Make a Choice
Someone in traffic cuts you off. Or steals your parking spot. You can look at it one of two ways. One, the person is @#@#%^$%@$. A cretin. A jackass. Two, the person is stressed out, harried, really has to get home to a sick child or an elderly parent. You can acknowledge the stress the driver just caused you . . . and MOVE ON.
You get a rejection letter. Unless it is a really detailed explanation of why your book was turned down, which is a rarity in this insanely intense business, it's likely to be nondescript. "I liked the book but wasn't passionate enough about it to take it on." "I wouldn't know where this would fit on my list, but I do think it has merit . . . good luck with it." Or, taken from an actual rejection of my first novel, Spanish Disco, "I didn't find the heroine's bitchiness endearing, though I liked the writing." Or, from Simon & Schuster, "While I have no doubt Erica Orloff will one day be a best-selling author [nice compliment], this isn't the book to start her career with--too tough a sell for my list right now."
Now, you can spend hours reading between the lines. Or reading the actual words and trying to decide "What the hell does it mean that you like the book but don't love it enough?"
Or you can make a choice. Accept the rejection, the comment, and move on. It doesn't mean you wrote a bad novel or you're a hack. It probably means the benign comment you got. In that, an editor's list is his or her prize. It's what they hone. And there are very few spots on that list. And whatever MAKES it on that list has got to be something the editor feels pretty passionately about--and fairly confident based on sales and marketing, that it can sell. So you may very well have written a good book, a GREAT book, but it's not a match.
Will there be a match out there for you somewhere? Hopefully, if you don't give up.
Make a choice. Don't absorb the rejection. Let it deflect and move on. Even if there is pointed criticism, step back and acknowledge it, decide if it's valid enough to make some changes. Make them. Try again.
So the next time someone cuts you off, do what I do. Smile and wave. They obviously need to cut you off more than you need to flip them off. Drive on. Make a choice. Don't accept their stress.
Thoughts?
You get a rejection letter. Unless it is a really detailed explanation of why your book was turned down, which is a rarity in this insanely intense business, it's likely to be nondescript. "I liked the book but wasn't passionate enough about it to take it on." "I wouldn't know where this would fit on my list, but I do think it has merit . . . good luck with it." Or, taken from an actual rejection of my first novel, Spanish Disco, "I didn't find the heroine's bitchiness endearing, though I liked the writing." Or, from Simon & Schuster, "While I have no doubt Erica Orloff will one day be a best-selling author [nice compliment], this isn't the book to start her career with--too tough a sell for my list right now."
Now, you can spend hours reading between the lines. Or reading the actual words and trying to decide "What the hell does it mean that you like the book but don't love it enough?"
Or you can make a choice. Accept the rejection, the comment, and move on. It doesn't mean you wrote a bad novel or you're a hack. It probably means the benign comment you got. In that, an editor's list is his or her prize. It's what they hone. And there are very few spots on that list. And whatever MAKES it on that list has got to be something the editor feels pretty passionately about--and fairly confident based on sales and marketing, that it can sell. So you may very well have written a good book, a GREAT book, but it's not a match.
Will there be a match out there for you somewhere? Hopefully, if you don't give up.
Make a choice. Don't absorb the rejection. Let it deflect and move on. Even if there is pointed criticism, step back and acknowledge it, decide if it's valid enough to make some changes. Make them. Try again.
So the next time someone cuts you off, do what I do. Smile and wave. They obviously need to cut you off more than you need to flip them off. Drive on. Make a choice. Don't accept their stress.
Thoughts?
posted by Erica Orloff at 5:33 PM
8 Comments:
Stout advice, Erica.
My first novel, and the middle-grade novella that followed, will probably spend eternity in a drawer. I'm okay with that. Writing them was a valuable learning experience. It takes a thick skin to make it in this business, and writers shouldn't take rejection personally. If at first you don't succeed...
But I am thinking seriously about having machine guns mounted to the back of my truck for tailgaters. :)
Erica,
I read somewhere that Fitzgerald lined the walls of his study with rejections slips he'd received. It is part of the process for most; although Leif Engers had an agent on his first try for PEACE LIKE A RIVER and his book went to auction in a month. It just depends on how the cards fall and what is currently in vogue. Just recently I read an article that an upstart journalist sent out V.S. Naipaul's A BEND IN THE RIVER and every editor it was sent to rejected it, including the house where it was first published. A Nobel Prize winner--so...what is in vogue is part of it, I think.
And writers seriously have to be masochistic. I have always succeeded in all my endeavors until I decided to write. Then, the rejections began to mount up and, what do I do?--I go back for more.
Drive in New Jersey for one week and you will long for the mountains of Virgina, Erica.
Gerry
Jude:
Believe me, I wrote the post and thought, "What a hypocrite I am," because it took a while to get to the point where a really nasty Amazon review didn't bother me--and that's ludicrous because in four years, it's happened all of one time. :-) So I knew I had to develop thicker skin, and I have to get that it's a match for reader or editor or agent . . . or not.
E
Gerry:
I love Naipaul's work, but I could see someone getting it in a slush pile and thinking, "Beautiful, but how do we market it." But it's not much different, in some ways, from anything in corporate America. Think of cigarette manufacturers, "We know this is going to kill you, but here . . . buy some." It's profit-driven . . . It's harder to market the things that are beautiful but not written or created for "the masses."
E
I forget who the CEO is now who took over Random House a few years back, but he essentially said that from now on everything they did--all the imprints included--would be based on profit. Toni Morrison was at the inauguration of the regime change and was sitting at the bar. He went up to her and she turned to him and said, "So, are you firing me, too?" I love her for that question.
Gerry
Every single rejection used to be like fuel to my fire. It made me work just a little harder but there were times when it would burn me up. I've since learned to question the feelings that rise up when a criticism lands on my desk. Is it entitlement? Pride? Fear?
Once I figure out what the tension is really about, I can let it go. Today's blog was a healthy reminder.
Mary:
I know with me, it's ego usually. And I need to check it at the door.
E
P.S. Which is a balancing act, because you have to believe in yourself to write.
tibia money tibia gold tibia item runescape money runescape gold runescape power leveling tibia gold runescape money runescape gold runescape accounts runescape gp runescape power leveling dofus kamas buy runescape gold buy runescape money runescape items tibia item runescape accounts runescape gp wow power leveling wow powerleveling Warcraft PowerLeveling tibia money tibia gold runescape powerleveling buy dofus kamas Warcraft Power Leveling World of Warcraft PowerLeveling World of Warcraft Power Leveling Hellgate money Hellgate gold Guild Wars Gold buy Guild Wars Gold lotro gold buy lotro gold Hellgate Palladium Hellgate London Palladium Hellgate London gold runescape money runescape gold eve isk eve online isk Fiesta Silver Fiesta Gold SilkRoad Gold buy SilkRoad Gold Scions of Fate Gold SOF Gold Age Of Conan Gold AOC Gold lotro gold buy lotro gold buy runescape gold buy runescape money runescape items ArchLord gold buy ArchLord gold DDO Plat tibia money tibia gold tibia item Dungeons and Dragons Online Plat
Post a Comment
<< Home