Hello everyone

Long time lurker, first time poster. I've had the good fortune to have found an agent for my first novel and it's currently on submission to publishing houses. I've received a few complimentary rejections from the first round and waiting on tenterhooks for one editor to attempt to convince his aquisitions team they should buy it. Cue four agonising weeks with no word.

Has anyone had any experience of initial editor interest and then a wider acquisitions team kicking a novel into touch? I know there's probably little read-across as every book and buying audience will be unique but thought I'd ask the question anyway. At the moment, I'm expecting the worst but hoping for the best.

Think this is a great site - looking forward to getting involved.

Cheers

pad

Pad, I have to admit, my agent has just said to me that in her experience, if it's going to happen at all, it happens quickly. Mind you, she's pretty high powered, and I think I'd make my mind up very fast if she was on the other end of the phone!

But very good luck anyway, and if it doesn't happen this time, remember to take all the compliments to heart as well as the constructive criticisms!

Emma

I think Emma's agent has a point. But once an agent sent my book out (which took 19 years to achieve!) I got a couple of rejections fairly quick - with all sorts of effusive comments (yeah, if I'm so clever, why aint I rich?). Then an acceptance on Christmas Eve (aw, look, it's snowing!). Time elapsed from sending out: about 4 weeks.

I'd say you're doing very well. Shit, you're only 32!

Seriously, best of luck.

Joe

With me, too, it happened quickly. And, Emma, CONGRATULATIONS on your publishing deal! (just found out....)

Sharon, many thanks. I was trying not to mention it in my previous post, as I had to check with my agent that it couldn't fall through!
Emma

Thanks for the thoughts guys. I tend to agree and am steeling myself. One welcome, positive aspect is the impetus it has given novel 2. If it does all come to nothing, I imagine it will be a very different feeling having a new first draft of something well underway, rather than facing the prospect of starting again from scratch. Amazing how that gets the laptop open and fingers on keys...

With me, I waited a whole unhealthy six months after I'd sent the MSS before my publisher offered me a contract.

She told me she's deliberated for so long because she really loved the book but had no idea how to market it.

JB

Pad, I used to push my synopsis and samples into the letter box and walk home and start the new novel. In fact, I tend to find that about halfway through the writing of one, the new one starts insisting that it's much more interesting, and I have to shut it up in order to get the first one finished and revised (and revised, and revised)
That's why I've got six novels in my bottom drawer!
Emma

I have to say, just having an agent is a huge head start. Well done on that alone, and EmmaD, Clare Alexander? Cor. Bloomin Well Done.

Adrian, many thanks. Clare's very nice, though I think she'd be scary if she wasn't on your side. Same goes for my editor at Headline. Apparently they had a tussle over various rights, and I'm SO glad I wasn't involved!
Emm

Well done, Emma. It's so great to hear good news like this. May your sales be as high as your spirits must me right now.

Just one question but tell me to mind my own business if you want. With hindsight, what do you think this latest novel has that the previous six didn't have? Have you improved as a writer over that time or is this story more gripping or have you just had better luck this time round?

Ashlinn

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correction: 'be' not 'me'

Many thanks, Ashlinn.

Never mind minding your own business - writing's all our business, I think! Every novel I've written has been much better than the last (shows how awful the early ones must have been, and what a slow learner I am!). I've watched myself learning as I work on it, and start the next novel with that new skill and knowledge. I find that ideas leapfrog, so that as I finish one and send it out, I think, 'Yes, NOW I know how I should have written that much earlier novel', and set to without getting the first version out to look at. So at least half of them, including this and the next, have big ideas, characters or plot elements that I've tackled before. Number Four is the first I wouldn't be ashamed to show someone now. It's still in some ways a favourite, because it's very compact and well-structured. That was the first one that got publishers interested. The next two were in some ways less successful, but only because they were much more ambitious in structure and scope. Then I joined the Glamorgan MPhil, and the result was Shadows - at least, an earlier draft of it.

