I don’t know how anyone else viewed the prospect of querying. I was nervous, but I didn’t dread it. Honestly, I was eager to start. I think part of it was that I had never done it before, so I wasn’t jaded. And part of it (a big part) was that I was riding the high of having been accepted into Pitch Wars the first time I applied (seriously, I’m still surprised and grateful for it). I didn’t get any requests during the Pitch Wars agent showcase, but I kept revising and eventually I was happy. I received positive responses from beta readers. There was nothing left to do but start querying. Even then, submitting my work to agents—submitting my work to judgment—was terrifying.
I’ve heard a lot complaints and discussion about the phrase “not right for me”, that nebulous phrase agents seem to use when a project is good, but not perfect. Or not perfect for them. Or they don’t know how to sell it. Or, or, or. It’s kind of become a catch-all phrase, but one that, when querying, you’ll probably hear a lot.
I heard it a lot. And I think what softened the blow of hearing that phrase about my own work, again and again, is that I’d thought it before.
When I started querying around this time last year, I worked in television development. Part of my job was to read scripts and judge whether or not they were right for our production company. Ninety percent of them were submitted through agents or managers, so they had been vetted before they reached me. And of the dozens I read I only loved two.
At my going away lunch my boss told me that she read the things I liked carefully because I was so… judicious with my praise. And it wasn’t that everything crossing my desk was bad, it was the opposite of that. I read scripts that were carefully crafted, by veterans in the industry, etc. But. But. But they weren’t right for our company’s vision. Or the humor was too mean. Or we couldn’t think of a suitable home. Maybe something about it wasn’t quite right but we didn’t know how to fix it. Sometimes it was too similar to something we were already developing. A lot of times it was a matter of personal taste. And, occasionally, a project that crossed my desk was just not good enough.
Once, my boss asked me to draft a rejection email for a submission. The dreaded “Thank you, but” email. Honestly? I opened the folder of query rejections and read through a bunch of the polite, but generic replies I’d gotten from agents because they weren’t mean, they were just honest. Thank you for thinking of me. You’re a strong writer. You have a good idea here. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how good your submission is, it’s just not right.
Over the course of the eleven months I’ve been querying, I’ve amassed a lot of rejections. A few came with a nice note, or helpful feedback, but for the most part, it was the generic “I read every submission carefully, but…” And 99% of the time, a rejection is just another email. It’s another red box in my submission spreadsheet, and doesn’t bother me. Much. It’s just a fact of life.
Working in television development was my dream job. I miss it every day. And I will forever be grateful for the way it prepared me to deal with rejection of my own. You’ll hear over and over again that publishing is a subjective business and having worked on the other side of it (albeit in television), I understand that first hand. It helped to make the rejections sting less.
Category: Writing
The Other Kind of Writing
I’ve been thinking a lot about the different kinds of writing that I want to do. Not just in my career (although that, too), but day-to-day. Mostly, I’m trying to decide if I want to get back into journaling. I say ‘get back into’ like I was ever dedicated or consistent. My journal never looked like the ones you see on Instagram, pretty and adorned, full of perfect lettering, bursting with color, and filled with pictures both pasted and drawn. My journal was just a hardbound book filled with flowing black ink and imperfect cursive and I’m kind of terrified to open it again.
I have three old journals, actually. Two of them scare the crap out of me. One, my favorite, is a hokey little book that was gifted to me by a friend of my mom’s and I covered it with an old book cover—the elastic kind you begged your parents to buy for your textbooks so you didn’t have to cover them with brown paper bags—and it looks silly. It’s filled with dreams. Not aspirations, but actual things that I dreamed at night. It stretches back to 2007 and has hundreds of dated entries. Once, I even made an index. That book hasn’t been updated recently, but I do have an ongoing note on my phone filled with dreams so I’m sure one day I’ll sit down and add to it even if it will never be complete.
The other two journals, they’re the real ones. They’re what you think of when you hear the word journal. Books of thoughts and feelings. Mine are from 2009-2015, roughly my college years and spanning into grad school. As much as I want to revisit my past self, to see what I was doing, what I was thinking, what I felt needed documenting, I don’t know if I ever will. I have no clue of the specifics, but I know they’ll be full of the pain, and confusion, and depression. They’ll be full of sentences like “I’m sad but I don’t know why” and I don’t know that I’m ready to face that.
Because I’m moving soon, I’m parting ways with my therapist. Recently, I’ve noticed that I don’t really know what to say when I go into our appointments. I’ll prattle on about my life, but I can no longer see the Big Issues that I need to address. There is no doubt in my mind that I still have those Big Issues, they’re just not as obvious to me as they were a year ago when I started therapy. I have more tools under my belt, and a fancy name for my depression (dysthymia—basically instead of going through bouts of Major Depression, I am low-key depressed all the time. To be diagnosed you have to have the symptoms basically daily for two years. Once I had a name for it and knew the symptoms more intimately, I realized I’d been dealing with this since I was 16). So all of those years of journals, those are from the time that I was depressed but didn’t know it for what it was and I don’t know if I’m ready to see just how much it affected my life.
I wonder if I’ll miss anything by not opening the journals again. Are there happy moments I’ve otherwise forgotten that would be nice to revisit? But I don’t think that’s the case. I only ever remember opening them up and pouring my soul into them like I was Ginny Weasley baring herself to Tom Riddle, when all of the feelings rumbling about inside of me were going to erupt and I needed a way to let them out that wasn’t (just) crying into my pillow or on the phone to my mom (or both. Usually both).
Those journals were my therapy before I was willing to go out and find an actual therapist.
Maybe I won’t open them, after all, I’ll just continue to tote them around every time I move, like the rest of the baggage I carry around with me every day. But they aren’t just baggage—they’re evidence of my perseverance and my growth. No matter what, I don’t think I’m ready to throw them out .
Molly Kasperek 