My debut novel, ‘Death by Numbers’ has just been published. It’s a cosy crime mystery that follows Una, a risk averse actuary, as she uncovers a series of mysterious deaths and must put herself in danger to find the culprit, even if it means losing the no-claims-bonus on her personal injury policy.
Please don’t think this is a novel that I simply turned my hand to during the lockdowns, or just ‘wrote itself’ after I decided to take the plunge. Getting to publication took me twenty years while I worked full-time in IT.
If you want to achieve a similar level of delayed gratification here are my top three tips:
Tip 1 – Tell your work colleagues you’re writing a novel
Early on in my writing efforts, I disclosed to my colleagues that I was working on a novel. My fellow workers reacted by telling me, ‘You’re going to be the next Dan Brown!’, ‘The coffee round’s on you’ or in one case, ‘Why bother writing a novel? It’s all made-up. I only read non-fiction myself.’ As the years passed, the comments morphed into ‘Are you published yet?’ before ending up with a plaintive ‘Still writing?’. But workmates continued to ask, and joking aside, I appreciated people taking an interest, even if my updates became less enthusiastic. They still thought of me as someone who wrote, so perhaps I should too.
Tip 2 – Spend too much time uncritically consuming detective series
I’m always happy to reach for a book that has a dénouement scene near the end. And I think it’s fair to say that ITV3 is my spiritual home. I even enjoy the adverts for cruises and recliner chairs. But it took me a long, long time to take a step back and start to analyse books and television programmes in order to become a better writer.
I now find it difficult to switch-off when reading a detective novel - I’m churning over how the clues have been planted or when the first murder took place, or how the author is upping the stakes. Don’t get me wrong, I still love reading these books but I’m trying to push myself to improve by learning from writers who are better than me at their craft.
And I don’t just analyse cosy crime books – I might look at a thriller and think about how the author creates pace and a page-turning quality. Sci-fi can be a rich guide to world-building. Romance can show to build an emotional connection with characters. Obviously, I’m being a bit broadbrush and you don’t learn only ‘one thing’ from a book or genre – I just want to get across that I enjoy learning from books that are in a totally different genre from mine. I’m not sure how successful I am in translating my analysis back into what I’m writing, but that’s part of the process too.
Tip 3 – Don’t send your book out to agents
My first three novels went straight in the ‘bottom drawer’ i.e. a document folder on my laptop. Given how long it took me to fashion an IKEA desk from three brutal planks of MDF, I probably wouldn’t have the wherewithal to construct an actual bottom drawer, or even one of the middle ones.
I didn’t seriously consider sending these fledgling books out to agents. I think I was hampered by a fear of rejection and the more straightforward realisation that they weren’t good enough and would need a huge effort to bring them up to a decent standard. By the fourth attempt, I redrafted the novel multiple times and when I couldn’t take it any further, I send it out to a handful of agents. I received some personal rejections – the comments were gently encouraging but I knew this novel was missing something – it went in the bottom drawer. But I felt I’d made progress, and I started on Death By Numbers back in 2017.
I was now on book five and painfully aware of my limitations as a writer. I had improved on the basics (reading back over early work told me that) but I’d also realised that I needed to be much more persistent and critical with redrafts. I really took my time reading many novels (Tip 2!), reading books on aspects of craft I was poor at (Setting! Show not tell!) and most of all redrafting until I was bored silly looking at my book. Then once more I psyched myself up to submit it to agents.
Some writers are gifted enough to be published with their first novel whereas I’ve had to graft to improve. By the time I was on my fifth book, I’d become so involved that I knew I’d continue writing novels, no matter whether or how they got published. And that’s another area that’s changed since I started writing, there are many more routes into publication now.
So, there you have my three tips on delaying publication of your novel.
Despite my terrible advice, there is a happy ending… eventually a lovely agent plucked my manuscript off the slush pile and took a chance on me. And having that one person say ‘yes’ made me forget all the ‘no’s’, for a good half an hour or so…
Death by Numbers by Jo Cunningham. (Constable, Little, Brown) Out Now
Una has always been more comfortable working with numbers than people. As an actuary for an insurance company, her job is to spot patterns that other people might miss. When the data for her latest project - into the predicted number of deaths in seaside resorts - shows a blip in her forecasts, Una's untarnished reputation at work is at risk. That is, unless she can work out why there's been an unusual spate of accidental deaths by the coast. Death by Hanging Basket? She's not seen that before. Where better to begin than her mother's hometown of Eastbourne, where strange fatalities are befalling her mother's bingo crowd. But as Una puts her spreadsheets aside and begins to investigate, a sinister pattern begins to emerge and she realises that there is nothing accidental about these casualties. Can Una stop the killer in this small seaside town, before she becomes a not-so-vital statistic?
