Inspirations from Kate Mosse

It was a beautifully sunny and hot Monday evening in Bloomsbury House in Holborn and the Braver Conversation with Kate Mosse kicked off with a short speech by Gemma Greaves, CEO, of The Marketing Society. Gemma set the scene nicely by explaining how this event was part of the organisation’s commitment to “Being Brave.” Over the last year, the society has been listening to brave stories from some incredible people, outside of the marketing industry. 

Kate Mosse started with a short talk on storytelling and bravery and came across as an incredibly genuine, warm, lovely and amazingly smart lady. She explained how her approach to writing stories was to focus on ordinary people who lived during extraordinary, historical times. In terms of bravery, she felt you could separate the “little daily actions” and “big actions”, and her definition of bravery was “being to be true to ourselves and authentic”. She also saw bravery as being a “little bit more than we thought we could be.” 

It was also great to hear the story of Kate’s career where she started as a secretary, even though she had been to Oxford University.

After that, she entered the publishing world as she loved to read books and eventually became a successful book editor. The turning point in her career came when she was offered a big publishing role, but she decided she wanted to pursue her passion of becoming a writer. And the rest is history as they say. It was really fascinating to hear how she felt she only became a writer when she felt she had a story to tell. She mentioned that when she starts writing her characters they take over the story, though for her it’s very important to stay true to the historical facts. She then finished her talk about the importance of daily self-reflection – something that truly struck a chord with us all.

Then we moved on to the interview section by Syl Saller, who started off by asking Kate what she felt was an example of her having done something truly brave. Kate responded by saying with setting up the Women’s Literacy Prize (which was the first of its kind) for fiction in 1996. The reason Kate set this up was simple - there was a problem and it needed to be solved. Even though 60% of books published were by women, only less 9% of female authors were shortlisted for literacy prizes. Clearly there was problem and Kate’s aim was to solve this problem. The response to the prize was very negative from the media and for 6 months, she was in the “eye of a media storm.”

I loved Kate’s approach to any problem.

You can either a) moan, or b) do something about it.

Incredibly, Kate is still asked every year to justify the awards. Kate felt that even though progress had been made in the 22 years since she set up these awards, it was still important to celebrate the best in women’s writing around the world. It’s also worth noting that these awards are the most successful, in terms of selling books and being recognised globally. 

The conversation between Kate and Syl was highly enjoyable and contained lots of warmth and wisdom. I admired Kate’s definition of feminism which was “to liberate women (and men) from the structures that do not suit anybody.” 

Kate had lots of wise advice for the many interesting questions at the end. In fact, she should probably write a self-help book - it would be a cracker! It was a privilege to hear from such a successful but very humble, caring individual. The memory (and life lessons) from this evening will stay with me for a very long time. 

One of which, is this - her favourite quote from Samuel Beckett:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

By Sean Singleton, Managing Director, Your Favourite Story. Follow him @paulpingles