Writing

Funeral poem

Ros Barber
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Funeral poem called Signal

A few years ago I wrote a funeral poem for general use. Grief and death are important topics for me, largely because of losing my brother many years ago. My brother was not religious. In fact my whole family were atheists. It was hard to find something suitable to read at his funeral. So many funeral poems are, I am sorry to say, just a bit clunky. The better ones are overused. I often had people asking me, as a poet, could I recommend a funeral poem. And I felt it was a surprisingly challenging task, given how much need there is for good (and not overused) funeral poems. Some funeral poems also only work in certain circumstances: they are only suitable for a spouse, but not a sister or brother. They are only suitable for an older person. What if you need a funeral poem for a child?

So I wrote this poem, deliberately, to be applicable to anyone at all. Anyone we have loved and lost, no matter what the connection. I wanted a poem that would help people to grieve, while still being a comfort in some way (at a time when there seems to be so little comfort). It incorporates my own beliefs and I hope it is a genuine help to those who have lost someone they love.

I offer it for anyone who would like to use it in their funeral service. There is no need to ask my permission. You can publish it in Orders of Service, no problem at all (it would be great if you can credit it to me but I won’t be policing anyone!).  There is a downloadable PDF here: 

Funeral-Poem_Signal_Ros-Barber

A Word version here:

Funeral-Poem_Signal_Ros-Barber

 

 

Signal
 
If we believe there is no afterlife

and love is shattered when the body fails,

we do ourselves a wrong: we strip our hearts

of love’s warm coat when death is blowing gales,

 

and wonder why we’re cold. If we believe

the soul we knew, and loved, and who loved us,

was never more than flesh and blood and bone,

their lively eye is lost, is ash and dust

 

and we’re alone. So ask yourself just this.

A broken radio gives out no sound,

but does the music it was tuned to, play?

And can you sense that broadcast even now?

 

Love is unbroken.  Mourn your loss today,

allow each moment that you need to grieve,

but listen for that signal in the air,

and know that we can choose what we believe.

The Creative Process in a Nutshell

The Creative Process in a Nutshell

Ros Barber
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The creative process is left out of most creative writing teaching. I’ve been teaching “process” for 20+ years, and I thought it would be helpful to share what I have learned here (and what I teach), in a handy, easy-to-link-to format.  Some of this only applies to writing. But some of it applies to all kinds of creation.

The process of writing is really two processes

The creative process is actually two separate processes: creation and criticism (editing). The biggest mistake an aspiring writer can make is trying to create and critique at the same time.  Example: a sentence comes into your head, and instead of writing it down, you start judging it, deciding if it’s worthy of even being recorded. You decide that it isn’t, and discard it. You’ve just said No to inspiration.  How would you feel if you gave someone a gift and they rejected it, saying That’s not a very good gift? Would you run to get them another?

Never create and edit at the same time. Say yes to any ideas that come: record them before you consider their value. Create freely, without judgement, and get a whole load of stuff down (on paper, on screen) until you run out of steam. Only when you have a whole heap of creation on the page should you switch into your critical, editing head and decide what to keep.

Useful Analogy One: The Clay

If a potter wants to make a pot, they need a big lump of clay. They can go and get this from a supplier (or dig it from a river bed). They put a formless lump of it on their wheel and start turning, shaping it as they go. They might have a rough idea of the shape they are after but they also let inspiration guide them as they work, moulding it and watching what happens. A writer has to make their own clay, and if you want to make life easier for yourself, accept however it comes.  It’s fine to get your words down in a formless lump. You can edit them later – turning the wheel, moulding the shape – but make the clay first.

 Separate creative and critical

Your creative self says YES, allows, loves, flows, dances with ideas, goes a little crazy. Imagine a four-year-old dancing, dressed up in wellingtons and a fairy costume, making up an extravagant and nonsensical story and building a castle out of yoghurt pots. That’s your creative self. Your critical self is like a strict, no-nonsense teacher. Never let that part of you in the room when the four-year-old is dancing. Otherwise you’ll get: What’s this nonsense? What’s the tiara doing on the cat? Stop this right now! And clear up this mess! The critical self sees mess, not magical castle. And creates a 4-year-old who decides dancing is dangerous and vows never to make up another story again. So don’t let your critical self stomp on your creative self. Compartmentalise.  Never give them headroom at the same time. Doing a few minutes of free-writing every day is the best way of training yourself into this separation.  Even now, after years of practise, I still feel myself trying to reject words and sentences when I am writing: I feel myself hesitate and wonder if they are good enough and I have to tell myself gently, Allow.  Allow is the magic word. Because:

