Tag Archives: publishing

Finding the Joy in the Journey

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The garden has its second planting. The canner is going full tilt. I got another personal rejection from a fiction agent.

It’s a journey. The rejection was friendly, kind even, and specific about the reasons. It’s good grist for the improvement mill, and I’m grateful that 1) I am now consistently getting past the interns with most agent queries, and 2) some agents are kind enough to supply feedback, believing in the maturity of the author to incorporate it rather than fling it back in their face. Good on ya, agents. Your job can be emotionally draining, and it’s so helpful when you send that kind of information.

When I get a personal rejection, it feels invigorating. Someone cared enough to read my work and give me an honest opinion. That’s quite something in today’s crowded, noisy world. It means there’s a reason to fight another day to get my work to the right person.

Agents are a lot like dating: you have to find the person whose worldview either aligns or at least encompasses yours. You have to impress each other. You have to learn to trust and believe in each other. It’s a LOT like dating.

And it’s actually fun. In a success-driven society where people literally make “friends” with each other based on how useful they think you’re going to be to them later, hunting an agent feels honest. And like a learning opportunity. It’s a financial contract with emotional edges. It’s a strategic process where you learn what works and what doesn’t, pit what you think against advice from experts, and learn to flex.

As you send your five queries per week, it can feel like a game. Which is a good thing. Helps you keep your sanity as you add another rejection to the RESPONSE column of your query spreadsheet.

These days those response entries say things like “Personal no, too much romance,” and “personal no, possible reconsideration if…” When I scroll up a dozen entries, I wasn’t getting past the interns. A spreadsheet doesn’t just keep you from querying someone twice, it shows you progress.

Forward, onward, north to Narnia – or Chicago, New York, Charleston. Not all the awesome agents are in NYC.

There’s a joy in the journey, and a satisfaction to knowing you’re writing something worth looking at. To having done the work. The gatekeepers are part of the work, so make them part of the fun.

You Ever Feel Stuck?

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You ever feel stuck?

Sometimes you just do. It’s a good time to eat chocolate ice cream, or go for a walk, or take a bath.

Getting unstuck is usually a combination of mental and physical, which is interesting because feeling stuck is usually entirely a mental thing.

But we’re mammals, so getting unstuck sometimes requires a little physicality. Shaking it off might be literal. Don’t overthink it, just get moving. Enjoy something. Not so much “rest” in the sense of removal from activity, but thoughtful rest in an activity you enjoy.

That was my advice to myself this week when I grew frustrated with my inability to attract a fiction agent. My nonfiction career is going great guns with our seventh edited anthology, thanks, but nobody thinks I have an imagination? I took myself on a long, shady walk in the woods to give myself a pep talk.

Two years now, I’ve been working on a coming-of-age novel set in West Virginia. Two years, the characters have shaped and stammered and grabbed the keyboard from my hands and run amok across it. Now it’s time to edit the opening to make it more of a grabber than an explainer. Something that has never been my forte. But in the personal rejections coming from agents (in a ratio of 1 personal for 3 standard), they pretty much say the same thing: the opening isn’t making me care what happens to the characters.

This is a puzzle to be solved, a craft to be practiced, and I have to remind myself I write because I like writing, because there are things to be said, and because it keeps me from strangling people with my bare hands. So, there’s that. Do what you love because you love it, and remember that’s why you started this journey.

That said, the journey doesn’t have to end down a dead-end alley with the words “your characters are not compelling” written on it. I intend to see that mine does not.

But oh, the energy, oh the strategy, oh the strange masochistic joy of this journey.

If you’re out there writing,too, be encouraged. I’ve published seven books across four lovely publishers, and this is what I have to say about our industry right now: this too shall pass. One way or another, we will unstick. Because, writing.

Get up and try again, kids. That’s my plan.