So, what does a manuscript look like?
This is what is on my desk at the moment:
Bit of a mess, huh? What you can see is the manuscript for my next book, at second draft stage. I have a very complex system happening there, with four different colours of post-it notes, four different coloured highlighters, a thick black texta, oversized mug of tea.
The yellow post-its are for vague new ideas and comments, the orange post-its are for more concrete snippets I have to insert, the purple post-its are for the tiny good bits in completely hopeless pages that should be transplanted elsewhere, and the pink post-its are for grand statements such as: MERGE CHAPTER TWO AND CHAPTER FOUR! DELETE ENTIRE CHAPTER! Or was it purple for grand statements, and pink for tiny good snippets? Oh, I don't know.
I've got a notebook for random thoughts and notes to myself, and my laptop for my Very Serious Chapter Summary table. And somehow, out of all this chaos and imposed structure, a story has to emerge!
All writers shloud really take to heart your message that rejection is common to everyone and is no reason for despair. And beginners in particular can benefit from your encouragement to use rejection as an opportunity for growth. Whether that growth is in the form of deeper understanding of self and market, or in actual story rewrites, is however a very dicey question.There was a time when I would have eagerly looked at how to change my story to make it better (read: meet an editor's tastes). But now that I've been at this game for a number of years, I'm much more grounded in the knowledge that, beyond a certain basic craft level, it's all a subjective world, a universe of opinion, and mine is as valid as anybody's. In other words, if my story pleases me, I don't care what someone else thinks of it. My creative work is self-directed, not other-directed.But of course, to teach that to beginners runs the risk of fostering arrogance and sloppiness, not to mention frustration when nothing sells. A balance needs to be found between inner strength and openness to criticism.When I'm rejected these days, I most often just renew the search, looking for the editor whose tastes come closest to my own, rather than revising. Or, as I did when I got impatient with the submission/rejection game on my story collection, self-publish.Once again what a great service you're offering here. Why is no one but me commenting?
