Way back in August of 2018, a reputable agent from the Andrea Brown Literary Agency and I had our first conversation over the phone. We had a good chat about some potential holes in the plot of my submission, and I went to work revising the novel. In January of 2019, this same agent emailed me: “I am 99% sure that this read will lead me to offer you representation, so I’m reading the revision slowly and taking notes/composing an editorial letter so that we can move right into that when we’re done. I’m super excited about this story and am hoping we’ll be officially working together very soon.”
She wrote, “I have a feeling this is going to be a great year for you.”
We’d just celebrated the New Year.
I’d graduated with my masters degree in writing seven years previous, almost to the day. I’d been seriously writing for sixteen years at that point, and I’d received hundreds of rejections, so to say that I was happy to see this type of encouragement in my inbox would be a severe understatement. Shannon Hale, Newbery Honor winning author, once spoke at a conference I attended. Back in the day, all rejections were mailed, and she had all of hers laminated on a massive scroll, which she rolled out across the room so that we could see just how deep was her thick skin. I’ve thought of that moment so many times since then—the idea of an award winning author being rejected. We won’t even get into J.K. Rowling’s story.
You can’t ever shed that thick skin either. Even when an agent takes you on as a client, you’re looking at inordinate amounts of confidence shredding critique. Another novelist, this one an advisor in my MFA program, showed us her current work in progress during a plotting workshop. This was after her agent already accepted the novel, and she flipped through pages and pages of just the first chapter of written critique where all you could see was red. After they’d said yes. I love it. Let’s do it. Or, in other words, I love it, just not that much. Let’s change everything but the title.
On second thought, the title needs to go.
Everyone experiences disappointment. Writers have not cornered that market. There are much worse ways to be taken down, and I’ve experienced some of that too, but it’s easier to elucidate in the context of writing.
I contacted my agent twice more between the months of January and April, when I finally received a reply back with the first words being: “I’m afraid I have the most disappointing news.”
She said she meant everything she wrote back in January, but she’d been battling anxiety and had to take dramatic steps to address it, which included readjusting her workload. She was parting ways with existing, as well as potential, clients. She said she was disappointed too. She recommended other agents.
I was sitting in the bleachers during a break between sets of my son’s volleyball game. Reading this and wondering how I was not sinking through the metal, so heavy was the force of this blow.
It was a Friday. The following morning, I woke that same son to tell him there was a writers festival in San Diego and did he want to go surf while I met with one of the other recommended agents?
I met with her. She gave me her card, asked me to email her the full manuscript. Our conversation ended with her asking who were my favorite authors, and me literally unable to remember the names of any authors, much less my favorites, like I didn’t have the headspace for it. Shannon Hale. Gary Schmidt. Natalie Babbitt. Liane Moriarty. Jerry Spinelli. J.K. Rowling for crying out loud. It goes without saying this was not a closed door, open window situation.
Nearly four years later now I’m still at it. In a different way. I try and gloss over rejections, don’t let them sit because those extra voices in the head can be debilitating for a writer.
Because everyone experiences disappointment. This takes us back to my previous blog post in which I described the But/Therefore approach to writing. A character makes a choice and that’s what moves the plot forward. That’s what shapes them. That’s what ensures they change from the beginning of the novel to the end.
I have been let down to a substantial degree BUT . . .
This isn’t the outcome I pictured for myself THEREFORE . . .
It’s not the disappointment that matters. It’s what a character does with that disappointment that has them resonating with readers in the best ways long after the last page is turned. Which begs the question, how do we resonate with those that know us best?
