Bollocks to Fay Weldon, I’m writing it anyway.
The strange genesis of a strange writing project.
The only literary superstar I’ve ever encountered was the late, great Fay Weldon.
It didn’t go well.
The circumstances don’t much matter. What does, from my perspective, were the effects. Because even though it was a very long time ago, Every so often – and without warning – I travel back to that sweltering office. Once again, her words are a knee to the cobblers, that glorious lance of pain which bends me over double. Then the languorous arrival of that gut-squeezing ache, diffuse, nauseating, and inevitable.
Fay would have hated this one, too.
But you might love it.
Cop this in the nuts for a start.
Is that laying it on a bit thick? Maybe, but only a bit.
And actually, it was two assaults to the Brazilians.
In the first, she was reviewing an extract from my first novel. I’d laboured mightily on the book, received encouraging professional feedback, then laboured on it again. Of course, I know that most authors work very hard on their novels, but believe me when I say that this was an extraordinary investment of effort. I still don’t know how I did it.
“Yes. Well. I didn’t think there was anything much in that.
What else have you got?”
After some years of this, I begged another author to tell me straight: was I just polishing a turd? Nope, he assured me, it was a fine piece of work. Maybe I could tweak a couple of things. Just to make sure, I spent hundreds more hours polishing, refining.
Then one day, through strange circumstance, there I was in front of Fay Weldon CBE, the doyen of feminist literature, and she was holding the first part of my precious manuscript in her hands. What words of encouragement did she bestow upon the aspiring young(ish) writer?
“Yes. Well. I didn’t think there was anything much in that. What else have you got?”
In less than five seconds, that was that. Next!
The thing is, this was Fay Fucking Weldon speaking. Lives and Loves of a She-Devil and Upstairs, Downstairs Fay Weldon. Fay Weldon, Chair of the Booker Prize judges. Fay Weldon, who went to work on an egg. If she tells you there’s not much to your work, who are you, oh insignificant smear of excrement, to argue?
And cop this one, too.
“Not much for your female readers, then,” she sniffed.
What else I had was an outline of a pitch-black comedy. A murderer targets those who don’t come up to his ecological or cultural standards, finishing them off in bizarre and gruesome ways. It contains a chillingly logical defence of killing. And the whole thing, I said, was about culture clash, about all that fury and loss we feel at the passing of our own culture, and how that can result in this violent release, and…
And. And. And. I was probably gabbling by then, gasping for breath after the first blow, and panicked by the look of disapproval she’d been wearing since the start.
She said, “Does anyone really find serial killers funny any more?” Emphasis ‘anyone’. Emphasis ‘really’. Well, no, not when you put it like that. Not when it’s Fay Weldon, bored and disparaging.
Also, she couldn’t help notice that there weren’t really any women in my plot outline. Well, no, it’s a first-person narrative by a man who lives in a tightly constrained world. His isolation is the point. He has a wife, though it’s uncertain whether she’s a product of his imagination. This didn’t go down well.
“Not much for your female readers, then,” she sniffed. I remember it as a literal rather than figurative sniff, but I might be mistaken. Either way, that was that. In summation, she thought that I couldn’t write, and my ideas were shit.
Tough love from a smart woman
Aww, was nasty Fay wude about his widdle booky-wookies? Did she destwoy his aspiwations?
Yeah, there’s an element of that. I didn’t attempt another novel for three or four years.
To be clear, that’s my fault, not Fay Weldon’s. She gave a terse but honest assessment of my work. Agents that reviewed the first novel agreed with her, and I never got anywhere with it. As for the murderer one: what on Earth did I expect one of the greatest feminist authors of our age to think about a novel with almost no female characters?
What Fay gave me that day, if only I’d have realised it, was a crash course in toughening up. It’s something every author needs. Because no one cares how much passion and how many lonely hours went into your work. They either like it or they don’t. If the latter, they won’t be shy in letting you know.
Being naturally as soft as shite, and just as dense, it’s a lesson I’m still trying to learn. Still, bless Fay Weldon for dispensing wisdom I wasn’t ready to hear.
Also, in the nicest possible way, bollocks to her. Because after a long old gap, I’m going to be returning to that second novel. Despite what the grand old dame thought, my view remains that serial killers can be funny, and that not every novel needs a Strong Woman, or even any women.
So, coming soonish, maybe: a black comedy in which a murderer targets those who don’t come up to his ecological or cultural standards, finishing them off in bizarre and gruesome ways. It contains a chillingly logical defence of killing. And the whole thing is about cultural clashes, about all that fury and loss we feel at the passing of our own era, and how that can result in this violent release, and, and, and…
As a writer, what’s your most bruising encounter?
If you’ve come out of a discussion about your work that left you feeling like you’d been mauled by a Kodiak bear, or just lightly clawed by a Belgian pensioner (no idea what I mean by that), then let me know. Send me a postcard, drop me a line, etc.
