The Making Of, Part 4: Standing Out

There are over 307 million people in the United State of America.

Of those 307 million, I would hazard to guess that at least 150 million of them are either full time professional writers, part time professional writers, full time amateur writers, part time amateur writers, or dabblers.

There's a quote, out there somewhere in the world, from Stephen King, revealing the number of rejection letters he received before he became a published author.  My memory is hazy on it, but I believe the number was up around 100.  King's motivation in revealing this information was to point out that all writers, no matter how successful, will get rejected a lot.

Yes, these are all my rejection letters, minus the e-mails.

This is why being a writer can be really brutal.  It is a constant assault on your self-esteem.  It's like being in middle school all over again and the literary agents, literary magazines, and publishing houses have all cleared the puberty hurdle while I languish at the starting line.

There's certain level of sadism involved in trying to get published.  If you're not famous or related to someone famous or doing a job that is incredibly unique and/or fascinating, you're going to have some troubles.  Sure, there are some objective qualities to look for in writing, but in the end the majority of any decision made by someone with the power to publish your work is going to be subjective.  And while all your friends and family might tell you how great you are, none of them are going to get you into the New York Times Book Review.

I have no idea how many rejection letters I've gotten.  I write a decent amount in multiple genres and formats, and I've been rejected for all of them.  Short stories? Check. Novel? Check.  I even have rejection letters from Marvel with a picture of Spider-man on them.

I found Hellgate Press by contacting them myself, without an agent.  More and more writers are doing that these days, although it would be a lie to say that having an agent isn't an advantage.

Hellgate is a medium sized publishing house in Oregon.  They specialize in military history, veteran memoirs, travel adventure, and historical fiction.  They were not the only publishing house that I queried on my own, but they were one of only a few.  I covered the country in query letters to agents, but when it came to contacting a publisher directly, I decided to narrow the field as much as I could.

I have nothing but great things to say about Hellgate Press and I couldn't be happier that my book is going to be in their catalog next to some worthwhile titles.  I'm hoping that our relationship will extend into multiple printings.

But eventually it will end, or at least slow to a drip.  I'm already readying my next salvo into the literary world, but the two books I'll be shopping around don't fall into any of the genres that Hellgate publishes.  So I need to start over, start fresh, and prepare for a new round of rejections.

And this is how it goes.  A short story gets put into a collection and you smile and you add it to your bio, because that's all that really matters.  Each new victory is just another way to pad your stats for the next fight.  I will lose far, far more than I win.

Then again, I suppose that makes those few victories all the sweeter.

Essentials of Writing

Write What You Care About and Understand

"All good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that which people like you will enjoy. Write what you care about and understand."

-RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON

Courtesy of Jon Winokur's "Advice to Writers" web site (which I recommend).

The Making Of, Part 3: This Is Not Your Diary

I can write about anything.

I'm not saying I can write well about anything, but I can write about anything, and usually at great length.  If it's something I like, then I can write a lot.  And if it's something I know?  I can write forever and ever.

When I decided that I would write "Pray" in the first person, and frame it with the story of the writing of the story, I dove into it with somewhat reckless abandon.  That is to say, I wrote about every little thing in my life and every little thing in the lives of my family.

The problem, of course, is that not all of that was relevant.

I could go into a ridiculous, pretentious discussion here about writing and how even writers who delve into the extremes of fiction are ultimately writing from a place of non-fiction, and how, as has been claimed, writers lie to tell the truth.  Like I said, I can write about anything and I could go on and on about that.

Suffice to say that there's something inherently confessional about writing, not matter what it is you're writing about.  And once you start down that road, it's hard to stop.  Even worse, suddenly every little thing in your life becomes fodder for the book, and soon you're adding symbolism to things that really aren't symbolic of anything.

Symbolism can be a horrible thing because it's so easy to abuse.  It's also really easy to use as justification for pretty much anything.  So over the course of a few hundred pages, I started filling the book with all sorts of crazy anecdotes about my life.

I spent pages writing about my first car.  Sure, my grandfather gave me that car (which he'd inherited from his mother), but did it have anything to do, really, with his military service or his relationship with my grandmother?  Not even remotely.  And yet I rambled on and on about it.

I received a note in red ink from Nicole that simply said "All this about a car??"

Needless to say, the section on my 1972 Ford Pinto (brown, no less) was substantially cut down.

It can be hard for even the best of us to know where that line is, the line between what is pertinent and what is fluff, between what should be shared and what should be kept secret, between fiction and non-fiction.  But blurring those lines is where I hang my hat, it's just sometimes hard to know when to stop.

Strangely enough, it applies to this blog, too.

Oh, and the book is entirely non-fiction, in case anyone had any doubts after that nicely pace, yet oddly phrased sentence up there.  Everything in it is pertinent, too.  I may have crossed the line on what should be shared, though...