Month: September 2015

Agent and Editor talk #1 at CB Creative – Sophie Lambert and Alexa von Hirschberg

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Last night was the first talk of six by visiting speakers, which should be one of the main real joys of the course – access to professionals in the industry. Sophie Lambert from CB’s sister agency Conville and Walsh came in with Alexa von Hirschberg, commissioning editor at Bloomsbury. They were pretty relaxed with each other, having collaborated on a couple of projects . This relationship was the interesting point or at least the new angle for me as I haven’t seen such a relaxed double act speak before, about what is a pretty fraught and aggressive industry according to the general hype.

This charming duo, paragons of publishing went into some detail about how they both work intensively to ‘grow’ their authors and are not put off by anything except excessive arrogance AS LONG AS THE WRITING IS GOOD – THE STORY IS EVERYTHING. Neither of them reject a manuscript from the first page (speak not of rejection from the first paragraph), Sophie reads at least 25 pages and Alexa up to 40 pages, although it must be said they both receive their diet pre-filtered by in-house readers. In fact Alexa credits the readers at Bloomsbury with discovering several of their big talents and calls them ‘the cleverest people I know’.  No need to differentiate your manuscript with anything wacky AS LONG AS THE WRITING IS GOOD, it will get the recognition it deserves.  Before rushing to apply for a job as a reader – apparently the CB/ C & W agents have received some outlandish submissions in the past, memorably one with the manuscript nailed to a sheep’s head and another one with dead rats, which, no surprises, didn’t get them an agent.

Both women are highly professional so maybe they were going easy on us since we’re vulnerable newbies, or maybe there really is humanity out there. Most comforting was the way Alexa talked about writers finding a home.  Anyway – Please God, let us all be blessed with agents and publishers like them.

Curtis Brown Creative course September 2015 gets under way

Tamsin HopkinsLeave a comment

http://www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk/

Last week we had our introductory talk with Course Director Anna Davis and Louise Wener, our tutor – ex popstar with Sleeper and author of Different for Girls. 

Louise Wener

Going round the table it was easy to see why the participants had been selected – confidence, great ideas and good presentation in abundance. Not intimidated. No Siree. I can ooze confidence when necessary, just need to work up to it. Anyway, Louise made it clear her watchword is NURTURING ENVIRONMENT (okay 2 watchwords), which is excellent because:

Tonight is the first teaching session and – hooray, I’m first up for a tutorial with Louise. You had to submit 3k words, and yes, I do have 3k words of this novel, but only just. Actually there’s 10k in existence but currently the drivelly outpourings of a first draft. Snot on the page as it were. Lucky Louise.

I’m doing my character notes (which I do for short stories but this is MORE – more characters, more depth, icebergs in the making), putting my plot points on cards a la Sol Stein and realising I have an enormous mountain of research to climb – I did know that, but now that I’ve started attacking it, the realisation has dawned afresh. Finding out that a lady’s maid is addressed as ‘Miss’ and the cook ‘Mrs’ regardless of her marital status for example. Just another way of dehumanising servants perhaps? Who knows? The Victorian psyche – well, that’s another post.