What keeps you going? What gets you excited about writing? What motivates you?

Recently, in offline discussion, Joe Hartlaub and I were talking about rejections. He mentioned an editor at Hard Case Crime who wrote the “best” rejections—two to three-page long letters with specific details that proved he paid close attention and had actually read the whole manuscript.

Editors and agents rarely have time to put that much effort into giving feedback to an author. Most often, it’s a quick “Thanks but not for us.”

When a professional reads more than the first five pages of the manuscript and recognizes value in it, the writer is over the moon.

Even though it’s a rejection.

Actual SASE

Back in the days when authors submitted manuscripts by snail mail, you always included an SASE (for anyone born after 1980, that’s self-addressed stamped envelope) so the editor/agent could mail rejections to you.

Occasionally, the SASE was used to mail the author a contract or check but that was rare.

There is a hierarchy of rejections–a ladder to climb:

Rung #1 – Unsigned form letter: “This does not meet our needs at this time.”

Rung #2 – Unsigned form letter: “This does not meet our needs at this time but please try us again.”

Rung #3 – Same form letter with a handwritten note (unsigned): “This is good. Do you have anything else?”

Rung #4 – Personal letter: “Good story but too similar to one we recently published. I like your writing. Send more.” Actual editor’s signature.

Rung #5 – Personal letter signed with editor’s first name. Now we’re buddies.

With today’s electronic submissions, the process is similar, just faster and cheaper without the cost of postage and printing.

But the process still requires climbing the rungs.

Finally you clamber onto an exciting but scary roof with a steep pitch. The editor/agent likes the sample chapter and asks for the whole manuscript. Get a toehold on the rain gutter.

A month or five later, the rejection says: “This is good BUT…”

Fill in the blank with:

“Characters felt inconsistent.”

“The climax didn’t live up to expectations.”

“I just didn’t love it enough.”

Etc.

Slide down the roof a bit but hang on with fingernails.

Rewrite and submit more. Inch up the shingles. 

“All the editors loved it but the marketing department doesn’t think they can sell it.”

At last, you reach the peak of the roof when you receive a long, detailed, personal letter with specific suggestions.

In December, I received the most beautiful rejection of my entire career (and I’ve received hundreds!). I couldn’t even be unhappy when I read the following:

“Several of us read it and we all enjoyed your fresh, exciting take on a thriller—particularly the way you used the genre to explore the very real issue of elder fraud. There are several striking scenes that are seared in my memory (especially that late-night rescue in the snowstorm!). We thought you developed Tawny and Moe’s relationship with great sensitivity and nuance, and this in turn made Moe’s shifts between lucidity and violence a more emotional experience for readers. Unfortunately, we had difficulty connecting as deeply to Tawny—it often felt like she was kept at a remove from us. For this reason, despite our admiration for your writing and the compelling and dynamic world you’ve created, we don’t think we’re the right publisher for your book. I’m sorry not to have better news. Thank you so much for the opportunity to read and consider STALKING MIDAS, and best wishes in finding the right home for it.”

It felt like the editor had sent me a dozen roses!

When you tell civilians (non-writers) about the wonderful rejection you received, they usually draw their chins back and look down their noses. “You got rejected and you’re happy?”

Only other writers understand the irony of a rave rejection.

What do rejections really mean?

You’re in the game.

What do rave rejections mean?

