I admit I was apprehensive about going to the festival. For a start the ticket and travel cost money. Around £500, which even for someone in a well paid job is a lot to fork out for one person on a long weekend.
Secondly, people you meet at writing events are either a) really lovely, intellectual, funny, honest folk, or b) deluded egomaniacs trying to publish a shocking didactic tract full of grammos. I was terrified that all the attendees would fall into the latter category. (This is rather hypocritical, as my book is a huge rant about power, money and sex and has more typos and clichés than you can shake a stick at!)
Welcome to the machine
The big realisation at these events is always the fact that writing is very much a business. Yes, one may spend many hours in a garret hunched over a typewriter with a mug of coffee and a cigarette, pouring ones heart and soul onto the page, but at some point a salesman enters the picture.
What I found really enlightening, was to hear publishing executives and literary agents talk about their work. I would recommend this to any aspiring writer. Yes, writing is a very personal form of expression, but it’s also about communicating with other human beings. The reader is as important as the writer. Maybe more important. The agent’s job is to find work that people will enjoy reading. Whether is it pulpy and proud, or the most challenging “Literature”*.
This isn’t to say that one compromises ones art. See it more as a Venn Diagram. The segment where “artistic” and “readable” coincide.
What surprised me about the agents is the warmth they had, and how passionate they were about good literature. This sounds obvious, but I had expected them to be a lot more cynical. One especially interesting point for any aspiring writers put there, is that they all agreed that they will only represent a book that they personally connect with. The reason being that sales is hard work, and you can’t sell a book that you’re not really really enthusiastic about. They all admitted to turning down brilliant pieces of work because they simply didn’t ‘get’ the writing. This is encouraging in some ways. Agents have their own tastes, so the rejection slip doesn’t automatically mean “you are a talentless scumbag, go, craw away and die”. But it also highlights the challenge of finding the right agent, not just someone who thinks your work is polished enough, but someone who genuinely enjoys it.
We love the machine
One of the most striking aspects of the event was the positivity of all the attendees. I chatted to about a hundred different people, none of whom were negative or blasé about writing.
They described it as challenging, intense, infuriating, exhausting, all-consuming. And then they spoke about the challenges of finding an agent, getting rejection letters, getting harsh critiques, getting more rejection letters, trying to secure a publishing deal, trying to secure a good publishing deal**, receiving negative reviews, trying to juggle writing and a day-job, trying to juggle writing and raising a family……….but in the midst of all this, I never heard anyone say that they were ready to throw in the towel.
I spend a lot of time lampooning the white collar world. This is because if you chat to most white collar workers for any length of time, they will, after a few minutes, or glasses of wine, start making offhand comments about quitting and becoming a surf instructor. Or a painter, or a coffee-shop owner, or a butcher. I’m not judging anyone for being a dentist / solicitor / actuary / merchant-banker / vet / insurance salesman / whatever. But I am scornful of anyone who works as a top flight divorce lawyer, when they’d actually rather be running a small flip-flop shop in Cornwall.
At risk of sounding slushy and inspirational, I really felt that each person I spoke to at York was following their heart and doing what mattered most to them. We live in cynical times, so it is extremely rare to be surrounded by four-hundred human beings who are so passionate about what they are doing.
A high point was chatting to someone else who loved Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, and meeting another female writer who works in financial securities (I am not unique, shock-horror). I am not the only person in the universe who is trying to appease both the Financial Services Authority, and The Muse.
In conclusion…….
I would recommend the festival to anyone who is serious about their writing. (I felt the £500 was money well spent, and I am fairly stingy about such things!!) The other attendees struck me as thoughtful and very hardworking, and I also noticed that people were very willing to learn more about the technical side of writing, and receive feedback on their work. (My fears about spending the weekend with four-hundred egomaniacs were completely unfulfilled!).
The £500 included the accommodation, which was in the modernist concrete halls of residence. They were a bit retro, but comfortable enough. Some people complained that they were kept wake by the honking of the geese who live on the artificial lake there.
The catering was Yorkshireian, but very nice, and the wine was cheap and tasty.
Overall I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the workshops. All the speakers had prepared the classes well and were charismatic teachers. If fact I learnt so much from the workshops that I actually said in my one-to-one meeting with a literary agent, that my manuscript had lots of faults in it, and that I would prefer to send her my next piece which will be much better…………
(NB this is a very high risk tactic when pitching your work to a top literary agent).
One of the biggest (personal) realisations of the weekend, is that there are a lot of people out there who are going through the same things as me. I was slightly worried that the event might be very competitive, but actually, once you get past the very amateur level, most writers have their own unique style, and their own niche in the market. I didn’t meet a single person who I would consider a direct rival. At the dinner for example, I sat next to a man who was writing about NLP, and a lady who is writing thrillers. I didn’t bump into another modern literary gothic novelist wannabe. (This was one of my biggest paranoias about the event; what if I meet the uber version of myself, and she laughs at my pathetic attempts!!!)
Meeting so many likeminded people really solidified my writing in my own head. Up until very recently it had been a rather left-field pipe dream, which I worried might be taking me away from sensible grown up things like office work and mortgages. Speaking to a few people towards the end of the conference, I feel it had been a huge turning point for a lot of them , both in terms of gaining insight into their own writing, and in taking their writing more seriously. There aren’t many events you can go to that will change your outlook in that way.
Maybe it was just the comedown after a really fab weekend, or maybe I’d come back from the festival a slightly different person. On my first day back in the office I did a rather rash thing. I came out as a writer……………
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*This word should always be pronounced with a deep, booming, Shakespearean tone.
**There is a big difference. In fact, one of the workshops was about Getting Published Well. It was fascinating.
