The Rest Of Us Get Rejected

I started reading the news report of author Tom Franklin's path to further success and I didn't want to read on. If this had been his first offering, I thought, he'd have been rejected like the rest of us. If I finished the article, would I discover something about publishing that would help me along?

Literary agent Nat Sobel had sold Mr. Franklin's first novel and there was a contract in place for this next one that turned out to be a waste of paper. The agent advised his client to start over.

If Mr. Franklin were not a client, merely a submitter who showed a talent for the written word, Mr. Sobel would have sent off a form rejection letter and that would be the end of it. Instead, he encouraged and suggested and discussed with the author, who eventually turned the manuscript around.

Over the course of several years, that novel rattled around in Mr. Franklin's head. He tried different things, cut out sections, got frustrated.

As I see it, there's nothing different in the process for those of us hoping for a chance and those who have credentials. Things don't work, and someone points it out to you or you see it for yourself, and you go back to the beginning to make it work.

So we don't have literary agents giving us the benefit of their knowledge. We don't teach at the University of Mississippi either, so we're even further back in the pack. We have to work that much harder to get noticed in a sea of writing teachers and MFAs.

Sure Mr. Franklin could have given up on the manuscript. He wrote other books while struggling to make Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter what it was supposed to be.

And so do we, the unpublished with manuscripts gathering dust and another one in process. We write, we re-visit and revise, and we keep on submitting in the hope that one day a literary agent will see the profit potential in our writing.