The failure I HAD TO HAVE
Julia Kite describes how she had to watch her dreams disintegrate before she could make a success of her first novel
Julia Kite
AUTHOR EXPERIENCE
I’m glad I had to fail miserably.
A few years ago, I wouldn’t have said this. The thought of it would have sent me into a panic, and then into a depression. I was always the precocious child, the clever one at school, the girl with her nose always in a book except for the times I had my hand scribbling stories across a notebook. Failure wasn’t in my vocabulary when it came to anything related to writing – or really anything academic. I almost took it as a given that I would have a book published while still relatively young.
In retrospect, that was a silly and naive expectation. Even reading over those last few sentences makes me cringe at how entitled it all sounds. Sure, I read about the changing dynamics of book publishing, but I assumed I would be able to get an agent and get a book deal anyway. I had no idea, as a 22-year-old sending out her manuscript to agents for the first time, that I would hit one brick wall after another. Rejections without feedback left me confused how to improve, and a never-ending stream of negativity shook me to the core.
After years of rewriting my first novel, I finally got a bite, or at least that’s what I thought. A prominent agent who liked my manuscript met me. He said that while he loved the book, he needed more than one out of me in order to properly market a complete unknown to publishing houses. I told him about a new project I’d recently started, a novel about the disappearance of a young woman in West London. I promised I’d send it his way once complete. And I did – and it evoked absolutely nothing from him, so we parted and I was left back at square one.