write craft

How do I get to Carnegie Hall?

One of the questions I’m asked most in the interviews surrounding my first novel, HADES, is any advice I might have for aspiring writers. My biggest challenge, when I hear this inevitable query, is which piece of advice I’ll choose, because more often than not I’m sitting there on live radio or in a chat room or at the edge of a table surrounded by hopeful and eager writers, and I’ve got just a minute to answer. The truth is, over the years, I’ve collected a mountain of advice for young, ambitious writers, because I was one for a long time, and I grabbed hold of each and every tidbit and applied it, tried to see if it was the key to that huge, heavy, perpetually closed door. I thought I’d make my blog post this time about this advice; but before I set out, I want to make it clear that these few wisps of knowledge are but some of hundreds, and it may be that none of them work for you. I’m sure you know, if you’re serious about this, that the journey is different for everyone. Your chances are low (so much lower than you could ever imagine), and your hopes are high (so high, no one understands them but you). I know. I remember. I’ve made a promise to myself never to forget. So let’s see if I can’t help you along a little, whether I give you the key or simply make you feel like your dreams are worthwhile.

1. Study writing. This probably wasn’t what you were expecting as number one, but let me tell you, it’s critical. I don’t mean that you need to set out now and enrol for a Bachelors or blow your life savings on a specialist course in the rainforest with bran muffins and wisened beards provided. You may want to do either of those things, or you might just take up a TAFE course. Go to free talks. Read books on the subject. Talk to other writers about what they do, and read with one eye on the techniques your favourite authors are using, what they’re actually doing to make you feel so good. You’ll get two benefits out of studying writing. First, you’ll have a teacher, who will have no emotional or financial benefit in telling you your work is great when it sucks. Secondly, if it’s a good course, it’ll make you push the boundaries of your writing – write out of your comfort zone in genres and styles you’re not familiar with. You may just discover that you’re a natural sci fi writer, when you thought crime was your bag. You won’t know until someone makes you.
2. Submit. Submit. Submit. I mean multiple times, and multiple works. As soon as you’ve finished a work and it’s doing the submission rounds, forget about it and begin the next (and don’t make it a sequel to the first one. You’ll likely be wasting your time). The amount of times writers who have told me they wrote one book and submitted it to three publishers, got three rejections and contemplated necking themselves before ‘giving the whole thing up’ would make you sick. To me, writing one book and submitting three times is the equivalent of playing one backyard tennis game and crying because no one invited you to Wimbledon. If you really want this, you’ve got years ahead, and multiple books. Yes, some people write one book when they’re eighteen and get signed internationally for what will turn out to be a career-making blockbuster. Some people also win the lottery on the first ticket they ever buy. And we all hate them, so let’s not talk about them anymore.
3. Take care of your heart. It’s alright to be sad about rejections. It’s a crushing thing, I don’t care who you think you are. When you write a book, you open yourself up – your fantasies, desires, dreams and fears go on the page. You perform. You sacrifice. And when you get rejected, it can be very easy to think that the rejection is about you as a person. If you follow step two, like I did, and submit to everything you ever write to every goddamn publisher in the country, you can spend weeks receiving rejection after rejection like daily kicks in the teeth. You can take it personally, and it’s a combination of things. The vulnerability of the artistic life. The cold, automated rejection emails that teach you nothing. Years of reading shit and knowing you can do better. Rejection can make you angry. It can drive you mad. It can break your heart. Don’t let it. Don’t spend years, as I did, angry and jealous and miserable. Like most negative emotions, your anguish won’t actually get you what you want.
4. Write what’s in you, not what’s out there. The things I think about are pretty sick. I have a dark mind, so I’m a dark writer. I spent a lot of my younger years being told that what I was writing was too dark, too gruesome, too depressing, too violent. I should have written a romance, I told myself. Romance sells. Vampire romances sell. Sexy vampire romances sell. But I hate sexy romantic vampires. So I kept writing dark stuff. I wrote it with joy, with passion, the way all things should be written, and I learned to write what I write so that it sells. Don’t do what everybody else is doing – do what you do until nobody does it as good as you do.
5. Foster relationships with people in writing. This means teachers, writers, agents, publishers, authors and people who work on the fringes of the industry. Don’t do this thinking that they’re going to do you a favour if you become their friend. You’ll just end up being some sicophantic whack job pestering people, and they’ll see you coming a mile off. If you talk to people in writing, you’ll realise they’re good people, not a bunch of gatekeepers to a secret club designed just to make you feel like crap, and this might protect your ego. You’ll learn from publishers that they’re excitable, passionate and hard-working people. You’ll learn from agents that they’re hungry, fiesty go-getters. You’ll learn that neither of these groups of people has a personal vendetta against you and your dream. You’ll learn from authors that the club, when you finally enter, is a terrifying and wonderful place, and that they’re just as anxious and hopeful and self-critical as those young’uns who haven’t made it yet. You’ll learn from other wannabe writers that you’re not alone in feeling that your bookish dream is a part of you, of your DNA, a journey you were always on even when you didn’t know it, from the moment your third grade teacher read out your illustrated flip-book story about a catterpillar to the class because it was so weirdly good. Get into the community. The dream will become more vivid.
6. Decide that you will write anyway. Forget about ‘wasted words’, ‘fruitless pursuits’ and ‘failed manuscripts’. Stop calculating the hours you spent on stories and characters that didn’t make it. Your good characters will never leave you. No professional ballerina spends her career counting the practice hours she spent before the audition she wasn’t selected in. She doesn’t count the times she fell down, strained something, made a fool of herself. There’s a certain amount of practice and preparation required to make it at anything – being a doctor, learning to sew, playing tennis, ballerina ness… ballerina(ing)? Ballerination. Just because you can count your words, manscripts, years spent and rejections received, doesn’t mean your training was any different, or any less necessary, than that required for all worthy dreams.

Happy writing, everyone.

SOLD

Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’ll never make any money out of your art. This is the cheeky smirk of someone who heard that too often.

Random News

So, I’ve graced the cover of Random News, the Random House trade publication/catalog heading out to hungry book buyers looking to order for stores. Opening the envelope, extracting the little hand written note from my publisher that read ‘Lookin’ good!’ and then opening this magazine has been one of the milestones of my publishing journey. I immediately took the book to my nextdoor neighbour, whose face lit up as though a switch had been flipped. Then she scrunched her nose up, as she does, and said ‘This is so weird. Knowing someone famous.’

If you haven’t already, like the Candice Fox Facebook page for random bits of news. See what I did there? 😉 http://www.facebook.com/candicefoxauthor

Momentum

It might be a bit odd for me to be telling you as a writer that you need to stop thinking. One of the few privileges you get as a person setting off on such a journey is the ability to look thoughtful; elbow on table and face in hand, staring at the light dancing in the trees. Stroking your beard now and then, if you have one (and in my opinion if you can have one, you should have one. I have crushing beard envy. Yes, I know that’s weird.) If you’re a writer, people expect you to think. It is the perfect excuse for being that person in the office who has five hundred and ninety origami kranes folded and scattered about their desk, the one who’s always staring at the elevator buttons as though reading them for some hidden code, the one who’s always in the dark on the balcony at the office Christmas party, champagned, quiet. Being a big thinker is ok, but sometimes thinking big can ruin everything. Let me demonstrate.

I’ve only been a runner for a few months. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, though: I like the idea of it, the animalistic nature of an early-morning jog into the mist, a slice of ocean now and then glittering between the apartment blocks, alluring. I got the idea that I might like to be a runner when my marriage died, the curtains of that heady illusion suddenly fallen all around in artistic splashes of red velvet and me, unloved me, in all my ok-shaped-but-honestly-kinda-flabby-and-definetely-badly-dressed glory, revealed. I thought running would not only give me confidence and my body back but it’s a very measurable goal and I could judge myself by it, reward myself by it, compare myself to others by it (Beginning to see the problems?). I started going to the gym and running on the treadmill and fiddling with the speed and the incline and the fan and trying not to throw up and after a while I thought I was good enough to take it to the streets.

I got into my tights one morning, pulled on my shoes, hooked up my music, opened my front door and looked down the street.

Jesus, I thought. That’s a long goddamn street.

