Acceptance vs. Ambition: Entering the Query Trenches
The little book that has haunted me for a year and a half.
Last year I read Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger for the first time, and I loved it so much that I wrote about it at length. Today, I consider it to be one of my all-time favorite books.
But there’s something from Franny and Zooey that I haven’t written about. Actually, it’s the line that I think about most often. Daily. Like a slow and constant strum in the back left corner of my brain:
“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
When I first read that, I ruptured a little. If good writing can hold up a mirror to a reader, then this single sentence was a clone of something inside me. Beyond Salinger’s brilliant way of assigning courage to what society equates as a lack of success, I hadn’t acknowledged the utter disgust I felt at my own desires and ambitions. But there it was, a wide yawn of self-hate.
And while that line haunted me for over a year, these last few weeks I’ve started thinking about it differently. Suddenly I’ve been wondering about what it means to be a nobody. Yes, there’s absolute courage in happily living a quiet “everyday” sort of life. But maybe that self-disgust has been less a meditation on humility, and more a detriment to my efforts to live a life with connection, compassion and meaning.
There are an endless amount of things that make writing a difficult profession, but I think the hardest part might be balancing the desire for acceptance, and the need for ambition. We have the tendency to conflate the two, but while they might be dependent, they’re different.
First, the desire for acceptance.
We talk about it all the time as a society. Be yourself. Don’t care what other people think. You do you. And sure, I envy the enlightened monk who can, to quote my favorite passage in Jane Eyre, “live in calm, looking to the end.”
On the plus side, I’ve actually internalized some of this. Or maybe a No Fucks Given attitude blessedly comes with age. Either way, I am getting to the point where I don’t need everyone to accept me as a person. As a result, I speak up more for myself and others. I’m better at creating distance and boundaries so I can be me.
Acceptance of my writing however, is a different story.
The reasons someone might not like me as a person could be entirely superficial. But since writing is pruning off bits of your soul and putting them in a vase for others to see and sniff, there’s nothing superficial about it. Your deepest questions and feelings are on display, and not everyone is apt to appreciate or understand them.
There’s a mindset that the reward for writing is not the publication, awards or accolades, but the joy of writing itself. There are stories of people like William Blake who wrote poems and ripped them up, not because they weren’t good, but because the joy of creation wasn’t conditional.
And that sounds great and all. But Kazuo Ishiguro puts it well:
Image via Twitter (every once in a while while scrolling through that hellscape, you find a gem like this)
“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”
For most writers (at least the ones I’ve come to know) the end goal isn’t really publication or accolades. The vulnerable truth is that the end goal of fiction is to connect with readers in the way Ishiguro describes. To have someone read your work and feel moved or seen or opened up to something new.
Whether it’s a story, a song, or a really great meal, that’s the desire for acceptance that I’ve seen in almost anyone who creates. And here I am, in a mostly healthy mindset, to say: I don’t think that is bad. At all. In fact, I’ll be bold enough to say that I think it’s a form of altruism.
Creative people put deep parts of themselves out into the world at great risk of rejection, shame—or at the worst, being ungenerously misinterpreted—all in the hopes that somehow, somehow, somehow, their work will land with someone who needs it.
That is not ambition. That is self-sacrifice in literal form.
. . .
The long and short of it is, I’ve spent two years writing and revising my book. I’m sure I could tinker with it forever, but at this point, I don’t know how to meaningfully improve it anymore. So I’ve taken the next step.
Here’s the thing: in order to be accepted into the hearts and minds of readers, I need a way to connect with more of them. Which is to say, I need to do the impossible and get this book published. So over the last month I have plunged into, as the publishing crowd says, “the query trenches.”
Vocab lesson: a query is a specific type of email you send to an agent who is willing to accept unsolicited submissions. It includes why you’re pitching the agent, a jacket-cover like summary of your book, and a short bio. Most agents want sample pages and may even ask about comparable titles, target audiences or more. It’s basically a cover letter to say, Hey, you wanna read 300+ unvetted pages from a stranger??
Needless to say: rejections abound. Agents receive dozens of these queries every week, and of course they don’t have the time to read entire manuscripts from everyone. They have to be very choosy about “requesting fulls” (your full novel), so even getting a request is great.
Actual footage of me during the publishing query process (this claim is not fact-checked)
The path to publishing is akin to an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course. It’s exhausting, demoralizing, and the vast majority of contestants slip off the spinning log or lose grip on the hanging bars.
The good news? I’m on the first platform on the fucked up obstacle course of publishing. Agents are interested in my project. Of the twenty-ish I’ve queried, I have a handful of people from reputable agencies who requested the full manuscript. It’s a good sign, but still no guarantee they’ll offer to represent my book. It’s not a story with mass appeal. Even if it was, depending on what’s happening with the agents and their current client roster, they may still choose to decline.
At this point, I’m a little powerless in the process. I’m mostly here, crossing my fingers and hoping that the project will resonate with someone and the stars will align accordingly. After two years of pushing ahead, it’s weird to feel like this. And whenever someone feels weird and powerless, inevitably, there’s commentary around faith.
Here’s mine.
When I say I believe in God, it’s my way of saying that I believe in Good. I know my book still needs work (after all, that’s what agents and editors are for), and I know it will not be for everyone. And there are definitely void-gazing moments where I’m absolutely convinced I’ve wasted two years of my life writing a flaming pile of trash. But when I pick up my head and go through the pages, I love my characters and their resilience. I actually do love my book. I think it’s Good with a capital G. And I have cautious optimism that through the flaws, the Goodness in the book will resonate with others in the publishing world.
And if it doesn’t, well, I’ve learned so much while writing it. I made creative progress in the middle of a global pandemic, and I’ve connected with some amazing writers along the way. Perhaps most importantly, now when I think of that Salinger quote—I no longer feel shame or self-disgust at my own so-called ambitions. I let myself feel proud of my efforts to create something meaningful, of my desire to connect with others, all in the face of unlikely success.
I know that it takes courage to be nobody; I’ve woken up as a nobody these last two years who, despite that fact, sat down to write a book.
But it still takes courage to be somebody, too.
- Tess Canfield, June 2021 via The Latest