Women Writers: Get Your Boast On!

Bee Rowlatt is a writer and journalist. Her current book, In Search of Mary is inspired by the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, and published by Alma Books.

Telling people that you’re working on a book is a mixed blessing. It can be like announcing that you’re trying for a baby. They will expect results, and keep asking you about it, and eventually you may reach a point where you feel delusional and wish you’d never mentioned it. You may also forget which of your friends you told. And then it’ll come lurching into conversations when you’re least prepared.

“Hey what happened with that book you were doing about some woman traveller?”

I developed a number of apparently breezy strategies to fend off this query:

“Oh that? I’m still working on it.”
“Well I’ve had a couple of rejections but – ha! What do they know?”
“It might get made into a documentary instead.”
“It was a bit too feminist!”
“It was a bit too obscure!”
“It got stuck between two labels: travel and biography.”
“I’m mostly focussing on the journalism at the moment.. I’m just SO BUSY!”

And so on. Mostly uttered with an eye-twitch, nervous laughter and a longing glance towards the door. People mean well, they really do. But it ends up making you feel somehow fraudulent. And I’ve been on the receiving end of enough kindly remarks about all the rejections JK Rowling received to know that these comments don’t help.

So what does help?

What really helps is someone else’s faith in your work. Someone (who isn’t your best mate) telling you: “This is good – I have confidence in your writing.” Sadly, in these straitened days you’re more likely to get a basket of exotic fruit delivered to your door by a topless fireman. No, the confidence will not turn up unannounced. It won’t come at all, unless you feel it yourself. It’s the Lean In theory: you have to fake it until you make it.

How? Talk about your work. This is a way of practising confidence in it, of finessing it – and, yes, of loving it. And it’s how my book got published. Admittedly, I learnt the hard way. Once I was asked at a dinner party what I was writing about. At that point I felt so low about the whole enterprise, I muttered “I don’t really know”. Later on I wanted to slap myself. Yes, it’s my fault for going to dinner parties. But my poor book deserved better. When I opened my laptop the next morning the resentment was mutual.

I’m not alone. Some of the most articulate women writers I know are curiously apologetic when asked to talk about the very thing that means the most to them; the thing that occupies their waking and sleeping hours. Why? Perhaps as women we’re conditioned from childhood not to be boastful or overly proud of ourselves. No one likes a show-off, or so we’re told. Well if it helps, think of your work as a separate entity, in need of a shove. Like a friend that you’re supporting on her first foray into online dating.

I vowed to practise describing my book; doing the sales pitch in my head, trying to make it sound sexy. If I didn’t, who would? And one day, this happened: a chance meeting, out of the furthest blue. It began with a random email from someone who wanted to talk about a play he’d written. It was set in the same time and location as my hero, Mary Wollstonecraft. Could we meet for coffee? I work from home, and miss the coffee-fuelled banter of my newsroom days. Of course, I agreed. But when we met, it soon transpired that what he was hoping for was a contact with a certain literary festival. I have nothing whatsoever to do with this festival.

“Oh.”

Awkward pause.

I stared at our coffees on the wobbly table and imagined how much he must be regretting buying them. Finally, by way of a consolation prize I broke the silence with a few gems from Wollstonecraft’s extraordinary life story. Then added that I’d almost completed a book about retracing some of her travels. Before I’d even got to “but it hasn’t found a publisher,” he said “I’m a publisher and I’d love to read it.”

And that’s how, from the ashes of the world’s most awkward coffee, the book found a way to be born. This isn’t just a simple boast. Well ok – it is a boast, and that’s the point. Because why the hell not? You have to stick up for your work, and maintain that boastful buoyancy, even when you least feel it. My intention is to inspire a bit more swagger and shamelessness amongst women writers. Granted; not all cups of coffee come with a receptive publisher sitting generously nearby. But you just never know.

So don’t be bashful about your writing. Don’t apologise or feel foolish for having embarked on the glorious, desperate act of writing a book. And don’t regret telling people – because there’s no one who judges this rash decision as harshly as we judge ourselves. Tell people. Describing it to people is part of your book’s gestation. Sinking into a deep artistic silence is not likely to encourage the unborn life. It’s cruel that a manuscript unblessed by a publisher feels like an eternal caterpillar: unlaunched, wing-less. But it may yet fly, especially if you talk about it. Give the caterpillar your best. Because if you don’t talk it up – who will?

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Bee Rowlatt is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She is a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph and has reported for the World Service, Newsnight and BBC2. The co-author of the best-selling Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad (Penguin 2010) as well as one of the writers featured in Virago’s 2013 anthology Fifty Shades of Feminism, Bee won the K Blundell Trust award for In Search of Mary.  Bee does regular workshops and events on journalism, radio, book adaptations, Mary Wollstonecraft, working motherhood, and feminism.

She also works on a campaign for a memorial statue of Wollstonecraft, has four children, and is currently based in New Delhi.

 

Tags: Bee Rowlatt, featured, In Search of Mary, Mary Wollstonecraft

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing