Our guest speaker on April 16 was Alice Jolly, author of two novels: What The Eye Doesn’t See, (2002) and If Only You Knew, (2006), a bitter sweet love story set in Moscow. Alice has also published short stories, poems and articles and works as an associate lecturer for the Open University teaching creative
writing at undergraduate level. She will be sharing her experiences of publishing and teaching.

Alice was bought up in Gloucestershire and studied history at Oxford University. Before her first novel was published, she worked for a merchant bank, and then for the European Commission as an aid administrator. She has also worked in local government and as a volunteer for a human rights NGO.
Alice has lived in Brussels for the last ten years. She travels back to England regularly to visit family in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. She is married to Stephen, who is a lawyer and they have a four year old son called Thomas.

Alice Jolly, WWN Talk - 16 April 2007

THE FINE ART OF NOVEL CRAFTING
Report by Helen Pearse

Our WWN April speaker, novelist Alice Jolly, gave us the unedited version of a literary
novelists’life, from the germ of an idea through to hitting the post-publishing publicity
trail… and tells us why she does it.

It seems that there is such a thing as a born novelist. It just takes time for the early certainty that you are a writer to transform itself into words on paper, ninety to one hundred thousand of them in all. “As a child and a teenager I wrote books, I lost confidence in my twenties, but knew for certain that I had to publish my first novel by the age of thirty. At twenty-seven I began, and just kept writing, no matter how muddled it got. It was a huge amount of work and a huge learning curve. And then I had to ask myself the question, ‘ What to do with it?’”

Alice sent her manuscript to an agent and had a reply within a record three weeks – a
resounding ‘yes’. After such a fairytale beginning Alice’s first novel faltered as “the agent couldn’t sell the book. There was positive feedback from editors, who all loved it and then a board of marketing people said ‘No’”. End of story. Undeterred, Alice embarked on another novel, What the Eye Doesn’t See. This time her agent sold the book and negotiated a two book deal with Simon and Schuster into the bargain. Alice explains, “I was six months pregnant and my agent was asking me ‘can you write a book in two years?’.” Alice finished her novels. The third one, If Only You Knew , was published in November 2006 and is dedicated to her stillborn daughter.

“Both books were extremely hard to write,” says Alice. “Six months prior to writing I start making a stack of notes, then I sit down and write the whole book – my last one was written in two months. What is being produced is unreadable, but for me getting the thing down is incredibly important. I do a very, very fast first draft and then fourteen major re-drafts…I need to see the whole book laid out…You need to be very clear about what you do or don’t need to say, and you become more daring at leaving stuff out. The best writers are masters at knowing what to leave out.” Alice has always been a member of a writers’ workshop, “we meet every two weeks, it’s a social thing too. But do join for the feedback too, although be ready to take it with a large pinch of salt.” She is also a big fan of the Arvon Foundation, and initially kept her writing going with a creative writing course through the Open College of the Arts. “Taking a course can only take you so far – but makes you write.”

Alice addresses the vexed question of ‘how to keep going’ (both her books took over four years to write). “I keep a sheet of paper with how much I do every day. It’s easy to think that you’re doing a lot of writing when you’re not. The first half hour is best for me. I write every day and I find it incredibly important not to be judgmental about myself…allow yourself to write a really bad first draft! Just write, don’t judge.”

Having lost a first novel to market forces for being ‘insufficiently commercial’, Alice still has no regrets about being a literary novelist. “For me it has to be the book I want to write…I didn’t want to compromise. I think there is a very difficult interface between creativity and commerce.” In spite of her first novel selling over twelve thousand copies in Waterstones and Smiths, she is having a hard time persuading them to stock her latest novel. “We live in a society where you can buy the book that won the Booker Prize for less than the price of a Big Mac. Publishers need to be making an investment in the early books of writers…Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Affair’ was, afterall, his tenth book.”

When asked why she writes, Alice replies with a quote from Kafka, “a good book is like an ice pick that smashes open the farthest reaches of our hearts