All I Want For Christmas is An End to Despair

A totally personal and selfish gift request

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

This isn’t the post I planned.

Yesterday I hit a wall of despair. I’m not being poetic. Every time I even attempted to head to my desk, I started weeping and had to sit back down on the sofa.

I’m a writer, so naturally, this is not my first wall of despair. I have hit this wall many times before. I remember in 2001, navigating frozen clods of mud on a country walk, expressing my hopelessness to Paul, saying “I should just give up,” and him saying, “What else are you going to do?” And that’s the problem. There’s nothing else. So in the end, after hitting the wall, I cry for a while, and then I clamber over it.

I’m a writer to my marrow. I believed I was a writer from the age of 4, long before I had written a word. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a writer, like children wanted to be firemen and astronauts, and now want to be Youtubers and Instagram Influencers. I knew I was a writer. I asked my mother to teach me to read and write, so I could get started, and she refused. Being a teacher herself, she knew schools prefer children to start from scratch, and didn’t want the disapproval. So I taught myself. During afternoon naptime, I used thin paper to trace the words of stories I knew by heart: The Story About Ping (the duck), and The Emperor’s Nightingale. I wrote print ‘a’s for a year or so.

At six, I won my first prize for writing a story, a whole box of Smarties from the Headteacher of my infant school. Proof I was right!

At nine, a bookworm with a maxed-out library card, I wrote a collection of Sci-Fi short stories, inspired by Ray Bradbury, typed them up on my mother’s Underwood typewriter and sent them to Puffin, Penguin’s children’s imprint. I started my first novel, a highly derivative (Watership Down-inspired) tale of a family of foxcubs.

My mother’s Underwood was much like this one, on a floor by yubowei from Pixabay

Aged 13, I committed to writing at least one poem a day, to improve my skills. I kept it up for five years. Some days I wrote ten or twelve. I wrote thousands of poems. I won poetry prizes. I was singled out for private poetry feedback by my English teacher, who sent my work to Ted Hughes and took me to meet him, on a rainy day in Billericay. Ted recommended I go on an Arvon course and the Local Education Authority gave me a grant. By now, a handful of people believed I was a writer.

Aged 15, I was on Arvon’s residential adult creative writing course at Totleigh Barton, taught by professional poets. The next youngest person was 30. When the school demanded I choose my route — Arts or Science — I chose the one I couldn’t do in my own spare time. I figured all wannabe writers do English degrees, and that science-based stories could give me an unusual advantage. Creative writing degrees, at that time, didn’t exist.

Aged 19, studying Biology, I started a university novel and got to 30,000 words before I realised it didn’t hang together. Plus, I couldn’t write dialogue. In prose, I had not yet clocked up my 10,000 hours.

Aged 21, I took a year off to dedicate to writing. Signed onto the dole and spent hours staring out the window, cutting my fringe and watering plants. Yes, I wrote the poem that was my first big success in an adult competition: Highly Commended in the National Poetry Competition. Invited to London for the prizegiving event, the youngest person in the room. I had four poems published in the Faber & Faber anthology Hard Lines 3, intended to showcase new talent: more than any other person in that book. They paid me £40; the sum total of my earnings from writing that year (the £100 from the National Poetry Competition arrived the next year). There was a launch at Riverside Studios. I got my first review: “Ros Barber takes no shit.” I was 22. I got asked to teach my first workshop; every one of the “students” way older than me. I was pretty sure I’d be a successful, published author by 30.

By 30, I hadn’t written another word. I’d been tricked into an abusive relationship and full-time motherhood. (If you don’t know the story, it’s here.) But this was the year my husband mocked my dreams while we were watching a show called Bookworm. Though my third son was only weeks old, I went upstairs and started writing (my third attempt at) a novel. I typed it, often one-handed, while breastfeeding my son. I finished it when he was a few months old: novel one. Sent a chunk to Arts Council England, applying for a writer’s grant. And was granted £1,500. The most I’d ever earned from writing. Not long after that, I was asked to interview for a post teaching creative writing at Sussex University, two hours a week.

By 34, while writing my second novel, I left my first husband and got my first agent. Who failed to place that novel, or the next one, though both got close. The tale of my trials with agents (six so far) is here.

I was a single parent on limited income, trying to write in the corner of living room while three (frankly disturbed) little boys watched Disney videos in the other corner. I kept scraping a living through writing and teaching it. I kept writing and submitting. I married a more supportive man who soon became chronically ill, leaving me the sole provider for my household once again (since my ex also stopped paying maintenance and court pursuit failed).

At 48, after a significant personal and professional struggle, I got my breakthrough novel (my fourth was my debut). Everything I’d dreamed of. A fat advance, literary prizes, and media attention. Three years later, my second novel didn’t do too badly, media-wise, and was shortlisted for a prize, but the advance was dismal.

