Christina Sunley‘s first novel, The Tricking of Freya – just out in paperback from Picador – was praised by Booklist as “a bewitching tale of volcanic emotions, cultural inheritance, family sorrows, mental illness, and life-altering discoveries.” Christina’s post about her eight-year path to getting this first novel written and published is truly inspiring. Enjoy! – Meg
You hear a lot of stories about writers who struggled heroically to get their first manuscript published, getting rejected by multitudes of agents… then dozens of publishers… but somehow persisting in the face of massive and resounding rejection, sending out their manuscript again and again and again, before finally finding someone who would buy their first book.
It’s a common story, sadly. But it’s not my story. I was lucky when it came to finding an agent and a publisher—that part happened relatively quickly and easily.
For me, the hard part—the part that took everything out of me, the part that asked for an incomprehensible degree of faith and boundless persistence—was getting the damn thing written. It took eight years.
Why?
The long version
I wrote an entire draft in the first person, then rewrote it in third person, then restructured the entire book and went back to first person again. I was writing about far away places and had to do a lot of travel and research. For a long time I had two narrators, one of whose story covered a thousand years. I developed a repetitive stress injury from trying to work full time in the software industry while writing a book on the side. I attempted to use voice recognition software to write a novel with a lot of Icelandic words (don’t try this at home). My lover of six years left me out of the blue. My mother – who inspired the novel, without whom I would never have even started the novel – died out of the blue. I fell in love with someone new… I’ll stop there, on a good note, a rhyme even.
The short version
I didn’t know what I was doing. And, life got in the way.
An advantage of sticking it out with that tricky first novel
A lot of people flounder around for a couple of years with a first novel, then stash it away in a drawer and start anew using everything they’ve learned to write a second book that gets published and is called their first novel.
It’s a perfectly reasonable and practical approach, but it was never an option for me. There was no way I could abandon Freya. I was like a dog with a bone, nothing in the world could have pried that messy novel-to-be out of my hands or mind or heart.
Instead I took everything I figured out in the early years, about point of view and story and how to keep writing no matter what, and plowed it all back into the same book. That book, The Tricking of Freya, was released in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press a year ago, and is coming out this week in paperback from Picador. And it really is my first novel—not just my first published novel.
A disadvantage of sticking it out with that tricky first novel
Everyone keeps asking if you’re finished yet.
A plea for persistence
Of course if I’d known at the outset that it was definitely going to take eight years, I probably never would have started. Luckily we can’t cheat life by peeking into our futures.
So, if you’re thinking about giving up (on your novel or any other life dream) – I urge you to consider persevering. – Christina