As to why Shadows works? Partly that I'm just better at the whole thing - I have a bigger tool kit, and by watching myself I've worked out a process that suits me. I get more things right first time, and when I don't, I see that I haven't sooner and know what to do about it. But mainly it's the MPhil: every inch of the novel has been scrutinised by my tutor, and most of it by a workshopful of my peers. And then 2½ agents. That's worth an awful lot for all the things it's very difficult to spot yourself, like whether the narrative drive keeps going, whether your plot is clear enough, in my case whether the two parallel strands were knitted together enough, and whether anyone except you cares about your characters. That encourages you to murder your darlings; it's so hard to be brutal to good bits of writing that just don't do the job. If I hadn't done the MPhil, I would have got a novel professional edited, to get some of the same feedback.

Also, I may be lucky in my timing. I was always going to end up writing historical fiction, but it has happened to come back into fashion, thanks to people like Ackroyd, after a period in the commercial doldrums.

And partly perhaps because I've been in love with one of my central characters ever since he was born in a brief writing exercise on a Skyros course. This is his third appearance!

Emma

Emma,

Thanks for being so honest. I've been thinking a lot lately about how much better we get as writers over time and about the importance of rewriting. I once read an interview with Larry McMurtry where he thinks that excessive rewriting bleeds the spirit from a novel and it made me think.

This obviously goes against the grain of current thinking where 'rules of writing' and creative writing classes hold the day. I have the subversive notion that these things make writing slicker but I'm not entirely convinced that they make it better. I'm open to being convinced.

Ashlinn

He spoke of "excessive" and "excessive" anything is automatically bad... but how do we define excessive? Only the writer can judge; andit al depends how close you are, in the first draft, to what your story is meant to be. the way I write, the first draft comes quickly and with much delight and spirit, but it's only after months of rewriting do i diecover what the story really is, in it's essence. It's only after digging deeper and deeper, searching intensely for the right words, do I really know myself; and then the spirit is not killed, but actually revealed! Was it Michaelangelo who said that sculpting is only the cutting away of stone that doesn't belong tothe sculpture? So it is with writing, I feel. At least with me, The first draft is really only a rough draft. A lot more has to go into it.
I suppose there are people who can produce a perfect first draft - I envy them1

I think writing-down performs different functions for different people, and happens at different stages of the story-making process.

Mozart's manuscripts are incredibly clean and un-amended, not because he was some kind of naive conduit for a stream of perfect music from God, but because he did his revising in his head, and the writing-down was a late stage of his process. (When you think of the cost and bother of manuscript paper and quill pen, you can see why it might be worth developing the habit). Beethoven's manuscripts are a chaos of crossing-out and editing, because for him, revising only happened after he'd seen what he had on the page.

Personally, I'm Beethoven, if you see what I mean. But as to revising, I think it's part of the question of when you've got your writer's head on, and when your editor's head. See Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, just in case I haven't mentioned it recently. Your writer positively shouldn't be your editor, censoring or amending too much - that's how you keep the drive and shape and passion of your story. But your writer is too in-the-moment to see where a juicy piece of writing which springs from some potent memory actually weakens the suspense, or when the exciting story bounds along at such a pace that it becomes bald and schematic. That's your editor's job, and the greater distance (which is usually time, but might be space) your editor has from the excited, uncritical writer, the more clearly the editor can see these things.

Excessive revising seems to me to happen when you try to revise to other people's criteria: you mustn't shut your instincts up while trying to do what they say. Not that they're wrong, just that you have to keep your writer's eye on your editor's revisions, as well as the other way round. If your writer is really sure that some revision is sucking the blood out of a scene, rather than making it clearer, then you should go with the writer. But you have to be sure that it's not just your excited writer trying to stop your editor very properly murdering a few darlings.

Back to revisions for my editor at Headline. They are not small, which is why the nice diversion of posting this isn't either...

Emma

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Sharon - the Michaelangelo analogy is spot on. For some, the first draft is like hacking the marble block out of the mountain - I can almost see the story in there, it's just a matter of chipping away.