Category: Writing

When Is It Time to Scrap It?

Written by @BrendanO’Meara

There are rejections and then there are rejections. The latter are ones where you had a distinct leg up. In my latest, most crushing rejection, I had an hour-long conversation with this agent at AWP in March. She loved sports writing and we had a wonderful conversation about sports, writing, and The Last Championship. You can imagine my dismay upon reading this:

I read your proposal right away when I received it.  And I enjoyed it immensely.  But ultimately, I didn’t feel strongly enough about the story to think that I would be successful selling it for you.

It felt like this:

This marks rejection No. 19, might even be 20. That’s a lot, even by my standards. Many of those weren’t adequately placed so that may not actually be as poor an indicator for the book’s sorry performance in the hands of gate keepers. I’m at the point where the reality is to scrap the book altogether.

1. The writing is poor, a possibility. I’m not, how you say, a master wordsmith. Or, let’s say, I’m not good enough to elevate what is a mediocre story to a readable, purchasable story.

2. Well, actually, that’s all I’ve got.

What I didn’t have through the first 20 rejections was a full manuscript. I also shopped it to the wrong agents most of the time. Child’s play, really.

Tell you what. Five more. Five more agents who represent baseball books. If it doesn’t get picked up from any of those five, this story goes in the trashcan.

What is your time table to scrap a project?

Hashtag #CNF Episode 5—Sheri Booker

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Sheri Booker’s memoir Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home chronicles her near-decade long experience immersed the culture of death. Everything from picking up bodies to preserving them in the inner sanctum of Wylie Funeral Home.

In it Booker learns that death knows no age and that a funeral home is every bit a part of a community as a church. She also answers the age-old question of whether bodies move on the embalming table or not.

Hashtag #CNF Episode 4: Harrison Scott Key

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By Brendan O’Meara

I get to interview some pretty cool people doing this humble little podcast. In this latest episode, I speak with Harrison Scott Key about his award-winning essay The Wishbone. The Wishbone won Creative Nonfiction’s Southern Sin essay contest. It is a wildly funny essay about his father bending the rules to win a football game … a pee-wee football game … in which he recruit’s his 14-year-old son—Harrison—to suit up as the team’s integral 11th player.

In this interview we talk about comedy writing and where Key developed his comedic sensibility. Enjoy and share!

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Consider supporting the show via Patreon patreon.com/cnfpod. Shop around if you want to support the community. I just paid out the writers from the last audio magazine. You make that possible. The show is free but it ain’t cheap.

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Stay wild, CNFers!

Hashtag #CNF Episode 3 Part 2: Brian Mockenhaupt

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Written by Brendan O’Meara

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In Part 2 of my interview with Brian Mockenhaupt, freelance journalist and author of the Byliner.com original The Living and the Dead, Brian talks about publishing with Byliner, what America learns from its wars, and the burden of telling such a heavy story. Enjoy.

If you or anyone you know would like to be on the podcast, please email me at brendan@brendanomeara.com and, as always, feel free to leave comments.

Listen to Part 1 of my interview with Brian Mockenhaupt here.

Please ‘like’ me on Facebook. Makes me feel good. I also give away stuff.

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Hashtag #CNF Episode 3: Journalist Brian Mockenhaupt Part 1

[subscribe2]Written by Brendan O’Meara

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Sometimes you have a great conversation and it lasts ten minutes. Other times you have a great conversation and it lasts 90 minutes. The latter was true for me and Brian Mockenhaupt, a journalist cut from the fabric of Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger.

I broke this interview up into chunks. Please enjoy the first installment as we talk about his award-winning masterpiece The Living and the Dead.

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What the NFL Draft Can Teach Writers

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Yes, the NFL Draft, the annual meat market where football coaches and general managers look to project a human being’s value, has come and gone. The lessons of the Draft are so valuable to the writer. Take Geno Smith.

Smith was the quarterback for the West Virginia Mountaineers. He was projected to be a slam-dunk first-round pick. But his name was never called. He dropped and dropped. At last he went early in the second round. At least he wasn’t Tom Brady who didn’t get drafted until the sixth round as the 199th overall selection.

Think about that for a moment. Tom Brady, Super Bowl hero, super model marrying, Ugg-endorsing playboy was deemed the 199th best player in the 2000 draft. In writing terms, he was rejected 198 times. He then saw owner Bob Kraft and told him he was the best decision he ever made.

As the rejections mount for your book, or your essay, or your love life, just think every no is one step closer to a yes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve let the ‘no’ devalue my worth. One ‘no’ ended my baseball career. I can’t begin to tell you how many rejections I’ve received for the three books I’ve written. My first, unpublished, has probably 20 rejections. My second book, Six Weeks in Saratoga, was rejected 15 times or so, and The Last Championship is, let’s say, getting up there, a career-high even.

One agent went so far as to bash the writing. Let’s excerpt that for comedic effect:

Thank you for the chance to read your proposal for The Last Championship: A Memoir of My Father and Baseball, and please accept my apologies for the time it has taken me to get back to you. The father-son relationship at the heart of this story is appealing, but, ultimately, I didn’t find the characters or the scenes as engaging as I’d hoped. Without the necessary enthusiasm for the writing, I’m just not confident that I’d be able to sell the book effectively. I’m sorry that this wasn’t a match, but I’m grateful to you for the opportunity to consider your work and wish you luck in finding representation.

