it forward.

A year ago, I sat down with my agent at the cafe in the courtyard of the British Library, and we discussed both the book I’d just finished writing — about to go out on submission to publishers — and ideas for a potential new book. On that roasting hot day, I felt cheerful, and optimistic, and ready to write. As soon as I got home, I got on with forming my rough ideas into an outline for a new novel.

Things went gradually sour.

The book I sent on submission hasn’t found a publisher — not the first time this has happened, but it doesn’t get any easier to slowly realise that the work into which you’ve poured so much of your time and energy and imagination — so much of yourself — has not found a loving home and won’t be broadcast to the world. Ok, not yet, something might still happen, it might yet find a home…

It’s the hope that kills you.

The solution to worrying about the fate of one book, I have found in the past, is to throw yourself into a new project. I tried to do this, and encountered a pretty big problem: I simply couldn’t make the outline for my new book work. I tried over and over and over and over, and it never quite came together into a satisfying whole that made both me and my agent happy. And the longer this process went on, the more desperate I became to start writing, and hence the less able I was to look at the outline dispassionately and work to resolve the issues with it.

I’ll be honest. I got so despondent with my lack of progress, so lacking in confidence, that I contemplated giving up writing altogether. The thing which stopped me taking that ultimate step wasn’t anything particularly positive, but the simple thought that, if I gave up writing, I didn’t know what else to do with myself.

I turned to the writing community for help, and found fairly rapidly that it was quite difficult to find people who’d had analogous experiences (one reason why Zen Cho’s blog post was so valuable). Instead, I found more people who were ready to dispense advice along the lines of: ‘Ignore what your agent says, just write what you want to write! Write just for the joy of writing! Have faith in yourself!’

Well. While I can see where this advice is coming from, it wasn’t ultimately very useful, for two reasons. One is that, if you’re trying to build a career as a writer, then you need to have good working relationships with the people around you — agents, editors etc. Ignoring what these people say is not a good way to build or maintain those good working relationships. The second reason is that the thing I wanted to write was a novel for which I’d agreed the outline. I’d lost any sense of joy in writing for its own sake. As for faith in myself — I didn’t have any of that, either.

Does this all sound very miserable? It was. Did I consider giving up altogether? See previous comments.

In the end what got me through was a combination of factors. It was the advice and support of a few friends and family members — shoutouts here to Helen Ellwood, Ann-Marie Hill, and Katherine Smith. It was sheer bloody-minded determination to keep going, even when everything seemed completely hopeless. And it was a bit of simple self-care: of trying my best to look after myself in the moment, and making myself promises for things I could do in the future.

One of those promises I made myself was that I would write a blog post, telling the world about my experiences, in the hopes that I would find the process cathartic, and have something to look back on and remind myself that I’d pulled through.

And here we are. I finally have an outline both me and my agent are happy with, I’ve started writing my new novel, things are going well. It’s been a bad year, but here’s to a better one.