I figured 5km was a good goal to head toward, so I started bouncing along. My GPS told me that the end of the street was two hundred metres from my house. I was already struggling. Sweat was tickling in my hair, and my calves started itching, so now and then ducking to swipe at my calves, now and then plastering my hair back from my face, and all the time panting like a shot ox, I got about eight hundred metres into the run and slowed to a walk. On the morning of the next planned run, two days later, I lay in bed for a good twenty minutes just hating the assignment I’d set myself. I thought about places I knew that were approximately 5km away. They seemed like foreign lands. It would take me years, I decided, to be able to get to 5km and I probably wasn’t going to enjoy the journey in any case. Runners lead joyless lives. All they eat is buckwheat, whatever the hell that is, and polenta, and their knees and hips go by thirty if they don’t get hit by a truck, and their friends hate them secretly, the way I’ve secretly hated plenty of runner friends for their success at it. People are born runners. Long-legged types wearing bum bags and massaging their hamstrings outside cafes filled with colourful cyclists, talking about gel insteps and Deep Heat and the Sydney half-kay and beep tests you can download to your phone.

Stupid runners. I rolled over in bed. They’re wasting their time.

It’s possible, and surprisingly easy, to think your way completely out of anything you might want to do that is even slightly uncomfortable. And sitting down over the space of a year or more and writing a novel is the perfect example of something you can over-think and talk yourself out of in no more than a couple of sentences. Ninety thousand words? All of them completely original, appealing, interesting, grammatically correct, plausible, believable, entertaining, publishable? Ten thousand hours to master the craft? All of them alone, completely alone, nothing but novelty coffee mug and Microsoft Word and blinking cursor and oblivion-spelling empty page… Nothing but experience, imagination, desire, instinct, to guide you? Are you nuts? Do you have any idea how long it takes just to get an initial sparkle of inspiration into a narrative structure? To formulate characters, give them environments, upbringings, baggage, idiosyncrasies, hairstyles, cars, pets, jobs, habits, attitudes, accents, sexual fetishes, to get this cast together, to make them do something that strangers would be compelled to read about? Do you have any idea how many edits a manuscript needs before it’s even of submittable standard? Do you know how many full-length novels the average writer writes before they hit on a winner?

Let’s just stay in bed. It’s warm here.

Writing a novel is like the longest run you’ve ever been on in your life. You can sit there before you even begin with your elbow on the table and face in hand, possible beard action, and imagine how bad it’s going to be. Those first sweaty, stumbling, uncertain pages, the discomfort of finding a rhythm, the shock of wind that hits you now and then as you rise over a crest and realise how far you are from home, what’s before you. Like running, writing is lonely; no one will know you did or didn’t do it today, whether you did well at it at all, whether you failed and stayed in bed, whether you wrote something that you’ll have to scrap tomorrow, time wasted. Before you even open a document, you can open your browser and read about publishing houses tumbling to the earth and writers losing their contracts and editors sifting through thousands of manuscripts a year, giving them a page to impress, a single page, tossing them over their shoulder into the burn heap.

If you didn’t think about all that, though, what might happen? What if you thought of nothing beyond this word. This one. This line of text. What if one idea just crept into the next, and there was no need for an idea beyond what you have in your hands, a man in a room, a man with a gun, a man with a plan. Whatever it is. Plenty of writers talk about the need for structure, planning, big picture schemes, PostIt notes on cork boards, roads mapped out, GPS hooked up, progress measured and chapters outlined. But what if all you needed, in fact, was momentum. Slow at first. Gathering speed. Not a thought spared for the distance left until finish. Just the pure dedication to this moment, and the action of writing, or running, and the will in this moment not to stop.

I implore you to forget about the journey for a minute, because it will be long, and hard, and windy, and painful, and you’ll want to stop at the half way mark. You’ll want to stop ten minutes from now. You’ll doubt yourself. You’ll tell yourself you weren’t born for this. You’ll hate the people sailing past you, watch them disappear over the rise ahead. All of that’s to come, oh yes, I can’t tell you that it isn’t. But what if you just didn’t think about it. What if you just stopped thinking all together.

I ran 8km this morning. Easy.

Happy writing, everybody.

