by James L. Rubart, @jameslrubart
“I’d like to come see you for a couple of hours.”
“You do realize I live three and a half hours away from you these days.”
“Yes.”
This was part of a conversation I had six weeks back with a friend of mine from high school. We’d stayed in touch periodically over the years mainly through Facebook and I’d always enjoyed our interactions. So I look forward to seeing him for the first time in ages. He wanted to catch up, but he also wanted to talk to me about the book he’d written and get counsel.
Over lunch he explained to me that it wasn’t one book he’d written but four. He’d hired an editor for the first manuscript and spent a decent chunk of money having them work on his story. They hated it. He’d also asked a friend he swims with to look at it. The friend said they thought it was stupid for him to be writing a book. He showed it to a second friend who read a few pages and said that didn’t understand what he was trying to do.
And now he was asking me to take a look.
On one hand I thought there might be something there as my friend is highly intelligent. His current job is checking out Boeing airplanes after they come across the assembly line and then taking them for a test flight. Yep. He’s the guy that flies the plane after it’s built to make sure you and I are going to be safe when the plane starts taking off and landing at airports around the world.
As we talked, I saw he was extremely passionate about writing. It was more than a hobby. It was something he had pursued with dedication and would continue to pursue.
Over lunch, he told me in more detail about a few others that either didn’t have the time to read his book, i.e., weren’t interested, or read it and didn’t think much of the tale. So as you can imagine, it was with a bit of trepidation that I opened his manuscript and started reading. As I type these words I’m about 25% of the way into the book. It’s over 90,000 words long so you can see I’ve sampled a decent amount.
Here’s my assessment. Yes, there’s fundamentals he needs to work on. Primarily dialogue and a bit too much telling.
But his narrative approach is brilliant. Highly insightful. And he’s funny. Really funny. I’ve genuinely laughed out loud at least four or five times. (I was shaking the bed so hard last night I thought I’d wake up Darci.) I can’t remember the last time that happened. His story idea is intriguing, interesting, layered, and contains some of the most astute hyperbole I’ve read in a long time.
Here’s my point: When you’re starting out in this industry—and even after you’ve been working at it for a while—it’s tough working up the courage to show people your stories. It’s not like you’re serving coffee and they’re rejecting the coffee. When they reject our work, they’re rejecting us because we’ve infused so much of ourselves into our creations.
So we hesitate. We put off hitting the send button. The net we cast does not go wide. We end up working with one editor and assuming their word is gospel. It isn’t. One of the problems with the editor my friend worked with is that they simply did not resonate with the story. It’s about baseball and a friendship between 12 year old boys and how that relationship plays out over their lifetimes.
Since the editor he worked with is female, I suspect she never was a 12 year old boy (which one would assume hindered her ability to get inside the psyche of a little leaguer.) She might not have even played baseball.
Hopefully you can see the lesson in all this. Before you choose an editor, interview them thoroughly. Interview multiple editors. Do not write a check until you’re confident they get you and get your story.
Before you share your manuscript with friends make sure they’re the kind of person who would read your story. My friend tried to share his story with people; there were only sporadic readers. This is not a good test group.
Cast your net wide, just make sure it’s in the kind of lake where your fish swim.
How Do You Stand Up for Yourself When It Means Losing Everything? Allison Moore is making it. Barely. The Seattle architecture firm she started with her best friend is struggling, but at least they’re free from the games played by the corporate world. She’s gotten over her divorce. And while her dad’s recent passing is tough, their relationship had never been easy.
Then the bomb drops. Her dad was living a secret life and left her mom in massive debt.
As Allison scrambles to help her mom find a way out, she’s given a journal, anonymously, during a visit to her favorite coffee shop. The pressure to rescue her mom mounts, and Allison pours her fears and heartache into the journal.
But then the unexplainable happens. The words in the journal, her words, begin to disappear. And new ones fill the empty spaces—words that force her to look at everything she knows about herself in a new light.
Ignoring those words could cost her everything . . . but so could embracing them.
James L. Rubart is 28 years old, but lives trapped inside an older man’s body. He thinks he’s still young enough to water ski like a madman and dirt bike with his two grown sons. He’s the best-selling, Christy BOOK of the YEAR, CAROL, INSPY, and RT Book Reviews award winning author of ten novels and loves to send readers on journeys they’ll remember months after they finish one of his stories. He’s also a branding expert, audiobook narrator, co-host of the Novel Marketing podcast, and co-founder with his son, Taylor, of the Rubart Writing Academy. He lives with his amazing wife on a small lake in Washington state.