The Silence author Susan Allott on writing, rejection and never giving up

“I refreshed my email and double-checked that I’d submitted to the correct addresses.”

After her novel was rejected by agents, Susan Allott considered abandoning her writing dreams. Now, on the publication of debut The Silence, she tells why she’s very glad she didn’t.

This is something I haven’t told many people. My agent doesn’t know. I’ve only mentioned it to a few writer friends. It’s not that bad, it’s not even unusual, but still I cringe with mortification even to think of it. In February 2013, full of hope and expectation, I hit send on six emails to agents, attaching my novel and covering letter. I’d spent just over a year writing this novel and I truly believed that it was finished, that it was very good, that it would find me representation. So I sent those emails and I wondered, as I went about my day, which one of the six agents would snap me up. I refreshed my email and double-checked that I’d submitted to the correct addresses. 

Months passed, and eventually the standard rejection emails came in. By then I’d faced what I’d started to suspect after a month with no responses: I’d submitted too soon. The novel wasn’t as good as I’d believed it to be, and it needed a lot more work. For a while I wondered if I should abandon my goal of publication. I had two young children to keep me busy and a part-time job. If I wasn’t good enough to make the grade as a writer, it would be better to face that and move on. I couldn’t afford to spend another year or more on this book, taking time out of family life, only to be rejected again.

I brooded on it for a few months, and I found myself thinking about my characters and their story. Ideas came into my mind as I was loading the washing machine. I wrote them down. More ideas came, until I’d filled a notebook. I was rewriting the book in my head, all the time. And I realised I couldn’t give up even if I wanted to. I was in it for the long haul.

So I took myself off on a week-long creative writing retreat and I opened a new document in my laptop. I started again, with a new beginning, putting my characters into the middle of the story. I found a new tone and a fresher voice. By the time I got home from that retreat I’d gathered enough confidence to keep going. I’d also considerably raised the bar. Sometimes I referred back to the earlier draft of the book for reference, picking out the better lines, but most of it didn’t make the cut. The novel I’d submitted, I could now see, was a competent first draft. It wasn’t bad. OK, in places it was pretty bad.

I’ve lost count of how many times I rewrote the book that was to become The Silence. I submitted it to agents again in 2017 and that time I had the response I’d hoped for all those years earlier. I got an agent, and then a publisher, and a multi-territory deal. The Silence comes out in hardback this August. I’m glad I picked myself up and kept going. 

Susan Allott is a British writer who lived and worked in Sydney in the nineties, but failed to love it or make it her home. She returned to London, where she met an Australian man, who she went on to marry. The Silence is Susan’s debut novel. She lives in London with her children and her very Australian husband. 

About THE SILENCE: 

It is 1997, and in a basement flat in Hackney, Isla Green is awakened by a call in the middle of the night: her father, Joe, phoning from Sydney. It seems that thirty years ago, the Greens’ next-door neighbor Mandy disappeared. Joe claims he thought Mandy had moved away with her husband, but now Mandy’s family is trying to reconnect, and there is no trace of her. Joe was allegedly the last person to see her alive, and now he’s under suspicion of murder.

So Isla returns to Australia for the first time in a decade to support her father and to search for the truth. Her arrival in Sydney brings up echoes from the past, taking us back to the heat of summer 1967, when two young couples lived side by side on a quiet street by the sea. The more questions Isla asks, the more she learns about both young couples and the secrets each marriage bore. Could her father have done something terrible? And how much does her mother know? At the center of it all lies a shameful practice rooted in Australia’s colonial past: the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families, children now known as the Stolen Generation.

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