Bette Adriaanse on writing, the course and getting published
In the second year of the Master in Creative Writing, I started writing what would become my first novel, Rus Like Everyone Else. There was no plan, I only had a few characters that had slowly emerged from my experience living in Amsterdam and London. Those characters had been wandering around inside my head for a while and their stories seemed to be connected somehow. There was a lonely secretary waiting for her life to start, an elderly man with agoraphobia, a granny with a soap-opera addiction, a young immigrant trying to make it, and Rus, a young man who had to start taking part in society after living the first twenty five years of his life under the radar.
I was living on a small farm in Devon when I began writing the novel, where I helped with the horses in the morning and tuned into the city-life of my characters in the afternoon. At first I was worried that being in the countryside I would only get ideas for stories about fields and horses, but the distance to my everyday life gave me the space to fantasize and create a fictional city.
Trying to sell the book was a story in itself. The first rejection I received was charmingly addressed to ‘Dear Adrian’, which is a good indication of how important you are as a new writer to people who receive hundreds of manuscripts a week.
The help I got from people I knew from the course made a big difference: tutors offered advice and encouragement, fellow-students were willing to proofread the novel, edit my cover letter and recommend my book. We celebrated small milestones, like readings, good reviews, publications in literary magazines, and eventually the big ones, finding a great agent, and now, a brilliant publisher.
Rus Like Everyone Else will be published by Unnamed Press in December 2015 .
http://www.unnamedpress.com/books/book?title=Rus+Like+Everyone+Else
Follow