Collected: June 2024 - How do you recover from failure?
This month, Doug Johnstone on lessons learned from failure, Catherine O'Flynn on broken utopias, plus our podcasts on writing technique, being published and finding one's true genre.
Utopias
RLF Fellow, novelist Catherine O’Flynn on being drawn to urban Utopias and her experience of searching for Spanish ghost towns - unfinished new developments, abandoned as the contractors went bust.
“There was something simultaneously post-apocalyptic and utterly suburban about the ghost towns: Ballardian dystopias filtered through a Mail on Sunday colour supplement. I read about them, watched endless programmes about them and ultimately went back to Spain and visited some. I found something beautiful in the empty rainbow-coloured playgrounds and dense thickets of weeds bursting through fresh tarmac.”
“My overwhelming response towards the failed experiment of my childhood, along with the many other broken utopias I’ve found myself drawn to since, is one of tenderness and melancholy. Utopia-building may be driven by megalomania, it may be driven by greed, but most often and most affectingly it is driven by optimism.”
Catherine’s essay is out now.
The Gift of Failure
RLF Fellow, crime writer Doug Johnstone on the lessons learned from failure.
“To a certain extent, all writing is failure. I don’t mean that in a depressing, angsty, existential way, like we’re all doomed to create drivel that we hate forever so what’s the point of it all.
Iris Murdoch addressed this best when she said: ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea’. Ian Rankin has that quote written on a piece of card pinned to the wall above his desk, a fact that fills me with enormous hope. If even multimillion-selling Ian Rankin thinks his books are wrecks, well, then, maybe I shouldn’t feel quite so bad about mine.”
If you’d like to read on, the rest of Doug’s essay is here.
Writing Technique, part 2
Episode 461 (Duration 20.55 min)
RLF Fellows share their writing process: William Ryan talks about how he writes scenes, from tension and pacing to characterisation and dialogue; Lauren James (who writes YA as Wren James) discusses the mechanisms of their creative process, and Menna van Praag on the focusing effect (or otherwise!) of deadlines.
My True Genre, part 1
Episode 462 (Duration 23.42 min)
In the first installment of our My True Genre series, RLF Fellows discuss how writers discover which form of writing suits them best, including considerations such as financial reward, social pressure, personal inclination and happy accidents.
Featuring RLF Fellows, Chris Arthur, Jon Mayhew, Laura Hird, Mary Colson, Rick Stroud, Elanor Dymott, Mark McCrum, Rukhsana Ahmad, and Marcy Kahan.
The Experience of Being Published
Episode 463 (Duration 17.18 min)
RLF Fellows reveal what it’s really like to be published: Mary-Jane Riley on what no-one told her about the experience of seeing her work in print; Beth Miller remembers how her first publication day failed to live up to her expectations; Alys Fowler shares the rituals she has developed to mark each book’s appearance in the world; Charlie Hill on his experience of appearing at literature festivals, and Ian Ayris reflects on the thing that has surprised him most about writing.
You can listen and subscribe to RLF Collected wherever you get your podcasts.