A How To Guide for Setting Aside an Unpublishable Novel
by Sandra Gail Lambert
Audio Version:
A How To Guide for Setting Aside an Unpublishable Novel by Sandra Gail Lambert
First, grieve. Have a little cry as you move the folder out of your computer's sidebar. We used to call this stashing it in a bottom drawer. Have an angry cry as you scroll down the submission table and stop to reread the blue notes which indicate the heart-squeezing moments of requests for fulls or partials of the manuscript. You try to skim your eyes over red of the rejections that followed, but no such luck. ("not for us," "no reflection on quality," or "good luck in placing.") Then move that submission table into the "Retired Submissions" folder. Whine about how the last five years of work having been for nothing. Which even as you whimper, you know isn't true. Perhaps you reread the novel and the truth is there are unfixable flaws. In a weird way it makes you feel better.
Second. Move a new file into the computer's sidebar. It doesn't matter if it's empty. Make up a title: "Thoughts on a Short Story," "Maybe These Could be Essays," or if you are finally regaining some of your writer hubris, "The Rivers Memory - My Current Novel in Progress." Open a new document and try to make an outline of this figment of a novel because you want to be someone who makes outlines this time around. You aren't. Still, you write a swirl of quick scenes and emotional moments. You save it into the new file. It is no longer empty.
Third. And this is essential. Have a party. A "book-release" party. Invite everyone you know. Many of the people you know are part of your thirty years of lesbian community so it is, of course, a potluck. Tell them they have to bring a gift. You admire the altruistic who tell us that no gift is required or ask us to donate to this or that charity. They are wonderful people. You are not one of them. Some of us have discretionary income and some of us do not, so you define "gift" as including the nonmaterial such as reciting a poem.
The Party. It is fabulous and celebratory. Some of the guests are other writers, and they've composed poems for the occasion. Others are avid readers and bring their favorite passages to perform. Some bring you gift cards to Office Depot, and you exclaim that now you have more money for ink cartridges. (You are one of the ones with minimal discretionary income.) A friend who has no clue about the publishing world or why you are even having this party appears in the doorway staggering under the awkward size and weight of a box. She has to squat to brace it on her knees and readjust her grip before she can step into the house. The box is full of paper. Ten reams. That's five thousand sheets. Oh, the possibilities.
END OF ESSAY
Addendum: In the essay "Why I've Decided to Never Query Another Literary Agent Ever Again," I imply the putting aside my first novel. Some readers (two of you) wanted to know if it was ever pulled out of the metaphorical bottom drawer. It did get pulled out. The fatal flaw was the one common to many first novels which was being autobiographical but not in a good way. I used that. I disassembled the parts. Some became the ideas for short stories and many segments became what they really were—personal essays. These I had some success in publishing and that felt good so I wrote more and eventually assembled them into the memoir A Certain Loneliness. It was published by University of Nebraska Press.
Tomorrow, I post the next chapter of The Sacrifice Zone. As usual I'll open up the first couple of paragraphs so anyone can read it. You know, as a teaser to attract paid subscribers.