Plot Twist! Reacting to challenges. (My talk for SHU writing students)
This week I was asked to talk to students at Sheffield Hallam University about how I have kept writing in the face of so many challenges. It was a great event and an interesting experience to talk about my whole writing journey. I don’t normally prepare for a presentation by writing but, on this occasion I did, so I thought I might as well share my talk here for those who weren’t able to attend. Hopefully there’s something in there to help you on your own way.
Plot Twist! Responding to challenge, reacting to change
I graduated Sheffield Hallam’s MA a very long time ago (I think 1999) and though I’ve actually published three books I still baulk at the idea of calling myself an author. What’s that about? Instead, I describe myself as a writer, a facilitator and a coach and I’m also the owner of The Writers Workshop in Orchard Square which, someone told me recently, actually makes me a businesswoman and entrepreneur which amuses me no end!
I’ve been asked to speak, I think, because, though I’ve been beset by challenges, I have always kept writing and I’ve managed to make some kind of successful career out of words. I can’t say it’s the career I planned though!
Actually, I’m not sure I had a plan at all. As a writer and in life, I’m definitely a pantser not a planner. Throughout my life, I’ve tended to act intuitively on instinct, and my life, career and writing are intertwined, one continually impacting on the other, which is why I decided to call this presentation Plot Twist. When we’re writing fiction, our job as writers is to throw obstacles in the way of our protagonists and to watch them react. Often, I feel like one of those characters. In fact, sometimes it’s actually helpful to see myself in that way. If I’m a character in a book, chances are it might yet all come good! Life isn’t always like fiction though!
I always wanted to be a writer. I remember that I confidently told my maths teacher at school that I was never going to need maths. I think I had some romantic idea that I would live in a cottage somewhere, write stories and live happily ever after. I had no idea back then how hard it is to make a living as a writer or how much time I would spend applying for grant funding, managing budgets and doing taxes. I also just presumed I was going to live happily ever after with some kind of handsome prince. So much for that. Anyway…
There was no support for young writers back then and I grew up in a very sporty family so that was my focus for a long time, that and academia. I did an English Literature degree (creative writing didn’t exist at university back then) and like anyone who was good at English was told I had two options: to be an English teacher or a journalist. I left university with no career plan at all, so I chose the teaching route and after a brief stint teaching in Prague I decided to do a PGCE. This period of life was pivotal for lots of reasons.
Firstly, after I’d approached an essay in a particularly creative way, the tutor on my MA was the first person to say the words to me: ‘You’re a writer’. She said I reminded her of a previous student, Berlie Doherty, and that my essay should be on Radio 4. I had no idea who Berlie Doherty was (though I know her well now) or what Radio 4 was (still don’t listen to it) but I do think those words stuck with me, though it took me a long time to call myself a writer. Maybe one day I’ll call myself an author too!
Secondly, even though I realised I liked kids and teaching creative writing, I hated the curriculum and atmosphere of school.
Thirdly, I married and divorced an American actor who I’d met in Prague within three years.
After my divorce, I began my MA. When I needed an idea for my MA novel, I found myself writing about a young divorcee chopping her hair off and starting over in her twenties (thinly veield authobiography). I got a distinction for the opening of the novel and decided to quit my job and focus full-time on writing for six months thinking I was going to write a bestseller. As a coach I’ve met so many people who do this! I’ve never met anyone who’s pulled it off in less than a decade! Though, I actually came close. I finished the book within six months, sent it to Curtis Brown and got a phone call the very next day from an agent called Ali Gunn saying that she thought it could be a bestseller. It was just at the beginning of the chick lit boom and she said she was only interested in books which would make hundreds of thousands of pounds which she said my book could. If I’d worked away at the novel for the next few years, my life might have turned out very differently, but she decided she couldn’t take me on and, after sending it to a couple of other people, I gave up and went back to work. Lesson 1: Don’t give up!
Having decided that I didn’t like the school atmosphere, I changed to youth work and spent a few years running a youth literacy project and working with homeless young people and drug users. Then I got a dream job as YouthBoox project manager with a remit to engage disaffected young people in reading with Sheffield Libraries. All of my teaching and youth work skills combined in this job and I was really good at it. This was when I did my first Arts Council bid and, in doing so, I realised that there was money out there to make things happen (this was the 90s!). I talked to the Arts Council and put in a bid to set up the Sheffield Young Writers Project which is still thriving today as part of Hive South Yorkshire. I loved that role and started to learn that I could shape my own destiny. Lesson 2: If you see a gap, fill it.
