As I lie down each night, my mind goes to the great American romance novel I will write…someday. In the past I haven’t done so badly. I produced two full mss and sent them off.
One was a beginning writer’s drivel. Trite plot, cliched characters, and unhoned writing skills.
The second was better. The characters breathed…through part of the story, at least. The plot was almost a plot. The conflict was enough to get started, though it couldn’t maintain the level of sexual tension required for a category romance novel. That second ms was received by a wonderful editor at Silhouette that I shall never forget. I’d met her at several writers’ conferences before I queried her. My initial objective was to obtain an agent, which I did thanks to an introduction from a dear friend, who was already one of the agent’s clients. On to the submission of the ms to the Silhouette editor, who incidentally has risen to a higher position in the publishing house now (13 years later).
So I sent in my mss, and with it, years of hope. I lived on needles and pins for the next few weeks. I’d been told the wait to hear one way or another could take months. A negative response (rejection) might come more quickly. I don’t remember exactly how long I waited, but one day I got the dreaded returned bundle with my address written in my own handwriting. I was almost too nervous to open it. So I simply stared at it a long time.
The letter was a rejection letter, as I expected, but not a final, don’t-ever-send-this-trash-again rejection. The editor wrote a very long letter and outlined the things that caused her to reject the ms. She told me exactly why she rejected it. I couldn’t believe it! Were all rejections so cordial, so helpful, so encouraging? The answer is no.
Evidently there was something in my writing and the story I’d conceived that interested this editor. She said she would like to see the ms again, after I’d done the things she suggested. She said she would reconsider if the revisions were done to her specifications. One of the things that worried me was that little thing called voice. Voice is that unique way each one of us has of saying things. The words we use. The vocabulary. The tone and feeling of our writing. I never quite found the voice the editor wanted for the particular imprint at Silhouette that she thought my story would fit into well enough to be published.
That was approximately 13 years ago.
During the past decade I packed away my writing and began to pursue other things. Hobbies. Social things. Family things. But recently that desire that lurks so deeply in my soul has been whispering to me when I lie down at night, when I meet someone who has some interesting quirk that could be used in a character, and when I least expect it some possible plot twist comes to mind. Yes! That need still lives within me.
So here I am as I begin this journey again. Hopefully if I keep talking here to myself, I can discover ways to better meet these characters head-on, and in the end, write a story that is publishable…but more than that, one that people will want to read and then afterwards, smile and say, “That was fun!”
