I’ve been shopping my middle grade novel, The Egyptian Enigma, for a while now. It’s a good novel, a lot of fun, but I’ve had no representation on it yet. Why? The blasted economy is part of it, of course. And my query letter could have been better, and now is. Even with those problems against me, I have been lucky enough to have a handful of agents request partials and fulls. Alas, no bites.
The rejections don’t bother me. They are part of the business, and I certainly would not want an agent repping my book who was not whole-heartedly enthusiastic about it. So when the agents came back with, “It’s just not right for me.”, I was fine with that. Disappointed, but not upset.
What made it tricky, for me, was the lack of any productive feedback from those agents who had read the book. I know they are hard-pressed for time, but having taken the time to read the book, I had been hoping for at least a sentence of advice on how to improve it.
You see, I am no literary genius.
I don’t suffer from the delusion that what I write is immutable and perfect. I know I have learned much about my craft, but still have much to learn about it. I am eager for feedback, revel in productive criticism. Unlike some of my fellow writers, I actually enjoy revision. And I have come to the conclusion that this novel needs revision—something is not grabbing the agents who have read it. Unfortunately, none of the agents has given me any indication what that “something” might be.
So I am re-visioning in the dark.
When you know something needs changed, but not what, how do you proceed? I have realized the futility of continuing to send the manuscript in its current form out there—there is a fatal flaw somewhere in it. I must fix it. But how can you fix something if you don’t know what’s broken? For a long time, paralyzed by the uncertainty of how to proceed, I did nothing—just continued to send the manuscript out over and over, hoping for a different result.
Isn’t that the definition of insanity?
Coming Up: How I found the clues to the fix, and fixed it