Landing on your ass
You know when you were little (or maybe not so little) and you went to sit down, and someone pulled out the chair and you landed flat on your ass?
What did you do?
Did you sit there stunned, feeling sorry for yourself? Did you laugh and get back up, hang on tight to the chair and sit your butt where it belongs?
It’s like this query workshop over at Backspace where I got decent, good and discouraging feedback…all from the same person. And to top it off, each agent’s feedback was completely different and that threw me for a loop, landed me right on my ass.
So being true to the form of being a One Minute Martyr or OMM (I allow myself limited time to ever feel sorry for myself) I turned their words upside down and inside out, wallowed in the pity of not sweeping the agents off their feet — and then I got up and got back on my chair.
What would you have done?
same. no other choice. if you don’t then whatever got you there on the floor in the first place wins.
A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water – Eleanor Rooselvelt
The agents reactions would have left me speechless, too. When I was showing my script around friends and family, everybody offered different and sometimes contradictory advise. And none of them mentioned the problems that I saw in the script.
I really think landing or even impressing an agent is a crap-shoot. You just need to do the best you can and hopefully get lucky.
SDT – same damn thing. Like you said, everyone’s looking for something different. There’s no way on God’s green earth to please ‘em all. You just need to please one, and there’s no doubt in my mind that you will. Keep on rocking, girlfriend!
That seems to me like the only thing you can do. If you gave up you’d never get anywhere. Good luck to you, I know you’ll follow find the agent that adores your work!
Same thing. I might also have polished, then tested the waters, sending a finished query out to a select agent or two to gauge reaction. Esp since each agent’s feedback was different. Is your query still being critiqued?
Nothing to do but get back on that chair (after a good laugh). Here you’ve discovered what I’ve loooong suspected about querying: “…each agent’s feedback was completely different…” It’s all about the search for the perfect set of eyeballs. Get your shotgun and fling them queries far and wide to increase your odds!
At different times in my life, I had to have some of my work judged as in good and bad and all the inbetweens. It is hard to do this but it is always a learning experience. I learned to take it as such. Take in what you want and leave the rest.
Best of all, evaluate responses. You can fall on the floor all you want but get up and learn from it.
Either learn it isn’t something you want to learn or something you do want to learn.
Learning the true value of critqueing is a tough one for all of us and it can really hurt.
In a workshop once, I got a bunch of praise from fellow writers, the instructor included, except one guy… said he didn’t like it at all (and he didn’t even back it up with solid examples from my writing. The jerk.) It hurt for a moment, I mentally smacked him, then I got off my butt and back in the chair.
You guys are all very smart, of course. After all, you’re here.
I have been getting and giving feedback for a couple of years now — and I always get back up. But having it surprise me, well, never ceases to surprise me.
What’s up with that???
I had an agent CALL ME and then pass when I sent her my manuscript saying that I “wasn’t as funny as she thought.” ouch. Haven’t been able to write much of anything since then. Your way is better. Get back up and keep on going. I will. Eventually.
I don’t know about you, but I like really strong coffee with very hot milk and no sugar in a big mug. I guess we all need to find the agents and then publisher and then readers who like coffee the way we do.
Wow, that’d be hard. Not so much the taking of it, but trying to figure out which advice to follow and which to not follow.
I have a tendency to assume everyone else can see better than me. Probably why I don’t do that sort of thing much.
One minute martyr–classic!
I’d definitely wallow in self-pity for a while and probably tell myself that I must really do suck. And then…I’d get over it. I’ve been writing long enough to know that things like that are just…a part of this whole business.
And then I read something really crappy and think ‘I know if THAT got published, then I will!’…eventually.