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Meg Waite Clayton

New York Times Bestselling Author

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June 2, 2010 By Meg Waite Clayton

Allison Winn Scotch: Stubbornness has Always Been My Strong Suit

New York Times bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch has a new novel out: The One That I Want, which Publisher’s Weekly calls “an aching, honest look into the death and rebirth of relationships … a wise, absorbing narrative.” She also has a wonderfully inspiring story to tell about the determination it took her to get into print. I know you’ll enjoy both! – Meg
I had several starts and stops along my road to publication, and any of them, I have to say in retrospect, might have been enough to knock someone less bullheaded out of the race. Fortunately, stubbornness has always been my strong suit, and I was undeterred.
Prior to transitioning to fiction, I was a full-time freelance magazine writer, but had always felt that pull toward novels. So one day, about eight or nine years ago, I realized that all the day-dreaming in the world wasn’t going to get an actual manuscript written, and thus, sat down – with no clue what I was doing at all – and started writing. The manuscript took me three or four years to complete, mostly because I stopped halfway and had no idea what to do from there…getting started was easy, finishing it? Not so much.
Eventually, I put my head down, dug in and wrote those last 150 pages, and well, I’d be lying if I said that I thought they were anything less than brilliant. BRILLIANT! I had already envisioned the bestseller list, the movie soundtrack, the cover art when I started my agent search. I can’t remember now how many queries I fired off, but it was somewhere in the ballpark of average: more than twenty, less than fifty, when I got that sweet, sweat offer that every writer hopes for – representation for my novel.
My agent said that the book would require fairly extensive editing, and so we got to work, cutting exposition, axing unnecessary scenes (brilliant, as I was sure they were), fine-tuning until she deemed it ready for submission. Oh, those anxiety-filled days waiting for word from editors – every second passed like an hour, every email in my inbox a quick sign of hope (then deflation when it wasn’t from my agent) that I was about to transition from unpublished to published author. Alas, the rejections rolled in…and rolled in…and rolled in. Many of them were very gracious and a few were near-misses, but lo and behold, by the end of our process, not one had come in as a “yes.”
Devastation. Despair. What’s a gal to do?
Well, for me, ever that stubborn toddler, I refused to give in. Within a few days of mourning, I sat down at http://www.allisonwinn.com/about-me/my computer and started fresh. This time, I actually had a vague idea of what I was doing, how to create a story arc, how to write the whole damn thing without a two year lag in the middle. So I did. I wrote frantically, completely the entire manuscript in three months. I passed it off to my agent with much euphoria. Unlike the first time around, when I blindly deemed myself brilliant, this time around, I actually had a basis for comparison, and I knew this one was good. At least much better than before.
My agent came back with edits, and I made them. And then….nothing. Silence. My phone calls stopped getting returned, my emails went unanswered. And very slowly, and then very quickly, I started feeling very, very sick to my stomach. My agent, I knew in my gut, had lost faith in me. Despite the fact that I loved this book, that this book, I was certain, was sellable.
A month or so of silence went by, and finally, we spoke. Yes, she admitted, she wasn’t gung-ho on this. She thought, and I’ll never forget this, “That going out with this manuscript will do more harm than good for my career.” And what did I want to do? She asked. Revise the original manuscript. (No.) Start an entire new one that she would take a look at. (No.) Or find someone else to represent the current one. (Yes.) To be fair, I hesitated and mulled it over for about two hours. And then, that was that. We parted ways amicably enough and that same afternoon (need I raise that stubborn toddler analogy again?), I started querying agents all over again.
Two major set-backs: 1) an unsellable completed manuscript, 2) an agent who didn’t think I was viable in the marketplace.
So what?
I queried my little heart out, and this time, I received several offers of representation within the first few weeks. I signed with my agent – Elisabeth Weed – who remains my agent to this day, and a few weeks later, she sold that manuscript, the one that would have done more harm than good for my career, in a four-way auction. Could it have gone a different way? Could my first agent have been right? Well…sure. Some stories will end like that. But mine didn’t. I refused to let it. I refused to let one person’s opinion – my original agent’s – dictate the course of my future AND refused to let it override my instinct that my book was a worthy one. Thank goodness for my gut. Thank goodness that I was born stubborn as a mule. Thank goodness that I connected with the right agent for me. That’s the story of how I became a published author. Was it easy? No chance. Was it worth it? Indeed. – Allison

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Filed Under: Guest Authors Tagged With: Allison Winn Scotch

Meg Waite Clayton

Meg Waite Clayton is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON, a Jewish Book Award finalist based on the true story of the Kindertransport rescue of ten thousand children from Nazi-occupied Europe—and one brave woman who helped them escape. Her six prior novels include the Langum-Prize honored The Race for Paris and The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly's 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. A graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school, she has also written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Runners World, and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face. megwaiteclayton.com

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