During that time my dad died and I had a brief relationship with an illustrator who asked me to write something he could illustrate. The relationship didn’t last long but, inspired by him, I wrote a middle-grade book which I realised later had its roots in my childhood and my reaction to my dad’s death. I didn’t set out to write a book about loss but that’s what I’d inadvertently written. I sent this book to Curtis Brown too. I went for a meeting and the book got as far as an editor before being turned down as “too Alice in Wonderlandy”. I later saw Julia Churchill at a conference say that she’d just signed an author who had written something ‘really Alice in Wonderlandy’ and learned the lesson that just because one agent turns something down, it doesn’t mean it should be thrown in the bin! Lesson 3: Keep looking for the right person or opportunity.
Meanwhile I watched the consultants who were reporting on my YouthBoox job getting paid a lot of money to write up my research and decided I could do better. Sheffield Libraries were never going to fully embrace the innovative ideas I had so I quit the project. I still remember standing in my back garden at around age thirty telling my friends that I was going to go freelance. Freelance what? they said, having no idea what I actually did for a living. Freelance Beverley I said. I’ve been a happily freelance Beverley ever since. Lesson 4: Think you can do better? Do it!
I was taken on as a consultant by The Reading Agency who ran YouthBoox and so began a decade of running creative projects with young people around the country, training librarians and youth workers and speaking at conferences. It didn’t leave much time for writing but I still dabbled and when I found myself at conferences surrounded by posh twenty-something commissioning editors called Camilla and Prunella who told me that they didn’t know much about teenagers I decided to write a YA novel based on my experience of working with homeless young people. Like all books it took a while and by the time I’d finished it, I’d decided to settle down with the wrong guy and have some children. My most important bit of advice which I give regularly to young female writers is: do not have children with the wrong guy! It’s the very worst thing you can do for your career. Only have children if you have a supportive partner who understands your need to write. Mine told me that he didn’t think I had what it took and if I was serious about writing, I would get up earlier, when I was already up at 6am, working most of the week and caring full-time for two children, one of whom was chronically sick. Lesson 5. Do not have kids with the wrong guy!
I could no longer do work away from home or run the Sheffield Young Writers Project as a parent with little support from their father so I took on a role as project manager for Signposts writing project supporting local writers in Sheffield. The Tories were in power by this time and funding was harder to come by. There was pressure on funded projects to find private sources of income and I had ideas about making money from writing. With the support of Writing Yorkshire, I trained as a coach and set up mentoring schemes and moved the project to Bank Street arts with the idea of setting up a co-working studio which we did in a very small way. We started to charge a little for membership. And then, having finally concluded that I couldn’t do it all, I handed over the reins of the project and eventually we lost our funding. I promised to set up a similar organisation but, in the meantime, I decided to carry on running the writing group that I’d set up on a paid basis and started offering one-to-one coaching as a freelancer. By now my daughter was at school and, appalled by the way writing was taught in the primary curriculum, I started to run children’s Writing Clubs. Lesson 6: Make the most of your opportunties
Around this time I chucked in an application to the Northern Writers Awards with my YA novel. I couldn’t believe it when I got the email saying that I’d won the Andrea Badenoch Award. I won £2000 and an invitation to the award ceremony. When my partner didn’t acknowledge my success and refused to attend the award ceremony, I knew our relationship was over and I became a single parent which, it turns out, is, in many ways harder than being in the wrong relationship as I was now trapped in the house full-time. Lots of time to write you’d think but by the time the children were in bed, I was knackered.
No-one wanted to publish my YA novel even though lots of agents acknowledged that it was really good. It wasn’t commercial enough and they needed a one-line hook, a high concept big seller. But it wasn’t a complete dead end. Via friends of friends I was offered a commission for a children’s book. My blend of experience of education, special needs parenting and children’s writing made me perfect to write Archie Nolan Family Detective. I actually earned £6000 and was featured in a full-page spread in The Guardian.
Meanwhile as a lonely single parent I rekindled a friendship online with an old flame which didn’t go anywhere and soon I met a wonderful man in Sheffield, but the relationship with the old flame gave me the idea for another book: a commercial proposition with a one-line hook. Lesson 7: Everything is material.
Things were going well. I was finally a published author and I had a wonderful new supportive partner, an eccentric blacksmith who loved my writing, but then there were more plot twists. My mum had had terminal cancer for a while and my book launch turned out to be her last outing and then, while I was still grieving for her, something I could never have predicted happened and my new partner died suddenly overnight and I was thrown into turmoil having lost my two main supports in the space of a few months.
