Return to sender

If you ever want to accomplish anything in life, you have to learn to deal with rejection.

This is especially true if you want to be a writer. A couple of years ago, I completed a novel titled Brother to Brother. It’s set in the south, and it features a lot of characters with rough edges, and some humorous (I thought) scenes, and it took me about three years off and on to finish.

My friend Sam Starnes, an accomplished (and published) author in his own right, reviewed my manuscript for me and gave me a lot of helpful suggestions. I started getting up at 5 a.m. to write and work on it for a couple of hours before I’d go to work. I read parts of it to my writers’ group and got a great reaction. I sent the first 100 pages off to a contest and, though I didn’t win, got a nice critique back that said it was definitely publishable.

So, I bundled up my 300-page manuscript, dove into the process of getting it published, and began dreaming of my days of Grisham-like success. Wonder who will direct the movie version? What should I wear when I appear on Letterman? Should I buy a beach house or a mountain retreat with all the money I’m going to make, or both?

I’m sure you can guess the rest of the story. I’ve been rejected more than the president of the high school chess club. But I’m not whining. I realize this happens to almost everybody who tries to write. A lot of successful writers got rejected dozens, even hundreds, of times before they were discovered.

I gave a reading once from my manuscript at a conference in Atlanta. A guy from a publishing house was there and came up to me and told me he enjoyed it, and he’d like to see the rest of my manuscript. I was of course fired up, and sent it off to him immediately. He wrote me back and said thanks for sending it, and he was looking forward to reading it in the coming weeks and he would get back to me.

This was in May. Of 2006.

I called him and e-mailed him a few times, but he seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Perhaps he’s been kidnapped. Or maybe it’s like when you’re younger and you’re interested in a girl who isn’t interested in you, so instead of hurting your feelings she just avoids you, hoping you’ll get the message. You know, just give it to me straight. I don’t want to go out with you. Your book sucks. I can take it. At least I’d have some closure.

Of course, it’s hard to tell if agents and publishers think my book sucks, because the biggest obstacle is getting someone to read it. Publishers generally just want to hear from agents. Agents don’t want to see your book, they want you to write a query letter, in which you have to describe the book that you slaved over for three years in one paragraph.

They glance at your letter, deduce whether they think the book has potential to land on The New York Times bestseller list, decide it doesn’t, and send you a very polite form letter rejecting you. I’ve gotten about 20 of these letters (or e-mails) so far.

A publishing house in Montgomery actually asked to see my first three chapters a few weeks ago, and I almost passed out. I haven’t heard back from them, but I’m going with the “no news is good news” philosophy, for now.

The other day I found a listing for an agent who specializes in Southern writers, and likes humorous books. Wow, I thought, this sounds tailor-made, so I sent off an e-mail query. I’ll give them this, they didn’t keep me in suspense. I got an e-mail back in about five minutes, saying my book sounded “promising”, but they weren’t interested. I haven’t been rejected that fast since high school.

Is it discouraging? Of course it is. The late Larry Brown, one of my favorite authors, got 250 rejection slips before he ever got published. I don’t know how he did it.

And there’s always that elephant in the room in the back of my mind, which is the thought, “What if it’s not really very good?” That’s a possibility. Not everybody finds me to be funny – I can read my blog comments to confirm that. Or ask my children.

In the meantime, I’m about 30 pages into a new one, so I guess the smart thing to do is just bear down and try to get it done, and maybe I’ll have better luck. But 5 a.m. comes awfully early.