A Novel Idea

Recently, writer and Facebook friend Kerry Madden took a turn ruminating about the topic of rejection at “A Good Blog is Hard to Find.”  She describes spending a year revising her first novel for an enthusiastic agent who recommended an editor with whom she should work.  Kerry quit her job (you have my permission to gasp here) to focus on the revision, then sent it off to the agent at year’s end.

A letter accompanied the rejected manuscript.  In essence, the agent proclaimed the revised novel “awful.”  As Kerry studied the agent’s notes on her pages, she realized that they stopped at page 80.   The woman hadn’t bothered to finish reading her 500-page book.  Kerry likens the manuscript that showed up on her doorstep to “a body bag oozing failure.”  She admits to a “grief-stricken Jack Daniels night.”  And then, she describes how she got busy, determined to prove the agent wrong.  Know where this story’s going?

“I was ruthless,” she writes, as she read her manuscript with “a cold editor’s eye.” She kept revising, reshaping, ultimately cutting 100 pages.  And then she sent it to another agent who sold the novel to William Morrow within one month.  Six months later, Diane Keaton optioned her book Offsides for a film with Jim Henson Productions.

The debut novel got terrific reviews.  The New York Public Library named her book one of the best for young adults in that year (’97).  And here’s my favorite part.  While the film never made it to the big screen, the agent who summarily rejected her book contacted Kerry’s screenplay agent to ask,  “Can I have her next book?”

I’m a sucker for any story about a writer who triumphs over adversity, so it’s fun to repeat this one.  And one could choose to call the happy ending a result of perfect timing, as painful as the rejection felt at the time.  After all, she picked herself up and made that novel into a better one.   And she vowed never to do to her students what had been done to her.

“I don’t allow my workshops to be anything but supportive and generous places to discover how to make the work better,” she says, and adds that the best lesson she learned was “to trust my own voice and not to quit no matter what an agent had decreed.”

She admits that if she’d let herself believe the agent’s judgment, she would never have written another word.  After all, she didn’t know back then that she was up to the challenge of creating a popular series – the Maggie Valley Trilogy – and one day receiving acclaim for her work of nonfiction, Harper Lee: Up Close. The thing is, it’s easier to be philosophical about rejection when one has a body of published work as a testament to one’s gifts.  What’s a writer, seeking an agent or hurting from a rejection, to do?

Here’s an option: play.  That’s what my daughter Liv and I did last week after meeting for lunch.  I asked her to be my “truth-tester” as we took a few minutes to follow the directions in “The Art of Perfect Timing,” by columnist Martha Beck (O Magazine, December 2009 ).  She’s the author of inspiring books like Expecting Adam and Steering by Starlight, a life coach, and the reason I renew a subscription to O Magazine.

Martha Beck reminds readers that the nonverbal brain is continuously registering incredibly subtle predictive clues.  Credit that right brain or call it the higher self.  Something in you knows more than you’re consciously acknowledging.  Martha Beck  invites you to think of something not happening for you as rapidly as you’d like and to enlist a friend to do a test that those familiar with kinesiology will recognize.

She reminds readers that the mind often creates what it believes, especially if the belief is unconscious, and that can include  the perfect time and place for things to come together.  It’s not so much about predicting as tuning in and unearthing powerful expectations of what’s to come.

I began with,  “I connect with an agent within this lifetime, ” and got an affirmative answer.  I had to laugh.  In contrast to finally snagging an agent after I’ve checked out of the earth plane and then returned for an encore — the possibility of an agent signing me on in nine months – or even in nine years — seems like no time at all!  The point is to be playful, not desperate;  open to, not disparaging of, a possibility to weave an experience of perfect timing into your own life story.  So go ahead… pick yourself up and play a little.