‘Flow’ is a state of allowing

All writers, muscians, artists, sportspeople, scientists, hell, anyone skilled at their passion, knows what it is to be in a state of flow, and what flow allows: in short, genius.  That unbelievable goal, that breathtaking symphony, that astonishing poem – every one was created by an ordinary human being in a state of flow. Our most revered cultural icons, from Austen to Einstein, from  Pele to Fonteyn, are all people whose greatest skill was their ability to get into, and stay in, the flow.  The concept of flow was first named by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. But long before it was named, it was known writers and artists across the centuries have described as the flow-state as inspiration, personified it as The Muse.  It is a sense of pure and unconscious (and un-self-conscious) energy flowing through you. There is no thinking involved. It is effortless. It is not something that your conscious mind could cog and chuff into being. Indeed, if brought in during the process, the thinking part of you will mess it up, exactly as it does when you suddenly become conscious of doing something amazingly well, and immediately fail. Think crucial penalty kick, missed.  You cannot ‘try’ to get into this state: trying is the opposite of flow. You must simply allow what comes to come, and keep saying ‘yes’ to what comes until what comes is amazing.

Useful Analogy Two: The Tap

Say you haven’t written for a while, or ever. It’s like moving into an abandoned house. You want to have a bath, but when you turn on the tap (faucet, my American friends) nothing comes out at first. And then it splutters, because there’s air trapped in the pipes.  It comes in fits and starts. But then the air works its way out and the water starts flowing: but it’s brown. The unused pipes rusted and now the water looks like something you wouldn’t want to touch. A lot of people, when they see the ‘rusty water’ writing coming out of them, give up at this stage. But the truth is, when it comes to writing, everyone is connected to the mains. You’ve just got to keep that tap turned on, let the water – the words – keep flowing.  Because eventually the water runs clear, and then the boiler kicks in, and it starts to heat up too. And now it’s worth keeping – finally, you stick the plug in, and let the bath fill.  The bath is your novel.  But you are the tap.  The creation flows through you.

Through you, not by you

Mystic poet William Blake knew this fundamental truth about the creative process, when he said of his works: “Tho’ I call them Mine I know they are not Mine.”

When you start out as a creator, you are generating the work yourself. You are trying to make things happen. Often you will try too hard: the work will be stiff, mannered, lifeless. An undeveloped writer manipulates their characters like puppets. They have to, because the characters are wooden; they have no life of their own. In my twenties, listening to writers talking about their work, I became intrigued by this recurring theme: the characters come alive, they would say. They just do things and say things, and I just write it down. This had never happened to me. I was a puppeteer.

And then it did. And everything changed.

When you have developed sufficient skill, it becomes increasingly easy to enter a state of flow. The characters become real in your head, doing and saying things that surprise you. Your job is to allow what comes, and to transcribe it into your medium: for a writer, words. Consider writing as an act of listening. Listening to the words that arrive in your head and allowing them; allowing the next words, and the next. In essence, your job is to take dictation.  From where?  Why, the collective unconscious. Or the Zeitgest. From mass consciousness, and from the edges and eddies of it too. From your inner being: that still small voice. Where do you get your ideas?, that evergreen question posed to writers at Q&As, is only groan-worthy because there is no sensible answer.  Everywhere. Nowhere. They just come. And that’s the point surely. We don’t get our ideas. They come to us.  They come whenever we are in a state of allowing/receiving/flow.  This is accidentally achieved in the shower, on the train, washing up, or walking the dog: whenever the mind falls into a kind of receptive emptiness.  It can also be deliberately induced by drugs and alcohol (not recommended, but traditional for writers) or by dreaming and meditation.  Or simply through the act of writing, writing anything, with love and without judgement.  The simplest way for any writer to get into a state of flow is, in the words of Natalie Goldberg: “Just write, just write, just write.”

Which brings us to my ‘top tip’ exercise and my third creative writing analogy, the compost bin. It’s much like the tap, but earthier.

Useful Analogy Three: The Compost Bin

Think of your brain as a compost bin. On the surface: potato peelings, eggshells and teabags. That’s the news, Facebook, Twitter, that thing you friend said to you at the bus-stop.   Some days, when you start writing, it will be like going into a compost bin from the top. All that comes out is scraps; eggshells and teabags. But don’t give up. Keep going. Below this level, the dross level, things have broken down a bit. So keep going. Dig out more and more. Eventually you’ll get to the stuff that’s been there a while, composting away, all mixed up and organic. It’s juicy, and dark. Don’t be scared of it. It’s potent. It can grow stuff.  Bring out a few spades of it, expose it to daylight, put a seed in it.  Then leave it, and see what happens.

