Harriet Now and Then

March 13, 2022 / Susan Barrett / Leave a comment

Susan’s thirteenth novel is about two women who share the name Harriet. Alternate chapters tell their individual stories. The first Harriet lived in the west country in the second half of the eighteenth century; the other is alive today. The first Harriet wrote poetry and married a man who had a good reputation as a poet. The second Harriet is a cellist and, through meeting an American professor of literature, becomes involved in research into the life of the first Harriet. The circumstances of the two women’s lives may be different but the challenges they face as women artists are similar. The 18th century Harriet does as well as she can, within the confines of a woman’s life at the time. Today’s Harriet was widowed young and left with an emotionally disordered son. She might have become a talented composer and concert cellist but has to gain a steady income while giving her son, now adult, a home and care. Both Harriet meet men who may make a difference to their lives but fail to do so, for different reasons.

Now available on Amazon in paperback and as an ebook. Follow the link at the start of this blog.

Thoughts for fiction writers

April 30, 2018April 30, 2018 / Susan Barrett / Leave a comment

Thoughts for fiction writers: what and why do we write?

First, the ‘why’. We write to communicate our ideas. That means we write for readers. That begs the question: the ‘what’. What kind of novel should we write to find the readers we want?

From clay tablets to illuminated manuscripts, from parchment to print, the path from writer to reader is always changing. With the digital revolution, more books are published each year than ever before. It seems every second person wants to write a book and does so. It’s remarkably easy to self-publish a novel. In that ever-expanding universe, broadly speaking, the men write crime, thrillers and sci-fi; the women, gothic tales, fantasy and romance. A huge number of these novels are never read by anyone outside the writer’s immediate circle. The writers who are natural publicisers or trained in marketing may do well. The quality of the writing has no bearing on the quantity of sales. There is no filter.

Meanwhile, life in the traditional publishing world continues. Publishers have always been on the lookout for the next new trend while they publish what followed the last trend. Their best-selling titles subsidise their punts on new writers. Once you are an established name, you can go on writing the books that you are known for. You are as safe as any writer ever is, as long as you keep up your standard. Even when your standard slips or you write something that is outside your usual stamping ground, you may still be published on the strength of your name. However, if you have never been well-known, then you are in the publishers’ bran tub, with or without an agent. Your latest novel may get picked out of the sawdust and given the necessary marketing boost, or it may join the thousands of rejected titles. If you are entering the fray with your first novel, you are lucky if you are one of the very few who are taken on as a calculated risk.

Literary or genre? If you write genre, then you are more likely to be taken up. This is simply because the great mass of readers read fiction that can be easily classified: as in crime, romance, spy, thriller, war, sci-fi, fantasy. But trying to box novels into literary or genre is not easy. A literary novel may have content that can be categorized as belonging to a genre. Crime and Punishment comes to mind, as well as Anna Karenina and War and Peace from 19^th century writers. In contemporary writing, The English Patient is a good example of a literary novel in the category or genre of war and romance.

Does the difference between literary and genre fiction lie in the quality of the writing? Sometimes, but not always. The quality of the writing is not a certain indicator of whether a novel is literary or genre. Genre can be well written. Literary novels can be poorly written. There are well written novels and badly written novels. Badly written novels will sell with the right marketing. A commercial success does not mean a book is well-written.

To justify the description ‘literary’, the novel should provoke thought. It should pay attention to human nature. The three elements of a novel – plot, character and context – should be balanced in such a way that each aspect illuminates the others. The theme may be concerned with a fundamental life dilemma. Literary novels have originality in ideas and style.

Discussing this with a friend, novelist, short-story writer and artist Marcus Campbell, he offered the following thoughts about literary fiction writing. “we write to explore and thus reveal a particular truth, which may, in the end, express some universal aspect of Truth”. He developed this further: “We write for the satisfaction of telling that truth in such a way that it convinces the mind and moves the heart of unknown readers, who may then experience our writing as a thing of value and beauty.”

Laudable aims, difficult to achieve in practice. Even if you write beautifully, convincingly, movingly, such work nowadays is unlikely to reach the readership you hope for. Where is the literary agent who will put time and energy on a long bet? What publisher will touch it?

To sum up:

For finding an agent, a publisher and commercial success, write genre.

For self-satisfaction, a faint chance of publication and critical acclaim, write literary fiction

Whatever we write, let’s write it as well as we can, and trust to luck.

