Facing Rejection

Earlier this school year, my seventh grader jumped in the car after practice and saw my jumbled piles of rewritten query letters and lists of agents. She looked at me and asked if I would cry if I got rejected by an agent. She’s thirteen, and to a young teen, rejection is THE.WORST. THING. EVER.

But guess what? Rejection is inevitable. They say that the average writer receives anywhere between fifty and one hundred rejection letters. I’m about ready to send out my query and that means when I open my inbox throughout the next few months, I’m more likely to receive e-mails starting with… “I’m sorry, but…” or “It’s not the right fit,” or “No thanks,” than I am to see, “Love it! Send me your manuscript!” Sounds like an exciting spring for me, right?!

I could curl up in a ball and hide under my bed until next fall, or cry, or tape my rejection letters to the wall and throw darts at them.

I thought about all this as I pulled out of the school parking lot. Someday my daughter will face rejection. I want her to know that rejection doesn’t mean that life is over. I want her to know that you can face rejection and grow from it, you can use it to make yourself better, it can make you stronger, and it can lead to other opportunities.

I told her a few stories of my own rejections, disappointments, and doors that had closed, only to find that God had been faithful and used those rejections to do something greater. I explained that I’ve spent a lot of time not only praying about my book and my writing, but also about the process of finding an agent, and that faith is trusting that God would open the right doors and close the wrong doors.

The querying process comes with a mixture of hope and excitement and, if I’m honest, a little fear, but I keep these words by Shauna Niequest taped to my desk, which are a good reminder of the attitude I want to have.

She says, “I’m practicing believing that God knows more than I know, that he sees what I can’t, that he’s weaving a future that I can’t even imagine from where I sit this morning

Unlocking A Novel- Pine Village Football

When I first started researching Mudlavia, I researched everything that happened in Warren County during 1918 and 1919. My research led me to the Pine Village football team and included reading The Good Ol’ Day’s “Game In Progress” and Doris Cottingham’s book, Pine Village Football The Inside Dope.

I wanted to tell the story of Mudlavia because of my grandpa, but while I was working on it, I discovered so many other fascinating stories about Warren County’s history, and the idea of telling the story of the Pine Village football team took root. There was a line in The Good Ol’ Day’s “Game In Progress” that caught my attention. It said, “The story of this man is a most interesting one and I sincerely hope that someday it will be told in full.” (The man they are referring to is Claire Rhode, the Pine Village football team’s manager.)

For two years now that sentence has been haunting me, and the facts, stories, and headlines about Pine Village’s football team have been rattling around in my head. The problem was that I could not figure out how to put that information together to create a compelling work of historical fiction.

I knew it would be hard to focus on a single player on the team (as well as Claire Rhode), because I don’t have a lot of individual information on the players and didn’t want to make a bunch of things up. There was also the fact that the team ran from 1898 until 1927, which is a huge span of time. Should I start at the beginning? Should I focus on the glory years? Should I try to fit all of it in?

For two years every idea I came up with felt wrong.

This past year I partnered with Simon Herrera from Vintage American Football to try and bring a vintage football game to Pine Village. I presented this idea to various people in our community and we formed a committee to make this game a possibility. Recently we were sitting in a meeting talking through ideas and someone mentioned something we could do and the meeting continued on.

I’ve had all this information in my head, all these ideas, all these facts, and suddenly her words unlocked them. I needed to be in the right place at the right time. A few simple words blew the whole thing wide open, and as I drove home, the storyline came to me.

If you are writing and you are stuck, keep researching and taking notes and writing. Be patient. As all that information gets filed in your head, at some point you’ll hear something or read something or experience something that will unlock your story and turn it into something magical!