The other night my daughter and I died repeatedly in a lava lake. We were playing Yoshi’s Woolly World and trying to get a final daisy that would unlock a secret board but the lava was rising and covering the daisy and…well, we died a lot.
After death number twenty-two give or take five, my daughter said, “Mommy, let’s just quit. We’re never going to get it.”
“That’s only true if we quit,” I cried, frantically pounding the A button.
Which is true. In Yoshi’s Wolly World and in life. Someday becomes never only when we quit.
This is not a sentiment I would have slapped on a poster, covered in glitter, and waved over my head until very recently. I was much more a “Why would I waste my limited time and energy on something that’s basically impossible?” or put more honestly “Why would I try so hard to most likely fail?”
Then I started querying agents for a novel, and I learned failing isn’t the end. Failing is a step.
I remember the queasy feeling I had as I hit send on my first query. This was it. After three years of writing, revising and researching the fiction industry, I was as ready as I could be. I was NOT querying a first draft. I had revised and revised again. I researched agents and made a list tailored to the book I wrote. I sent my query to workshops and had ACTUAL literary agents critique it. I was ready, and with my hand shaking, I clicked send. Then I sent nine more.
They all said no. So did the next ten agents. And the ten after that. All form rejections.
Querying literary agents is a pretty good dry run for living with chronic reflux. Once those queries are out, checking your inbox triggers chest pains, difficulty breathing, and nausea. It didn’t matter if the query was sent six hours ago or six months ago. If I had an open query and that little red circle appeared over my inbox icon, my stomach flipped. My expectations rose.
And then I’d read the rejection. It’s amazing that pixels on a screen can stimulate the physical sensation of being punched in the gut.
The first few rejections hurt but weren’t devastating. I didn’t panic. There are varied tastes. Some agents just won’t be into a vigilante anti-hero no matter how well written. Although someone should have recognized my talent by query 20. Or 25. Certainly by 30. But the form rejections kept coming and feeding the self-doubt. Because I wouldn’t have queried a novel I didn’t think was good. So the agent rejections were a reflection not only my book but on my judgement as a writer, right?
Eventually I went in search of data because that’s what people with social science degrees do. I wanted a number, so I googled “What’s the average number of rejections authors get before signing with an agent?” I found enough numbers that I know my total rejections over three projects isn’t even that high.
But back then, I had no idea where my count would end. Would I be the author who got an agent on her 65th query for her sixth manuscript? Imagining the time and energy it would take to write and revise six novels left me breathless. Could my heart take a shot of adrenaline every time I checked my email for a decade? But giving up after one novel wasn’t even trying and I couldn’t quit without really trying.
So I wrote another book. And I queried it. I got more form rejections. They caused heart palpitations and pain. But…and this was a revelation…not as much pain as that first batch.
I realized as I neared that 100 rejections mark, that the more times I read “no”, the faster my heart rate returned to normal. By the time I was into three digit rejection numbers, the emails caused only a flutter of despair. I could tell my husband and family “Nope. Another pass” with merely a shrug. I seemed to have developed a high tolerance for “no”.
Then project number three got me my first full manuscript request and first rejection of the entire manuscript. That one was bad. My query reflux flared up. I cried. But there were more full requests and I started thinking “At this rate, eventually someone will say yes.” I’d heard “no” 130 times, but somewhere along the line my thinking had shifted from “maybe not ever” to “eventually”.
As long as I didn’t quit. I’d gone from form rejections to personalized rejections to a partial request to multiple full requests. If I kept going, one rejection at time, I’d eventually get to a yes and after four years, I did. After 138 rejections.
So here’s what I hope to pass on my daughter.
There will be some doors that never open no matter how hard a person tries. I will never be and could never have been a professional basketball player or super model. I do not have the body for either. Nor do I have the eyesight for fighter jet pilot. Some things are out of our control.
And not everyone has the luxury of failing repeatedly. They don’t have time and energy to spare on ventures that might not bring any financial return. They don’t have family to support them during the trial and errors or bail them out after the crash and burn.
Failing repeatedly is a priviledge. If you’ve got the safety net, take the leap.
Do not let fear of hearing “no” or shame from having to admit rejection in front of family and friends be the only reasons you don’t try. Hearing “no” gets easier. It’ll always sting, but it will stop defining you. Every failed attempt teaches and makes you better. And you will get better.
So tryout for the team. Audition for the roll. Submit the story. Send off the resume. The regret from never trying will be so much worse than the sting of failing. And if there answer is “no”, well, your life will go on exactly as it did before you tried. It won’t be worse and now you have the chance to learn something and try again.
Take the step. Get a “no”. Reassess and try again. And again. Get 138 “no”s. Get 500 “no”s. You’ve only truly failed once you stop trying.
That’s what I yelled while my Yoshi leapt over rising lava. And eventually we got that damn daisy.
Fortunately in Brazil, Projeto Tamar has worked with local communities to dramatically reduce the hunting of turtles while they lay their eggs. In fact, Projeto Tamar has been working for 37 years, just long enough that they’ve recorded an 87% increase in babies hatched over the last five years compared to the previous five. The first few groups of turtles hatched under the protection of the project are finally old enough to come back and lay eggs of their own.
I recently asked my husband what his favorite books were as a kid and without hesitation he said “O Gênio do Crime.” He couldn’t remember the author’s name, but he remembered in detail an ingenious system the kid detectives invented to tail a very tricky criminal. My husband remembered this book instantly after forty years, and it wasn’t about ancient Rome.
The kids of São Paulo are on the verge of an uprising when the company manufacturing soccer trading cards stops awarding prizes for collecting because of counterfeit cards being mass produced in the city. (It’s possibly the most Brazilian crime ever.) The police have yet to find this “gênio do crime” (genius of crime), but Edmundo, Pituca, and Bolachão are determined to succeed where the police have failed and ensure the kids of Sao Paulo can continue collecting cards and prizes.
It happened. I finally got the brutal agent response I will talk about twenty years from now at book signings. I’m a real writer now. Yay!
My first thought was “Portugal, a Christian country in Europe full of white people, may feel too foreign for Americans?” I’m still trying to figure out what about US demographics gives the agent this impression. If Portugal is too foreign what countries will Americans read about? Great Britain, obviously. France, yes. Germany? What about Russia? They’re white, but their culture is pretty dissimilar to the US.
The Census Bureas predicts that by 2020, the majority of kids in the United States will be members of a minority race or ethnic group.