Try, Try Again

How many books do you have to write before you get published?

The simple answer is that I wrote one novel that was not published, but my second was.

But if the question’s aim is to probe how much stamina a writer needs, then the true answer lies in the detail. Like the fact that my first published novel, Falling Off Air, arrived in bookstores in 2004, a full ten years after I wrote that first doomed manuscript—a decade in which I wrote, had three children and did some freelance journalism, too. Or that by a rough estimate I wrote about 400,000 words in draft for the 100,000 that were eventually published. Or that I contacted 18 literary agents before I found one who wanted me.

When I accompanied my husband, James Miles, to Ann Arbor in 1994, I resolved to spend one year writing a
novel. If it was not published then I would waste no more time on fiction. 

It was at the end of that year that a literary agent rang after receiving my manuscript and left a message that I should call her, causing my heart to pound with excitement. When I rang her back, she told me how bad she thought the book was. Over the next few months I showed that book to about a dozen publishers and a couple of agents before I admitted defeat. It is brutal to discover that being a writer is to share your most private imaginings, only then to have them hurled back at you, sometimes with what seems like an undignified amount of glee.

But there are reasons books get thrown back, and some of the rejections were encouraging, so I started again. Being a journalist was good training—I knew to write in short sentences and structure my story, and to keep in mind how many words I had to play with. I edited ruthlessly. I never joined a writing group, partly because I was scared, and partly because I couldn’t see what I could learn from picking apart the language of a paragraph or two when it was the shape of the book that seemed the difficult bit. I did, however, read every book on writing novels that I could find.