Philip Gwyn Jones writes: Speed Dating in the Writing School

I left the South, I travelled North.

I trundled upwards across the misty flat middle of England one November morning on a train that seemed as if it had pulled in from the 1980s, with no electrical sockets, no wifi, Plantagenet upholstery, a cart touting Twix and tannins, and with standing room only between Nottingham and Sheffield, a heave-on. There was a Woolworths bag under my seat. Well, figuratively. All very fitting as I was off to my first meat market since the 1980s, although this was of the Creative Writing variety, where aspiring writers are given a narrow fifteen minutes to communicate their genius to we agents one after the other across a table in the [not remotely 1980s] very swish building in Manchester’s university quarter which houses the Manchester Writing School of MMU, plus a magnificent Poetry Library amongst other delights. It even has poetry festooning its stairwells in militantly large type. The Oxford Road area is now half-Shoreditch, half-Tribeca, and the scuzz of it that attracted me in those selfsame late 1980s to zip across the Pennines to throw shapes in the Hacienda and environs has been [mostly] swept away. The speed dating was all brilliantly organized by the crack Comma Press team, and the finest recent Creative Writing and Writers’ Workshop graduates of Lancashire and Yorkshire [and beyond] lined up for their auditions, clutching their shinily polished pitches. And they were each of them nervous, but each of them was extremely impressive. They unleashed their projects on us, one by one. And we agents tried to help them with their pitching and their persuading. It was all warmly collaborative. In trying to help them think about what they needed to address in their future presentations, whether in person or on paper, as usual I had recourse to my Five Cs, those question zones you should be occupying as you prepare yourself to go into battle for your beloved book-to-be, namely:

COACHING Who is your best coach or tutor or reader to date? What did they teach you about writing?

COMPS What have you read? What has your reader read? Who are you talking to when you write? What will they previously have enjoyed: films, art, telly, music as well as books. What has inspired you? Who is your aspirational model as an author?

CONTENT What is the cargo of your book? What load are you carrying? What will you give the reader, what will you leave behind with them?

COMMUNITY Where do you belong? Where do you share your thoughts and feelings? Are you sharing your thoughts on artistic expression? Are you able to solicit feedback? Recruit support?

COMMS How would you describe your skills, your intentions, your context, your connections? Who are you? Does representation matter to you? Does identity matter? How will you communicate that?

I find that if you can think about these questions inside this framework it goes a long way to helping you help a prospective agent or publisher understand what you are trying to achieve and who is achieving it.

But as I said to every hot date at the Manchester Writing School, ultimately, of course, what matters most is the writing itself. The rest is dancing and decoration.

I can’t help the way I feel.