Rooster #17

Take homes from my book event with Kit DeWaal and Michael MacGee...

Hello folks, welcome to The Rooster. This week I thought I'd tried something different and record you a rooster on audio and then transcribe it. I am making the audio for paid subscribers.. and the transcription below is open for everyone.

Please forgive any mistakes..picture me talking to you in real time from a local cafe that's playing terrible calypso versions of pop songs. But we move.

I wanted to talk this week about my literary salon that I put on last night at the London Irish Centre.

I've been doing these for a couple of years now and they are a way for me personally just to get to chat to other writers, as we know writing is a very lonely sport. I always find that it's so interesting to quiz other writers about their processes and just to feel closer to other writers and to learn from them basically.

Last night I asked two very different writers to come and talk to me and to our lovely audience. I welcomed Michael McGee, who is a Belfast writer. He wrote a book called Close To Home, which came out a few years ago now and won all the prizes, the Rooney prize, the debut fiction prize of the Nero Prize, loads of Irish prizes as well . It’s a book about a young fellow in West Belfast who comes home from Liverpool after doing a degree and he is trying to kind of make it in the world and who's kind of in this liminal space between his working class upbringing and the university education he has and the kind of people and the life, I suppose, that that kind of thing offers.

It's also about masculinity as a whole and class and, you know, systemic discrimination against working class people. It's also about the troubles and the intergenerational trauma that that comes with someone who was born fifteen years after the Good Friday agreement and kind of how the trauma has been inherited and how it's manifested in a new generation of people.

It's an excellent book, and very tender, very funny, also, very heartbreaking.

And then the other person I invited was Kit DeWaal, who is a fucking bad ass.

She's in her mid 60s, which is unbelievable because she looks like she's in her 40s. She has got a new book out called the Best of Everything, which came out in April and I can't stop thinking about, I love it so much.

So we had one kind of debut book that came out a few years ago, one brand new novel from a very experienced and prolific writer, Kit, who has written a memoir, three novels, short stories, all sorts of stuff.

Kit got into writing in her forties after spending fifteen years working in law, social services and as a magistrate, she wasn't remotely intimidated by the middle class world of writing because she's kind of broken through so many barriers already in her life and her career. Whereas Michael came through as working class writer with no idea about the literary scene or culture and had to learn all on the fly after winning all these awards and being invited to all these literary events.

So they were very different in their approach to writing and and how they got into it but one thing struck me as quite remarkable.

Both of them took ten years to publish a novel from when they decided to start writing to when they actually got to publish a novel.

So Kit adopted a son in her 40s and used that as a kind of ruse to start writing and she said that she thought she was gonna be great. She was really confident in herself.
She wrote two crime novels both of which were rejected.

Then she wrote her now famous debut My Name Is Leon thinking no one would see it; she'd lost all her hope and optimism and confidence, but she wrote it anyway and from a very different place, a truthful and tender and vulnerable place. And that is what launched her into literary success.

So then Michael also told me, which I didn't know, that he did a degree in English literature, then he went on to do a masters in his early 20s, during which he wrote two novels, one when when he was 21 and one when he was 24. Both of which got rejected.

And again, he had to really dig deep but he said there was something in the way of his writing. He wasn't allowing himself to be fully truthful in his writing because there was a lot that he hadn't really processed about his own life and his own trauma. And it wasn't until he was able to do that that he was then able to write Close To Home, which as he was writing it, was part memoir, part novel, and he couldn't decide which it was gonna be. It eventually became a novel, and the novel aspect of it worked only in being able to create a new character that wasn't him and attribute all of his experiences to this new character, so that he could actually remove himself from the weight of the experience of what he was writing and actually write about it objectively.

But I couldn't believe that both of them had written two novels and both of them had had two novels rejected before they both found their way.

And the process of both of them finding their way was exactly the same.

They basically had to look inside themselves and write about what was in their hearts, and in their life experience so far, in order to write the most true and authentic novel they could and that's what broke them through.

So let that be a lesson to us folks.

Writing is about perseverance and writing is about rejection.

The rejection is as important as the success, because that's what helps you get closer to knowing what. you can write about, and and also with perseverance, writing is about truth and truthfulness to yourself and uh, not necessarily having to know the answers to everything, but being able to ask those questions, being able to interrogate things that are meaningful to you.

Both authors said that in the two rejected novels, they were books that they were trying to write in order to be successful as opposed to books that they were writing from their heart because that they needed to write them.

So, again, another great lesson.

Don't ever try and write for other people.

Don't ever try and write for a for a brief or for an agenda of what you think success looks like. You have to write for you, you have to write for what's in your head and what's in your heart.

And it's so easy when you write and when you're learning how to write to kind of a adopt inadvertently stylistically, the voice of other authors that you love. And it takes time to develop your own voice to figure out that what that voice sounds like and to have conviction in the voice. And maybe sometimes it takes two novels worth of writing to figure out what you aren't before you can figure out what you are.

Now, one of the questions I've got asked at the end of the night was from this woman who was amazing.

She was just like, all very well and good, like ten years of trying for each of you, but what did your family and friends say? and how did you survive?

Mick McGee said he was basically working in coffee shops and bars and service work, working as little as possible, working just enough to pay the rent so he could spend the rest of the time writing. That's how he did it.

And and Kit said that she kept entering short story competitions, and these competitions were a way for her to be able to explain herself to other people and say, oh, no, no, look, I won fifty pounds last week in this short story competition in Ireland or whatever. And they were a way for her to feel seen and validated as a writer when she was completely kind of on her own shooting in the dark.

So I thought those were really interesting take homes from last night's London Irish Centre show. Thank you to everyone who came. It was really nice to be able to open up the guest list and invite some of my paid subscribers, and to meet you! Charlotte in the toilet queue I’m looking at you!

I will keep trying and find ways to involve you guys in in the things that I'm doing as much as possible.

And on that, I wanted to let you know that next Tuesday night at 9 pm, I am going to be doing a scheduled chat on here. So keep it free.

It's been a while since the Changes community have all got together and had chats, and I have an idea for a theme, so I'm gonna put that to you next week, I'll remind you all that's happening.

In the meantime, keep writing, keep persevering, keep trying to find your voice, truth and authenticity is the way forwards!!

Slán libh - have a gorgeous weekend.

xx