The truth about writing a book…

Brace yourself, it’s not pretty…

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The first and last time you’ll see this goth in colour…

When I envisioned myself writing my book the image in my head was deeply romantic. I’d be stationed at a beautiful wooden writers desk overlooking a bucolic view. On the desk would be a jam jar filled with freshly picked lilacs, a handmade mug with mint tea, and a blank page just waiting to be filled with rousing ideas.

The reality of writing a book is about as far from this image as is humanly possible. For over a year, I sat anywhere I could bear - desk, table, sofa, floor-  was surrounded by reams of print outs with scrawls on them, unopened mail, take away boxes, chocolate wrappers and often wore the same clothes for days on end. As final deadline day approached I double dropped my ADHD meds (not endorsing or encouraging that btw), and stayed up all night to edit/rewrite things to meet my own mad perfectionistic standards. In turn those standards gave me raw itching skin that wept and kept me awake with how painful it was - that hardly seems like a fair trade, does it?

Tired, itchy and sad….

The reality of writing a book has moments of dreaminess, joy and validation, but it is also fairly nightmarish at times. I wanted to share this because I hope it might help; offering solace to those who have gone through it, are about to, or are curious about the process. There are a growing number of authors opening up about their experience (like my friend and fellow journalist Stacey Duguid - see her post here) so I hope this will also offer a window into what it’s like.

Ugly started out as an entirely different book; a nameless and vague idea about pretty privilege,  something I thought and still think is a fascinating subject. I pitched it to a fancy literary agency a few friends worked with - they seemed keen. Then they suddenly seemed less keen, which was odd. I'd also put them on a pedestal - I felt so inferior to them - so it felt like my dream had been brutally taken away. After two meetings and several calls with interest, their brusque parting line was: ‘sorry, we don’t think there’s a market for this at the moment - good luck.’ A year later I realised they had a similar-ish book coming out by one of their authors, and a part of me now wonders if they wanted to scope out what I had planned to write - who knows? Thankfully, I rejigged my concept and found the right agent for me and the book who genuinley got it. 

probs the most exciting insta post I’ve ever done!

The book went to auction and I got a brilliant deal, but I had no idea how to write a book. There is masses of advice on book writing for fiction writers, but far less for non fiction. Perhaps that’s because the majority of them are heavily edited by ghost writers and editors or maybe it’s just me who struggled, despite being a long-form writer. I thought the latter would help me out, but a book is long-form on a whole new level. This isn’t a 3000 word feature, it’s 100k+ words that you have to deliver - and if you are a journalist or professional writer, chances are you’ll agonise over the smallest of details - which isn’t viable when you have so many words to write. I tried to work out how best to approach it, but in the end did what I always do - whether it’s writing this column here, or a cover interview - I leap into it headfirst and slightly chaotically. In hindsight, doing the bulk of the research first would have been a smarter plan, I sort of did it as I went along - which was both risky and terrifying. It worked out for me, thankfully, but it so easily might have failed.

Then there’s the thing that’s ruined writing for so many sensitive, talented journalists - and that’s ‘the fear.’ This fear is an invisible chokehold; it stops you from saying what you really feel, or really want to for fear of being seen as too extreme, polarising, or confronting - and the resulting cancellation on social media. The fear is a sort of sieve of the worst kind, because the people whose voices are left are so often the brash, the baiters, the narcissists and then those who are thick skinned enough to to shake off any rebuttal with ease (please show me how?)

My fear was so bad that I did something quite mad; I paid an assistant to delete my twitter feed - hours of painstakingly removing any tweets that weren't book related that cost me a fair bit of money. My worry? That somebody would unearth some random tweet where I’d said something untoward without thinking it through. (I still get messages about using Kesha as a punchline for a gag, but this was way before any of the truth about her experiences came out, I hasten to add.) I was 96% sure I hadn’t said anything heinous, but the 4% of paranoia won - it always does. The other way that fear tripped me up was overdoing it; I wanted to pour over every word and sentence. I wanted to sew everything together with the most up to date research and pop culture references. But I was also researching like a person with ADHD does, exhaustively with multiple tangents , and that’s why it took me longer to write than I’d hoped - I didn’t want to get it ‘wrong’ in any way.

