How to fail and still be a writer

Learning from our teenage selves

If you’d like to hear me read this post please click on the audio (it’s my first time recording audio and I’ve got the snuffles) so I hope you still enjoy it.

This week I was asked to talk to Year 11 girls about my career. My first thought was OMG! What career?! (It’s a West London CofE Girls School. Probably three of the girls will have a parent that’s at least been nominated for The Booker Prize, and they will have been too busy at the Hay Festival or similar to come and talk. My oldest daughter Ava was in a drama class once and the teacher asked if any of them knew someone who had a BAFTA, seven immediately put their hands up, one girl called out “My mum’s got two.” Comparison really is the thief of joy.

Sarah Beeson MBE (my mum) and Amy Beeson (me) in the auditorium

How do you get to be a writer?

I still ask myself how realistic is my chosen career. Most of us don’t have it as our main source of income and you usually need an extra string, or two or three to your bow to pay the bills.  If you’re independently wealthy and have an uncle who owns a publishing house and you’ve inherited a nice London townhouse in Belgravia, then sure, you’ve got all the time you need to write a great novel. You could host literary salons’ and go on a European tour and write amazing things. Not the life of a freelance mum balancing writing and running a branding and communications pocket-sized agency, who is trying to squeeze in working amongst school runs, shopping, cooking, and the never-ending bloody laundry. Is this why men so often tell me, “I don’t read books by women, but I’ll give a copy of your book to my mother.” Please tell me in the comments what I should reply to this…because to my shame, I know I once replied to another author at the HarperCollins summer party, “Oh, let me know if she likes it.” He didn’t.

Moving on…is a writing career about luck or self-belief? From the inside it feels like a series of events that happen to you. I didn’t tell them about the self-sabotaging thoughts that flooded my brain as I mused on what to say about my career in the 15 minutes I was allotted before lunchtime. I didn’t them that even adults feel like they’re not good enough. That occasionally when a Publisher is shmoozing you, you do feel very important but it’s fleeting because you more frequently  feel resentful of the people you love for distracting you from writing, and that your publisher isn’t promoting your work very well, and your agent probably wonders why they signed you in the first place. Then when you do get to write you worry you don’t know what to write or that it isn’t very good, and how are you going to pay the mortgage, and will you lose your home? But once you’ve got past all those annoying thoughts if put some work in and stop worrying you have joyful moments when you know what you’ve written is very good and feel smug and like everything will work out in the end, but it never lasts because that’s just life. If everything was perfect, you’d having nothing to write about. I can’t tell them that…that’s just my subconscious, it is not careers advice, which is probably what they want.

Does getting published come down to luck?

Do I give them a run down of my qualification and experiences? Tell them get these GCSEs (especially the A* in English Literature and English Language), then these A Levels (especially the A in English). Then go to somewhere like UEA and do English Literature and Creative Writing, then onto York University and do an MA in Writing for Performance. Do work experience at this newspaper, get a job as an assistant director with this theatre company, work in creative conceptual language development and learn lots about branding and communications strategy. Use all that to write an impressive pitch to these agents, and have a synopsis ready to show these publishers. Write press releases, and give interviews, and do lots of talks and interviews in bookshops and libraries and women’s magazines and go on stage at large events and conferences.

But probably what really makes the biggest difference is getting it on the shelves in ASDA and a slot in the WH Smith Book Charts and thousands of eBook sales before it comes out, and sadly, that doesn’t always happen, that’s not in your hands. Sometimes, your publishing house has a big shake down and fires lots of people, or they walk out, and the people left didn’t sign your book and so they don’t really care whether it sinks or swims. All of these things are the potted history of my career, and I made the best of them, there was no plan. It’s good to have all of these experiences and skills in my pencil case (handier for a writer than a toolbox), especially the communications skills, they’ve really paid off in all areas of my life. I did tell them that a lot of writing is sort of failing, except it’s not failing it’s learning, and if you flip it, it’s playing. Seeing what works, what doesn’t. Like having a big dressing up box and not worrying about how silly you look if you try this and that.

How did I turn my wish to write into producing something?

I pinpointed when I started to be a writer, and realised it was actually when I was in Year 11 and wrote my first play. I didn’t write out of inspiration; I wrote it out of humiliation. From my very first nativity play to the age of sixteen I had a woeful list of acting credits behind me. I never got to be Mary. At my tiny village primary school, I played the chime bars (what ever happened to those) in the nativity, a Robin in Eden, a doll in the toyshop who had one line at the end, a chorister in A Christmas Carol and a chorus girl in a theatrical review. I joined a drama group in secondary school, and it was much the same story I was in the chorus. I so badly wanted a proper part and some dialogue. It came to a head when the group put on a production of Billy Liar at Stafford Gatehouse Theatre, and I was given the part of Red Indian who appears in a dream. I quit. It was shameful.

I didn’t go into why everyone passed me over. As a teenager I knew the answer all too well. It was reception class all over again when my mum was called in because I’d vandalised my own self-portrait. We’d laid down on the classroom floor on top of long piece of wallpaper and someone had drawn round us so we could create a life-sized painting. We were only four and a teaching assistant (though we didn’t call them that then) had helped us paint it. They painted me pinky-white with rosy cheeks and I’d taken a brown felt tip pen and scribbled all over it. My mother was called in. “Why did you paint her white?” She asked. “We didn’t want to upset her.” 12 years later the Red Indian casting was a different setting but the same old story. I didn’t want this to be my story anymore…The mortifications of Amy Beeson, the only brown girl in the school, class, drama group.

This week I told a room full of Year 11 girls that I wanted a decent part, so, fuelled by humiliation and indignation over the summer of 1997 I wrote my own bloody play called Murder in Haywoods. An immersive murder mystery set in Bugborough Hall. I promised all the box office revenue to the local Labour Party in exchange for paying for a set that had opening French windows and the hire of the village hall. I craftily wrote a cameo role for our local MP to play himself - it got loads of press (the signs of my future career were obvious very early on). I wrote it, directed it, and gave myself a starring role. We had no idea what we were doing and rehearsed in my mum’s sitting room. For one night only (really, I could have been more ambitious on the run) we sold out the 100-seater village hall. I had my moment in the spotlight because I was also the murderer. It sounds ridiculous but due to popular local demand I wrote another three of these plays, doubled the ticket price and always sold out. I told them, that writing those plays set me on a path that at eighteen I was part of a young playwrights’ festival at Birmingham Rep and fell in love for the first time. (They really liked that bit).

What I could still learn from my sixteen-year-old self

What did I learn from turning rejection into opportunity? Firstly, that I didn’t want to be an actress. I realised I loved creating worlds and putting it all together into a production, and that for me, writing was better than pretending to be someone else on stage. And secondly, that it’s important to have people to support you but most of all you have to back yourself. That every time I write, start a new venture, I’m no different to that sixteen-year-old girl, who wanted to do it, so she did. It doesn’t mean that what I do is perfect, but it means I know that what I need to make things happen is always there, I just need to tap into it. I know I can do it deep down, and when I’m blocked, the person who is usually standing in my way, is me.

And I would have like to have told them that no-one has ever shown the slightest bit of interest in my carefully curated National Record of Achievement, but they wouldn’t have had a clue what I was talking about.

If you’d like to read any of my published books then please consider buying from my online bookshop. The New Arrival, Our Country Nurse and Happy Baby, Happy Family. To find out more about my life as Head of Storytelling visit Wordsby Communications.