The Tongues of Men

A few days ago I went to London for the launch of Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph. She is the first from our Trinity College English set and also from among her UEA Creative Writing MA peers to get a novel published.

Anjali has already been picked out by the Telegraph as possibly one of the best young (that’s under 40 in literary life) novelists in Britain – not bad to be listed alongside Zadie Smith et al at any rate. If you’re looking for something to read over the Summer, you could do much, much worse than picking up a copy of her debut novel.

I loved the launch and after parties because of all the other writers there. Some had deals done and were approaching launches of their own; others were redrafting their manuscripts, half way through, or still mulling over ideas. But we all shared a common identity, multifarious as it is. We were all writers, and writers of fiction at that. In Cambridge I’m more often surrounded by small children or IT geeks (pretty sure my colleagues don’t read this blog, but in case they do, I know, not all of you are small children), both of which can be delightful.

But this felt like coming home.

It may have been the wine, but I felt tremendously energised by the evening. It was fun to meet some other writers from Cambridge especially, one of whom turned out to be my five-year-old’s best friend’s mum. She is going to introduce me to other writers and groups in Cambridge. It is such a relief to find other people round the corner going through the same creative processes, who might understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, and might give me feedback and advice. A welcome tonic to the hours spent alone coercing words to come out onto a laptop.

Most interesting of all was that all nearly all of the writers I spoke to gave me the same counsel. The first guy leaned toward me on the Tube and said, ‘let me encourage you like a trainer encourages an athlete when he slaps him in the face: the pain is only just beginning.’ He was on a fourth draft of his novel, that is, his third complete rewrite. ‘Take your time,’ he said, ‘don’t let anyone rush you. Publish when it’s ready.’

Others said the same thing. Take your time. There is no point pushing something out before you’re really happy with it. It takes ages to edit, to redraft, to rewrite. One girl said by the time she got published she could recite the whole book word for word. She said that by then she ‘hated the characters, the good ones and the bad ones.’

This isn’t advice I’d had from anywhere else. Most people just want to know when I’ll be finished.

I’m still aiming to get the first draft completed this year. But after that? Don’t rush me. I’m a writer.