Write-Off with Francesca Steele

Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of six novels including Less and Less is Lost, which are both bittersweet, tragicomic road trip tales about Arthur Less, a failing and flailing mid-list novelist. But it’s not just through his fiction that Greer is familiar with mid-list despondency. He originally wrote Less when he was feeling exactly that way himself, but then, although it was rejected by 12 British publishers, felt slightly less dependent when it went on to win the Pulitzer! Last he year he published a follow-on, Less is Lost, which his agent actually advised him not to write for reasons we discuss. He did it anyway. I love this interview. Andrew is just such a jolly yet occasionally reassuringly despairing writer, racking up dozens of drafts and being honest about the poverty early writing can involve. I loved in particular talking to him about the details of turning the originally serious Less into a comic novel, and also about finding the diamond heist. You’ll have to listen to end to find out what that means but I think it’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. Find the diamond heist! Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!

Monica Heisey is the author of the very funny Really Good, Actually, which just came out a week ago and became an instant Sunday times bestseller. It’s about a woman in her twenties getting divorced, which is something that Monica herself did aged 28, weirdly just after she had begun to write a different novel in which her character Kathleen had started to have marriage problems. That book didn’t make it, which we talk about here, but Monica is actually pretty used to things not making it because she’s also a TV writer (her credits include Schitt's Creek) and comedian, worlds in which rejection at various stages really is par for the course. Monica was so great to talk to about outlines; since doing this interview I feel enthusiastic about plotting for the first time ever! We also chat about avoiding writing until characters pop up in your head all the time, and about rom coms (yes, we talk about When Harry Met Sally in this interview), and why heartbreak might actually be easier to write about than love. Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!

Last year, Alan Garner became the oldest person ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, at the age of 87, for his novel Treacle Walker. Alan has been writing novels and other books for more than 60 years, many of them rooted in the folklore and mythology of Cheshire where he is from. His first novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen had people calling him the new Tolkien and he received an OBE in 2001 for services to literature. Among Alan’s books is his incredible memoir Where Shall We Run To, in which he describes his childhood. He was a very sick child and spent days, weeks, staring at the wall of his bedroom during the second world war, thinking and dreaming, and perhaps sowing the seeds of becoming an author years later, But he also describes the pain of being cast out of his community when he got into grammar school. A rejection that still seems to pain him today and which feeds into the type of writing that he does. Alan has an unusual writing process, that often involves years of what he calls gestation, where he barely writes at all, waiting for the subconscious part of the brain to come up with the goods, and I think there’s something to learn from this - that a writer’s work really isn’t all done at the desk, and that patience isn’t just a virtue but a necessity. I loved chatting to Alan about writing swear words on the first manuscripts he was throughly dissatisfied with, thinking T.S. Eliot’s wasteland was a load of rubbish and giving up academia to write even when he had no idea whether he’d be any good. Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!