One Woman's Struggle in Iran - a memoir from Nasrin Parvaz

by Catriona Troth

Many Prisoners in One Room by Nasrin Parvaz

In 1979, Nasrin Parvaz returned from England, where she had been studying, and became a member of a socialist party in Iran fighting for a non-Islamic state in which women had the same rights as men. Three years later, at the age of 23, she was betrayed by a comrade and arrested by the regime’s secret police.

Nasrin spent the next eight years in Iran’s prison system. She was systematically tortured, threatened with execution, starved and forced to live in appalling, horribly overcrowded conditions. One Woman’s Struggle is both an account of what happened to her during those eight years, and evidence that her spirit was never broken.

In 1990 she was released and in 1993 she fled to England, where she has been a client of Freedom From Torture. She has given talks on the violation of human rights in Iran, both in Farsi and in English, in a number of countries. She has spoken at Southbank Centre (2015 and 2016), Bare Lit Festival (2016 and 2017), and for organizations such as Amnesty International, Cambridge PEN and Freedom From Torture.

Nasrin’s prison memoir was published in Farsi in 2002, and in Italian in 2006. The English edition is now seeking support on the crowd-funded publishing site, Unbound.

One Woman’s Struggle is not an easy book to read. The opening chapters, which detail her interrogation under torture, are devastating. This is the reality of which dystopian depictions of totalitarianism, like V for Vendetta, merely skim the surface. Small wonder that many break under torture. Far more extraordinary are those who find within themselves the strength to endure.

Once the interrogations end, the hardships and degradations of daily prison life begin. The dirtiest trick of totalitarianism is to persuade its followers that those who it oppresses are no longer entirely human. The regime in Iran played this trick with brutal effectiveness. But Nasrin’s memoir also shows how the humanity of the women in prison nonetheless survived. It is a story of friendship and mutual support, of how the women drew strength from one another and found endless small ways to show kindness and even find tiny specks of joy.

The book begins and ends with fleeting encounter, when Nasrin recognises one of her tormentors in a London supermarket. The guard is terrified, but Nasrin turns and walks out into the spring sunshine.

Some things in Iran have changed since Nasrin was released. The interrogation centre where she was first held has been turned into a museum. School children are taken there on tours, but they are told that it was only used in the Shah’s time. Other things remain. In an echo of an incident described in the book, when international ambassadors visited Evin Prison earlier this year, political prisoners were hidden away where they could not be seen.

This book, however, is not simply about the prison system in Iran. It is about oppression – and especially the oppression of women – wherever it takes place. It deserves to stand with Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man as an indictment of cruelty, brutality and the dehumanising of fellow human beings.

Here Nasrin talks to Catriona Troth about her hopes for the book, for Iran and for women the world over.

Prison by Nasrin Parvaz

When you started writing One Woman’s Struggle, did you imagine it would be published one day, or was it initially something you did for yourself, as part of the healing process?

I started writing it to publish it. Publishing was my only aim as my prime aim was to communicate. My personal experience is not just personal but is part of the universal history of oppression and struggle.


How did Freedom from Torture and the Write to Life group help you?

I received therapy from FFT for a few years and my therapist was really kind and helpful. She helped me in other areas of life, as well as in the therapy room. For example, I wanted to study psychology and she helped me to find a bursary, so I only had to pay half the price of the course. Things like this that I wasn’t aware of!

When Sonja Linden started the Write to Life group, I was one of her first clients and I must say, if it wasn’t for Sonja, and later on, Hubert Moore who was my mentor, I might have not continued writing! English was not my first language and I was trying to learn it by exchanging one-to-one lessons with people who wanted to learn Farsi.

The Write to Life group helped me in many different ways – including learning how to put my prison experience into words and how to write a story.

The book has already been published in Farsi. Why is it important for you that it is published in English as well?

Actually I first started to write it in English, but half way into it I realised it wasn’t good enough, so I began to write it in Farsi. I want to tell the world what is happening in Iran and to tell them that the government is carrying out crimes such as imprisoning and executing people for what they believe in – or what they don’t believe in.

