This is my second attempt at querying agents with a book that I genuinely believe is very good. It may not be perfect—and every time I put it away, my brain, annoyingly, comes up with new ways to make it better—but is any novel ever “perfect” in the eyes of its author? From Leonardo Da Vinci to Paul Valéry to Gene Fowler, many a creative has declared some version of “No art is finished. It’s merely abandoned.”
Getting rejected in spades has raised questions for me about what makes good art. Is it just a matter of taste or is there some unwritten standard that my novel has yet to achieve? The most often-repeated phrase you hear in this industry is “This is a subjective business,” but it feels like a cop-out, like someone dumping you with “It’s my problem. Not yours.”
Kant would argue that a great deal of aesthetic judgment is subjective, but there is a certain universality in the human experience that lends itself to a shared sense of beauty. This may explain why some books, movies, and songs are so popular. (Although it’s by far the only reason—there’s also marketing, publicity, distribution, timing, and sheer luck.)
This TikTok delivers some depressing news:
You’re not a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. You’re not a better writer than Rebecca Yarros. You’re not a better writer than Sarah J. Maas. I say this as someone who deeply respects the act of writing and knows that I’m not a better writer than these three writers because the hardest part of writing is not line-level writing […] If you can write a good sentence, awesome. But the hardest part of writing, bar none, is keeping a reader interested.
Although I wouldn’t trivialize the difficulty of line-level craft, it’s true that you can sell books and make a fine living without stringing together beautiful sentences. But it doesn’t matter because you can only write the book you want to write. You can’t force yourself to write like Stephanie Meyer or Sarah J. Maas. So how do you make good art on your own terms?
An aesthetic experience, according to Kant, involves the “free play of Imagination and Understanding.” Imagination synthesizes sensory information and Understanding forms a unifying concept from this information and—here’s the important part—isn’t limited to any one concept, as it is with other forms of cognition (like reading a physics textbook).
In fiction, the imagination is activated by the premise of the story and understanding comes in the execution. The premise establishes the character’s desires and goals, the central conflict, and stakes. The premise hooks the reader’s attention, but then you must reward their attention with understanding. Whether you’re writing commercial, literary or upmarket fiction, a book is satisfying if it delivers on the promise of the premise. And here’s the thing: there’s no one right way to do it. It’s the free play of Imagination and Understanding.
And that’s why it’s so hard.
If there was one right way to tell the story, we would all learn how to do it. But the same story—the same basic premise—can be told countless ways.
When a story inspires the imagination, you will get differing, often contradictory, opinions about how to write it. One person is totally bought into the crazy revenge b-plot; another has a hard time suspending disbelief. One person finds the love triangle distracting; another person thinks it’s the most intriguing part of the middle. One person thinks there’s too much emotion in a scene; another thinks there’s not enough.
When you cater to everyone’s vision of what’s good, you cater to no one’s. The hardest part of the publishing journey is trusting your own vision and having the clarity to defend your creative choices.
Cultivating your own taste, your own judgment, is a worthwhile endeavor, in art and in life. There is no one right way to be a person in this world, just as there is no one right way to tell the story you want to tell. Beauty is whatever is deeply resonant to you. Sometimes your taste aligns with others’. Sometimes it doesn’t. The best fiction workshops teach you how to write more like yourself.
I was worried when the responses to my query were so divisive. People either loved the premise because it was disturbing or they didn’t like it because it was disturbing. I kept wondering if there was something I should do to make it more palatable to a wider audience. So in my pitch, I tried to explain why my character makes the choices she does. I tried connecting the dots to make the premise more believable. And I went from receiving a handful of manuscript requests to zero requests.
Getting dramatically different reactions to your story is a good sign. Any work of art will have its detractors, and often, the same reason it haunts and delights one person is why it repulses someone else.
Negativity is the invigorating force of life. It also forms the essence of beauty. Inherent to beauty is a weakness, a fragility, a brokenness. To this negativity, beauty owes its power to seduce.
— Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty
You must be fiercely protective of the sharp edges of your work if they are there for a reason and not let other voices try to smooth them out. Because the goal isn’t perfection. Perfection is an illusion. The goal is to write the book you want to write.
Of course, there are valid suggestions. There are rules of grammar and syntax, elements of craft, and genre conventions. But you have to know which suggestions to ignore, or you’ll find yourself blown off course. You have to trust that staying true to your vision will eventually get you to the other shore.
Hope your querying goes well!
Good luck with your manuscript Elaine! Based on your description of it as “too disturbing”- I’m already intrigued, personally!