Professional jealousy = wasted energy so get over it

However, this isn’t always that easy.  Jealousy isn’t always something we can control. It’s an emotion that takes over. It chips away at us and can seriously damage our well-being. Can we talk ourselves out of it?

I’m probably not alone in being jealous of J K Rowling. She’s a great story-teller, obviously well-read and we all love Harry and co. And darn it, her first adult novel has gone straight to the top of the bestseller charts. But some of my stories are just as good, aren’t they? I’m well-read too and I think my writing is quite good. I have another feeling towards J,K, though. I’m extremely grateful to her for giving us another great example of good versus evil, of getting so many people reading – including some previously reluctant males - that more people are reading my works too.     

It’s sometimes harder when it’s closer to home. My colleague Antony Rowland recently won the Manchester Prize for his poetry. I lecture in creative writing at the same HE institution where he teaches a little creative writing and lots of other things. I immediately felt useless. Shouldn’t I and the others in the creative writing team be achieving this sort of success? Hang on a minute, though.  I’m not a poet and I didn’t enter the competition this year even though there’s a section on short fiction. That spark of jealousy, fortunately, only lasted about five minutes. The next emotion was of extreme pride. One of us has been noticed. I was also extremely touched when Antony said in an interview with a newspaper that he was part of a strong creative writing team.

Frank Cottrell Boyce recently won the Guardian Literary prize. That’s where I’d like to be and maybe I won’t get there because – well, Frank Cottrell Boyce – will I ever be that good? But wait a minute: he writes a range of material for the same readership as I write for. So, my work counts. I’m glad he was given this award. I’ve met him once and even shared the dubious of pleasure of getting lost and arriving late at the same event with him. I will be working with him in the not too distant future. So, someone in my circle of influence is highly regarded … bring it on.

What about when someone in your critique group or another writing friend gets published / represented where you’ve been looking? Or gets a better book deal than the one you were offered? Or wins a competition that you also entered? That can be harsh. You want to be glad for the friend but you are so disappointed for yourself.

At this point I have to remind myself of what I often tell my students. You can do it IF you really want to. It is of course an enormous “if”. You will have to face rejection, feelings of inadequacy, possibly poverty, they say 10,000 hours working on your craft and this occasional jealousy for which you may well hate yourself for a while. You have to hold the vision. There is some luck involved but you usually find when your scrutinize the more successful work, that guess what, it is actually better then yours even if it is by only a small margin.

This is where those fellow-writers who make us jealous for a few moments can help us.  They provide the bench-marks. It’s the Manchester Prize, the Guardian Literary prize and a decent book deal with representation by a decent agent that you set as your goals. Our friend / colleague / writing buddy has done this, therefore it is possible for us as well. We may have to try a little bit harder, though.

I always take much comfort in remembering Louisa May Alcott who worked as a jobbing writer for twenty years, no doubt earning a meagre living but being content in her work, and then wrote Little Women. Aren’t we glad that she did? She invested what she earned from that in the railways and became quite rich. Possibly after 10,000 hours of other writing?  

We can’t help the feelings but can we turn them into something that can work positively for us?                         

   

CWIG One-day Conference 2 April 2011

This was a day that started off with us all licking our wounds and ended with us feeling cautiously optimistic about the future and remembering that what we do has value.

We have to be realistic: school budgets are slashed, librarians no longer have their School Librarians Association fee paid and are often only employed for the weeks the children are in school, and school visits are harder to come by because schools no longer have the money. Even if you do one for free… you often fail to sell books – parents don’t have the money either.  

And yet, a publisher who came to talk to my students this week reported that his sales had only gone down by 2% because of the recession.

Tony Bradman reminded us that we have a responsibility to be paid properly. We have an economic value. Perhaps it will be difficult to return to the golden days for the 1950s and 1960s when children’s literature had a special place possibly because of the 1944 Education Act, but we still have something very important to bring.

Yes, we have to promote ourselves now. I do already do a lot of what was mentioned – blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. but for some time have been looking for a sensible way of providing a newsletter. One of the other delegates came up with the answer: Mailchimp. It’s a package that will manage your database and is free up to 500 subscribers.  

That’s why we go to these occasions: to find out from our friends.

And yes another great value is meeting up with old friends and meeting in the flesh for the first time those chums we know in cyberspace.

Ideas were shared also for the full conference to be held at reading in 2012. That already sounds as if it too is going to be inspirational.  

Frank Cottrell Boyce was the final speaker. He reminded us that everybody can benefit from reading and not everybody is going to write. So the traditional author visit, with the writer reading from their book, still has enormous value.

The whole conference was so inspiring that my little note-book, in which I jot down ideas for short stories and blog posts, had as many pages filled in a couple of hours as it normally has in a couple of weeks. We have a future and it actually looks quite bright. It just needs managing.