More rambling through the wilderness: N M Browne
I am sorry if that makes my posts a bit samey. It is making
my life a bit samey too: like a video on loop. I keep returning to the same
sentences, changing them, then rereading them and changing them again. You see, I have to sound like a twelve-year
old boy and the prolix middle-aged woman keeps on sneaking out through
inappropriate qualifiers, peeping out through syntax that ought to have died
with the Edwardians. She is a pain this middle aged woman. She will keep mucking
up the flow of the story with random passages of overwritten prose. Then when I
walk away from my desk, make yet another hot beverage I take pity on her. She’s
doing her best, not everything she does is dreadful, she’s just out of touch.
Oh shit! She’s me.
How can someone in this state have anything useful to share?
I am sadly not a
writer who can think about the sales pitch before I have the book. Maybe I’d be
a best seller if I could.
In this particular story I’ve had to tease the plot out as I
go, extruding it through some subconscious mechanism I don’t understand but
which seems to run on an unhealthy mix of coffee, wine and youtube videos. I am
not complaining, I am very happy to be working. I am however apologising for
doing EVERYTHING WRONG. If you are or have ever been a student of mine - cover
your eyes.
I don’t know what my story is about. If you were to ask me,
as kind people occasionally do because its nice to take an interest in the
weirdo in the corner, I say;’ It’s a children’s book,’ then, ‘It’s a magical
thing about a boy. It’s a bit of a strange story. I’m not expecting much of
it.’ THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO DO IT. We must all have an elevator pitch rehearsed
ready for that question. We never know who might ask it so we must, like
literary girl scouts, always be prepared. Similarly, the same gentle, patient
interrogator, valiantly making conversation with this dippy woman pretending to
be a writer might ask: ‘and who is it
for?’ Sadly they will get by way of garbled reply something like‘ Well, it’s
younger, not YA but not very young maybe nine or perhaps twelve.’ They are
entitled to regard me as a rank amateur. A children’s writer should know their
target market, should gear the text to meet the needs of a particular kind of
reader.
My way is not the way to write. It is definitely not the way
to sell but sometimes it is the only way you can proceed.
Obviously after this
last round of word wrangling, and plot untwisting I will be able to share
helpful stuff about how to bag a million readers with nothing more than a
facebook page and a digitised arrangement of well-ordered words. I’ll explain
how to negotiate film rights and build an audience on twitter. Or not. Till
then all I have is the wilderness and my blunt machete…
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