Tracey Mathias

I wanted to be some sort of writer throughout my childhood. I went from making hand-stapled handwritten books to typing animal stories on my dad’s typewriter. I got into trouble with one of my primary school teachers for writing too much and failing to finish a story before the end of the lesson. I wrote poems. The best lesson of my entire life was in Year Eight when our English teacher Mr Evans dropped blank exercise books on every desk and told us to ‘write a novel.’

I stopped writing in the sixth form. I was doing English A level and I felt overwhelmed and discouraged by the gap between the brilliance of what I was reading and the clunky awkwardness of what I could write.

That stop lasted a long time. Apart from some short stories in my twenties, I wrote nothing until about thirteen years ago. Then a number of things fell into place at once. Working for a music summer school I ended up writing last minute song lyrics; it was a playful job and it gave me a rush of my old pre-A-level English enthusiasm for writing. I thought of the pivotal point of a plot and lay awake for a week, dreaming it into a children’s story. My youngest daughter was due to start school in the autumn; I would have a few free hours each day. I had what I like to think of as motive, means and opportunity: a renewed impetus to write, a plot, and time. In the course of that school year, I wrote what would become the first volume of the Assalay trilogy, A Fragment of Moonswood.

I’d had an agent when I was writing Assalay, but then she moved on and I was dropped by the agency – which felt rather like sliding back down to square one of a cosmic snakes and ladders board. I kept writing over the next few years, and by mid 2016 had almost finished Night of the Party: a political thriller and love story set in a near-future, dystopian England. In September I attended the SCBWI Agents Party where Molly Ker Hawn of The Bent Agency was one of the panel agents. During the discussion the panel was asked what they didn’t want to see in submissions, and Molly’s answer was emphatic. ‘No dead sisters.’ That’s a major thread in Night of the Party. I put a large X through Molly’s name in the print-out of guest agents. After the discussion, during the informal meet and pitch session, I happened to catch Molly’s eye, gave her a little wave, and said ‘Dead sister story.’ She said ‘Not for me, then.’ Remarkably, no one else was trying to pitch to her right then; we got talking; she asked about Night of the Party and asked me to send it to her when it was done. She was one of three agents I submitted to in my first round; the others rejected me, she loved the book, and that was that...

Probably the lowest point came in the years after I finished writing the Assalay trilogy. Starting again was incredibly difficult: I’d created this huge, sprawling, over-populated, colourful world, and everything I began felt thin and tiny and unconvincing by comparison. For a year, I found it difficult to settle and commit to anything new: I wrote about 20000 words (each) of three different novels which are all still residing in a bottom drawer. I forced myself to finish the next book, which is a rather muddled story of twins, family secrets and (possibly) a ghost. It took me four years. At the end of it, I’d learned a lot but the book didn’t feel good enough to secure an agent and after a few submissions I stuck it with the others in the graveyard drawer. I think that might have been a give up moment – if it hadn’t been for the fact that I already had the central idea for Night of the Party, a strong passion for the characters, and a clear sense of how the plot would evolve.

This is too difficult! I read and read and read as a child, sitting against the wall in my room with my pet guinea pig on my lap; he nibbled the edges of the pages as I read so that all my books from a certain period have eaten corners. I loved books about things I didn’t do (sailing, camping, riding). I particularly relished the Flambards trilogy by K M Peyton, and I adored Swallows and Amazons. I loved Nina Bawden’s Squib which made me cry, and Harriet the Spy by Louise FitzHugh which made me cry and laugh. I loved Jill Paton Walsh’s historical novels about the Second World War: The Dolphin Crossing and Fireweed.

I always re-read childhood books with trepidation, because some of them just don’t have the same magic when you revisit them as an adult. I’ve re-read all of these, though (some many times!) and still enjoyed and admired them.

I think the best advice for any writer that I’ve ever read is in Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Bird by Bird, which has some great practical guidance but also – maybe more importantly – some words of real spiritual wisdom about this mad, heart-breaking and frustrating enterprise that we are all embarked on. She says (I’m paraphrasing) that the writing is its own source of joy; getting an agent, getting published, getting great reviews, winning awards – all the things that you feel you’re aiming for aren’t the things that matter at all. What matters is writing – not least, because it’s the writing that endures when all other things fail you.

That said, I would advise anyone starting out to cultivate both stubbornness and humility. Know the heart of your story and be fierce in sticking to it, but take advice; find wise comrades whose intelligence and honesty you trust, and listen when they tell you why the story that you’re trying to tell isn’t working.