Write-Off with Francesca Steele

Since releasing this episode in January, Pineapple Street, now out in the UK, has become a New York Times bestseller! Enjoy! ---Jenny Jackson’s forthcoming novel Pineapple Street is one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, but Jenny is also a Vice President and Executive Editor at Knopf, so she knows all about publishing from the other side of things too. She has an incredible list of authors, from Emily St John Mandel, to Cormac McCarthy, Helen Fielding, Katherine Heiny, who we’ve had on this podcast before. And she says that after 20 years in publishing writing has taught her to be a better editor. Finally, she says, she understands why it is that authors can be so reluctant to revise. Jenny actually wrote another novel right before Pineapple Street that she wasn’t able to publish and the experience left her heartbroken. Luckily for us, she decided to jump straight back in and write something else. I’m so grateful to Jenny for sharing that experience here, and also for her advice on fulfilling and subverting reader expectations, rejecting authors she’s already worked with and what it felt like to have friends in publishing pass on Pineapple Street. Pineappe Street isn’t out in the UK until 13 April but I really recommend that you pre-order it. It really is that good. And I will rerelease this episode coming up to publication. 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!

If you want to write domestic fiction I cannot recommend reading Tessa Hadley, or indeed listening to her here, enough. Tessa, who has been long-listed twice for what is now the Women’s Prize and whom the Washington Post called “one of the greatest stylists alive”, wrote four failed novels throughout her thirties and was finally published aged 46, with Accidents in the Home. She has now written eight novels and is one of the modern masters of domestic fiction, burrowing into the complex inner lives of middle aged women and the clashes between them, their feelings and the outer world. They are books of enormous sensitviy but also, as Tessa says here, born of a lot of control and labour, and while Tessa is clear about how compelled she is to write she is also keen to dispel the idea that it is in any way easy. “I’m a slow and painful writer.. writing in a knot of constipation” she says,. I find her story as riveting as her writing. She worked away for years on what she later realised were all the wrong sorts off things - books about big political events when really she was interested in things closer to home. I found her fascinating on how she kept going (even when someone told her nobody wanted to read stories about people in their forties) and how writing is learning to hear what you sound like in readers minds.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!

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!

Jenny Jackson’s forthcoming novel Pineapple Street is one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, but Jenny is also a Vice President and Executive Editor at Knopf, so she knows all about publishing from the other side of things too. She has an incredible list of authors, from Emily St John Mandel, to Cormac McCarthy, Helen Fielding, Katherine Heiny, who we’ve had on this podcast before. And she says that after 20 years in publishing writing has taught her to be a better editor. Finally, she says, she understands why it is that authors can be so reluctant to revise. Jenny actually wrote another novel right before Pineapple Street that she wasn’t able to publish and the experience left her heartbroken. Luckily for us, she decided to jump straight back in and write something else. I’m so grateful to Jenny for sharing that experience here, and also for her advice on fulfilling and subverting reader expectations, rejecting authors she’s already worked with and what it felt like to have friends in publishing pass on Pineapple Street. Pineappe Street isn’t out in the UK until 13 April but I really recommend that you pre-order it. It really is that good. And I will rerelease this episode coming up to publication. 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!

Good news for Peep Show fans! I am so delighted to have Robert Webb on the podcast today. Rob's memoir How Not To Be A Boy is one of my favourite books ever, a brilliant look at Rob's background and what I think we would now call toxic masculinity – it's the best exploration I've ever seen of how gender stereotypes serve men as badly as they serve women. Rob has also written an excellent novel, Come Again, about a woman grieving her late husband who suddenly finds herself back at university meeting him for the first time. Rob is, of course, best known as the star of the comedy Peep Show, which he worked on with David Mitchell for 12 years, before which the duo spent years in the wilderness taking random writing jobs and being rejected all over the place, like most freelancers. Rob talks insightfully about that time, and also about how hard it is trying to write a second novel when the idea for the first came to you like a lightning bolt. 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!

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw’s book of deliciously vibrant and rebellious short stories about sex and black women navigating social pressures, won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2021, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020. What I love about Deesha’s writing journey is that she did so much other stuff before she even thought about writing. It was only really when she quit her more high-flying job and began teaching the creative processes of writing as an English teacher that Deesha began to learn those creative processes herself. She’s now 50 and her debut, that award-winning book, Church Ladies – which was initially roundly rejected by mainstream publishers – was published in the UK last year. It’s now being turned into an HBO show. Deehsa and I talk about how her mum’s life and death affected her writing, about learning to write as an adult and about trying again and again to write the novel that she kept on not getting quite right. I so enjoyed this interview and I hope you do too.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!