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New authors often ask if you need an agent to get published. Well, I have been without an agent twice now in my writing career – once before my first novel was published in 1999, the second over the past year 2009. I thought it might be interesting to compare my experiences.

I found my first publisher without an agent. This took me six years from the day I decided to get serious about my writing, during which time I published around 50 short stories, won a few competitions, had a lot of fun in the small press world, and collected enough rejection slips to paper my bedroom (yes, these were real paper rejections since nobody had email in those days). Since I knew nobody in the publishing business and had never met a professional author, it was very much a trial and error process. I got hold of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and made a list of all the children’s publishers and agents. For want of a better system, I started at A and worked my way through. I sent sample chapters of Song Quest to a mixture of agents and publishers, and happened to find a publisher first. That publisher was Element Books (sadly no longer with us), and the editor who picked my work off the slush pile was none other than Barry Cunningham, who had just moved there from Bloomsbury fresh from discovering Harry Potter to start a children’s list. (Interestingly at the time, Bloomsbury rejected my book with the helpful note “sorry, we don’t really publish fantasy”...) After Song Quest had been published – but before it won the Branford Boase – I sent a copy to an agent I really wanted to work with, and she took me on immediately.

Those six unagented years were frustrating, yes. But even as an unpublished author, I was treated with respect. Everybody I approached replied, no matter how unsuitable that publisher or agent might have been for my work (and I can see now that some of my submissions were total shots in the dark… sorry if you were one of those people!). Yet within a few weeks, I’d receive a standard rejection on headed notepaper, occasionally with a scribbled note from the editor or agent at the bottom explaining their refusal in more detail. Whatever those editors or agents might have been privately thinking along the lines of IS SHE DELUDED/MAD?!, they treated me in the polite, businesslike manner I expected from them, and in return I remained polite and businesslike even when years of creation had been dismissed as unpublishable by return of post.

A decade on, things could not be more different. There is now a dedicated children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, so presumably more publishers and agents than ever before. There are more potential authors too, coming out of writing courses with a good knowledge of the market and at least one book edited to perfection. The business ought to be healthy and thriving. No more half-crazed authors who can’t string two words together sending in manuscripts that have no hope of ever seeing the light of day. Writers these days are market savvy in the extreme. And yet the polite rejection slip appears to have vanished from the face of the earth.

Not one of my saes have found their way back to me. Of course there’s now email instead, which is both easier and cheaper. But have the polite letters from publishers been replaced by email rejections? It seems not. Rather, they have been replaced by silence… a silence I have come to assume means NO, except how long do you wait before you are certain you are free to send out the same proposal again? And how can you guess when silence means “no”, and when it means they’re discussing how many zeroes to

The part of me that dreams up stories is quite separate from the part of me that goes to the supermarket for food, drives my car, or does the accounts. It is a fragile part, since it needs to feel safe before it emerges. Yet it is also a strong part, because it is always there deep inside me even if it does not feel like coming out. I am talking, of course, of my muse.

Traditionally the muses are young women who appear in Greek and Roman myth. First there were three, then seven, then nine. They had names, and they specialized in poetry, music, dance, history, astronomy. But obviously nine muses are going to be vastly overworked in our modern age, when nearly everyone seems to be writing a book or making music or doing other muselike things. So my muse is not a daughter of Zeus. He’s male for one thing, and he’s a unicorn.

I can tell when he is sulking. In some environments he emerges, delighted and curious and playful. He likes open spaces, mountains, beautiful gardens, candles, sunshine, snow, independent shops, second hand bookstalls, car boot sales, interesting artwork, music, colours, animals, the moon, stars, sparkly things. He dislikes noise, grey streets, traffic jams, litter, crowds, fluorescent lighting, mobile phones, dentists, and men in suits. He likes to be given little treats – a coffee in pleasant surroundings, a walk in a scented garden, ten minutes of sitting in the sun, a candlelit bath with incense and wine, an open fire on a cold day. In short, he has to be charmed.

For quite a while I did not know what my muse looked like and called him vaguely “my artist”. But gradually over the years he took form. He first showed himself to me when I won a short story competition – I went shopping with the intention of spending my winnings on something special to remind me of my success, and came back with two unicorn book ends. They were rather sweeter and pinker than I imagined, but of course they were my muse as a foal…



(I have been wondering if this means he is a twin – does anyone else have a unicorn as their muse?)

Later, browsing around Hay-on-Wye during festival week, I came across a poster of a more grown up unicorn, which I have on the wall of my study. I burn candles and incense on the shelf beneath it if I need his advice. I painted the wall behind him red for inspiration. He watches me as I write peering over my shoulder and breathing magic mist over my computer. Naturally, he is on the south wall for creative development (he’s into feng shui at the moment).



The unicorn is quite an interesting muse to have. He is a shy creature who will only respond to gentleness (the traditional maiden), and yet has potential for aggression when threatened (a sharp horn). Unicorn horn also has magical properties – it is supposed to bestow eternal life in powdered form, and can transform poison into sweet wine. Unicorns have a spiritual connection sometimes associated with the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel, and are also associated with healing. They are usually shown as being horse-like, which means they can be ridden (but presumably not bridled). They are everywhere you look, and yet they do not exist except in the imagination.

I was on the cross-trainer at the gym, listening to music on my little zen-stone, when a song prompted a short story to drop into my head.

I find it's like that with short stories. Putting a novel together takes an age. You research the background, come up with characters, name them (always difficult), invent histories for them, thrash out a plot, change the plot, change the characters, start again... A novel, for me anyway, is constructed over months, even years – bashed together from odd bits and pieces. I always think of a full length book as being 'under construction' or 'up on the stocks'.

A short story tends to arrive almost complete. I suppose that's because it's short. Often there's no need even to name the characters. I may not know the exact words I'm going to frame it in, but I have the whole span of the story, its mood, its imagery, sometimes even the way it's going to be told – in the first person, say, or in a series of short, disconnected scenes.

I'm usually aware of a novel putting itself together. I remember the initial idea, I know when I decided to include this character, and that incident. I remember deciding to drop that whole section, and the reasons why. But a short story often seems to have come from nowhere. One moment I'm sweating on the cross-trainer, thinking of nothing in particular – the next second, there's a story. And it does seem as if some inner light-bulb has illuminated the inside of my head.

When I sit down to write the story, there's a lot of hard concentration and revision – this isn't automatic writing I'm talking about – but the work focusses on the arrangement of words in a sentence, or to what degree I can pare the narrative down before it becomes incomprehensible. With a novel the work covers a far wider range – research, say, or the sheer logistics of getting character B to a particular place, at a particular time, so s/he can encounter character D.

I suppose I'm saying that, for me, a novel is about plotting and a short story is about language. (I keep saying 'for me' because I'm very aware that it might be different for another writer).

I can clearly remember the arrival of some stories. I was watching the film 'Silent Tongue', in which a simpleton boy, played by River Phoenix, is mourning his dead wife, an Indian squaw. Her body, wrapped in a blanket, has been lodged in a tree, for the birds to pick clean. The boy, unable to understand that she is dead, sits under the tree, on guard, driving the birds away with shots from his rifle. The woman's ghost appears to him, haranguing him for keeping her tied to her body – she can't travel on to the other world until her body has disappeared.

My head is so stuffed with old stories and songs that they leak out of my ears. As I watched this part of the film, the words of the old ballad leaped into my head: 'Who lies weeping on my grave and will not let me sleep?' I was seized with the idea of writing my own version of this old song. I pared it down to almost nothing but dialogue, and then realised that I could make the title work as well. I called it 'Overheard In A Graveyard', and so was able to cut all description or even mention of the setting. The finished story is told entirely in dialogue. The two voices aren't even given genders – they could be male and female, or both male, or both female. You decide.

OVERHEARD IN A GRAVEYARD
'What is Longing made of, that it never wears out?
Bone breaks. Rock wears away to sand. In this dark rain, hard iron falls to rust.
Razors blunt. But Longing's edge still cuts deep... '

Published by Hodder in my book, 'NightComers'
The whole story can be read on my website at www.susanprice.org.uk

I used a similar title for 'Overheard In A Museum', (unpublished as yet) which came when I fulfilled a childhood ambition to visit the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, and stood beside the Gokstad ship. The museum is within sight and sound of the Oslo Fjord, where the ship must once have sailed:

'When the doors of the hall open, I smell the sea. I hear it. The pulse of the long-felled oak runs through me, and I feel the sea rush past and under me, and I surge forward to climb the wave. But I never move. I shall never more move...

The most surprising arrival of a story was during the SAS conference last year. My colleague Katherine Roberts (author of I AM THE GREAT HORSE), headed a collage workshop. Under Katherine's instruction, we first had to fix in our minds the kind of story we wanted to write, or the writing problem we wanted to solve. Then we whiffled quickly, at random, through a pile of magazines and, without thinking, ripped out any image or words that caught our attention. After a few minutes of this, we had to look through our bits of paper, and arrange them on a larger sheet to form a collage.

There were about ten professional writers in that room, with glue and paper, and tongues sticking out between teeth. It was, for an SAS conference, a rare few minutes of intense, absorbed silence.

Collages finished, we each had to speak about our own for a few minutes. I had known from the outset that I wanted to write a ghost story. I had chosen a large photograph of a wild moorland area. Over it I had glued a headline that had grabbed my eye: 'Buried in an Unmarked Grave'. There was a photo of a street of old terraced houses, and a dark, dirty flight of steps. But when I had to talk about the collage, I couldn't say much. I said I felt that the flight of steps led down into the underworld, and that someone was buried 'in an unmarked grave' on the moorland, and 'nane shall ken whaur they have gane'. Another colleague, Celia Rees (author of SOVAY), said that it reminded her of a famous murder case.

And then we went for lunch. My room was near where we'd been working, and I tossed the collage on my bed, and sped off to the refectory, for an hour or so of the usual lively SAS chat. I forgot all about the collage, but when I came back to my room at the end of the afternoon, there it was on the bed. The instant I looked at it, Celia's comment and my own thoughts came together and the story 'Carla' was in my head – the characters, the incidents, the mood, the way I would tell it.

I wrote the story about four months ago, and am still tinkering with it, but on the whole, it pleases me well enough. It's unpublished, but I've added it to a collection of new stories that I'm slowly building up, and which may be published one day. (I met my agent today and she told me to send her my stories, as she has a possible sale in mind).

I'll add this latest story to it, when I've written it, if it's any good at all. The song I was listening to on the cross-trainer? 'Cruel Mother' by June Tabor -

She leaned her back against a thorn
All alone and so lonely
And there she has her babies borne
All in the green woods of ivy

She took a knife both long and sharp
All alone and so lonely
And pierced it through each tender heart...
All in the green woods of ivy...