Given a free hour to wander around a bookshop, it will be with an air of expectation that I pick up intriguing-looking books by authors I haven’t heard of (beautiful cover designs attract my attention and ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ by Kiran Desai is a particular favourite of the moment so is currently decorating my dressing table).
The sense of simmering excitement as I enter a bookshop has less to do with the prospect of finding a novel on a theme that sparks my interest than finding evidence for the existence of ‘accidental novelists’. These are the seemingly rare souls who have not worked in publishing/have not spent their whole lives working towards getting a novel published/have no relevant qualifications/are not from literary families/grew up surrounded by bookshelves that were more likely to be groaning under the weight of well-thumbed volumes by Enid Blyton than Jane Austen but who have still managed to get a publishing deal. In other words, people that I can identify with in every sense except the publishing deal bit. Finding them means making a bee-line for the back-cover author blurb.
Articles on the subject stress the difficulty in getting your first book published and sometimes it seems like an overwhelmingly pointless task to even try. Remembering that JK took delivery of 12 rejection letters before Bloomsbury decided that Harry Potter #1 was a go-er gives cause for hope until you remember that she at least came with credentials (an English literature degree). Qualifications-wise, I really am a scientist through and through, and I only decided that I wanted to write a novel 4 years ago. The closest I come to a literary connection is an unsubstantiated family legend that somehow we are related to John Galsworthy of ‘Forsyte Sage’ (and Nobel Prize for Literature, 1932) fame, and despite years spent zipping from new office to new office as a temp, I have never so much as sniffed the inside of a publishing house.
I haven’t had the chance to wander around a bookshop in search of hope for some time, but I did read a newspaper article on Toni Jordan recently and found some there instead. It was a lengthy piece that began with the depressingly familiar line, "winning a contract with a publisher on your first foray into fiction is rare", but went on to describe how Jordan, a former molecular biologist and vitamin company marketing manager, had bagged an agent and a publishing deal for her debut novel. This is currently selling like hot cakes, apparently. True, she had decided to abandon science for a career as a commercial copywriter, to which end she’d enrolled in a professional writing and editing course, but she’d only signed up for the ‘novel’ option as a way to fulfill course requirements. No long-standing literary ambition there then.
So Toni Jordan is a true ‘accidental novelist’ and indeed that was the title of the article. My own term for this type of person used to be ‘damn lucky bastard’ but I think that ‘accidental novelist’ is perhaps fairer. After all, while the stars may indeed have been aligned in such a way as to help their cause, these novelists have done one other thing that I’ve yet to do – finish a manuscript. I may have typed ‘The End’ some time ago, but the mammoth amount of editing that remains to be done means I’m a long way off being ready to present a polished manuscript to an agent or editor. But when I am, there is indeed hope that it will be accepted, be published with a beautiful cover and find its way onto my dressing table.