Perseverance

Over on the Bookends blog, Jessica Faust is discussing the topic of Resubmissions. This is not revising and resubmitting the same work, but being rejected by an agent or editor, writing a new book, and trying again with that same agent or editor. Jessica says:

a number of my clients were previously rejected, and because of that I know firsthand that a rejection means nothing. Unless I tell you that what you’re writing does not fit the type of books BookEnds represents, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t keep trying, just like there’s no reason I won’t keep trying to sell the work of my clients.

Nothing new to me here. As I have said before on this blog, I was rejected by my now-agent with another book.

What does surprise me, however, is the number of comments on the post suggesting that writers do not realize this is the case. Of the 16 comments not made by Jessica herself on the post, eight of them were from writers who didn’t realize that they could submit again. One writer even went so far as to say:

I am one of those who sees little point in submitting to an agent who has already rejected my work. To me, a rejection means my style is not compatible with what the agency represents.

Actually, it just means that the agent doesn’t think she can sell the book you sent her. I was really surprised to see this opinion coming from this particular writer, who I’ve seen around the blogosphere and who is a fellow columnist at Romancing the Blog. She usually seems so savvy. She went on to say that if the agent ever did hope to see another submission from the rejected writer, she should make sure to write a note about how much she liked the writer’s voice and is looking forward to seeing the next work.

Interesting. What happens if the agent doesn’t like the writer’s voice in that piece? What if it isn’t well-developed, or isn’t well-suited to the material at hand? What if the agent thinks it’s total crap, but the writer then gets it together, has a massive leap forward in craft, and writes something that knocks the agent’s socks off next time? If you go into a clothing store, but don’t see anything that you want to buy during that particular trip, do you avoid that clothing store for all eternity? Or are you back in a few weeks when their spring line comes in? Or do you make a point of going up to the clerk and saying that though you didn’t see anything you wanted to buy this time, you would be happy to come back at a later date because you see a lot of promise in that clothing store.

Come now.

It isn’t an agent’s job to encourage people who aren’t their clients. It isn’t an agent’s job to do anything on a rejection except say “no thanks.” Full disclosure: my rejection from my now-agent did in fact encourage me to send her something else I’d written, but if it hadn’t, I doubt I would have been deterred.

I never thought that a rejection was about me. How could it be? The people involved didn’t even know me. And it was unlikely they’d remember me or the book they rejected when I sent them my next book. Yes, if I sent them a dozen manuscripts and none even inspired cursory interest, I’d think that we probably weren’t a good fit. Or if their rejection letter detailed exactly why we’d never see eye-to-eye about the needs of story, I’d probably cross them off my list. But a “no thanks?” That’s them saying they don’t like that book/don’t think it will sell/don’t think they can sell it/etc. So what do you do? You write the next book.

I wonder if some of this reluctance to retry agents who rejected you is a wounded pride thing. They’ll never ask THAT girl to the prom again. But if I really want a job someplace, I’m going to apply every time a spot comes open.

I wonder if it’s a matter of not wanting to let go of a particular work. That if they eventually sign with an agent for work C, they’ll never be able to sell works A or B. When I signed with my agent, she told me that we could revisit one of my earlier books that she’d considered. It was me that said, “Nah, let’s move forward, not backward.” There are a lot of books that don’t make good first books, but can later be revisited and “fixed.” I have several multi-published friends who are currently writing or have rewritten unpublished novels from early in their career. And there are lots of writers like me, who with 20/20 hindsight, can look back on their earlier books and see why they are better left in the recesses of their hard drives.

But I know that this is basically a useless statement. Agent Kristin Nelson made a comment to this effect several weeks ago and the commenters on her blog said, basically, that if their X number book, on average, was the one that had selling potential, should they just rush through writing all the X-1 books so that they can get to the “selling” one? Ah, wouldn’t that be nice, huh?

When you are writing these books, you have to believe that this massive undertaking has a purpose. No one writes a book thinking “this is my practice book.” Each of the four books I wrote before SSG were books I thought would sell. I finished them, polished them, queried them, sent them out when they were requested, sniffled (and occasionally cried) over the rejections and then, after they’d had a good period of time to sink or swim, I chalked them up as a learning experience and moved on to the next book.

Another commenter on the Bookends blog wrote:

I just had that same experience with a publisher. They didn’t accept my revise and resubmit, but they invited me to send future work. I like them and I will…but is it too much to submit the rejected work somewhere else in the hope it’ll sell? Or just focus on my current WIP?

Well, personally, I wouldn’t give up after just one publisher. (Neither would I be submitting to publishers without an agent, but that’s a whole other issue.) And yet, the agent makes a very good point when she responds with: “if you feel your WIP is much, much stronger and when looking back on the first book truly believe you aren’t going to find someone for it, that it’s not as strong as it needs to be than feel free to put it aside.”

I know that feeling. I wasn’t very far into my second manuscript when I realized that the first one had some fatal flaws. I remember getting the rejection on the partial. I barely even shrugged. I was already onto book three.

Sometimes I hear writers say they know that X book is “The One.” I never had that feeling, or rather, I always had it. Every book was “The One.” I’m not the kind of girl who can devote a year of my life to something that I already know will be a waste of time. And in the end of course, it’s not a waste of time; I got better with every book I wrote.

And yet sometimes, this very thought process paralyzes writers. Writers who never finish or even start a book, determined to have that “perfect” sellable concept before they put in the time of coughing up 400 pages. Writers who query projects that don’t exist so that the subsequent requests will spur them on to write. All well and good if they actually do write the books. But what if they don’t?

This is the kind of behavior that gives rise to that wise old axiom: Writers write. Writers are the ones with manuscripts under their bed or on their hard drive, not the ones with ideas in their heads and query letters in their pockets. Writers write. They don’t necessarily sell.

Stephen King said in his fabulous book On Writing that you should write the rough draft of your book with the door closed. That means you don’t think about your audience, you don’t think about your market, you don’t think about how your mom is going to blush when she reads the scene on page 78 — you think about the story. What the story needs. And then, after it’s written, you revise it with the door open. You think about where the reader will get bored, where you get bored, what the market is going to freak out about, what the audience will expect. But the book has to exist, first.

Writing a book is hard. The first time I went from “Chapter 1” to “The End” was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and that was after I took a ridiculous amount of credits and wrote two theses my last semester at college. And now I’ve done it six times, and still every time I start, I wonder if this will be the time that breaks me. So it’s good to believe that it is all worth something. It’s important to believe that.

And it’s also important to understand that, no matter how much we believe that ourselves, no matter how important the book is to us, it’s just a story to someone else. It’s a story for an agent to reject with a form letter, or for a reader to bang against the wall.

When I get a rejection, I am spurred on to do better. Send them my next book with, “oh yeah? Reject this.” And maybe they won’t be able to.