Publication is in your future.

~~~

TKZers: What is the best rejection you ever received?

Was the story eventually published?

Please check out Debbie Burke’s new thriller Stalking Midas which garnered rave rejections before publication. Here’s the link.

Writers often veer down one research rabbit hole after another to find answers. Sometimes, it’s the topic that keeps us digging. Other times the answers we seek are buried under mountains of other stuff.

Which topic took you the most time to research? Did you have to leave the house, or did you find the answers online?

Do you have a favorite research topic?

By John Gilstrap

Sue Coletta’s excellent post on Monday took us into the reality of murder.  When I finished reading it, I wished I could un-read it.  That’s no insult to Sue.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite.  Good writing makes you squirm.  (Or laugh, or cry . . .)  I read the piece to the end out of respect not just for the author, but for the victims.  It’s important for people to understand what those young ladies endured in their final moments (or, God help us, final hours).

If that same scene were included in a novel I was reading, though, written by someone I didn’t know, I’d have closed the book and banned the author from my shelf.

Having been a first responder for 15 years, I was eyewitness to the aftermath unspeakable acts of cruelty.  I’ve tucked in protruding viscera and I’ve bagged a few heads.

I’ve comforted the bereaved, but that was the part I hated the most.  I was fire and rescue, not police.  My job was to bring order to chaos–to stabilize dangerous situations–and then go home.  No one ever died on my watch or in my ambulance because back then, only a medical doctor could pronounce death.  Thus, people were either victims who were clearly dead when I arrived at the scene, or they were patients receiving life-saving care when I delivered them to the emergency room.

I was then–and am now–something of a Pollyanna.  There’s always a way to win, always a route to a positive outcome.  All I need to do is never give up.  If the first strategy doesn’t work, you throw that aside and try something else.  And then something else again.  If the positive outcome does not arrive, it won’t be because I didn’t do everything I could.  It’s a theme that drives my fiction.  There’s always a way for the good guys to win.  Or they die trying.

When I was researching my nonfiction book Six Minutes to Freedom (2006) and I finally got permission to talk to the Delta Force operators who performed Kurt Muse’s daring rescue, there was a common theme that drove every interview.  To a man, the operators I spoke with told me that come hell or high water, they were bringing Kurt home.  If he stayed, they stayed.  When Operation ACID GAMBIT was done, more than a few of those operators were shot to pieces–one of them amputated his own foot to escape his crashed rescue chopper–but they never stopped fighting.  And they delivered Kurt to his family five days before Christmas.

Victimhood makes me uncomfortable.  I have no desire to read torture porn, which is one of the reasons why I don’t like reading about fictional serial killers.  Those scenes with the suffering victims are all about hopelessness.  Yes, it happens in real life, and if I want access to real-life case files, I can gain it with a phone call.  It’s a call I’ll never make.

In reality, violence smells bad.  It’s sticky and it’s ugly.  It’s unnerving.  When I commanded a horrific auto accident or occupational injury, my standing order to my crew was, “If it’s ugly, cover it up.”  No one functions well in the presence of mangled people.  I bring some of that to my fiction, and I get occasional hate mail as a result, but that level of reality–the reality of the aftermath–doesn’t push me beyond my limits.

The irony is not lost on me that I write violent books, and that good guys occasionally die at my hand.  I can’t define where my breaking point is on how much is too much, but there’s a line there somewhere.  The knee-jerk response is to say that violence against children is the line not to be crossed, but I cross that all the time.  I don’t do it gratuitously, though.  At least I don’t think I do.  I will not write a scene with sexual violence against women.  Come to think of it, I don’t write much about sex at all.

What are your thoughts, TKZ family?  How much squirming are you willing to endure when reading books?  At what point do you send a book sailing?

By PJ Parrish

The most common question I get from readers is how do my sister Kelly and I manage to write books together without killing each other.  So here’s a little dramatization:

Chapter 1

The first hurricane season of 1987 season, called Alina, left the beach a mess. Ex-cop Louis Kincaid walked along the beach in front of his Captiva Island cottage, watching the shell collectors who were picking up their post-storm prizes.

KELLY: Wait a minute. You really want to open your book like that? You only have a couple pages to get readers’ attention.
ME: What’s wrong with this? It’s tight. It gives reader info. Sets the weather.
KELLY: Elmore Leonard says never open with weather.
ME: But I have to open with it. The story has to open after the hurricane because Louis is about to find something cool on the beach which gets the case going.
KELLY: I get you. But weather has to mean something. It can’t just lay there. What about the prologue you wrote where that woman dies? Can you make it relate better to that?
ME: Wait…let me try again.

Her name was Alina…

KELLY: Better. Now we think this is the dead woman.
ME: Her name was Alina. The first hurricane of the 1987 season was…
KELLY: No no…good idea but you didn’t do anything with the image. Take it another level. Treat Hurricane Alina like a human being.
{{{ME: Fingers frozen over keyboard}}}
KELLY: Don’t think. Just write.

Chapter 1

Her name was Alina. She was born during a sultry summer thunderstorm somewhere near Mali, a thing no one cared about in a place few had heard of. In Senegal, she inhaled the cool ocean breezes, and in the Cape Verde islands she found her fury. By the time she reached Hispanola, she was a killer.

The first hurricane of the 1987 season turned out to be the most deadly in decades, littering the beaches of Haiti with fishing boats and bodies. Then she slammed into the southwest coast of Florida and turned due north. Finally Alina died, drifting away as a depression somewhere over Chesapeake Bay.

And now the shell seekers were out, celebrating her wake. Louis Kincaid watched them as they walked the beach.

