Follow Through

You’ve spent weeks, months, years writing your novel. You’ve listened to your characters. Told their stories. Described their hometowns, their friends, their troubles.

Then you took a close look at your words to make sure they were the exact ones you wanted. Made sure the verbs were active and descriptive. You took out your highlighters and systematically analyzed your descriptions, emotions, and internal thoughts. You happily discovered a token of symbolism and rewrote a scene to make the meaning more poignant.

You traded critiques with your writing partners. They gave you hours of their time to help you see the good things in your work and point out the areas that needed a little something.

Now what do you do? Hide the manuscript in a drawer?

Or maybe, you make a few tentative submissions and after weeks of waiting, hoping, dreaming, you get one—or several—of those “it’s not for me” letters.

Then do you put your characters in a drawer, silencing their voices?

I know it is tempting. I have my fair share of half-written stories or first drafts that are buried somewhere in my desk. But if you’ve gone to all the trouble to take a real shot at getting published, you have to keep going.

So, how much rejection should you prepare for? Here are some numbers I saw floating around this week:

• Brodiashton: I credit my finding an agent to my sis-in-law’s challenge to me to “reach 100 rejections”. Probably wouldn’t inspire everyone. August 17th #kidlitchat

• Jake Bell’s blog entry The View from the Rejection Pile: “There is an old writers’ adage that if you haven’t gotten one hundred rejections–or maybe it’s two hundred–you haven’t tried hard enough.…If you send out only one query letter to one agent, you only have to deal with the blow of getting one rejection letter. However, while the writer who sends out 237 queries to get one acceptance may have to endure 236 rejections, the final scoreboard between the two would read 1-0.”

• And, on Monday you can join the WriteOnCon live chat (August 23 at 9 PM EDT.) and ask Elana Johnson about her 189 (!) queries.

The book is written. You think it’s pretty good. May as well follow it through until the end. And if you do, come back and tell us. We’d love to celebrate with you!

http://twitter.com/shonnaslayton