On Rejection: Lee Kravetz

How to transition from writing non-fiction to fiction

Welcome to this week’s edition of On Rejection! Author Lee Kravetz has published three books, two non-fiction—Strange Contagion and SuperSurvivors—and his debut novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. I always love hearing from people who write in different genres, and I hope you all enjoy this one as well.

If you’re just discovering Collected Rejections, welcome! In this world, writing is still fun, rejection is not a bad word, and we’re all here to grow as writers. If you’re into that, subscribe to this newsletter here:

Hi Lee! Tell us about a time you experienced rejection.

when I was working on my novel, my agent rejected and sent it back to me not once, not twice, not three times but six times. 

How did you get over it?

I always gave myself 24 hours to get over it and then on the 25th hour I started over again, worked on revisions, and sometimes even overhauled the entire book. Six to 8 months later, I would send it back again.

If you could go back and tell yourself anything right before that experience, what would you say? 

Every rejection is an opportunity to revise and make it better.

Your first two books were non-fiction, and your first novel came out last year. How was writing fiction versus non-fiction different for you? Did you find you have a preference?

Aside from the fact that you are working with fact versus fiction, the rules of writing are actually pretty similar with any genre or book. You have character, desire, opposition, subtext, and tension. I find fiction to be oh so much harder to do but much more worthwhile. I can’t imagine going back to nonfiction. 

What are you working on now? 

It’s still a little bit too early to announce publicly but I can tell you that it’s fiction and that I am gearing up for a lot of “revise and resubmit” emails until it’s right!

You can follow Lee on Facebook or check out his website.

---

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. That just means if you click through and buy a book, I’ll get a few cents of profit but it won’t cost any more for you.