When I was a child of about ten, an ambitious grade school teacher decided that her class should collectively write a novel. Every week, we would write a chapter, and it was all very democratic: the theme was decided by vote, and any child who felt so moved, would submit a chapter for that week’s plot point. The class voted for the one they thought was best. Needless to say, I submitted my chapters, week in and week out, but never got chosen. Still, I just knew I had it in me to do something spectacular! So, one week, I got out my pad and pencil and, summoning all my creative juices, wrote a chapter for the class novel that I was sure would be chosen. And it was! Unanimously. The only problem was that I had got so carried away, I had gone beyond the agreed-upon plot point and finished the whole novel. And it was disallowed.
Although I’m not sure if my nascent writing career can be tied to that moment, it definitely had an impact: One day, I would write the whole story, all by myself, and this time, it would be allowed. After high school, I went from an MA at Edinburgh University to an M.Litt. at Oxford. My field of study was philosophy, a little off-track maybe, and it took the next eight years. Perhaps I could have used that time to better effect studying literature, but delving into the history of thought was actually fertile ground for later creative pursuits.
With two degrees in hand, I then stepped off the path of the academic career it seemed I was destined for and turned back to my first love, which is telling stories. The path was not that smooth, however: after eight years in academia, whenever I went to write, it was my head that engaged, and that is no place for a novelist to live. Academic writing is about swimming laps; creative writing is about launching off a wobbly diving board and hoping you survive. It took a while for me to stop swimming laps. It seems to me a lot of literature these days comes from the swimming pool and not the diving board, and you can write a novel that way, but it tends to be plot driven, and does not rely on thelusciousness of words.
Still, I was committed to diving in deep, so I set the intellect aside and started to write poetry. Again, it is my perception that a lot of modern poetry is linear, a product of the head. Writing poetry should be an exercise in taking the lid off your feelings; your task is to convey what is so about the human heart. I used to attend a writers’ group, which was hosted by a poet. Every week, I would bring in a new poem, until one night that poet said to me, “You keep writing new poems, but, really, you’re writing the same poem over and over again. How would it feel if you took that theme and expanded it into something longer?”
And the rest, as they say, is history. When I was about thirty, I began a novel that encompassed some autobiographical points. The writing, however, came out stilted, line after unbroken line, single space, the kind of thing you can get away with in academic writing. It took years of revision for those pages to start to break up into dialogue and paragraphs. Until I really began to tell the story.
I presented it at many a writer’s conference and sent it out to many an agency, but it wasn’t until ten years later that an agent from a reputable agency, God bless his heart, uttered the memorable words, “You really know how to write.” Yes, Sir! I have been practicing for a very long time. That agent could never secure my first book with a publisher, though he did get Simon and Schuster to take on another book of mine (I had written several at this point) which was published in 2014. It was a time travel story, set in a fort in my native rural Scotland where up until the 8th C, Scottish kings were crowned. While waiting the two years until publication, I wrote two sequels. The book sold seven and a half thousand copies, which apparently isn’t enough for a Big 5 publisher. They wouldn’t look at the other two.
Enter Sibylline Press, a hybrid press founded by an energizer bunny called Vicki DeArmon who publishes the works of women over fifty, which by 2024, I was. They picked up another book I had written from my well stocked shelf of unpublished works, called “Mrs. McPhealy’s American.” Last month they re-issued book one of that time travel series with the promise of publishing the two sequels within a year, and another more literary book called “Song of the Selkie” due out next autumn.
So, that’s the story of my journey. My advice to upcoming writers is that this path is not for the faint hearted. You have to have something to say, and you have to dive into your story with all your heart. You shouldn’t really listen to anyone. Any writer who came to that writers’ group I attended looking for affirmation that their writing was good enough for them to carry on was inevitably not going to make it. You have to have more combustion than that.
I am a publisher’s nightmare, in that I don’t put myself out in the ethernet enough or go around looking for publicity. I write books, and that’s what I am still doing. Sibylline really ought to fire me, but, even if they did, I would still turn up at my desk every morning. It’s what I do. In the end, it’s really all I know how to do.
