Written In Isolation

Written in isolation

If you’re reading this then the website must be live. Or it posted on my behalf to facebook and all those other social networking sites. Here’s hoping I haven’t done anything to ruin all the designer’s hardwork. Which brings me to the point of this post. Something that always attracted me to writing was the isolation, I was never much of a team sports person growing up, I tended to stick to things you could do by yourself, fencing, archery, martial arts, things like that. So writing seemed a good fit, not just because I enjoyed it and passed a fair few exams by dint of it, but because it was something I could work away at without having to deal with other people. Or so I thought, over the years, and so much so over the last few months, I found that nothing is written in isolation. Beyond even the experiences and life that goes into sourcing the material for a writing project, you actually have to involve people. Who knew? People like publishers, artists, website designers, lawyers, distributors, proof readers, test readers, writing groups, peer reviewers, bloggers and critics.

Ok, that seems like a lot. It is a lot, in fact it took a lot of effort to get this far and there’s a bit of a ways to go yet. I’m learning, slowly, that just having someone say ‘we’ll publish your novel’ is only just the start. Like making a national sports team and then being told ‘now go win this tournament. Done that? Ok, now go win the world champs.’ New milestones crop up and present themselves, which is a good thing.

I used to intensely dislike this one aspect of Film and TV. How the media attention and recognition often comes to be focused on one or two people, be it the director, producer of A-list actor, because having worked around all that it really is a team effort, and a massive one at that. Look at the credits at your next cinema experience. Stay to the end, there’s a lot of people who worked on those 90-minutes there.

And…then I go and find out it’s the same for getting a book out into the market. Like I said, I’m learning…slowly.