Polly James

Tel : 01603 516323

The hazards of being a writer, part one.

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Before you get published, when your dreams of being a writer are still just that, you have this fantasy of what authors’ lives are really like. My fantasy involved the following (lunatic) beliefs:

  1. All writers are famous.
  2. All writers sit at desks in quiet, sunlit rooms with beautiful sea or rural views.
  3. All writers look exactly as they do in their profile pictures.
  4. All writers have millions of fully-formed ideas for stories in their heads, just waiting to be put down on paper, and all those ideas need to become award-winning novels is to be typed up.
  5. Writers are sociable, entertaining people who hang out with other writers in literary salons and other cool places.
  6. As soon as you’ve been published, that means you’ll never be forgotten. You’ve made your mark on the world and your legacy will live on after your death.

Now that I really am a published author, I feel I owe it to other aspiring writers to rip the scales of delusion from their eyes. (You’ll thank for me for it one day. One day when you’ve chosen a different career.)

So, as a public service, here is what I have learned about numbers one to six above:

  1. All writers are famous. No, they’re not. During a family game last Christmas, the following question arose: “Name five authors”. Not one person mentioned me.
  2. Authors work in quiet rooms with beautiful views. No, they don’t. I write sandwiched between two neighbours who are obsessed with hammering the shit out of things, and my view is of a pub car park. See my next post for why the “sunlit” part is such a lie.
  3. An author really looks like his or her profile picture. If you’d ever seen the state of me while I’m working, you’d know this wasn’t true.
  4. Fully-formed stories live in authors’ heads, just waiting to be put down on paper. If only. This is the biggest fantasy of all.
  5. Writers socialise a lot. Not most of the writers I know. Most of us are deeply anti-social, mainly due to the hammering in my case, but also because we look like hell from gaining so much weight as a result of sitting down all day. (Not to mention our tendency to reward ourselves for every new paragraph we type by stuffing our faces with chocolate.)
  6. Writers are remembered by other people after death, because of the books they’ve published. See point 1. My family forgot about me while I was still alive. I rest my case.

Writing tips, favourite books, dinner guests and more…

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Forgot to post this until now, so am very embarrassed about the state of my memory, which is clearly even worse than I thought.

It’s an interview I did with “She Loves to Read”, in which I go on about various things including:

  • My ideal dinner guests.
  • The best writing advice I’ve ever been given.
  • My favourite books.

You can read the full article by clicking here.

 

Back to life, back to reality…

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Or, rather, back to the real world after a three-month hiatus working on various edits of my new book. (So much for my promise to blog about the process regularly. I clearly lied.)

 

Just to update you, here’s what’s been happening since I last posted about writing, which I think was just after I’d submitted the manuscript to my editor after making what’s known as a “developmental” edit. That’s basically where you flesh out characters and scenes more fully, and generally improve the book so that it doesn’t lie flat and dead on the page with nothing truly coming alive.

 

In my case, this developmental edit was combined with a structural edit, which is where scenes get moved around, cut or extended etc – in other words, fairly big changes are made, and the author often gets outfaced by the scale of the work involved and loses the plot at this stage. I know I do, and my concentration’s not helped by my neighbours’ obsession with knocking down walls at every opportunity – when they’re not hamering the shit out of things for no apparent reason, that is.

 

Since then, the hammering and wall demolition has lessened a bit (though I bet I’m tempting fate by saying that), and I’ve been able to concentrate on completing a line edit with the help of my editor at Avon Books. That kind of edit focuses on the smaller detail, and is followed by a copy-edit, where the manuscript gets checked for clumsy grammar, spelling errors and factual inaccuracies.

 

Once both those edits have been completed, the book goes off to production to be typeset and, when it comes back to the author after that, it’s the first time the 100,000 words you’ve been wrestling with for months finally morph into something resembling a real book. That’s always a real buzz, and I’m thrilled with the font that’s been chosen for the titles and chapter headings.

 

Finally, the typeset proof is proofread – both by the author and a professional proofreader – to pick up any remaining errors, spacing problems etc, and that’s the part I finished dealing with last week.

 

Now I’m working with my editor on things like the blurb that goes onto the cover, while also waiting for the cover itself to be revealed to me – cue massive excitement, combined with a degree of trepidation.