To Be Frank

Today I say goodbye to a very special man in my life: my protagonist, Frank. This afternoon I handed my approval on the final copyedit of my novel to my publishers at Random House, so from this moment on the words are set in stone. Frank, the women he hopelessly tries to understand, the partner he has no clue is an incredible danger to him, the killer he’s trying to save the people of Sydney from: they are out of my hands now, born and grown and out on their own, and I am sad.

Frank was a friend to me, one of the only men in my world I was certain I understood.

I could predict Frank. I trusted him. I fell in love with his inherent goodness, and there was goodness in there after all, deep underneath the misogyny and vanity and the serial marrying. I think even those writers whose protagonists aren’t meant to be loved, writers like John Fowles with his vile Freddie Clegg, feel some attachment to their main guys no matter their shortcomings. Face it, we all felt a bit sad when Tolkein’s Smeagol died, didn’t we? That hairless, annoying little freak. The world was one monster short when Mordor swallowed him. And the world needs monsters, failures, sickos and beasts. They make the rest of us look good.

Who is your protagonist? Why have you given him or her so much of your imagination? Do they do something, believe something, live some way that you imagine without the restrictions of family pressure, monetary strain, or something as fundamental as your gender, you would? I’ve admitted to many a creative writing student that a lot of Frank is me. I don’t like girls, and I have no real desire to be a man, but stepping into Frank is very much something I enjoy because I think we share a sense of humour and I’m characteristically bad at writing ‘normal’ women. I felt Frank’s bewilderment at the mechanics of flirting with women when a gay friend of a friend tried to pick me up at an engagement party for an hour and a half and I was clueless to what she was attempting the entire time. I know the skin-tingling rush that Frank feels at a live NRL match when the ball flies seemingly without restraint from one to another to another runner on the field toward the overlap, the unconscious desire to rise slowly out of my plastic seat, my hotdog forgotten. I feel his quiet terror when someone special comes into my life, the pulsating panic at the idea of losing some part of myself in order to give someone else what they need, the joy and tragedy of becoming half of a partnership. If things had gone a different way in my life and academia hadn’t ended up my calling, I would certainly have been a cop, and in fact made it into the training scheme twice but backed out each time. I don’t think these aspects of my personality make me any more a man or any less a woman, or any more Frank than Candice. But I think it does make Frank a better character to have a little of me in him.

What piece of your protagonist will be you, I wonder.

And will you be game enough to put a piece of you in every character on the page? I don’t suggest you wash the book with yourself so that your jokes flutter out of every mouth and everyone in the book is a Sex and The City fan; I mean here, a woman might be an obsessive picker of food just like you, and there, a man might hate slow walkers on the footpath like you, too. Someone might be the kind of disorganised freak who has a basket for clean clothes and a basket for dirty ones, both empty towers amid a valley of clothes, and a desk covered in a mountain of paper topped by an empty expanding file: just like you. Someone might chew their nails like you, lick their teeth like you, laugh like you in that honking way that makes people across the restaurant turn and look. I know I harp on about Stephen King a lot, but some of his best characters are writers.

What’s wrong with you, after all? You’re your own greatest muse. No one knows the taste of your mother’s lasagna like you. No one knows the stories you and your sister used to write when you were kids or how bored you got in your local church every goddamn Sunday morning, how you used to sneak books in inside your jacket and read them between your knees. It’s fine to imagine you’re someone you’re not: a king, a warrior, a witch, a billionaire, a farmer looking for a wife. But things become more real when you get inside these people, look through their eyes, pull their hands on like gloves and make them move instead of puppeteering from above, detached, godly. And you’re trying to make things are real as they can be, in the end. That’s your job.

I suppose my mission here is to remind you that the kind of characters who make people angry, who cause them to close the book in the bookstore and move on, or to rant on chat forums and bag out fans of the work are those characters who we can never hope to be. No one will ever be as beautiful, mysterious, worldly, heroic and sexually attractive as a certain teen dream vampire who’s blockbusted the genre over the last few years (I’m sure you know the one I mean. Prince Sparklepants.) This guy wouldn’t fart if you paid him. He talks about love as freely as he talks about the weather. Not once in the series was Prince Sparklepants drunk, obnoxious, rude, unable to articulate himself, a bad driver, grammatically incorrect, suffering from B.O., the instigator of a joke that no one else thought was funny. He’s never underdressed, overdressed, late, lost, too tired to pay attention to what someone else is saying, Facebooking in bed in the dark. He never accidentally calls a fat woman pregnant, tells his girlfriend to make him a sandwich, drools while he sleeps or leaves his hair all over the bathroom. Any character who did all these things across the same book would be too crude to believe of course, but when someone does them every now and then you remind the reader that your character is real.

