This week, I realized that I’ve made tremendous progress on my once-stalled novel (210 pages down, yay!), but I also had a tiny heart attack when I looked at my Excel sheet and realized that I’d brought in no new assignments, aka paying work, for several weeks. Oy.
So I did what every reasonable freelancer does when faced with the prospect of an empty bank account and outstanding bills: I went on a query rampage. In a matter of three days I had sent out 14 queries, some to editors I know and work with and some to new-to-me editors at top-paying publications. As of this morning, I have three assignments totaling over $2,500, one from a $1-a-word market that I’ve never written for before.
In my 30 Days, 30 Queries class, students arrive with some level of skepticism about whether they can do it. 30 queries is a tough ask in 30 days, no matter how experienced or inexperienced you are. Then I give them an easy assignment and they do it and they feel a rush, a high of having sent a query that wasn’t even too difficult to send.
They send another, and another, and the momentum builds. I share my tips and strategies and they begin to realize that it doesn’t have to take days and hours of work to send out a query letter.
By this point, many of them have sent more queries in a week than they have in the last three months. And then, around day 10 or so, a breakthrough happens. An editor responds. It doesn’t matter whether it’s with an acceptance or a rejection, but the fact that there wasn’t simply radio silence (for most students) creates a world of difference.
Suddenly, we’re not talking to the void, we’re building relationships. And 30 queries starts to look like an achievable goal that will lead to results.
An experienced writer posted on Facebook last month that she couldn’t see herself sending 30 pitches in 30 days simply because she can’t imagine thoroughly studying 30 markets in a span of a month and then coming up with ideas for them. But this is where where experience comes into play. Because the first time you send 30 queries in a month, it will be a slog. If you’ve never written for magazines before and if you’re not a huge magazine reader, you’ll find it a struggle, there’s no question about it. But most of us read at least 4-5 magazines regularly, and many more than that online or every now and again in some waiting room or the other. We can think of ideas for them easily without the need to actively “study” them. But it gets better. Because after you’ve studied a magazine thoroughly once, you never need to do that again. You’ve read it now, you understand the tone, the style, the format. And if you get rejected once, you pitch them again, and again, and again, until you land an assignment.
With each pitch, you get closer and closer to understanding what they’re all about. So that when, like me, you’ve been writing for newspapers and magazines for over a decade and read them as part of your monthly routine, you don’t even need to pick up a copy to know when an idea is a perfect fit for a certain publication. And so you’re able to send out four or five queries a day without even really thinking about it because this is what you do, it’s what you’re good at.
But you can’t get to that point without having done that hard work first.
Which brings me back to my novel. I look at the scenes I wrote three years ago and rewrote two years ago and then rewrote again last week and there’s a marked change. There is more maturity in the writing and there is more strategy in the telling of it. I couldn’t have done that three years ago when I first started and had I tried to rush the process, it would have been an inferior novel to the one it now will be. Yet, I couldn’t write what I’m writing today if it hadn’t been that practice I’ve put in over the many years that I’ve written, both fiction and non-fiction.
I’m just as guilty as anyone else of reading about six-figure book deals and movie options and feeling a pang of envy. I’m not above wondering when it will be my turn, when I will finally get it out and away from me and not have to worry about it any more.
But you know and I know, that a writing career is built slowly, one word at a time. I wrote thousands of words before I was good enough to be published in TIME and The New York Times and will write thousands of words before I get that book deal, hopefully for this novel, but maybe not. Maybe this will be my practice run and the second one will hit the target or perhaps the third one. It doesn’t matter. I can’t stop trying, I can’t stop writing because despite all the angst of it, this is exactly what I want to do with my life.
My writing career, like yours, like everyone else’s, will be built slowly, with plenty of defeats and successes. All I can do is take a step forward towards my goals day after day, every single day. So I write four pages, send three query letters, put up another blog post. I take small steps and hopefully one day, they’ll add up to a big and successful whole.
What small step will you be taking towards your dreams today?