“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” said Ernest Hemingway, whose idea of a great social life involved a remote cabin, dead animals, and the bottom of a brandy glass. “Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing.”

Isaac Asimov – a self-confessed claustrophile whose greatest childhood wish, according to his autobiography, was to live in a magazine stand in the New York subway so that he could listen to the trains and read – agreed. “Writing is a lonely job”, he wrote. “Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his typewriter or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.”

The writer as maverick loner, doomed to exhaust their emotional energy in the dazzling salon of make-believe inside their brain, has become a romantic cliché; and it is one that writers themselves particularly love. Certainly, to write well, we must, well, write, which requires hermit-like stretches of solo graft. But we’re also prone to using our creative introversion as an excuse for perfectionism and pride. In our day jobs we evangelise teamwork, but at night we obsess over our manuscripts like a host of literary Gollums, snarling at the idea of ‘feedback’.

By we, of course, I mean me. As a child of social media, I have long been a vocal champion of open mental API. But up until two years ago, while I over-shared in every other area of my life, I couldn’t bring myself to expose a single sentence of my fiction to someone else’s scrutiny. ‘Writing groups’ were herds of passive-aggressive women firing off thinly veiled invective about each other’s historical murder mysteries in community centres, and if I couldn’t pour out the prose with the sole support of a Moleskine and a martini, I simply wasn’t fit to write.

Everything changed one balmy August day in 2010, when my mother emailed me a link to (the pre-S.J. Watson, little-known) Faber Academy. “I don’t need a bloody course.” I snapped, contemplating the glittering string of adjectives occasionally bumping into a plot on my laptop. “I just need to write. I certainly don’t need the bastardised highlights of Steven King’s On Writing flogged to me by some consumptive publishing house reduced to whoring out its name to would-be soft-porn self-published housewives with more money than sense.”

At the other end of the phone, there was a dignified pause. “Darling,” my mother said, “It was just a thought.”

But it was a thought that lingered. Perhaps I was being a little rigid. Perhaps writing was more of a craft than a trait. Perhaps, just perhaps, a tiny bit of mentorship might not go amiss. In any case, it would be a good excuse to buy new stationary. So, two days later, I sent out the first ever extract of my book, and two months later, found myself in a room in Bloomsbury with fourteen other tense-looking weirdos who had obliterated their ISAs in order to secure a place on a six-month novel-writing course.

There are many reasons why I am now grateful for that decision, from the warmth, wisdom and wit of our brilliant tutor, Richard Skinner, to the generous guidance of guest speakers such as Helen Dunmore. But the fourteen most important reasons were undoubtedly those fourteen fellow weirdos. I didn’t know it on that first day, but thanks to Faber, I’d found my writing group.

Now, over two years later, ten people from our original class still meet every month. A fortnight before each session, two of us still email round 5,000 words for the others to discuss – just like Richard taught us – with a chairman to keep conversations on track. This spring, we even organised a four-day writing holiday in Italy, complete with exercises, readings, one-to-ones and private writing time.

We are friends now, proper friends. We meet each other’s partners, we cook each other dinner, we sing awful karaoke while drunk on cheap wine. But, in that room above a pub, our shared commitment to getting those damned novels finished comes first. It’s a unique relationship, necessarily different from those we have with our families and our regular mates.

Our group is the place where we can bang on about the stuff that would quite rightly be esoteric and irritating to anyone who has never tried to write a book. Did I get away with that exposition? Do my semi-colons drive you nuts? Have you discovered the snapshots on Scrivener? These people care. More importantly, they understand. They might not always have the answers, but you can be sure that their questions will force you to face up to all those sneaky little obfuscations and evasions that you’ve been trying to repress.

So what makes a good writing group? Without a doubt, diversity. We are recent graduates, we are working mothers, we are globetrotting businessmen, we are retired. We even, God forbid, live outside London. We all share a certain ballpark of skill, but it would be difficult to imagine a more eclectic mix of personalities and writing styles. Our collective life experiences and expertise (including that of a lawyer, a doctor and a wonderfully pedantic architect) help inject fresh perspectives, catch factual anomalies, and prevent any whiff of echo-chamber. Somewhere in the class, each one of us has our natural first reader, but we also have our natural critic, too. And reading others’ work is just as valuable as having yours read.

“To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light,” explains Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer. “Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.”

What else matters? Commitment – you have to be willing to consistently put in the time if you expect others to do the same for you. Kindness – you’re dealing with the raw underbelly of our identity and dreams, and it is easily flayed. Honesty – because a true desire to help each other succeed sometimes requires harsh truths, albeit tactfully delivered. And humility – fighting your corner can help you understand what you’re trying to write, but learning to shut up, sit back and listen is even better.

There’s a lot of luck involved in corralling a compatible group. But now I’ve experienced the benefits – benefits which have helped turn my novel from an egotistical outpouring into a almost-better-than-rubbish third draft – I would urge every aspiring writer out there to trawl writing courses, networking events, bookshops, libraries, social media and friends of friends until, by trial and error, they build their own magic circle of trust. And finally, remember that one old cliché still works; unfortunately, your mother is always right.

Ten years ago I had an idea.

It happened – as these things often do – when one area of my work rubbed up against another. In this case, the question of how to shoehorn the diverse and tangential life of a forgotten eighteenth-century writer (William Hayley 1745-1820) into a book-shaped structure met the PR work I was doing for Tim Wright’s NESTA-funded In Search of Oldton for the trAce Online Writing Centre…

 The combination sparked the following thoughts…

a) digital technologies and a non-linear narrative might suit the story I wanted to tell more effectively than a traditional book-biography could

b) most people read biographies to get to know the person they’re about

c) reading a book-form biography is not remotely like getting to know someone in real life

d) it might be possible to create a digital biography that simulated the messy, blobby, incomplete process of getting to know someone IRL

and

e) that might be interesting. And fun.

I started telling people about it. Most suddenly remembered an urgent appointment they were already late for. Others (including Tim Wright, Sue Thomas and Chris Meade), at home in the digital writing world, were supportive and helped me to sharpen my much-less-than 20/20 vision.

And that was more or less it for five years until, in 2008, Chris Meade posted on Facebook about an if:book UK William Blake project – Songs of Imagination and Digitisation. There was a strong connection between William Hayley and William Blake, so I asked Chris if I could contribute a piece. He said yes, and the resulting combination of money (£800), validation and, importantly, a deadline, allowed me to think my idea into an online, dramatised (and marginally fictionalised) retelling of the relationship between the two Williams: www.rolledbythewind.net.

The following year, I sat down with Chris and we punted a speculative application for funding the 3D Life, as we called it, into Channel 4’s IP fund. They weren’t interested. So we left it at that.

Another two years passed, then, in Spring 2011 I learned, via Twitter, about plans for a book hack day. I contacted the organisers, Paul Squires and Nico McDonald to ask if I could do a short presentation about my biography project. They said yes. After I’d spoken, developer Michael Kowalski, then in the process of founding Contentment – a creative technology startup solving problems to do with digital content production and publishing – expressed interest in the idea, but said he didn’t yet have the technology needed to make it.

Later that year I wrote a feature for the Independent on Sunday about digital literature and – because I felt it needed one – made (unpaid) a short accompanying video for the website. Two weeks work for £300, I thought. Idiot, I thought. But then… that piece led to an invitation (via Twitter) to speak about the future of the book for Tomax Talks (fee: £50).

John Mitchinson, co-founder of Unbound, was one of the speakers that evening. During my spiel, I mentioned my desire to write the biography of a crap poet no-one had ever heard of, who’d been dead for 200 years but that, for some inexplicable reason, no publisher was interested. Afterwards John said it sounded like a perfect Unbound project and did I want to do it with them?

Of course I did.

HayleyWorld became an Unbound project. After approximately 18 months on the website, it’s 19% funded. At the current rate it’ll take over six years to hit target (please pledge generously). Call me naïve, but I still believe that one way or another, we’ll get there. But I might have to get creative.

Meanwhile, Sophie Rochester invited me to speak about having a project with Unbound at the November 2012 Writing Platform event at Rich Mix. I said yes. Michael Kowalski was again in the audience. Eighteen months on from Book Hackday he told me that he had the technology and would be happy to work with me.

Gemma Seltzer – writer and Arts Council, England Literature Officer – spoke about funding: Grants for the Arts: Time to Write and Nesta’s Digital R&D fund for the Arts. I chatted with her afterwards and, although the Arts Council rarely funds non-fiction writing, she offered to help me pull together an application. That, by the way, isn’t because of anything special about me. It’s her job.

We met, and then, to cut approximately two weeks of limb-chewingly agonising form-filling, flecked with bile-bitter pessimism (WHY AM I WASTING MY TIME? THEY DON’T FUND NON-FICTION) followed by a six-week wait increasingly darkened by my recognition of the sheer hopelessness of my situation short, thanks in a large part to Gemma’s support and guidance, I was awarded a grant of £9,295.

“You really weren’t expecting that, were you?” she said, when she phoned to tell me the news.

I wasn’t.

Meanwhile, Michael and I decided to try for the Nesta fund. That has to be led by an arts organisation – in this case, Unbound – with a technology partner (Contentment) and also a research partner – a UK higher education institution. I found computer scientist and AI researcher Dr Sandy Louchart of Heriot-Watt University in the British Library. He was speaking at an event with Chris Meade that I attended. One brief natter on the spot and a skype chat later, he was in. We were good to go.

I won’t bore you with the ins-and-outs of what exactly we were good to go for/through. Suffice to say the Grants for the Arts application experience was, in comparison, like skipping through sunshiney meadows with the one you love (unless you suffer from hay fever, in which case it was like that only without pollen) and by the end of it my brain had knitted itself into a ‘70s macramé wall-hanging. It’s probably less painful if you have a budgeting fetish (I don’t), or if someone else does the whole thing for you (they didn’t). Having said that, one of the many upsides of applying for funding together with partner organisations rather than solo was that everyone contributed and critiqued content and – most importantly – checked and corrected my adding up.

While ploughing through the Nesta application, I realised there were several unanswered questions troubling me about my project. Questions like “do people really read biographies to get to know the people they’re about? Shouldn’t I find that out rather than making an assumption?” and “What are the processes through which people get to know each other? Don’t I need to understand what those are in order to be able to simulate the experience in a biography?” I was pondering these and wondering whether I needed to go back into academia when Kate Pullinger mentioned on Facebook that Bath Spa University had a small number of practice-based, digital writing fee waiver PhD studentships on offer. I applied (that form was much easier).

As I write Unbound (including me as one of their authors), Contentment and Heriot-Watt University are through the Nesta initial expression of interest stage and waiting to hear the results of our final application. If (and, naturally, it’s a big if) we get through that, there’s a panel interview to negotiate. Meanwhile, I’ve morphed into a full time PhD student at Bath Spa University (although, to fund my living expenses and support my daughter etc I’m still doing other work).

All of which means it’s now time to make something concrete of this idea I’ve been talking about for a decade.

Wish me luck.

Lisa Gee

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