September
It had all been gearing up to this. This was the moment that would decide my future: was I cut out to be a writer, or had I just wasted a decent law career, six months of work and thirty years of dreaming?
I know that sounds dramatic. But that is how it felt; packing up my car with all my most flamboyant clothes and earrings (because that’s how writers dress isn’t it?) and hundreds of notebooks and pens ready to learn everything I could from the real writers at the festival. I had my coffee and my playlist for the road and I set out to York.
The agents had my submissions, they would have read them by now, already formed their opinions, they were ready to tell me: success, or failure.
I walked into my meeting with Agent One undecided if I would be able to speak or if I would just vomit on the desk in front of her. I refrained from vomiting. She was nice. She loved my style and prose but wasn’t blown away. Ok. Well, she didn’t laugh at me or tell me to give it up, but she wasn’t that reassuring either.
Later that day another agent read my work and gave me feedback. This was a bonus chance – an opportunistic moment for unplanned feedback. After talking to Agent Two I went back to my room to have a secret cry. She was lovely but she really didn’t get my book. Said she didn’t see how my idea was unique. It was not for her.
I hyperventilated my way into meeting with Agent Three. She sat across from me and beamed. She loved, loved, loved my first three chapters and my soul swooped high above the room on the lake where we sat.
But, she said, she wouldn’t have got past my synopsis if I was submitting under normal circumstances because it didn’t show why my novel was unique. My soul hit the floor hard.
Then she said the dreaded words, the words that tipped me so easily into my worst nightmare, the thing everyone talks about at writing festivals but I never worried about because I would make sure it never happened to me,
“I didn’t really get any sense of a unique selling point from your synopsis but I feel like there is one judging by your first three chapters. I wondered if you could explain to me now what makes your story unique?
What’s your elevator pitch?”
The elevator pitch. Quite possibly the worst three words an introverted novelist can hear. The succinct and perfect one sentence hook for your 100,000 word novel. The thing I have never, never ever, managed to satisfactorily create.
And now my whole success depended on it.
I opened my mouth – as dry as my hands were wet – and words came out. Words that felt like silt at the bottom of a stagnant pond. I stuttered out my sludgey pitch and waited, heart forcing its way out of my throat, for her blank stare and disappointed judgement.
“Wow!” She said, “well, if that had been in your synopsis I would have requested your full manuscript today. Is the novel finished?”
“erm, not quite,” I said, wondering if she had heard something different to what I had said, “but nearly,”
“Well, when you do finish it, please send it over to me. And, the beauty is, you don’t need to pitch it to me again because you already have!”
When I regained the feeling in my legs I walked back to my room.
I walked into that room a different person to when I had left it that morning. I walked back into that room as a writer. A writer with a plan. A non-linear, completely insane plan. But now, I realised, I was totally on board with that. My insane, non-linear plan so far had been a wild ride and I’d take the lows for the highs any day.