Because of my personal experience when I started to write my book, I could only see that torture and execution were happening in Iran; but now I can see that this is happening everywhere. Some might say it’s not happening in western countries, then I’ll tell them that I see it whenever I walk down the road. Yes, the homeless people living in the streets of London and other cities of the world are subject to physical and mental torture. I no longer see that torture - as a means of crushing people - is something that happens only in prison, but as something that is part of the world’s system. Witnessing something so dehumanising is psychological torture for passers-by: it is for me. Every time I see a homeless person, the same feelings of frustration and helplessness I experienced in prison when I was being tortured or my cellmates were being beaten come over me and I feel depressed. 

 

As much as the book is an indictment of oppression, it is a celebration of the strength of women and women’s friendship. How do you think that spirit survives when everything in the system is designed to crush it?

The strength of women and our friendship was one of the ways in which prisoners put up resistance to that system. The Iranian women’s resistance started in 1979, when only a few days after Khomeini arrived in Iran, he announced women should wear the chador – which is like a burqa, except that the woman’s face is uncovered. The next day, on the 8th of March women poured into the streets of Tehran and many other towns. It’s true that the regime eventually forced women to cover their hair; but it took three years till they made it a law and they couldn’t put women into sacks; head scarves became compulsory and nowadays, women are arrested if they don’t observe this law.

Unfortunately so many men have not supported women’s struggle against this sexual apartheid and actively benefit from it.

How optimistic are you for the future of Iran, and particularly for the role of women in the country?

I can’t separate Iran from the rest of the world. We all are in the same boat that is running fast with the current towards a future full of more misery, unless we do something about it. In Iran – the same as in the rest of the world - we need a just system that safeguards freedom and equality.

Regarding the women of Iran, I must say that they haven’t given up their struggle for freedom and equality with men. Since marriage gives all the rights such as divorce and custody to men, for many years it has been common practice for some women to ask their husbands to sign papers giving both parties equal rights. Many of the new generation don’t even bother with marriage and simply live together, even though this is illegal.

What is the most important message you would like people to derive from the book?

That we need to struggle for a just world: a world without torture and execution.

Thank you, Nasrin. I hope many people will support your book and enable it to be published! It deserves to be widely read.

To pledge support for Nasrin's book, please visit the Unbound site here, where you can also watch a video interview with Nasrin.

You can follow Nasrin on Twitter at @NasrinParvaz

Telling Stories

by Roland Denning

Author and film maker Roland Denning reminds us that story telling is just as important in non-fiction as in fiction, and describes how the process of film making can be (as Michaelangelo’s said about sculpture) a process of ‘cutting away the parts that aren’t the horse.’

When Words With Jam asked me to write a piece about writing for documentary films, I had to break the news to them that it’s not something I do. Well, to clarify: I write and I make documentaries, but the documentaries I make are not written.

There is a honourable tradition of documentaries which do depend on carefully written narration - think of history programmes and nature series like Life On Earth - but the films I make tend to be either observational or constructed out of interviews, without voice-over commentary. However, they may not be written but they are certainly constructed and, like any form of movie making or writing, they need a story.

Stories are key. A few years ago I wrote a novel (about a world where no one believed or believed in anything any more - sorry, it was meant to be a satire, not a prophecy) and, in the years leading up to and around it, I got very involved in writing groups - both online and (more intensely) in the ‘real world’. The thing about writing groups is that analysis tends to take place on a page by page or sentence by sentence basis. We would talk about point-of-view, whether mood and emotion were convincingly expressed, whether metaphors were working, whether dialogue was convincing. We urged each other to ‘show not tell’, to cut away the fat, to be honest and direct. We seldom talked about story and how a story is constructed.

Workshops in the literary world seldom discuss story structure but their movie equivalents talk about little else. Screenwriting courses and books outline elaborate systems to analyse the mechanics of a story; there are no end of screenwriting gurus keen to inculcate their personal take on the 3-part, 5-part, 7-part or even 11-part story structure.

At its worst, the formula approach to screenwriting produces the formulaic movie where you can set your watch at the ‘inciting incident’ that occurs 20 minutes in; the twist and turns of the plot are so familiar that, rather than being elevated or entertained, you feel you are taking part in a meaningless ritual.

At the same time, we know when stories work and when they don’t, as when we get to the end of a book or a story and feel cheated. When a story is weak, almost inevitably you can point to a structural fault (sadly, the converse is not true - you can’t create a great story purely on the basis of an impeccable understanding of structure). Story, in itself is a form - depart from it too much and it ceases to be a story. The fact that a reader can feel cheated means that there is some sort of implicit deal between author and reader, but fulfilling that deal is not that simple.

Let’s start with the basics: stories are about characters and characters are ‘wanting machines’ - a character who doesn’t want anything is not really a character. This has little to do with screenwriting theory, it is the essence of classic storytelling and drama. Go see any Shakespeare play - as soon as a character appears on stage, you know what he or she wants, just as we know what Jack and Jill went up the hill for. Characters all want something but, of course, they can’t quite get it. One screenwriting guru described the mainspring of narrative as being the gap between expectation and result: a character has an intention and does something expecting a particular result. But something else happens and how he or she responds to that is the essence of story.

Desires are the engine of story and the structure of that story holds together the diverging and overlapping paths of those desires. There is always set-up, conflict and resolution - if you don’t have those basic elements, you don’t really have a story. Of course, you can have films and books without stories, just as you can have atonal music without melody and art that is purely abstract, but there is always some form of inherent tension, and for the vast majority of the world, we expect our books and films to be based on narrative.

When I look back to my fellow writers in those workshops, so often the problems were structural and fundamental. Stories would not end right because they didn't start right - protagonists would go on a journey without a clear reason why, they would be passive, they would not make choices or decisions but just drift along (another useful screenwriting trope: character is not revealed by what the protagonist looks like or says, but by the decisions she or he takes).

Someone once described the ideal screenplay as one which keeps you guessing what is going to happen all the way to the end but, when you finally get there, you realise that no other ending was possible.

Let’s get back to where this essay started. Documentaries, of course, are narrative forms - they have stories, and the world does not naturally come in story form; stories are something that humans construct.

Often TV documentaries are accused of inaccuracy or distortion or downright lying - what seems to pass by almost all viewers is that, in a sense, every documentary is a lie - it is a construction, and constructing a documentary is very similar to writing fiction. You need to find characters, you need to see them in conflict, you need to offer a resolution. You need a story. ‘Fly on the wall’ TV documentaries might shoot 100 hours or more for an hour of TV; subjects often complain ‘our life isn’t really like that - most of the time not much happens and it’s really boring’. Of course, but, importantly, this is not just a case of just throwing away the 99 hours when nothing much happened, it’s choosing the 60 minutes that can be shaped into a hour that tells a story.

How do you find those precious 60 minutes? The process is very similar to writing a story – you find characters, protagonists and antagonists, individuals with goals to achieve that are frustrated or challenged in one way or another. You look for conflict and possible resolution.

The process is, perhaps, not quite as nefarious as it seems, it’s something we do all the time when we respond to questions like ‘what happened at work today?’ or ‘how did that date go?’. The questioner doesn’t actually want a list of events and actions, they want a story.

How do you maintain some sense of integrity, how do you guard yourself against accusations of distortion or bias? That is a very difficult question to answer, but it applies to every non-fiction account whether it is an essay, a newspaper story or a documentary. It is easier to spot manipulation and outright lies than it is to find paradigms of authenticity. The judgements you have to make are complex, subtle and subjective. The best you can do, perhaps, is to present people as you see them, as honestly as you can and avoid things like using out-of-character remarks or out-of-context juxtapositions which would present the situation unfairly, but that ‘fairness’ is still a subjective judgement.

