A Writer's Familiarity with Failure

My literary agent, Kristin Nelson, has been blogging this week about fun facts on each of her clients, and a couple of days ago she posted a tidbit about me! pubrants.blogspot.com/2011/01/… She says, "Marie Lu—was an attendee I met at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference. She submitted sample pages to her first novel which I passed on (sensing a theme here!). Then I took her on for a novel that I wasn’t able to sell. Now her debut YA, LEGEND, is one of Penguin’s big books for this fall. Talk about paying some dues."

And that leads me into a blog entry I've been meaning to write for a while.

It's easy for success stories to be the news we all like to focus on. Seven-figure deal! Four-book deal! Multi-city tour! And so on. But for almost every successful writer, there's a long story of struggle in how s/he managed to get there. And I was no different. So today I'm going to talk about my failures in writing, and all the bumps I hit before I reached a smooth patch of road.

When I first started writing seriously (i.e. for the goal of publication), I naively thought that I would finish my manuscript, send out a few letters to literary agencies, get an agent, and then be on my way to getting my manuscript accepted by a big NY publisher. I was in high school. Life was bright, shiny, and optimistic. How hard could it possibly be? Plenty of teenagers get publishing deals, I remember thinking. Christopher Paolini. Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. They were my idols, and I wanted to make it into their small circle.

I didn't even know how to write a proper query letter, but I mailed those letters off to about 30-40 literary agents. The result? Manuscript #1 didn't get a single request for sample chapters. Not a single one. Undaunted, I sent out letters to a dozen more agencies. I got back a dozen additional rejections. At this point I took a step back, flipped through Manuscript #1 again, and tried to be honest with myself. Manuscript #1 simply wasn't ready to be a book. It was full of cliches and meandering plots, weak characters and poor writing. I'd spent a full year writing it, and turning my back on it hurt. But I took a deep breath, put the file away in my archives, and started on Manuscript #2.

Manuscript #2 was The Glass Sonata, a fantasy novel some of you might remember. For this one I planned better. I worked hard on a worldbuilding document (a spreadsheet that I used to keep track of the places, countries, customs, and magic in my book), and even made a chapter-by-chapter outline of how the story would go. I'd learned this was a good way to go into writing a novel instead of plunging headlong into it with absolutely no planning. I had high hopes for Manuscript #2. I worked on it with every spare moment I had--setting my alarm for the middle of the night so that I could write quietly for a couple of hours, sneaking moments in after school and during lunch periods, writing on weekends when I should have been studying for my SAT (sorry Mom!). Manuscript #2 had stronger writing, better characters. I thought it would be The One.

And for a while, it looked like it might come true. I still got rejections, but I also got requests for sample chapters. While I settled into college life at USC, I got two requests for the entire manuscript--one of them from a leading literary agency that specialized in fantasy/sci-fi. Eagerly I bought a little laser printer and printed out two sets of my four hundred page manuscript. Then I waited.

Eureka. Fantasy Agent called one afternoon, eager to sign me and The Glass Sonata. I shrieked. This is going to happen. I now had a venerable agent at my side, and it was only a matter of time before a publisher bought Manuscript #2.

What I didn't know was how different it was to get an agent to take on your book, vs. what it takes to get a publisher to buy that book. Months went by. We got a couple of bites, and one request from an editor for revisions. I worked hard on that revision, sent it to my agent, and waited for the publishing contract to arrive. Nope. Silence. A year of silence.

As writer Natalie Whipple says, this is the quiet agony of writers who have been signed by agents but haven't had a publisher buy their books. You are now floating in a sort of purgatory, a space where you have no control over what happens to your book. The only thing I could do during this time to keep myself sane was to work on the next manuscript. So I started Manuscript #3. I attended writers' conferences. I tried to hone my craft. Another year passed. Something happened in my personal life that turned everything upside down. I became depressed, bitter, and unreasonably angry at times. I managed to finish Manuscript #3, but all the silent waiting and the personal life drama had taken its toll. Manuscript #3 was weak and unfocused. My agent was obviously not impressed. Months later, after I graduated and got my first job, we parted ways.

