Welcome into Flight School:
Save the dates: July 31st & Aug. 14th at 9:00 a.m. PST
(🐦⬛Free for subscribers. Find your code in the footer of this email)
What: A two-part live conversation with me and my co-teacher, Becky Ellis. We are both memoirists and fiction writers and will share what have we learned about perseverance and success, and discuss how memoir and the novel are the same.
Plus, we want to hear from you. Bring your challenges and concerns about your writing journey to the conversation. We’re here to support you.
Sign up now: Space is limited so get save your spot.
The Agent Who Broke My Heart (and My Confidence)
“You cannot only write memoir,” my big-wig literary agent sneered. “You MUST write a novel. Do it. Do it NOW!”
If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. This is how a very high-end, and very well respected agent spoke to me when I was a new writer and experiencing unprecedented success with my first memoir, Blackbird. Tough love worked with all the Bestselling-Iconic-Writers-I-Cannot-Name that she represented and who was I to quibble? I went to work.
A year or so later, I gave her my first novel about dreams and dreaming, saying I knew it wasn’t good but that I was trying. She mocked it, tore it to shreds and laughed me out of our relationship.
While letting her go didn’t help my career, I told myself I’d rather work with people who were helpful vs. helping me over a cliff.
The Second Time Around
Fast-forward twenty-years and I wrote a five POV novel set in WWI Italy. Literary with historic elements. My new agent was on fire for the book and had several editors eager to read based on my past successes with Blackbird.
Out it went in 2021 and here are the rejections.
One editor, only one, wanted to work with me but only if I redrafted the entire book killing nearly all the characters and reshaping the plot based on her vision and tastes. No contract. No advance.
Agent Number Two told me to “do it! It’ll be great.”
Another agent let go. Another bridge burned. Plus, those twenty-seven rejections tormented me. Each one a small death pushing me further from my desk and the possibility of becoming a novelist. That’s it, I told myself. I cannot do it. I am not smart enough. I just don’t get this. I can’t. I tossed the book into a box and shoved it in the back of a closet.
The Wilderness Years
Fast forward another four years and I’ve just completed another draft of that book. Version eight was in 2024 and version nine was just this summer.
I have no agent yet but that’s the least of my worries because I know I’ve nailed it. At last. I abandoned representation but I kept my writer’s soul.
How?
By diving deeper into craft and form. Over these years, I read and taught great literature. I studied and taught structure, voice, point of view. I built classes for others and helped them grow in craft and form, too. And most of all, I learned that all those editorial rejections weren’t a verdict on my worth as a writer but evidence I had further to go down the path of learning. Once down that path, it was time to pull the book out of the dark and start again.
The Resurrection: 90 Days of Revision that Changed Everything
Four hours every morning. Two thousand words every day. Focus, focus, focus. And in this, draft number nine, I’ve created from a place of hard-won craft knowledge and emotional honesty I hadn't possessed before.
The story that emerged, The Home Tree, spans from 1881 to 1917 and follows siblings Maria and Vincenzo Favaro as they flee violent trauma in childhood and rebuild their lives in a new place. Where the original manuscript skated across the surface of their pain, this version plunged deep. I wrote about Maria's sixteen years of sexual captivity. I explored how Vincenzo, born of rape, must confront his violent origins to become the hero his family needs. I anchored everything in the central metaphor of oak trees that survive by being broken open to offer sanctuary—a image that carried the emotional weight the earlier version had lacked.
Craft Revelations that Made All the Difference
One editor who passed on the book wrote: “It has a fairytale-like quality and the writing that I'm finding difficult to fully connect with." I took that to heart and this version is grounded in authentic historical detail and psychological truth.
Where other editors struggled with "five perspectives," I now have complete command of multiple points of view that serve the emotional architecture. And, I've learned the difference between a story and situation. The first manuscript had been a situation—things happened to characters. This new version was a story—characters were transformed by what happened to them, and that transformation drives every page.
This is the book I was meant to write about how families weather trauma across generations, how ordinary people find extraordinary courage when everything familiar crumbles, and how the courage to face painful truths becomes the foundation for healing and renewal.
The Hard-Won Wisdom: What Rejection Really Teaches Us
Rejection is not the opposite of success—it's part of the journey toward it. Every "no" teaches something essential about craft and relationship.
When I seek out my next agent, I have battle scars enough to know who I’ll work with and who will get a big old pass. And I expect many agents will want to represent this book because it’s that good. Watch this space.
The perils of the creative writing journey are real. Rejection stings. Self-doubt is relentless. The marketplace can feel impossible to navigate. But the promises are equally real: each failure makes you stronger, each revision teaches you something new, and persistence—combined with genuine craft development—eventually leads to work that finds its champions.
Whether you're choosing between novel and memoir, struggling with a story that won't come together, or facing your own stack of rejections, know this: the work is teaching you what it needs to become. Your job is to keep learning, keep growing, and keep believing that the story you're meant to tell will find its way to the page when you're finally ready to write it.
🎙️Your Turn: Join the Conversation
Let’s take a deep dive into your own perils and promise as a creative writer. Part One of our conversation is Thursday, July 31st at nine A.M. PST. Part Two is Thursday, August 14th at nine A.M. PST. Don’t miss these talks.
Subscribers come for free, so use the code in the footer of this email and if you have ANY trouble, email me pronto and I’ll get it to you.
We'll dive deep into the craft decisions, emotional breakthroughs, and practical strategies that transform failure into triumph. See you there.
✍️ Until we meet, share your own promises and perils in the comments. Where are you on the journey? What troubles you the most? What is your greatest victory so far?
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