Thanks to Pepper Basham for inviting me today, that amazing writer/mom of 5/pastor’s wife/full-time teacher/soon-to-be Professor Dr. Pepper. (Sorry Pepper, I couldn’t resist!) Pepper is a fun person to be around, and I believe she must be really energetic to keep up with so many different things. She has talent in abundance, but aside from boundless energy and talent, I submit to you that the most valuable characteristic she has is perseverance.
Perseverance is perhaps the most necessary thing for a writer trying to get published, simply because one never knows how long it’s going to take. You can be the most talented writer in the world, but if you’re not willing to learn a few basic rules and principles about writing fiction, how to submit to publishers, and to keep submitting when the rejections come, you will never get published.
The publishing world is hard to break into. There are so many reasons a publisher might reject your work. Some reasons may seem obscure, and other may seem reasonable and understandable, but the reasons are legion, I’m afraid. More than I even have to go into in this blog post. This is something we as writers must accept and not get too caught up in. I’ve seen authors spend their time railing against the injustices of publishers and their seemingly random reasons for rejecting manuscripts, but let’s face it. That isn’t doing them any good.
A writer’s best friend is perseverance.
If at first you don’t succeed … I wrote a few short stories and articles for children when I first started writing, and the first short story never got published, but a couple of the others did. I kept sending them out until they sold. I learned so much from that experience. I learned that there are many, many reasons that a story may get rejected. A rejection doesn’t necessarily mean “Your writing stinks.”
When I started my first novel about six years ago, I was confident it would get published. But when I went to my first ACFW conference and found out that nobody wanted my missionary story, that publishers just weren’t publishing missionary stories, I realized I was probably going to have to write something else if I wanted to get published.
Did I try to find out what the publishers were looking for, the popular genres of the day? No, I wasn’t that smart. I started writing a book that had been haunting me for months. A Medieval fairy tale retelling romance for Young Adults. Well, at my next conference, I found out CBA publishers weren’t publishing a lot of YA’s, they didn’t publish romance for YA at all, they believed Medievals didn’t sell well, and there were absolutely no fairy tale retellings in all of CBA, as far as anyone knew. My book had absolutely nothing going for it.
Long story short, I didn’t give up on that book. I kept revising it, learning all I could about writing and editing. I sent query letters and proposals, per the guidelines on agents’ and publishers’ websites, and after two years, I finally found an agent brave enough to take on my Medieval YA fairy-tale-retelling romance. Meantime, I had written a second Medieval YA fairy-tale-retelling romance. My agent sent the first one out to nearly every CBA publisher in the business but one by one they all rejected it. Finally, when it seemed all hope was lost, I saw that the YA editor at Zondervan was open to historicals, so I asked my agent to send The Healer’s Apprentice to her. And the rest, as they say, is history. But it took three years and a lot of perseverance.
What causes a person to persevere against seemingly impossible odds? How can you get this thing called perseverance? I remember Dr. James Dobson talking about how he had been picked on a lot as a kid, and he believed his drive to succeed in life had a lot to do with his desire to show those other kids, the ones who’d picked on him, that he could be successful.
I did want to prove that I could be a successful writer. I may not have admitted it, even to myself, but I wanted validation. I wanted to show that all those people who had rejected me were wrong. I wanted to show my husband and family that all the sacrifices were not in vain. I felt a drive inside me to succeed.
But I have seen that kind of drive get people, me included, into trouble, cause them to fall into sin, like pride and jealousy and envy. It’s not wrong to want to succeed, but we must always let God guide us. We must humbly submit our drive to God and let Him tell us which direction to go, how to have balance in our lives, when to write and when to spend time with our family or friends. And we must always confess our pride, jealousy or envy to God and let Him take it from our hearts, because those emotions are so destructive. And yet they are almost inevitable in this business. We must constantly remind ourselves to “rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.” And we must ask God to help us not compare ourselves to other people, which always leads to either pride or jealousy.
Were there ever times that I wanted to quit? Oh yes. I asked God to let me quit and do something else, to give me a job that would bring in actual money and would make me feel productive and give me some validation. But always, and in different ways, God told me to keep writing. And He still tells me that.
Because let me tell you, the need for perseverance doesn’t go away when you get published. There have been many times when I asked God, Why am I doing this? A few months after The Healer’s Apprentice was released, my publisher did a week-long promotion giving away my book as a free download. Already my book was getting some really negative reviews from people who didn’t realize it was a Christian book. Being a fairy tale retelling, the title and the cover, all appealed to people in the mainstream. Amazon was flooded with negative reviews, people speculating about me, insinuating things about me that weren’t true, attacking not only my story and my writing but also me as a person.
I was devastated. But eventually, perseverance kicked in. I realized so many things, not the least of which is that it’s not about me. It’s about God and what he wants to do. And I know God won’t let me quit.
So perseverance is vitally important. If you don’t have any, get some! Prayer is the key to that. The three P’s I like to stress are Perseverance, Priority, and Prayer. But that is fodder for another blog post.
May God bless your writing!
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Melanie Dickerson is the author of The Healer's Apprentice, a Christy Award finalist and winner of The National Reader's Choice Award for Best First Book. She earned her bachelor's degree in special education from The University of Alabama. She has taught children with special needs in Georgia and Tennessee, and English to adults in Germany and Ukraine. Now she spends her time writing and taking care of her husband and two daughters near Huntsville, Alabama. Visit her on the web at www.melaniedickerson.com.