Useful ‘Flow’ Exercise: Freewriting

I’ve been using this one forever. Or since I read Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (I was 21; feels like forever). If you’ve been to a few creative writing workshops you’ll know it too.  Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes. Start the timer and start writing, as fast as you can. Write without stopping, without judgement, without crossing out, without correcting your grammar or spelling, without really caring if you are writing in “proper” sentences. (Though you should be writing forward in a flow to the edge of the page, in free-flowing sentence-type things, not doing some kind of word association down the page). You are trying to get ahead of your ‘thinking’ self; the conscious bit. You want to write so fast that you cannot possibly plan what comes next, you have to write what occurs. You are trying to get a direct line between your head and your writing hand/fingers. So that whatever words are in your head end up on the page. If you’re thinking Oh God, I don’t know what to write! then that’s what you write ‘Oh God, I don’t know what to write!’ and keep going from there, transcribing whatever’s in your head directly. It doesn’t matter what you write. Give yourself permission to write absolute rubbish. Sometimes it is nothing but rubbish. Sometimes something usable is buried in it (but don’t stop to check in the middle of the process; write until the timer goes). It doesn’t matter. You are turning the tap on, and keeping it on. You are getting past the eggshells and teabags, and towards the compost. And maybe in that compost a seed can grow.

“You” = “One” = “Me”

“You” = “One” = “Me”

Ros Barber
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One morning you wake up and you think,

Okay, enough is enough. I am going to do the thing that scares me. I am going to ask for help.

You hate asking for anything. But especially help. You have spent years being strong and capable. The times you asked for help and were refused (way back in the last millenium, when you were struggling to cope, alone with three small boys) hurt so deeply that you swore never to ask anyone for help again. You are a very strong and capable woman. You tile bathrooms. You build websites. You construct furniture.  You help other people for a living. You don’t ask other people to help you.

But ten weeks ago you made a commitment to stop hiding the fullness of who you are.  To have the courage to tell the truth: not The Truth, because you know there are many truths, but your truth, even though you know that will make you vulnerable. You have read Brene Brown. You recognise that vulnerability is a form of strength. So today, you will overcome your fears and ask for help.

If that isn’t scary enough, the kind of help you must ask for is money.

Money: society’s greatest measure of success. You know that if you tell the world that you are struggling financially, despite all the things you have achieved, and won, and been awarded, some people will conclude you are a failure. But that is the form of help that is required; the thing that will genuinely take the pressure off you, so that you can focus on what you’re good at: writing. Maybe there are some people out there who can see the value of your writing, and who like it enough that they could spare a dollar a month (84p inc VAT) to help you focus upon it. So you set up a Patreon account. You discover that Amanda Palmer has enough Patreon supporters to provide her with $36,000 a month (strictly speaking, per ‘thing’ at about one ‘thing’ a month). You are nowhere near as popular or successful or well-known as Amanda Palmer, but nor was Amanda Palmer before she started asking for help.  You don’t need anywhere near as much financial support as Amanda Palmer gets. It is worth a try.

You eat the frog. You e-mail your friends and family, to let them know about the Patreon account. Five of them become patrons, which is lovely, and you thank them. Another one turns up the next day (when you are at work in London) with bread and cheese and teabags. Your husband calls to ask you why your friends are turning up on the doorstep with food parcels. It is sweet, but also embarrassing, because you are not on the breadline. You are not a charity case, any more than Amanda Palmer is a charity case. More embarrassing than the food parcel, the wealthiest person in your family (an actual millionaire) writes you a lengthy text to explain why he cannot spare 84p a month.  It makes you squirm inside, and wonder how much he spends on coffee, which is none of your business. It reminds you how much you hate asking for help. You would have vastly preferred silence.

You think maybe people don’t understand why you are asking.  So the next day, you write a post on your blog explaining why you have been reduced (and that is the way you think about it) to asking for patronage.  You explain that even writers who have had considerable success (as you have) make far less from their books than is commonly assumed. You share the link on social media, and get on with your day.

Then something extraordinary happens. People love the article. They appreciate the honesty about author earnings. The link is widely shared. 5000 people read the article on the first day, and by the end of the week, 10,000 people have come to your website to view it.  That’s as many people as would normally come to your website in a whole year. Three become patrons, and you are deeply grateful to all three of them. (But let’s face it, it’s not looking good for the Patreon idea. Three patrons out of ten thousand readers is a conversion rate of 0.0003%.)

People comment on your article. Like the friend who brought the food parcel, some of them offer something you didn’t ask for. They offer advice. If money is what you want, they say, you should self-publish.  Self-publishing is the answer to low author incomes. You answer their comments, explaining why you don’t think self-publishing is a solution to your problems, especially as a novelist who writes literary fiction. But the same advice keeps coming. So you decide your next blog post will be about that: why self-publishing isn’t the answer for you.

