The Novel problem

With a successful career as a journalist and advertising copy writer, I was inspired to live my dream. To become a writer.

 

I had always wanted to write, as literature was the only artform open to me. Never having travelled to the mainland I had never seen theatre, ballet, opera, I had never visited an art gallery, the only music I had ever heard were the Touring Folkies, a group of folk singers who travelled from island to island until they were thrown off.

 

Books were the only artform capable of making the journey to the island. The boatman ran an informal library service for the islands on the archipelago, and also had contacts with the book wholesalers which meant that he could get me contemporary fiction at reduced prices. It was as if the net book agreement didn’t exist, which of course it didn’t for the offshore principalities he was purchasing for.

 

So I tried writing. I struggled for inspiration, after all nobody wants to read stories about a young boy living on a virtually uninhabited island which he never leaves. But, inspired by the success of my journalistic career, I started writing about things I knew nothing about.

 

I was naive.  I thought that as soon as a publisher read one of my stories they would rush to publish my work. I hadn’t understood that to them I was an isolated nobody, sitting alone on an island nobody knew existed. I just wasn’t attending the right parties.

 

I sent my stories everywhere, and got rejection letters back from everywhere. Getting short stories published, I discovered, wasn’t as easy as getting published in a magazine. I wrote a short story based on an article I had written for Basildon Breakdance Magazine, only to receive a rejection from the publish, stating that my story was full of factual inaccuracies about Basildon and breakdancing. This was true, but hadn’t been a problem for the magazine.

 

My attempts to get a novel published proved even less successful. Time and time again I met with the same reply: ‘You have to actually have written a novel before we can publish it.’

 

I did try to write a novel, of course I did, but it wasn’t easy. A short story, or a magazine article, could be knocked out in a couple of hours, with little thought. But a novel! That needed a plot, complex characters. Not just 80,000 words, but 80,000 words that made coherent sense. 

 

I had almost given up hope. There was just one publisher left in the Mainland Publishers Yearbook.  I sent them a selection of my stories and pretended it was a novel, hoping they wouldn’t spot the blatant fact that my ‘novel’ was nothing more than a random gathering-together of short stories.

 

Amazingly, a few days’ later, I received an acceptance letter and a cheque for two hundred mainland pounds as an advance for completion of the novel.

 

I read and re-read the letter, but it made no sense.

 

It was a contract, to complete a novel, within the space of two years. In addition to a two hundred mainland pounds advance, I was promised a further five hundred pounds upon completion, plus a commitment to ‘publicise and, where possible, sell the novel in bookshops and such like’.

 

A genuine contract with a genuine publisher and, more importantly, genuine payment.

 

Also enclosed was a summary of the novel I was to write, including a chapter by chapter outline of the plot. The novel was a murder mystery, set in New York. None of the sample chapters I had sent had made the cut.

 

Why had I, a man who had never left the isolated island I was born on, seen no greater crime than the theft of a shiny new penny by a malicious magpie, been commissioned  to write a murder mystery set in New York City?

 

It was madness.

 

Yet, it was also being paid to write a novel.

 

Confused, I waited for the hands of the clock to rotate several times until they had finally reach mainland office hours, and I rung the publisher. An answerphone message informed me that this was a publishers, not a normal business, therefore there was no point my ringing before noon.

 

I called back at the appointed hour. The publisher, it transpired, had left for an early lunch at the nearby pub. I explained my dilemma to the secretary/receptionist/person who does all the actual work.

 

“He’s probably just confused you with another writer,” she said, matter-of-factly.

 

“Really? Do publishers do that? I thought they prided themselves on accuracy and meticulous attention to detail.”

 

There was a strange pause on the other end of the phone. Eventually the woman spoke. Mr Metaphor makes most of his decisions down the Dog and Horses, where he has access to a bottomless pool of real-life inspiration. It does mean he’s prone to, very occasionally, sending a contract to the wrong author.”

 

“You mean I should return the contract.”

 

Another strange pause.

 

“You could do that. Or you could just write the book you’ve been contracted to write. After all, it will be published and you might not get another opportunity.”

 

“Thank you,” I said.

 

I thought long and hard about the moral implications of writing what was clearly another author’s book and began writing it a few minutes later.

 

I asked the boatman to bring a book on New York on the next boat. Unfortunately, the only book he could find was seventy or more years old, which was why my first novel was set in New York in the 1930s, when the jazz age (whatever that was) was at its height.

 

Against all my expectations, the book was published with very little editorial alteration and became a modest success (The best murder mystery set in New York during the Jazz Age published this year – The Off-Mainlander Magazine) and I signed a contract to write a further three books.