BUY TICKETS

Written by Sharon Bala | #NoOneSucceedsAlone

There is only one name on the spine of my novel but my book benefitted from several ghost writers. Before agents and editors and publishing houses, there was my writing group, Melissa, Jamie, Susan, Gary, Morgan, Matthew, and Carrie, scrawling notes in the margins, circling passages they liked and crossing out metaphors they didn’t. They critiqued pace and character and prose, spent their weekends pouring over early drafts, and encouraged me to submit the manuscript, to send it out into the world. These were acts of friendship but they were also acts of devotion. The Boat People is my novel but it belongs to them too. In the past eight months, four of us have published new novels. Flip through any of our books and you’ll find immaculate pages of neat typeset, not a comma out of place. But behind each carefully-crafted sentence and paragraph lurk the ghosts of other words. Stars and arrows and queries in red ink. Scribbles in the margins only we can see.

 

See Sharon at the 2018 Whistler Writers Festival