The Long and Winding Road to Getting Published No. 1

Now, this is probably not something they teach you in writing school, and they’re quite right not to, but I got my first writing contract by telling the publisher how much I didn’t like one of their books. Maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as that sounds, but what an opening line.

It was a guide book. By a very reputable publisher. And it spoke of a city I’d lived in, one that was impossibly beautiful, one that had medieval walls, a Catalan Modernist pharmacy one side of the river and a medieval one the other, a history spanning back to the Romans and an old town partly encircled by the original walls that was a jigsaw of flower-lined lanes and cobbled streets. More than that, it was one that had welcomed me as a young man and given me a home. And they rubbished it. Quite comprehensibly.

I seethed for about five minutes and then, very much against my normal character, I wrote to the publisher to let them know what I thought was wrong with their depiction of Girona, a small and delicate city some 100 km northeast of Barcelona. Even more out of character, I said I could paint a better picture of the city, and its coastline and mountains. Just so you know, it’s where the Pyrenees suddenly run out of land and fall into the Mediterranean.

To give them their due, the publisher wrote back and said “Go on, then.” It actually took about a year of emails back and forth, while I proved to them I might just be able to do it, but I eventually signed a contract with them and gulped a bit as I realised I now had to write a whole book. One that meant research, and writing lots of words and living up to the challenge they’d set me. In the end, I wrote the book, plus another one, and I co-wrote four more, so I must have done something right.

The thing is, how I came to write the books isn’t the point, it’s why. And what I learned from it. First, what I learned. Writing to a schedule and having to follow strict guidelines both in terms of style and of structure were a terrific apprenticeship. There’s nothing like writing to order to hone your skills… skills that include not just the use of words and ideas, but of working with an editor, learning to edit your own work and what to include and not to include. Oddly, it also helped me learn how to write fiction in that you had to learn to paint an image of a town or museum or monument in as few words as possible. That was a great way to learn how to see the essence of a place and portray it as succinctly as possible. And that spills over into characters and the art of revealing your protagonists’ natures and motivations with the barest of brushstrokes.

So, any writing is a way of learning, especially if you have to write with discipline. A blog, regular articles, a diary, for work, anything. It doesn’t even really matter if it’s fiction, non-fiction, personal or professional. They all teach you your craft and the ability to write to a deadline and target. The thing is to do it and to have a purpose for doing it, and a price for not doing it… even if that price is set by you.

And the why? We’re often told to write what you know, but I think it’s far more important to write what you feel. That seething anger I felt at reading something that casually dismissed a whole city and its culture ignited a fire in me. It unleashed a passion. I knew I had to say something, even though I didn’t know when I wrote my initial letter to the publisher what that something was. I just knew that my need to write about a part of the world I loved was much stronger than my usual reticence in coming forward and voicing an opinion. 

The same holds true for fiction. When you write fiction – and especially crime fiction – you’re writing about the human condition, about what makes some individuals do what they do, and – perhaps more importantly – our emotional response to that. That’s where you need to have that passion, that seething anger – or even just a simmering desire – to say something, to talk about an issue or a topic that matters to you. And there are few media as powerful as fiction – and crime fiction – in which to do it. I write about Paris under the Nazi occupation, and one of the tenets some people lived by was to save up their anger and use it when it suited them. With fiction, it doesn’t have to be anger, it can be any emotion, positive or negative, but it’s important to save it, store it, and then unleash it in your writing. Use that passion to release the power in the story you need to tell.