From the Foyles Blog

12th November 2013

Earlier this year, Anna Freeman became the second winner of the biennial Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize, which rewards an unpublished author with representation by Tibor Jones and Associates.

In September, Anna blogged for us about the ego-bruising experience of having her writing edited for the first time and learning to trust the judgement of her agent, Sophie Hignett.

With her first novel, The Fair Fight, complete and due to be published in August 2014, she's been casting about for ideas to fulfil the two-book deal she's signed with Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Here she talks about the difficulty in forcing vague ideas to coalesce into something she can explain to her expectant publisher.

I'm still editing my first novel, while the deadline for submitting it to the publisher sidles ever closer. I'm beginning to feel okay about it, actually - I think I'll work right up to the deadline, and then just open my hands and let the book flap its covers and flutter off. I've stopped worrying so much about that novel now that I have the second one to worry about; it needs me more than the first one.

It was my idea to ask for a two-book deal. I have a friend who's written a wonderful novel and now has to come up with a second one, without a deadline to write to. My friend would have hated to have a two-book deal. She wants to write her book when she's ready, without an editor poking at her imagination to see if it's marketable. Some writers can't write under pressure; I'm not sure I can write without it. The idea terrifies me - I feel fairly sure that if I was in her position I'd just keep beginning different novels and throwing them away. Or maybe I'd just do 'research' forever, and drown.

So I asked for this, and must be grateful. I am grateful, I'm more than grateful; I'm delighted, elated and fracking* terrified. Somehow I must come up with an idea.

I can't just decide to have an idea. I can't even let the ideas know I'm interested in case they run away, into the heads of people who don't even want them. Ideas can smell desperation; they'd rather attach themselves to all those people who say they've had a great idea for a book or a film but they can't imagine when they'll have the time to write.

I caught the idea for The Fair Fight when I wasn't looking; I was lazing around in my pyjamas, reading a book I meant to give to my niece,  Horrible Histories, by Terry Deary. (In case you don't know it,  Horrible Histories is a series of children's books about all of history's nasty bits, with appropriately gruesome illustrations.)

I found myself gripped by the paragraph on female prize-fighting; it just seemed so odd that women were boxing on stage at the same time that Jane Austen was sipping tea. I typed it into Google and it all got a bit weird and destiny-scented - the words 'Bristol' and 'The Hatchet Inn' came up. Bristol, the city I grew up in, and The Hatchet, the pub I'd been working in for four years. Both featured heavily in almost every history of boxing I could find. I couldn't really not write The Fair Fight, after that.

I can't expect that kind of serendipity again, can I? I did have two baby ideas that I was feeling pretty hopeful about, but I think I killed them. I didn't mean to. What happened was that in asking for a two-book deal, I then had to sell the idea of a second book to the publishers. This seems fair, since I was asking them to pledge money for something that doesn't even exist yet. Unfortunately, after I'd explained my two baby ideas five or six times, they'd turned into so much drivel. I've noticed this happening to me before - the summing up of an idea often makes it sound trite and colourless.

A novel doesn't start as a synopsis, at least not for me. It begins as a feeling, an almost bodily sense of the tone the story will take, never mind what will actually happen in the narrative. Of course I can't summarise it accurately. Maybe I could if I'd said something like, 'Book two? I'm thinking it will be kind of dove-grey, you know? But like, an exciting grey that smells of swirling skirts.'

So, I got my two-book deal and I killed my tiny darlings to get it. Happily, the editor I ended up with is fairly relaxed about it - she seems to trust that I'll find a good idea, which is lovely and I just hope she's right.

I do have a miniscule spark of an idea. It's not even a baby, just a sperm half-stuck into an egg; I can't show it to you or even look at it until it's strong enough to be examined without bruising. It's a mewling, half-formed thing, like Voldemort before he returned to power. I'll feed it on my own tears and insomnia, and if it won't grow properly I'll just have to whack it into bits with a shoe. There's always the possibility that another idea will come along while I'm trying to nurture this one. Ssh, don't tell them I'm looking.

*Fracking is my new swearword - it makes me disproportionately happy.