Tabitha Vohn asked Janet Fitch:

During your career, what have you found to be your least favored part(s) of the writing/publishing process?

Janet Fitch What a good question! Well, being an unpublished writer and trying to get those first stories published is brutal… loads of rejection. Luckily I"m the contrary type, when people tell me no, it makes me even more determined to hear that YES. But I'm also willing to do whatever it takes--like getting better, like learning everything, like spending time making sentences sing, like listening to critique and finding out what's wrong with stuff that kept getting said no to--to get that yes. Rejection is the worst part.

Titles are hard.

Hating book jackets is hard, and not getting what you want--with any luck you don't have to go out with a book cover you're ashamed to be seen with. So far for me, I've liked the hardbound covers but sometimes have had a bit of a battle with paperbacks.

Publicity is a battle, sometimes your publisher 'sees' the book's readership differently than you do. Maybe they're looking at (naturally) the widest possible readership, while you're focused on the people you wrote it for. But in my experience sometimes people you didn't expect to love a book really did. So I've learned in a lot of ways that I'm not always right. Sometimes I am though.

Reading reviews is awful--I make someone else read them first. The problem with reviews is if they're good you scream with happiness for a moment, but it doesn't last. One bad review sears you, it takes a long time for it to heal--one bad review outweighs ten good ones. The difficulty is, that if a review is insightful, you think--yeah, but the book is DONE. I'd love to have known that while i was writing the damn thing.

Cutting is hard. I'm not a cutter. I'm a "throw it all in" person. I'm happy to cut, I just can't do it on my own. It's not that I'm afraid to kill my darlings--it's just I never know which ones to kill. I'll just slash right and left and end with the absolute dullest part of the chapter still standing. The go back and put everything in again.

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