Hold Them and Fold Them

When to Hang On and When to Let Go

Welcome to summer, a season I enjoy as much for the nostalgia as for the heat. Would that it were 85 degrees or more all the time. I would probably be even more comfortable at 85 Celsius. I’m always cold. My colleague told me once she thought I was a person who is always too warm, because she always sees me in my home office in a sleeveless top in the middle of winter. That’s because I keep it 85 degrees in my home office all year round. I intend to title my memoir I’m So Cold. Anyway it’s already hot as heck, which is great. You know what else I like about summer? Thunderstorms.

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Before I continue, please make sure to read “Assistance” in The Quiet Reader magazine’s sixth edition this month if you have not yet done so (or read it again to make up for someone who has not and will not read). I will probably stop harping on you to go read it someday, but not today.

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Today’s Shelf Life is on a topic that has been on my mind lately—that’s how every Shelf Life topic is decided, actually—which is how to know when you’ve given a manuscript a good run and it’s time to admit the unthinkable to yourself: That dog won’t hunt.

Fun story about the idiom “this dog won’t hunt”: Once I had a father-in-law, and that man loved hunting. He hunted:

• Buck season

• Doe season

• Bear season (but never shot a bear)

• Small game season

• Muzzleloader season (I didn’t know this was a even thing)

• Longbow season (with a compound bow he made himself)

Their family normally lived in a rural area but when I met them they were living in the DC area suburbs for someone’s job. While they were here they got a dog and that dog lived in the DC suburbs for the first five years of his life. Then they moved back to the country and my father-in-law tried to take the dog hunting and was shocked—I say, shocked—and disgusted that the dog wouldn’t hunt.

Sir, that is a suburban dog. If you want him to hunt you better take him to a Trader Joe’s and set him on a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck.

The above anecdote is not relevant to today’s topic but I’m really good at telling it. It slays at parties. It’s funnier in person, trust me.

You write something and maybe you want to publish it. Maybe you don’t—and that’s fine, too. There’s all kinds of reasons people write and I know people who enjoy writing and have lukewarm-if-any interest in publishing their writing. But let’s say you do.

You can self-publish it or you can publish traditionally, either through a large publisher or a small one, a corporate press or an indie—in any event, finding someone who is willing to invest in publishing your work. There’s nothing wong with either route; indeed, there are pros and cons to each. But let’s say you want to publish traditionally, meaning you would like an entity other than yourself—or an LLC hastily opened under your sole proprietorship—to publish your work and pay you for the privilege.

So you’ve written and you begin the process of submission. If you’ve written a novel or a memoir, you’re querying agents or editors at publishing companies directly. If you’ve written (or are working on) nonfiction, you’re submitting your proposal (see Producing Your First Proposal) to the appropriate channels. If you’ve written a short story or poetry, you’re submitting to literary or genre magazines.  

My question, then, is this: How many tries do you give a manuscript before you put it out to pasture? How long do you keep flogging a manuscript around the auction block before you admit to yourself that it’s simply not going to sell?

There is an upper limit, somewhere, to how many tries you can give something. Once you’ve queried every agent there is, every publisher in business, or every literary magazine on the planet—that’s it. That’s the maximum. At that point you have to take a break and wait for new people and businesses to enter the fray. When I lived in LA, I called that stocking the pond. As in, “I have gone on a date with every person on Tinder in a 30 mile radius of here so I’m going on dating sabbatical while they restock the pond.”

Most of us probably are not going to come to the point of having queried or subbed to every potential publisher of our work. For starters, going through that process so exhaustively takes valuable time away from writing the next manuscript, or revising, or editing, or whatever other writing-related tasks we have to do.

The more personal resources I put into a manuscript, and the better I think it is (ie, the more I believe in it), the more reluctant I am to admit when that manuscript needs to be taken out back and shot taken to a farm upstate to live a long and happy life.

I’m on the precipice right now with a short story manuscript that has made the rounds with no takers, with few personal rejects and mostly forms. I’m approaching the point where I have to decide what to do with this manuscript, where to keep putting it out there and thereby putting myself out there, potentially setting myself up for discouragement.

I can hear what some of you are thinking: “Catherine, that’s a short story. I wrote a novel. You can’t seriously suggest giving up on a whole novel”—but I have a whole novel in the trunk unsold so yes I can.

