On the Hardest Truth about Writing

c/o Rebecca and Gabriel Smith

On Monday, I went along to the latest Writers in Conversation event. Previous interviewees have included Jennifer Egan, Rachel Seiffert, Xiaolu Guo and Helen MacDonald.

My colleague Rebecca Smith was being interviewed by my colleague Carole Burns about her new novel Conversations with an Octopus (Legend, 2024).

It’s a delightfully entertaining and exquisitely written not-quite-cosy crime novel set around the not-quite-idyllic seaside village of Ottersea, where — in a too-small tank in the heart of the Oceanworld aquarium — lives a charismatic and very well informed octopus, Jane.

Named, as Rebecca proudly admitted, after Jane Austen. (Rebecca is Jane Austen’s five-times grand niece.)

When a murder breaks the calm of the village, the ripples reach even the waters where Jane attentively sits —

The conversation took place in front of a good audience in the bar area of the MAST Mayflower Studios, Southampton.

Carole is a fantastic interviewer — conversational but always trying to get at some quirky nub of the truth.

Rebecca is one of the most generous teachers you could ever hope to have. She is soft-spoken but fiercely focused. And she is always encouraging.

However, toward the end of the event, a young woman in the audience asked Rebecca a second question.

The young woman’s first question had been, ‘Why do you write?’ Which I thought Rebecca coped with amazingly well. It’s not something I’d want to answer, with no preparation, in public, at the end of a long day of not writing.

The second question was the much more usual, ‘For young writers, do you have any advice?’

Rebecca’s reply astonished me.

Here are her exact words (I was recording the session on my phone) —

My son, who’s still just about in his twenties, and his book came out this summer [Brat by Gabriel Smith],… said to me, actually before it came out, because I’d quite often talk to him about my teaching, and so on, he said, ‘Mum, you’ve got to tell them to work harder than anybody else.’

Whoa.

And I thought, ‘That is true.’ And I know I tend to be really nice, and really encouraging, but actually you have to work harder than everyone else. So that’s not very cheering, but it’s true.

As soon as Rebecca said this, I got my notebook out and wrote it down — and knew I had to pass it on.

I was astonished because I realised instantly that it was something I wouldn’t really want to say so plainly to anyone, especially a student.

It was something I would avoid saying —

You have to work harder than everyone else

Because it might be discouraging. Because it might come across as harsh.

Instead, I would imply it — as I hope I did in Monday’s entry ‘On a Full List of All the Short Cuts You Need to Write a Really Good Novel.’

There are no short cuts.

Surely that implies that There is a long way to go, and the way will often be hard.

But now it was out in the open. In the bar area of the MAST Mayfair Studios. Rebecca had passed on Gabriel’s words. What a relief to be so plain.

Of course, not everyone can work harder than everyone else.

Only one writer is the most hard working in the world.

I wonder who it is? Joyce Carol Oates? Gabriel Smith?

The rest of us have to work as hard as we can — in the little time we have available, in the busy circumstances of our lives, in good faith.

p.s.

Hopefully, Gabriel Smith will be joining Carole for a Writers in Conversation event this coming Spring. If so, I’ll let you know.

p.p.s.

And if you’re thinking of getting some of that hard work in — with workshop support and individual mentoring — by taking a Creative Writing MA, applications are now open for the one in Southampton where Rebecca, Carole and I teach.

Message me if you’re interested.

Rebecca Smith.