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Having your work published is as good as sticking a target on your back and shouting, 'Fire!'

Putting yourself out there can be scary - especially if it’s in a newspaper

Being a writer is a strange thing. Many of us are quiet people, who don’t enjoy life in the public eye. We struggle to communicate person to person, and find it much easier to do so via writing. That’s certainly the case with me. While that’s not strange in itself, the thing that DOES make it strange is that we also want people to read our writings, so we yearn to be published, yet being published means being in the public eye, and that is utterly terrifying.

My new novel - A Time to Live - is now out in the real world. This means that there will be reviews trickling in. I spend a lot of time checking various platforms, my heart in my mouth, my palms sweating, my fingers crossed, that reviewers will be kind. And generally book readers are infinitely kinder than newspaper readers. If a book reviewer doesn’t enjoy a book, they tend to say things like, ‘This wasn’t for me’ or ‘I feel this could have been edited better’ - it is rare to see a truly horrible review (unless, possibly, you are super-famous, and then I am sure people love to hate you).

Newspaper readers, on the other hand, are an entirely different breed, and their vitriol can be distressing.

I’ve had two pieces published in the last few years where I’ve stupidly clicked on the comments beneath. The first was in the Daily Mail (I know, I shouldn’t be surprised that there are angry people there!). It was a short piece about the problems we were having selling our house at the time. I didn’t think it was particularly controversial. I was genuinely confused about why our happy family home wasn’t selling. I’m not going to go back into that comments section again so that I can quote from it exactly - it is soul-destroying stuff, and it played round and round my head for weeks afterwards, to the extent that I never wanted to write another newspaper article again. But here’s a selection of half-remembered comments that still stick in my head:

‘Stupid b***h! Thinks she can get free advertising. Well bad luck - your stupid article is not going to help sell your stupid house.’

‘Look at her surname - she’s not even British!’

‘Maybe if she tidied up the sh*thole she’d do better.’

And so on, including lots more swearing and even more unpleasant abuse.

Sweetly, there were also a couple of readers who had replied to the nasty comments, telling the authors to stop being so horrible, which went a teeny way to not shattering my belief in myself and the rest of humankind entirely. Still, nothing could prevent me feeling overwhelmed for a while, even a little shaky, but at least I learnt a lesson: which is to make sure I never - EVER - read ‘comments’ beneath my newspaper articles. (I also try to avoid obsessing about book reviews, but this is not so easy.)

As a writer, you do learn to cope with criticism - it’s an integral part of the writing process, and I’m usually good at it - years of editing other people’s work, and having my own edited, of sharing writing in classes and analysing my own and other people’s work teaches you how to discuss things in a gentle and useful way, how to accept positive and negative feedback. I know that everyone has different views on things; the world would be a boring place otherwise. So if you’ve got a valid comment, I welcome it. But nastiness is uncalled-for.

Although I’ve steered clear of comments since that Daily Mail article, you can’t always escape. Much more recently I wrote a feature for the Telegraph - about how moving to the countryside had helped my anxiety (the irony of writing an article about anxiety only to be trolled will not be lost on some). I avoided responses to the article online, but then I saw that the Telegraph had posted about the article on Instagram. We authors are told we have to use these platforms - Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. - to promote ourselves (another thing that does not sit easy with me), so I clicked on the post and was going to add it to my story on Instagram, when I couldn’t help glancing at the comments below the post.

‘Silly c**t.’

‘First world problems.’

‘What an idiot. You don’t have to leave London to stop drinking.’

That last one clearly hadn’t read the article properly, but I didn’t want to engage with him or her and I suppose I shouldn’t be giving them air space here either, but I think it’s important to explain how scary it can be putting yourself out there. I am grateful this doesn’t seem to happen so much with books, but it shouldn’t happen with newspapers either - otherwise genuine people will stop writing about and sharing their experiences because they will be too scared to.

There is a huge disconnect between the way people perceive writers and their lives - bohemian and mysterious, but also well paid (!!) and privileged, and perhaps - because we’ve put ourselves out there - open to abuse. In my experience, none of the above is true!

As my grandmother might have said: try and say something nice, and if you can’t, then don’t say anything at all.