Choosing the images that tell a story: still from Mario's Cafe

Often when you set out to make a documentary you are not quite sure what the story is - or you think you do, but you end up with a different one. A few years ago I made short film about my local café - a small, personal project - because I thought there was something rather special about the place - it seemed as more of a community resource than a place where people just fed themselves. The owner, Mario, is a charmer but the themes only emerged after spending many days hanging out and filming there. Mario clearly loves the place and its clientele, but there is also a sense that he could have done more with his life, and the job, like most jobs, is hard work and frustrating. But it needed something else, and through chance, another story emerged. Mario had employed a young waitress, who was constantly late. Every day he complains about her (although not to her face). Then one very busy Saturday… well, I won’t tell you quite what happens but, in that moment, his character is revealed (remember what I said above? ‘Character is revealed by the decisions the protagonist makes’.)

Mario’s Café has no pretence to be a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary as Mario acknowledges my camera’s presence and talks to me occasionally. The story of the late waitress is true, but astute viewers may notice that the busy Saturday towards the end of the film is a composite of two days, and, because it was only shot with one camera which can not be in two places at the same time, ‘reaction shots’ never take place quite when they are supposed to. Having said that, nothing was contrived for the camera – but you will have to take that on trust.

Roland’s satirical novel, The Beach Beneath The Pavement, is still available on Amazon, as is the DVD of Mirage Men, the feature length documentary he co-produced and co-directed. He recently directed a series of short films on the arts for the pan-South American TV channel, teleSUR. More about his various projects here.

Combining the Personal and the Professional

The challenges of writing a non-fiction guide to breast cancer

by Dr Kathleen Thompson

Words with Jam asked me to write about the challenges of writing a book involving my personal experiences. Let me explain – I am a doctor who was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago. I found negotiating and understanding the treatment surprisingly difficult, even as a doctor, and it made me realise how bewildering it could be for someone without a medical background, who was also in a state of shock following a devastating diagnosis.

So I decided to write a book to guide people through the breast cancer experience. I wanted to explain the tests they would undergo, and the different treatments; how they would feel and why. I also wanted to share my knowledge about medical research, to help people make meaningful treatment decisions. I wanted to explain what cancer was, why we get it, and how to avoid it.

But how should I write it? People are in a state of shock when dealing with a cancer diagnosis, whether it is affecting themselves or their loved ones. A dry text-book approach wouldn’t work. I knew that I couldn’t have picked up any such book to save my life whilst I was having treatment – and, scarily, such a book may save your life. It is critical that you are well-informed during your cancer journey - relying on professionals isn’t always enough.

So maybe I should just tell my own story? No - although other people’s suffering can hold a morbid fascination, generally, unless you are famous, your personal story is only really of interest to friends and relatives.

However, I could combine the two approaches, drip-feeding important information, within the gentle wrapping of my own story. Besides, my particular story had all the elements of a good novel – point of change, tension, multiple episodes of jeopardy, almost resolution … then further jeopardy. It would be light relief from the factual information.

It worked well. I wrote short sections of essential information, then some of my story, reinforcing theory with light relief. At the end of each chapter was a summary and ‘Further Information’ box. Bite-sized pieces were key for people dealing with cancer.

There were some interesting sequelae to this approach. Using only parts of my experience, to complement the factual information perhaps gave a biased view of my personal life, and some people assumed I was alone through my cancer treatment. This wasn’t true, I was surrounded by a loving family and good friends, but I limited mention of them, for many reasons.

There were some interesting challenges too. If I were really to help people and make them feel that I understood their problems, I had to write honestly, including when things went wrong. It was the pitfalls, which would help my readers the most – the reassurance that it was OK to challenge medical decisions for example, and how to do it.

However, unlike a novel, my characters were not figments of my imagination. They were real people, who were generally trying to do their best. We all make mistakes, and my care was not always perfect. But the relevant characters in my book were not necessarily bad or incompetent. So was it fair to label them, based on a freeze frame of their professional lives? I didn’t believe so.

Consequently, my first step was to change not just their names, but also their physical characteristics. The breast cancer world is small, I had to try my best to prevent people guessing who the players really were.

I also used a pen-name. A curious member of hospital staff may check my name, or simply remember me, then the confidentiality would be broken.

My main concern was for the reputation of some of the staff involved, but I also needed to protect myself from any backlash. So I consulted a publication lawyer. He explained that libel only applies if a statement is false. As I had kept notes at the time of my treatment, I was confident of the accuracy of my account. I was also concerned about my interpretations of anti-cancer literature. As an expert in medical research I was keen to give a critical appraisal of some alternative ‘anti-cancer therapies’ which seemed to have limited scientific basis. My lawyer helped me with wording to make clear that I was writing my opinion. Generally one cannot be sued for an opinion. These modifications allowed me to write honestly without fear of litigation.

People asked me what effect writing a book had on me emotionally? Was it hard to revisit the traumatic experience, or was writing about it cathartic? To be honest, no, and no. When I wrote my book I was over the original trauma of the diagnosis and my main focus was to help others. I had a strong feeling that my cancer had happened for a reason. With my medical background I was well-placed to advise others. In fact, strangely, in some ways, I’m not totally sorry it happened.



From Both Ends of the Stethoscope – Getting Through Breast cancer by a Doctor Who Knows by Dr Kathleen Thompson

60 Seconds with Lynne Barrett-Lee

By Gillian Hamer

A multi-talented, multi-tasking author, Lynne Barrett-Lee writes fiction, non-fiction, ghostwriting ... oh, and throw in the odd creative writing tutorial too. A passionate reader first and foremost, who became a passionate writer.
www.lynnebarrett-lee.com/

Her latest non-fiction release promises to help write the killer short story - and I personally think her top tips below are fabulous words of wisdom.

So, let's attempt to dig a little deeper in our 60 Second feature.

You have many talents - fiction, non-fiction, teaching, ghost-writing - what gives you most pleasure?

Different things at different times. I just love writing narrative. But Ghosting has been particularly thrilling as it's been such an unexpected departure for me. I thought I was far too much the egotistical 'creative' type but I find I love taking a real story, about a real (hopefully humbling and inspiring) person, and shaping it to read as compellingly as a novel would, and creating dialogue/developing character to bring someone real to life. It's a singular job - not one bit like journalism.

Why do you enjoy teaching creative writing?

Not for the money, for sure! I teach once a week, for two hours, at Cardiff Uni, and do it because it gets me out of the house and into the warm embrace of other aspiring writers (sometimes the embodiment of the 'me' I recognise from 20 years back, as I attended such classes myself). I trained as a primary school teacher in my 30s - my first published piece was for the TES - and I love inspiring and motivating writers, so perhaps its in my blood. Cheesy but true. We also go out a-razzling sometimes, which also makes me happy.

How did you move into ghost-writing?

By accident, in 2007. One of my husband's former patients, who had read both a couple of my romantic comedy novels and my weekly Western Mail column, wrote and asked me if I'd help her tell the story of her amazing life. She came off a motorbike and was paralysed from the chest down at the age of 14 and, via an extraordinary journey, ended up marrying the consultant who told her she'd never walk again, 25 years later. You really couldn't have made it up. After that, my agent asked me if I'd like to ghost another; it's kind of gone - indeed, snowballed - from there...

I love your ghost-writing quote - 'you never quite know where saying yes might lead you ...' - what has been your biggest adventure?

I have been on several. Geographically, when I was asked to go to Arizona to ghost the story of Giant George, then the world's biggest dog; professionally, when a book I ghosted (The Girl With No Name, which had been the project of no less than 5 ghosts before me and was languishing unsold) was sold in 19 countries and became a global best seller; emotionally, when I agreed to ghost Bye Mam, I Love You, Sonia Oatley's memoir about the murder of her15 year old daughter, Rebecca Oatley, and in terms of personal joy, it's a tie between the bestselling series I've co-authored for 4 years now - about which I can't tell you without killing you! - and the trilogy I've just co-authored with an amazing lady called Julie Shaw, about the Notorious Hudson Family (hers), which is published imminently. The first, OUR VINNIE, was so full of grit it made my fillings rattle. I could not be more excited about it and have such high, fizzy hopes.

Writing is such a solitary process, how do you adjust to writing alongside someone?

They don't tend to sit in my kitchen with me, happily, which means I can still write in a nightie, nibbling cheese. We tend to have three or four meetings, then communicate by either phone or (mostly) email. Most of my collaborators are happy to let me take care of structure, storytelling and syntax, and regular bombardments of drafts peppered with comment boxes full of questions... Most also love bashing out their innermost thoughts and letting me pull everything together into something both readable and, hopefully, that elusive 'unputdownable'.

'The Girl with No Name' looks a fabulous book to have worked on, can you tell us a bit about the experience?

As I mentioned above, it was a long one, and with such fascinating subject matter, quite an adventure. The main problem Marina had was that no-one accepted the veracity of her story, so I had to find a way of telling it that would help the readers warm to her. I believed her completely the moment I met her, which helped. I honestly believe anyone would. I then had to strip back the huge ms her adult daughter had created over years, and pull together something that both captured her child's voice convincingly and gave the reader something of an old fashioned adventure story. I'm very proud of what we made.

You've recently published 'Telling Tales: How to Write Sensational Short Stories' - tell us your top three tips for writing an award winning short?

I've yet to win an actual award; I've been placed, highly commended and had one of my novels make a short shortlist (Hurrah! A trophy!) but I have had over 100 sort stories published, so I figure I'm qualified, and my three tips - oh, this is hard - would be to...
A) remember the two Cs; Conflict and Change. Every story needs both, and the change must come about as the result of the conflict.
B) write with a plan. You need to know what point you want to make in order to know where and how to start. I know some would argue you should just start writing and see where it takes you, but I am a planner; it makes you so much more focused and prolific.
C) Be emotionally intelligent. Which kind of chimes with what's above. No, you can't buy a packet of emotional intelligence in Tesco, but what makes fiction sing is that sense of connection between author and reader. Make yourself an enthusiastic student of the human condition and borrow ruthlessly from real people.

So many strings to your bow, anything else you'd like to try?

I love writing dialogue, so to create a script or screenplay from one of my novels or ghosted memoirs would be a fun thing to do, but nothing beats book-writing for me, so it would always win out, I think. That said, as I now work on a laptop in my kitchen, I am considering turning my old office into a studio to draw, paint and create huge, mad mosaics out of reclaimed glass and ceramics. Lol - in some lifetime, anyway... I have no plans to ever retire.

Tell us which book would win your 'Book of 2014' award.

Currently a tie between David Nicholl's stunningly well-observed 'US' and Donna Tartt's 'THE GOLDFINCH', which I am about 150 pages away from finishing. If it ends the way I want it to, I think it will win by a short nose. Theo will stay with me always. God, I wish I'd written it.

Tell us your writing plans for 2015.

I have two further titles to write incognito (see above) and am just waiting - everything crossed - for confirmation that the next three Julie Shaw titles will be published late next year. That will all keep me pretty busy, but I'm also working on a proposal about a man, a dog and a tornado, writing the amazing story of a boy with 90% burns, penning my weekly column, keeping up with my ironing (helps with the thinking), and droning happily at creative writing students once a week. Mostly, you'll find me in my kitchen, being effortlessly glamorous. #not

Submitting Non-Fiction

by Helen Corner

Helen Corner, founder of the Cornerstones literary consultancy, gives some guidance on how to ensure your non-fiction proposal lands on the agent’s desk and not in the slush pile. 

 My job is to help authors through the redrafting and submitting stage; talent and inspiration cannot, as we know, be taught, but I strongly believe that a writer can be shown how to craft their skills and to approach the publishing arena in a confident way.

Once you’ve finished your non-fiction proposal, it’s tempting to throw it into the publishing ether to see if someone will recognise your talent and commission your work. However, agents and publishers are a business and if something isn’t working – perhaps your writing is unformed, or your submission is incomplete or unclear – then it is likely to be rejected and they almost certainly won’t have time to give you feedback or tell you why. Agents and publishers often talk of metre high piles of unsolicited material – manuscripts (mss) sent in direct by authors - and their time is already filled with servicing their existing authors and taking on new clients, so your submission has to shine above the rest. The key to this is preparation and perfection.

