“I’ll be forever grateful to Helen Lederer, the brainchild of CWIP for shining a light on funny female fiction.”
Novelist Kirsty Eyre tells how she survived radio silence, rejection and writing in the car park to become an award-winning novelist.
Last year, my debut novel ‘Cow Girl’ won the inaugural Comedy Women in Print prize and this year, it will be published – makes it sound so easy, doesn’t it? Of course, it wasn’t.
Where do I start? In my twenties, when I wrote a (pretty dreadful) book about a Chalet Girl base on my ski season experience? In my thirties, when I turned my hand to writing comedy stage plays which got great acclaim on the fringe circuit, but involved being nocturnal – something of an impossibility once my kids came along? Or in my forties, when I tried writing a novel, originally called ‘Billie’s Queer Year’ in diary format which got rejection after rejection? Let’s start here – in the gutter of doom, bruised and battered from radio silence and standard template rejections from reading assistants.
Going nowhere, I enrolled on the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course where agent feedback encouraged me to lose the diary format and effectively rewrite the book, which took another year – diaries are obviously big on interiority and low on description, so it needed a complete overhaul. My fellow writers on the course turned out to be instrumental beta readers. With two young children, writing was often half-an-hour in the carpark outside ninja school, a paragraph on the toilet or in a soft-play centre. Finally, I was ready to submit to agents. Again, a few standard rejections but then I got through to an agency Pitch event and bagged myself ten minutes with a super-agent who gave invaluable feedback at breakneck speed – all I had to do was execute. He loved the concept. He was from Yorkshire (where the book is set) and completely ‘got it.’ He was the one. Only, of course, he wasn’t… Four months after submitting, I got a standard rejection from his assistant. Gutted.
I licked my wounds, tweaked it again and found a new title, ‘Cow Girl,’ which seems obvious now (it’s based on a dairy farm amongst 150 cows) but hadn’t been. Another round of submissions got me a full manuscript request and an injection of unbridled enthusiasm from an agent that got my hopes soaring again. Six months later I received an email to say that she’d left the agency.
What next? I joined London Writer’s Club which features regular Q&A sessions with literary agents each month. I identified my favourite agents but wanted to wait until I’d heard back from the Comedy Women in Print competition to which I’d submitted Cow Girl. After all, Cow Girl was a comic novel, so it was worth a shot, right? A week later and I’m dancing around the kitchen with excitement at being on the long-list. This was an invaluable string to my bow in terms in my pitch letter- I’ll be forever grateful to Helen Lederer, the brainchild of CWIP for shining a light on funny female fiction.
A month later, I signed with my agent, Felicity Trew. I was made up. The upward spiral climbed higher when shortly after, Cow Girl was short-listed and then went on to win the inaugural CWIP prize. The rest is history. My debut novel, Cow Girl, is now available on pre-order and comes out on 25 June (eBook, audio) and 3 September (paperback).
Kirsty Eyre is the winner of the inaugural Comedy Women in Print award (2019). Her debut novel, Cow Girl is out (audio/ eBook/ paperback) on June 25th 2020. She loves tea and hates her big toes. Her writing credits include several comedy stage plays receiving great acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Originally from Yorkshire, she now lives in South East London with her partner and two children. Find her at @KirstyJaneEyre on Twitter and @eyre.kirsty on Instagram
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The winner of the inaugural Comedy Women in Print award for COW GIRL reveals her writing journey.