 

Covers are worth a whole post on their own, so let’s just say here that it’s super-stressy when you’re waiting to see what your book – the fruit of all those cancelled social events and all that grumpy, batshit-crazy pacing around the house at 3am – will look like when it finally hits the shelves.

 

That’ll be happening on June 30th, in case you’re wondering…

HarperCollins/British Film Institute Romance Festival

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Last month, I was invited to “attend” the BFI/HarperCollins Love Fest, which you can read more about here. (The speech marks are because I’m old enough to find the concept of attending a virtual event a bit weird, though I did enjoy it.)

The festival ran over a whole weekend, and there were various discussions and events taking place on Twitter throughout, and a lot of excellent advice for aspiring authors and scriptwriters, which you can access from the link above.

I didn’t manage to join in with everything, because I was still busy working on the line edit for my next novel, but I did read a lot of the advice, along with all the author Q&As, which were fascinating.

During those, writers were asked various questions about their favourite romantic films and novels, and the diversity of their responses was fascinating, though a lot of the usual suspects did crop up time and again, as you’d expect.

I chose what I thought was a list of quite unusual titles to recommend, but there’s no such thing as originality, as I discovered when Mhairi McFarlane and I both got stumped by “What’s your favourite male lead in a romantic film?”, and chose the male lead of the same TV series instead. (Miles in the sublime, “This Life”, in case you’re wondering.)

If you’d like to know more about the novels and films I chose, there’s a transcript of my Q&A below:

Meet Polly James @Mid_WifeCrisis #BFILoveFest

Polly JamesTell us about yourself

Raging insomniac, chronic procrastinator, obsessive reader. In other news, I’m married with two children, and a large extended family, none of whom think I’m half as funny as I think I am.

Tell us about your latest book

I’m still working on it at the moment, but it’s called WOULD LIKE TO MEET and is due to be published in June next year. It’s the story of a couple who separate after many years, and what happens when the woman discovers her ex is using an internet dating site.

When did you start writing?

I first started in reception class, when I used my handwriting practice book to document whatever had happened at home the day before. (No embarrassing detail was spared, though the spelling sometimes succeeded in inadvertently protecting the privacy of family members.)

I then began to keep a diary when I was eight – and still do – but I didn’t really start writing seriously until I took a degree in Creative Writing ten years ago, after which I began a blog called Mid-Wife Crisis, which I wrote as the main character, Molly Bennett. Molly then went on to feature in my first novel, DIARY OF AN UNSMUG MARRIED, which was based upon the blog.

Which romantic book do you wish you’d written and why?

The Rosie Project, because nothing’s made me laugh so much for years. The portrayal of Don Tillman is a work of genius.

Which romantic film do you wish you’d written & why?

It’s Complicated, because then I could change the ending to make Meryl Streep’s character choose the man she should have chosen. (The one she had the most fun with.)

Favourite romantic lead (film or book)?

Can’t decide but in a TV series, it’s probably Bruce Willis in Moonlighting or Miles in This Life.

When did you last kiss in a cinema?

Years ago, but that’s because we prefer to slob out at home and watch films on the sofa via Netflix. The last time I remember going to the cinema (to see Al Pacino in Insomnia), a stranger sat down next to me and promptly fell asleep. He snored the whole way through the film.

Favourite screen couple?

That’s impossible to answer, so I’m going to cheat and give you a selection:

  • Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated
  • Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind
  • Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’s Diary. (Yes, I did say Hugh Grant, not Colin Firth.)
  • Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook
  • Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply
  • Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits

Favourite romantic line from a film?

It’s a line the Prime Minister says in Love, Actually: “When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love.”

Which actress (actor) would play you in a romantic film about your life?

In reality, it would need to be a short, ageing person with red hair and a tendency to say what she’s thinking out loud – but who wants realism? I’d far rather be played by someone younger and far more gorgeous than me, especially if she’s also funny, but I know I’ll look like an egomaniac if I actually pick someone like that. Instead, I’ll just mention in passing that Jennifer Aniston did a very good job of being funny and gorgeous as Rachel in Friends. Red hair might suit her, and make-up artists are used to ageing people.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

My husband and my two children.

