Every October, as the leaves change, the weather turns cool, and most people start thinking about preparing for the holidays, my people—the writer people—start thinking about NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, aka November.
The goal of the NaNoWriMo participant is to crank out 50,000 words. For one month, you are freed from the tasks of editing and revising. The thinking is that if you let go of your critical mind and focus strictly on putting down one word after another, you may wind up with the bones of a novel. There’s no penalty if you don’t make the word count. (What’s the internet going to do, slap your hand? “No WiFi for you!”) Some people get so stoked about their mounting word count that they commit to writing an additional 30,000 words in December.
Every year, I consider whether to participate in NaNo, but I have yet to find myself at the threshold of a new manuscript in the fall. I don’t want to stop working on my current manuscript and start a new one. I write every day, I’m committed to my work in progress, and I like to finish things. But in the spirit of NaNo, every November I’m conscious of stepping up my productivity, being less critical of my first draft, and just getting the words down.
I was planning to do that this year, too—and then I went to my writers’ group meeting this morning, where the subject of submissions came up . . . specifically, my quest to find an agent.
Part of me sees marketing an extension of writing. Why spend years working on a manuscript—writing and rewriting and revising and editing and honing until you know all 300+ pages by heart (well, not really, but I can recite whole passages)—if you don’t intend to do everything you can to get your work in front of readers?
This year I’ve learned something about myself, and it’s humbling: I’m not a special snowflake after all, because like every other writer, I’d rather write than submit my work.
I started 2013 fired up about submissions, and I worked on them diligently for a few months. Some agents requested partial or full manuscripts, and I sent them. Some rejections were so thoughtful that they were almost as good as an acceptance.
Almost doesn’t cut it. As rejections stacked up, I read articles about how many times various well-known authors were rejected before finally being accepted by an agent, signed by a major house, and published to critical acclaim and commercial success. Most of the articles started with this: J. K. Rowling was rejected a dozen times before the first Harry Potter book was accepted! Pfffft. I hit a dozen rejections in my first week of submissions.
I didn’t think rejection would faze me as much as it has. I’ve worked in publishing; I still have editorial clients. And I’ve always been annoyingly insistent when someone in my writers’ group was disheartened over rejection: “Submit it again. And again. And again. Don’t give up. There are more agents out there.”
Why didn’t someone smack me? Right now, I kind of want to smack myself.
Today, it was my turn to listen. “Be relentless,” advised a member of the group—and something about that word, relentless, struck me just the right way.
So, once again, November means no NaNoWriMo for me. Instead, it means ReSubMyNoMo: Relentlessly Submitting My Novel Month. In the few days we have left in October, I’m organizing my studio and finishing my current editing job—and come November 1, I’m relentlessly submitting a manuscript I believe in.