Part of what we do at Cornerstones is passing through first-time authors to agents, and each agent has different quirks and preferred ways of being approached. You’ll only know who likes what by carrying out your own research and this sense of care and targetting should shine through in your submission. So, draw up a list of three to four agents and profile them so that you target them in a personalised way. Look at their website, see exactly how they like work to be submitted; Google them to see if they’ve written any articles or have been written about in the trade press. When you introduce yourself in your cover letter, you want the agent to notice you and take you seriously. How professional it would sound if you mentioned, for instance, that you have read an interview on them in a writing magazine, and that you thought they might like to consider your non-fiction idea because they were currently looking for this kind of subject.

You’re now ready to prepare your submission. You can either target one agent at a time – but be prepared for one month or so for a response, or you can target a couple at a time. If you do submit to more than one agent it’s important to say this in your letter (you don’t need to say who you’ve submitted to but you do need to be transparent with your approach) and tell them that you’ll let them know of any developments – this immediately signals professionalism in your approach because you’re aware of etiquette. By contrast, an agent will find it irritating if they think it’s an exclusive submission and then find out that another agent has already shown interest. I would advise against sending out your submission to more than three or four agents at one time, as it suggests a lack of conviction both in your work and in the agent you’re targeting.

For non-fiction, usually all that is required is a proposal and an agent can make a swift decision based on this. Every agent works differently - some just require a cover letter introducing you, your idea and a market analysis of why your idea would appeal and then some sample chapters. Others may request a synopsis or an introduction (why you, why the subject), and perhaps a contents list which will allow the agent to see the areas you intend to cover, along with sample chapter(s). For non-fiction the most important thing is why you’re qualified to write it. You can either write as an authority on a subject - for instance, if you’ve written about a particular period in history you should have some form of academic or professional credential to back this up; or, you can write from personal experience – you might have grown up in Africa and wish to write about how apartheid affected you. Either approach will carry weight, as long as the subject itself is inherently fresh and interesting; agents see a lot of memoirs and very few are published, so to succeed in this sub-genre you must be telling an outstanding story.

The agent will probably glance at your cover letter and then go straight to your writing, and their decision whether to take you on will be 99.9% down to you and the concept - are you high profile or ‘interesting’, and is this high concept, unusual and likely to sell – backed up by the quality of your style and delivery. Every second that the agent remains with your work counts, and you don’t want to give them any excuse to turn it down. The real key to a professional submission, irrespective of genre, is to ensure that your writing is as strong as you can make it. Even if you’ve redrafted several times and you’re convinced you can’t do any more revision, have one last read – perhaps read it aloud – and get someone whose opinion you trust to read it as well.

Check your presentation: is it a standard type and font (Times Roman, 12 point); are your chapters numbered and double-spaced; does each chapter begin with the narrative left justified and each subsequent paragraph indented? Are all your contact details, and the agent’s, correct (have you called the agency to double-check the agent’s name and that you have the right address)? If you would like your material returned don’t forget the stamped addressed envelope, with stamps on it, and not the white sticker that the post office will try to give you, as this goes immediately out of date.

And finally… remember that as a writer, your primary function is to be creative and original, so don’t lose sight of what you love to do, and persevere. I wish you all the best in your professional submission, and I hope to see your book on the shelves on day.

With a background in publishing, Helen is the founder of Cornerstones, and Kids’ Corner - a leading literary consultancy. ‘Rough diamonds’ in the slush pile inspired her to set up Cornerstones, to give authors feedback on what works in their MS, what doesn’t, and what they  can do about it. She now heads a 60-strong team of readers, all professional authors or editors, who share her vision of helping writers. Cornerstones scout for agents and are known for launching new writers. Based on their workshops, Hodder commissioned Helen Corner and Lee Weatherly to write ‘Write a Blockbuster and Get it Published’.

If you would like to participate in the Cornerstones Opening Page Mini Masterclass, send your opening page to submissions@wordswithjam.co.uk with the subject ‘Cornerstones Masterclass’.