Sean Chercover on the first time
Sean Chercover is the author of Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City (out next week), but is relatively new to writing novels. We asked him to talk about starting out (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here): I know writers who can tell you inspiring stories about how they queried hundreds of agents and kept submitting and never gave up until their walls were papered with rejections and their persistence finally paid off. I wish I could inspire you with a similar story. But the truth is, getting published wasn’t that hard.
Truth is, I got lucky. Timing is a big part of getting noticed. Your manuscript has to land on the right agent’s desk at a time when said agent is in a relatively positive frame of mind and in the mood to read the kind of thing you’ve written. That happened for me after only 23 rejections. And a few short months later, we had a two-book deal with HarperCollins.
I was also lucky because I met some very supportive people along the way. People who showed me the ropes, encouraged me, and made introductions. Two in particular, Jon and Ruth Jordan, opened a lot of doors.
Now, as the second of those two books hits stores, I look back and realize how very lucky I was, and I am grateful. If the universe had been configured slightly differently, I could just as easily been a guy with his mattress stuffed full of rejection letters.
Yes, getting published was easy; the hard part was writing the book…
I’d known that I wanted to write crime fiction since I was a teenager, but it took years for me to get over my fears and embrace that desire. Many of the same authors who influenced me and made me want to write, also paralyzed me, because they were so much better than me.
Lawrence Block (coincidentally, one of the guests of honor at this year’s Bouchercon) was a huge influence, but reading his novels set the bar so high that I often despaired and gave up. Same with Walter Mosley. And SJ Rozan. And Laura Lippman (another guest of honor this year, and local star). I started a lot of novels during these years, but never finished one.
Block’s books about the craft of writing, however, were helpful. And that started me on a binge of reading "how to write a novel" books. Which is a lot easier than actually writing a novel.
Finally, I woke up one day and I was 35 years old and I had a bunch of half-written manuscripts at the bottom of various drawers, and I just got fed up with myself. So I resolved to stop reading books about how to write a novel, and write a damn novel. More important, I would finish what I started.
I remembered a piece of advice from some book or another, wrote it on a note card and stuck it to the wall above my computer screen. I referred to it often. It said:
Just write the story that you would want to read.
And the manuscript I finally finished was my first published book.
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
