Tag Archives: literary agents

The Gap

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I’ll always remember when I sent my first query letters. It was two Winter Olympics ago, Vancouver 2010 – I distracted myself from my inbox by watching Johnny Weir and Evgeni Plushenko, and watched my first rejections roll in a few minutes before alpine skiing.

(I took a shot of vodka for each rejection. I realized a couple of weeks later that 1 shot per rejection was quickly becoming unrealistic.)

It was my third manuscript, but the first one I deigned may be good enough to take that next step. I got five requests for more material out of 79 queries. The first full manuscript rejection was maybe one of the kindest I’ve ever gotten to this day, the first time an industry professional ever called me ‘talented.’ And I remember how excited I was that I’d worked hard enough to trick someone into using the t-word.

Because I was, by this point, painfully aware of the gap that existed between the story in my head and the story I was putting down. I knew I wasn’t naturally talented, but I was going to make it up by wanting this more than anyone else, and hopefully that would be enough.

Eight years later, I sent another round of queries. This was my seventh manuscript. My last agent search had taken three years.

This time, it took three weeks. Responses came fast. Rejections still came faster, but form rejections were few and far-between – they were personal, they were complimentary, and the t-word was used over and over again. It was incredible. It was like all of my most self-indulgent daydreams rolled into a one-month period.

And it was weird as hell. I’d spent so much of my career feeling like I needed to catch up, and suddenly, like a switch had flipped, people were treating me like I was there already. I still kind of felt like I was tricking people. But it occurred to me, an entire eight years after that first rejection, that the people reading it couldn’t tell what was natural talent and what was hard work. On the page, it looks the same.

Progress isn’t always a thing you can track, especially not when you’re so close to it. But sometimes after a particularly good session, when I look at the scene in my head and the scene I just typed, I don’t feel the shortfall quite so keenly. Sometimes it even feels close.

Now, I’m watching a new set of figure skaters and alpine skiers dominate the Olympics. I’m working through an edit letter I’m thrilled about. And I’m catching up to the story in my head, bit by bit. I’m not watching my inbox, not yet. That comes, with any luck, later this spring.
I haven’t completely bridged the gap yet. But now I’m not sure anyone ever does.

That is, however, what revisions are for.

It’s been such a pleasure contributing to this blog over the past year. Congratulations to our new 2018-19 fellows, and happy writing!
-Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow

What Happens on Submission Stays on Submission

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When I was querying literary agents for the first (and second, and third) time, I kept a moderately active Blogspot. Nothing too formal, but enough to connect me to a community I’m still lucky enough to know today. I had their posts as a guidebook. Whenever I wasn’t sure if I’d been waiting too long, or if I said the wrong thing, I read their experiences, held them up to mine to make sure I was on the right track. Whenever there was a question I wasn’t sure if I could ask, the answer existed somewhere already.

When I signed with my then-agent at the end of 2012, I posted about how excited I was to go on submission to editors. And then, following the conventional wisdom I’d read about, I kept my mouth shut. It has, for the most part, stayed shut since.

The rationale behind the Submission Cone of Silence is as follows: it keeps you from saying anything you’ll regret, and it preserves the illusion that you’re a fresh talent rolling into an editor’s inbox just minutes after signing with your agent. And all those What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Sell a Book guides told me the same thing. That it’s hard, of course it’s hard, but you can tell everyone all about that after you sell.

And then I kept not-selling.

This is the point where I’d look for someone else’s story to reassure me that I was normal. This is also the point where it became clear that everyone else got the same advice I did. The blog posts were self-selecting. Submission was the longest month of my life, I must have read about a dozen times. And then I’d look at my submission list, time-stamped about a year prior, and wonder if one day archaeologists were going to find me half-crumbled into dust and still clutching my laptop.

(“Extraordinary,” they’d whisper. “She was refreshing her inbox all those years.”)

I asked my friends, published and almost-published, when they sold. On the second round. On my second book. On the second round of my second book. By the time my third book went out on submission, I’d stopped asking.

I did a lot of backspacing, both in writing and in tweeting. Everything I tried to say sounded ungrateful, or impatient, or dismissive of the luck and privilege that got me this far. When my agent parted ways with me, I did a lot of acknowledging it without acknowledging it. It was easy enough to figure out if you read between the lines, but if I didn’t say as much in public, maybe no one would figure out what an Undesirable I was.

And after a while, I just wanted to own it. I’m competitive. If I was going to be an Undesirable, I wanted to be the Least Desirable Person in Publishing.

I didn’t own it. I cultivated an even better poker face. I got really good at keeping my excitement in the forefront at events and book launches, and saving the bucketsful of conflicting feelings until I walked home. I gently brushed off questions about when my book was coming out, and I said a lot of No, that’s okay. I didn’t want anyone to feel like they’d asked anything wrong. It would hurt more if they stopped asking.

This is, I know, a lot of talking about not-talking. I started this post thinking I’d talk about the times spent scribbling on the margins of my day job, the manuscripts shelved, the foothold into the writing world that I worried I’d lost until the Writers’ Room and its wonderful community helped me reshape it. These are still things I want to talk about. But then I started to wonder what about these stories was so damaging that I felt the need to sit on them for over four years.

After all, writers tend to lose perspective, stuck in their own heads. When I called my grandmother the night I received the WROB fellowship, I laughed that I finally had good news for her.

She firmly informed me that I had good news for her all the time.

–Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow