Category: Writing Page 18 of 24

I read about a new(ish) London-based Literary Agency recently, and so last week I sent off some sample chapters of my completed novel ‘Human Noises’ and other bits of ‘please think about representing me’ material to them. And so the waiting begins.

I’ve had… well, let’s say ‘mixed experiences’ with contacting Literary Agents before – to the extent that m’colleague and I used to have a running competition to see who could get the most disappointing response; he won, though whether you could consider that a victory in the strict sense is certainly open to debate.

When the novel’s being mulled over, I always tend to adhere to the idea that no news, as per the cliché, will be good news – within reason. For the first couple of months, I can delude myself that people are meeting in boardrooms and banging their fists on tables as they shout about the bidding war for TV and Film Rights, but after a while I have to accept that the chances are it’s a no – as the ex-Literary Agent Betsy Lerner put it, “No one reads a manuscript, loves it, and doesn’t call the author”. Very true.

Still, while I’m waiting to hear, I shall plug on with the current writing, can’t have all my chocolate eggs in one basket and all that.

In related news: over the course of the weekend, I had the pleasure of reading a short screenplay script by Dom, which was both fun to read and an interesting exercise, as one of the first – and very worst – things which people do when commenting on something someone else’s work is to automatically start thinking of how they would have written it. Which isn’t even close to useful – what I want from people who read my work is a genuine appraisal of which bits work, which bits don’t, what needs to be clarified or dropped, and things like that; not a wholesale rewrite (unless the grammar and structure is worse than I could possibly fear) to make it read like someone else’s work.

Whilst I’m not going to delude myself that I’m likely to challenge the likes of people like Lucy and Lianne, who will both read scripts for you and give you an analysis (tell them I sent ya), I have to say that I enjoyed reading and reviewing Dom’s script, as it meant trying to make sure I can use proper words and terms (though, I hope, not jargon) to explain my thoughts about something which can often seem quite nebulous and tricky to describe. Here’s hoping Dom finds my remarks (which I’ve e-mailed over, Dom) useful.

Of course, I may well be less willing to ‘take it’ if the agency gets back to me with a list of brutal but true reasons why ‘Human Noises’ is a pile of pants, but as I say, at the moment, I’m dreaming of the early-morning meetings where high-powered people argue over who gets me as a client.

Yes, yes, I know – but let me dream for a bit, eh ?

Given the previous post , I thought I it was only right to post an update on what writing I’ve been doing since… well, since the last time I posted about what’s on my writing list at present.

It’s not quite as busy as it could have been, but just last week I submitted my entry for a competition to write an advert for the new Patricia Cornwell paperback – in fact, you can view it here. The decision-making process is now underway, so if any of the judges are reading this, hello, I hope you’re well, and can I buy you a drink? Just being friendly, it’s not a bribe or anything, of course (actually, it looks as if a few people have already looked at it, and given me some votes, which is kind).

I’m also re-tooling ‘Broken Glass’, the screenplay I wrote for last year’s Red Planet Screenplay Competition. I’m of a mind to see about submitting it to this year’s British Short Screenplay Competition, though if I don’t make the deadline for that I’d like to have it finished anyway, for my own satisfaction.

Throw in the novels I’ve started (although one of them is, I found out over the weekend, similar to a well-respected foreign film in terms of several story beats, hmm), the novel I’ve finished and intend to start throwing at agents again, and the radio play which I really do have to get finished and off to the BBC Writers’ Room , and I like to think that’s about enough to keep me busy, at least for now.

Plus, of course , the 9-5 job and the arrangements for getting married in less than six months. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’d forgotten either of those.

And no, I didn’t just add that previous sentence in case my boss or my beloved looks at this post. Honest.

I’ve recently been reading Paul’s Rainey’s (brilliantly titled) 2000AD Prog Slog Blog, in which he works his way through 1,100 copies of the British weekly comic 2000AD (home of Judge Dredd). If you’re even remotely familiar with 2000AD, I’d recommend it highly – and indeed, the rest of Paul’s site is worth your time, especially The Book Of Lists, which features some very funny stuff.

