How to Become a Published Novelist in Only Twenty-One Years

My exact path to publication as a novelist.

I decide to write a novel. At the time, I’m living in semi-regional Queensland with all the trappings of a proper-regional life i.e. nothing much happens. I’m smoking buckets under the tank stand and brewing beer in the laundry. At midday, there’s 21 Jump Street re-runs on TV. We ride bikes around at night. Eventually, I give up on the novel or forget about it. I can’t remember which.

Back in the city, stuck in an office, and bored out of my mind. This is worse than the small town. I start writing for zines. These are mostly ratty, photocopied punk publications run by other people. This is not exactly pre-internet, more that the internet is unevenly distributed. It is, in fact, the proper wild west of online culture. No one knows what the internet is or what it’s for. For example, one day in the office, my boss shows me a snippet of the Tommy and Pammy sex tape on his work computer. ‘What I want to know son,’ he says, ‘is how they got that horse on the boat?’ It’s an open-plan space. The entire idea of getting fired for something like this is maybe 5 years away.

(Saturn Returns)

Have quit the office job and I am now doing some post-graduate research in another field. It’s all a cover story, because I don’t care one iota about academia. Mainly, I’m playing in bands around Brisbane’s inner-city. This is a fun time of life, but not one without its troubles. Someone ends up dying. That puts me in therapy where my authoritarian Jungian therapist insists that writing will be good for me and my blossoming anxiety. ‘Write stories or tell yourself stories,’ he says. It works. A full recovery is had. Except now I have to write 5 days a week. May as well write a novel. Back to that.

Tutoring media studies undergrads for rent money. Finish my first novel. Submit the manuscript to the publishing industry after rounds of revision. My bandmate’s sister works at a small publisher. She reads it and gives me some feedback. She says, always know what time, date and place a scene is occurring in. Great advice. Past that, nothing much happens with manuscript #1. But it still feels like a good idea to keep writing. Have to anyway, because the authoritarian Jungian therapist has been right about everything else. I keep at it 5 days a week, usually in my underwear at the kitchen table in the glorious Queensland summer.1

Still tutoring. Lose half a novel in a hard-drive crash. This used to happen a lot before cloud computing. A blessing, to be honest. It’s like Hemingway losing his juvenilia on a train, except much, much better for the world because I am not Hemingway. At the time, it is sad, though.

Still playing music. The fallout of a disastrous European tour sees me working night-fill at Coles. It’s a bit of a worry, but I am also freelancing as a music critic, which is interesting. My general despondency, and my failure to become a published novelist, prove adequate training to write about the music industry.

I finally graduate from my post-grad degree.2 I immediately sell everything I own and move to Europe with my girlfriend. Berlin is still cheap in 2012. I get an apartment in Neukölln where I start writing one piece of flash fiction every day, using a set of rules I have made for myself.3 This is my route back into fiction. I do absolutely nothing with these stories except store them on Dropbox. I’m still freelancing. I’m technically unemployed, but a pizza costs 2 euros in Berlin. Thus, a single album review pays about 10 pizzas. What a time to be alive!

I land a full-time office job (lecturing in contemporary music) at a university in Melbourne, which is just as well as my first child is due soon. I tamp down the anxiety of impending fatherhood with my tried-and-true method: writing 5 days a week. I’ve been writing all this time, through all the years, but now with the baby on the way, I decide it’s a good time to focus on a crime novel. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, deep down. As it shakes out, my partner gives birth to a beautiful human baby. I complete a baby novel, which is called a novella.

The novella (Amazon) is published by J David Osborne’s micro-press Broken River Books. This is back when it’s just him on his own. The novella does fine. It gets me noticed. By the time the novella is out, I have another manuscript finished. A friend works in a book store and happens to talk to the commissioning editor of a new imprint. This editor is looking for crime novels. Broken River is closing down. I figure, I may as well submit my manuscript to this new press, which I do without consulting a single piece of advice on how to do so. Instead, I send a short 200-word pitch email and attach the entire manuscript. Courtesy of gmail’s archive, it appears I said this:

The book is called THE STUDENT. It’s a campus mystery novel, albeit a fairly hardboiled one. My favourite campus novels are The Secret History, The Rules of Attraction and The Wonder Boys. I love these books but all three of them are set in snowy, picturesque humanities departments. I wanted to write a book about punishing summer humidity and business degrees.

Not bad, all things considered. I’ve got the basics: genre, comparison titles, market analysis. I’m no genius; I was pretty adept at pitching music venues at this point in my life.

(The secret to all pitch emails: write the thing from their side of the desk.)

While the book is under consideration, I’m short-listed for one of Australia’s crime fiction prizes, The Ned Kelly Award. I don’t win, but it helps me seal the deal for The Student. It all feels very much like a lot of things have happened all at once, after a long time of not much happening at all.

The Student (Amazon) is published.

I see it in the shops and in the newspaper. I am a ‘published novelist’ now. The book sells fairly poorly, but the idea of giving up on writing for any reason is now totally alien to me. I’m back writing 5 days a week, starting the day after publication, and what happens with my first novel is that I learn this: the books are just the exhaust of my writing, rather than the objective. To be crass for a second, it’s actually the money that clarifies this. The advance for The Student was $4,000 AUD and I will never forget how it felt to see it in the bank account. That was the big moment of publication for me.

How did it feel?

Like someone was buying my food waste.

Not a bad business to be in, at any price point.

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