Before I start, if you go to Books<\/i> on my website and click on Other<\/i>, you\u2019ll see a sketch for the cover of my book of mean poems, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It<\/i>. The final cover will have some color but won\u2019t be much different from what you see. I adore it. It perfectly captures the book\u2019s mood of malevolent complacency, and I can\u2019t look at it without grinning evilly. The book won\u2019t be out until April, 2012, so it\u2019s way too early to pre-order.<\/p>\n
On December 27, 2010, Jenna Royal wrote …I recently read an interview with an author who said that you shouldn’t try to get published as a teen, just keep trying to improve your writing skills and not try to put your writing out there because it isn’t worth your trouble and the rejection is too hard on your self-confidence at this point. What are people\u2019s thoughts on this? I for one know that I’m not going to try publishing until I know that I’ve got something worth putting out there, that I’m really proud of, something that I’ve put myself into and polished and perfected until it’s the best it can be. Even if I feel I have something like this, should I still wait?<\/i><\/p>\n
Jenna Royal, you asked about teens, but at least part of your question applies to every age as well.<\/p>\n
I sent the first book I ever wrote straight out to publishers (I was thirty-nine). It had merit, and I thought it was great, but it was unpublishable. I hadn\u2019t read a children\u2019s book in many years and had no notion of what was going on. My story line was simple, possibly good for young children, but the ideas I explored (art appreciation) were more appropriate for a much older audience. The two parts didn’t go together, and the manuscript was universally rejected.<\/p>\n
So I started educating myself and kept sending picture book manuscripts out. I was not shy, and although rejection made me unhappy, it didn\u2019t devastate me. Were my later stories (the ones that never were accepted) good enough to be published? I don’t know. I did my best and released them into the world.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve talked about my road to publication in other posts, so I won\u2019t repeat here. Years later, while I was still unpublished, an editor visited a writing class I was taking. He said that the two fastest ways to get published were to write on a subject nobody else knew much about or to write something completely great. And I thought, Then I\u2019ll never get published. The only subject I knew thoroughly was welfare policy, which wasn\u2019t promising for a children\u2019s book, and I didn\u2019t think I was writing anything great or ever would. I was working on Ella Enchanted<\/i> at the time, which turned out well. But I still don\u2019t think about writing a great book when I write. Mostly I think about figuring it out and getting through it.<\/p>\n
There are many ways to divide the world into two categories. You may have heard the theory that everyone resembles either a pig or a fox, which I don\u2019t see. But I believe people divide into those who over-appreciate themselves and those who under-appreciate themselves. It\u2019s hard to advise on sending work out to a publisher without knowing which group a person falls into.<\/p>\n
Alas, over-appreciators, in my experience, rarely have the insight to know what they are. So they flood publishers\u2019 slush piles with bad books insufficiently revised and are the reason everyone else has to wait so long for an editorial response. If you are the rare over-appreciator who recognizes this quality in yourself, you shouldn\u2019t put anything into the mail or cyberspace until at least three people say it\u2019s ready.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re a severe under-appreciator of any age, you should push yourself to get your work out or you never will and readers will be the losers.<\/p>\n
Another problem with being an under-appreciator is that if an editor rejects your work, you may say to yourself, Aha, I knew it wasn\u2019t any good. Then you may never send it out again. You don\u2019t know what was going on at the publisher when your manuscript was read. An editorial assistant may have sat down to a stack of submissions up to the ceiling. Four hours later he was drooling and muttering gibberish to himself and unable to identify the next Jane Austen if he came across one of her manuscripts.<\/p>\n
One way to get a sense of the worth of what you have is to set it aside for a few weeks. If you under-appreciate you may be surprised at the high quality of what you\u2019ve written. If you over-appreciate, you may be able to see the flaws.<\/p>\n
In this process of deciding whether to submit a manuscript, you may want to ask yourself how you handle rejection. If you take turndowns hard, I don\u2019t say not to submit, I say think about supports to help you if – and more likely when – rejection comes. Tell friends what you\u2019re doing. Assemble a cheering section. If you\u2019re in a writers\u2019 group you\u2019ll have your pals’ misery to keep company with. Read about all the famous writers whose work was initially rejected. There are collections of rejection letters for renowned books. Buy one or borrow one from your library.<\/p>\n
You may also want to start small. Lots of kids\u2019 book writers begin by submitting stories to children\u2019s magazines before submitting to book publishers. If you\u2019re writing for adults, there may be online publishing opportunities that may be easier to break into than the big publishing houses. If you\u2019re a teen or even younger, googling young writers<\/i> will lead you to opportunities. I\u2019m not saying you have to start small, only that you can if that\u2019s where your comfort zone is.<\/p>\n
As for being a teen per se, I can\u2019t imagine that an excellent manuscript wouldn\u2019t get the same treatment if it came from a teen as if it came from an older person – that is, its excellence may or may not be noticed, as in the example above of the exhausted editorial assistant. Sometimes good writing isn\u2019t picked up.<\/p>\n
Do I think a teen can write a terrific story or book? I imagine so. Some of my students have been very talented.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, a few years ago I came across my folder from my creative writing class when I was a senior in high school. Now I\u2019ve lost it again, but one story sticks out in my memory. Before I tell you about it I need to reveal a little about my family history. My grandmother and my aunts – my mother\u2019s mother and her sisters – criticized my mother often, not in a helpful way or even a forthright way, but in snide, indirect digs. I knew, and I was totally on my mother\u2019s side. I hated the three of them. When I was in middle school my aunt got sick, and the story I found was about an unpleasant, selfish old lady in a hospital.<\/p>\n
My writing was okay. But reading the story as an adult I was shocked at how meanspirited it was. When I wrote it, I knew that I was imagining my aunt as the main character. She and my other aunt and my grandmother are long dead now, and I still don\u2019t think of them fondly, but today I couldn\u2019t approach them as characters or, if they could be brought back to life, as people in such an unsympathetic way. I\u2019ve grown up.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean to suggest that teens are heartless. I wasn\u2019t heartless myself. And you may be nothing like me. You may at a young age be able to get inside the mind and spirit of lots of different sorts of characters. You may have oceans of empathy. But you may lack some other depth of experience or character growth that will improve your writing later on. It would be terrible if, at fifteen or eighteen, you were finished, complete, as good as you were going to get.<\/p>\n
So, write and send your writing out if you want to test the waters. If you have early success, how lovely, and how marvelous that the best is probably still to come.<\/p>\n
Here are two prompts:<\/p>\n
\u2219 Improve on my early effort. Write about an unpleasant, selfish old woman in the hospital, but reveal her inner life, so the reader feels for her. Why is she in the hospital? How sick is she? Does anyone visit? Is there anyone she especially wants to see?<\/p>\n
\u2219 Over-appreciation and under-appreciation can pervade any aspect of life, not only writing. A dragon descends on the greater metropolitan area of Cincinnati, wrecking homes and incinerating maidens in Ohio and Kentucky. The governor of each state sends an adventurer to dispense with the monster. Unbeknownst to the governor, one adventurer is an over-appreciator and one is an under. Write about how each one prepares to encounter the dragon and how it comes out. If you like, turn the action into a story, a novel, or a seven-book series.<\/p>\n
Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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