I’m not saying an unsold manuscript is a dead manuscript. There’s plenty of things you can still do with it, and those things will make up the second half of this essay. But before you turn to those options, you have to look yourself in the eye (in a mirror, I guess) and acknowledge that the manuscript won’t publish traditionally. That you have exhausted your list of suitable agents or editors and you’re at the end of the road (cue Boyz II Men).

A subject I want to tackle before I get to those, though, is that of self-publishing while you wait to get a book deal for that manuscript or in hopes that your self-published manuscript will gather the attention of publishers who will then want to sign it. Most agents and publishers will not consider signing a reprint in this scenario. If your work has been published before—even on your blog, even on Archive of Our Own, even on Wattpad—you cannot sell first publication rights and that is what most agents and publishers are seeking. There are rare exceptions, but if you publish the manuscript yourself you will most likely not be able to traditionally publish that manuscript later.

Without further ado, here’s a short list of productive things you can do with the manuscripts nobody wanted. 

Press Pause

You can—and should—put your manuscript in cold storage instead of the trash. That is to say, I don’t mean you should put your manuscript in cold storage if you’re not ready to move on you. But you should put it in cold storage rather than the trash.

There are a lot of reasons to put a manuscript on the backburner and focus your writing and publishing efforts elsewhere for a while. First, as I mentioned above, there’s the pond-restocking phenomenon. Perhaps the agent who will fall in love with your query hasn’t opened for business yet. Perhaps the market just isn’t right for your story right now. 

Second, as you move on to new projects, you practice your craft and your skills improve. Your second manuscript is likely to be better than your first, your third better than your second, and so on. You may find later manuscripts are more salable, and that may lead to one of two scenarios:

1. The agent or publisher of a later manuscript may want to take a look at your trunk manuscripts; or

2. With the benefit of experience you may realize how to revise or rewrite the earlier manuscript to make it salable.

An unpublished manuscript in the trunk can always rise again.

Cannibalize It

Do the Hannibal Lecter maneuver on your manuscript and eat its liver with some fava beans a nice chianti. What I mean by cannibalize in this context is cut the story open, take out its tastiest bits, and serve them up for the benefit of your other manuscripts.

There’s no manuscript that is completely without merit. Even the Twilight series had world’s best undead dad Carlisle Cullen. The manuscript you put on ice today may have pieces that would shine if you set them in or combined them with your other manuscripts. Something to keep in mind is that the little pieces and parts of your manuscript do not belong to that manuscript; they belong to you and you can use them for whatever you want. 

Does your trunked manuscript have a great bit of dialogue that you’re sad will never see the light of day? Put those words in a character’s mouth in some other manuscript. Does it have a round, well-sketched  side character that you wish you could use in a different story? You totally can. Just cannibalize it.

But what if, one day, you take that story back out of the trunk to publish but an element has been used for another published story? No big deal. Just revise it in the trunk story—or don’t. You know how many Stephen King books Randall Flagg shows up in?

Reconceive and Retell

If you find your trunked manuscript just doesn’t want to leave you alone and keeps yelling for you to let it out of cryostasis, you might still be able to breathe life into it.

I’m assuming the manuscript was already revised and as polished as you could make it before you started down the submission path, so I’m not suggesting you revise and start sending it out again. That’s kid stuff. You probably already tried that, maybe even multiple times. I’m talking about completely reconceiving the story in an innovative way and telling it again. Some ways of doing this might be to:

• Change genre—for instance, from fantasy to science fiction, or romance to mystery

• Swap point of view—retell the story from a different character’s perspective

• Rethink the chronology—shuffle the order in which events occur, or are told

Maybe there are good bones here—something about the story that is fresh and entertaining—but the manuscript just didn’t do it for the markets to which you submitted. Rewriting from a completely different standpoint, and with the benefit of all the experience you’ve gained since you initially wrote it, might be just what the doctor ordered. I’m often in favor of putting a problem aside for a while and then coming back later to tackle it from a new angle—and this is just the kind of thing I mean.

In truth, no manuscript you write ever has to be dead forever. You can give up on it, you can even intend that give-upping to be permanent, but unless you wipe the files out of existence or destroy the hard copy, it’s still going to be there waiting for you. I’ve had things sit for years until the solution to what was wrong with the manuscript suddenly came to me long after I thought my brain had stopped working on the problem. It can’t hurt to take a cruise through your trunk stories every now and then to see if any old concepts or ideas might have grown new legs, like some kind of weird fungus, while they were down in the dark.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a manuscript is cut it loose for a while and move on to other things. Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do for yourself, too.

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If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

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