Fay Weldon - Why Will No-One Publish My Novel?: A Handbook for the Rejected Writer

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Youve written a book, triumphantly typed The End, but now, it seems, no-one wants to publish it. What do you do next?

Dont give up: ask yourself what went wrong, then do something about it.

Author of over thirty novels, stories and screenplays, and tutor on the prestigious creative writing course at Bath Spa, Fay Weldon has a lifetime of wisdom to impart on the art of writing.

Why Will No-One Publish My Novel? will delight and amuse, but it isnt just another how-to-write handbook: it shows you how not to write if you want to get published.

Lets get the poor me s over with. Self-pity does not become you. You will develop a wrinkled brow and a turned-down mouth.

All the same, it is a blow, as Mr Rochester, staggering, said to Jane Eyre when Mr Mason turned up unexpectedly from the West Indies. Jane, Ive got a blow; Ive got a blow, Jane!

Sorry, not for us not for us, not for us, not for us, not for us, not for us rejected six times Ouch!

All that time wasted, all that endeavour, all that wrestling with language, tenses, structure, all that time taken away from family and friends, and for what? For nothing.

Bitter. A humiliation. A blow. A public failure.

Okay. Over. But what next? Six times means re-think time.

Dont panic. Just ask yourself why. Work out what went wrong. Why no-one wants the novel on which you worked so hard. Research says that 80 per cent of all submitted manuscripts are rejected, and I have no reason to doubt it. But ask yourself exactly what category (or categories) yours may have fallen into what pigeonhole.

Face it. Be brave. Check the possibilities described below. Then do something about it. Look, learn, re-draft. Edit. Re-edit. Send nothing out that you do not believe to be perfect, that you cant argue for word by word. Well, within limits. And best to know these limits. Read on.

Which pigeonhole was yours?

a) Perhaps your novel was just plain boring?

b) Perhaps you had nothing to say.

c) Perhaps it had no structure: came to no conclusion: wandered all over the place.

d) Perhaps it was too old-fashioned: youre out of touch with the new world.

e) Perhaps theres no USP unique selling proposition and though editors loved it, Marketing didnt think they could sell it. (These days Marketing rules the roost.)

f) Perhaps it was likely to upset too many people. Controversial.

g) Perhaps your synopsis failed to explain your novel as well as it could.

h) Perhaps its too good for them too much fine writing, too little plot.

i) Perhaps they didnt get further than page one before rejecting you as illiterate, not sufficiently educated.

Anyway, your novels been rejected six times, and no-ones told you why. Lets take these possibilities one at a time. Be brave. Do not be defeated. Learn from them. More than one pigeonhole may apply, and all too often does.

a) Too boring

Dont take this as an insult. It doesnt mean you are a boring person no-one who undertakes and has the stamina and will to complete a whole novel is boring, believe me just that you may well have failed to put into the novel the spark that makes you what you are, and why you chose to write it in the first place, and it shows.

Your novel is dull. It has been written with great care, but perhaps using the left side of the brain, the rational, sensible, censorious, red-pencil side, leaving the woozy, fuzzy, dreamy, inventive, right side out altogether.

You may well have used one of the many How to Write a Novel instruction manuals around, and followed all the rules, but its wooden, static, lacks any sense of imperative, of a story that has to be written and demands to be read. Whatever its genre, comedy or tragedy, romance or dystopia, light-hearted or grim, who cares? You wanted to stay anonymous, shelter behind the mechanics of your plot, divorce yourself from your characters ignoring the fact that they must be some aspect of yourself or how could, why would, you have made them up in the first place?

You refused to lose your good opinion of yourself. Your leading character steals, lies, fornicates, cheats nothing to do with me, you told the world. Foolish! Hiding was a mistake. One that will take a lot of rectifying, but it can be done. Though itll need courage.

A writer needs a fair bit of introspection to succeed. I spent five years in psychoanalysis before I was sane enough to write anything longer or more interesting than an advertisement, poor craven wretch of a copywriter that I was, though with a nifty turn of phrase, but little else until then. I could sell product pretty well, but not ideas: I exhausted myself after a couple of paragraphs and craved immediate results. In advertising its write today, in the paper tomorrow . All short-term stuff. In novel writing youre in for the long haul. Take yourself seriously. Know who you are, what you are, and why you are writing. Its the hiding from the self that makes one boring on the page. So forget any delusion that youre a nice person, youre as awful and evil as the worst person you ever imagined. This stuff has to come from somewhere. Abandon your good opinion of yourself before you start your rewrite.

Many fiction writers, it seems to me, are working out on the page the painful problems of their childhood and family, however disguised this is from themselves and others. Some can get it over with in their first novel and lose the desire to write thereafter; theyre the lucky ones. Some go on puzzling and niggling and suffering for the rest of their lives, as I did. (Well, not exactly suffering those were the angry, funny, feminist novels of my youth, which mixed rage with levity, and spoke for an indignant generation.) But I still obsess as to why my puritanical mother was like she was and my darling absent father the way he was, and never paid maintenance. The war between the sexes. Ive never got over it.

Its not just novelists, either. See it in historians. Consider the case of Edward Gibbon, celebrated eighteenth-century historian and belle-lettrist, much of whose life was spent writing the magnificent and entertaining (for those days) six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , proving that the fall of Rome was the result of the dawn of Christianity. He described himself as a puny child, neglected by my Mother, starved by my nurse. He had five siblings, all of whom died in infancy, but still, he complained, his very Christian mother treated him with disdain. As the Duke of Gloucester remarked to him in 1781: Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?

Well, of course. Never got over it. Still puzzling and niggling away at the past, his own or the worlds. Whats the difference? To the child, the home is the world.

Of course a novel shouldnt be over-autobiographical but needs to be written by a human, not a reporting robot, rule obsessed. Its an act of communication between writer and reader. If you try and hide yourself too much (your personality as echoed in the enthusiasms, pains and rages of your characters all hidden aspects of you, remember) and just report what these characters do, readers will shut off because you have failed to engage them.

Its been a not for us six times over, though no agent or publisher will tell you why to your face. Boring! Though they wont say this it sounds too crude and unkind.