The Importance of Perseverance
By Patrick Dearen
Inside every aspiring novelist burns a dream–publication, readers, recognition. The process sounds so uncomplicated; a person needs only to translate ideas and emotions into a book through creativity, craftsmanship, and a willingness to bare soul. But the world is full of wanna-bes with potential and passion, so what separates those who succeed from those who fail?
Sometimes the answer is as simple–and as profound–as a single word.
At age twenty-two in January 1974, my first month out of college, I isolated myself on a Central Texas farm that had a 1920s-era house with neither electricity nor plumbing. By the light of a kerosene lamp, I slipped a sheet of paper into a manual typewriter and wrote the first sentence of a novel concerning a young man’s spiritual journey across Texas during the Great Depression. I called it Perseverance, never dreaming that its very title would be my mantra through draft upon draft, rejection slip upon rejection slip.
Within two months, I landed a job as a reporter for a San Angelo, Texas newspaper that demanded a 4 p.m.-1 a.m. work schedule. Upon returning home each night, I burned the 4 a.m. oil in my quest to grind out another thousand words on the novel. To a young writer such as I, the pace seemed relentless, especially after writing news stories for each preceding nine-hour period.
Quickly, the plot took shape. Circumstances forced my main character, Ish, to turn to the freight trains in an effort to reach the Texas Gulf Coast, where his hospitalized mother faced death. He did so in an era in which four million desperate Americans took to the rails or roads in search of jobs, homes, hope. For some, the track was a road to nowhere, a dead end in a boxcar or under the wheels or in a sea of emptiness. In my budding novel, the fate of many seemed certain, until Ish grabbed the rungs of a passing freight.
He brought with him the traits bestowed by his rural upbringing–faith, conviction, dedication. But now he faced thundering wheels ready to mutilate and knife-wielding hoboes restless to kill, a barreling train anxious to derail and railway policemen itching to shoot. Only here in life’s trenches would he meet up with the dregs of society: the wayward and the runaways, the dope addicts and prostitutes, the winos and criminals. The locomotive’s black smoke drifted back down the line to cover them all like a shroud, but it was more than death they faced–for this train wouldn’t stop until it carried them all to their destinies.
And their only hope lay in Ish’s Perseverance to make the world a little better place.
That was my conception of the novel’s premise, its characters, its theme. But while Ish journeyed closer to his dying mother with each new page that sprang from my typewriter, I found myself on an odyssey of my own.
Five months into the novel–and two-thirds toward its conclusion–my mother died, an unwelcome case of life imitating art.
I set the unfinished manuscript aside, and for the next six months I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. The parallels with reality were just too painful. By the end of the year, however, I chose to use my grief as a motivating force rather than let it cripple me, and I dragged myself back to the typewriter.
Sixty long nights later, I typed “The End” on a sheet of cheap copy paper and scribbled a note below:
79,778 words
completed Feb. 20, 1975
at 10 till 7 p.m. in San
Angelo on my supper break.
Little did I know that my odyssey was only beginning.
Of course, I did the obligatory second draft and readied the manuscript for submission–a six-month process in itself–but I soon met with form rejection slips that told me nothing more helpful than the fact that my novel failed to “meet current needs.” Just what the heck did that mean?
Enter William Edward Syers, a noted Texas novelist, folklorist, and newspaper columnist. I met him through my journalism work, and he volunteered to read Perseverance with the view in mind of assisting where he could. From his gracious mentoring, I learned an important stylistic point: The power is in the verb. Previously, I had piled adjective upon adjective, believing such to be good writing. Now, I realized that “The railroad track snaked through the hills” was far more effective than “The winding, snake-like, sinuous railroad track went through the hills.”
Syers also stressed the importance of scene structure. I had always written by the seat of my pants, unaware of where a scene was headed until it carried me there. Heeding his advice, I began working out each scene in advance, but never so rigidly that it would rob my writing of spontaneity. Characters indeed take over at times, leading their creator down unexpected paths toward a better novel.
Syers had four specific observations that would play roles in my later drafts of Perseverance: first, that I had failed to convey an effective sense of place in my East Texas scenes; second, that my protagonist Ish needed to be older (in this version, he was only fifteen); third, that my plot wouldn’t sustain an 80,000-word novel; and fourth, that Ish’s impact on other characters would be more believable if it came through actions rather than words.
The criticisms hurt, of course, but I never forgot his professional assessment, and I addressed a couple of his concerns in a third draft, completed late in 1976. Still, Perseverance failed to find a home.
As I continued shuttling the manuscript through the revolving door of New York publishing, I worked on other novels. One, to my delight, was picked up by Zebra Books in 1979, and the following year a second and third were accepted by another mass-market house, Tower Books. On the heels of the latter successes, I shipped Perseverance to Tower, only to meet with another rejection. “The writing is smooth and the plot well-defined,” wrote an editorial assistant, “but we feel the book is geared toward a younger audience than what we cater to.”
Twice now, knowledgeable readers had criticized Perseverance’s teenage point of view, yet I stubbornly clung to fifteen-year-old Ish, even as I launched into a fourth draft later in 1980. After all, I told myself, if a youngster’s point of view worked in so-adult-a-novel as To Kill a Mockingbird, why couldn’t I get by with it?