Then something brilliant happens. On Tuesday the books editor of The Guardian gets in touch. The Guardian!  Your favourite newspaper!  (Even though the Guardian review of your first novel was the only bad one it got. At least the Guardian review of your second novel made up for it). The editor says they enjoyed your piece about author earnings, and would you like to do a follow-up piece in the Guardian books blog? Maybe about why you won’t self-publish your literary fiction, because you made some interesting points about that in the comments? They will even pay you. (Not much, but something! You asked for money. Here comes some money.)  You say yes, of course, brilliant, you were going to write about that next anyway.  When do you want it?  Not soon, you hope, because you’re going away for the weekend for your husband’s birthday weekend in a couple of days and you have a pile of student marking to do. They say by Monday please. (Which means by Thursday, because you’re going away for your husband’s birthday weekend). You say you’ll do everything you can to squeeze it in. (The Guardian!)

This is a great opportunity. Here comes the next fear. What if I fuck up?

Okay, you think, you can do this. They like what you wrote before, so you just have to write like that again. You have to tell your own truth just the way you would on your blog, forgetting this is for The Guardian, because that will only make you nervous, and if you are nervous you will fuck up.  So to keep yourself relaxed, you write it as an unpublished post on your own blog. It still feels a bit scary when you are writing it, but only a little bit.  Some people might not agree with what you write, but it is just your opinion, based on your experiences. You are not laying down the law, just saying how you see things.  You try to keep it sharp and funny. Because of the student marking, you don’t finish it before you have to run off to meet your husband and daughter at the Eurostar terminal with your £29 winter sale bargain tickets tucked in your computer bag. You try to write it on the train but you get motion sick. You finally finish it on Saturday morning, at the kitchen table, using headphones to block out other people, which is to say your beloved husband, who wants to go out and enjoy a city he hasn’t visited in ten years, and especially your daughter, who keeps asking “when will you be finished?” Suddenly worried it might be a damp squib after the last one, that it might be so bad they won’t even publish it, you press Send. Writing never seems to get any easier; any more certain. You try not to worry about whether it is okay for the next forty-eight hours.

On your husband’s birthday it goes live.  It has been edited. Some of your words have changed. The heading and subheading are not yours at all, and not quite the way you would have put them: you wouldn’t say ‘poverty’, for example. You are not in ‘poverty’, very clearly, because you are in a beautiful apartment in beautiful Paris.  Yes, you are here thanks to credit cards, and Christmas optimism, and your father-in-law’s generosity… but ‘poverty’ sleeps in shop doorways.  You guess ‘massive debt’ doesn’t have such a poetic ring. Never mind. Money always comes unexpectedly when you most need it. And look what is happening. The Guardian! Life is wonderful. Everything is heading in the right direction. You go out for the day with your family, take your daughter to the top of the Eiffel tower for the first time, and for a boat trip along the Seine at dusk.

When you return to the apartment’s WiFi, there are a lot of complimentary tweets and messages. People mention that the comments section is getting lively and you know what that means. You avoid ‘below the line’ discussions as a matter of course. There’s no way you’re going to read the comments on your own article. You’re not some kind of lunatic.

Though part of you feels ridiculous because the article’s headline claims you are in poverty, and you are actually, right this minute, opening a bottle of champagne. You didn’t buy the champagne. The owner of the AirBNB apartment you are renting, Marie, another writer and the classiest woman you know, bought the champagne for both of you as a gift, because she knew it was your husband’s birthday. This is the universe’s way of letting you know that you are loved and blessed beyond measure. You take a picture of the birthday spread. (You are eating in, to save money. Your husband’s birthday meal is a ridiculous combination: reheated ravioli, and champagne.) You cannot share the picture on social media, because you’re in Paris drinking champagne when you’re supposed to be poor. People would be angry about that.

But people are angry anyway. You expressed an opinion some of them didn’t like. Your biggest mistake, it turns out, was using ‘you’ as the indefinite pronoun. The article was about you, your experiences and opinions, but because you didn’t want it to be full of the word ‘I’, and ‘one’ seems too awkwardly posh and ‘a person’ is ridiculously formal, you used ‘you’ in your subheadings. People tell you that your use of ‘you’ was provocative. Because you used ‘you’, some people think you mean them. In fact, they are sure you mean them. You’re a writer, they say, you know how to use language and you knew full well what you were doing. It reminds you of when you were 21 and temping at the Alliance and Leicester Mortgage Advance department, and one of your duties was answering phones to people who shouted into your ear “You told me it would take two weeks EIGHT WEEKS AGO!” and even though you weren’t even working there eight weeks ago and hadn’t told them anything, you experienced their frustration as a personal attack and would go home every night and cry.

