A small audience of writers got tips and advice from a pair of published authors during the 2016 Manitoba Writers on the Train question-and-answer session with poet Ariel Gordon and novelist Anita Daher of Winnipeg at the Thompson Public Library April 2.
Probably the most important tip of all was not to expect overnight success or for it to come the way you dream it will.
Gordon told the audience she published her first book at 33 after having been writing seriously since the age of 13, earning two university degrees and a post-graduate certificate in journalism in the interim while being involved in publishing any way she could.
“I was getting every job I could in publishing,” Gordon said. “I worked at all the little literary magazines in town on summer student contracts when I could. I wrote for all the places that were doing reviews that would take me. I volunteered for the writers’ festival in town. I volunteered for the writers’ guild.”
Daher originally saw herself as a picture book author but after having dozens of picture book manuscripts rejected, she eventually succeeded as a novelist, drawing on her experience of living in La Ronge, Saskatchewan when a fire destroyed part of the community as inspiration for her first book.
“The fire in this book follows the fire that happened in La Ronge even though the community’s not actually mentioned,” said Daher. “I’m using my knowledge of aviation. I’m using my knowledge of the fire and I’m creating a story about a girl who’s lost her father and who’s never come to terms with that.”
Just as important in her journey to publication was getting past the doubts she had when younger to realize after leaving a career as an aviation radio operator that it was a possible occupation.
“I then started thinking who am I? Yeah I’m a mother, I’m a wife,” she recalled. “The only thing that I’ve ever been is a writer. By this time I’d forgotten that terrible little voice.”
Both said the road to getting published depends on having the ability to express yourself without relying on either unconventional forms or ones that are played out.
“I just want to see clear writing,” said Daher, who was an acquisitions editor for eight years with Great Plains Publications. “I want to have a strong sense of who the character are what story’s gong to be told in the novel.”
“You mostly want to writing to be as strong as possible and to be sort of surprised by the work,” said Gordon. “It’s hard to say what is surprising about poetry or about writing of any kind but you know it when you see it.”
And while it’s important to stay true to who you are as a writer, it’s not a guarantee of success.
“When I worked in a literary magazine we would often get centred rhyming poetry about God from jail and we didn’t publish a lot of that,” said Gordon.
Both writers also pointed out that while modern technology has created more opportunities for self- and online publishing, the high-profile instances of people parlaying their blog or self-published novel into a book deal are the exception rather than the rule. That route is possible if you have a large audience, but if you don’t, self-publishing can make the odds of getting something published less likely.
“You’ve already taken a part of that market that the publisher would want to sell to so they’re not going to be as interested,” said Daher.
There are also avenues for success besides writing the great Canadian novel and having it published by a major publishing house.
“There’s a real value in looking for those smaller publishing houses and going with them because you really get a lot of personal attention,” said Daher, whose own genre of books for younger readers has some advantages over writing for adults.
“You sometimes don’t get the sort of celebrity that writers for adults get but your books stay in print a lot longer because they go into schools, they go into libraries,” said Daher. “Maybe they discover the third book in a series and they go back and read the first and this is how your books stay in print so you actually have an accumulative career and over time your royalty cheques keep coming in and they grow because all of your books are staying in print.”
