How To Get Your Novel Published

Rosy Thornton is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as well as a rookie novelist. She lives in a Cambridgeshire village with her partner, two daughters and a small pack of spaniels.

You could win a copy of Hearts and Minds in our competition.

Details below!

First, may I say how grateful I am to David for giving me this space to air some thoughts about writing? Writers relish nothing more than being the chance to write – and being both an academic and a lawyer as well as a novelist, that’s two more reasons in my case for being ever ready with an opinion!

I told David that I might talk about the dangers of ‘writing close to home’, because that is a topic which has been much on my mind in the past few weeks; I hope he will forgive me if it ends up also being about confused identities.

When I first started to write fiction in 2005 it was very much a secret vice. I came clean about my habit at home, to a certain amount of gentle ribbing from my nearest and dearest, but mentioned nothing to anybody at work.

The usual embarrassment at the hubris of believing oneself capable of writing anything other people might some day wish to read was compounded, in my case, by the fact that I work at the University of Cambridge, where every second person has an unpublished novel or three in their bottom drawer. And these people’s magna opera are, you can be sure, undiscovered Booker-contending classics, works of major literary merit – certainly nothing so insignificant as humorous commercial fiction.

Even when I finished my first novel and secured a literary agent, the whole business seemed unreal to me, like a closet Walter Mitty life of mine, wholly remote from my everyday existence. (‘My novel’ I used to try saying to myself in my head, and ‘my agent’ – but it never sounded very likely.)

When, after we had edited my manuscript together (communicating in the prescribed 21^st century manner, only by e-mail) and my agent suggested coming to Cambridge to meet me, the pieces of my separate worlds, so tidily kept apart, seemed set on an alarming collision course. I had to warn him that his appearance in the faculty Senior Common Room was likely to cause me severe trauma, since heretofore he had no existence beyond the magic electronic box on the corner of my desk.

Publication of that first book, in the autumn of 2006, was negotiated safely. I was on sabbatical leave and working largely from home, so such things as a book launch were able to take place without anybody at work noticing. My first novel, More Than Love Letters, was in any case a romantic comedy, and thus designed to pass beneath the radar of most of my esteemed colleagues.

The problem came with my second novel. Succumbing to pressure from my agent – a fan of the campus novel genre – I decided to take the plunge and do what it might have been natural to do from the start: namely, to write about Cambridge.

Hearts and Minds is set in St Radegund’s, a fictional all-women college which breaks with 160 years of tradition and appoints a man as its new principal, to the virulent opposition of some of the feminist dons.

It was the easiest book in the world to write. For one thing, I had been Fellow of one (women’s) college here for sixteen years and am currently Fellow of another (mixed). For another thing, anyone familiar with the arcane workings of this university knows how little need there will have been to exaggerate its eccentricities for comic effect: if anything, I had to tone things down a bit to make them believable to outsiders.

So far, so good. The novel came out in paperback at the end of June this year – thankfully hitting the shelves of the local bookshops just after my students had toasted their examination results, packed up their belongings and departed for the summer.

But my colleagues are still here, and this time there has been no concealing my guilty secret. I have effectively been ‘outed’.

It began when I arrived at work to check my pigeonhole and was greeted by the college porters holding open the local newspaper, the centrefold of which contained an interview with me – complete with photograph, leaning against a sixteenth century pillar, hooker-style – under the banner headline ‘Sex and the City’.

Thanks very much, that journalist – way to help my credibility with my workmates! (I wouldn’t mind so much, but to my best recollection there isn’t any sex to speak of in the novel at all.)

And then… well, people round here started actually reading the thing.

I send an e-mail to an eminent professor of history about a disciplinary case I am investigating in my capacity as Deputy Advocate of the University. I am in full-on trying-to-be-grown-up work mode. He replies – with a P.S. about my novel.

I write to a student’s personal tutor; he replies – with a P.S. about my novel.

I phone the office of the college bursar and his secretary answers; ‘by the way,’ she says, ‘I read your book…’

So, is this situation a comfortable one?

I would have to say: not really, no. Universities and colleges are small, insular institutions, where rumour travels fast and everyone knows everyone else. It makes them perfect as the setting for fiction – but it also makes them a difficult place to be ‘that woman who wrote the novel’.

It can also lead to a peculiar kind of schizophrenic confusion, trying to function plausibly in one area of one’s life and being confronted continually with another.

There are times when I want to be Rosy the lecturer, Rosy the lawyer, and not Rosy the comic novelist.

I have spent twenty years trying to believe in myself as a Cambridge don without feeling I have my fingers crossed behind my back; believing that I am really a novelist as well will no doubt take twenty more.

Reconciling the two – maybe never.

And if I’m worried about the shreds of my reputation now…. what on earth will happen in October when the students come back?

Thank you for a lovely entertaining post, Rosy!

And now it’s competition time!

Rosy will choose two of our commenters below at random, each of whom will receive a copy of Hearts and Minds.

I’ll post the winners’ names on Friday. Good luck!