Finding my agency

How securing literary representation changed the way I see myself

“Mummy…good at writing.” Maybe my 7-year-old son is…right?

I was utterly thrilled, amazed and proud as punch to get signed by my wonderful literary agent ten days after sending her my submission package in December 2021. To be clear: this swift timescale is unusual. And that’s why this post is not going to be a blow-by-blow account of the run-up to what was probably the most unexpectedly exciting week of my life.

It’s not going to tell you about the spreadsheet of agencies I’d been meticulously researching and adding to for months, nor about my struggles with writing a synopsis (which I honestly found harder than writing an entire novel).

It’s not going to outline the weeks it took to perfect my cover letter, nor about the way my hands shook on the frosty morning I submitted my manuscript extract to ten of my dream literary agents.

I’m not going to go into all of that because so many other authors, editors and literary consultancies have already done so brilliantly, I followed their guidance to the letter and there’s nothing I could possibly add.

Instead, I hope you’ll indulge me as I share with you what securing a literary agent meant to me.

2021 had been a hard year, as it had been for many of us I’m sure. Just as I’d finished writing the first draft of my manuscript at the start of summer, I entered a period of intense stress at work. The trigger for the stress wasn’t huge in the great scheme of things. However, the situation unleashed a huge amount of self-doubt, insecurity and anxiety that I now realise had been building up inside of me for decades.

Because, the truth is, I’ve always felt a bit invisible. A bit forgettable. A bit of a wallflower, I guess. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to be said for being able to blur into the background whenever the world feels a bit much. But when you’ve spent your life subconsciously striving to make yourself ‘useful’ and ‘likeable’ in order to be noticed, it’s easy to bury the fundamental, in-built quirks and qualities that make you you.

Rediscovering creative writing showed me how I could channel my innate weirdness into something tangible and meaningful. It allowed me to reconnect with the ten-year-old girl who’d nervously read her Take That story to her classmates all those years ago. To remember the unconventional teenager who’d inadvertently say the strangest things, much to the amusement of her peers. To appreciate the awkward young adult whose brain was always buzzing with ideas and worries, but whose face was affixed with a permanent grin so as to not risk scaring anyone away with her natural intensity.

Don’t get me wrong, all this stuff is part of growing up and, like everyone, I was doing my best to navigate my way through a complicated world. But I got so preoccupied with focusing on how others might perceive me on the outside that I gradually stopped noticing what I needed on the inside.

But writing my book changed that. For the first time in decades, I’d found a way to spend my ‘spare’ time that felt nourishing. I could happily sit for hours tapping away on my story and still feel full of enthusiasm and energy at the end of it. I was finally embracing what my brain had yearned for all along: to imagine, to create and to play. To find connections between unexpected things. To write relatable but ambitious stories.

I’ve always known that I could write well on behalf of others, but what I’ve always doubted was whether I was any good at writing for myself. So when I sent my book out into the world in the run-up to Christmas in 2021, my expectations were low. I’d read countless accounts of authors hearing nothing back for weeks or even months, and I was already planning to send out another round of unsuccessful submissions in the new year.

But my expectations were wrong. Requests for my full manuscript arrived quickly. Quite a lot of them. Yet, while all the interest was amazing, it also had a strange numbing effect on me. I’d never experienced so much positive yet unanticipated attention from so many people all at once, and my brain didn’t know how to handle it.

But I muddled through, signing on the digital dotted line with my literary agency shortly before Christmas. And that’s when I could breathe again and begin to process what all this meant: for the first time in my adult life, I felt seen instead of ‘liked’. I felt valued instead of ‘useful’. I felt like I had something I might be able to offer the world beyond being ‘the smiley one’ or ‘the organised one’.

This newsletter is called ‘Becoming an author’. But, really, the instant I started writing my first book in 2020, I already was one. So now I’m wondering whether I should have called the newsletter something else. Because, actually, I’ve not been becoming an author, after all.

I’ve been becoming myself.

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This month’s tip for other aspiring authors: Would you like to become an author, too? Here’s how to do it: start writing something. Congratulations, you’re now an author! To deepen your understanding of your characters I couldn’t recommend Dr Stephanie Carter’s Psychology for Writers online course more highly. If you want your characters to have realistic flaws who develop in line with their psychological make-up throughout the story, this is the course for you.
Currently reading: Skip To The End by Molly James*. I do love a rom-com with a twist, and the premise for this one had me hooked from the blurb: imagine if you could see how every romantic encounter would end the instant you kissed them for the first time? I’m a few chapters in and loving it already (and thanks to Quercus for the gifted copy). Full review next month!
What I last enjoyed reading: Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister*. I’m such a sucker for any books with time-travelling elements, and this thriller has another great concept: a mum watches her son murder a stranger one night. He’s arrested and seems destined for a long prison sentence. But the next day she wakes up and…it’s the day before the murder. Can she stop the murder from ever happening? This was a brilliant, twisty page-turner, though I did think the morality of the big reveal could have been explored more critically.
What I last enjoyed watching: Everything I Know About Love. I’ve not read Dolly Alderton’s memoir on which this (fictionalised) series is based. But I did love her novel Ghosts*, and this show, too, is hooked around a 20-something millennial woman who’s yearning for something but can’t quite pinpoint what. Set in 2012, the show perfectly captures a society on the brink of the social media revolution, told via a group of girlfriends who’ve moved to London straight out of uni. I loved watching these characters grow, make mistakes and learn fundamental truths about themselves.
What I’ve been thinking a lot about: Satire. As in, has satire gone too far? Are we laughing at chaos more than we should? Is satire being weaponised as a means of diluting our justified anger and preventing us from rising up? I’d love to explore this in my fictional endeavours one day…