One theme which I think comes through rather well in Paul’s write-ups is the discovery (or, as appears to be the case, re-discovery) of how the names of certain writers pop up in the credit boxes for the stories. This rang a bell for me – from a moderately early age I recall noting the names of artists (Terry Bave, Sid Burgons and the like) and writers (Tom Tully) in the comics I read. I knew I liked certain authors of books – Enid Blyton or Nicholas Fisk, for example – but in comics it seemed that there were fewer opportunities to figure out who was writing or drawing the strips, and this was something that I was interested in (please don’t take this as some kind of innate insight into the nature of publishing on my part; for some time, I believed that the copy of Krazy comic which was delivered every Saturday was actually drawn by the artists – so the above isn’t any kind of brag at precocity).

As I grew older and lost interest in humour comics (and the comics I liked merged into each other, trimming down my choices), I started to read superhero comics and adventure comics such as Tiger or 2000AD (and latterly the relaunched Eagle). I don’t recall offhand if there were credits in Tiger, but I noticed that certain writers in 2000AD and Eagle (John Wagner, Pat Mills, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, to give key examples) were responsible for stories I enjoyed, and I started to look out for their names.

Attending a comic convention in (I think) 1986, the then-editor of 2000AD, Steve Macmanus, said that they were very keen to attract new writers, and probably motivated more by the idea of seeing my name in my favourite comic than any realisation that I had a deep-seated need to communicate with people, I started sending things in to 2000AD. I was using an old, smudge-prone typewriter, and at the start I was definitely formatting scripts in a rather haphazard way, and the pages were as spotted with Tipp-Ex as my teenage face was with acne, but I was writing, and enjoying it.

Now, if this was a memoir by a writer who’d made it big, this is the point where I’d talk about the rejections and the first sale and the further sales and so on, but I’m still plugging away at writing now, two decades on, with only a small degree of success. Then again, I’ve been ‘writing around’ college and latterly work, and not always giving it my full commitment, so perhaps I should be grateful even for that small degree.

But, reading Paul’s comments on spotting recurring names in 2000AD, I recalled a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago. We’d written a number of comedy sketches for TV (and I still feel they’re pretty good, even if he has now fled the UK for Spain in what appears to be a belated attack of shame), bundled them into a pretty spiffy series proposal (if nothing else, I can honestly claim that my formatting skills are much improved since the early days) and whilst they were being mulled over by a TV Production Company, we were talking about them in suitably cautious but optimistic tones.

We fell to discussing what would happen if the series was made, and did well, and so on, and m’colleague said, quite firmly (and to my mind rightly) that he didn’t want to be famous. Not, we agreed, that writers tend to get famous in the same way as actors or even directors do (cf the old gag about the wannabe actress who was so stupid she tried to get a better part in a film by sleeping with the writer), and in fact we concluded that even if you could make a good living as a writer the chances were you’d be able to walk down the street without any kind of attention being paid to you at all. Which we both agreed we liked.

I said, though, and I still feel it now, that I’d like to write things that might make people look out for my name in future, seeing it as a mark of something that could be of interest to them. So basically, I want to write, and reach a level of recognition where people would see my name as a kind of shorthand for stuff they might like. There are all sorts of elements to what I’d like to write and why (novels which receive acclaim and sell by the palletload which make points which people hadn’t previously been inclined to consider or discuss, screenplays which make children cheer and adults cry, comics which repay re-reading, and so on*), but what I’m talking about is the point at which I’d like to think I’d actually feel I’d ‘made it’. It’s less a thing of income, but more a level of recognition. And I’m painfully aware that wanting people to say “John Soanes? Didn’t he write that ‘Human Noises’ book? I liked that one”, in the same way that I do about other people’s work, is tantamount to me saying that I’d like to be noted as a writer by the kind of people who note the role of a writer. Which might be the same as saying I’d like to be recognised by people like me, a rather frightening notion.

And, I suddenly realise, not necessarily a million miles away from saying “John’s work was very popular amongst people who like that kind of thing”. Uh oh…

*Yes, yes, I’m painfully aware that these things actually need to be written by me for this to come to pass, but I’m talking in the abstract here. At least for now.