Life is frustrating enough when you work the daily grind and you see people get ahead due to whom they know, not based on merit. When it comes to writing, watch out! At some point in our early careers, we all say “Oh, yeah, Johnny Doe only got that gig because he knows the editor personally” at least once.
It seems inevitable that when you want something really-really badly, someone else comes along and snatches it right out of your grasp. This sensation feels worse when you’re a new or not-yet-published writer. But the truth of the matter is, there are two parts to the equation. Chance and Effort.
Effort is the work, the sweat, and the tears you put into something. It’s staying up late at night to finish a scene, waking up early to write the first lines of the next bit, making notes during day-job meetings or shoving all your RL chores into one huge mega-afternoon-trip so you can use your breaks and lunch hours to cram yet another 100 words or so into that story. Effort is spell-checking, punctuation and grammar read-throughs, and doing the research you really don’t want to do because you’re feeling lazy.
Effort is sending in the same damn Biblical Horror story (which scares your family & writers group to pieces but no editor seems to like) in to a million different markets in the hopes that someone sees a story gem long buried in the rash of rejections since the day you finished the piece.
Effort is controllable, predictable. It’s all you, Baby, and if you don’t put in the effort, you can’t expect to get much back to begin with. Believe me, I’ve been there.
Chance, however, is something else completely.
Like with Apolo Anton Ohno in that speed-skating competition on Feb. 13th, chance is the X factor that hits the other players, leaving you with the unexpected opening for your silver medal. Chance was me telling everyone I was going to be a novelist, trying to sell a media tie-in novel, and getting a call that said “No, we don’t want your novel, but if you’ll write us a short story in the same property, we’ll pay you for it.”
In the writing industry, I’ve found that Chance is always followed by some minimal output of effort. Writers don’t just luck out into gigs. They get attention by something they’ve done or said. Not bad things or bad attention. The writers getting all the jobs you covet are people who have shown they can churn out that 70k novel in two weeks or that they know how to meet deadlines / co-write with a team.
J.K. Rowling got the Harry Potter gig because she went to every single last publishing house in the industry. The one who decided to take a chance? Scholastic. Before then, no one in the mainstream public knew Scholastic did any non-academic publishing. Good for them and her. That’s effort.
Chance is meeting an agent at a convention, being friendly without being pushy, and happening to chance upon a conversation tidbit which leads naturally into discussing a book you’ve just finished. Said agent gives you a card and asks for a call after the con and suddenly (s)he’s sending out your manuscript to every publishing house around. (This has happened to people, BTW.)
In case I’m not making my point, Chance requires Effort to precede it. You can’t win a writing contest if you don’t write the story and submit it. You can’t hook up with that agent properly if you haven’t finished that novel. You can’t get that short story gig unless the editor has seen something of yours that impressed him.
The battle to be published seems never-ending, but put your best foot forward and give it your all. You may not get the gig you want. You might get something that’s just different. But you might also get something better.
