Past rejection: Hard-earned advice on getting published includes persistence and proofing

Emma Marns' first novel The Walk was published in 2023. In this interview with On Creative Writing Emma shares thoughts on generative AI, her favourite authors, and books, and offers hard-earned advice on getting published. Emma has a BA in English Literature from UEA, an MPhil in Irish Writing from Trinity College Dublin and is starting a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Essex this year. She is a freelance journalist and has had words featured in The Independent, The Sun, Stylist, and Metro among others.

Author Emma Marns

OCW: Which authors and/or types of books do you like to read?

EM: My ‘academic’ expertise is modernism – the likes of James Joyce and T.S Eliot – Shakespeare, and postmodern Irish fiction and drama. I am a huge fan of everything written by Jane Austen; my favourite of hers is Sense and Sensibility. I also love the Swedish writer Jonas Jonasson; I’ve read all his novels and two in particular – The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared and Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All are two of my favourite books of all time. I really enjoy historical biographies and a bit of self-help non-fiction. At the moment I am reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, and loving it.

Planning out the main parts of a novel helps little bits of magic happen along the way

OCW: Are you a plotter or a pants-er?

EM: Terminal plotter. I keep notes in notebooks, on my phone, in my head, on Post-It notes, I write out timelines and sequences of events . . . I like things to be organised and plotted as much as possible. However, a lot of little twists and turns in The Walk just appeared in my head out of nowhere and weren’t pre-planned. I like to think if you plan out the big important stuff, the little moments of magic happen on their own.

Hard-earned advice on getting published

OCW: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?

EM: By very close study of the Bloomsbury Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2020, following a multitude of agents and independent publishers on Twitter and keeping a spreadsheet of all my enquiries and submissions. It was arduous, it took forever, I had a lot of rejection but it’s important not to let that consume you. I had five full manuscript requests from over 100 submissions, and from that five, two offers to publish. I started

submitting in August 2020 and signed a publishing contract in December 2022, so it’s not an overnight process by any means.

OCW: What advice/guidance would you give to writers?

EM: Read, read, read. To write, you must read.

Unless the rejection says the writing is dreadful and the story is awful, keep going and exhaust the market if you really believe in it. Agents can receive up to 500 unsolicited manuscripts a month but only take on a handful of new clients a year – the net is very, very small and rejection is all part of it. It is not personal; take feedback gratefully if you get it, and keep going.

Also don’t be tempted to submit before the manuscript is finished, and I mean really finished – edited, polished, and for goodness’ sake proof-read your submission emails. Some of the errors I made were unforgivably embarrassing!

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a benefit or a threat to writers?

EM: A threat, a very dangerous and horrible threat that I cannot even believe has been allowed to get as far as it has.

AI destroys the gift of writing and is an insult to devalues an artists time and effort

Reading a novel or a piece of writing that has been shaped, informed and stylised by someone who experienced this or that, grew up here or there, was influenced by something or other, is a gift. What makes a literary landscape so rich is when lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds and walks of life produce their vision of the world. Generative AI erases all that, and it's an insult to the time and effort that goes into producing any piece of art—a novel, a painting, a photograph.

Not to mention the scandal of AI development companies essentially stealing works in order to train their AI generators. I just think we all lose when it comes to AI.