Publishing People Part One (and why your characters aren't really real)

Forgive my absence over the last few days. I have had to tear myself away from checking the amazon rating (which has gone up to 10,000 and down to 90,000 at various points) to spend time with some of the people who made my book happen.

When you’re writing, you’re on your own. Well, apart from your characters, and contrary to what some delusional writers say, the characters AREN’T REALLY REAL. They don’t do anything without your permission, they don’t live outside your head, they don’t talk to you.* When I was writing The Bride Hunter, I did feel that the characters became very vivid in my mind very quickly, so that I could easily work out what would be their authentic response to a situation…but I still knew that I was the puppet-master and I could take them where I wanted and do nasty things to them (all to help them ‘grow’ and simultaneously to make the reader want to turn the page) . I worry about writers who think their characters talk to them.

It's completely different when readers (and so far I only have my editor, my agent and various family members to go on with The Bride Hunter) say that the characters SEEM real. That is something every author dreams of.

This is what it’s really like – Author Julie Cohen has recently uploaded a photo of her Post-it plotting door – and I used a similar technique for Bride Hunter, where I worked out roughly what was going to happen, and used Post-its to put the scenes in the most dramatic order.

Anyway, that was a bit of an aside. So the other night I went to meet a lot of the people who make the book real. Now, before I got my first deal, I had no idea who most of these people were or what they did, yet I was fascinated by the mysterious world of editors and agents and so on, so I thought it might be fun to describe the main dramatis personae. I shall be describing the different roles in separate posts over the next week or so. Hope I don’t get it wrong: my career could depend on it.

Let us begin with…

The Editor: often this is the first person you meet after your agent calls to say a publisher is interested in your work. In the world of commercial fiction, your editor will, nine times out of ten, be a woman, and probably be extraordinarily glamorous. In fact, the editor is usually way more glam than her authors, because she has to be very persuasive and elegantly professional in meetings/lunches with influential buyers from bookshops and supermarkets etc. If you are able to write full-time, then she will definitely be better turned out than you are, because while you are sitting at home in forgiving track suit bottoms, comfort-eating biscuits because you can't find the right way to finish a sentence, your editor is negotiating high level deals over rocket salad (without ever getting a leaf stuck between her teeth).

She will also have impeccable literary taste (well, the fact that she paid company money for your book is the ultimate proof). She probably did English at Oxbridge. If you're lucky, she is like your big sister (even if she's ten years younger than you), explaining the ways of the publishing world with the same no-nonsense yet compassionate tone that a big sis uses when advising you on Boys and Periods. She will treat your story with the same respect: making suggestions but not killing your style. The best editors (and I count my lucky stars in this respect) will push you like a sports coach, so your personal best really does get better each time, even though there will be moments when your brain suffers from the writing equivalents of cramp, tennis elbow or groin strain.

How to spot them: Designer clothes (though possibly last season's, as salaries in publishing are notoriously low) OR arty signature style a la Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. High heels OR, if she's a little more old-school, then that Ms Jean Brodie style sexy blue-stocking look. Excellent lipstick. Slightly tired eyes (all the Touche Eclat in the world can't disguise the particular kind of red-eye induced by reading so many manuscripts). One shoulder (usually the left one) lower than the other, from hauling said manuscripts home on the Tube.

* it is possible, of course, that I have been doing this whole writing thing quite wrong. If so, can someone share the secret of communing with the fictional world, as I have a feeling that it would be an awful lot quicker to write a novel if the characters did their own thing and all the author had to do was listen to the disembodied voices and transcribe them.