Writing Journey #8 – Persistence Pays Off

 

A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success. – Bo Bennett

If you read my last post, you know that I shared about a rejection that hit me hard just when I thought I might be moving toward success. Isn’t that the way of it sometimes? Just when you think things are going your way, you hit a pothole on the road you thought was getting you where you wanted to be.

I did hit that pothole, ran right up to a brick wall that seemed to have no gateways in it. At least that’s how I felt for a few days, maybe a few weeks. But then I shoved that rejected book out of sight and kept going on the new story road I was ready to head down. Whether they had sold or found favor, I had written two novels from the first sentence to the last. Word piled on top of words.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone. – Zadie Smith

I needed to believe I could to it again. To have confidence to not only write another book, but to write one full of historical details along with bringing my imagined fictional people coming to life.  I rolled a clean sheet of typing paper into my typewriter, still a manual model but an upgrade from the portable one I’d bought from my sister’s friend when I was a young teen.  This was a desk model. It had keys that strengthened the muscles in my fingers. It made a loud clatter as I began hitting those keys to make words spill across the white paper.

I had my characters all named and imagined. There was Sarah Douglas, my main heroine and Matthew Stoner and Cave Hawkins and a young boy, Sarah’s brother named Johnny. I’m sure I had pages and pages of historical research and character studies. I needed all that to have the courage and confidence to type that first line to get me underway. I probably have that first draft around here somewhere. Maybe. Anyway, here is the first sentence of the novel now. Like a misty purple border outlining the far horizon, the mountains were in sight at last.

Reading it now, I think it could have been better.  After I wrote that first sentence and filled in that first page, I rolled in 300 or so blank sheets and filled them with words too before I wrote “the end.” It took me a year from getting the reject on the cattle drive story to get this new story written and then a few more months editing it and retyping it on nice crisp paper to be able to send it out. When I think about this, you can’t imagine how thankful I am for word processors where mistakes can be easily corrected without typewriter erasers. It took me hours and hours to retype that story but that was how everything worked back then.

Eventually I had the big stack of pages done with Kentucke Dream by Ann Gabhart on a title page on top. In November 1977 I  sent the manuscript off to my agent who was still willing to look at this new story even after her rejection of the last one a year and a half before. In a few weeks, my agent wrote back that the story was “quite well put over.” She said she’d do her best for me. What more could I want?

I got a rejection in the mail the next month, but the rejection had personal remarks on it. The editor said the story was good but the romance needed to be more clear but and it didn’t fit in their genre. I handled that rejection with ease since it wasn’t final. That was a good think about having an agent. She sent it right out again.

And then the letter came. On January 3rd or 4th, I’m guessing now since I write about it my journal on the 4th. We were stripping tobacco and getting it ready to be off to the warehouse to sell. Tobacco was our farm’s cash crop and we raised about an acre. In December and January we spent a lot of time as a family in the stripping room pulling the dried tobacco leaves off the stalks, tying them into hands to thread on a stick and press flat in a specially made press on the stripping room wall. The older kids helped. The youngest mostly watched if his granny couldn’t keep him. I came to the house and someone had gotten the mail. There was a letter from my agent. I can still remember standing at my desk in the kitchen opening that letter even before I washed the tobacco gum off my hands. And it said Warner Books  had made an offer on my story. They were going to give me a few thousand dollars in an advance. I know my hands had to have been shaking. My agent asked if I wanted to accept the offer since she wasn’t totally satisfied with the terms. Uh, yeah, did I want to accept it! The very thought of my book being published was almost more than I could comprehend.

I had a letter in the mail to her right away.  Not long after that, I began to learn more about editing to get my story ready for public consumption and that actually getting a book from manuscript to store shelf could be a slow process. But persistence had paid off.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist. – Isaac Asimov

Thanks for your patience as I explore the past in my writing journey. While I’ll never forget opening that envelope in my kitchen before I started preparing our supper, plenty of other things I would have forgotten except for my writing journal. And now I’m sharing it here to make another record of my journey.

Have you had times when persistence paid off for you?

Remember, I’ve got a giveaway going to reward those of you reading these writing journey posts. So far, not many entries. I’m going to pick a couple of winners who will win their choice of one of my books. Unfortunately, not this first book I published since I don’t have copies of it. Anyway, you can get an entry by any comment you leave on each post, with extra entries for commenting on the new posts. Deadline to enter is midnight EST August 23, 2025. You have to be at least 18 years old to enter and winner will be notified by email. Maybe if you’ve entered my giveaways before and not won, persistence in entering again might pay off this time.