Rejection and criticism by YA Erskine

As a would be writer, there is more advice out in cyber space regarding how to handle rejection, than possibly any other topic you want to google. Well, apart from Harry Potter and Twilight of course. That said, it’s great to know you can soothe your screaming, ripping, suicide-prone self by reading stories of rejection from the very greatest of the literati. It doesn’t make it any more pleasant when you receive ‘that’ letter, but nevertheless.

After receiving my own fair share of rejections for a few years, I found myself in an alien universe where, God forbid, my manuscript was accepted and about to become a book. Now, being a bit of a sensitive soul, not to mention a bit of a ‘glass half empty girl’ when the mood strikes me, I got to thinking. Not everyone is going to like my book. In fact, some people will detest my book. There will no doubt be negative reviews, because let’s face it, there always are. Even the most brilliant of novels such as Tsiolkas’ The Slap, generate criticism.

The more I pondered this, the more it worried me. Could I handle it? How do I handle it? Just when I thought I had time to mentally prepare myself, the first ‘not so complimentary’ comment marched up and slapped me in the face.

Even before the book had been released.

In response to one of my interviews.

The commentator had, I believe, taken umbrage at how I’d described my own policing journey, how I ended up bitter and twisted, how I hated the system and felt let down at every turn. He essentially felt that I’d gotten it wrong, that policing had changed and was more positive now and that my own comments weren’t a good look for policing. At first, I was mortified. Interviews are tough, particularly when you’re an introvert who is, by nature, a writer – not a talker. You don’t have the luxury of going back and editing a radio interview.

So after a few hours of stewing on his words I began to apply a few of the principles I’d mentally put into place in order to help me deal with criticism. And I’m pleased to say I felt a whole lot better for it.

They might seem a bit obvious, but here they are anyway.

• Take a long walk to clear your head
• Remember not to take criticism / negative reviews personally
• Remember that not everyone will (a) agree with your own points of view (b) like your work
• By becoming a public figure, you are opening yourself up to all forms of scrutiny
• Unless you’ve gravely erred (and by that I mean being incredibly politically incorrect), suck it up and don’t feel that you have to apologise to everyone for offending their sensibilities. They’ll get over it. (If, however, the said gaffe is grave then a heart-felt, well placed apology will hopefully do the world of good)
• Remember that even the genius’ in their field have copped it from time to time and that it’s going to be pretty much impossible to keep everyone happy.
• Most of all, pull on your big girl panties and get over it.

One final thought on that topic. Elbert Hubbard once said ‘in order to avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.’

To the commentator who didn’t appreciate my interview, I’m sorry, but I choose to be something.

Fiction vs non-fiction by YA Erskine

Over the past few weeks I’ve given a few interviews in relation to The Brotherhood and one of the most prominent questions I receive is ‘which characters and events in the book are real / true?’

Well, at the risk of being sued, here goes. In my first post I told you how the first manuscript I wrote was autobiographical. By the time I got around to The Brotherhood, I’d found that it was actually a lot more fun to fictionalise characters and events. I could make them uglier, more annoying, more sexist and more naïve than in real life.

In truth though, there’s a fair bit of myself sprinkled throughout a number of the characters; Lucy (her youthful naivety), Jo (the relief of leaving it all behind and her dream job in London – which just so happens to be my dream job), Charlotte (how I used to feel about the need to keep up appearances) and Cameron (his ideas on the justice system).

When I think of Sergeant John White himself, the central holographic character in my novel, I think of one of my wonderful sergeants at Devonport from whom I learnt so much in the early days. It’s his idiosyncrasies, his mannerisms, his eye for detail, his nurturing spirit and his fierce loyalty that I’ve injected into John. That said, I’ve let the character of John himself make his own choices and mistakes – fictional mistakes that have nothing to do with my real life sarge.

Others such as Commissioner Ron Chalmers and Darren Rowley are a complex mish-mesh of multiple real life characters I had the occasional displeasure of associating with over my eleven years of policing. Whilst they are fictional creations, like most authors I imagine, I have blended a number of known characteristics, sayings, attitudes and flaws from the various real life people into the fictional constructs.

Some, such as Will and journo Tim are wholly fictional.

In terms of real life events, there’s only a handful scattered throughout the book. Jo and John’s encounter with the bowman, the court case Cam relates in the pub, the subsequent handclapping scene. As per the disclaimer, they’re all fictionalised for the purposes of melding into the story I’ve woven, but they all occurred. The cross bow incident, whilst it didn’t end quite as badly as Jo and John’s, was on of the crucial events in my policing life that made me reassess my career and conclude that I couldn’t keep policing on the frontline. It made me realise that one day, I might not come home. A stark, frightening reality.

Cam’s court case stole a year of peace from my and my husband’s life and also made me re-evaluate my faith in the complaints system. The handclapping debacle was possibly the nail in the coffin that left me fuming, red faced, shaking with anger and on the very precipice of telling a certain senior officer to shove his job fair up his arse.

