Agents Again

I’ve just sent the opening of my novel to a dozen literary agents in London. So my fingers are firmly crossed. It’s almost a year now, since I first submitted to agents. The novel has changed enormously in that time. I’ve rethought the identities of both the main protagonists (a postman hero and a waitress heroine) and the antagonist (a smooth-talking villain). I’ve introduced several minor characters. Key aspects of the journey that the protagonists take have been altered too. And I’ve changed the narrative from the past to the present tense. In effect, the novel has been transformed over the last year. This was needed. The novel I had a year ago was a working draft. Not the more polished product I have now. A year ago it had plenty of flaws, which at that time, I couldn’t see. But I’ve learned so much about novel writing and editing since then. All of it gained the hard way - by making mistakes and later on having to rectify them.

Novel writing is indeed a craft. It requires time, determination and experience to develop as a writer of fiction. I’ve been working hard at improving my novel for a year, mostly on my own. I got feedback from a novelist who read and commented on the manuscript last spring, and from two agents who were generous enough to write and tell me what they liked about my novel and what they thought didn’t work. The others just rejected it: some by a standard rejection letter; the rest by no response at all. Many agents’ websites now say, if you haven’t had a response within two months then you should assume I’m not interested. So among the many qualities a writer has to develop is a tough skin.