Did they have that many “dream agents”?

Why not send to just one or two top choices?

And, really, how long does it take?

Answers flew in — achingly honest and reminiscent of everyone’s distant and not-at-all-distant (often painful) publishing journeys. thought back to how long it took me.

The answer? You got some time?

My published-too-young book: In my twenties, I co-wrote a nonfiction book (under my former — married — name, Randy Meyers Wolfson) Couples With Children. Co-author Virginia DeLuca and I, in our work with pregnant and post-partum women, saw that suddenly shaky marriages were of more concern than diapers. And we wanted to write. We bought How to Get Happily Published by Judith Applebaum, wrote a proposal and a sample chapter, sent it off and shortly thereafter had a contract. I won’t go into the many mistakes we made after that (the only thing we did right was selling the book) but this ‘easy’ sell offered (extraordinarily) undeserved confidence.

Soon after, I got divorced. Now I was a single mother and talking about marriage and children seemed, um… embarrassing to say the least. And fiction was really my love. The nonfiction Couples With Children was left to languish.

In between raising kids, badly-chosen men, working in human services by day, and bartending by night, I co-wrote Novels 1 & 2 with Ginny: two mysteries. Got an agent. We thought we had a series. Didn’t sell books.

Moving on, still submerged in bad men and fantasy, still not applying myself to learning the deeper tenets of writing fiction, and skating on sheer want, I wrote Novel 3, which should have been titled: The Book That Helped Me Pretend I Wasn’t Screwing Up, My Life By Mythologizing It.

No agent. No sale. No memory if I wrote a query. Probably not, because a friend insisted on sending it to his wife’s-cousin-the-writer, who called it… execrable? Deplorable? Tripe? He didn’t soften the slam by deeming it poetic or lyrical. Because it wasn’t.

Got depressed.

Had a drink or ten.

Thank goodness I had that inappropriate guy to lean on!

Fast forward: Sent kids through college. Lost bad guy/s. Found good one. Got serious about writing. Embarked on my homemade MFA and wrote my trilogy:

Novel 4: Dove in. Joined a writer’s group. Finished. Got an agent. As soon as she put it out for submission, I began writing:

Novel 5: Showed it to said agent. She liked it so much that she replaced the now-limping and ten-times rejected # 4 (are you still with me) with newly minted # 5. And I began writing:

Novel 6. Showed a bit to agent. She loved it. Said keep going! Meanwhile, she kept trotting out #5 to a few editors.

Then my agent turned more attention to representing a different genre and it seemed right for us to part ways. Leaving this agent was wrenching. The “bird in the hand” theory pulled, but I felt a sweet spot with # 6, and felt that I needed the right person to represent it (aware many would find it dark).

No hard feelings, a virtual handshake goodbye, and agent and I said goodbye.

Back out on the agent-hunting circuit, feeling like a confused divorcee. (Do I talk about the ex? Pretend it never happened?)

Six months later I signed with new (wonderful and current) agent. She read. She edited. I revised. She sold#6 (The Murderer’s Daughters) in eight days.

How long did it take to sell my debut novel from when I began writing fiction?

• 20+ years
• Six novels
• Three agents

What I learned:

1) To take heart from positive words embedded in rejections and believe the good things they said about my writing. Believe when they said “the work just wasn’t for them.” To take their criticisms seriously and pay attention to ideas generously passed on. (Well, not the one that said, “she was so over domestic violence.”)

2) To believe that writing, like any craft, requires honing, and not to beat myself up over unsold books. They weren’t wasted time — they were my education. I doubt Georgia O’Keefe sold her first paintings. Or Grandma Moses, who I feared I might pass in “firsts.”

3) To surround myself with supportive writer friends and take heart from their success (even when I felt green and evil.)

4) To learn when to fold them.

5) To know when to hold on.

6) To realize there is no such thing as a pre-met “dream agent” anymore than there is a pre-met “dream husband.” The dream agent is the one who loves your book — because s/he’ll make your dreams come true. You’ll know them when you find them.

I held on through years of rejection, chanting the old joke:

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, practice, practice.

Getting my craft to match my passion and thoughts took many years. I would never have said it back then, at my personal ground zero, but I’m happy that it worked out as it did. The Murderer’s Daughters was the right book for me to debut with. Had I sold any previous novel, I don’t think I would have ended up feeling as right as I did.

I think, like with a partner, when you have the right material, there’s a magic click, and you fall in love — whether it takes six books or sixteen years on one book.

Maybe that’s how long it takes. As long as it takes to feel the click, and have someone else agree.

And now, making up for lost time, I just turned in Novel # 7 (The Comfort of Lies) and am on Chapter 7 of Novel # 8 — working with, yes, my dream editor at Atria Books. – Randy

The remedy for artistic bitterness is immersion in the present, in the joyful, continuing struggle of making something. You keep the challenges new, you solve the problems a new way, you do what you don’t know how to do yet, and you’ll stay awake in your spirit, and it won’t matter quite as much what anyone thinks.

Stay awake in your spirit. I love that.

If you have a favorite quote on literary envy, an anecdote, or a favorite remedy, do share it in the comments!

