Finding Your Voice

Today I was going to write a gentle blog post about how to conduct your relationship with your agent/potential agent, but Jessica over at Bookends beat me to it. 

Two of the most important things she says are, “I don’t want an author who disrespects me” and “agents are only as successful as their reputations.”  The latter is the reason why an agent will suggest revisions to your proposal/manuscript before sending it out; the former is the reason why an author and an agent will go their separate ways if the author is unwilling to listen to the agent’s feedback. 

Here’s the thing: a professional is able to accept feedback, criticism and suggestions without taking it as a personal attack on her worth as an individual.  I understand that this is hard to do: I have received any number of edit letters that have made me seriously consider joining the Peace Corps, where at least they’d appreciate me.   But I’m a professional, working in a highly competitive business, so here is how I respond, no matter what I think of the feedback:

Thank you so much for your suggestions.  I can see that you have thought them through carefully and I’m sure they will be an enormous help in the revision process.   I will consider your feedback carefully as I get to work and will let you know if I have any questions.

Then I shut the hell up for about three days.    

By that time, I have eaten enough chocolate and drunk enough tequila that I’m willing to entertain the idea that perhaps my agent/editor does have some worthy ideas for how I can improve my project.  Then I start making the requested changes.  I make them even if I don’t agree with them.   

It’s that last that many writers find impossible to do, and since they don’t agree with anything the agent/editor says, they respond to an edit letter with, “Nah, I don’t wanna.”  Which is not the response of a professional.  Trust me on this.

Once I have made the requested changes, I very often see that the agent/editor is right, or at least not wrong, and so there’s no problem.  I submit the revision and collect a check.  But sometimes, not as often as most writers would like to believe, the agent/editor is wrong.  But by having made the change, I can show that I tried, explain why it’s wrong, and then begin a discussion about what else could be done to fix the weakness the agent/editor sees.   

This is how I show respect for my agent and the editors I work with, and it’s what I expect from my clients (who are all so wonderful that this post is absolutely not about any of them).   Graciously accepting agent/editor feedback on your work is basic professional behavior; don’t personalize it.  And for heaven’s sake, keep some Ghirardelli on hand for all such emergencies.

Every single stage of my writing career has been a pain in the ass.  I think the last time my love of writing was pure and unadulterated with any concept of “why does this have to be so hard?” was when I was five and the lightbulb went off in my head and suddenly I could write in sentences.  All of the labor that had gone before — identifying the letters of the alphabet, naming their sounds, sounding them out into words, figuring out how to hold the number 2 pencil in my hand so I could form large, awkward letters on my Big Chief tablet — all of that was overshadowed by the fact that I could make sentences that anyone could read: my parents, my teacher, my siblings, a total stranger whose name I didn’t even know.   Just as intoxicating was the fact that I could make things up — I could lie through my teeth — and no one got mad at me as long as I prefaced the bald-faced lies by saying, “This is a story.”

Sometimes I forgot to preface the lies, but I was five, what do you expect.

From then on, though, the process of getting to the next level — figuring out how to put those sentences into paragraphs and the paragraphs into chapters, how to make a plot work, how to create characters, how to write dialogue — has been a pain in the ass.    On the non-fiction end, it’s been the same: figuring out how to write effective queries, putting together book proposals, writing and promoting books — all one enormous pain in the ass.

Which is not to say that the process has been unrewarding.  Obviously it has been or I’d have given up a long time ago.  I’m just saying that getting to the next level may be joyful, it may be fulfilling, it may feed some deep inner need for meaning, but it is also plain hard work.  A lot of the time the work goes nowhere.  Half the time I’ve got nothing to show for all those words I spill on the page except the understanding that this is not working.  Which, in the end, isn’t all that useful a piece of knowledge.

Because I have a bizarre affection for the Stoics (”be of good cheer, all men are mortal”), I found it very comforting when a friend of mine recently pointed out, ”We’re way past the stage where this is going to be easy.”  Which, as a mantra, may not be as catchy as “Just Do It” but I like it better.

A long time ago I wrote a novel I loved.  Loved.  It was a flawed novel, as many beginning efforts are, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love it.  I still love that novel, even though I’m perfectly well aware of its imperfections.  I may in fact love it because of its imperfections.  It is at the same time the worst book I’ve ever written and also the best, and if you are a writer you know exactly what I mean.

I spent countless hours on that manuscript, trying to get it perfect even though no amount of effort could save it from being the work of a beginner. Countless.  More hours than I have ever spent on anything else in the universe, with the possible exception of my daughter. 

That book meant everything in the world to me, and the smartest thing I have ever done is shove it in a trunk and lock the trunk.

Wait! you say (I can hear the dismay in your voice).  Didn’t you just spend the last two blog posts talking about resolve and getting through the tough slog and shouting Never give up!  Never surrender! ?

Why, yes.  Yes, I did.  But I mean that in terms of your ultimate goal, which I’m assuming is to be a happily published writer (though we could debate all day about what that means).  Lesser goals work in the service of larger goals.  Writing a book is a lesser goal to being a happily published writer, although obviously you need the one to get the other.  But you can be a happily published writer even if you set aside a particular book to work on one that will be better.  In fact, I can almost guarantee that you will have to.

Here’s a thing I’ve noticed among all the writers I’ve dealt with over the years.  The professional ones – multi-published, making a living at it – always understand that you have to keep moving or you drown.  You finish one project and start another.  You realize that your first novel is never going to be published so you start your second.  The unpublished writers are the ones who keep clinging to that first project, never quite willing to leave go of it to move on to the better one.

None of those unpublished writers have ever listened to me when I said they need to write their next book, and why should you be any different?  But please, I’m begging you.  That book you’ve been working on for ten years?  Find a trunk for it.  You’ll thank me later.