Time to go - by Ruth Hatfield

After three years of monthly panics about what to write, I've finally decided to give up writing these blog posts, for the foreseeable future at least. Three whole years - in that time, I've had two books out and produced (well, birthed) two children. Seems like a good period of time to reflect back on. So what have I learnt, really? (Disclaimer: this is entirely about me, but I'm talking about myself in the second person because that often seems like the easiest way to make grand statements about complicated things).

That producing children is easier than producing books.
That children demand more of you than even books do.
That pouring your heart and soul into working out how best to raise your children is easier than pouring your heart and soul into working out how best to write your book.
That children know instantly when you are trying to think about something that is not them.
That child-raising and book-writing are two relentless, exhausting endeavours.
That child-raising has a higher chance of bringing you joy and happiness.
But not necessarily of making you feel you have said what you want to say.
Because mostly you are just repeating 'Because it is' and 'DON'T PLAY WITH THE DISHWASHER'.
And sometimes you forget that words were ever a pleasure to you.
That children are their own magic.
And books are your magic.

I had something else to say - about the failure of my books to sell, about ten years of work, thoughts and dreams dissolved in the aether, about the cruelty of a savage review, about something a wise friend recently said to me concerning my reluctance to let myself write what I really want to write, and how it was a bit like being too frightened to let yourself fall in love again after suffering heartbreak -

But that seems like the best place to stop. When there's still something more to say.

Ol’ Green Eyes is Back – by Ruth Hatfield

A bit of a tangent this month, but as ever I’ve spent more time mopping up earwax than sitting at my desk in the past few weeks. I’ve also been trying to explain to a child why it’s not good to get into the habit of being mean about other people, even if it’s because you’re worried about them. I dredged up that Roald Dahl line from The Twits: “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.”

But while I was explaining what this meant, I thought about the dilemma of writers (to be fair this also applies to pretty much anyone in an insecure and solitary profession these days). We go around making contact with other writers and then keeping up with each other’s news on various forms of social media. Often a Twitter feed or a Facebook wall can seem like a string of everyone else’s successes and prizes. Rationally, we know it isn’t really so for all the other writers out there, but that doesn’t really matter. Feelings of jealousy and insecurity can creep in all the same. And that can lead to all sorts of things – trouble and fear in our own writing, ill-wishes towards people we hardly know, a tendency to assume that success in books is sometimes ‘bought’ by publishers with bigger marketing budgets than our own.

What do these feelings do to us and our work? Is it good to admit our jealousy to ourselves, or even to others? We’re authors, we’re supposed know about suffering – shouldn’t we just tell ourselves to be glad for other people?

Actually I think the pressure on writers to be generous and altruistic human beings is pretty unbearable, sometimes. I’m very much of the opinion that there’s no point in pretending we don’t feel the things we do – that way madness and a good deal of self-loathing lies.

But of course, it’s not healthy to allow bitterness to eat you up, particularly when you’re trying to write children’s books. Or to let feelings of insecurity cripple you. And while feeling insecure about the achievements of distant strangers who you might have met once at a conference might be allowed, it’s important to be able to celebrate the successes of friends with genuine joy in your heart – otherwise you really would turn into Dahl’s ugly person.

I think for me, possibly, the key is making a distinction between some people’s successes and some other people’s successes – I do rejoice in the wonderful books written by people I know and like, and I find it’s quite easy to feel good about the nice things that happen to them, as long as I allow myself to accept that I don’t have to feel happy when someone I maybe have met once, but might not really know, wins another prize or publishes another novel and it rattles through all my social media. In fact, in those cases, I’m positively allowed to have malevolent thoughts, and that doesn’t make me a bad person, just a human being.

I’m not sure how to explain that to a two-year-old who’s chanting at strangers in the street, however. But I’d be interested in others’ thoughts on this – do you allow annoyance to flow through you like a river? Or do you take yourselves firmly in hand and try to see the good in everybody’s work?

How (not) to be a professional writer - in one easy step: by Ruth Hatfield

If anyone in the East of England hasn’t stumbled across the Norwich Writers’ Centre yet, I can only recommend checking them out – they organise fantastic workshops, talks and all manner of other usefulnesses. On Saturday 3^rd October, they held a ‘Professional Development Day’ for writers in the lovely Dragon Hall. I’m reasonably new to the business of trying to trade as a writer, and keen to pick up practical advice on all aspects of it, so while my family enjoyed a day out in Caistor learning about Bernard Matthews, I sat and listened to talks on tax, applying for grants and crowd-funding.

