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How on earth did you end up doing archaeology? Of all the weirdly specific, vocational jobs, you manage archaeology 😂 Anyway, I enjoyed this and look forward to more in the future if you carry on.

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I don't think I've ever known a writer, whether personally or not, who had anything like a conventional or normal path to success. The one common element seems to be the willingness to work hard. Writing is extremely difficult work, after all. Writers who make it tend to be writers who write, and publish, a lot - the ones who spend a decade working on their special novel without ever finishing it tend to go nowhere.

Related to this, the day job - or better yet, a series of them - isn't just economic fallback. It provides human experience, essential to good writing.

One thing I really appreciated here was your discussion of your readiness to deposit half a novel's worth of prose in the circular filing cabinet. Assuming 2000 words a day, five days a week, that's a month's work, if you're an extremely fast writer. Having the willingness to critically assess all of that work, find it wanting, and discard it, is crucial - a writer must also be their own most critical editor, which means regarding their own work with a certain ruthless detachment from the emotional investment they'll inevitably have with it (to say nothing of the inherent reluctance to go back to square one after putting in so much time walking down the wrong path).

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Feb 19, 2023Liked by Helen Dale

Your writing reads like we're sat by a fire in Scotland, in a pub full of firebrands, with a decent drink and half-played chess game in front of us. You're holding court and not in a boring way. You have a great way of telling your story without being narcissistic. Have you considered being Meghan Markle's latest PR? :-D

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Feb 19, 2023·edited Feb 19, 2023Liked by Helen Dale

You're right of course about the day job thing. Part of the problem is the "fake it til you make it" culture, that many writers' carefully curated online presentation hides the 9-5 cubicle job/well-paid spouse/inheritance/uber driving/whatever that actually allows them to write. So from the outside, it looks like they make a tidy income just from writing.

I regularly encounter people who think that by writing the occasional piece in major papers that I must be making a fortune.

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Feb 19, 2023Liked by Helen Dale

DeBoer is absolutely right about the bitterness.

But life is full of disappointments.

Heraclitus said: “Out of every one-hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”

We all think that we are that warrior.

As we get older, we realize that only occasionally do most of rise to the level of fighter.

Mostly, we pass our lives as targets.

Happiness consists of trying our best, living good (moral) lives, and enjoying what we have.

The bitterness comes from not accepting that we aren't the warrior, that we aren't lucky (in this endeavor), or that we didn't work hard enough.

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wagmi

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Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing

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I think the biggest thing is the opacity of the publishing world. Sure I could self publish with a few clicks of the mouse, but the real publishing......it's like a black hole in my research.

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Feb 24, 2023Liked by Helen Dale

Hello Helen, I enjoyed your interview on MindMatters. The question I start with is; Why write? There are billions of books of all kinds in the world. Why would a person choose to read a particular one that is not assigned in a university class? Most current writers seem to write for fame and money, and some find a formula for writing that captures enough interest/conflict to be profitable. This is not a moral judgment.

The next question I ask is why has Helen been successful? The first thing is your sincerity and the next is your forthrightness. These are values of Helen. They are not an image or PR stunt of Helen. You write from your heart and mind together. What attracts readers to you is the same.

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Actually I would sleep with somebody for a million quid as long as they had had a good shower or a bath. No big deal. I would draw the line at gay sex though. Yes, writing is bloody hard work and I admire anybody that manages to get there in print. My experience, across many encounters, is that it is about who you know. My stepfather got a deal because a friend of his brother was at Eton with a literary agent. The idea that somebody somewhere is going to pick up an MS from the tired pile of elegantly bound Garamond and go, "Fark me, this is the next Harry Potter" is like winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket. A musician once told me that getting your stuff heard is like pinning a post-it note to a tree in a very big forest. The chances are near zero. I do what I tell everybody: wait. You may be dead, but one day a supercomputer will curate the best of the best and if you are the best, it will find you.

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