“I was still tirelessly writing and submitting, and receiving the same responses: we like your writing, but not the story. What was I doing wrong?”
When Silent Night author Nell Pattison was on the verge of giving up, it was a look at her bookshelves and a change to her previously fixed mindset re genre that got her back on track.
I wrote my first novel in 2010, as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, the annual online challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November.) For years I had started stories, with no real idea where they were going, but this time I sat down and plotted out my full idea, and wrote it in around five weeks. It helped that I was living in Scotland at the time and we were under a great deal of snow, closing the school I worked in for two weeks. With no other commitments, I spent days on end writing.
That novel was set in the near future, with some rather dystopian changes to government and social interaction, and followed a young woman who wanted to escape the regime and discover more about her family heritage. I didn’t really think about what genre it came under until a conversation with a friend who was also a writer. ‘If it’s set in the future, it’s sci-fi,’ he told me. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as there were no spaceships or similar, but he had a point, and from then on I thought of myself as a sci-fi writer. I read more sci-fi and planned a few more novels, realising that the first one probably wasn’t going anywhere.
Several years later, I was still tirelessly writing and submitting, and receiving the same responses: we like your writing, but not the story. What was I doing wrong? I was a good writer, plenty of unbiased people had told me, but why couldn’t I come up with a story that people wanted to read? For about nine months, I didn’t write anything, wondering if I’d ever achieve my dream of publication. I had, effectively, given up.
I might never have got myself out of that rut if it weren’t for an epiphany one day when looking at my bookshelves. There were plenty of sci-fi and fantasy novels there, but there was another genre that was more heavily represented – crime. And then it dawned on me that I had always read crime and mystery novels – I tore through the Nancy Drew series in my local library as a child, so the librarian got me started on Agatha Christie, and I had every book published by Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs and Jeffery Deaver to name just a few. All of the novels I had written had some sort of crime or mystery element, but in my mind I had pigeon-holed myself as a sci-fi writer.
And that, as they say, was that. I changed my mindset about what sort of writer I was. I wrote my first crime novel in 2016, using my knowledge of British Sign Language and the D/deaf community to create my main character, BSL interpreter Paige Northwood. While it took some time to get an agent and a publisher, THE SILENT HOUSE was published in March this year and became a USA Today bestseller, with the sequel SILENT NIGHT published in November and a third instalment due to be published in 2021.
Without that moment that made me change my mind about who I was as a writer, I might never have got to where I am now. Maybe I would never have written another novel. Sometimes we can get bogged down in our fixed views of who we are, but if we take a step back and re-evaluate, sometimes we can find a new path that takes us where we want to be.
After studying English at university, Nell Pattison became a teacher and specialised in Deaf education. She has been teaching in the Deaf community for 13 years in both England and Scotland, working with students who use BSL. Nell began losing her hearing in her twenties, and now wears hearing aids. She lives in North Lincolnshire with her husband and son. Nell is the author of novels The Silent House, which was a USA Today bestseller, and Silent Night, featuring British Sign Language interpreter Paige Northwood.
About SILENT NIGHT:
A school for the deaf takes an overnight trip to the snowy woods. Five teenagers go to sleep, but only four wake up. Leon is missing, and a teacher’s body is found in the forest…
Sign language interpreter Paige Northwood is brought in to help with interrogations. Everyone at the school has a motive for murder – but they all have an alibi.
As Paige becomes increasingly involved, she suspects there’s something sinister going on. With the clock ticking to find Leon, only one thing is certain: the killer is among them, and ready to strike again…
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