Despite my attempts, I am not a serious person. I might know what a 401k is and have serious thoughts on the mpg of my hybrid car, but it’s all a facade. At my core, I am silly. I love rhinestones and tutus, I laugh at fart jokes, and I consume unhealthy quantities of bodice-ripping romance novels that I find in the Clearance section of Half-Priced Books.
So it probably won’t shock you to hear that I’ve also tried my hand at writing one of those aforementioned romance novels. It was fun, and the story was silly.
Basically I wrote a short (55k words) tale of a millionaire who turns into a merman four nights a month and the scientist who loves him. Naturally it was set in a compound in rural Alaska. As they say, create the art you wish to see in the world.
When I had written a sizeable amount, I did what anyone with a healthy amount of self-esteem (inflated ego) might do. I submitted it for publishing at a few ebook imprints. And then the waiting began.
While I haven’t had traditional success yet (no one has offered to publish it), I did receive my first rejection letter! And that’s almost as good to me!
Aside from the fact that it was a fun little project to write, I learned a lot about the business of writing, and I can’t wait to try again. Look out world, there is so much more paranormal romance where that came from.
Thus, I figured I’d share some of my thoughts here in hopes that writing them will make me remember them later.
The five things I should have done better (and might in the future):
- Learn ALL of the genre conventions and stick to them. I read a lot, so I naturally assumed I could write without thinking. I was wrong. Art has rules that aren’t always visible to the consumer, and when those rules get messed with, the reader gets mad. Romance, in particular, is a formulaic genre, and you have to get it right. I did not. One of the rules of the genre is that the characters need to meet in the first chapter. Mine met about a quarter of the way in. This is a no-no, so I had to fix it at the last minute. This is how I wound up hastily tacking on a prologue. Needless to say,the work suffered for it .
- Make sure your first chapter (or prologue) is perfect. This seems obvious, but is easy to mess up. How I messed it up is avoidable: I wrote it when I was pretty much over the story. But people fail at this for the opposite reason, too. Writing gets better with practice, and your characters feel more real after you’ve been writing them for awhile, so your later chapters are naturally going to be better than your first. Clearly the beginning needs to be written later in the process than its name suggests. This brings me to…
- Write your synopsis while you are still excited for the novel. In my defense, I did not know this would be required. This is a bad defense, because if I knew I was thinking of submitting it, I should have checked the requirements early and often, but even better-planned people than me can get this one wrong. You don’t realize how much you will be sick of your story by the end of it. You think you will love your characters forever and never think about pushing them off a glacier while on a routing hiking trip (no one would ever know). But you might be, so plan for this. Write your synopsis when you are about two-thirds of the way done with the story, right around when you’re writing your first chapter. Your synopsis is your selling tool, it is going to create the interest in your novel. Write it while you’re still excited about the project.
- Know when to cut your losses. You know how that first book in a series is almost always the weakest? That’s still the one that got published. I guarantee there are worse novels that author wrote that never saw beyond the publisher’s rejection email. That’s normal. Writing is fun! If your book is never getting better, move on. I promise your next attempt will be better.
- Celebrate failure! Writing a novel is an accomplishment, even if it isn’t up to Harlequin Romance’s line of paranormal ebooks standards. Celebrate it! Taking a risk is its own reward and you are amazing for trying!
And, because I have no shame, I present the rejection itself to you:
Kate's 52 Book Challenge 