Writers are sensitive creatures. Self-publishing, as it turns out, is a sensitive topic. Some ‘Indie authors’ believe you have attacked the practice of self-publishing as a whole, rather than expressing your personal reasons for not self-publishing literary fiction. (You are not against self-publishing. You self-publish two non-fiction books). Because you have said self-publishing can make you act like a fool (you give the example of endless self-promotion on Twitter), some people think you have called all self publishers fools. They miss the nuance of ‘can’. Your husband tells you (fondly) that you are an idiot, because that was obviously going to happen if you put ‘self-publishing’ and ‘fool’ in the same sentence. The word you had originally used was ‘twat’. You can’t decide if ‘twat’ was better or worse than ‘fool’. You consider it jocular, but other people might find it more offensive. Twat or fool, you regret not having more time to sit on the article before sending it; more time to realise for yourself how some people would read that sentence.

Not reading below the line doesn’t save you. After winding each other up into a frenzy of rage about this perceived attack on themselves and their choices in the comments section of the article, the angry people seek you out. On your website, on Facebook, but mostly on Twitter, because that’s where you hang out for fun.

You are accused of ‘eviscerating’ self-publish[ing/ers], by people who attempt to eviscerate you for “your rude, belittling music metaphor.”  You’ve never been attacked for a metaphor before. They mean that part where you compared literary fiction to opera. You were trying to say it’s unpopular; it has limited appeal, a small market. Jesus, you don’t even like opera. You like Taylor Swift. You remember reaching for that metaphor under pressure on Saturday morning, and thinking literary fiction is like… what… bluegrass? jazz? what?  and then remembering Will Self had compared it to opera and thinking that would have to do, because you really needed to give your attention to your husband and daughter; it being the weekend, and your husband’s birthday weekend, and them seeing little enough of you as it is.

Probably because of the opera metaphor, you are called an elitist and snob. You, a person who feels inadequate for being schooled at an Essex Comprehensive, who makes basic errors of grammar, and who has to Google which/that every time you use them. You are called an attention grabber, an egotist, and a failure. You are told that your ‘facts’ are woefully out of date, even though you didn’t really use any facts (because it was an opinion piece, not a factual piece), except for the 90:10 marketing to writing ratio supplied to you by two self-publishers on your original blog piece.  You trusted that they knew what they were talking about. The funniest tweet that comes out of your being outdated (unquestionably true; your offspring would concur) is “The 90s called and asked for your background research. ;)”  You gave that one a ‘Like’.

For the first time in your life, you are called a cunt. The impact is slightly softened by the fact that the person who calls you a cunt goes by the Twitter handle ‘Angel Medium’.

Three days on, you are back home, and it is still happening. A few people are coming to your defence, which is heartening. Actually it is people coming to your defence that brings tears to your eyes, so you shut Twitter down for the day.

You walk the dog. It is one of those mornings where, even though you are deep in thought, strangers come up to you, engage you in conversation about the dogs, laugh with you. It’s like the universe is putting its arms around you and hugging you.  Letting you know: no matter what is happening on social media, you are loved. And that people on the whole are good, and kind.

After staying calm and polite through the barrage of people’s fury and misunderstanding, it is people’s kindness that makes you cry.

You decide to write this, and post this, even though the angry people will come here too.

Authors and the Truth About Money

Authors and the Truth About Money

Ros Barber
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The Rich Writer Myth

One of the biggest myths about becoming a successful novelist is that it means you must be rolling in it. ‘Six-figure-advance’ trips off the tongue very easily, as if it were normal. ‘Royalties’ sounds juicy. Money: still something that people who want to write a novel want to write a novel for. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I got a very handsome £75,000 advance for my first novel, The Marlowe Papers. But that was £75,000 for four years’ work, and paid over another two years, so in essence £12,500 a year (before agent’s commission and tax). Add to that the fact that I had, like many startup businesses, launched my career through getting into debt to an amount almost equalling the advance, and you’ll realise it wasn’t actually a life-changing amount of money.

I also hadn’t realised that unless your debut novel becomes a best-seller, you’ll not get that kind of money for the second book. My advance for Devotion (2015) was £5,000. That’s £5,000 for two years’ work.  This is not because it was 1/15th as good as The Marlowe Papers.  Some people are liking it very much indeed.  But that low advance (which is actually a pretty average advance) is causing me headaches. Thanks to the critical success of The Marlowe Papers, and nearly 20 years of teaching experience, I now have half a job (2.5 days a week) as a creative writing lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.  But that’s half a salary, which means that every month I have to find ingenious ways to drum up the other half to meet my living costs. Those ingenious ways are time-consuming, not always money-generating.  In short, what they do is get in the way of writing any more books.

Writer Royalties

What about royalties? Surely if you’ve written books that win prizes and get reviewed in the mainstream press, you must be getting regular royalty cheques? Only if you’ve earned out your advance, because an advance is an advance on royalties. And the way things have gone in the publishing makes it increasingly hard for an author to earn out their advance.

Yesterday, as I was finally bracing myself to put out the begging bowl, I pulled out my publishing contracts and put my royalty figures into a spreadsheet. I found out that in order to earn back that £5,000 advance on Devotion I would have to sell 12,500 copies of the paperback through Amazon, or 7,500 copies through independent bookshops. (That’s because Amazon and other large retailers press publishers for large discounts, and the publisher passes on the effect of those discounts to the author.)  If you know anything about publishing, you’ll understand that literary fiction doesn’t sell in those quantities unless the book makes a major prize list. So there’ll be no royalties on either of my novels in the foreseeable future.

Supporting Authors

The best way to support an author is to buy their book, read it, and, if you like it, tell other people about it or even buy it for them.  But as far as supporting an author financially, buying their book doesn’t help them out as much as you might think. Here’s what I get if you buy a paperback of either The Marlowe Papers or Devotion (RRP £8.99).  (I say, ‘what I get’, but in truth, this is the amount that will get offset against my advance, reducing the debt I owe to my publisher).

  • Buy directly from the author at full price: author gets £4.50* (minus any postage)
  • Buy from an independent bookshop/Hive: author gets 67p
  • Buy from large-chain bookshop: author gets somewhere between 40-67p
  • Buy from Amazon: author gets 40p
  • But second-hand from Amazon marketplace: author gets nothing.
  • Buy from second-hand bookshop or charity shop: author gets nothing.
  • Borrow from library: author gets 7.67p. (And I actually receive this money. It comes through the PLR system and not via my publisher. For 2014-15 I got £69.41).

[* authors can buy their own books from their publisher at 50% discount. But some contracts will stipulate these books are ‘not for resale’ or will attempt to limit how many copies an author can sell direct to readers.]

I noted that my US sales (the US paperback is released in April) will net me even less, because they are based on “price received” rather than the recommended retail price. The US paperback retails at $15.99, but the publisher will receive something on a sliding scale between 70% ($11.19) and 30% ($4.80) of this amount from the retailer, and my paperback royalty rate of 7.5% is calculated on that figure   So in the US:

  • Buy from an independent bookshop at non-discounted price: author gets 84 cents (59p)
  • Buy from Amazon.com (at maximum discount): author gets 36 cents (25p)

The audio book of Devotion has just been released (hurrah) but my royalty on this is also on price received, and frankly I can’t even tell what that will be, because though it retails for £16.62, I can’t imagine anyone will pay that when the most prominent price is £0.00 next to a notice that potential listeners can get it free with a trial of Audible (£0 for 30 days, then £7.99 a month). What the author will get from that is anyone’s guess.

I should add, these are not abnormal contracts. They are vetted both by my agent and by The Society of Authors. It is just where publishing is going, and is the reason why average author income continues to shrink year on year (see ‘Author’s Incomes Collapse to “Abject” Levels’).

Modern Patronage

It is clear that authors, like other creative people looking to make a living doing what they love and are good at (bringing joy to many people in the process), are going to have to look to new ways of supporting themselves. In the olden days, writers, composers and artists needed wealthy patrons.  Then for a while, there was Net Book Agreement and substantial funding for the Arts, and we could mostly survive directly from the fruits of our labours. Then came funding cuts, and the internet: for love it though I do, it has ushered in Amazon and their erosion of author royalties, the free and 99p Kindle, e-book piracy, and a ‘free content’ mindset. Authors need patrons again – and hey, where are the wealthy people?  Not sponsoring writers, as far as I know (though I’m prepared to be proved wrong!). The modern model of patronage, Patreon, is based on crowdfunding.  You can become a patron of the arts for as little as $1 /84p a month.  That’s $1/84p you probably won’t notice, but if enough people do the same, your chosen artist/author really will.  Check it out. The continued survival of literature written by anyone other than the wealthy and privileged could depend upon it.

If you like anything I’ve written; if you’d like me to write more; if you’d happily buy me a cup of tea if you met me, then maybe you’ll consider becoming my patron.  You can do this for only $1 (84p including VAT) per month. Patrons will get regular ‘insider’ updates and at certain levels get other rewards too (first edition signed and specially inscribed copy, name in acknowledgements etc). Find out more by clicking here.

