Lara Zielin

Has this ever happened to you? You finish your novel, write a kick-ass query letter, send it out and get a really good response? Agents want to see partials! People are reading your words!

And then — thud. Rejection after rejection hits. “This just isn’t for us.” “We liked the premise but it just wasn’t strong enough.” “We’d love to see something else.”

Blah, blah, blah.

It’s happened to me, and more than a few other writers I know.

So what do you DO? Where do you go from here?

The first thing is to play the numbers game. I know urban legend says Fitzgerald got, like, 650 rejections for THE GREAT GATSBY before someone said yes, but the reality is that if you get more than 10 on one work, it’s probably time to edit.

I know that sucks, but just hear me out.

The question becomes, then, how to edit effectively. My previous post about family relationships is a good place to start. Can you flesh any of those out? But what about other relationships? Friends? Significant others?

Here’s another example from DONUT DAYS:

Emma, the main character, likes a boy. Of course. (This is teen fiction, people). In the first draft, he was a cute boy who was out of her league. Not terribly inventive. I thought about whether or not I could add some spice to that relationship and thought, okay, he’s a cute boy, but what if he wasn’t always cute? What if Emma sees him and suddenly he’s pulled an ugly duckling, going from geek to chic?

Now the relationship is a bit more complicated. Suddenly, there’s an element of surprise there.

Then, I thought, what if he wasn’t just any boy. What if he was the son of a family rival? Ah-ha! Now we’ve got some Romeo and Juliet strains playing in the background.

I’m not saying I wrote a masterpiece, but I am saying I went back and worked on characters and their relationships to one another, and it made a huge difference.

Anyone else out there got some stories to share about this process?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 3:27 pm and is filed under agent, editing, query letters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.