I mean, I’m not some all-seeing goddess of agents’ private thoughts, but I’ve been seeing a pattern in some of the writing spaces I haunt (physical and digital), and I wanted to tell you that I know why you keep getting rejected.
You’re not doing enough work.
I see this thing in different spaces over and over where someone spends time writing a book-length story. Then they spend two weeks or a month or maybe even two revising it, and then they’re sending it to agents. Then I see the sad rejection posts.
What I don’t say on those posts is, Of course you’re getting rejected! This work is in its infancy. You did a revision of a first draft, and sent that out to agents looking for highly polished stories. I can say with near certainty that whatever it is you’re submitting probably still reads very much like a first draft.
How do I know this? Because I’m degreed, and an experienced beta reader, and a writer myself. I’ve seen so many people send out stories that are just not ready yet. I did so myself, when I was younger.
Sometimes it’s ignorance – people think you write something, you revise is once or twice, then it’s ready to go. They lack a process and an understanding of craft. They pump out 100,000 words in a short period of time, are riding high on that “OMG I did it!” energy, and think…well, that’s the hard part. Now I just check the grammar and tweak a few things and I’ll have a bestseller in no time.
Nope.
Is it possible to have a first draft that’s so amazing that it doesn’t need much work? I mean…sure? But you likely don’t. Let’s just be honest here. If you think you do…you don’t. After the first draft, you’re still learning what the story is. Even if it’s been in your head for a long time, it reveals itself in different ways once you start actually putting it on a page.
Then there’s the process of learning what works, and you need other people for that. Several other people, over a period of time. You need feedback from beta readers to know what you need to fix, where you have gaps, where they got confused or bored, where you info dumped, where they wanted more. You need to understand and know how to apply craft. You need to rewrite and refine and polish.
The good news? That’s all teachable. You can learn and develop a process and achieve everything you want to achieve.
The other trend I see are writers who did put in a lot of work, but query too soon. Sometimes this happens because a writer just wants to be done – I do see this a lot in writing communities. It does get tedious, sitting with the same story and same characters for years, going over and over it, getting readers and critiques, answering really big questions about theme and what’s at the core and motivations. The scene work, the sentence work. It’s a lot. Then you start feeling that false sense of urgency and thinking, I need to get this out there.
The point of this is, if you’ve been rejected by a lot of agents, be honest with yourself – did you do enough work? Ask your beta readers. As your mentors. Ask them to be really honest. And if you’re not still sure, go to conferences and literary festivals and ask published writers what their process was and when they knew they were ready to query. The one thing I will say about writers – most of the ones I’ve encountered are always all too glad to share their experiences.
Mental Wanderings: Art, Nature, Life 