Taking control of the narrative

and telling a different kind of publication success story (plus a 24hr flash offer to join the Membership for the price of a hardback)

Hi friends,

If you’re new here, hello! I’m Lindsay. I’m a writer, critic and expressive writing facilitator based in Glasgow, Scotland. On Substack, I’m holding the necessary space for myself and others entering midlife while very much still figuring things out.

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Photo credit: Anna Considine @studiogently

Scroll to redeem the 24-hour flash annual Membership offer and if you want to know what to expect in the Membership, including my Writing for Better Mental and Physical Health short course which started a new four-week run on Tuesday with replays available, then head on over to my welcome post:

Start here! Welcome to What Now? with Lindsay Johnstone

This week, I want to celebrate seeing a long-term creative project through to completion on

Substack

. It’s a different type of publication success story and it’s been happening quietly but consistently here for almost a year.

Since last November, I’ve been sharing a near-weekly audio episode and behind-the-scenes peeks from my memoir, Held in Mind. Last Wednesday, I published the final episode. Today, I’ll share with you why I published here rather than continue to pursue traditional print publication. I want to talk to you about the particular joy of building a strong and loyal community of first supporters for the story.

There won’t be any spoilers if you’re yet to dive in. Promise.

Like all good stories, this one had a strong opener…

It would be a lie to say I hadn’t ever considered writing a memoir. Long ago I’d toyed with the idea of writing about being a young carer. Later, I thought I’d write about growing up on a sawmill, which felt vaguely Tara Westover-ish. My family had lived and worked on the land since the 1930s and I grew up with my mum and grandparents in one of the three cottages in front of the yard while my uncles, aunts and cousins lived in the other two. We were likened to The Waltons. And yes, my mum is really called Mary Ellen. Yet I couldn’t find a way into the story that felt compelling enough.

I thought about it again when I started an intensive course of psychodynamic psychotherapy in late 2019 though I knew that a therapy narrative alone wouldn’t be weighty enough for a book and dismissed it because the journaling I was doing was just for me.

However, after discovering a cache of letters, photographs and family ephemera at my childhood home that taken together charted my grandmother and mother’s struggles with mental illness, I saw things differently. I knew then there was the potential to craft a braided narrative that would span the generations to explore the legacy of maternal trauma, addiction and the mental health care system. I knew it had the potential to be a story that would help me better understand my own, and maybe others’ too.

Trawling the family archive

I treated it like an archive project, first reading, chronologising and transcribing all the letters, diaries and other bits and bobs while simultaneously sorting through the photos and slides. Much of the material had never been seen by anyone other than my long-dead grandparents. It had sat quietly in an electric blanket box on a shelf in the walk-in cupboard outside their bedroom: a room that would eventually become my mother’s and, for a time, mine.

I trawled the internet archives for birth, death and marriage certificates. The electoral rolls as well as valuation rolls, newspapers and local maps. The census, too. Initially, I had ambitions for the narrative to go even further back in time, but decided the story had to be contained by the relations I have known. We all have to draw a line somewhere.

My great-grandfather’s birth certificate from 1871. There are stories that go far further back than the one I chose to focus on

I quickly became obsessed, seeing patterns, parallels and clashes everywhere. My story would, at times, mirror my mother’s or grandmother’s in ways that I couldn’t quite believe. The courting letters my grandparents sent each other in the first half of 1946 spookily foreshadowed events far in the future. The separation my grandparents experienced before they married was echoed by COVID’s impact on my therapy. The way my husband, my father and my grandfather coped with their wives’ poor mental health was also at times strikingly similar, forcing me to consider the timeless impact on us all of marriage, parenthood and the pressure of work.

I felt driven by a particular shade of madness to make sense of it all as though it was a puzzle to solve. I’d listen to the same four or five songs each morning on the fast walk that came before that day’s words, my brain forging all kinds of connections.

I was so in it. It was an intoxicating, feverish time.

A few of the finds

That, and I had faith in the work. I was confident it was good, which isn’t always the case. Before I finished the first draft in late 2021, I entered a chunk to a Creative Scotland and ASLA (the Association of Scottish Literary Agents) scheme for emerging writers called Our Voices and was accepted on the programme. I also submitted the first intentional scene I wrote for the manuscript (the handwritten words scribbled on the front step between lockdown home-learning sessions never changed much in the redrafting) to the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival Writers’ Award and was shortlisted. It was published in an anthology that you can read here.

Gather: SMHAF Writers' Award 2022 illustrated by Molly Porteous

On the back of all of this, I signed with my first agent. After edits and writing the proposal, the book went on submission to the Big Five and selected indie publishers in mid-2022. Concurrently, I was shortlisted for and then won the John Byrne Award with a further extract.

I hope I’m forgiven now for having thought the whole “publishing a book” thing seemed pretty straightforward. Given the success of the extracts, I thought it’d sell quickly. That it might even go to auction because that’s what I’d been told to expect.

Reader, it didn’t.

Then the dragging middle every writer hopes to avoid

After a few weeks, we started to accrue rejections from editors at various imprints with myriad reasons why it wasn’t being taken forward. I remember feeling pretty calm about it initially. Some cited timing. Similar upcoming titles. That is wasn’t quite right for that specific editor’s list. I could handle those. Some, though, were so gushing I was sure it could only be good news, only for them to say at the end of the email that they were sorry but they couldn’t take it forward to acquisitions (the money people). Privately, I worried about the pitch. As the months rumbled on, less privately.

We then submitted it to some more indie imprints and received yet more rejections. A couple of editors said they wouldn’t feel comfortable taking it on because it contained stories of vulnerable people. I got that, but also stood by my decisions. I’d obscured the identities of every professional I wrote about, but the places and the family members were all true. It felt impossible to imagine an alternative. My family was on board and I welcomed the opportunity to work with an editor, a sensitivity reader and a legal team to make sure that everything I’d written about was handled with care for others.

I began to wonder whether all of these rejections were just ways of telling me it wasn’t ready. Whether we’d misjudged the whole thing. Whether it wasn’t good enough. I asked for my agent to take it off submission.

Once an editor at an imprint has said no, there’s no going back to them with that manuscript. While they’re yet to respond, you can take it off the table and plan a resubmission. I reworked the pitch and the proposal and in early autumn last year and headed into a studio to record the first three chapters because there were rumblings that we could sell it as an audiobook first direct to Audible Originals. I was on board with this, having come to understand that the path to publication is windy, long and unpredictable.

The twist in the tale

I decided to share the chunk I’d recorded here on Substack as a limited series of nine episodes while the manuscript was back out on sub. It wouldn’t impact the process since it would be held behind the paywall and would be a good chance to test whether the story resonated. The episodes would run from November through to January, more or less exactly four years on from the events of the present-day strand of the narrative. The pattern-spotter in me was pleased by this.

It was terrifying, though.

Still, the likes, comments and shares bolstered me at a time when I needed it. They reminded me to keep faith in the story. It was the listeners, really, who kept me going while my confidence in my words was low. They motivated me to keep on going in the new year when my former agent stopped pushing the manuscript.

Some of the early episodes

A happy ending

In February, then, I decided to go for it here with the whole thing. I set up a rudimentary recording booth in my office with my girls’ old cot mattress and a reconfigured cardboard box and downloaded editing software to approximate the pro sound of the first few hours as best I could.

As the weeks went on and more and more of you joined us behind the paywall, I came to understand that we were making something powerful together. Sharing the story in this way wasn't a failure. It was a massive success. A meaningful, communal experience in which listeners felt able to share their own stories with me and with one another. It’s been a dynamic one, too. Unlike when a book hits the shelves, I’ve been able to see when and how listeners have absorbed the story. Some have been with me since episode one, listening each Wednesday. Others have joined in the months since that first episode launched and have binged it in chunks. I LOVE opening up my email to find a run of likes from a single listener.

Epilogue

Although this manuscript may well yet be published in the traditional sense, I believe that it has a different energy when absorbed here on Substack (or wherever you listen!). We’ve formed a book club, really, with a built-in community of readers and access to the sort of behind-the-scenes stuff that could never make its way into a printed book.

If this has whetted your appetite and you want to join us, here’s a one-day offer: hit any of the buttons in this post to lock in an annual rolling Membership for the price of a hardback book. You gain access to everything the Membership has to offer including the audiobook, the archive and my courses. Next year, I’ll be launching a brand new one all about forming narrative from (family) archive, so if you are considering writing about your family or a significant building or place, this is going to be for you. More details in the new year.

I really hope that you click through and upgrade to the Membership, and I’m here ready to answers any questions you might have, especially if you're upgrading from an existing monthly membership and following the instructions in the email sent to you on Friday.

If you’re already in the annual gang, a restack or a share of my Instagram stories today would be so appreciated to help others find us.

I’ll be back with you next Sunday with the next instalment of The Cost of Caring series with

Wendy Pratt

, author of Nan Shepherd Prize longlisted memoir, The Ghost Lake, which you can buy here. We can’t wait to share this important conversation about the intersection of caring and creativity with you.

Lindsay x