It blows my mind that people would queue up to meet me….this is the best part of the whole process <3

I finished UGLY the day it went to press - which I do not recommend for your stress levels - and then went straight into promotion for it. I was beyond burn out, and wrecked from sleepless nights, and days of working 18 hours or more. It wasn’t just hard on my body, it was system-altering and I’m still trying to work out how to fix my thyroid levels and to avoid flipping into that familiar overdrive where I ditch self care entirely for work. I braced myself for the TV shows, radio interviews and festival slots  uber grateful to do the biggest ones which is quite unusual for a first book I’m told (and due to my brilliant PR team.) But what I really wanted was a review in the books section of the papers. It didn’t get a look-in - even on the paper I’ve written for since I was 23. I wondered if it was because it was self-help adjacent? But plenty of self help books have been reviewed, so it wasn’t that. I wanted those reviewers to read UGLY and help flag what women were going through and to flag the insidious side of beauty culture that was ruining people’s lives. Instead, honestly, I think they probably saw the word beauty journalist and thought it was ‘women's fluff.’ All the stuff that matters to us and affects us is irrelevant after all. Or maybe they’d filled their slots for authors of colour that month - who knows? You don’t want too many of them, after all. 

Another blow came when I heard about a book in a similar vein to mine being released, and its young author was given a huge advance and international book deal. Despite my envious gut reaction I knew it wasn’t about her at all, it was about what it brought up for me and my own confronting experiences. I’ve been rallying against the ills of beauty culture and promoting inclusivity in the beauty industry and women’s magazines for almost 20 years, so part of me did think why did I even bother? I’m obviously not what the publishing industry wants - and I know that rejection well; I’ve never been what magazines or the beauty industry wanted either. I’d almost rather somebody tell me the truth upfront, like an honest but firm conversation from that no BS friend: “You should manage you expectations; if you’re not young, pretty and white this whole book thing will an extra tough bloody slog.” And on top of feeling crap about the joys of institutional racism, I also felt bad for not being wholly in the young author’s corner from the start - it wasn’t their fault society is like this, after all and I hate feeling unsisterly. But when you’ve written a book about pretty privilege, there’s certainly a cruel irony to facing it in real time.

This isn’t to say it’s easy for everyone who is white/young/pretty as such - things are never quite that simple - but there is a race issue within the book publishing industry that doesn’t seem to have really been tackled. Recently at the Hay literary festival, I met a friend of colour who is - by all metrics - hugely successful. We chatted in a corner before they told me ‘honestly you wouldn't believe the conversations and ways I’ve been overlooked and treated on my journey. It’s been a joke.’ I was shocked; if it was happening at that level - and was unspoken because we have to play the game after all - it certainly was at mine too, which did give me some (sad) solace.

Other authors of colour have told me that they’ve felt there’s only been one space for a person of colour at a time, and that their lack of press coverage, cover quotes, social mentions and pre-orders comes down to a lack of connections (Tilly and Sniffles went to boarding school together after all.) One friend’s work was essentially ripped off by a white influencer with a bigger following and there’s nothing they can do about it and books by authors of colour automatically fall into the invisible ‘ethnic’ category no matter what their content and therefore being seen to lack ‘mass appeal’. I remember this phenomena well from a health title I worked at where the sales would shoot up if a white blonde celebrity was on the cover, compared to others. What are you meant to do with that? You can’t implore people to check their inherent bias and level up after all unless they read the bloody books in the first place.

Nova Reid wrote a brilliant substack post about her book journey that is very much worth reading about the topic of race and publishing. She said: “From being tokenised, to being assigned editors that are racially illiterate at best and racist at worst, to having their experiences of racism denied or minimised. Some even recounted their agents washing their hands of intervening when racism reared its ugly head, saying it was outside of their expertise and that they had done their job by negotiating a book deal. Diabolical.”

I was lucky in this regard. I had a brilliant editing team and agent who were intersectionality versed and gave me a sensitivity reader when I asked for it because I was worried that I’d not catered for the LGBTQ+ and disabled communities enough. I’m super grateful for my team feeding things back to festival organisers too - when I flagged that a literary fest had confused me with another Asian person - just before my 400+ person talk no less - it was completely destabilising. Just when you’re like ‘wow, this is wild that so many people bought tickets to hear me talk’ you’re cut you down to an irrefutable truth: it doesn’t matter what you do, how hard you work, how good you are, you’re just another brown face to put in a box, disregard or ignore entirely. 

There is one truth I now know that I didn’t before; if I’d been white this journey would have undoubtedly been easier. I feel horribly naive for thinking otherwise.

Much love and some feels…

FURTHER READING:

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Buy ‘UGLY: Why the word became beauty obsessed and how to break free’ in the UK here, in the US here and click here to for other countries.

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