Your memoir rings true, Frank. I particularly like this passage, detailing the response by editors and agents ( getting to be the same sort of co-mutual screen these days) to your already attentively-read manuscript:

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But despite the great word-of-mouth and the long list of writers I had proclaiming my book’s worthiness, every editor and agent I came into contact with was condescending and arrogant. To a one, they all wanted me to fundamentally change the book, despite its successes as it was already constructed. I decided I couldn’t, in good faith to my nearly 1,000 current readers, make such sweeping changes (Have the entire thing take place in high school! Eliminate all but four characters!).

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I wrote three novels from the ages of 48 to 51. All were short. I accumulated about 150 rejection slips, some of them long, handwritten notes from veteran editors at venerable publishers . Some of these longer rejections praised my books. I also had an agent helping me.

But the tune that was played back to me by these gatekeepers was quite consistent:

1. Study Stephen King. He’s a success.
2. Eliminate the first 100 pages.
3. Your novels are too “character-driven.”

Concluding that I was not a novelist, I went back to the humble comic strip, something at my level.

I always enjoy these “riots”– thanks.

Kasper

The Gold Rush/Publishing metaphor could not be more on target–nor rendered with such grace and resonance. Keep on writing, because your skills are mad, and manifest.

Thanks for the read.

–DM

Oh, sure you want to go bowling with me. Someone probably told you I once bowled a 28!

Thanks again for sharing in glowing terms, the frustration felt by many.
Ric
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/RicMarion/

There are no guarantees no matter the profession, whether that be an attorney, a stockbroker, an actor, a biopharm CEO, a musician, …

But we keep doing it because it’s what we like to do. I’m with Julie about finding a j-o-b that doesn’t suck the life out of me. One that I put in my eight hours and flee.

The key with a job is to find one that doesn’t burn you out too much so that you can devote time to your fiction. I try to write two hours a day every day, but some times it doesn’t happen. Some days I’ll have an hour and other days I’ll have three hours.

Just keep writing. I share your disappointment. My first novel didn’t get published, not unless I count the future serilization in 07, but still it wasn’t what I dreamed or thought the journey would be like. Now that the second novel is making the rounds I worry less about it and just focus on writing more flash stories and working on the novel in process.

Writing itself may mean lots of things to lots of people, but at the root of it is a love of language and of expressing onself creatively. That love is what drives me to write again and again. The business side that’s filled with submissions and and those other less enjoyable things called rejection I just view as part of a job. It has to get done. If not for the writing there wouldn’t be anything to be accepted or rejected.

Just keep writing for the love of it, not the business side. Remmber the business is just that, it’s a job.

Julie

If the novel feels like too much work I break up the routine and write a flash story or see a friend.

For myself, I first started writing to make sense of a very strange childhood & youth, with scenes & experiences worthy of Fellini or Bosch or maybe Lynch when he’s really getting his freak on. In THAT regard, my writing has already been a success as a personal catharsis.

But we don’t write merely for ourselves, otherwise we’d only keep journals that our heirs would probably relegate to the landfill after our passing :)

Just finished reading WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL, by Donald Maass. The guy’s been one of the top NY lit agents for 30 years, and his input is VERY useful (but only to us journeymen authors, I fear it would be useless to writers just starting out). It’s not a “hack template” to ho yourself paint-by-numbers style, its more an examination of the common factors he’s noticed in all the “dark horse” blockbusters that reached a large readership despite all expectation.

In Maass’s opinion, there’s no substitute for quality writing (surprise!) BUT, interestingly, he felt “word of mouth” was the only REAL factor in a book’s success — while marketing, distribution and promotion are useful and important, if enough people are seduced by your book, they’ll tell their friends, who will tell theirs, ad infinitum.

The momentum may be slow to build, but if we write a good book and get it out there, it WILL ultimately snow ball into something. Guess the only question is, how long do you have to wait?

Immortality is part of the draw for most of us, I think: like Thucydides 2500 years ago, we dream of writing a book that will be read forever, we imagine strange posterities marvelling over our genius LOL.

Jim Thompson, close to the end, told his wife to guard all his manuscripts carefully. “I’ll be famous ten years after I die,” he assured her.

He was right.

Pearce Hansen

“any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.” ~james baldwin

certainly, if baldwin saw it that way, the rest of us are certainly entitled to our struggles and doubts. ;)