After pouring through the 1997
Writer's Market for days, I chose three agents who looked promising. I wrote my cover letter. I printed out exactly what the book said each
agent wanted, in the format they said they wanted. This one wanted 5-thousand words. This one wanted three chapters. I followed the instructions exactly. I never mentioned my age in my cover letter;
I feared it would get my book thrown out without anyone looking at it. I still don't know if I was right or not.
On December 31, just before 5pm,
I was at the Concord Post Office with my mother. I remember carefully addressing the padded
brown mailers, and sliding a submission into each.
By the end of January, I had
heard back from each, with a resounding, Not
Interested.
Here is where I will add another
piece of advice to young writers (or any writers, really) trying to get
published: you will get rejected. Even if you have written the best book in the
world, so absolutely flawless that no human being in the world could possibly
look away from it (which, quite honestly, is doubtful – drafts of first novels
are flawed things, for all of us, which is why we need editors) it still takes
sheer luck for your manuscript to end up at the top of a pile on the day when
the editor or agent in question is feeling in the mood to read something new.
There was a Catch-22 echoed in
every book I read at that time, and I assume it's still true: Most agents won't
take manuscripts from unpublished authors.
Most publishers won't go anywhere near manuscripts from authors without
agents. And no one really likes an
unsolicited manuscript.
So grow a thick skin. Your labor of love, that work you've sweated
over, bled over, poured your very being into, will be rejected. It will
hurt. You need to move on. If you get published, you'll hear worse from
critics. Total strangers will feel comfortable
trashing this product of your soul. So a
little rejection now will is probably good for you. Take the time between rounds to keep
revising. Get more feedback from people you
trust (not people who are nice to you- this will be covered in "how to
edit a novel").
If you get a letter back from an
agent or editor who took the time to write you a letter explaining why he or she rejected your work, treat it like
gold! That meant they read your
book! If it's obvious they're just not interested in your genre, or they say
"I loved it but I'm not accepting new material," that's still kind of
awesome. You'll be luckier still if they
have pointed out something you didn't notice, didn't think of, that's turning
agents and editors from your genre off.
You might be able to fix it.
But of course I was thirteen, and
I didn't do any of this. I got rejected
three times by the end of January, and that might have been it. They
hated me! All my friends had lied to me.
My work sucked.
I had no intention of trying
again.
Then the day came, before the
start of my second semester of eighth grade, when my class went to tour the
high school in anticipation of our moving up next year. Actually, we toured two schools, the regular
public school, and the vocational-technical school. I loved the vo-tech school. I had no faith in my academic abilities at
that point, but I loved working with my hands.
I loved building things. I wanted
to go into automotives, or carpentry, or learn to be an electrician.
Sometimes I still look back, and
think how handy it would be if I had learned to do any of that...
(Continued on Page 3)
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