Todays guest author, Tamar Cohen, comes from London, and is the author of The Mistress’s Revenge. She has published nine non-fiction titles and written for The Times, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and The Guardian, but Mistress is her first novel. (“Deftly plotted and bleakly funny, with a devious twist of an ending,” Marie Claire says!) Reading her thoughts on the difference between fiction and non is great inspiration for moving into the last days of NANOWRIMO, or for picking up a pen to write anything! – Meg
Remember how it felt at school when someone rubbished the hideous new shoes your mum made you buy, or the idiotic answer you gave in physics class or how you run like a duck? Remember how personal it all felt, how that one comment made you feel like everyone, but everyone in the world hated you? For me, writing fiction is like that but a gazillion times worse.
Which is weird because I’ve made a living from writing for over twenty years. Over that time I’ve plundered my private life to write features on everything from things my partner and I argue about to the state of my teenage son’s bedroom. I’ve written for monthly magazines, weeklies, tabloids and broadsheets. Plus I’ve knocked out nine non-fiction books, written to order on a variety of fascinating and, frankly, not-so-fascinating subjects. At one stage I even had a weekly column in a national magazine talking about the highs and lows of family life. So you’d think I’d have had plenty of time to develop a rhino-style thick writing skin. And I have. Except when it comes to fiction.
Now, with the vantage of hindsight, I wonder if my hyper-sensitivity about sharing the contents of my imagination with the world is why it’s taken me so long to produce my first novel. I was forty-seven when The Mistress’s Revenge was published in June this year. Until I sent it to an agent last March, no one had ever read any of my attempts at fiction (and believe me, there were many). It probably sounds ridiculous in this era of creative writing workshops and book clubs where holding your work-in-progress up to public scrutiny has become second nature to most, but I just couldn’t do it. It was too personal. Though I’d written ad nauseum about myself in the past, writing fiction was like writing with myself, with every fibre of my being. Of course I was writing about made-up people and events, but the medium through which I was writing them – every carefully-selected word, every sentence structure, every idea – was all me. I was presenting myself on a plate, peeled and shelled and without seasoning. What if nobody liked it? It’d be like going to meet your beloved at the door wearing only your most seductive lingerie and a willing smile and him saying ‘meh, no offence but it’s just not my kind of thing.’
The first person to read my novel was my agent, the second was my editor. When she came in with a pre-emptive offer for a two-book deal, she backed it up with lots of confidence-boosting comments from other people in the company who’d read the opening chapters of the manuscript. I started to believe it might not be so bad, this public scrutiny business. I let a few close friends read it, then a few more.
My publisher had put me in for the Amazon Vine programme where top rated reviewers get a chance to preview books before they are even out. The first clutch that came through were so wonderfully enthusiastic I cried with gratitude. Then came the first negative comment. Not even negative – still three star – just not completely positive. Instantly my newfound confidence shrivelled up inside me like a grape in the sun.
More and more of my friends read the book. Ninety-nine point nine per cent were encouraging but there were one or two who failed to mention it, though I knew they’d finished it. Their unvoiced opinion became the elephant in the room. Just say it, I’d urge silently, even if you hate it. I told myself I wanted their honest response. But, you know what I soon realised? I didn’t. What I wanted was for everyone to love it, because as soon as anyone came up with the slightest, teensiest bit of constructive criticism, I was straight back to the school playground again, smarting because my best friend Julie didn’t love my new trainers.
It might have helped if I had written a different type of book, but a story which revolves around infidelity and obsession and the madness of a woman scorned was never going to appeal to everyone. A few readers complained that the characters weren’t likeable, and even though they were never meant to be, I couldn’t help feeling secretly they were saying it was me who wasn’t likeable. You see what I mean about hyper-sensitive?
Six months on from publication I’m pleased to report it has got easier. 
I’ve learned to see the funny side when reviewers disapprove of the book because they are ‘against infidelity’ or suggest it might be more useful recycled into toilet paper. And to be doubly fair, most people have been overwhelmingly and heart-warmingly generous. But now it’s getting near time to hand in Book Two, and I can feel it all starting up again – the doubts, the not-worthiness, the heart-in-mouth knowledge that I’m soon going to have to stand up in public in my gym knickers again, wondering if I’ll be picked for the soccer team.
Am I glad I’ve taken the leap into fiction? Absolutely, and not a day goes past that I don’t remember how lucky I’ve been to get published. Do I wish it hadn’t taken me twenty-odd years to work up the courage? Yes, yes and thrice yes. Will it stop me taking it all so personally next time? No, probably not. But if there’s anyone else out there, who has several manuscripts mouldering in a drawer that they don’t dare show anyone for fear of rejection, I’d say this: for god’s sake just do it. Because when you’ve put yourself on the line like you have to with fiction and someone – whether it’s an agent, an old friend or the woman from the corner shop – says ‘uh-huh, yeah, I get it’, what you actually feel is, ‘wow, they get me’. And, whether you’re a ten-year old school-kid, or a forty-eight year old mother-of-three, there’s nothing better than that. – Tamar
