August 2011 - Michelle Richmond

The Art of Rejection: Kathryn Stockett’s tale of never giving up

More Magazine features an essay by Kathryn Stockett, author of the wildly successful novel The Help, now a wildly successful film. It’s an old story, but worth repeating: novelist gets a zillion rejections, or 60, to be more precise, before finally landing an agent, a publisher, and a long-running spot at the top of just about every bestseller list you can imagine.

Stockett’s advice for writers and anyone else who keeps hitting a brick wall? “Give in to your obsession.”

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In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60? Three weeks later, Susan sold The Help to Amy Einhorn Books.

For Stockett, 61 was the magic number. With The Year of Fog, my magic number wasn’t far behind. I like to believe that every good book has a magic number, that books will find their way into the hands of a receptive agent and editor given enough time and persistence. For me, the agent was Valerie Borchardt, and the editor was Caitlin Alexander, and I consider my book very fortunate to have fallen into their hands.

So if you have a book that keeps coming back with a form letter that says, “Unfortunately, this book is not quite right for us,” don’t give up. Envision in your mind a magic number. You don’t know it yet. No one does. It could be twenty rejections from now, or forty. Or it could be just one.

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What writers can learn from late, great music man John Carter

In July’s obit section, WORD magazine remembers John Carter, songwriter, producer, and A&R man extraordinaire, who “was instrumental in the careers of and a passionate supporter of Bob Seger, The Motels, Sammy Hagar, Melissa Etheridge, Tori Amos, David and David, and … Tina Turner.”

WORD quotes an interview for industry website Taxi, in which Carter said that “the one thing he had learned was that over 70 percent of hit records have titles containing nouns.”

All kinds of songs become successful, and therefore can be held up as examples to encourage someone that what they’re doing is right, but I think, in general, it’s an English lesson. Lyrics are important It’s about a story. It’s about a great title. The title should have a big noun in it. Some of the best songs are even proper nouns. Nouns, baby, nouns!”

If you think about it, the same principle applies to good writing of any kind. One, “it’s about a story.” And two, it’s specific: proper nouns are nothing if not specific. It’s the very old, very true creative writing 101 lesson: you get to the universal by way of the personal. You reach many by focusing on the struggle of one. It’s easy to find great books with a proper noun in the title:

Ulysses
Lolita
Portnoy’s Complaint
The Great Gatsby
Jane Eyre
Madame Bovary

Okay, you get the picture. Of course, this is not to say it has to be a proper noun. I can think of equally exciting books that have only improper nouns (I don’t think that’s a thing, really, but I like the sound of it) in the title.

To Kill a Mockingbird
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Bluest Eye
Things Fall Apart (what can be less specific than things?)
Brave New World

You’ll note, however, that all of the books in the latter category get very specific very quickly, with characters whose personal and unique struggles have a universal quality. Scout moves us not because she’s archetypal, but because she is a very specific child at a very specific time and place, engaged in a universal struggle played out in the tragedy of one man and one town.