Is it possible to look forward to rejection letters? Because that means I’d be finished writing my WIP. And also finished writing query letters. And yet right now I feel light years away from either. So, despite probably what is a general consensus, I will someday look forward to rejection letters. Honest.
—Terresa Wellborn, comments
Many of my clients decide to take the plunge and hire an editor because they’re so depressed—they’ve gotten a rejection explaining what’s wrong with their book, but they don’t know how to fix it.
I, on the other hand, am ecstatic for them. “You got a personalized rejection! You made it through the Form Letter Revolving Door. That’s golden!” Then we set to work and fix whatever’s wrong in the manuscript.
I can pretty much always see why the agent said what they said, and I do know how to fix it. Once in a very great while, though, the agent’s wrong. One client got a rejection letter so rambling and full of grammatical errors I told her not to bother with his advice. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was obviously not a pro. (There were problems with the manuscript, which we did get busy on.)
The thing to keep in mind is that this is not school. You’re not writing your Work In Progress as homework. And you have absolutely no obligation to do anything with it once it’s done.
I had a long talk with another client the other day who’d written a book he loved just because he wanted to and only started worrying about querying and dealing with publishers after his friends said, “You should get this published!” Beware. Your friends love you, they’re glad to see you happy over your accomplishment and want to see you happier still, and—even more—they picture themselves being taken for sumptuous dinners at the Top of the Mark and introduced to Stephen King once you’re a famous author. (He’ll want to meet your friends.)
They know pretty much zip about publishing, though.
Published authors make squat. Not only that, but in order to get published it’s going to cost time and energy—years of your life, folks—and suffering beyond belief. It’s also almost certainly going to cost some money to get your manuscript into a shape an agent and acquisitions editor can accept. I’m sorry this is true, but it really is.
Last week I finished a full Copy, Line, & Developmental Edit on part of a novel that had great potential, but would almost certainly not have been accepted for publication the way it was. It’s staggeringly beautiful now. I mean: staggering. What the author had written that blossomed and became the entire story when we set it all in its proper order and cleared out the tiny bits of this and that obscuring it? Staggering. If we can put the rest of the manuscript into the same shape, this author is going to be producing work of the quality of Frank McCourt and Khaled Hosseini.
Chances are good the literary agents who rejected The Kite Runner saw it before it was completely edited.
Can I do this to your manuscript? Well, I can’t make you Khaled Hosseini. This particular writer is already a publishing author with a long, interesting life behind him, access to a fascinating aspect of culture, and what appears to be an instinctive understanding of the finest points of Show Don’t Tell.
But I can organize your manuscript and clean out the fluff so it’s a professional work. I can work with you on turning exposition into scenes. And I can help you figure out exactly what story you’re trying to tell and how to do that in a way that keeps a reader’s attention all the way through. I can also tell you what scenes to write for the parts I can see that need to be written but haven’t yet, and I can tell you how to approach the writing and why, and I can tidy the new scenes up into professional work for you when it’s done, as well. I can get you a publishable manuscript an agent or acquisitions editor will love.
That’s my job.
You have to do your work, though. You have to commit yourself to becoming a professional writer. As Chris Ryan says in the Client Testimonial he wrote for me, I don’t reduce your workload, by any means. I increase it.
So it doesn’t make sense to hire an editor if you’re just shooting to get published without becoming a professional writer.
And it certainly doesn’t make sense to shoot to get published if you’re not interested in becoming a professional writer.
Writing—publishing. Publishing—writing. Two completely different animals.
Write your WIP because you want to. Write it because you love the act of writing, the characters, the world you’ve created for them to live in. Write it because your days and nights are way more fun this way than they would be if you didn’t write. Write because you want that book to live in your house with you for the rest of your life.
But don’t write it because you think first you have to do this, then you have to write a query letter and synopsis, then you have to suffer through years of rejection waiting to get discovered. You don’t. This is what people are talking about when they say, “If you want to write, you must be prepared for hell.” What they mean is, “If you want to publish.”
Again. Writing—publishing. Publishing—writing. NOT THE SAME THING.
And if you do want to be a professional writer, then by all means work on your WIP for as long as you need to in order to make it the book you most want it to be. Luxuriate in it. Wallow in it. Spend your days learning craft and your nights dreaming stories. Look forward to learning query letters because they, too, are one of the marks of a professional writer. And look forward to rejection letters because they come at the end of the long, long road of the first step in learning this particular craft (out of all possible crafts) that is becoming a piece of you, this profession that you want to be a part of who you are.
But even then, remember: You have a life. Just the one.
Get out there and live it.
