How I got a publishing deal...(Part One)
The journey to becoming a debut author and tips for aspiring writers. 10 min read.
One of the things most people know about me is that I’ve been working on a novel for FOREVER. Most people know that my novel is about three Nigerian women living in Singapore and that it’s inspired by the time I’ve spent living in Asia and the women I’ve met here. What most people don’t know is the story of how I got to this point. It might have seemed like I was plugging away quietly and then suddenly a book deal appeared from thin air - if only!
Many people are intrigued by book publishing and the publishing process and there are more and more incredible books (both fiction and non-fiction) being published by an ever-increasingly diverse range of authors, making the dream feel more achievable. And it is.
If there’s one thing I love, it’s telling a story. So grab a ‘cuppatea’ (that’s how I say it) or a coffee (using a straw stops you staining your teeth - you’re welcome) and enjoy the neat and tidy movie sequence of how it happened.
For years I had played with different forms of writing: playwriting, screenwriting, poetry and short stories. With the exception of screenwriting, which I remain obsessed with, I struggled to find my flow. Most of the time, I didn’t focus on any particular outcome. I felt no desire for feedback or reader engagement at that point in my life! Of course I know now, that growth as a writer requires feedback and critique, but I was nowhere near that point of maturity. Writing was a form of expression, a compulsion almost and few people read what I wrote because I was too scared to let them.
In my twenties, that compulsion to write and connect with other writers led me to apply for the very first Royal Court’s Young Writer’s Programme where I learned how to deconstruct play scenes and identify a character’s motivation. I wrote a lot of poetry at university (UCL) but I didn’t write much while at RADA, mainly because I felt under pressure to choose one clear path as an artist. I started and discarded so many stories that I began to worry I would never complete something and if I never completed a piece of writing, how could I call myself a writer? In truth, I had a lot of drive and a lot of ideas but absolutely no skillset to execute any of them. It didn’t help that writers like Helen Oyeyemi and Zadie Smith made it look so easy publishing these incredibly accomplished, assured pieces of work at such a young age. I started to wonder: did I want something I didn’t have the talent to deliver? (I might write a post on this concept of ‘talent’ when it comes to art…)
Fast-forward to 2013 - exactly 10 years ago. I’d gotten married, moved to Singapore and I had three chapters of an incomplete first attempt at a novel, (a whodunnit I really hope will end up being my third book) but nothing else to show for years of ‘writing’.
TIP ONE: Find a writing group
I discovered through the website Meetup what I believe to be the most important thing an aspiring writer needs: a writing group. The Singapore Writer’s Group was everything I was yearning for. Once a month, a group of about thirty people, the first thirty to rsvp, would meet at someone’s house and read 3,000 words of each other’s work. Writing crossed over genres (short stories, poetry, memoirs, science fiction, romance, horror, Young Adult) and sometimes bewildering and amusingly, criss-crossed over multiple genres. It was here I began to read widely and started to understand literary conventions, but more importantly, I started to get a feel of what worked and what didn’t work. It was so instructive to hear so many different critiques and see how people’s personal tastes sometimes diverged widely but more often that not, even if they didn’t always articulate it the same way, readers responded to the same things: a great hook, an interesting premise and characters that didn’t make you want to punch them in the face. Inevitably, the discussions would lead to book recommendations and comparisons with published authors so I also began to learn about contemporary writers from all over the world and the best books to read.
TIP TWO: Find a writing partner (maybe)
The SWG’s expanded to hundreds of writers and fractured into different sub-groups, which allowed me to get even more quality feedback, first from other contemporary fiction writers and then specifically, from writers attempting to complete full manuscripts. This leads to me to the second thing I believe an aspiring writer needs: someone to write with. The years when I met up in cafes with friends, had a gossip over a coffee and then set alarms on our laptops and wrote side-by-side, are some of my happiest memories.