 

Inside the Dragon Hall, Norwich

There were a few gems on the tax liabilities of self-employed writers: if you’re fortunate enough to win prizes, you owe tax on them if you or your agent submit your work, but not if someone else enters it (I’ve been chucking this over my shoulder and thumping it on the back for a week but the logic still eludes me); every time someone in another country downloads your book you should be paying income tax in that country; it’s a bad idea to pay your tax bill with a cheque from an account that you haven’t disclosed to the taxman. And there was a brilliant talk by Melanie Gow about crowdfunding that make me want to pull on my boots and march across Northern Spain.

The day as a whole was interesting and thorough. In hindsight, though, as I grapple with the one issue that’s left a taste in my mouth as lingering as a slug trail on the carpet, I realise that I often attend workshops looking for that magic Writer’s Job Description which will tell me how to eliminate the insecurity of a career based around writing books. This is impossible, of course. The best approach seems to be to maintain diversity – write books, do events, network, tour schools, dress up as a penguin and get filmed stealing from fish counters and so on.  And, of course, using social media to create an online presence and promote your work.

So during one of the talks, someone asked the question: ‘Do you have to be on all these social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook etc, in order to sell books these days?’. At which, a knot curled up tight inside my belly. Because this is my not-at-all-secret Guilty Secret: I’m really rubbish at social media. I know very well that I should put some effort into it, but every bone of my body is so disinclined to tweet the progress of my biscuit-crumb-baby-wailing-laundry-hanging-staring-into-space-filled days that I still just… haven’t got round to it yet.

And I absolutely knew that the speaker was going to tell this room full of people that yes, they do have to engage with these things in order to make a living from writing: i.e. to be a ‘professional’ writer. And he did.

This time, the knot inside me rebelled and sprung loose – that’s your opinion, I said. Not the absolute truth. What you’re doing is repeating a lazy modern ‘truism’, and scaring people.

Social media seems to be the new orthodoxy of the writing profession – a vital part of the job, as I’ve been told many times. I don’t deny that it is very useful, and I really should be trying to use it. But this is how things happened for me.

When I was a child, I wrote endless stories. Even though that was how I filled my spare hours and how I learnt to understand the world, it was my own personal crusade and my love: I didn’t ever think I would do it as a job. A job was something you went to a place and did for someone else, who paid you to do it.Now that I’m older and realise that it might be possible to indulge myself in writing for all (or most) of the days of my life, I’m very keen to know exactly how I can make it into a job – my own job. And I want to follow all the good advice of others who’ve gone there before me. But I don’t want to try and make writing into a job that I dread. So I have buried my head in the social media sand, dragged my feet through the social media mud, and tried desperately to push down the guilt about not doing it.

After I disagreed at this talk, someone trotted out the ‘formula’– you engage, you get followers, they buy your book, spread the word, it goes viral, you have a huge fan-base, more people the world over start following you and buying your book, and so on. The implied threat being that if you don’t go on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, you won’t get followers, you will never sell your books, and you won’t be able to be a professional writer. And I just realised that while I still feel guilty about not using enough social media, I just don’t buy this line anymore.

If we allow and repeat a general orthodoxy that you must use social media in order to become a professional writer, it essentially sends out a message that no matter how good your book is,if you haven’t done your time on Twitter then the book itself is useless. And I don’t think we’ve yet reached a point where that’s true. It might be rarer these days, but it is still possible to get a publishing contract without having an internet presence at all. There are all those other event-based options, too - you can establish and maintain a presence in the physical world. It might be harder, take longer and wear down the soles of more pairs of shoes, but it’s possible.Social media is a useful tool, but it isn’t the single, vital and unique step that must be trodden upon in order to access the solid floor of a writing career.

Sitting in the ancient Dragon Hall, acutely conscious of the inspiring and unforeseen longevity of some human endeavour, I felt strongly that it is very wrong to discourage anyone from putting their all into their art on the grounds that they will never ‘make anything of themselves’ unless they are also prepared to share more aspects of their life than they want to. I’d even go so far as to say it is very bad advice. The future might prove me wrong, but if it does, I guess at least I’ll have sunk into such obscurity that nobody will know how to get in touch with me and tell me…