Hello, writers. When I was in sixth grade we had this weekly class called "Health", though it was actually about drugs. Man, we learned a lot of facts about illegal drugs. Then one week the health teacher came in and did this lesson about the IALAC sign. IALAC stood for "I am lovable and capable" and she told us this story about this boy who woke up with this IALAC sign and then during the day all kinds of @#$% happened to him and the sign got ripped up till it was just a little shred.
She even had made an IALAC sign and ripped it up as she told the story.
The lesson made no sense to any of us, and the next week it was back to drugs again. Which was kind of a shame because none of us were taking drugs, but all of us were shredding each other's IALAC signs.
Now, we all know writing shreds your IALAC sign.
First of all there are the rejections. The form rejections are bad, but at least they're usually polite.
(Anyone who ever got the infamous Gardner Dozois form rejection from Asimov's Science Fiction will understand why I say "usually".)
Once they start stacking up-- thirty or forty form rejections, or two or three hundred-- you begin to get a self-image of someone who's not a writer at all, or at least not a good one. And that's bad enough.
But then there are the mean rejections. And these tend in my experience to come from agents, not editors. The only qualification needed to be an agent is say "I'm an agent," so the person who's sending you a mean letter may or may not be actually know what they're talking about. And these letters just wreck your day and can make you decide to give up.
After a while, if you keep fighting, you eventually start to get the letters that actually tell you specifically why they're not buying the manuscript. And though this stuff is really useful (one I got said "you seem to be treating serious subject matter too lightly," which was true) it's also a bit rough on the old self-esteem. And then you react in one of three ways.
- Fix the thing that's wrong with the manuscript, especially if more than one rejection letter points it out.
- Realize that it can't be fixed, scrap the manuscript, and write something better.
- Ignore the advice of a knowledgeable professional and keep trying to sell the damn thing, or self-publish it.
It's a deeply flawed system.
But then after the rejections, after you sell, there's more. Your editor doesn't like what you've written just as you wrote it. If you're lucky she'll say this very, very tactfully, but it still hurts. At the words "Now about this character of yours..." you can feel your blood pressure rising. My character? She's going to criticize my wonderful, brilliant, much loved child character?
And then after publication come the critics. And they can be quite nasty. In fact, some of them get off on being nasty. In fact, some of them are not entirely distinguishable from the sixth-graders mentioned above.
And if your book ends up being wildly successful then even more people will say they don't like it. So all in all if you write your self-esteem is headed for the shredder.
I suppose the answer is that as best you can, you have to build up a kind of resiliency-- a thick wall that the slings and arrows can't get through, ideally equipped with an arrow-proof communication port where things that are really useful will get through. A tall order and I'm not sure anyone ever really does it successfully.
I don't know. What do you think?
Write On! will be a regular Thursday feature (8 pm ET) until it isn't. Be sure to check out other great lit'ry diaries like:
sarahnity's books by kossacks on Tuesdays
plf515's What Are You Reading? on Wednesday mornings.
cfk's bookflurries on Wednesday nights.
Your happy writing links for the week:
When you're stuck on a plot point, the answer is in the question.
Seven figures is at least a million dollars, right? Hopefully it will work out for them.
Another well-known writer decides to self-publish. Thoughts?
One reason YA is hot-- adults are reading it.
And The Guardian muses about why YA is so death-intensive these days.
Write a heavy-metal filk form rejection letter and win a free critique from the Rejectionist-- deadline 8 p.m. ET tomorrow.
Alan Rinzler on how self-publishing can lead to a book deal.
Never, ever sign anything with any agent or publisher whom you haven't checked out at Writer Beware or Preditors and Editors.