I couldn’t find the whole piece on line to link to, but the magazine’s website is rich with other information. I’ve been a subscriber since not long after I started writing. It’s my favorite comfortable-chair magazine. – Meg

My name is Alex George, and I am a debut novelist. All over again.

Let me explain.

I’ve published four books before, but only in Europe – never in America. I stopped writing completely after my fourth novel was published while I studied for the Missouri bar exam (I had been a lawyer in England for eight years, and had to re-qualify when I moved to the States.) It wasn’t the most relaxing sabbatical, but the break gave me the time and distance I needed to assess my writing career, which had not been going well. Sales were disappointing, and writing had stopped being fun. I was in a rut that I seemed unable to escape from. My publisher kept asking for the same kind of novel, time after time; every attempt to develop or expand the scope of my books was met with polite but firm editorial disapproval, and vague references to “readers’ expectations”. I had left my job as a corporate lawyer to write full-time some years earlier, and the additional pressures caused by that decision had squeezed any last pleasure remaining out of the act of telling stories.

With my fourth novel completed, though, I was out of contract. And (the bar exam having been successfully negotiated) I had also resumed my legal career – which meant, glory of glories, that writing had become a hobby again. Better still, I was free to write whatever book I liked.

I took a deep breath, and resolved to try and write the sort of book I had dreamed of writing for years. I wanted to tell an ambitious, big, complex tale – the kind of story that a reader could disappear into. And so I put my first four books out of my head and set off on this new journey, writing as if this book were my first. I got up at five o’clock every morning and wrote for two hours while my family slept. It was a slow process – painfully slow, sometimes – but I rarely missed a day. Even if I only wrote a handful of sentences, every morning my collection of words grew a little more. There were the usual moments of crippling self-doubt, of course, but on I stumbled, a few paragraphs at a time, and the story gradually took shape. Characters materialized; ideas coalesced. I took my sweet time, and I had a ball. After five years or so, I had produced a novel – or something approximating one. It was so different from anything else I had written that it really did feel like a debut. If nothing else, it represented a fresh start. After a few epic rewrites I sold worldwide rights to A Good American to Amy Einhorn Books in 2010, and the book was published a couple of weeks ago. It’s my first book to appear in the United States, and so I have been christened a debut author once more.

If there is a moral to this story, I suppose it is this: write the book you want you to write. The chances are that it will be far better than any other book you’ll produce. A Good American was the book I always longed to write but never could, and perhaps because of that it feels like my first novel. In fact, it feels like a whole new career. I feel very lucky to have been given a second chance. – Alex

Every time something is written about The Weird Sisters that refers to it as my “first novel,” I cringe.

Here’s the thing: it’s not my first novel.

It’s my fifth.

And that’s only counting the ones I managed to finish – there are pages and pages of notes and drafts of novels that never got past the first few chapters.

Maybe I’m a late bloomer, but it took me a long, long time to learn how to write a novel, and even longer to write one that was any good.

Part of this is definitely my fault – I spent a lot of time trying to write in genres I thought would sell, trying to write stories I thought would sell, instead of writing the story I wanted to tell in the style my heart wanted it told in. But I can’t criticize myself too much for that – playing around with different voices and the rules of different genres was part of what helped me find my own voice.

Here was the hardest part of the whole process, though: recognizing they weren’t any good, but getting back up to do it all over again anyway.

Writing is hard, you know? And I think there’s a tendency, when we’re done, to rush right out and share it with the world – friends, family, the internet, agents, editors – just because the darn thing is finally finished.

I did that with one of my manuscripts – I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been. I knew it had inconsistencies and plot holes big enough to drive a bus through and was in desperate need of a few months of lying fallow while I worked on something else and then came back to it with fresh eyes and an honest heart. But I had set some ridiculous deadline for myself, and I think I knew, deep down, that it was going to be hard, hard work to whip that baby into shape, and I just couldn’t face it.

I’m lucky that I only sent it to one person, and that one person rejected it (she would have been a fool not to), but took the time to read the entire thing, complimenting me on what I did right, and detailing what I did wrong.

It was a hugely embarrassing experience – I felt bad for having wasted her time, especially since she was so incredibly gracious about the whole thing.

But here’s what I did:

I read her comments carefully.

I wrote her a note thanking her for her time.

I sat down and started writing again.

And that time, I wrote the book I really wanted to write. That time, I listened to my heart, and thought about the things in my life I wanted to understand, and I didn’t think about whether or not the book would sell.

I just wrote.

And, ironically, that became The Weird Sisters – the novel that did sell.

I’m not alone in having my debut novel not being my first – it happens all the time, and there’s no shame in it. No one expects someone who has only watched other people play the piano to sit right down and knock off a few sonatas. That’s entertaining, but it’s not impressive.

What is impressive is watching the concert pianist who has been practicing hours and hours, every day, for years, who has raged and cried and threatened to give it all up, who has played the same measures over and over and over again until they were exactly right. That’s what makes a brilliant pianist.

That’s what makes a wonderful writer. – Eleanor

• “I have nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess that no one can ever believe this narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.” – Charles Dickens
• “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
• “It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. ” – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
• “There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.” – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
• “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

and my favorite, because it’s the kind of book I like best:

• “Give me a moment, because I like to cry for joy. It’s so delicious, John dear, to cry for joy.” – Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend