For unpublished novelists, the process of getting discovered is shrouded in mystique, but it starts even before you write the first paragraph. Here, judges from the Discoveries Prize – novelists
Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Chibundu Onuzo and agents from Curtis Brown – outline the process from first beginnings, through growing your manuscript, to what you need to know as you begin to submit to agents.
Anne Sexton tells the writer: Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. But what if all you can hear is your breath, empty air? What if all you can feel is your heart, thumping fear? Until two years ago, Sexton’s advice made me recoil in horror. I don’t need to draw on my own life, I thought, I’m a fiction writer – Imake stuff up. Part of this was an instinctive reaction against the way authors, especially when they are also women, are often read into their work. How writing a woman with unlikeable traits is sometimes attributed to the authors’ own personality, how their doomed love
