A Writer’s Roadmap Thursday Postcard
“What continual rejection did…was drive me back into the basics of who I was”
Pat Barker
Pat Barker worked hard on two novels she described to Valerie Stivers of The Paris Review as “sensitive middle-class-lady novels, the kind of thing the person who bumped trolleys with me in the supermarket would have been quite happy to think I was writing.”
When publishers turned both novels down, she asked herself what she would write if she knew for sure she’d never get published. She said to an interviewer for Five Dials:
“I was getting more and more bloody-minded all the time. By the time I was writing the third I was very much writing what I wanted to write without any kind of references to the publishing industry at all. That’s not a bad attitude.”
This third novel was the prize-winning Union Street.
After that, Barker went on to write and publish more books–her best-known work possibly being the stunning Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road). She won lots more prizes and was eventually made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
What can we learn from this?
If you’re writing fiction, write first for yourself.
Cheers,
Pat