In the last post I raised the question of why I received so many rejections. My guess? Me. More specifically, I think my writing simply wasn’t good enough. How can that be? After all, I placed in the top 10 of the Jerry Jenkins contest. Believe me when I say I was confused.
However, after time passed, and after studying more about writing, and after re-examining my work, I was no longer surprised at the rejections. I can best explain this with something I found on the Steve Laube Agency web site, which I’ll paraphrase: Pretty good writing will be rejected – it takes being magnificant to get published.
Now, I’m sure every beginning author – including myself – starts out thinking their work is magnificant. Unfortunately, we tend to be blind to our deficiencies, and a couple of things contribute to this: 1) Our writing very well may be well above average, and 2) We get feedback from family and friends that tell us how good our stories are.
I’m not a sports fan, but the best analogy I can think of has to do with professional ball games. Let’s use football as an example. Think about the high school’s best football players. They’re good at what they do, and their friends and family think they’re great. And, at the high school level, they really are great. But how many of them make it onto college football teams, and of those that do, how many of them are considered great at the college level? And then, of those “great” college players, how many of them make it to the NFL? Not many. And, in fact, it’s not uncommon for well-known college players to become average pro players.
Similarly, someone who’s writing appears “great” to the average person may just be writing at a superior high school level. And even those who have studied the craft a bit and make some improvements, and maybe even place in the top 10 of some well-known contest are just at the college level. It takes further study and practice to reach the true pro level of writing. Furthermore, family and friends probably won’t even notice the difference in the pro level of writing and the “great” high school level – they don’t have the experience or the “eye” to understand the difference in quality. Agents, editors, and publishers have an eye for such things, and they will reject anything at the high school level, and most manuscripts at the college level. You have to be near perfect to snag a publishing contract – and even then there are other factors that may garnish a rejection.
That’s why I believe I never got published when I first set out to make it in this industry – I was good, but not at the pro level.
I’ll start diving into what I’ve done to improve my writing in the next post. We’ll talk about how to move from being an A+ high school writer to a pro writer.