Thirteen months ago I finished graduate school and entered the job market. I spent seven of those months unemployed, and during that unemployment I essentially wrote full-time (when I wasn’t looking for work).  It was during this time that I wrote Variant, found an agent, and sold the book. And I think I’ve learned more about writing and publishing in the last year than I’d learned in the nine previous.

Here are five big lessons from the last year:

1. Don’t be afraid to kill (or abandon) your darlings

In late August I finally decided to shelve a book that I’ve been working on for three years.  I liked the book–I really liked it–but the reason I’d been working on it for so long is because it just wasn’t working. I kept revising, changing the characters ages and motivations, changing the point of view and tense, because, dangit, I was going to get it right eventually!

The guys on the Writing Excuses podcast use the phrase “kill your darlings” to mean that sometimes you have to get rid of something–a scene, a character, a plot–that you really love because it’s just not right for your project.  Being the nerdy business person I am (my grad school was an MBA) I think of it in terms of sunk costs.

Here’s a quick primer: a sunk cost is cost which has already been paid and cannot be recovered. In economic theory, you shouldn’t let sunk costs affect future decision making; you should only think about future costs. In a simple example, let’s say you bought a non-refundable movie ticket, but you then hear that the movie is terrible, offensive, and even out-of-focus. According to economic theory, your ticket is a sunk cost–you’ve already paid it and you can’t possibly get the money back. So, when you’re deciding whether or not to see the movie, the fact that you’ve already paid for it should not affect your decision making; going to see the terrible movie just because you’ve already paid for it would be a stupid decision.

Behavioral economics, however, shows that we do this kind of thing all the time–we let sunk costs affect our decision making.

In the case of my book, the sunk cost was my time. I didn’t want to abandon this book solely because I’d spent three years working on it. I didn’t have any good ideas to fix it, but I felt so invested in it that I had trouble letting go. If it hadn’t been for an intervention of sorts (my brother challenging me to write a book in two months) then I’d probably still be plugging away at that thing.

2. Network Be Social

I hate the term ‘networking’. I think that the concept is, on it’s face, Machevellian and selfish. It sounds like you’re only being social to get ahead; your friendships only exist to help you climb the ladder.

So, let’s not use that word. Instead, let’s say “Be Social”.

In the Writing Excuses podcast I was recently interviewed on, Janci Patterson and I were talking about how we broke in to the national market. Both of us found our agents through friends. In fact, almost everyone I know who has an agent found them through some sort of networking social connection: friends, conventions, conferences, writing groups, pitch sessions, etc. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to get published without networking social connections, but it’s a heck of a lot easier.

(Just, again, don’t treat it like networking. Go to conferences and writing groups and have fun, and make real–non-selfish/networky–friendships.)

3. Revise

I wrote Variant with the intent of having it complete before World Fantasy, so that my brother, Dan Wells (a nationally-published horror writer), could introduce me to agents and editors and I’d have something complete to send them.

So, with World Fantasy as the deadline, I worked on the book every day, revising and polishing. I have a friend who was also going to the convention, and was also working on a book. She finished her draft and then declared she was done and was going to work on something else. I suggested to her that she might want to do some revisions and clean-up but she refused, saying that it was good enough, and, if she wrote quickly, she might be able to take a second book to the convention too.

Now, I’m not saying that the reason that I’m published and she still isn’t is because she didn’t revise. I haven’t read her manuscript so I have no idea what it’s like. It might be great. However, I will say that if I had taken that attitude–that it was good enough and I didn’t need to keep working on it–Variant would have never even gotten an agent, let alone sold.

(To be perfectly honest, I regret this with my first two novels. Yes, they were published, but I hate to go back and read through them because of the simple, obvious errors that they are riddled with. I wish I could go back in time and scrub them thoroughly.)

4. Be cheerfully flexible

My dad has a philosophy that he cites all the time: “Be cheerfully flexible”. He learned it during his days as a stage manager, working with a ton of enthusiasticly creative producers, directors, actors and designers. As the stage manager, he had to gather all of the creative ideas and actually implement them in the real world. And he learned that he could produce the best final product, with the least stress to himself and others, if he simply became cheerfully flexible.

When my agent, Sara Crowe, started sending Variant out to publishers, it very quickly started building up rejections. And, more importantly, several of the publishers were rejecting it for the same reasons. Sara gave me the option: let it ride and see what other publishers said, or correct some of the manuscript’s problems. I corrected the problems.

We sent it out again, and it was rejected several more times, sometimes with big, detailed letters from editors who effectively said “We LOVE it, but it needs to be completely rewritten”. In fact, Erica at HarperTeen–who is now my editor–rejected it.

Finally, after a third round, I decided to rewrite. This was more than a simple revision–it was completely changing the final third of the book and removing a major character completely. However, within two weeks of finishing that revision, I had four offers, including the one I accepted with Harper.  I could have easily told Sara to keep sending out the manuscript, that someone somewhere was going to like it, and that I was a great artiste who didn’t compromise. And I’d still be unpublished.

5. There is no magic bullet, but getting published is possible.

Something I’ve thought about today while I’ve been writing this blog is that I know several authors who have done/are doing all the things I’ve listed above–and they’re still not published. However, I have no doubt that they eventually will be.

Over the past ten years I’ve watched many friends get published and become successful. Two things have struck me. First, they work like crazy. Second, they never give up.

Ten years ago I was in a writing group of five people. Of that group, three of us have gone on to get published nationally: Brandon Sanderson has been wildly successful, both with his own epic fantasy and as the writer of the final Wheel of Time books. Dan Wells, my brother, has a three-book deal with Tor writing critically-acclaimed horror. And here’s what the three of us have in common: Brandon was working on this thirteenth book when he finally sold one (which happened to be the sixth one that he wrote). Dan also sold his sixth. And Variant is my seventh.

In other words, keep at it. Getting published is hard work, but it’s definitely possible.