A Novel Idea

Savo Heleta wrote a book.  And it was published.

But not before he and a family friend showed up at my door, several years ago, with the proposition that I help Savo ready it for publication.  (Savo had begun learning English only three years earlier and had just started to flesh out his account of a boyhood spent in war-torn Bosnia.)  I didn’t have the heart to tell him or friend Michael (students at St. John’s University in Minnesota at the time) that it was unlikely that Savo’s story would find a publisher; instead I agreed to read his draft and give him feedback.  Once I did, he didn’t balk, as I’d feared he might, at tackling a revision, and that constituted progress.

Excited about the revised form and wondering if publication wasn’t meant to happen, I encouraged him to reorganize the text.  At my urging, he abandoned the chronological order of events, for example, and placed on the very first page, the post-war scene when he points a gun at the head of a former tormentor — a man stuck behind the wheel of a truck in a stalled UN convoy — with Savo poised to pull the trigger.  I asked him if he could also put down on paper the feelings that accompanied experiences like having a home riddled with bullets, his parents seized by thugs, the family’s near-starvation, and he delivered.  More progress.

Did the book have a purpose beyond describing the horrors of war?  Savo dug deeper, exploring big-picture themes, too.  Progress, again.  Indisputably.

There were others who weighed in on his manuscript and, characteristically, Savo took their input to heart, remaining faithful to his dream.  I loaned him a book on writing proposals and he wrote a book proposal of his own.  He corrected grammatical errors.  By the time he graduated, the work-in-progress had become worthy of an agent’s eye.  It’s when he began querying these agents that signs of progress began to elude him.

How to dub the first ten rejections, progress?  Or the next twenty?  A few days ago, he reminded me of how giving himself over to the process, rather than judging his progress, carried him to publication.  He emailed:   I sent out some 100 queries to agents between 2005 and November 2006.  Your advice was crucial here.  You always said that all it takes is one person who will somehow connect with me and my story.  Finally, one day, I received an email from one of them who wanted to represent me.  She is from Colorado…her family is originally from Croatia and she grew up reading about the Balkans.  She said she had to help me get a publisher after reading my query and proposal.  She found a publisher a few months later.

I’m thankful for this reminder as I’d forgotten my own advice – that all it takes is one person who will somehow connect with me and my story.  Of the seven queries I’ve sent to date, the most recent went out four weeks ago to an agent who asked to see an entire (and different) manuscript of mine a few years back.  She was gracious enough to still read that one after I revealed that on the same day, I’d simultaneously sent a requested “full” to a colleague…who also happens to be her friend.  Her stated reply-time is five weeks and I didn’t want to have sent my manuscript to someone else in case she asked to see this one, too.

So far, three agents and one agent’s assistant have honored me with a reply, albeit each one, a “sorry.”  One agent asked to see my next manuscript.  During the lull in querying, I’ve taken two decades worth of Book Nook Program workshop content and research as well as eight years of Early Bird Project (early literacy) materials and pared all of it down to fit into two small plastic bins, thus creating new spaces for my writing — book manuscripts, revisions and promotions to come.  I have a query ready to go to the next agent on my list on Wednesday (the agent’s maximum five-week reply-time) and I just completed a registration form for the winter SCBWI conference in New York.  Paltry progress?  Not going there.  This is the first of my process reports, a process I’m trusting to lead me to one special agent.

After all, Savo Heleta wrote a book.  And did I mention it was published?

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