For 25 years, I’ve been making the best I can of a writing life. Most of my income has come from teaching writing to others. I’ve also had numerous grants, prizes, and in the 2000s, public art commissions. Earning a living has always made book-writing slower than I’d like, but my output, quite frankly, has been dismal. Not for lack of writing — I’ve millions of quality words behind me — but for lack of financial support, and the challenges of traditional publication.

Self-publishing isn’t a viable option for lit fic, as I outline here (I got hate for that article. I’m not against self-publishing per se. I have even done it.) Lit fic authors need proper support to make an impact with our (limited) market. We need prize nominations; mainstream media reviews.

And now, we need a platform. All authors, we are told, need to master things we’re not naturally good at and don’t enjoy. Marketing. Short-form video content. And I’m tired, you know? Truly. I just want to write.

And everywhere I’m reading (against my best interests) how traditional publishing’s dead now, and the mid-list author extinct, and if you’re not an under-30 Tiktok sensation or celeb, then forget it. People aren’t reading books anymore. And the main source of my income for all these years, creative writing in higher education? That sector’s decimated. Ten and a half years, I had my dream job, and tenure, but as of last summer, that’s gone too.

I do what I can to stay buoyant. Because what else can I do? If I’m not buoyant, I’m sunk. I know very well that the only way anything good ever happens to me is if I align with hope, and faith, and let go of trying to make things happen. Get into the flow and just write. Trust all will be well. I have some pages to deliver to my agent before Christmas. Stay hopeful, stay buoyant.

But yes, from time to time, all hope dissolves.

There have been signs it was coming. Trouble dragging myself to my desk. And yesterday, I hit the wall of despair. For two days, I’d been immersed in correcting the captions of a one-hour interview with multimillion-bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult about her novel By Any Other Name. I conducted this interview at the request of a charity I’m involved in. Captions are vital for accessibility, and it wasn’t a job I could delegate. I don’t have an assistant (contrary to the fantasy of a stranger who wrote to me last week while drunk). And though I might have asked my daughter, I was aware I was still the best person for the job. I was the one who knew what was said (or intended). Yes, I’m a perfectionist who has trouble delegating.

The problem with being immersed in my conversation with multimillion-bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult was, it turned out, that. She’s multimillion-bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult. And I am not. She brings out a book every two years with Penguin. My last book was published ten years ago, by Oneworld.

And it’s not that I haven’t written something else in that time. Long-time readers will know that I have. A deeply researched historical tale of female transgression. In every aspect, an epic.

The hurdles that have come between it and publication would make a novel in themselves. In the film of my life, this would be my Fitzcarraldo. My agent says to stay schtum about the obstacles; that story will make good publicity material when this novel finally hits the shelves. Keep saying that with manifestational power:

“this novel finally hits the shelves.”

The idea arrived in 2013. I started it in 2015. I finished the first draft in late 2022. All while working to earn a living. I’ve revised it twice since then. Early next year — once I have these pages of another book submitted — I have the mammoth task of cutting it down by half. To fit the current (risk-averse, shorter-novel) market.

Should we sell it, I intend to keep the rights to the epic version. For any super-fans: the Director’s Cut.

Comparisons are odious, I know. But I have taken so many decades to make so little progress. Very often, these days, this is the problem I’m facing. The gap between the last book and the next, getting wider and wider.

Even people who know me, have known me for years, saying to me, “Are you still writing?” As if they no longer believe I’m a writer. Yet what else do they think I am? To say to me “Are you still writing?” is like saying, “Are you still breathing?” If I’m not a writer, I’m nothing. I spent decades persuading the world that I was, and now, it seems, that work is undoing itself.

Hence the occasional tidal wave of, “What’s the point?”

The point, I guess, is keep the faith. The Royal Literary Fund have recently given me an interim award from their Hardship Fund. These grants for hard-pressed authors are based on a combination of dire financial need and literary merit. Before me go the greats: Dylan Thomas, Doris Lessing, and James Joyce. All of them struggled to stay financially afloat and were supported by the RLF. Funny how this landed in my inbox (via the RLF) this morning.

I should be good at this. All I’ve ever done, it seems, is battle against the odds. So I shall keep battling; keep aiming to be, yet again, the unusual, inspiring success story I have been before. Through these dark months, I think I might need something additional to stay buoyant.

I’m thinking the answer might be Bhangra.

Merry Christmas.

If you can’t afford to support me with cash (totally get it, in the same boat), a comment, a like, or a share make absolutely fantastic (capitalism-free) Christmas gifts.

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I don’t think I’d still be here without my paid subscribers. I’m enormously grateful for your support, both moral and financial. I’m reshaping my offering for paid subscribers for 2026.

I’m going to keep offering the online EFT tapping circle, monthly, for as long as people want it. Our next is on December 28th 2pm GMT. Register here:

Tapping In Your Best Year Yet

You can bet I’ll be very committed to this one for myself as well as you. As a group, let’s create a strong, positive start to 2026!

I would love it if you could help me shape what else I can offer.

I would love to hear from you about these ideas or any others you would like me to consider.