The Forgotten Guide to Happiness. Sophie Jenkins
I hadn’t been expecting the but. ‘Is it too long?’
‘No – well, maybe a touch. It’s not that. The question is, Lana, what’s the hook?’
I did some quick-thinking. ‘The hook is that this is the sequel to Love Crazy,’ I said after a moment.
‘That’s not a hook,’ Kitty said.
‘Okay.’ I had another try. ‘The hook is how love turns to heartache.’
‘Yes. Heartache. That’s what the problem is. It’s the storyline.’
‘Eh? What’s wrong with it?’
‘Frankly, it’s depressing. The last few days I’ve had this dark shadow over me and’ – she hoisted my typescript up as evidence – ‘it’s this book. It’s bleak.’
Couldn’t argue with that. ‘Well’ – I shrugged – ‘that’s the story. It’s about the break-up. It broke my heart.’ I was starting to feel nervous. No one likes criticism. ‘That’s why it’s bleak.’
‘It’s not just bleak; it’s bitter.’
‘Yeah. That’s what I was trying to get across.’
Kitty sighed and changed position. She studied the neat tan shoe dangling on her toes and looked up again. ‘Lana, no one wants to sit down with a book that makes them feel bitter. Bitterness is not appealing,’ she said. ‘What’s happening with your blog?’
‘I was getting so much hate mail I stopped posting.’
‘You see? Sad; now that’s something else. Sad, you can get away with, at a push. So, maybe you could have your hero die of something?’
‘Yes, I could do that!’ I leant forward eagerly. ‘Trust me, I’ve imagined it – Mark Bridges is hanging off a cliff and I could save him, but I don’t, and at the funeral, although I’m wearing black, I’m ecstatic that he’s been smashed to a bloody pulp on the jagged rocks.’
Kitty screwed her nose up. ‘No, that’s a different genre altogether. Look – think of your first book. Writer falls for photo-journalist. You’ve got lots of conflict but plenty of pay-off, too – and that ending, with Lauren and Marco moving in together, and that last line …’ Kitty pinched her fingers together, waving the words at me like a tiny banner. ‘“… Their adventure wasn’t over. It was just about to begin.”’
Woah, was I wrong about that.
‘You’ve already given us the happy ending,’ Kitty said, ‘and the sequel should go on from there. It should be about their continuing adventures. Forget about the fact Mark Bridges abandoned you for a Swedish girl—’
‘Helga,’ I said gloomily; her name hurt like a curse.
‘Whatever – that’s between you and him. Leave real life out of it. We’re talking fiction here. This isn’t about you and Mark Bridges, it’s about Lauren and Marco, the couple your readers love. We want the adventure, the lifestyle, the feel-good factor.’
‘Feel-good factor?’
‘So let’s talk about what happens next. Maybe Lauren and Marco start a family,’ she suggested.
I looked at her in dismay. ‘You want me to write about having a fictitious baby?’
‘That’s it! Remember, your book is about living the dream. No one wants to read about how it all went wrong and you didn’t get out of bed for a month – they can look to their own lives for that sort of thing.’
I stared at her bleakly. What kind of insanity would that be, writing as if Mark and I were still together, in love, and then switching off the PC and coming back to the desperate hideousness of reality? I couldn’t do it. The whole idea made me ill.
I gripped the chair tightly. ‘Kitty, could you just tell me, before we start thinking about new ideas, is there anything at all about this book that you do like? Apart from the paper?’
She thought about it for a few moments, obviously troubled by her own integrity. Personally, I don’t mind a lie if it’s told in a good cause.
‘The problem is, it’s too real,’ she said at last.
‘But the first book was real!’
‘Broadly speaking, yes; but you fictionalised it, you made a romance of it, whereas this one’ – she laid her palms on it – ‘to be honest, it reads like a misery memoir. Lana, I want you to see this’ – she spanked the typescript with the flat of her hand – ‘as a catharsis, a healing process, a way of getting all your angst out of your system.’
‘But – you don’t like any of it? There’s nothing I can keep?’
Kitty sighed – the only thing worse than receiving bad news was giving bad news. ‘Okay. Forget about writing a sequel. Put this book behind you and start again with something new. Start afresh. Invent a hero. You’re a writer. Be creative! Find that little spark of hope!’
I tried. I looked inside my head for a spark of hope. It was very dark in there. There was no glimmer of light at all. Opening my eyes, I said in desperation, ‘I don’t know where I’m supposed to get that from when there isn’t any. I’m not sure I even believe in love any more. What if it’s all a myth?’
I expected her to get panicky right along with me, but she stayed calm.
‘We need to think about your publishers, you know,’ she said gently. ‘Anthea feels that Heartbreak is not suitable for your established readership. Those are her exact words.’
Ohhhhh.
Don’t ask me why I hadn’t considered this before. I’d got the idea the publishers were buying my writing, when actually they were buying the romance. I hadn’t realised that until now.
To be fair, Kitty had asked me at regular intervals to show her the sequel, but had I? Nooooo. Had I even given her a synopsis? Nooooo.
Why not? Well – I was convinced she would love it: the Dream turns into a Nightmare. It was real. I honestly thought Kitty would be moved to tears; I didn’t expect to make her depressed.
I burned with shame. Second novels are notoriously difficult to write. Kitty was strumming the rubber bands binding my four hundred sheets of good quality paper together while she waited for me to work it out for myself.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What are my options?’
‘Either you can start again …’
‘Or?’
‘You can pay back the advance.’
‘Or?’ I prompted in a panic, because I was broke and the promise of a payment was one of the major factors why today had started off perfect.
Kitty raised her eyebrows and shrugged. On the or front, that was it.
Generally, you have to be thin-skinned to be a writer, so you can be insightful and all that, but you have to be thick-skinned too, because no one in the history of the written word has ever written anything that everyone likes.
Still; rejection does put you off, even if you’re trying to be philosophical about it.
The truth is, I like being a writer. I don’t like the actual writing, which is hard work, but the rest of it – lunches, interviews, festivals – is great fun and I recommend it.
I looked around. On the shelves were books with bright covers. By the law of averages, some of them had to be bad – trust me, plenty of bad books get published. And how depressing was this – mine was too bad even by those standards.
I imagined starting on a new book. In the right genre. A contemporary romantic novel.
I pushed myself out of the low chair and walked right