Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [84]
Self-publication’s okay, then, if you can afford it. And if you know that it’s not the road to wealth, fame or professional status.
And what is the road to all those good things?
You just keep punching. You must submit your manuscript relentlessly, shrugging off rejection and sending it on to another publisher the day it comes back. You simply cannot let rejection get you down, whether it comes in the form of a printed slip, a personal note, or a refusal to read your book in the first place. You can remind yourself that all a rejection means is that one particular person decided against publishing your book. It doesn’t mean your book stinks. It doesn’t even mean that particular editor thinks it stinks. And it certainly doesn’t mean you stink.
You can remind yourself, too, that most novels have taken awhile to find a publisher, that many smash best sellers were turned down by ten or twenty or thirty publishers before someone recognized their potential. And you can tell yourself that success doesn’t hinge upon merit alone, that the determination to keep marketing your book is equally essential if you’re going to get anywhere.
You already showed you’ve got determination. It takes plenty of it to get a novel written from the first page to the last. You’re not going to quit now, are you?
No trick, then? No handy household hints to make it easier?
One trick.
One way of taking your mind off rejection.
Get busy on another book. Get deeply involved in another book, so much so that the rejections the first one piles up won’t hurt nearly as much. You’ll be amazed, I think, by how much easier the second book is to write—and by how much you’ve grown as a result of the work that went into the first one.
One of the functions of an agent is to spare you the hassle of marketing your own work, not only because he’s better at it than you are but so that you don’t have to concentrate on two things at once. Until you acquire an agent, you’ll be wearing two hats, an agent’s peaked cap and a writer’s pith helmet. To keep the marketing process from taking your mind off your writing, make the business of getting your manuscript in the mail as automatic as possible. And, to take the sting out of the rejections your novel accumulates along the way, throw yourself into your second novel as completely as you can.
Chapter 15
Doing It Again
It’s a lot easier to begin work on a second book if some eager publisher snapped up the first one ten minutes after it left your typewriter. But it doesn’t happen that way very often. As I suggested earlier, a great many of us write first novels that turn out to be unsalable. And many who do go on to produce salable second novels—but that only happens if we get that second novel written.
There’s no reason to assume that your first novel will turn out to be unpublishable. But there’s every reason in the world to expect that it will take a long time finding its way into a publisher’s heart and onto his spring list. That time will pass much faster and be put to far better use if you spend it writing your next book.
Among other things, plunging into your next book may help you deal with the old My-Novel’s-Finished-And-I-Wish-I-Were-Dead Blues.
I almost hesitate to mention the depression that so frequently follows the completion of a novel for fear of making it a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d hate to think that, having finished your book in high spirits, you’ll now go sit in the corner and sulk so you can be just like the pros. I think it’s better overall, though, to be able to allow for this sort of thing. We writers tend to regard ourselves as unique specimens of humanity, so it may be reassuring to know that one is not the first person in the world to have finished a novel and wanted to throw up.
It does indeed happen to most of us, and I’m sure it’s not limited to writers. This sort of after-work depression seems to be the typical aftermath of any arduous long-term creative endeavor. Indeed, it’s quite obviously equivalent to