KELLY: Now there’s a book I’d read. It’s got a hook. It sets the tone of the book. It has atmosphere and it came from YOU.
ME: Me?
KELLY: Yeah, you. You listening to your passionate writer self but taming it with craft.

Okay, the skit is over. This is pretty much how Kelly and I work. It’s not easy having a co-author. Most writers don’t want to share their vision. Or their royalty checks. But that means you’re very alone.

How many of you feel alone? How many of you paint yourself into corners with plots? Procastinate. Lose confidence? Beat yourself up? Re-read to the point of paralysis?
My whole author persona is based on co-authorship. But something evaporates when you are going alone. You feel like your safety net is gone. You feel like you have no one you can trust to tell you the truth, the good or the bad. You alone are responsible for what is on the page. And who do you turn to when you’re at your lowest? Mother, spouse, friend? Who will push you to finish when you can’t stand looking at the Thing That Is Consuming Your Soul?

How, if you are alone, can you get beyond this? Maybe if I try to explain how it works for us, maybe you can learn to listen to your inner co-author.

It all starts with an idea. But not all ideas are created equal. How do you know when you’ve got a good idea for a book? For us, we toss around plot ideas and decide whether they work for our character Louis. Not all do. Ask your inner co-author: Is this story juicy enough? Has enough meat to carry 300 pages or is it just a short story? Is it fresh? If your hero or story is not new, is it at least a different angle? Don’t chase a trend, especially if you don’t care about it.

Inner co-author voice: Meh. I think John Sandford wrote this story ten years ago. And does the world really need another alcoholic detective with a thing for Thelonious Monk, Rooster ties and redheads in leopard leggings?  And if you even think about writing an unreliable girl book, I will never speak to you again.

Okay, so you’ve got a juicy idea and you’ve written those heavy words CHAPTER ONE. Now what? Did you start your story at a prime dramatic moment?  Or is your beginning just a lot of throat-clearing? Like, did you lard in a couple pages of your protag’s backstory? Did you open with paragraphs of scene-setting description because you didn’t really KNOW where to begin the action? And why are you wasting so much time and valuable pages on some minor character who isn’t even important to your story?

Inner co-author voice: I think you need to start over. See that little black key at the top right of your laptop — it says DEL?  Press down hard and don’t let up til your screen is clean again.  Don’t worry. It only hurts for a minute or two.  You’ll thank me in the morning.

Well now. You’re on your way. You’ve got a fresh idea and a cool protag no one has seen before. You’ve figured out the best moment to open your story. You’re ten chapters in and roaring along. Then…you hit the wall. Or the muddy middle, as I like to think of it. You’re being sucked into the sand like that poor kid in Lawrence of Arabia or sinking in a  swamp in the trunk of a ’57 Ford like Marion Crane in Psycho.  How do you make the story’s middle come alive?

Inner co-author voice: There’s a bunch of cool tricks you can use! Create a rift in the team, like the three guys in Jaws.  Give one of your main characters a big secret that when revealed, sends the story in an unexpected direction. You don’t get what I mean? Go read William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.  Introduce a new character, but make darn sure they deserve to be on stage.  Better yet, kill someone off! Just don’t make it the dog.  OR…now don’t get mad at me because I know how much you hate this: STOP AND OUTLINE!  Stop yelling at me.  I know you’re a free spirit who goes where the muse leads you. But sometimes, you have to stop at the Texaco station and ask for directions. You don’t have to follow them. But the exercise of STOPPING AND THINKING AND WRITING THINGS DOWN might show you where the road begins again.

Ah, lookie here. You finished the manuscript! Seven months have gone by. Maybe seven years.  It’s time to take the baby out for a stroll and get all the ooohs and aaahs you’ve been waiting for.

Inner co-author voice: Are you nuts? You finished the first draft, Buckie! Now the hard work begins.  No, no…don’t even think about writing a query letter to Meg Ruly. Print out the whole messy thing and — stop it, just stop it. You have to do this. Print out the thing, take it to Starbucks or your favorite bar with a pencil and a bad attitude. Cross out all the stupid words, flabby dialogue, florrid descriptions.  Look for plot holes and fix them. Make your character’s motivations deeper.  Cut that dumb prologue. And while you’re at it, you use a passive voice too often.  Voice is like being good in bed. Think about that.

Whew.  You made it. You rewrote the book, at least three times. It’s 2,000 words shorter and you’ve shined it to within an inch of its life.  Now you have to send it out and get…probably ignored, very likely rejected, maybe even mauled. This is part of the process.

Inner co-author voice: Huh, you got another rejection letter? And you’re sitting there, sniffling and reading it for the hundredth time trying to find its hidden meaning. There is none. A rejection letter means 1. Your book wasn’t quite ready.  2. The editor recently accepted a manuscript too similar to yours. 3. You queried the wrong agent or editor for the genre you’re writing. 4. The agent has too many clients already. 5. The editor’s slate is too full.  So what? Query someone else and then more. Send out as many queries as you can stomach because it’s a huge waste of time to send out ONE query and wait to be asked to the prom.  Oh yeah, and while you’re waiting the eight weeks or more it takes to get an answer, start writing the next book. And remember: No one is rejecting YOU. They are rejecting your story, often for reasons that have little to do with its quality. Do. Not. Take. This. Personally.

One last thing about having an inner co-author. You really need to listen to them closely. Because they will tell you the truth. And they will keep you going when you feel like giving up and getting a job driving the cart at the airport.

Inner co-author: Don’t give up. We can do this. Have some faith. Work hard. Word harder. But when you do something well, when the words come together, pat yourself on the back. In the immortal words of Stuart Smalley. You’re good enough. You’re smart enough. And doggone it, people will like your books.