Posted By: Richard White, 10 January 2012
Terri Armstrong attended a Writers' Centre Norwich Masterclass workshop back in June 2010, led by author MJ Hyland. She has kindly written to update us about what happened next. It's music to our ears - read on! 
In June 2010 I had already begun sending the manuscript of
Standing Water, my first novel, to agents and publishers when I saw that M J Hyland was holding a Masterclass at the Writers' Centre. I’d vowed years before to give up ‘studying’ writing, and just write (I took the Diploma in Creative Writing at UEA and had done various other classes and courses), and my novel was ‘finished’, but this was a class I couldn’t resist; M J Hyland - one of my all time favourite, most revered novelists! I felt a bit guilty only paying twenty five quid.
The group was small, and of mixed experience, but Maria Hyland gave the same incisive, direct but practical advice to all. We’d each provided her with a sample of our work a couple of weeks prior to the class and I’d picked a significant section of my book, where a revelation takes place. I’d worked on the section a lot but it was still niggling me; why didn’t it seem right? I couldn’t work out what the problem was.
When Maria returned my piece in the class I panicked - red writing everywhere! She hated it. The whole book was rubbish; I was a talentless nobody who should never have bothered. When I calmed down enough to read the comments most of them turned out, thankfully, to be positive, and the rest provided me with exactly what I’d been hoping for – the answer, at last, to why the section wasn’t working. As with the other members of the class, my piece was discussed, and everyone had an opportunity to comment, question and advise.
Following the class, I revised not only the section Maria Hyland had looked at, but the whole novel in light of new ideas and understandings I’d gained from the Masterclass.
In August 2010 I had a happy surprise, with Standing Water winning the Yeovil Literary Prize, and an incredible and much welcome £1000. After a steady stream of rejections (nice book; won’t sell) it was just what I needed to lift my writing confidence. I pushed on.
At last, in December 2010 a small independent publisher called Pewter Rose Press offered to publish Standing Water, and I accepted.
Standing Water will be published in February 2012. Maria Hyland’s endorsement: ‘A talented writer with immense natural flair’ will be on the cover. Who would have thought?
Novel launch: Standing Water, by Terri Armstrong
Join Terri at the
Book Hive in Norwich to celebrate the launch of
Standing Water.
23rd February, 6:30pm, Free.
Standing Water by Terri Armstrong
‘A completely engaging and particularly vivid story about friends and family, love and death, set, mostly, in the brutally harsh outback… A powerful tale, loaded with pertinent, and increasingly poignant issues of betrayal and redemption, loss and new beginnings… Exceptional.’
Henry Sutton.
Winner 2010 Yeovil Literary Prize
Published by Pewter Rose Press, February 2012
