JOSEPH ZIGMOND
The new author says that working in publishing as an editor didn’t mean it was easy when it came to writing his first novel
Full disclosure: I am in the publishing industry, so I knew what to expect from this process. But part of that knowledge was how unforgiving the process tends to be – which arguably wasn’t very helpful. At every stage I submitted my book under a pseudonym because I didn’t want to be treated differently from other submissions. And that worked, because it often felt brutal.
I loved literature at school. It was the only thing I was ever any good at. So, having studied literature and film, I then got a place on a publishing graduate scheme. This was very intimidating both as a commercial business and a literary culture. If you’re nervous about admitting to being a writer, then a journey into the sausage factory was not particularly emboldening. I’d done some writing at university but without finishing anything substantial – and in this new environment my writing froze. But then, as I got a permanent job working purely on non-fiction books, a useful distance developed between my work reading, and the writing style I’d been aspiring towards. If, as EL Doctrow says, ‘The historian describes what happened; the novellist describes how it felt’ then I could study facts in the day, and feelings at the weekends.