‘The Answer To All My Problems’ – by katherine howell

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Before my first novel was accepted for publication I prayed for that very news. I fantasised about receiving it in a phone call, what my agent would say, what I would say in reply. I crossed my fingers before opening the letterbox and held my breath checking email in case she opted for those methods. I wrote and redrafted and wrote more and different stuff and threw out swathes of manuscript and wrote even more and hoped so hard. I was utterly focused on that goal.

And then I achieved it. She phoned /and/ emailed to say I had a two-book deal. I burst into tears. I shook as I told my then-husband, the neighbours, rang my family a thousand kilometres away, wrote to everyone in my email address book. The manuscript went for editing, and I had twelve months to write the second one after taking four years to write the first. Life was so sweet, I floated everywhere, of course I could do it. I could do anything!

You can see what’s coming,can’t you?

Trouble.

It wasn’t about the new book, though I ended up taking more than a year to write it (because of a late-identified plot glitch and the enormous reworking needed to fix it). It wasn’t about deadline pressure, either.

It was because I’d literally thought all my problems were solved – I’d truly believed that I’d reached the top of the mountain and whatever else happened, nothing could ever be so hard as that climb.

But then I saw there was a brand new mountain range facing me.

It sounds stupidly naive now, though I can see how it happened. I’d banked everything on making it to that point and hadn’t thought much at all beyond it. Oh, I’d dreamed – lovely shiny dreams – but never imagined I’d find myself with new problems, some of which seemed unsolvable.

For example, having one book published, it’s natural to want the next one to be better. But what does that mean? Who judges? By what standards? In the face of such slippery questions I looked for concrete, quantifiable answers: the number of reviews, the number of hits on my website. But there tend to always be more reviews for a first novel than for a second, and website hits mean little at any time. I asked for opinions, but some people liked the first more, while others liked the second. I thought I might be able to tell for myself when I read the published book, but it felt like trying to choose between one’s children. I tried to focus on narrative elements, comparing plotting, characterisation, suspense, but each is so intertwined with everything else.

I finally decided it couldn’t be done: that just as a book is judged good or bad by an individual reader, another would be judged better or worse in the same way. I needed to try to ignore the whole issue and focus on my only real concern, which was to keep on working.

Ah – keeping working. The subject of next week’s post.

Until then, tell me, Alumni: what did you find to be an unexpected problem in your writing life?

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