Further Developments with The Marlowe Papers

Ros Barber
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filming trailer for The Marlowe Papers stage versionThis week, I had the huge privilege to be present at the filming of a trailer for our stage adaptation of The Marlowe Papers. A high quality affair thanks to professional film company Drop Dead Films, who have all the right gear (HD cameras, jibs etc.) and who offered their services after seeing the play during its run in the last week of January.

The snowballing of a creative project is a great process. It’s wonderful to consider how something goes from being you, all alone with your idea and typing a few words on a keyboard… to ten years later, having six creative people in a room all bringing your idea to life with skill and passion.  What’s even more wonderful is knowing that this won’t be the end of it: dozens more people, perhaps eventually hundreds, will end up giving their creative input into various iterations of a story that began in my head.  The contract for the option of The Marlowe Papers opera was finally signed this week.

And in further developments, I am currently working (and loving working!) on a film script. It’s a great joy to enter the world of my characters once more, and the stripping out of Marlowe’s internal musings (such a huge part of the book and a significant part of the play), as well as the words whose work will be far more effectively done with cameras, has left me some room to develop and deepen some strands and even add new scenes.

None of this would be possible without the huge enthusiasm of everyone who loved the original book, from my agent, my editor and the rest of the team at Sceptre and Hodder, to readers and reviewers.  And Nicky Haydn, whose insistence we adapt it for the stage has led to so many delightful things, and to even more people being able to enter and enjoy this imaginary world.  And Jamie Martin, whose masterly acting has brought to life the most challenging of scripts and persuaded me I can adapt it for the screen.  Here’s to all of you wonderful people, and all the wonderful people to come: deep gratitude and appreciation for everything you have done and are yet to do.

 

Fear of Failure – and How It Makes Us Play Small

Fear of Failure – and How It Makes Us Play Small

Ros Barber
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fear of failureFear of failure is the block that comes up more often than any other when I am working with writers. It is the holding category for about the half the content of ‘Write the Damn Book!‘ It is the bucket into which writers can throw a great deal of their negative self-talk:  what if it’s rubbish? what if I can’t do it justice?  what if I can’t find an agent? what if I can’t find a publisher? what if it doesn’t get reviews? what if it does get reviews and the reviewers hate it? And not just writers: anyone who ever had a dream of doing something and were afraid to do it. Fear of failure is a kicker.

Fear of failure is what stops most people even starting. Why put all that effort into something if it’s (probably) going to fail? And look around: don’t you see people failing everywhere? And look at all those failures in your past. Remember how painful they were? Better not even try. Better keep that dream where nothing can break it: in the future. Better keep that novel safely in your head, where it can remain as perfect as you envisage it, and not be sullied by your monstrous attempts to render it into actual words.

This is the paralysis that met me when I first sat down to write The Marlowe Papers. Especially after I spent three months writing an opening I was rather pleased with, only to put it in front of my then supervisor Lavinia Greenlaw and be told (quite correctly) that it was crap. (Obviously she didn’t say ‘crap’ – we talked viewpoint and narrative voice and stuff like that – but the upshot was, DELETE, back to the blank page). At that point, fear of failure got me round the throat like a cold bony hand and wouldn’t let go. Not a word would come out because they would be words leading to FAILURE.

Luckily, at just that point, I had learned EFT.  I began tapping every day on the individual fears that made up my own fear of failure; the foundational events that made me want to run away screaming: the three unpublished novels, the ‘also ran’ poems. Hell, here I was proposing that I could write a novel in the voice not just of youthful genius Christopher Marlowe, but of Marlowe-as-Shakespeare… i.e. the Greatest English Writer That Has Ever Lived.  With absolutely no evidence that I was capable of doing anything of the sort.

Hubris. You betcha.

It took weeks of daily EFT to completely eliminate fear of failure for this project. And then – guess what?  It was back for Devotion and I had to tap the fears connected to that book out of the way. But that’s because if you are always moving forward, out of your comfort zone, you are going to keep meeting fear.  You are expanding yourself into territory you have never visited before, and that is bound to bring some fear along with it. Fear is a good sign, in other words, of where you need to grow. So long as you don’t let it actually win, so long as you recognise it and move through it, fear is the first energy of the creative process.

So how do you stop fear of failure from destroying your dreams?  If you’re procrastinating on a creative project – failing to begin it, or failing to make progress – fear of failure is probably behind it and you’ll need to take action to remove it.

How to remove fear of failure

To remove fear of failure I highly recommend energy psychology techniques.

