Own Who You Are

I just sent off a query to a respected agent. I spent ages looking at all the agents that took the type of novel I’d written (historical fiction) and decided she was my first, best bet. Now I’m looking at other agents, with an eye toward submitting two teen novels and a fantasy. And in my perusal of agent web sites, I came across an agent pet peeve I’d never heard of before: “I hate it when books start with someone waking up and not knowing where they are.”

About one second later, I sucked in a breath of horror because my historical novel, the novel I had just submitted to the perfect agent, started out with, you guessed it, a soldier waking up in the middle of an empty battlefield and he doesn’t know what has happened to him or where the rest of his battalion is.

So, am I completely hosed? The agent I sent the query to didn’t mention this particular dislike, but if a couple of agents mention it, is that dislike pretty prevalent amongst all agents? Do all of them groan in dismay when they look at the first page of a novel and it starts out with “It was a strange feeling to wake up dead”?

“Gosh, do you think I need to rewrite the beginning of the novel?” I asked my husband.

“Well, you kind of need that part, don’t you?”

The answer to that is “Yes.” In fact, I’d already rewritten the beginning of the novel to INCLUDE that portion because I wanted to really emphasize how mind-blowing and disorienting it would be for this young man to wake up and not know where in the Sam Hill everybody was or why he was alone. Which leads to more confusion later on when he tries to talk to someone and they can’t hear him because, well, he’s dead. In the first version of the novel, it felt like I was doing a lot of telling and not showing as I tried to explain the soldier’s situation and how he had arrived at that time and place through flashbacks. It got awkward and unwieldy. Rewriting the beginning of the novel fixed that problem. Or so I thought.

There’s a lot of angst and second-guessing myself when it comes to submitting queries, even though I think I’ve produced strong work. In the midst of a crisis of confidence the other day, I finally wrote on a sticky note in all caps “OWN WHO YOU ARE” and stuck it to my computer. I’m proud of what I’ve written. I’ve worked hard to make my novels as good as they can be. Are they perfect? Most likely, no. But they’re pretty darn good. If I love what I’ve written and believe in what I’ve done, hopefully other people, agents included, will love what I’ve written and believe in me as well.