And when real people face the dangers and challenges you set for them, readers care.

It’s with a heavy heart that I let Frank go, not knowing if I’ll get the chance to pump him with life again in book two. But I’m excited as to what and who else I can be, who will grow out of my desire, quirkiness, loneliness, greed, who will be shaved off my skin and gathered together in pieces, planted in soil, grown into something beautiful or poisonous, something that lives on its own. From here, the life that will burn in Frank will come from other people, strangers, reading him and hearing his voice. You can’t keep your people, but the loss of them is soothed by the gift you make of them to your reader. I hope you like Frank. He can be a bit of an idiot sometimes.

Try a little tenderness

One of my most horrifying encounters with a creative writing teacher happened while we were engaged in a one-on-one workshop class in his office, in which we were working on my first big novel, Touch. James was one of those quiet, badly dressed, golden-hearted teachers who I’ve often thought about years after our classes. His softly spoken doctrine on how to write still flutters through my thoughts today as words appear behind the cursor and creep across the page. He’s here, in my writing, keeping my excessive description down with a heavy but caring hand and lifting my vocabulary up ever so often, pointing a stern finger in my face whenever I’m tempted to cliche.

A menacing ghost I keep alive.

I sat down with James one morning and he had my manuscript spread out before him, and he gestured to the pages with a sort of disappointed shrug.
‘This storm here, at the beginning of chapter two,’ he said. ‘You describe it for a page and a half.’
‘Yeah?’ I said.
‘I know what a goddamn storm looks like.’
‘Not this one,’ I countered, trying to save my dignity. ‘It’s… uh. It’s pretty fucking epic.’
We used to swear at each other a lot, James and I. He started it. It’s just something we did.
‘Is this fucking epic storm critical to advancing the plot in any way?’ he asked. I scratched the back of my neck.
‘No.’
‘Well cut that shit out,’ he said.

He put his big black marker onto the paper and slashed the pages out like he was cutting open a box. It was tough. But it was the first of many times he would do it. I know what a messy apartment looks like, he’d say. I know what a bus station looks like. I know what a park full of kids looks like, too. Words tumbled and fell. My words. And when they were gone there was only plot, and character, and every now and then a piece of setting only where it was crucial and only where it was beautifully and uniquely described. I was sad for all those gone places, weather events, distant mountain ranges peeking between suburban rooftops. They had been fun to write. But remember what I was telling you last time you were here about things that are fun to write: They’re not always fun to read.

When you’re trying to decide if something has to go; and I’m not only talking about setting here, but dialogue and characters too; ask yourself whether you could have done what you were trying to do in less words, less instances. Think about songs, and how little space and time songwriters have to describe a character or a place or an emotion and how they do it, and whether or not your novel can be one great long beautiful song of few words but many ideas.

Look at this, from Kris Kristofferson‘s ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’:

Take the ribbon from your hair,
Shake it loose and let it fall,
Lay it soft against my skin,
Like the shadows on the wall.

So much here isn’t written. Rather than telling us that we’re in a dark room lit by soft light, we know that there are walls and shadows and that’s all that’s necessary for us to feel the warm glow. Rather than telling us that tender loving sex is about to happen, or that she’s beautiful, or that he’s naked, his desire is merely for her to let her hair down and to touch him with her ribbon, so all of those things come in the same bag. In twenty four words, we have a shadowy room, gentle love, the caressing touch of hair, ribbon, skin. We fill in the intimacy and romance and tension and longing and all that other gooey lovey disgusting stuff ourselves. To write it would just be patronising, wouldn’t it? You patronise someone whenever you tell them something they’re quite capable of working out for themselves.

The same goes for dialogue. Real people don’t talk that much. I mean we talk, sure, but we don’t talk about things like love, desire, hurt, fear. Particularly men. It’s an awful lot more powerful to suggest that one character loves another than going and spoiling it all by having them say something stupid like ‘I love you’.