Trust me, I was licking my wounds after this one. I came close to hitting the EJECT button on the cockpit of my career using a promising love of donuts as my parachute. Usually agents don’t go so far as to say they don’t like your writing. I appreciate the time he took to write this and to address that it was a total bomb.

What did Tom Brady do when 198 players went before him? He out-worked everyone, took advantage of Drew Bledsoe getting injured, and took his team on a 13-year run the NFL has never seen.

The diamonds are the ones who slip through the cracks. Your job, my job, is to make all those people who said no wish they hadn’t.

That then begs the questions: When might it be time to give up/retire? But that’s for another blog post altogether.

The Eroticism of ‘No’

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Written by Brendan O’Meara

When I need a dose of motivation, I watch Don Draper in action. When a fire lights under his ass look at how he burns.

At the beginning of this scene, Don enters Roger’s office and grabs a drink right away. Even Roger is taken by this “drinking with a purpose”. Don doesn’t want piddly business, he wants big fish. Screw bagging a few marlin; he wants Moby freakin’ Dick.

Don laments how his letter denouncing Lucky Strike has effected his mojo with potential clients. Rogers throws it right back at him, “You used to love no. No used to make you hard.” He goes on and I do hope you watch the entire 5:20. After all, it’s what we do.

What?????!!!!!

All we are are salesmen. We are always on the clock.

All publishers, magazines, newspapers, are are customers/clients looking to benefit/profit from our services. At every turn you need to give them reasons to say yes, of course, but you need them to question why on earth they would even consider saying no.

Now, imagine you go into a meeting, or a phone pitch, with any editor and you pitch cold the way Don does in this scene? Can you imagine facing rejection? Can you imagine the gall should they say no?

So. Go on. Say no. I want you to say no in my face so hard that spittle gets on my sunglasses. I also want you see the face of doubt in your own reflection.

Because ‘no’ … ‘no’ is one step closer to yes.

Have a great week, I’m on the road.

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Best in Tweet 2/27/13

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Written by Brendan O’Meara

Hot dog, we’ve got some good ones this week. Buckle up. It’s this week’s Best in Tweet.

 

 

 

 

Good times for readers and writers

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Put up your ducks, I mean dukes.
Put up your ducks, I mean dukes.

Written by Brendan O’Meara

I’m not prone to fun. I don’t like crowds. I have broad shoulders so I tend to bump into people. I’m not very social. I like to watch movies on my somewhat undersized TV and read books. My wife doesn’t like me^1^. If there’s wet blankets, I’m like the smallpox-infected blankets Jeffery Amherst gave to Native Americans.

But I have fun when I listen to Book Fight: Tough Love for Literature. It’s a podcast for writer’s, though serious readers would dig it too. It’s a podcast about books, but a podcast recorded as if it were cool to talk about books at your favorite bar. It’s profane^2^, curmudgeonly, and just good company.

Tom McCallister, co-host of Book Fight and author of Bury Me in My Jersey: A Memoir of My Father, Football, and Philly, is a friend of sorts, though we’ve never met. 51flccWHfVL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_We “met” through email when I gave his memoir a 2-star review on Goodreads. He wrote to me about it and I gave him my reasons. He does a great thing in his memoir that has to be applauded: he writes an unflattering picture of himself, which is a lesson unto itself in memoir. I gave it 2 stars because I wanted more of his father in the story and I don’t like footnotes^3^. He’s a great writer, an unpretentious product of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which says something in and of itself. All in all, if you’re writing memoir, you should read his. His book has 45 ratings on Goodreads, which is a ton (I have 12) and most are 5 stars. Overall it’s a 3.84 stars out of 45 reviews. That gives you an idea that it’s a great book.

Since that first email a few years ago, we’ve kept in touch about sports and writing. Then he started the Book Fight podcast with Mike Ingram, fiction editor at Barrelhouse. It’s a fun listen. I’m listening right now.  Naturally, if you’re a geek for the mechanics of prose, subscribe to it on iTunes.

Footnotes

1. Not entirely true. She likes the occasional social interaction where I’d rather stay home and read.
2. Not overly so, tastefully profane, like talking sports at a bar. But not a Philly, New York, or Boston bar. Maybe like a Seattle bar, or an Asheville, NC bar.
3. I have since come around to footnotes. I found them so disruptive to the narrative that I usually can’t continue reading. It’s like reading with the TV on or something. They make for funny tributaries that don’t belong in the main river.

The offer still stands, for a time, that should you subscribe to this website, I’ll send you a personalized copy of Six Weeks in Saratoga. Subscribe, I’ll reach out to you. My thanks to you. If you factor in shipping, that’s a $30-value, if you’re into value plays.

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Best in Tweet, 2/19/13

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Written by Brendan O’Meara

My aim is to give some people props on Twitter. People have some great things to share and that sharing should be rewarded, even at this little place I call a blog. Without further ado, here’s 10 tweets from cool stuff I found. (Some go back quite a ways. It don’t mattah!)

 

 

 

 

 

There you have it, lots of stuff for you to enjoy.

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