I don’t know if anyone saw this post by the lovely Beth Revis yesterday (hence the link), but I’ve been thinking about that book a lot.
She calls it the book of your heart. I call it the book I think about every
time I do a work out. Every. Time.
Right, and I’ve already written it.
And queried it.
And nobody took more than a 10 page bite (and man, those
rejections came back faster than a tweet).
So I had this crazy idea. I hadn’t written it very well. I’d
started it in all the wrong places. I’d done everything wrong that a person
could, right down to the waking up from a dream sequence. Yeah, that was me
with the waking up scene on page one. ::shakes head in presumed shame::
Well, I’ve decided that what it needed was about a million
tons of voice, a POV shift (third to first) and a title change. I’m excited—like
jump up and down excited—until I remember what querying was like the last time
for this project. I was told that the premise was tired (someone said they had
read a book that was pretty much exactly the same), and the writing was weak.
Okay, I’ll grant the writing for sure. I can see that it was awkward and
labored. And I can even see how the premise tied to that writing was definitely
the death of that submission set. No questions. Every last agent who turned me down
should have (and Thank you to those of you who asked for pages just in case it
got any better; I <3 you). But I can’t let this book go. I just can’t. Not
yet.
And this is where my dilemma breaks into the writing advice
issue. In her post Beth talked about moving on. Letting go. Clearly her book
was much closer to prime time because it went all the way to acquisitions at a
major six (yikes!), whereas I had a handful of requests for pages. My concern
is this, did I give my book a good enough shot and should I just move on, or
should I rewrite it from scratch and see if I’ve gotten better enough? Should I
do what Beth did and move on, letting the Book of my Heart wind up as the
practice novel that never made it? No, I’m not asking the internet for advice,
I’m about to give it.
See, Beth’s book went to an acquisitions panel. Lots of
people had read it. My book… well, my mother, my grandmother, a few betas here
and there (all of it fantastic). Agents? Well, I’m serious when I say I’m
certain no one read past page ten (and it was a prologue, urg!). Right there, I
can say that from a business stand point, my book hasn’t run its course. No one
has seen it. And if I make the changes I plan to make, it’ll be utterly
different. Whole new book = whole new query life.
What I think I’m trying to say is that each situation is
different. Clearly, I’m still too attached to the book of my heart. That doesn’t
mean I shouldn’t go back and rework it. Sometimes people give advice to writers
that’s hard for me to understand.
Case and Point: Shannon Messenger. She wrote her novel and
rewrote her novel forever. I mean forever forever. She wrote more drafts of her
novel than I wrote of my dissertation (and that is really saying something).
But if she’d gone with a lot of the conventional wisdom—write and move on—she might not have gotten published. (Yes, I know it's more complicated than that, but you can read it for yourself or check out her Friday the Thirteeners post here about giving up).
Which means there’s a fine line between hanging onto our
dreams and moving on to the next book. I’m not saying I disagree with Beth. I’m
just saying that there’s a time and place for each of our steps. The question
is recognizing where you are. My poor little novel had such terrible writing
that it didn’t stand a chance.
I wouldn’t be in this position if I’d had a hundred fulls
that got rejected by agents.
If tons of agents had read my book, it would be dead (or
near dead). Trunked. Shelved. Sent to the great paper pulp known as my blender
(strange art projects at the Rockford house).
I think that’s part of the move on advice. If your novel has
already gone out into the business side of things, then it might be a goner. If
three agents have read ten pages, clearly there’s some latitude for improvement.
My advice: move on after you’ve really and fully walked down all the paths with
a novel you are willing to walk down (and I know that for some of you that
includes self publishing, and that’s perfectly okay too). That means rewriting,
editing, revising, rewriting again. Many of the book-of-my-hearts out there are
dropped. That’s when people give up. I think part of it is because those books
are so emotionally tied to us that it’s very hard to be objective about them.
It’s harder to rewrite them than anything else you’ve ever rewritten because
they are your soul on paper. How can you control-C control-V on your heart?
Control X?????
So yeah, move on. Don’t move on. Rewrite. Enjoy only for
your friends and family relishing in the fact that you finished a novel,
whatever. Do what’s best for you. Just remember that if your goal is
publishing, that is a big part of your overall decision, and you have to look
at the business side of things when trying to make the move one/stick with it
decision.
Now, I’m going to go turn a query failure into PURE AWESOME.
Oh, and just to tease, I’ll even tell you the title and a touch
of the hook (You know, the part where I sound like a used car sales man “Come
on by and read my manuscripts, you won’t believe the stuff I write! Hurry,
hurry, hurry!” But don’t actually hurry because I have to rewrite it from
scratch).
PRINCESS SINGULARITY
1 princess + 1 prince = happily ever after
3 princesses + 1 prince = nightmare for the faerie godmother
who has to sort it all out.
