The Best Advice I Ever Got by Katie Couric

The Best Advice I Ever Got by Katie Couric

Author:Katie Couric
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-12T07:00:00+00:00


Kathryn Stockett

Bestselling Author of The Help

Don’t Give Up, Just Lie

If you ask my husband what my best trait is, he’ll smile and say, “She never gives up.”

And if you ask him for my worst trait, he’ll get a funny tic in his cheek and narrow his eyes and hiss, “She. Never. Gives. Up.”

It took me a year and a half to write my earliest version of The Help. I’d told most of my friends and family what I was working on. Why not? We are compelled to talk about our passions. When I’d polished my story, I announced that it was done and mailed it to a literary agent.

Six weeks later I received a rejection letter from the agent, stating, “Story did not sustain my interest.” I was thrilled! I called my friends and told them I’d gotten my first rejection! Right away, I went back to editing. I was sure that I could make the story tenser, more riveting, better.

Several months later, I sent it to a few more agents. And received a few more rejections. Well, more like fifteen. I was a little less giddy this time, but I kept my chin up. “Maybe the next book will be the one,” a friend said. Next book? I wasn’t about to move on to the next one just because of a few stupid letters. I wanted to write this book.

A year and a half later, I opened my fortieth rejection: “There is no market for this kind of tiring writing.” That one finally made me cry. “You have so much resolve, Kathryn,” a friend said to me. “How do you keep yourself from feeling like this has been just a huge waste of your time?”

That was a hard weekend. I spent it in pajamas, slothing around that racetrack of self-pity—you know the one, from sofa to chair to bed to refrigerator, starting over again on the sofa. But I couldn’t let go of The Help. Call it tenacity, call it resolve, or call it what my husband calls it: stubbornness.

After rejection number forty, I started lying to my friends about what I did on the weekends. They were amazed by how many times a person could repaint an apartment. The truth was, I was embarrassed for my friends and family to know that I was still working on the same story, the one nobody apparently wanted to read.

Sometimes I’d go to literary conferences, just to be around other writers who were trying to get published. I’d inevitably meet some successful writer who told me, “Just keep at it. I received fourteen rejections before I finally got an agent. Fourteen! How many have you gotten?”

By rejection number fifty-five, I was truly neurotic. It was all I could think about—revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed The End.



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