It was writing that I turned to. It was the only thing I could do. I signed up to Megan Devine’s Write Your Grief and started sharing a blog. It became very popular. It helped me to survive. It gave me an outlet for my grief and helped other people too. I started writing for The Huffington Post, sharing unadulterated truth rather than fiction. I was bypassing gatekeepers and going to straight to readers who were loving what I was sharing. Though I was devastated personally, nevertheless, it gave me a huge confidence boost. I realised that regardless of what the London publishing industry said, I had something to say. I also realised what I often tell writers now, that at the point when I was most vulnerable and terrified by what I was writing and sharing, I was also writing my best work. Lesson 8: Be brave and vulnerable
I was incapacitated by grief and barely working, just running my weekly writing group and Writing Club and now I started to run grief writing courses and workshops and to attract new clients who were writing memoirs or processing trauma.
I was still thinking about resurrecting some kind of writing organisation in Sheffield and, having inherited some money from my mum, I thought about buying some kind of arts centre or a writing retreat but neither seemed very practical for a traumatised single parent.
I started looking for people to work with and a place from which to run a writing centre and got an enthusiastic response from the team who were developing Castle House. It was a dream come true to have the potential to build something for writers down there but it was a tricky place to work and the partnership didn’t work out. It was incredibly hard to walk away from but I couldn’t stay. We launched in October 2019 and by December I’d left! It was the hardest thing to walk away but I set up The Writers Workshop alongside the Creative Guild in Orchard Square in January 2020 knowing that I was now in competition with the Writers Hub which I’d helped to establish! Lesson 9: Sometimes you fail before you succeed
Meanwhile I’d found a big, relatively cheap house by the sea and set it up as a holiday let and started running occasional writing retreats when my children’s father had the kids.
That didn’t last long. By the time she was twelve, my daughter’s mental heath was suffering and she was unhappy at her father’s house and started to refuse to go. On February 25th I launched Dear Blacksmith as a memoir with Valley Press, on 26th Feb I emailed the children’s father to say that we had issues that needed resolving and by March I was involved in extraordinary family court proceedings.
We had two hellish years. I was fighting to keep my kids in family court, looking after them both, home educating and trying to make a living during a pandemic. My love for them and my need to survive and support them spurred me on. As soon as the pandemic struck, I set up a Facebook page called Keep Calm and Carry on Writing from which I set daily writing prompts. Grief had taught me that this was how to survive. My newly painted workshop had to close and I pivoted my business to work online. Unexpectedly, business was booming. Everyone was trapped at home and wanting to write. If I hadn’t had a court case to fight and two kids to keep alive and home educate, I’d have made a fortune! But what was most important is that the children remained with me and though it is hard being a lone parent, I am grateful that they’re both thriving now. Lesson 10: There are opportunities in the strangest places
I set up Monday Morning Motivation to keep us all going and gradually set up a membership scheme to support writers and myself. This is how I have always done things - looking for what would serve me as a writer and recognising that it would be helpful to others too. Lesson 11: If there’s something you need as a writer, others will need it to
Meanwhile, my frustration with home ed curriculum led me to write Writing Revolution – my children’s writing handbook which I self-published to create a passive income stream. It was something I could do quickly to bring in funds because I’d been running writing workshops for so long.
Still, I was going slowly mad with no time to myself so I followed my ex-partner’s advice and started to get up even earlier to write my novel in the mornings. I was surprised that as a non-morning-person I wrote 60,000 words in 20 minute bursts at 6.30am. Lesson 12: There is always time to write.
Finally The Writers Workshop reopened and gradually expanded. I learned that I can’t do it all alone and built the associate model and the membership. Now we have 12 associates, 120 members, a thriving community and a business that supports writers in Sheffield and beyond. I’m immensely proud of what we’ve achieved. The old Writers Hub disbanded during Covid and, in my view, what we have now is even better than what we planned at Castle House. Lesson 13: You can’t do it all alone. You need a community
As for my own writing, I’m onto draft three of the novel. It wasn’t quite working and I’ve changed it now to include a new plot line which I think will strengthen it. There is a wall of secrecy around family court which I’m unable to breach while my children are under eighteen, but I can use elements of my experience in fiction. Life continues to inform art and writing continues to help me to process life. Meanwhile, I keep putting my stories and poetry out there. I keep writing. I keep responding to challenges. Things are in a much better place but I don’t know what will happen next. I just know that, whatever it is, I will handle it and that whatever I’m going through, writing and the writing community will be alongside me. Lesson 14: Writing will never let you down.