If you write and submit your writing, you will get rejected. Repeatedly. Harshly. Or you’ll be ignored. It’s like in Lost when Rousseau warned Sayid about Benjamin Linus: ‘He will lie. For a long time, he will lie.’ You will be rejected—for a long time. But the good news is that one magical day it’ll all turn around. You’ll open your e-mail. The name of an agent will be there, waiting for you to click on it. In your heart you know it’s another rejection. You don’t want to read it. But you open it, as you knew you would. OMG! It’s not a rejection, it’s a request; Jennifer Jackson wants to read my entire Iconocop manuscript (for example)! Believe me if you are persistent, if you build your knowledge repertoire and name, it will happen.
IT’LL TAKE YEARS: I know, you’re thinking you’ll be the exception. Your first MS is phenomenal, the next Look Homeward, Angel. Let’s be real: your first manuscript is borderline trash. Put it in a drawer, write for another year, and then dig that 250,000 word behemoth out and give it the once-over. You’ll be eating crow, sure as sugar. Same goes for your second beast. My first two works of naiveté are safely tucked in a drawer where they can’t hurt anyone with their offensive prose and meandering plot-holes. Submit your third. By that time you’ll have done what many wish and fail to do: you’ll have written that novel you always wanted to write. You wrote it, finished it, and then repeated. Congratulations, you’re a writer on your way. You’re clinging to that Writing Ladder like a champ. Don’t keep revising that first epic fantasy. Move on to the next project. Challenge yourself; write in a different genre, use a different POV. Submit shorts to e-zines and contests. Continue reading “Own Those Rejection Letters–And Start Getting Requests”