There are two asian guys sitting in the alfresco area of the cafe in which I’m writing this (the same cafe where I wrote Over The Wall). They’re smiley characters in skinny jeans and suit jackets, bathed in sunlight, doing everything they can to avoid sitting in their chairs the mainstream way; putting their feet on the other chairs, hanging their legs over the arm rests, tucking a foot under themselves. They’re bejewelled and drinking from tiny cups. One’s texting and listening. The other’s explaining something embarrassing; he won’t look at his friend. At the end of the story the friend lets his head hang back a little until it catches all the yellow light from above and smiles in a sad kind of way. Says nothing. And that’s critical. He says nothing. It’s the look that says ‘I feel ya, bro’ or ‘Man, that sucks’ or ‘Jeez, I’m glad it wasn’t me’, or all those things at once.

We say ‘I love you’ by brushing the back of someone’s neck with our fingers as we pass behind them sitting at a desk. We say ‘I hate you’ by breaking something that we know they cherish, not picking up the phone, turning our chair away from theirs. You can say ‘I want you’ by taking a ribbon from your hair. I remember a friend telling me once that she was in that shadowy, soft, tender place with a man between the shut door and the surface of the bed and the guy she was with said ‘Let’s do this.’ It turned her off so fast and so bad she had to leave. You can ruin everything with just a few words.

Try to be tender with your description. Light, and soft, and subtle.

When you say ‘storm’, your reader knows what you’re talking about, so as soon as you’ve used the word your reader has clouds and rain and lightning and thunder in their head. Add a couple of things your reader might have forgotten about this experience if you like: the heaviness, the earth taste to the air, the way a sound can, if it’s loud and sudden enough, move in your belly like an unborn child. Then leave it. Refuse to ruin it with more. Cut that shit out. You’ll be left with the intricate bones of an idea, and your reader will add the flesh and make it move.

Battle scars

So before I talk about that stomach-twisting, soul-crushing, esteem-dissolving phenomenon that is a part of every writer’s life; rejection, I want to take a few quick lines to say hello to all my new followers and to welcome you to my blog. When I started this thing, a slow line of followers developed as I tagged the right way and promoted myself on Twitter, but the bulk of you, I imagine, came along when ‘Over the Wall’ was selected to be Freshly Pressed. I invite you to make me a part of your writerly experience – comment, argue with and query me – because if there’s one thing I know about writers is that you’re all a rare breed of spotted cat when it’s cool to wear stripes, and the more you learn and share with each other the better your writing will be. So high-five to my writerly friends in Pakistan, Qatar, Jamaica, Costa Rica, London, The Isle of Mann, Iceland, and everybloodywhere else. I’m glad to have you here.

I’ve been writing since I was twelve, although back then it was all imitations of Martin Scorsese films with shadowy-eyed wiseguys and slinky prostitutes, and my complete teenage ignorance about New York and drug importation crippled my work. I moved from gangsters to vampires when Anne Rice rocked my world at age sixteen, so for three straight novels my protagonists were French-lace-wearing undead and I fumbled with romance, which I wasn’t very successful at, as I was no one’s idea of desire with my waist-length black hair and my Blundstone boots and my rainbow braces. The first time I submitted a manuscript it was one of these preternatural angsty adventures to HarperCollins, and I got a rejection letter (in the mail!) a few months later. It was automated, but I didn’t know that, so I was thrilled by the ‘careful consideration’ they’d put into rejecting my work and the luck they wished me in my writing future. I ran back to the computer and thundered out another book, and this time I sent it to twenty publishers. The letters came back one at a time over nine months. Wow, I thought. This is tough business. 