In my opinion, there are three broad categories of writing partners:
The ones who are bored and want company. You know you’re not getting much done when you meet with this friend but you come away feeling pleased with yourself because you did a lot of talking about writing. If you’re honest with yourselves, you give up quite quickly, watch YouTube book reviews and gossip about who just got published in your writers group!
The ones who really just want you to help edit their work. After about 10 minutes go by, you can tell by their constant eye movement and nervous keypad tapping that they’re going to turn their screen around and ask ‘If you don’t mind…’
The ones with the goal of a specific word count and one of those apps that time you and delete your work if you’re too slow! This type of writer friend is doing you a favour by agreeing to write with you and they get very snippy if you interrupt them too often. This is the ideal writing partner because they shame you into getting work done.
The truth is all writing partners are valuable. They make the journey enjoyable and validating and they provide a great sense of comfort in the knowledge that your decision to spend years of your life living in your head is a pleasure shared by many others. When you get serious about writing and being published, you will need to snip all the noise away and that includes the presence of other writers, but when you’re first starting, writing partners can be an excellent community.
TIP THREE: Figure out why
When I first joined my writing group, I worked on a contemporary thriller that was too dark for me to want to revisit after my first baby, and as an antidote, I deliberately started writing the story that would become ‘In Such Tremendous Heat’/’The Sun Sets In Singapore’. I wanted to write something light and funny but with some meat and I had a blog at that time called ‘Black Girl In Spore’. I began posting serial episodes and I was thrilled to get lovely messages from readers online. I’ll admit that I made the mini-chapters heavy on plot and light on depth and craft but at the time, I was just so happy with my three characters: Amaka a banker with shopping addiction, Dara, an ambitious, slightly uptight lawyer and Lillian, a quiet, loner of an artist.
I’d stopped acting at this point but I continued to write around a full-time teaching job, having two babies and producing my first commissioned screenplay. Somewhere around 2018, watching yet another writer I knew get published and feeling burned out from juggling too many balls, I sat myself down and asked what I really wanted. The truth was that I didn’t have to write. No one was forcing me, no one was waiting on me and I hadn’t signed any contracts at birth compelling me to keep going. So why was I doing this to myself?
This brings me to my third tip: figure out why. I realised I wanted to write a novel because I wanted something to live on after I die (well until it goes out of print!). If I died never having seen or held a book of mine, I would die with a regret too heavy to dismiss. That may sound ego-driven and more than a little melodramatic, but I didn’t care. I could write poetry, short stories, short films for fun, but I desperately wanted to give my characters a full story, a beginning, middle and end, just like the stories I used to write stories and staple together as a child. All the other reasons floated away.
And who was I writing for? Did it matter who, if anyone read it? People write for themselves and for pleasure all the time but I knew I wanted women, specifically black women, to curl up in armchair or on a train with this book, and disappear for a few hours.
With my mind now clear, I made the difficult decision to stop my blog. I couldn’t create art in the messy, authentic way I needed to and write neat, snappy blog posts at the same time. I couldn’t commit to lightning writing exercises every morning and hold headspace for blog stats and analytics. I was given really good advice to try and do both, so that I could use my blog as a ready-made platform to promote my book when the time came. I didn’t take that advice and I’m glad I didn’t. I think there have been many stages to this process but in that first stage which included writing at 5am before work, writing on the weekends and evenings, in the half-terms and holidays and in airports. I owed it to my characters to disappear into their voices and to be present in the process, not fixated on the end-result.
Share this post with anyone you know who wants to write a book and is interested in the publishing process and stay tuned for part two: literary agents, publishers and why YouTube is essential for debut authors.
Thanks for reading!
x
Kehinde
Links:
Preorder your Book Depository copy of 'In Such Tremendous Heat'
Preorder your Amazon UK copy of 'In Such Tremendous Heat'
Review and follow 'In Such Tremendous Heat' on Goodreads
A peek behind the scenes :) thank you 😍😍