Award-winning journalist and writer Francesca Steele talks to authors about their experiences of rejection, from self-doubt to books not selling, and how they get past it.
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Since releasing this episode in January, Pineapple Street, now out in the UK, has become a New York Times bestseller! Enjoy!
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Jenny Jackson’s forthcoming novel Pineapple Street is one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, but Jenny is also a Vice President and Executive Editor at Knopf, so she knows all about publishing from the other side of things too. She has an incredible list of authors, from Emily St John Mandel, to Cormac McCarthy, Helen Fielding, Katherine Heiny, who we’ve had on this podcast before. And she says that after 20 years in publishing writing has taught her to be a better editor. Finally, she says, she understands why it is that authors can be so reluctant to revise.
Jenny actually wrote another novel right before Pineapple Street that she wasn’t able to publish and the experience left her heartbroken. Luckily for us, she decided to jump straight back in and write something else.
I’m so grateful to Jenny for sharing that experience here, and also for her advice on fulfilling and subverting reader expectations, rejecting authors she’s already worked with and what it felt like to have friends in publishing pass on Pineapple Street.
Pineappe Street isn’t out in the UK until 13 April but I really recommend that you pre-order it. It really is that good. And I will rerelease this episode coming up to publication.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
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16 Feb 2023
Tessa Hadley
If you want to write domestic fiction I cannot recommend reading Tessa Hadley, or indeed listening to her here, enough.
Tessa, who has been long-listed twice for what is now the Women’s Prize and whom the Washington Post called “one of the greatest stylists alive”, wrote four failed novels throughout her thirties and was finally published aged 46, with Accidents in the Home. She has now written eight novels and is one of the modern masters of domestic fiction, burrowing into the complex inner lives of middle aged women and the clashes between them, their feelings and the outer world.
They are books of enormous sensitviy but also, as Tessa says here, born of a lot of control and labour, and while Tessa is clear about how compelled she is to write she is also keen to dispel the idea that it is in any way easy. “I’m a slow and painful writer.. writing in a knot of constipation” she says,.
I find her story as riveting as her writing. She worked away for years on what she later realised were all the wrong sorts off things - books about big political events when really she was interested in things closer to home. I found her fascinating on how she kept going (even when someone told her nobody wanted to read stories about people in their forties) and how writing is learning to hear what you sound like in readers minds.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
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9 Feb 2023
Andrew Sean Greer
Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of six novels including Less and Less is Lost, which are both bittersweet, tragicomic road trip tales about Arthur Less, a failing and flailing mid-list novelist. But it’s not just through his fiction that Greer is familiar with mid-list despondency. He originally wrote Less when he was feeling exactly that way himself, but then, although it was rejected by 12 British publishers, felt slightly less dependent when it went on to win the Pulitzer! Last he year he published a follow-on, Less is Lost, which his agent actually advised him not to write for reasons we discuss. He did it anyway.
I love this interview. Andrew is just such a jolly yet occasionally reassuringly despairing writer, racking up dozens of drafts and being honest about the poverty early writing can involve. I loved in particular talking to him about the details of turning the originally serious Less into a comic novel, and also about finding the diamond heist. You’ll have to listen to end to find out what that means but I think it’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. Find the diamond heist!
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
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