People ask me for advice in relation to writing, so perhaps one thing I can advise is to dig deep, mine the events that have caused you such high emotion and build on them. You might not have been loving them at the time, but gee they can come in handy when you have a blank page sitting in front of you!

Writing The Brotherhood by YA Erskine

Even though I had the question that would underpin the novel, I wasn’t sure how to begin. Third person, first person, nothing seemed to provide me with the appropriate platform to express multiple, deep seated viewpoints. I burned with the need to show how this murder would affect everyone around the victim.

After much sitting and staring out the window and many long hot showers (the two places where I do my best thinking) I eventually decided to give everyone, well, the most important characters anyway, their individual say. Ten chapters, ten narrators. All equal.

So I had the story I wanted to tell, the voices I wanted to use, and a rough structure. From there, I began at the beginning and simply wrote and wrote and wrote. In the ‘architect vs gardener’ debate on author styles, I’m a gardener. I had no preconceptions of how the book would turn out. Just took it one page at a time and let the characters grow as the ideas flowed.

I didn’t set out to write according to any particular genre rules. I did however, have a few ideas about what I definitely didn’t want to do with it.

I didn’t want it to be a whodunit. Death in opening chapter, lone tortured protagonist, red herring, red herring, red herring, *yawn* chase, interview, confession, justice. It’s predictable and unrealistic.

Nor did I want to give it a happy ending where everyone is satisfied with their day’s work. That’s so far from the truth it’s not funny.

Also, I figured that you rarely get to hear things from the crook’s perspective. I didn’t want to be like most other books where you only hear his or her tale in the video interview room at the very end. I wanted you to hear more of his voice, to experience his journey, to see his rationale.

Lastly, solving crimes is never clear cut. Every person involved has an agenda. Everyone has personal issues which cloud their judgement. Everyone makes assumptions and mistakes. None of us are perfect. All of us are flawed. In real life, no matter how good the investigation is, these aspects do impinge.

So with these ideas in mind, I began the writing journey.

The question behind The Brotherhood by YA Erskine

In late 2006 I finally resigned from policing. It was the best decision I’d ever made in my life and I regret not doing it years earlier. Not only did I walk away from policing, I also took the first important step away from the blackness (later to be diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder) that haunted me. After a stint in Melbourne, my husband’s work took us to Canberra and it was there in September 2009 that I was sitting in front of the computer, surfing the morning news when I opened one of the Tasmanian papers and nearly fell off my chair.

But firstly, consider this. Three years had passed since I’d left policing. Not only was I geographically a long way away from Tasmania Police, but was also very mentally removed from it. I’d stopped waking in the night and worrying that all the dead bodies I’d dealt with were hiding under the bed. I’d stopped shuddering every time I heard the wail of a siren. I’d begun to see the beautiful things in life again – things I hadn’t seen for over a decade – the birds in the trees, flowers, people smiling as they walked by and wished me good morning. I’d stopped assuming the worst of everyone and everything and was happier than I’d ever been.

When I opened the article however, I was catapulted back in time. For there was a photograph of an ex-colleague who I’d known since our academy days in 1995, had worked with on and off, but had lost touch with after I left policing. He’d been involved in a horrific situation involving a firearm where he could easily have been killed on duty.

I was astounded at how emotional I became just reading the article. I’d considered myself completely cut off from policing, but obviously I was wrong. Thus The Brotherhood was born that morning from a simple question. ‘How would those nearest and dearest (and even those very far away) feel if one of their colleagues had been murdered on duty?’

The origins of my writing by YA Erskine

I began writing in 2003 because I was pissed off. I’d been policing for eight years. I hated the job itself. I hated the red tape. I hated the crooks. I hated the way the public hated me, abused me, assaulted me – without knowing anything about me. Most of all, I hated the so-called justice system that let the guilty walk out of court giving you the finger while the innocent walked away faithless and shattered.

I’d morphed into a bitter, negative monster and the world was a dark, pessimistic, gloomy place. I didn’t want to police anymore, but my mortgage told me otherwise and I didn’t feel as though there was an option.  I was kind of trapped in my own blackness. So in my down time, I sought both refuge and freedom in writing.

The Brotherhood, in it’s earliest version, was autobiographical. A friend read it and commented that it was so angry he could see the spit flying off the pages. And it was. So I put it in a drawer to marinate.

Four years later, in a considerably better frame of mind, I dusted it off, tweaked the crap out of it and sent it out into the world of publishing for opinions. Alas, the rejection letters all read the same. ‘It’s really interesting, but we’d be sued. Sorry, but we couldn’t take the risk.’

One agent, however, suggested I fictionalise it. So I did. In the end I received the old ‘it’s good, but not for me,’ spiel, but there were a couple more promising nibbles in the meantime. However, I knew deep down that it still lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. So again, I let it marinate while I focused on other projects. Then one day in September 2009, completely out of the blue, I opened up an online newspaper and The Brotherhood was born.