When I hit university at twenty I decided to take my writing ‘seriously’, so I sat down over a year and a half and squeezed every conceivable idea I had in my head into a 270,000 word crime epic monstrocity. Touch was a world unto itself, a heady clash of supernatural and detective novel spanning thirty years with a cast of dozens, multiple sub-plots and a desk full of research embedded in its pages. It was going to be the crime novel to end all crime novels. I sent it to fifty publishers and got cracking on the sequel straight away (because there was no way this wasn’t going to be the next Da Vinci Code) and was twenty thousand words into book two when the rejections started rolling in. It’s too big. It’s too descriptive. One of the main characters is an insufferable melodramatic sot who can’t seem to drag himself out of his self-loathing and thinks way too much about everything. It’s too dark. It loses it’s way. I watched the emails come in with ever-increasing existential panic. With ten publishers left to reject, a year or so after I’d sent the book out, a big Australian publisher called (I nearly died) to reject me verbally. The problem was, the caller got my book and someone else’s book muddled up in her head and half the rejection didn’t apply. ‘I really think that Mike is just an inconsistent character overall. The orphanage scene demonstrates this, you know?’

There was no Mike in the book. No orphanage scene. But I didn’t argue. I just cried. For three days.

So I scrapped Touch, and it’s sequel, Breathe. I wrote another book, The Retriever, inspired by Liam Neeson‘s character in Taken. I sent it to sixty publishers or so, but this time I made sure I included some overseas options. I caught the attention of a renowned London literary agent, who went nuts over the book initially before fizzling out about two seconds after I’d told everyone I’d ever met about her interest. ‘You have a great book in you,’ she said. ‘It’s just not this one. I’ll be here when you write it. Send me everything you do from now on.’ The sentiment she expressed was something I’d heard before. I was getting to know publishers by name and they were getting to know me in their oh-god-not-you-again kind of way. Keep writing, they told me. You’re good at this. The book is coming. This just isn’t it. 

No, this isn’t it either. 

Sorry, no, not this one, either. 

Um, this is getting awkward, but… No. Maybe the next one?

I’ve never taken rejection well. For each of the two hundred or so rejection letters for the four serious novels I wrote before Hades, I got drunk. I hated the game. I hated the publishers. I hated Stephanie Meyer, and J. K. Rowlings, and that eighteen-year-old who wrote The Lovely Bones for their Cinderella publishing stories. I called my mother and ranted and raved until I knocked my wine glass over. How could no one want me, when there was such trash out there being printed and sold from Bangladesh to Boston? How could no one want me, when some of the people rejecting me were two-man garage publishing houses printing erotic poetry from elderly school teachers? It was rigged, I decided, the whole thing. J.K. was probably some big-wig publisher’s girlfriend in high school. I didn’t need to be published to write. And write I did. Every day. The same way I had been since I was a kid, chewing bits of plastic and hammering the keys and pulling my legs up and crossing them in the desk chair, Jerry Springer on the TV in the background, Facebook open on the tool bar. I wasn’t going to be less dark. I wasn’t going to write on trend. I wasn’t going to pick themes from the bestseller list or try to sound like James Patterson. I sat down and wrote Hades, and it was glorious fun. It’s going to final print in November.

I used to be ashamed of my colossal pile of rejection material, so much so that most of the time when I received a damning letter I kept it to myself, or deleted it immediately. My pile of rejections used to make me feel like a bad writer, and sometimes, when I was really low, a bad person: a loser, someone still harbouring the juvenile fantasy of an unobtainable rockstar dream, someone who should really just face reality and get a proper job. I’ve changed, and it wasn’t the publishing deal that changed me. Not long before the deal, I’d started joking to my family and friends that I was going for the title of Australia’s Most Rejected Writer. Before that, I’d been shocked by the respect, love, admiration and humour I’d inspired in others by being the blind, idiot wife of a cheating, gambling husband. When my marriage failed (and it was a monumental failure: I mean, I failed at that like it was my job) my shame was cancelled out by how wonderful everyone was about it. I was suddenly fallible. Brave, even. I’d proven myself.

 Failure, I realised, and your determination to pick yourself up and brush yourself off afterward, can be an honour code.

It’s something that happens to everyone. It’s something essential to life. So the fifty, sixty, eighty, two hundred rejections you get will be the two hundred scars you got fighting your way to the frontline. Rejection should harden you without making you bitter, it should change the way you feel about yourself and your work, and when you gain success, as you will, it should stand as an indicator of your growth. For now, promise yourself that you will print your next rejection letter and keep it, the way I didn’t keep so many of mine, because it will be a part of your history. It will be a moment, one of hundreds, when you were told you couldn’t do what you were trying to do.

And you didn’t listen.