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The Life of a Novelist, When it Rains it
Pours by Elena Hartwell
To say it has
rained a lot in Western Washington this year is an understatement. It’s the
first week of April and the rain gauge at my house in North Bend shows just
under twenty-seven inches since the start of the year. That’s a lot of water.
When it rains, it pours.
Did you know the
original expression, “it never rains but it pours,” was from England and
considered negative? It meant bad things happen in clumps. But then in 1911,
the Morton Salt Company came up with a solution to salt clumping together from
any amount of moisture in the air by making finer grains and adding a small amount
of an anti-clumping agent. Their clever ad team came up with, “when it rains,
it pours” – meaning even when the rain is coming down, our salt still pours.
That’s why the little girl on the label stands in the rain under an umbrella.
It became a positive expression in the US.
Yet here we are
over one hundred years later and most people consider the expression negative
again, even in the United States.
Personally, I’ve
always thought it was contextual. Sometimes good things happen all at once and
sometimes bad.
Writing is a lot
like that expression. When it rains, it pours, sometimes in a good way, some
times not so much.
As a playwright,
a single play of mine would get produced at different theaters with different
outcomes. One production might earn stellar reviews, while another got bashed
by the local press. I’d be touted as a brilliant voice in theater in one state
and read, “don’t quit your day job” in another.
As a novelist,
I’ve had very good reviews for my first novel. One Dead, Two to Go garnered several four- and five-star reviews on
Amazon and some fantastic reviews on blogs and magazines. Two Heads are Deader Than One started out with two five-star
reviews before it officially launched on April 15.
In a very short
space of time, One Dead was nominated
for a Foreword INDIE award for best mystery of 2016 and Two Heads was picked up by Harlequin for inclusion in their
Worldwide Mystery Series. This means they will reprint the original Camel Press
publication and that reprint will go out to Harlequin subscribers and be
available on their website.
When it rains it
pours.
The writing
process can feel a lot like a long, wet winter. For the most part, I love
writing. I enjoy sitting down at my computer and working on my latest draft. My
characters entertain me. I discover interesting new things in my plot. I also
love the research aspects. I get to meet with amazing experts, who provide me
with details of careers and areas of life I’ve always been curious about.
Working with my beta readers gives me insights into my own work, great ideas to
take into rewrites, and inspiration for reaching the finish line.
But some days, I
just wish the sun would come out. One more round of notes feels like a slog. I
wake up and think, I’m ready to work on the next book, why isn’t this
manuscript finished? And I look out the window and it’s raining again.
When it rains,
it pours.
I’m often asked
how long it took to get my first book published. The answer depends on where
you want to start measuring. The short answer is I pitched One Dead, Two to Go to one publisher, they picked it up a month
later, and in a year and a half it was on the shelf. The more complicated
answer is I started writing my first novel in 2007 and three manuscripts,
hundreds of rewrites, and several rejections later, my first novel was
published April 15, 2016. Nine years later. The most complicated answer is I
started writing when I was about four. I even hand stitched a book together
complete with tassels when I was six. I wrote for the theater for twenty years,
with wonderful productions interspersed with hundreds of rejections and then
spent years learning how to write fiction, until finally, at the age of
forty-seven, my first book came out, so call it forty-three years. But by 2018,
I’ll have three books out.
When it rains,
it pours.
Many readers
believe the most important thing a successful writer needs is talent. I would
argue it’s tenacity. The difference between the published and unpublished
author is often that the published author endured one more rejection than the
unpublished author. They sent their manuscript one more place. Rewrote their
manuscript one more time. Read one more book on craft or went to one more
conference, where they participated in one more workshop, met one more agent or
pitched to one more editor. The published author went out in the rain and got
wet one more time than the writer who didn’t.
When it rains,
it pours.
Even a published
author isn’t guaranteed a career. The second book might never get finished. The
publisher might go out of business. The editor could retire. The reviews might
be terrible and the contract ends. The only thing a writer can control is the
writing. Just as we here in Western Washington can’t control the weather, we
can only decide what to do with it. Do we go out and live our life, mud or no
mud? Or not. Does the writer go out and write, failure or no failure? Or not.
The only thing I
know for sure, is when I go downstairs into the kitchen, while taking a break
from my current draft, the Morton Salt will pour, even with moisture in the
air.
When it rains,
it pours.
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