Is this a story of taking action or of not taking action? Let’s find out together.
Up there on the list of Things I Get Asked A Lot is some variant on “when should I start querying my novel?”
When you’re done.
“But it’s mostly–“
No.
“I’m almost–“
No.
“Then I can keep–“
NO.
When you’re done.
When you’ve edited it to death. When it’s as good as it’s ever going to get. When this is the book you are truly capable of writing. Then and not a moment sooner.
When I was twenty, I got a Request For Full from a major romance publisher. They were launching a new imprint, and I had the perfect thing. I queried it and got the request within a week.
The problem is, the book wasn’t done.
Like, not at all. Like I had barely typed The End.
Oh, yeah. I was dumb.
See, I thought I was gaming the system. I am, and always have been, a really fast writer. I was nearly done with the book when I started querying. Nearly, but not quite. I was being very professional, so I had done my research into query times. Don’t expect less than a few months, I’d seen. Sometimes years. I’d be done well in advance of then.
That didn’t actually work out great.
In fact, it worked out even worse than I could have predicted at the time, because frantically trying to write the ending revealed a major plot hole. Truly massive. The book no longer felt like it could make sense without an incredible lift of a rewrite. It would take months. Months might even be an underestimate. I didn’t know, I’d never been here before. I was twenty. Maybe I’d just written a bad book and these poor romance publishers didn’t know yet. Maybe nothing could be done to save it.
(Note to Reader: this is rarely true. Unless you are writing some kind of hate manifesto, your book can probably be saved.)
If I was being honest with myself, which I was not at the time but am now, I had gotten a little bit overexcited. I was cocky and enthusiastic, an intoxicating combination. I could have known, if I had stopped to think seriously, that pulling the trigger could backfire easily, and I shouldn’t count my chickens or whatever folksy metaphor applied. But I didn’t want to stop and think, and therefore I did not stop and think. I wrote a query packet as if for a finished product and sent it off, never bothering to feel regret until the reply came back, at which point I felt regret in spades.
It was a beautiful request. The acquisitions editor loved my chapters so much. The romance was authentic. The ending was a great twist. (Ha-ha.) She wanted to see it very badly.
I immediately developed the worst case of Imposter Syndrome I’ve ever had before or since.
It was at this point that I should have taken action, because frankly I could have said almost anything at that point and gotten grace. There’s a lot of frustration in the publishing industry, but when it comes to timing, I’ve found that there can be a lot of grace too. If it happened to me now, I’d send something along the lines of:
“Hey! Thank you so much. I’m finishing up an urgent edit that came up while I was on submission with you. I will get it to you A.S.A.P.!”
Maybe I’d send it anyway. Maybe I’d let them catch the plot hole, because I’ve had important publishing people catch plot holes before and they were pretty nice about it. Sometimes they even have good suggestions.
Instead, I simply… didn’t. Didn’t anything. Didn’t email. Didn’t write. Didn’t even open the document. I just left it as it was, plot hole and all.
I’m not saying I would have gotten a contract at twenty. Of course not. I probably wouldn’t, because in the end, with hindsight, it was not a very good book. But I could have, and that’s the point. I got the action and inaction points completely backwards. If I had waited to submit the book until it was done, I could have sent that full off without a qualm within hours. If I had replied with honesty, I could have sent a better book within a reasonable time frame. Instead, I ignored the entire thing as if it had never existed, and thus created an unearned chance for myself which I was forced to waste.
I don’t think that enthusiasm itself can really be a bad thing. It often has goodness at its root. The problem comes with where we anchor it. We can often incorrectly identify the thing to be enthusiastic about.
I could have taken the time to finish enjoying the writing of my book, or realized that I had world enough and time to write as many books as I wanted. Instead I tried to jump the queue, and wasted years of a career that could have been.
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