What’s in a name?

April 21, 2018April 21, 2018 / Susan Barrett / Leave a comment

If only I’d foreseen the plethora of Susan Barretts that abound in the writing world, I’d have called myself Zuilla Plenkinthorpe when I started out in the 1960s. This morning, while tidying my tracks on the internet, I came across one more Susan Barrett to add to the list of – what might you call us? – sib-writerlings. There’s a writer about economics and accountancy and at least two novelists sharing the name, and now here comes another. This newcomer was, like me, born in Plymouth, although many decades later than me by the lovely look of her. But she had the foresight to put a J between her forename and surname.

A lack of foresight is not as bad as the mistake I made when Amazon started Author Pages. Halfway through my career (actually, I don’t know if it was halfway or not – there’s no way of telling), I signed on for the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa. My idea was to get in touch with contemporary views of fiction. One of my tutors was an excellent writer of children’s nature books. Ah, I thought to myself; I’ve written children’s nature books, too; I can bulk out my list of publications with those titles. To my mortification, there is no way for the author to fix the order of the list of titles on an Amazon Author Page. When an interested reader clicks on my page, A Day in the Life of a Puppy pops up in pride of place – that is, if the clicker has opted for an alphabetical list. I want my novels to head the list, and my minimal children’s books forgotten. The system doesn’t allow me to delete them. Ggrrrr.

Something else I’ve learnt in the last years is, if I want to be welcomed by a publisher again, I must write a different kind of book. All this is to say that my next novel will be a tale throbbing with adjectives by Zuilla Plenkithorpe.

Phew!

May 13, 2017 / Susan Barrett / Leave a comment

How do other people manage to set up their personal websites? It is easy enough with WordPress to get a basic site up and running. But it has taken me days and days to work out how to get social media buttons onto the sidebar of this one. I fly about between screens, chasing URLs and passwords and old memos in the deep caverns of my computer and among the loose notes and notebooks on my desk. The worst of it is that I cannot reward myself with a glass of wine at six o’clock. I’m trying to lower blood pressure through diet rather than medication, so no alcohol for a while.
All these tussles and puzzles need to be gone through in order to regain my mojo for writing. I want to find new readers for the kind of fiction I like to write. In the past when I was lucky enough to be published by mainstream publishers, I received lots of good reviews. I can see no reason why there aren’t a number of readers out there who would enjoy my last three novels. But how can we find each other?
I’ve given up on getting any response from agents or publishers, and am now swimming in the crowded ocean of self-publishers, most of whom – or so it seems to me – write fantasy fiction of one sort or another, with an anything-goes kind of attitude to writing standards.
If anyone who happens to read this and is in the same situation as I am – a writer of literary fiction who has been published in the past by mainstream publishers – do please get in touch.

How to be your own PRO

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 / Susan Barrett / Leave a comment

I’m just at the beginning of this lesson. I’m not even sure if the job title is still Publicity Relations Officer. But I have learnt one or two things since I began hoping to sell my books this autumn.

First of all, it’s necessary to have the confidence that what you are selling is worth selling. This is not easy when it is your own work.

It’s like looking in the mirror. Do you count the lines on your forehead? Those will surely have increased just by looking at them with a critical eye. Those of us who regard our own image with lasting satisfaction are few and far between. The same applies to writing. Of course it’s right to be self-critical while you are doing the writing. But if you want to sell your own book, then you have to squash that impish little self-doubting critic and concentrate on what is good.

The next imp that jumps in is the one who tells us not to boast. I wonder if this imp pesters people of my (elderly) generation more than others. I know I was brought up not to draw attention to myself. This attitude is a severe disadvantage if you want to sell your work.

But an advantage we have nowadays is the way we can easily communicate with the world without leaving the safety of our own rooms. I have decided to run an advertising campaign on LinkedIn. I’ve placed an ad, with the image of the cover of “A Home from Home”, on a pay per click basis. Clicks will come through to this website, but will any click on this site result in another click to the Amazon page of the novel? And will that further click result in a sale? It seems a long chance.

My early career as an advertising copywriter prompted me to write FREE in big letters in the headline. The only thing I could offer free was the ebook edition on Kindle Unlimited. So no royalties there. But it may bring me new readers. And that’s my biggest aim.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1537014838