Happy dance for Sarah Hilary! A lesson in not giving up, and a little about itchy wrists...

Happy Dance!

Sarah Hilary

I'm delighted to welcome Sarah Hilary to the blog today, and I can't help doing a happy-dance at the same time...
      If you have ever had your writing rejected, and thought it's no good, I'll just give up now - please read on. Sarah is an object lesson in how things CAN come right if you DON'T GIVE UP! 

Let's start with an announcement on a book-trade information website... Headline Acquires Two Novels from Sarah...  and it's lovely, wonderful, woo hooishly great. But behind the woo hoos is another story, and it's that one  Sarah and I would like to share with you. These books are not her first, and second, second and third, or even third and fourth..

Anyhoo - it was 2008 and I was off to Bantry to the West Cork Literary Festival which always includes the Fish Prize awards event.  I knew Sarah, but only on the internet - and I knew she needed to go too, as she'd won one of the Fish competitions that year - The Criminally Short Histories prize. So I offered her a lift from Cork Airport. We nattered like old mates... and now, five years later, I think we probably are old mates. (Well, I'm the 'old' one, she is the younger, tenacious one...) And here we are, five years later, still nattering...

Hi Sarah! I shall stop the happy dance for a few mins now. 

          I remember listening to the plot of the novel you were working on some years back, in the car on our way to Bantry. I remember wanting to stop the car to be able to concentrate properly, to find out who, then why, then what happens, and how...it was just a brilliant story. I sat with you at some event in Bantry Library, right next to the Crime section, and said, ‘You’ll  soon have a whole shelf...’ and you laughed. 

       Well, five years later, you can laugh for a different reason, with delight, hopefully. But. It has not been an easy ride from 2008 to here, has it. It’s been a rocky road - and I’ve followed your fortunes with bated breath! Can you describe your journey to this point, with regard to the crime novels? Chart the ups and downs, if you like...

Sarah: I remember that road trip vividly. Your interest in the story, and your conviction that I could make it into print, spurred me to Try Harder. My motto for the years between then and now has been (and still is!) Must Try Harder. It’s been a heck of a journey - more twists and turns than the road to Bantry - and I’m a little breathless to have got this far. I think the story I described to you was the second or possibly the third manuscript I’d submitted to Jane Gregory, who’s now my agent. She didn’t sign me until the fourth manuscript - and it’s my fifth and sixth books that she’s just sold to Headline - so it’s just as well I decided early on that I was in this for the long haul. 

The ‘downs’ were each time I heard, “Not this book, maybe the next,” but I was lucky enough to be told, each time, what I could do to improve my writing, plotting and so on. Of course it’s incredibly hard to see any silver lining when you’re right under the cloud of rejection, but the only thing to do is to keep moving forward, and keep believing that what you write next will be better, because it will be. That’s the great thing about writing - you really do get better at it. 

(VG: I liked those quotes - so they're in red. And here is the cloud of rejection covering the light of good things...)

The ‘highs’ were each small milestone – winning a short story contest, getting into a print anthology – and seeing fellow writers break through, or sharing the struggle with writing buddies. I must mention the fabulous Ms Anna Britten, whose sympathy, sage advice and support has kept me going over the last two years. It was during one of my lowest spells that Anna and I settled on the need for defiance as a strategy for fighting on. Not arrogance, but a determination to defy the odds, and the urge to give up. I created one of the characters in SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN in a moment of defiance, and he’s a character my editor loves.

VG: *Waves to Anna Britten* - isn't sharing this thing we do so important, on so many levels? I am so glad to hear that. We all need  supporters...

And here is a pic of one of your top supporters, your daughter Milly, stealing your thunder when you won the Cheshire Prize for Literature! 

 You are just an incarnation of the advice I was given, myself, and which, when I’m asked to give a newbie writer advice,  is the first thing that comes to mind. ‘Don’t give up’. You are the best possible example of the wonderful things that can happen if you don’t give up.  But it ain't easy, is it? What did it feel like to keep going? What was it that made you sure that you would succeed in the end? Or were there times you lost faith and had to pick yourself up again?

Sarah: Crikey, how did it feel to keep going..? This is where therapists will read and weep – that they didn’t make money from my teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling. There were days when I lay on the floor and wept. Days when I was furious with myself for falling short (again), and when I told myself that surely if I had any real talent, it shouldn’t be this hard to get published. I don’t think I was ever sure that I would succeed in the end. At the outset, of course, I had a writer’s ego; I submitted my first film script when I was 15, to a company listed in the Writers and Artists Yearbook (the possessing of which was enough to convince me I woz a Writer). Towards the end, I had virtually no ego (a good thing, on the whole) and was armed only with defiance, being a rarefied version of the bloodymindedness I was born with. My paternal grandmother was fond of telling people, ‘You’ll never get Sarah to do anything she doesn’t want to do,’ which is another way of saying I can’t be talked out of something I’ve set my mind to. 

Most helpfully of all, by this stage, writing is like a tic or a reflex; I can’t not do it. So here I am. Oh and I keep getting ideas for better books! I’m always excited by The Next Book, chiefly because I know it will be my best yet; it’s a fresh chance to do a better job at the thing I love doing. Who wouldn’t want that?

Just one of the many anthologies your work can be found in...

 VG: Yee ha! So - say you have to pick yourself up from a big disappointment. How do/did you do that? What advice can you give to a newer writer who is facing the wall?