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Only when seeing your children for the first time, which probably ensures the survival of the species, given that most babies look like Winston Churchill, and have very little to say for themselves.

I do believe in lust at first sight, though it didn’t apply to me and my husband. We first met at a party, where I decided he was a jerk, and he decided I was the rudest person he’d ever met. (He’s just ordered me to admit that I told him to go away because he was boring me.)

Three years later, we met again and were married six weeks afterwards, and that was twenty-eight years ago. So I suppose I believe in dislike at first sight.

3 romantic books EVERYONE should read:

  1. Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier
  2. Cheri & The Last of Cheri, by Colette
  3. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles

3 romantic films EVERYONE should watch:

  1. Gone with the Wind
  2. Dr Zhivago
  3. Bridget Jones’s Diary 

Are you on social media?

Yes, though I’d get a lot more writing done if I wasn’t.

I’m on Twitter, on Facebook and on Pinterest. I also blog and have my own website, too.

 

My top five writing tips, in Novelicious

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The lovely people at Novelicious ran this piece ages ago – but, shamefully, I forgot to link to it ’til now. So, if you’d like to know what my top five tips for writing are, look no further.

Polly James’s Top Five Writing Tips – Novelicious.com | The Women’s Fiction Blog for Readers and Wrihttp://Polly James Top 5 Writing Tips

Argh. (The trials of restructuring a book.)

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No-one tells you, when you’re an aspiring writer, what the editing process can be like – or if they do, you don’t listen. You’re too busy dreaming of finding an agent, and then acquiring a book deal, and after all that has finally happened, you’re far too excited to think about what comes next, apart from untold fame and fortune.

Then you’re allocated an editor and informed it’s time to begin the “structural edit”.

“Just move that event forward to the first quarter of the book,” your editor says, making it sound very simple, “and lose that character, but create another two. Then put this bit in the last third, and change the beginning completely. That’s all you really need to do.”

“Okay,” you say, and then you start to do it.

A few weeks (or months) later, when you’ve deleted scenes and moved thousands of others around – sometimes even splitting them, or shifting single sentences – you now have no idea whether you took that section about your main character’s dead aunt out, or whether you still need to write about her funeral. Have you already mentioned that the family dog was kidnapped by a burglar, or should you leave the random sentence that refers to it in the scene you’re working on today?

There are post-its all over the walls of your house, index cards all over the floor, and so many notes on the manuscript that they now exceed the word count of the book itself. But not to worry – you are still firmly in control, so a night out might be justified.

You’re back at your desk the next morning, feeling refreshed and full of enthusiasm, until…Sod it, now you’ve found the original bit about the funeral, just after you’ve written a whole new scene for that.

Oh, and you forgot to mention that the family owns a dog, before you changed the kidnapping scene. You said they had a cat – and you killed the burglar off, three weeks ago.

 

 

Aberfan 4

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Here’s the poem I wrote about Aberfan that I mentioned in my last blog post, the one that Judith Porch based her powerful calligraphic piece upon…

(It was originally published under my non-writing name, on the BBC Wales website.)

 

Aberfan 4

I saw Aberfan as it happened.

Stood, that hot afternoon

In Pen-y-Wern.

Staring out across the deep, green bowl

Between us.

Tasted the black gold filling my throat

While the sun beat down

And the Heads of the Valleys shimmered.

They said I imagined it

But I did not.

I felt those small, dark-eyed children,

Just like me,

Meet their clawing, tarry deaths.

Heard their parents screaming

As they dug, and dug

Amongst the slimy black

That paid their wages and

Filled their children’s mouths.

They said I imagined it

It was morning and a

Steady rain falling.

A painting based on one of my poems

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Some years ago, I had a poem published on the BBC Wales website. It was about the Aberfan disaster, which I recall happening very clearly, despite having only been six years old when it occurred. (I lived in the same valley in Wales as Aberfan, and was the same age as many of the children who lost their lives that day.)

Last year, I was approached by a calligraphic artist named Judith Porch, who had been inspired by my poem, and who had gone on to create this wonderful artwork as a result. I thought Judith’s piece should have wider audience, and I’ll also post the poem it’s based on, as soon as I can find a copy of it….