I had very little idea when I started on my writing
journey, how pertinent a metaphor “journey” was actually going to be.
As I trundle along, I constantly discover twists and
turns, as well as the fact that a point which looks kinda close is actually a
helluva lot further away than it seems.
Sometimes the road is smooth (like with my writing surge last November)
and sometimes it’s bumpy (like with the agent rejections, or the frequent
discouraging thoughts that tell me I’m a crap writer and there’s no point
bothering).
After posting my last blog, I started wondering how many
people would feel sorry for me because of the rejections, or think that I’m
obviously not a “good enough” writer to get published (which may be true!).
A lot of people have the impression that you write a book
and then get it published. That couldn’t
be further from the truth. Writing is a
very loooooong path, with a gazillion more hurdles than you would ever
imagine. I’ve blogged about various ones
in the past, will undoubtedly blog about more in the future, but for now I just
wanted to bring some perspective to my agent rejections.
Being rejected is a completely normal - even expected -
experience for a writer.
The fact that JK Rowling was rejected by TWELVE publishers
before one accepted Harry Potter is quite well-known. Apparently many of them felt that boarding
school stories were old hat! I’ve often
wondered how those editors live with themselves! It’s gotta be pretty gutting to know you
passed up on one of the biggest literary phenomena ever :-/
I also found out last week that although Roald Dahl’s
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was published in America in 1964, it took 3
more years to convince a UK publisher to take it on. You'd have to be blind or illiterate not to see how amazing that story is, surely?!
A friend of mine was accepted by an agent last year,
having had about 8 rejections before that.
The thing that really opened my eyes in this situation was that he
knew, or had at least met, all/most of those agents. I’m sure that with that extra level of
knowledge and connection (which I don’t have), he would have first approached
the ones he felt would best like his books and be the right fit relationally to
work with. Yet it STILL took several
attempts to find the “one”.
Submitting your work to an agent isn’t like applying for
a job. It’s like sending a speculative
application to a company you want to work for, without having much of an idea
whether or not they’re wanting to take on someone like you at that moment (or
ever!).
Taking the right story, at the right time, to the right person,
is an incredible hurdle and one that writers are usually not aware of when they
first start writing. There are so many
people trying to do it too, that agents are often overwhelmed by manuscripts.
It could be massively off-putting. Some days it IS massively off-putting. But it cannot stop me, you or anyone else who
dreams of being a writer to stop writing (or not to start). As I was so fantastically reminded by this
timely blog post from Jeff Goins a few weeks ago, writers shouldn't write
to be published. We have to just write
for the love of writing. If we do that, then
what comes out of our fingers and imaginations is likely to be worth
reading…and therefore publishing. If we
write to be published then we’ll be listening more to the crowd and less to the
Muse, and will be constrained by real and imagined factors. Our work won’t have the spark, vibrancy and
originality it should. And it definitely
won’t be a fun experience.
