When the rejections keep coming
The politically correct response to make to a writer who keeps piling up rejection after rejection is to slap her on the shoulder and tell her to buck up, that success is just around the corner. I don’t agree with that, or that it’s not always that simple. If you’ve been fishing for a couple of years now without a bite, it means something’s wrong, and if you ever mean to catch anything, you’d better check your bait. (End of fishing metaphor.)
I always considered myself a pretty good judge of my own work, but one thing I’ve come to realize over the past few years is that all writers believe this. I’ve read manuscripts that are muddled messes, riddled with graceless narrative, stilted dialog, cliched characters, and plot holes that could swallow Texas. I’ve read manuscripts whose authors seem utterly unacquainted with the basics of grammar and sentence structure, who appear never to have even read a single book of the genre in which they’re writing. And yet every single one of these writers is passionate, even eloquent, on the topic of her writing, even as months pass without a positive reply to a query, even with rejection slips accumulating like snow in Buffalo.
If this describes you, I have a question for you: What makes you think you’re a writer?
I don’t mean this as accusatory or belligerent, but in its purest, stripped-down sense. Ask yourself honestly: Why do you believe you’re a writer?
If you want to be a published writer, you have to have some basic skills: to be able to craft a comprehensible sentence or choose the right adjective; to know where to use punctuation and paragraph breaks, not just according to the “rules,” but for maximum effect. You have to understand that writing is not just about character and content but pacing, the rhythm with which words are arranged to fall upon the ear. You have to know what to put in, which is easy, and what to leave out, which isn’t.
These things can be learned; and the easiest and best way to learn them is to read. Read as much as possible, not just the kind of book you’re writing but everything that interests you. Like immersing yourself in a foreign tongue, immersing yourself in books forces you to absorb their structure, their patterns and flow. You’ll find yourself thinking in the language almost without effort.
But there’s more to writing a publishable book than just knowing how to parse a sentence or whether the word you want is “azure” or “sapphire” or just plain “blue.” (There’s nothing wrong with “blue,” by the way; too many overly-descriptive words can be worse than none at all.) You’ve got to have, before you have anything else, a story that people want to read.
Here again, I’ve discovered, all writers think alike. More prevalent than any other shared trait is the conceit among writers that our story, the one we’re burning to tell, is the most original and compelling in the history of the printed word.
But be honest: When was the last time you read a wholly original story, one without precedent in the English language? It seems to me that the books people identify with and love are not the ones in which the ideas themselves are original, so much that the way in which they’re told is fresh and bears the writer’s unique thumbprint. Anita Diamant’s best-selling novel The Red Tent is a re-telling of the little-known Biblical story of Dinah; Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning A Thousand Acres is a modern-day version of King Lear. These writers have taken age-old, time-honored stories and made them their own.
At this point I can hear you grumbling. Your book, you say, is an almost exact replica of Scruples or The Firm or The Hunt for Red October!
But I didn’t say that people want to read duplicates of popular books; I said they want the stories re-told, in a way that’s new and personal. If your manuscript is too clearly derivative of another book, or if there’s simply nothing to set it apart from others in its genre, an agent or editor is likely to say, “Why bother?” You need something that will distinguish your book from the hundreds of others that pass across their desks, that will get the reader’s attention and then make her read on.
I wish I could tell you what that something is, but there isn’t a universal answer, one secret ingredient that, like yeast in dough, will make your story rise. It’s different for every writer; you’re the one who has to determine it. You don’t necessarily have to be able to put your finger on it, to give it a name. But it had better be there, whatever “it” is, or your manuscript is going to keep landing back in your mailbox till Kingdom Come.
I truly feel this is a thing a writer has to learn to figure out on her own. But it can be difficult, especially when you haven’t had much experience, and in that case you may want to enlist the aid of others.
I’m not a fan of special interest groups or critique groups for writers. For every truly helpful comment I’ve gotten from such a group, I’ve met three insecure, frustrated writers whose style of criticism made me feel like I’d just competed in Thunderdome (“two men enter/one man leaves”). But if you have a writing friend or friends you trust, by all means, ask for their assistance. The longer they’ve been writing, or the more experienced they are in the field of publishing, the more likely it is they will be able to help you. Tell them your manuscript or your query hasn’t gotten a positive response, and that you’d like some honest feedback. Then be prepared to swallow your pride and listen.
