Page 3 of 3

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: March 1st, 2010, 12:44 pm
by Vegas Linda Lou
I'm not sure if this is right place, but since I've been more active in this thread of Nathan's forum, I thought I'd post this link. It's a YouTube video of me reading an excerpt from Bastard Husband: A Love Story during my one-woman show, "The D Words: the Funny Side of Dating, Divorce and Other Delights." The show is part stand-up comedy, part dramatic reading--nothing like anything offered here in Vegas.

http://www.youtube.com/user/VegasLindaLou (language warning at the end)

For those of you who need a morale boost: The show opened two weeks ago, and last Thursday night I did my worst show ever. I swear, I was ready to run. I suck! How can I gracefully get out of this? Then I made a few minor changes and the next two nights hit back-to-back home runs. I'm learning a ton of lessons through this experience, like when a project is right out of the birth canal, you have to be prepared to wipe off a little crap. We can't hit a home run every time; just try to get on base.

P.S. Keep in mind the camera adds 10 pounds. No, make that 20.

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 9:02 am
by taylormillgirl
Congrats, Linda! I haven't watched the link yet, but your show sounds like a riot.

I think I've revised my contingency plan based on a lot of good advice in this thread. Here's what I'm thinking:

A: If I'm rejected--we're talking form rejections--I'll shelve my manuscript and rewrite it when my skills improve. I'd hate for inferior writing to come back to haunt me at some point in the future.

B: If I'm rejected--the personalized "I love this, but I can't sell it" type of thing--I'll share the manuscript with the world in some way.

And I need to add one comment. There seems to have been a misunderstanding among a few posters who think I'm advocating giving up after rejection. That's not the point of this thread. My original question was what do you plan to do with your manuscript if it's rejected: shelve it, self-pub it, e-pub it, or put it up online in its entirety for free.

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: March 4th, 2010, 12:27 am
by BlancheKing
This probably doesn't have anything to do with the other author's advice either, but I think no manuscript should have to sit in a drawer. We may not all be authors, but we are writers; telling stories is what we do best. Even if a story isn't as well written as we intended it to be, it's still a story, and more importantly, it's our story. We cared enough to hunch over a desk for years planning/writing it, so what's another few years of editing? Given the right words and genre, anything can be interesting. Look at P.G. Wodehouse's stories. One of them is literally just about the someone stealing someone else's cat, and yet it's an absolute page turner. And I'm pretty sure most manuscripts sitting in people's drawers have more purpose to them than pet theft.

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 3:13 pm
by MoiraYoung
Elizabeth Poole wrote:I don’t have a backup plan. I never considered the idea that I might not get published.
This (and everything Elizabeth said in that comment) is exactly how I feel. I'm not trying to be naive or self-centred, either. I've just been doing this my whole life, and I know it's what I'm meant to do.

If I don't get accepted yet, I take the rejection as a message that maybe I need to learn more. The down side of having wanted to be a writer my entire life is that I've had to learn the lesson that I still have more to lean repeatedly. You work on it for long enough, you start to think you're there, only to realize that you're not. At this point I've realized that I won't stop learning, and that's not a bad thing, either. I feel blessed to have such perspective as it is.

But I'm only 27, and I came to the realization that a lot of authors are first published in their late thirties, early forties, or older. In thirty years, I'll be 57, with hopefully a few more decades after that. I've got plenty of time to develop my craft.

Talk to me when I'm 50, though -- if I'm not published by then, you can be sure I'll consider self-publishing!

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: April 3rd, 2010, 3:08 am
by wildheart
Like some other writers on this thread I too have wanted to be a writer since...well, since I knew what a writer was really. I have never wanted anything else as much as I want this. In all honesty I have not been writing seriously with intent to publish long enough to want to go the self publishing route. I'd rather improve my skills, submit, get rejections and try again. I do feel though that maybe I should keep my options open if in ten years or so I am still not published. I hope that is not the case though. Writing as a career...it is my dream. I'd like to make it happen. I'm only 20. I've got a lot of time left to learn the craft.

So...I guess that means that if after I finish my novel and it gets rejected...it'll probably be sitting on my shelf for awhile. If in ten years I still have to hide them in a drawer I'll probably look into the self publishing thing.

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: April 3rd, 2010, 6:20 am
by BlancheKing
wildheart wrote:Like some other writers on this thread I too have wanted to be a writer since...well, since I knew what a writer was really. I have never wanted anything else as much as I want this. In all honesty I have not been writing seriously with intent to publish long enough to want to go the self publishing route. I'd rather improve my skills, submit, get rejections and try again. I do feel though that maybe I should keep my options open if in ten years or so I am still not published. I hope that is not the case though. Writing as a career...it is my dream. I'd like to make it happen. I'm only 20. I've got a lot of time left to learn the craft.

So...I guess that means that if after I finish my novel and it gets rejected...it'll probably be sitting on my shelf for awhile. If in ten years I still have to hide them in a drawer I'll probably look into the self publishing thing.
Maybe it's an age thing, but I'm with you. I'd rather not publish than self-publish, and I have no intention of not publishing. I don't know what the agent's take on this is, but I'm convinced that there's no such thing as an unpublishable manuscript. If it's not good enough now, then edit the **** out of it until it is. Hard work= book deal, right?