Sarah: I suspect I’ve given the answer to this already in my ramblings above. It’s about knowing that what you write next will be better - and therefore the odds of it being published will be improved. I know that what you’re writing Right Now might feel like the best thing you’ve ever written, and so it should. I know you’ll feel proud and protective of your story and especially your characters, and that’s okay. It’s allowed. What’s not allowed is letting that pride and protectiveness stop you in your tracks. 

Always have a Next Book bubbling under, even if it’s just a handful of notes in a pad somewhere. I like to keep a notebook that I flip over so the back pages are like a separate pad (I put different stickers or doodles on the covers of each side to make it look like two pads) and those back pages are my Next Book. This means a) not all my eggs are in one basket, and b) with luck I’ll be hooked on writing the Next Book by the time my current one is being read by agents or editors. It really does soften the blow if the first one doesn’t make it. Just the fact that you’ve stopped thinking about it and given headspace to a new story and new characters - makes the rejection easier to bear.

and another anthology - is the shelf full yet?!

VG: Brilliant. Your sage words are emblazoned in RED! And so - on to the books... Tell me about the novel that broke through for you... how long had you been working on this one? Did you have any professional advice to help you shape it?

Sarah: It took me about a year to write SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN, although the idea had been playing in my head for longer. It’s a story about secrets, and survival. The secrets that put us in danger and the ones that keep us safe. It’s about who we pretend to be in order to survive or simply to get by, and who we really are, under the skin. The blurb reads like this:

No two victims are alike.  

DI Marnie Rome knows this better than most. Five years ago, her family home was a shocking and bloody crimescene. Now, she’s tackling a case of domestic violence, and a different brand of victim. Hope Proctor stabbed her husband in desperate self-defence. A crowd of witnesses saw it happen. But as the violence spirals, engulfing the residents of the women’s shelter, Marnie finds herself drawn into familiar territory. A place where the past casts long shadows and she must tread carefully to survive.

I hope it’s a novel that upsets the traditional ideas about domestic violence – and makes us look afresh at why people commit crimes of this kind, and how society chooses to punish these crimes. I’m also fascinated by the psychology of seeing, the emotional lens that colours everything we witness, and by the role of the witness. This role is vital to solving and prosecuting crimes, but what does it mean to be the witness to a brutal crime – how does it change that person? Is there a sense in which they become responsible for the “truth” of what they saw? 

       Marnie, my heroine, is someone who trusts her intellect first and her emotions second. She’s always questioning the truth of what she sees, and she’s someone who wants to make sense of the world as it is. Of course she’d like to change it, but she understands that mess is part of the human condition. She has a huge capacity for compassion, which I think’s essential for the hero/heroine of any crime novel. I wanted to write a detective who was much more than ‘a woman in a man’s world’. Marnie has a woman’s empathy and intuition, and the intelligence and honesty to know these gifts sometimes lead her astray. 

My first draft got quite a tough reader’s report via my agent, and I realised I’d have to change something to make it work on the level I intended (well, more than work – it had to shine). After that, I spent a couple of months despairing quietly and bending my brain around What To Do. Then a further three months rewriting. The two months where I didn’t write because I was thinking - they really helped. I think if I’d sat down and tried to rewrite straightaway, I’d have made the same mistakes all over again. As it was, I produced a second draft that my agent loved – and so did more than one publisher. It went to auction, which was very exciting, and it’s sold in five other countries already. I’m thrilled to think the story will have so many readers.

 VG: Fantastic stuff - this is the dream, isn't it?  And thank you for your honesty here - I am so fed up with writers who tell others that it was easy, they woke up one day and... because even if that did happen for one writer, for the other 99% it ain't like that! It's a hard old slog. 

      Next question: When do you think it is OK to accept advice, and when to ignore it?

Sarah: That’s a tough one. Tempting to say you should never ignore advice, but since I was once advised to give up writing (by a boss who likened it to his DIY: “We’re neither of us very good at it, but it keeps us out of trouble”) I think I’ll say instead that you need to develop an ear for advice, like an ear for music. I say this as someone who is virtually tone-deaf but who can generally tell when a piece of music is off, even if I can’t tell you why or by how much. 

You might think it’s a good rule of thumb that if advice comes from an expert you must act on it, but this doesn’t quite meet the case, I think. After all, the expert might not be in tune with your genre or your writing. So much is subjective in publishing. SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN went to auction, as I say, but for every two publishers who loved it there were four who didn’t, or not enough to offer for it. ‘All it takes is one’, as the adage goes, and you should certainly never give up – or make radical changes – based on what appears to be a loose consensus. Unless or until your gut (or your ear) tells you that what you’re hearing is the truth. 

I honestly think this is something that only comes with time and experience. I spent years railing against rejections from editors who’d missed-the-point of my writing (show me a writer who hasn’t done this at some point in their lives and I’ll show you a saint, or a fibber). Then I spent a good number of years performing literary gymnastics as I tried to meet the demands of every editor all at once, believing they must know best, or better. 

Now, if an editor is saying something invaluable – something I ignore at my peril – I can hear it. It chimes. 

When my editor at Headline told me I needed to do a bit of work on the penultimate chapter in SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN, I knew she was right. My wrists itched; it’s a physical response – and I think it only comes with long experience. I wish there was a shortcut, I really do. Maybe one of your readers, V, will know a trick for this?!


VG: I love that!  Are there any short cuts worth thinking about when it comes to making a manuscript better? Nah, I don't think so...but as ever, am happy to be proved wrong. So have at it!

Thanks Sarah - I know how busy you are with all the hoo ha - enjoy every step. It is so richly deserved. One more happy dance...la la la...ooops that was my bad leg...

vx