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.
I think publishing is more like eternal two-dimensional purgatory. At least in hell you have something to set the rejection letters aflame with.
Exactly! And in purgatory even your matches are limp and damp.
Victoria
“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.”
Victoria, by this, do you mean that it’s almost certain that a work will need professional editing before it’s accepted by an agent? To play devil’s advocate here — I’ve heard several agents say that they get nervous when they find out a submission has been professionally edited, since they can’t tell if the writer is actually good enough to survive the publishing journey without external help. One could argue that if a writer’s work really is at the stage where it almost certainly needs professional editing to get published, then that writer shouldn’t be thinking about publication at all, and should still be working on his/her craft. What do you think?
I should clarify that I’m not saying professional editing isn’t valuable — just that it shouldn’t be a crutch.
Livia,
Yes, it is a fact that professional work needs editing. It is also a fact that what was once considered an acceptable level of roughness in a manuscript—“oh, our editor will handle that”—is no longer acceptable. Acquisitions editors are being jettisoned from publishing houses like sandbags from a sinking balloon. The ones left are carrying both their own and their peers’ workloads. It is a disaster.
Sure, you can scare away an agent easily by announcing right off the bat, “My book’s been professionally edited!” That’s because your query is about your book and your credentials. It is very emphatically NOT about how your book got the way it is.
Saying, “My book’s been professionally edited,” is akin to saying, “My mother loves it!” You use your query letter to get the agent interested in your characters and basic premise, and you send a few pages to show the agent it’s well-written. How did it get well-written? At the query stage, they really could not care less. If you insist on telling them, they know you don’t understand the purpose of querying. This is what scares them.
Once the agent’s taken you on as a client, and they’ve had some conversations with you so they know you approach the business as a level-headed grown-up, they are not going to have a heart attack if you say, “You know, I worked with this editor, and it really was a great experience. It helped my book enormously. I’m using them on my next book, too.” They should—if they understand the role independent editing is playing in the new publishing paradigm these days, at all—be very pleased to learn you take your work that seriously. You’ve found another really great professional necessary to the formula! You’re paying for it! Hurrah—we’re all gonna profit!
The truth is that it really takes two people to write a book properly: an author and an editor. This is why even great writers like Hemingway and Kerouac and Toni Morrison (who was a Random House editor herself) needed editors. This is why even editors need editors.
Can you get a novel accepted by an agent without any help from an editor? Sure, you can. IF you are such an experienced writer and editor (you must know what it is an editor does, as well as be able to bridge that horrific gap between writing and editing yourself) and your novel is so incredibly closely-polished the agent can see either they can finish the polishing or they know an acquisitions editor who has time to do it.
Can you also get a novel accepted by an acquisitions editor without an agent? Yep, you sure can. Nowadays, you can even get your novel published without a publisher.
But will it be good? Will it be great? Will it be something you’re proud to have your name on for all posterity?
I’m sorry—you really are going to need an editor.
Victoria
P.S. Oh! And don’t mistake the fact that writers need editors to mean the writers aren’t good at their craft. I can think of several literary novels I’ve edited recently, just off the top of my head, that are gorgeous, amazing works any publisher would be ecstatic to get their hands on. However, they were all coming back with very complimentary personalized rejections when they were brought to me. Everyone could already tell those writers knew their craft—they just needed help over that last hurdle to making it publishable.
You write the best posts!
This line: So it doesn’t make sense to hire an editor if you’re just shooting to get published without becoming a professional writer.
I wish I was at that point right now. Unfortunately my life seems to be crumbling around me, and I’m not talking about my writing life. I’m simply not ready for the professional part. My family, my three year old, everything else, just won’t let me get there yet. But I see it in the future and I’m striving to get there. I know publication means deadlines and hardcore dedication that I’m not ready for yet. I want to be, but I know there’s a time and season for everything. I wish I was at the point to send you my work! One day. 🙂
Oh, Michelle, do not worry. If you’re a writer, you’re a writer for life. It waits for you.
I didn’t write for ten years. Seriously—I was a poet and a fiction writer and working on novels from the time I was a child until I was 36. I worked as a salaried tech writer and editor for years—good bucks just for knowing how to write clean, clear sentences in the right order. I published a nonfiction book and was working on proposals for further nonfiction.
Then I had my son, and suddenly all bets were off.
Never, ever, ever let writing interfere with your real life. You may be a writer, but more than that you are a human being. You get one ride on this merry-go-round. Spend it with the ones you love.
When there is time for writing for you again, there will still be writing in the world.
Love your three-year-old. What a crazy, insane, magical age that is!
Victoria
Thanks for your response! It strikes me that a very helpful marketing tool for independent editors would be some kind of survey data looking at the percentage of manuscripts accepted with and/without prior independent editing. If you wanted to go crazy, you could also look at the % of manuscripts by new and returning authors, as well as the % of bestsellers, award winners, etc. Do you know of any such information? I’m a scientist so I love numbers 🙂
Boy, I’m sorry. I do not, Livia. That data would have to be collated by the agents themselves, and my guess is they’re too busy. Plus there may be cases in which they simply never know.
Publishers do not publish books as-is. I can tell you that. It just doesn’t happen. Some editor takes a gander at them. It just isn’t always someone with much time. Like I said, even Hemingway and Kerouac, who were such craftspeople, couldn’t make their words all work all the way through on their own. Nobody of lesser talent is going to be able to, either.
Unfortunately, the current changing climate of the publishing industry means the level of editing going on fluctuates wildly these days. That means it’s very possible many books in the works right now will come out in another year or two looking like crap. It already happens, to a greater and lesser degree, among midlist genre works. And ever since international conglomerates began buying up publishing houses in the 1980s, the standard quality of published fiction has dropped precipitously. I fear for the future of literature, when this kind of drop is what we can expect to see happen again.
And that’s just traditional publishing. We already know there’s a staggering glut of unedited self-published stuff out there that pains the eye to read. This is only going to get worse.
I can tell you that Lucia Orth hired an editor at one stage and later worked extensively with her agent on editing before BABY JESUS PAWN SHOP was published to critical acclaim. And Lucia’s a consummate artist. That woman is incredible with words. BABY JESUS PAWN SHOP is a tour de force.
As always—do the best you can, take as much time as you need, learn as much as humany possible about the craft. Above all, enjoy it. It’s your novel. You want it to be something you can be proud of for the rest of your life. That’s your goal—as trivial and earthshaking as a goal can be.
Victoria