Today’s post is a personal one from yours truly.
About a year ago I began sending out my manuscript. It was a good day and I felt fantastic. There it was, sitting before me in all its over 100k word glory. Beside it lay an even larger pile of edits and changes I had written on each individual page.
After a soul-crushing adventure into writing my first query letter (funny how difficult it is to describe something you spent years writing and then turn around and try and boil it down to its essence) I found myself hovering over the mouse.
SEND.
There it was, my first query to an agent who I hoped wouldn’t send back a, “you’re joking, right?”
If only I had known then how unprepared I was. How out of order my process had been.
I’d written a full manuscript in a vacuum. No formal fiction training, no exploration online for Do’s and Don’ts. I had a story and I let the excitement fuel my days at the screen, punching word after word into it.
The only problem with that approach is that I made a bunch of mistakes from the first keystroke. I made simple storytelling gaffes, plenty of grammatical errors and a whole lot of the dreaded “Show, Don’t Tell”.
The good thing? I still believe my core story is solid. It was written with passion, with care and most of all with the desire to simply express a vision in my head. Heck, half the time this story was writing me (but that’s for another time).
That said, if I were to have a genie to grant wishes only involving my book (strangely specific genie, right?) I would ask for the following:
- I wish I had a good writing community to participate in.
- I wish I could have written 10+ short stories before getting the idea for this full length beast.
- I wish I could write a good query letter
Alright, that last one is irrelevant to that scenario. I just can’t write those suckers very well!
I’ll end my ramblings here for this post. The core takeaway I wish for anybody to get from this is quite straightforward. Don’t write in a vacuum. Don’t be afraid to sharing your story. If you plan on publishing it, you’re planning on many people reading it! It’s tempting to hide it away until you think it’s perfect.
But I’ll tell you, my writing was far from perfect and only began to improve once I had outside perspectives to help me see what I was doing both correctly and incorrectly.
Stay strong friends! Write on!
