A few years ago a woman named Lindsay Davis opened my manuscript and became my agent. For me it was a total Sally Field moment. Someone who wasn’t in my critique group, someone I wasn’t married to or the mother of or the daughter of — someone who didn’t HAVE to believe — believed, too.
Then Lindsay announced that she was getting married and moving overseas. Her clients, who were cheerfully adopted by other believers at Writers House, were thrilled for her. We thought it sounded very Jane Austen and hoped her life would be full of accents and dancing. We were also nervous. A few of us found each other and formed a transition support group that we called The Lindsay Situation. We’ve watched each other’s budding careers from afar ever since.
Fast forward to March of 2011, when it’s time to watch Ruta Sepetys’ career from close up. Her first novel, Between Shades of Gray, comes out on the 22nd.
Ruta Sepetys
Ruta’s book, which has already received a starred review in Kirkus, is about 15-year-old Lina, who is yanked from her home in Lithuania and deported, with her mother and brother, to Siberia. It’s a book about living, when people all around are dying. And it brings to print the story of millions of people that for so many years has been buried under ice and dirt.
ME: While I would love to talk about the journey that your characters go through, I’m afraid I’d give too much away. So I wanted to begin by talking about the journey you went through as a writer.
RS: Well, let’s just say that my journey could have been very different. I originally wrote a middle-grade mystery and was fortunate to have some publishers request it after critiques at conferences. I wanted to work with an agent, rather than submit the manuscript myself, so I queried Writers House. They responded with a request for the full and at the last minute I decided to also include ten pages of Between Shades of Gray, just to show a range of material. The agent called and said the middle-grade novel was fun but that the voice of BSG was more authentic and that was the book I should submit. Well, the ten pages I sent? That’s all I had written! So I shelved the middle-grade book and began to write BSG. I often think how very different my journey would have been if I would have stuck with that first book. I am so grateful to Writers House for their guidance!
Me: When you were first beginning your writing career you received a really tough (and we’re not talking Bounty-tough, people, we’re talking Chuck Norris-tough) critique. How the heck did you survive?
RS: Oh yeah, I’ve had some rough critiques! But you know what? I am so lucky to have had that experience. I mean, it has to be difficult to tell an aspiring writer, “Actually, this really sucks.” But it helped me so much more in the long run to hear the truth. Sure, it hurt, but it eventually scarred over. I’ve also been part of an amazing writing group for over five years. We know each other really well now and our critique sessions can be pretty brutal. But we respect and trust each other completely.
Me: Ruta’s spirited essay about tough critiques and her eventual book sale can be found here. It’s a great read for anyone who is finding the road to publication a little bumpy.