  • You can learn EFT like I did (free and detailed tutorials from the inventor of EFT can be found here) and move it out of the way yourself with a little dedication.  It will usually take at least a couple of weeks (tapping for 20 minutes a day), but this method is free, and it will give you plenty of insights into yourself along the way, as well as blessing you with some unexpected secondary gains.  (I got improved relationships with my spouse and family, and relief from anxiety and depression, just for starters).
    • Cost: FREE
    • Time: Approximately 5 – 15 hours in total, not including EFT-learning time.
  • You can see an EFT or Matrix Reimprinting practitioner.  This will costs £60-120 a session for someone who really knows what they’re doing, and you’ll probably need a few sessions, depending on the complexity of the underlying causes.  Not all practitioners are equally effective: try to get a personal recommendation.  I’ve been doing this kind of work one-to-one and in groups (notably on Write the Damn Book) for years, but I haven’t the time to take on any new one-to-one clients at the moment.
    • Cost: £60-£1,200
    • Time 1 – 10 hours, not including travelling to/from appointments
  • There’s a brand new development of EFT and Matrix Reimprinting called Release and Replace. I’ve been using this with my existing personal clients over the last few months with incredible results. You can read about it, and how it works, here.  What’s great about Release and Replace is that you can ‘bundle up’ all the past traumas that are creating an issue (such as fear of failure) and neutralise the emotional charge on them in a single session.  End result: that problem stops being a problem in less than an hour.  Don’t believe me? Try the method for yourself. No travelling to/from the appointment, and unlike any other kind of therapeutic session I’ve ever heard of, there’s a 100% no-quibble money-back guarantee: if you don’t release your fear of failure, you get a full refund.
    • Cost £17
    • Time 90 minutes.

Interested? For more details click here.

In the meantime, let me have your comments on your own experiences fear of failure, or indeed your experiences of energy psychology techniques, if you’ve tried them.  What has worked (or not worked) for you?

 

The Marlowe Papers on Stage – Jamie Martin as Kit

The Marlowe Papers on Stage – Jamie Martin as Kit

Ros Barber
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Jamie Martin as Kit MarloweThe first run of the Marlowe Papers opens in Brighton on Tuesday 26th January 2016. It’s on for just five days, with the final night on Saturday 30th. The director is my friend Nicola Haydn, who helped me adapt this one-man version from the book. The adaptation was no mean feat: the audio book version (which is unfortunately read very badly and which I cannot recommend) was 9 and a half hours and the play – with original music by by Fiddes Smith – runs to 110 minutes (plus interval). I worked closely with the actor and director to hone the script for performance am loving the results. There something really wonderful about your characters being brought to life in front of your eyes.

Jamie Martin (who was most recently in the Young Vic’s very successful World Factory) is tremendous, both as Kit and as numerous other characters. I hope many people who loved the book will get a chance to see it and well as many people who haven’t read the book at all. We plan to take the play to London, and perhaps tour it across the UK, even beyond if that proves to be feasible.  Come and see if you possibly can!

***

Update: 5-Star review: “It is impossible to take your eyes off Martin’s performance – which is a masterclass in how to perform a one-man piece.” – Brighton Argus, 29 Jan 2016.

Roundup of the Year 2015

Roundup of the Year 2015

Ros Barber
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The Year In Brief

devotion novel ros barber
2015: the year of DEVOTION.

If you have limited time to spend with me, or a short attention span, here is my year in terms of firsts. Because firsts always mean you are moving forward (unless they are shit ones… no, even if they are shit ones).

First…

  • appearance on Woman’s Hour
  • review in the Times Literary Supplement
  • poem officially on an ‘A’ Level English Literature syllabus
  • drive of an MX5
  • flappy-paddle gear experience
  • trip to California as an adult
  • trip to Ashland, Oregon
  • trip to Singapore
  • national TV appearance (UK)
  • book as editor
  • Business Class flights
  • stage play in production
  • Man Booker Prize party
  • dinner with a Booker winner.

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Book Stoppers: What’s the Point?

Ros Barber
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what is the point of writing a bookI wonder how many books have never seen the light of day, because the potential author of that book kept thinking “What’s the point?”  Whether you secretly think it (perhaps so secretly that you keep it from yourself) or whether you find yourself sighing out loud when you sit down to write, “What’s the point?” is a serious book-stopper.

Lots of writers — both aspiring and published — suffer from ‘What’s the point?”  Anyone who has ever seriously thought about writing a book has considered the huge number of books out there.  Books in bookshops. Books in charity shops. Manuscripts of books piled high on the desks of agents and editors. All the the books that aren’t published. All the books that are published.  All the books that don’t get reviewed or win prizes.  All the books that sink without trace.

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