Previous winners of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair offer advice on how to get your manuscript over the line
Fidelma Kelly
Alison Langley is a freelance journalist and her first novel, Ilona Gets a Phone , was a finalist at the Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair 2022.“Have at least one other person read your 10,000 words, if not the whole novel, and give you detailed feedback on what is and isn’t working. Try to find a reader who is as close to your “target audience” as possible without falling back on someone who you know will just tell you what you want to hear.
Laura McKenna is a writer of fiction and poetry, whose debut book Words to Shape My Name was a Novel Fair winner in 2020.“Have confidence in your words, edit to polish not perfect, but, most of all, take a chance… you’ll never know if this is your ‘right time, right place moment’ if you don’t submit.”
“Don’t rush your writing and don’t underestimate the significance of the editing process. Try to strike a balance between working toward the deadline and giving the work time to mature organically. Try not to just ‘fit a brief’, but believe in your unique voice and preoccupations. It’s a long game, and, regardless of whether you get a deal or an agent ‘on the day’, you want to stay in the ‘writing game’ for the long run ideally.
If you’re a few drafts in, I found it useful to focus on one section of the book and to make that as polished as possible. I worked and reworked the first few chapters – reading it out loud, reading it out of order, printing it out and seeing if that revealed something new, eventually sharing it with one or two friends to check that I hadn’t made some enormous mistake – and then, once I had submitted that much to the Novel Fair, I applied the same method to the rest of the book.
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