JANE LYTHELL: I AM WRITING: My Writing Path and Writing Tips

As a child, from an early age, it was bliss to escape into a fictional world through reading. Later we lived in Norfolk and as a teen I read my way through the novels on offer at Sheringham library, as my town didn't even have a coffee bar!

I also tried my hand at fiction. When I was eight I wrote a story for my younger sister Caroline about Sally Dumpling. Sally was a fairy with curves who lived in a yellow rose and her best friend was a robin.

I studied English Literature at university so enjoyed three more years of intensive reading, novels and poetry. Writers were my heroes: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I started to write short stories. These were highly autobiographical and I never did anything with them though I think they were teaching me something about how to write. Then, from age thirty and for many years, there was no time for writing and a lot less time for reading. I was working in film and TV in the kinds of jobs that gave you very little empty time. You need empty time to be able to write. And I had my daughter and was a lone parent from when she was little.

But I had stories in my head which I wanted to tell. While I was at the Foreign Office, heading up their TV and Radio Unit, I started on my first draft of what would become The Lie of You. One of the things that helped me at this time was the Arvon Foundation which runs writing retreats. I went to two week-long retreats, one in Devon and one, a year later, in Scotland. These gave me a spur. I met other would-be writers as well as the two published writers who led the courses. This made me take my desire to write more seriously. I carried on with The Lie of You.

The next step in my writing path was blogging. In 2011 I started to write a novel in instalments which I called The Chronicles of Chloe Greene. It was set in the 1980s and centred on a young idealistic woman called Chloe Greene who lived in a run-down house in North London with two artists. Each week I wrote an 800 word instalment and would post this up on my blog every Tuesday. I tweeted the link and I began to attract readers. Readers would post comments on the instalments which I found thrilling. Blogging gave me two very good things: the discipline to write every week and the sense of reaching an audience, however small.

I took my draft of The Lie of You out of the drawer where I had stashed it and read it again. I felt it had something and I finally plucked up courage to ask my partner Barry to read it. Barry is a TV script writer and we hadn’t been going out very long! I asked him to be honest. Was it worth trying to redraft it or should I start again? Barry said it opened well and that the characters were interesting but that the last third of the book had lost direction. And it had.

This encouraged me to work on it again and I rewrote it and sent the first forty pages of the manuscript to the literary agency Sheil Land. I didn’t know anything about publishing and my finished manuscript was 57,000 words long.

I had the huge luck to be taken on by the literary agent Gaia Banks of Sheil Land. Gaia guided me. She explained that publishers expected a novel to be at least 80,000 words long. We discussed how the book needed new scenes to deepen the characters and the plot. And I learned that you never submit to a publisher until you have made your book as good as it possibly can be. A first draft is just that, a first draft. It is at the redrafting and editing stage where you can hone and polish your book.

Six months later Gaia submitted my now longer novel (87,000 words) and I was selected for publication by Head of Zeus which was a new publishing venture. If I could do cartwheels I would have done these all around the garden!