It's a Product, Prudy

By Prudy Taylor-Board

It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.

~Sally Field

Like most writers, I was over the moon when I sold my first poem. I was in high school, and I decided it was easy! You just wrote something, sent it in, and waited for the check. Right? Alas, wrong, wrong, wrong.

To be fair, I did all right for years. I wrote articles and short stories, submitted them and, most of the time, they sold.

Until I wrote a novel, which I would rewrite from prologue to epilogue four times over five years, and get rejected more than thirty times before I finally sold it to a New York publisher. Those were unquestionably the most exciting yet frustrating years of my writing life; however, two lessons emerged that have stood me in good stead. And, surprisingly, they didn't come from another writer, but from my late husband.

Jack's family had been in the wholesale business in Cincinnati for three generations, and Jack had been in sales for the majority of his working life. He knew how discouraging it was to fail to make a sale, and he was genuinely kind and understanding when I received one of my myriad rejection letters.

As time passed, he also grew a little tired of my angst, so one day he sat me down. "Prudy," he said, "let's say you go into a dress shop. You try on ten, even fifteen dresses, but you walk out without buying a single thing. Did the store fail? Did the clerk fail? Did the dress designer fail?" He paused for dramatic effect. "No," he said at last. "No one failed. There was nothing the matter with the dresses. The simple truth is that this particular store didn't have what you wanted.

"Get smart," he said. "Think of your novel as a product, not as a piece of your soul. If you think of the novel as being separate from you — Prudy, the person — you won't take the rejection so hard. The publisher who sent the rejection isn't saying you're a lousy human being or a wretched writer or that your book is bad. He's merely saying it doesn't meet his needs."

Jack made sense and, heartened, I began work on yet another revision. As I proceeded chapter by chapter through the novel, I recognized that his words contained still another bit of writerly wisdom: If you want to buy a prom dress, you don't go to a store that specializes in casual wear. Translation: the salesperson/writer must know the market, i.e., the publisher or agent who likes his or her product/genre.

The novel sold the next time out. Since then, I've written five more novels, eighteen regional histories, a how-to book about writing your first novel, and a ghostwritten autobiography.

They've all sold.

Thanks, Jack.

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