KEY POINTS:
So your New Year's resolution is to write your best-seller at long last. But have you found yourself headed for the end of January without any words on the page? Or perhaps you're like Waikato writer Michelle Holman once was, with a stack of half-written manuscripts you're unable
to finish?
For years Holman worked 12-hour shifts as a nurse, raised kids and
wrote in every spare moment but never completed anything. She tried creative writing courses but they tended to be full of elderly folk
wanting to write their life stories or those working on classic dark New Zealand literature.
"I can remember at one of the classes suggesting that next week we should all write something funny and there was just this silence,"
Holman recalls.
In 2005 she made it her New Year's goal to finish a manuscript. Holman's first best-selling chick-lit novel Bonkers was published by HarperCollins at the end of the following year. She's since produced a second, Divine, and is writing the third. But she still has a day job and mostly writes after her family have gone to bed.
"Because I had a best-seller people expect me to be driving around in a Rolls-Royce but you don't make that kind of money in New Zealand," Holman says.
If it's literary fiction you want to write, then you're likely to make even less money even if you can get published. Most publishing companies have teetering piles of manuscripts and aspiring authors need to find a way to get to the top of one.
Auckland's Centre For Modern Writing (part of AUT) has an agreement with Random House to look at graduate's manuscripts with a view to publishing them. But getting on the Masters of Creative Writing course in the first place isn't easy. Only 12 students a year are accepted by
director John Cranna.
"To apply, students must submit 20 pages of original prose fiction and the primary criteria is the literary quality of the work," he says.
In return for $6000 for the year-long course, students work in what he
describes as an intense masterclass environment where they learn to critique their own writing and are mentored by established authors with the goal of creating a workable first draft of a novel or short-story collection.
"The course is about literary self-exploration and creating an environment in which that authentic original voice can spring
forth," explains Cranna.
If your aim is to write popular rather than literary fiction, a crime novel say or a romance, you probably wouldn't feel "comfortable" on this course, according to Cranna.
The best advice for any aspiring author is to write the fiction you enjoy reading. That's what Aucklander Nalini Singh did and now she's the most successful Kiwi author you've probably never heard of.
Singh is huge in the US where her paranormal romances are published - she's even attained New York Times best-seller status.
Writing began as a hobby for her, then, during the break between school and university, she started reading Harlequin romances and decided she
could write one.
"It wasn't very good," she says. "But the first book doesn't have to be brilliant. It's an apprenticeship."
Singh worked as a lawyer then took a job teaching English in Japan,
requesting a rural area so she'd have the peace to write. Joining the Romance Writers of New Zealand helped her learn the proper manuscript submission procedures.
The first novel Singh submitted was rejected but success came when she had a romance called Desert Warrior accepted by US publisher Silhouette. At 31 she writes full-time and her stories are a blend of futuristic fantasy and romance.
Hers is a real success story but Singh has a few words of warning. "A lot of people think, 'this trend is hot so I'll write one', but if you don't love the genre it's going to come out in the book, especially if you're writing romance," she says. "It's really, really difficult to write a Mills & Boon. They're 50,000 words long and relationship the whole way, no car chases, no murders. Everything has got to come from the emotional heart of the book."
Singh publishes three full-length novels and a novella each year but is generally overlooked as a New Zealand author. "There's not much attention on genre writers here," she says, "so people don't realise
you can make a living from it."
Of course, once you've decided on your preferred genre and completed a
manuscript, there's the knotty problem of deciding whether it's any good. That's where Jill Marshall comes in. A successful author, she offers a manuscript assessment service. "For first-time writers this will be the first feedback you'll get without a publisher rejection slip being involved," says Marshall.
"It points out where you're at and how far away from a finished version you are."
As well as copy-editing to make sure everything is grammatically shipshape, Marshall gives advice on structure and character development and pointers on how to get published. Her rates vary from $150 for
a picture book to around $1500 to assess and edit a full-length adult novel.
"It's a lot to invest but whether you go on a training course or find a
mentor, these days you're going to have to part with cash."
A good assessor should help your work stand out from the rest. "The market is incredibly tight so it has to look as good as possible,"
Marshall says.