The more you write, the more your own voice will take shape, and as you learn to heed that voice, you’ll develop the ability to separate the constructive comments from the bull. Even well-meaning writers have a hard time divorcing their egos from the work; our natural inclination to “fix” others’ prose is by trying to make it our prose, but I don’t think this does the creator of the work any favors. What you want isn’t someone to re-write your book (if you do, what you really need is a ghostwriter), but an impartial eye to tell you what isn’t working. Is it a confusing plot line, trite dialog, sloppy syntax? Then take what they’ve told you, and use it to make your book better.
It can often be fairly easy for an outsider to diagnose problems, just by applying an un-jaundiced eye. The problem may not even be with your book itself but with your marketing strategy. For example, I read recently of a young writer who was having trouble finding a publisher for her semi-autobiographical first novel; the manuscript kept coming back with the common response that the “chick lit” market was saturated, which, she said, proved it wasn’t being read, since it was in fact “completely different.” Not having read the manuscript (which she ultimately self-published), I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know she was giving the opposite impression by including the phrase “bachelor gal” in the title, which sure sounds like chick lit to me. (Be aware that the excuse that a certain market is saturated can be an editor’s or agent’s way of letting a writer down gently. What it means is that that market has too much run-of-the-mill product in it already, and that, in her estimation anyway, yours doesn’t have the necessary elements to rise above the chaff. If your manuscript is compulsively readable and exceptionally well-crafted, it will find an advocate no matter what its genre.)
You can enlist the help of what I call a “civilian,” or non-writer, to tell you what’s amiss, but choose this person carefully. I think that, at a bare minimum, she must be someone who reads a lot, preferably in the genre in which your book is written. In my experience, civilian readers can provide some of your most valuable feedback, as they tend to react to the characters and the story as a whole without agonizing over every adverb and comma the way writers do.
Resist if you can the urge to draft your non-writing, non-reading spouse or best friend into this. Their role is to cheer you on unconditionally and to commiserate with you about the bastards who don’t recognize your genius. Also, these relationships can be fraught with all kinds of baggage and, for a number of reasons, it may be in the other party’s best interest not to see you succeed. (Not that you would get mixed up with such a person.) Unless you’ve got a deal like John Irving’s, in which your spouse is also your agent, try to find someone emotionally impartial for the job.
Which comes down to the most emotionally impartial creature there is: the professional editor.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of hiring an editor to critique a manuscript. It seems to me that the ability to analyze and improve one’s work should be part of learning to write, that it’s just as critical a skill as crafting paragraphs. But it’s also true that this ability comes more naturally to some than to others, and that hiring a pro to look over your work can be a valuable tool in developing the skill on your own.
If you do decide to hire someone, make sure you’re clear about what you want from her. Different types of services exist, from the content edit, in which the editor does a general read-through and comments on the overall style, theme, etc., to the line edit, which involves line-by-line copyediting of spelling, syntax, and structure.
How do you find a professional editor? You could go straight to the Internet or the Yellow Pages, but if possible, try contacting a local writers’ organization or ask writing friends for a referral. You want to know that the editor is capable of handling the kind of job you want done, i.e., “Have you edited many action-adventure novels?” Anybody with a B.A. in English can hang out a shingle calling herself an editor, so don’t be afraid to ask about pertinent experience or credentials.
Only you can decide whether, after a lengthy period and a number of rejections, to fish or cut bait. (Sorry, there I go again.) Persistence and patience often will out here, as shown by the number of well-known stories in circulation of now-famous writers and books that were rejected repeatedly before finding a home; among the names are Dickens, Grisham, and Margaret Mitchell. And there are certainly enough mediocre books on the shelves to prove that the one thing their authors had in common, besides or instead of the conviction their story was the most original and compelling in history, was their hide-bound determination to see their work in print.
That said, there’s no shame in retiring a manuscript, in taking it out of circulation and filing it away in the proverbial desk drawer. (I have the manuscripts of two complete, full-length novels in boxes in my office closet, and two more that long ago went into the shredder.) It’s inevitable that, over the course of our writing careers, we’ll have misses as well as hits. Sometimes setting your work aside for a time even gives you a new perspective; a break can provide a clear new view of both its strengths and weaknesses. You might end up re-working it someday, or using it a springboard for something else.
The only real way to learn to write besides reading is to write, and write, and write. It’s the only way you’re ever going to learn to translate that unique and compelling story of yours into something the rest of the world wants to share.