This was my writing low. After the joy of getting my first agent, now I was suddenly right back where I started. I didn't write for four months. But soon, inevitably, the itch to tell stories came back. I started Manuscript #4, a historical fantasy about Mozart as a child. And slowly, very slowly, my writing started to flow again. I went back to researching agents. One agent in particular stuck out to me. Kristin was someone I'd met at Pikes Peak Writers Conference during my college years, and in the short conversation I had with her I knew she was a true writer's advocate, someone brilliant and sharp and kind. I liked her so much, in fact, that I was only halfway through writing Manuscript #4 when I decided to query her. (By the way, this is a no-no. Do NOT do this. Usually it does not work out for the better!) A couple of weeks later, she requested sample chapters, and then she requested the full. I panicked. I sent her all of Manuscript #4 that I had (about 150 pages at the time), and bashfully admitted that I still needed to finish the full. Thankfully, Kristin gave me a chance. She asked me to send her the finished manuscript when it was ready. In two weeks, I wrote 30,000 words. I sent off Manuscript #4 to her in a frenzy, completely unedited and unpolished. I also sent it out to several other agents I had queried that had requested the full.

And the impossible happened. I got an offer of representation from another amazing agent. Flustered, I emailed Kristin about the development. A weekend later, Kristin called me to offer representation.

A smooth patch of road. I had a venerable agent once again.

But Manuscript #4 went out on submission at a time when the Great Recession was at its deepest. A story about Mozart as a child isn't exactly blockbuster material, and although my agent loved it as much as I did and sent it out with passion and gusto, every publisher was understandably wary of taking on anything that looked like a risk during such a bad economic time. Rejection after rejection came in. We trudged on. Several editors did express interest in the story, and we came very close to selling it a couple of times. Still, after almost a year, we had no bites. We considered taking the book to smaller publishers. Secretly, I knew it was the end of the road for Manuscript #4. I buried it in my ever-growing archives folder.

Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter behind Dexter (Showtime series) and all the Twilight films, once said that to be a writer, you have to be able to get kicked in the teeth. You have to be lying on the ground, bleeding, and be able to pick yourself up and brush yourself off, and keep going. Her words are completely true. For some, writing may lead to instant success. For the rest of us, it is a long and hard road. It is a test of endurance.

While my agent and I waited for slow, monthly responses on Manuscript #4, I began work on Manuscript #5. Unlike my previous stories, Manuscript #5's plot came to me in a flash. I was lying on my living room carpet, lazily watching the movie version of Les Miserables, when I suddenly thought, "Hey, why don't I write a story about a famous boy criminal and a famous teen detective hired to hunt him down?" I remembered one of my favorite characters, the boy protagonist of The Glass Sonata (Manuscript #2) that I had abandoned so long ago. I decided to revive him. Manuscript #5 poured out in six months. My agent, with her unwavering support, guided me through several rounds of thorough rewrites. Finally, over a year after I had first signed with her, we took it out on submission.

Manuscript #5 was Legend. And after two submissions that took a year to fade away into nothing, Legend sold in a few short weeks. The suddenness took my breath away. When everything falls into place, it all seems so easy. But that ease is the end result of a full decade of failure.

I'm no writing prodigy. (Or a prodigy in any field.) It took me a long time to learn my craft, and as I work on Legend 2 I still have blinding moments of self-doubt. Will this one end my career before it even starts? Will I disappoint? But as a writer, we have to be able to take that kick in the teeth. Even if everything falls apart tomorrow, I will still be writing. And for everyone who is an aspiring writer, no matter how many kicks you get, you have to keep writing. Because success won't feel like anything if you don't know what failure feels like.

(Here are some other stories of writers that have experienced bumps in the road.)

Marina Fiorato: www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo…
Sherrilyn Kenyon: www.facebook.com/note.php?note…
Holly Lisle: www.fmwriters.com/Visionback/V…
Natalie Whipple: betweenfactandfiction.blogspot…