‘If You Don’t Try Nothing Ever Changes’
—Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
This jumped out at me this morning reading her, reminding me of the time I’d secured a literary agent, namely Sophie Scard from United Agents. The year was 2019, I was in Mumbai and on a webinar with Oxford University completing their Advanced Creative Writing Course. Their guest speaker, whose name I don’t recall, but who once worked with United Agents, gave us a step by step recipe as to how to successfully approach one. Armed with this advice, and motivated, I answered Sophie’s request, who said she was interested in excellent writing of all types, and sent, together with synopsis and bio, the first ten pages of my manuscript. I got a message—to send on more, to which she replied, ‘I love your writing and would be thrilled to represent you, if that would be of interest.’
I was in Hong Kong, for the IB, and we arranged to chat when I got back to India, where we discussed the order of the collection, which stories to cut, or add, which needed to expand … I felt lucky, as she said normally for new writers a novel is first preferred (which I was working on, and she also loved), but the short stories, she said, were so good, she wanted to speak to publishers, many of whom, she said, she could think of would be interested in my work.
I worked ferociously over the next year and hit a dip when, my mother fell ill and I had to fly to Cyprus and visit her. I couldn’t write, her situation was getting worse. As ever, however, I found comfort in journalling, this time her condition; her time was running out, her memory fading and I had one last chance to rekindle and get my mother back. A record of this I later documented in ‘A Visit to Mum’s’ in my Our Foreign Borders collection, a story whose characters I had to fictionalize, so hurtful was it to witness, let alone record my mum’s decline—it was the only way I could get to through it, to the last full stop.
During this time, Sophie and I barely communicated: perhaps twice—I work to deadlines; I always have—she had a more open approach, and I’m impatient; need faster responses to final edits so I can finish and move on.
Then COVID hit—we all have our stories—and I was locked down at The Royal Bombay Yacht Club—hey!!—no a better place!!—facing the sea and India’s Gate to possibilities and new horizons. I wrote poetry there, worked on the Foreign Borders collection to its polished state, admired and learned about the club’s history and architecture and its gifting from Queen Victoria and her Albert through India’s Gate. And, after three months there, a flight to Holland appeared, then Greece, and finally Kosovo, where I settled and added another story to the collection: ‘Lockdowns, Mothers and Other Freedoms’, a now single woman’s view on life and her relationships, set in Pristina’s incredible forest landscape.
I’m so grateful for the messages books send us in motivating us to write and share our experiences. My journey with a literary agent was an important one, one which gave me the confidence to believe in my voice, dig deeper, write with purpose and share my genuine stories with others. Indeed, ‘That Date with the Boy at the Tapas Restaurant’ in the collection I pitched to The Bridport Prize for Fiction: it came in the top 7% of entrants worldwide! Plus, J. David Simons, author, editor and journalist, on the final story in Our Foreign Borders, said: ‘‘ ‘Breaking the Rules’ works as a short story on so many different levels, wonderfully textured in terms of both character and plot, beautifully described, the confident way in which information is held back or released, this is an example of a writer totally in control of her craft.’’
Ferrante, in the ‘Adolescence: The Story of the Shoes’ section of her novel, explores the exciting cusp of adulthood; that time where families in Naples break through traditional patterns with new business initiatives. Lila, desperate to convince her unbelieving father of his unique shoemaking skills, confides in her best friend, Elena, who convinces her to press on, and thus their path to success begins…
We each have our unique journeys.
What have yours, with agents, been, and how would you best describe your success?’
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