I guess I just couldn’t accept the fact that I wasn’t Harper Lee–which may explain why Draft Four garnered only additional form rejection slips. By now, I considered Tower’s personalized rejection something of a victory.
As the years passed, however, I realized that Ish had been locked in a time warp too long and decided that I needed to make a man out of him. In 1986, I did exactly that, re-thinking the novel from the viewpoint of a twenty-one-year-old and devoting months to Draft Five. I also trimmed the manuscript to 72,000 words and drew upon a recent research trip to the East Texas piney woods in addressing another of Syers’ concerns, the novel’s sense of place.
Still, form rejections continued to fill my mailbox.
With three published novels and a nonfiction book under my belt by the end of the ‘80s, I attended the 1990 WWA convention and met veteran editor Marc Jaffe of Houghton Mifflin. He invited me to send in Perseverance, which I wasted no time in doing. On August 28 of that year–a decade and a half after my first submission–Jaffe forwarded my second personalized rejection:
“Perseverance is in many ways a moving and powerful work. It has passion and conviction. I wonder, though, if there is only enough substance here for a shorter work–a novella, so called–in order to point up the work’s strengths even more.”
Back in 1976, William Edward Syers had told me much the same thing, but I had resisted the drastic cuts he had suggested. Now, though, it was time to take scissors in hand and do what had to be done.
Draft Eight totaled 60,000 words, and Draft Nine 55,500 words. Still, the manuscript gathered only the proverbial dust, even as I continued to pursue publication doggedly.
Meanwhile, my fourth novel, When Cowboys Die, not only had been published in hardcover by a New York house, but had been named a Spur Award finalist in 1995. Too, I had been lucky enough to produce four additional nonfiction books that had been published to good reviews. As an unpublished writer, I had held the delusion that all I needed to do was “get my foot in the door” and publication of Perseverance was sure to follow. Now, it looked as if I’d have to kick that door down and bull my way through.
It wasn’t until 1996 that I received my third personalized rejection, this one from Zondervan. But even as executive editor Dave Lambert told me that Perseverance, despite its strengths, wasn’t appropriate for the press’s specialized market, I found reason for hope in his unheard-of request on behalf of another Zondervan editor. So smitten was she by in-house discussion of Perseverance, she wanted to keep the manuscript long enough to read it for her own edification – a “pretty good sign,” Lambert consoled.
Three years later, I approached scores of publishers with a subsequent draft and netted a fourth personalized rejection. “It is a strong coming-of-age story, with good writing that is even brilliant at times,” said a university press associate director, who proceeded to outline suggestions for revision. Contracted work delayed my rewrite, however, and when I contacted the press for further instructions a few months later, I learned that the associate director had packed up and left, taking the press’s interest in Perseverance with her.
Dat-gum the luck. So now what?
How about another draft?
By the time I completed Draft Eleven, Perseverance was, in essence, an entirely new novel, albeit one that owed much to the ten full drafts, two partial drafts, and four polishes that had preceded it. Not only did this 46,000-word version incorporate all the suggestions that expert readers had tendered across three decades, but I drew upon almost forty years of writing experience and fifteen published books, eight of them novels. I had never stopped believing in Perseverance, never had been willing to consign it to the scrap heap. But was I dedicated, or just a fool?
In 1979, four years after I had typed “The End” on the initial draft, Ed Eakin established Eakin Press in Austin, Texas. By 2005, the press stood as the largest non-academic publisher in the state and had in print hundreds of books–two of them mine. I respected the press for its personal approach toward its authors, and even though the company published only limited adult fiction, I knew that my new manuscript would receive careful consideration.
I queried the press, then shipped the novel to Austin.
Anxious months later, I received an email from Eakin’s publisher, Virginia Messer:
“Perseverance is the best.”
In 2006, Eakin Press published Perseverance as a trade paperback under its Sunbelt Eakin imprint. More than thirty-two years had passed since I had written that first page by kerosene lamplight, and thirty-one years had gone by since I had unwittingly scribbled “completed” at the end of Draft One. The novel had spanned much of my life, from energetic youth at twenty-two to graying senior at fifty-five. Like my character Ish, I had persevered, succeeding in accomplishing my goal through the sweat of my face and bulldogged determination. I had faced setback upon setback, but my Perseverance had grown ever-stronger, leading to greater depth of character and ultimately to hope.
A burning dream.
It can flicker and die, or flare, like a star. To an aspiring novelist, the choice may be his own.
THE END
Patrick Dearen is the author of nine novels, as well as seven nonfiction books focusing on cowboy life and the Pecos River country of Texas. Perseverance, he says, was inspired by his father’s firsthand account of hard times along the rails in Depression-era Texas. In addition to his Spur finalist citation, Dearen received the 2006 R. C. Crane Award for fiction and garnered nine national and state journalism awards. A wilderness enthusiast, he makes his home in Midland, Texas, with his wife Mary (a newspaper editor) and their son Wesley.
