Megan McDonald: A Life of Books, Libraries & Unforgettable Characters

What advice would you offer writers navigating the process today?

Well, my experience is so different because we're going back now 35 years, maybe.

I wrote my first book.

I didn't even have a computer.

So I actually... didn't have any idea how to submit a manuscript or what it looked like or who to send it to.

And a friend of mine took my scribbly notebook draft and typed it up for me just so I could even read a clean draft.

And so back in my day, you literally... put the self-addressed stamped envelope in with the printed pages and sent it off to an editor at a publishing house and then just wait a really long time to find out if you even will be read.

And for me, I was really lucky because I was working as a librarian.

We had a conference every year.

This is at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh where I grew up, and I was working there, and they brought authors and their editors every year to this conference.

So I met this editor in person just over a lunch or something for this event, and it gave me the idea that I had a name of somebody I could send to.

He kind of peered at me over his glasses and said, "'Are you a writer?' And I didn't even know how to answer at that point, but he invited me to send him something.

And this was Richard Jackson, who, oh gosh, he's no longer living, but he was really a premier editor for many, many years in the business.

So once I had that connection, I just sent the manuscript off and it got lost in the mail two times.

So I would wait for like months and then call them up and they would say, we have no record of this hermit crab story, right? So I was like, well, what do I do? And they were like, send it again.

So I sent it again.

Well, by the third time...

It was so frustrating, but it actually worked in my favor because the editor felt so terrible that they kept misplacing it that he read it like the day he said, send it to me certified or whatever.

And he read it that day and called me on the phone and said, I want to publish this.

So I was just so incredibly lucky.

And I know that's so different from the stories of the hundreds of, you know, You know, I remember hearing Madeline L'Engle speak, and she said she could literally wallpaper this big room in her house with all the rejection letters she had received.

So I've since had those, but I was just very lucky on that first book.

And again, I really didn't even know how fortunate I was because...

I had made a connection with an editor and now he said, show me anything else you have.

So things that I had been working on, I was able to then have an avenue to send those off.