I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed The End. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. It was all I could think about: revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. How many have you gotten?”īy rejection number 45, I was truly neurotic. I received 14 rejections before I finally got an agent. I’d inevitably meet some successful writer who’d tell me, “Just keep at it.
Sometimes I’d go to literary conferences, just to be around other writers trying to get published. The truth was, I was embarrassed for my friends and family to know I was still working on the same story, the one nobody apparently wanted to read. They were amazed by how many times a person could repaint her apartment. Call it tenacity, call it resolve or call it what my husband calls it: stubbornness.Īfter rejection number 40, I started lying to my friends about what I did on the weekends. I spent it in pajamas, slothing around that racetrack of self-pity–you know the one, from sofa to chair to bed to refrigerator, starting over again on the sofa. “How do you keep yourself from feeling like this has been just a huge waste of your time?” “You have so much resolve, Kathryn,” a friend said to me. I wanted to write this book.Ī year and a half later, I opened my 40th rejection: “There is no market for this kind of tiring writing.” That one finally made me cry. Next book? I wasn’t about to move on to the next one just because of a few stupid letters. “Maybe the next book will be the one,” a friend said.
I was a little less giddy this time, but I kept my chin up. I was sure I could make the story tenser, more riveting, better.Ī few months later, I sent it to a few more agents. Six weeks later, I received a rejection letter from the agent, stating, “Story did not sustain my interest.” I was thrilled! I called my friends and told them I’d gotten my first rejection! Right away, I went back to editing. When I’d polished my story, I announced it was done and mailed it to a literary agent. Why not? We are compelled to talk about our passions. I’d told most of my friends and family what I was working on. It took me a year and a half to write my earliest version of The Help. If you ask my husband my best trait, he’ll smile and say, “She never gives up.” But if you ask him my worst trait, he’ll get a funny tic in his cheek, narrow his eyes and hiss, “She.
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