And if all else fails... med school or law school

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: April 3rd, 2010, 3:51 pm
by wildheart
BlancheKing- Oh yes, I completely agree with your statements. Our manuscripts could always be better. But I think more than anything continuing to write new stories is the most important. The more we write, the better our writing should be. Meaning the closer we are to getting an agent. And maybe it is an age thing. Maybe, if after years of failing to get an agent I'll decide to self publish. I won't know until I get there. So I'm just going to write like mad and hope my dreams come true.

And authors who got published did not get there by sitting on their butts. The ones I have read said they went through years of rejection before they made the sale. And the biggest thing that got them published? Persistence. No matter how many rejections they got, no matter who told them to stop writing, they didn't. They kept at it. They improved their craft. They continued to write. They read. And they succeeded. They didn't give up. So I ask myself every day: How can I reach my dream if I take myself out of the game before I have even started?

So when I finish my manuscript I will send my query letter out to agents. I will hope for pages. I will get rejections. And I will keep writing because with every word I put down I am that much closer to having an agent say yes instead of no. Oh, and in case you are wondering...I have never sent my work out to agents before, so when I get rejections I might feel differently about all this, but I doubt it.

And yes, BlancheKing, I must agree....there is always med school if this doesn't work out.

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 12:13 pm
by Margo
The contingency plan is: continue working on the craft of writing and keep writing. I also occasionally pause to do short stories, to change things up a bit and establish a name.

Rejected manuscripts go into a trunk for a period of time, while I figure out what's wrong with them and whether they can be revised to good purpose. I'm not one of those people who wrote a couple of novels and - voila - got a publishing contract for #2 or #3. It's no wonder, since I finished by first book-length ms at 13. By 18 I had three finished (all crap). Did another two in college (smaller heaps of suckfulness). And another after college (which hardly sucked at all - but still sucked slightly). This is not counting partials. Of all these, only the last still exists. I will probably try to rework that story and do it again from scratch. The others have been deleted, shredded, what have you. They served their purpose in the learning curve, but I'm realistic about them. Someday the agent who signs me will experience a miracle - the first new author he/she has ever signed who does not immediately bury the agent in a heap of crappy trunk novels.

While I agree in theory that no novel is doomed to being unpublishable, I also have experienced in practice that there are those who either don't know what's wrong the the novel in order to fix it (and don't have access to professional-quality feedback), and those who would rather argue with agents and editors than listen to them. A prime example is an aspiring writer at an intensive workshop I attended a couple of years ago. Over breakfast she ranted about what the agent and editors told her in critiques. When the published novelist next to her gently noted that she agreed with the critiques, the rest of the table got to hear a pretty ugly argument between them. I don't honestly believe I will ever see the aspiring author's name in print, unless it's self-pub.

No insult intended to the self-pub crowd here, but I would not consider self-pub. I have met three writers who have gone that route (we had the same writing teacher), been to their readings, and found that not one of them was ready for publication. One book was a pretty flat, stereotypical thriller riddled with errors regarding anti-terrorism military tactics, training, and weaponry. When my husband (who trained with the British military to serve in Northern Ireland, had been through the training, and had actually used the weaponry) pulled the author aside to point this out, the author didn't take it very well. My guess he wasn't the sort to take anything but positive feedback.

As for the occasional discovery of self-pub material that leads to movies and book deals, I'm sure a handful do. I'm reminded of the film He's Just Not That Into You. "You're not the exception; you're the rule." Of course, they go and ruin it in the name of a happy ending by making the heroine the exception instead of the rule, but that's Hollywood. I don't believe 25% of all writers are producing publishable material, even in comparison to some of the sloppier stuff being turned out by bestsellers-turned-primadonnas (who do frequently see a slide in sales numbers and an increase in disgruntled readers). I don't think the discovery odds are better with self-pub, especially as the industry grows. Sincere congrats to successes like Linda, though. If you get to be the exception, make good use of it.

Re: Do you have a rejection contingency plan?

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 12:34 pm
by Quill
You said it, Margo.

My contingency plan is to keep getting better. Somewhere in me there's a great writer and my job is to keep working on my craft until that writer emerges consistently on the page. I've got the rest of my life, it's not a race, I'm content being the little engine that could. What keeps me going is the need to express myself in words. Plus I enjoy the learning and the slow but steady improvement.

In a way, my current work in progress is pulling me along. It's a good enough story that it demands of me to learn to write equal to it. If that makes sense. It doesn't want to go away. It doesn't want to be trunked.

I will say that I am sometimes envious of young writers like Ally Carter and Sarah Dessen, who hit home runs seemingly right out of the gate. Although I'm guessing they probably have a bunch of trunk stuff, too.

I will also say that I'm really happy having stumbled onto this great community of writers here at Nathan Bransford Forums. You have already been a significant support group for me. Thank you, all.