FEATURE
From the Reading Chair: Behind the successful debut
Sometimes it feels like certain authors come from nowhere to become the next big thing. However, this is almost always not the case. Laurel Cohn examines the myth of the overnight success. ‘Douglas Stuart’s Booker win heralds arrival of a fully formed voice’ (Alison Flood, ‘Douglas Stuart wins Booker prize for debut Shuggy Bain’, The Guardian, November 20, 2020). It’s the sort of headline – and success – that writers dream about. Alongside the Booker Prize, Shuggy Bain went on to win a host of other awards in the US, UK and Europe. But it wasn’t the only debut to hit the big time in 2020. Alka Joshi’s The Henna Artist quickly made it to the bestseller lists of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly. It became a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub pick, and is currently in development for a Netflix series. We are right to be dazzled by stories of authors bursting onto the scene with debut novels to win major prizes or become bestsellers; such spectacular successes are indeed newsworthy, because they are rare. But let’s not lose perspective: these writers haven’t ‘come from nowhere’. Behind the fairytale success you will find backstories of years of hard work, diligence and determination. The ten-year overnight success Joshi’s The Henna Artist was hailed as an ‘overnight’ success, yet as she has pointed out in many interviews, that success was built on a manuscript development process spanning a decade. Joshi had been toying with a book idea based on her mother’s life and an early draft became her thesis for an MFA. A few years after graduation one of her thesis advisors contacted her to see how the writing
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was going. Joshi had had a break from writing, but the advisor put her in touch with an editor, who read the manuscript, and Joshi worked on those recommendations for the following year. The advisor then sent the work to her agent, who agreed to take her on. The agent worked with Joshi for several more years, honing the story, trimming and tightening. There was major culling. After getting through that process, the agent suggested it was now ready to send to a developmental editor. The editor came back with fifteen pages of suggestions. That feedback knocked over Joshi’s confidence and her will to keep rewriting. She put the manuscript away. For a year. When she revisited it, and reread the editor’s advice, she could see how encouraging the feedback had been, and she pushed through the next draft. Finally, her agent agreed it was ready to submit to a publisher. The nub of it is that it takes time to master the craft. In an interview Joshi said, ‘It took me ten years to really learn how to write The Henna Artist, how to layer it with all of the complexities, and how to grow a character in order for the story to come alive and make it meaningful to so many people.’ While there will be differing levels of natural talent and experience that writers bring to their projects, you can’t bypass doing the work. The apprenticeship Writing takes practice and the more you write, the better you get at it. You can think of your time spent on unpublished manuscripts as an apprenticeship. My use of the plural – unpublished manuscripts – is deliberate. Very few of the published writers I know or have
