This essay is a part of a five-part series that delves into the process of querying literary agents to represent a novel draft. If you missed the introduction, please read it first! Then head back over here.
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Most of my values come from my life partner, T. She is a therapist who specializes in trauma-focused care. I like to read whatever is lying around and over the years in our home, I’ve read a number of books around trauma, healing, self-love, self-care. This is the frontier of knowledge around which I’m most interested. It’s also the work that I engage in myself in weekly therapy.
About a third of the way into the dispiriting querying process, I wrote a phrase on a post-it and stuck it to my laptop:
Investing in the Internal Helps My External Goals.
My internal infrastructure is my emotional landscape. Specifically, I needed to work on my resilience. I needed to be able to sustain repeated rejection, to understand that it was not a personal referendum on me but rather the consequence of other forces.
Market forces, of course, are impersonal. And querying puts you in the realm of the market. Alternatively, the agent could be in the process of retiring her practice (that was true for one of my rejections) or they have too many of one kind of author on their list and are looking for a different cross-section.
Of course, ‘know how to deal with rejection’ is pretty standard fare but here’s how I dealt with it:
1) Commitment to Process over Product:
There are countless benefits of switching from an outcome-based approach to a process-based approach. In the context of querying, this took the form of switching my goal from “securing an agent” to “sending out one query per day.”
This same principle also helped me finish my novel draft and it’s a powerful principle to live by, IMHO.
2) Doing Body Check-Ins:
This takes practice. It’s the casual cousin to full-blown meditation. It’s stilling all thought (as much as possible, of course. Thoughts will drift in naturally and it’s pointless to chastise yourself and criminalize yourself when that’s inevitable). Focus on your breathing. Scan your body from the soles of your feet up. Usually, midway through this exercise, two things happen:
1) I feel calmer.
2) The stakes of the enterprise clarify themselves. I realize that I can’t do a thousand things at once. And no one’s life is depending on the outcome of a query. The body check-in then allows me to do my work with less fear of failure and less of that wordless sense of unease and impending disaster.
2) Self-Affirmations
These three are great. The third one is another post-it on my workstation.
- I want this person’s validation but if I don’t get it, I’ll be alright.
When you research an agent, and you feel a connection to them, it can lead to a quickening of the heart rate. You think, “This is it. This is the one. They will get this.” But statistically speaking, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. This affirmation helps with preparing for that likely rejection.
- I am enough. I am good enough. I am doing a good enough job.
Because there’s no limit to querying, it’s easy to think you’re not doing enough. Starting with the assumption that you are enough and that whatever you’re doing is bonus helped me, I think. But different strokes, of course.
- An Accumulation of Hard Work. Suddenly, it pays off.
In our field, there isn’t a steady supply of good news. It comes in bursts. And there are long fallow periods. So, this affirmation exhorts me to stick to the process.
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Remember to celebrate Wins Along The Way
This could be your first partial request, your first full request, a request for a revise and resubmit, or even an especially kind note in what is a dreadfully impersonal business.
It’s embarrassing but one form that my fear takes is “fear of jinxes”. In the early stage of the querying process, I failed to celebrate the micro-wins because I felt that would jinx ultimately securing representation. But it can be such a long and arduous process that it’s so thankless to hold out celebration until you achieve the ULTIMATE end. When I started celebrating the micro-wins, the process felt less charged, the stakes were less brutalizing.
This allowed me to invite my loved ones into the process a little bit more and they enjoyed that instead of having to watch me suffer from a distance. And it didn’t jinx anything. Nor did it affect the lovely dinner celebration I had after signing my contract.
But even as I type this I hope that I haven’t jinxed anything because the road to publication remains long.
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Perhaps this is all a bit hokey. But it would be irresponsible of me to talk about querying without discussing my internal infrastructure. I spent almost as much time on my internal infrastructure as I did on the querying itself. It meant that I was less of a burden to my loved ones and colleagues. And it helps with writing, too. That’s important.
