Some honest thoughts on the book that nearly broke me
My new suspense novel, Connie, is coming out in January - in just under two months’ time!
However, it was around this time two years ago that I had an email from my agent to inform me that my editor had called her and said that the book wasn’t working.
This was after we had been editing it together for an entire year.
Let’s rewind a bit!
In 2022, I sold a novel in a different genre under a pen name, Charlotte Rixon. It was all very exciting.
However, I had begun to build a readership for my suspense and I definitely didn’t want to give up writing in that genre just because of the new deal - not least because I loved working with my original publisher, Quercus.
So I suggested to my agent trying to sell a new suspense novel on a partial - something I had never done before. My editor was about to go on maternity leave so we negotiated a really long deadline that would work for us both.
It gave me time to write a second book under my new pen name (I had been given a two-book deal in the UK), while also still having time to write a draft of my new suspense for when my editor came back to work.
Timing-wise, it couldn’t have worked out better.
Except for the fact that, after writing the partial - just 10k words - I had a year’s break before coming back to finish it.
And in that year my brain had completely moved on from the original idea I’d sold (a kind of black comedy about a female vigilante killer).
In the time that I’d taken to write my other book, I noticed that a ton of other ‘angry female serial killer’ books had been released or announced, many with a slightly acerbic, witty tone.
(This is surprisingly common, I’ve come to realise - there really are trends in the zeitgeist!)
My book wasn’t scheduled to be released until 2025 and I worried that if I continued in the same vein of the original 10k, it would look as though I’d just copied everyone else.
So I decided to change the whole book. Without telling my editor.
Merrily, I wrote away. The book I wrote was completely batshit. It was semi-epistolary (but that’s not what made it batshit). A chunk of it was written as a false confessional memoir, left after the protagonist died (or did she?). Much of it was written in the second person.
When I sent it over to my editor, I called it my ‘most ambitious book’.
But really, it was just a mess.
Absolutely bloody nuts.
I’m not sure what came over me to be honest. Perhaps selling that other book in the US had gone to my head?!
Perhaps after five relatively ‘safe’ narrative styles, I just wanted to be a bit braver, and write something a bit different?
Either way, my kind editor came back with a pretty hefty structural edit.
Four pages of notes, but in a very small font (lol) .
We had a meeting to discuss the issues she had raised (which were basically: this book is batshit and gives the reader whiplash) and I went away to edit.
And then I redelivered. And she read then sent over some more edits. And… rinse and repeat.
I’m not sure how many times we attempted to wrangle my batshit book into some kind of order. But in the end, just before Christmas 2023, we reached a crisis point and my editor admitted that it still wasn’t working.
By then, I had had enough. I hated the book. I didn’t want to do any more edits on it. I never wanted to spend another minute with bloody Connie and her bloody crimes (pun intended).
And so I did that thing that authors do when they reach rock bottom: I asked my agent to get me out of the contract.
This all happened right before Christmas, and my agent wisely counselled me to have a break from it and to see how I felt in the New Year.
Which I did. Did it ruin my Christmas? A little bit. I was worried about the financial implications of giving the money back, for one thing.
I thought perhaps my career was over (but I also thought maybe I didn’t actually care if it was).
But over the Christmas break, I did start to see a way through the fog.
Rather than editing the book yet again, I saw a way that I could rewrite the book completely, from scratch, using a much more conventional narrative structure.
I also had the idea of making it dual point of view, using the police officer who was involved in Connie’s life as a child as the second character.
I started writing a completely new book, and then I delivered that in May 2024.
This time when my editor came back with her thoughts, it all felt much more doable. We worked on the book throughout 2024 and by the end of the year, it was finally signed off.
I WAS SO RELIEVED.
However, I still thought the book was terrible.
I thought my editor had only accepted it because she’d basically had enough of the whole thing herself, and would be happy with anything vaguely passable and not completely batshit that they could just print and move on from.
I still thought it was the end of my career (maybe it is, time will tell!)
When my publisher got in touch earlier this year to say that proof copies were available for me to send to authors to read in advance, I was actually mentally cringing at the thought of my respected friends and colleagues reading my car-crash of a novel.
By the way, none of this is false modesty. This is ABSOLUTELY how I felt.
One of my closest author friends read quickly and was really nice about it, but I was sure that she was just being kind because she knew how agonising it had all been.
Then some other authors read, and they were also nice about it.
Then it went up on Netgalley…. And I braced myself for the one and two star reviews.
But to date, there haven’t been any?!
What is going on?
I am sure they will come, because they always do, but the first bunch of reviews have ALL been four or five stars.
I can’t tell you what this means to me. Or how confused I am. 😆
But also, it’s made me realise some fundamental things:
1) The longer you work on a novel, the better it will be
I think by the time I came to write the new version of Connie, I knew her so well that it really helped with her characterisation. She felt completely real to me, and I think this is coming across to readers too.
I’ve always been a quick writer, but perhaps that’s not always a good thing. There’s something in letting characters and ideas marinate for a while that results in your book becoming richer.
There’s a lot of talk about how important it is to release one book a year if you want to build a viable career as a commercial fiction author. I’m beginning to question that narrative. I agree that at the beginning of your career, the smaller the gap between your books, the better. But once you are a bit more established, perhaps it’s not so important.
Perhaps it’s better to take the time to get it right.
People who liked my other books don’t seem to have forgotten about me just because I haven’t had a suspense book out for a year.
But also, you can’t really rush a book. It takes what it takes - and they are all different.
2) How hard a book is to write has no bearing on how the book will be received by readers
I actually did an Insta post about this very subject…
My second-most hated book (by me!) is my third novel, The Perfect Father. It’s another one that was really tricky to get right, involved multiple edits and also ended up (to me at least) feeling a bit… Eastenders (sorry Eastenders, no shade).
And yet, it’s my most popular book to date and has sold more copies than all my other books - nearly 75,000 in fact.
So basically just because a book was easy to write and you enjoyed the process, that doesn’t mean it’s good. And just because a book is difficult and you hated writing it, that doesn’t mean it’s bad.
3) As you get more experienced, some parts about writing get harder
Lots of things get easier as you write more books. But some things also get harder.
You’re more self-aware. You question yourself more. You want to try different things, to experiment and stretch yourself.
And in doing all those things, there’s always the possibility of it not working out.
But that’s OK. It’s only by trying new stuff that we learn.
4) Having some time away from a book can be really helpful
It was only two weeks in the end, but having those two weeks off over Christmas made a huge difference to how I felt about Connie, and freed up my brain to find another - much better - way to tell her story.
I’m really really shit at taking breaks. But this is something I’m going to try to do more.
Conclusion
There’s so much pressure that comes with having a book deal, whether it’s your first or your tenth. I think writers in general tend to be pretty hard on themselves.
My experience with Connie has been a humbling reminder of exactly what a huge undertaking writing a novel is.
Just because we’ve done it before, we kind of forget what an enormously difficult thing it is to do.
But it’s OK to mess it up. It’s OK to admit we’re struggling. Because it’s bloody hard and the experience of writing each book is unique.
I still kind of lowkey hate Connie. But finally, I’m also quite proud of her too, in the same way you are proud of most of the difficult things you accomplish in life.
If you’d like to read my no-longer-batshit book, then you can pre-order here.
I hope you enjoy it more than I did. 😜
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