Joanne Harris
I wrote my first book when I was nine. It was a 17-page adventure story, handwritten, lavishly illustrated, entitled Flesh-Eating Warriors of the Forbidden City. My best friend and I micro-published it by copying it out a dozen times, packaged it with a suitably bloodthirsty cover and blurb and sold it, for sweets, to our schoolfriends. We basked in an abundance of sweets, which we ate without telling our parents, and for a week became the richest and most popular kids in the class. It was the most lucrative book deal I was to have for the next 30 years.
Encouraged by this early success, I announced to my family my plan to become a novelist when I grew up. My mother (a teacher, the child of a teacher, married to a teacher) looked surprised, and not in a good way. She led me to a room in our house that was filled with books, mostly by 19th-century French novelists who had died (as she informed me) penniless, in the gutter, of syphilis, and asked me to reconsider my career choice. To no one’s surprise, I grew up to become a teacher, and remained in teaching for 15 years.
That said, I never gave up my passion for writing. I kept it a secret from everyone, writing my stories by hand in a series of notebooks, until my soon-to-be husband bought me my first word processor as a birthday present and, having taught myself to type by transcribing my work-in-progress, I began to experiment with the idea of sending my novel to publishers.
In those pre-internet days, I knew nothing about the process of submission. I had no idea that most publishers did not read unsolicited manuscripts, or that my manuscript should be double-spaced and printed on only one side of the paper. My one rejection letter was devastatingly kind: ‘This is quite well written, but far too long and complicated for a children’s book. PS: illustrations should be of professional quality.’ The rest of the publishers I approached did not reply at all.
I sought help at my local library, where I discovered a copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook. From it, I began to learn something about the role of literary agents, as well as some of the things I now think of as blindingly obvious. Realizing that the library’s copy was out of date I bought my own, and continued to do so for many years afterwards. Every year there were different features, covering different aspects of the trade. For someone living in Barnsley with no creative writing qualifications, no writer friends and no contact with the publishing world, the book was a lifeline; it gave me the chance to benefit from the experience of people I thought (wrongly, as it happened) I would never meet, and introduced me both to my first agent and to the Society of Authors, an organization that helped me connect with the writing community and which continues to provide me with invaluable help and advice. Though it took me some years, and many more rejections, finally to become an overnight success, what I read in that first (and slightly outdated) copy of Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook helped me formulate my goals and set my feet on the tortuous path that would eventually lead me to this point in my career – a career I’d once thought impossible.
If you are reading this as a new arrival to the world of publishing, let me pass on a few of the things I wish I’d been told when I was unknown. First, there is no such thing as an ‘aspiring’ artist or writer. If you write, you’re a writer. Welcome to the neighbourhood. We’re all of us at different points on the same learning curve, and we all rely on practice, experience and the input of others to help us improve. Second, nothing you create is ever wasted. If your work is rejected at first, you may find that it gains an unexpected lease of life in later years (that too-hard-for-a-children’s book with the bad illustrations grew up to become my Runemarks series and has been published all over the world). And even if it doesn’t, the repeated act of creation itself makes you a better artist.
So go on, stop worrying, make mistakes, collect your rejection letters, dust yourself off and start again – stronger and knowing more. You are in excellent company, and your failures are nothing to be feared; they are simply the milestones on the road to success. Lastly and most importantly, love what you do. Love writing, love making art, and try to make it as good as you can. There are as many different ways of making art as there are people making it, and for as many different reasons. But the love of it brings us together – as readers, as writers, as artists – and when things go wrong and we may be tempted to give everything up, it is the love of this curious thing we do that will keep us going.
Joanne Harris, MBE is the author of 18 novels including Chocolat (Doubleday 1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, plus collections of short stories, cookbooks, novellas, game scripts, libretti and screenplays. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of Sheffield and Huddersfield, and has been a judge for the Whitbread Prize, the Orange Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Betty Trask Prize and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science. She is currently an elected member of the Management Committee of the Society of Authors.