109 rejections and just one lousy career

One of my writing students-cum-clients, having recently finished her first novel and begun the dreaded quest for an agent, asked me to tell her my “how I got my agent” story. Instead of answering her question in a thoughtful and useful manner (which would have robbed me of at least ten valuable minutes, never to be recovered) I linked her to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCUKrB2vGbM

This is me at the inaugural presentation of the now notorious Regreturature, a celebration of embarrassing juvenilia read by writers who have since gone on to make something of themselves (something less embarrassing, one hopes) put on by the San Francisco Writers Grotto and LitCrawl. What I’m reading is the query letter that I and my collaborator Will Jacobs sent out to agents in 1981, when we were young and brash and arrogantly stupid. Coming off years of having all our books rejected, we had decided to go for broke and pitch nine books at once (three of which we hadn't even written yet) to every agent we could find. And every one of those nine pitches was grotesquely overdone.
      My client found it ridiculous and funny, just as she was supposed to, but she also said something that put a new spin on it for me. Because part of what I relate in the video is that we sent a letter to 110 agents and got only one positive response. Which, taken as a numerical fact, sounds like it should have been dismal and ego-deflating...except that that one agent agreed to represent one of the books we were pitching, The Beaver Papers. Then she sold it to a publisher, then it came out and sold pretty well. Which led to the sale of a second book to the same publisher, The Comic Book Heroes, which is what got me into writing both comics (and from them, screenplays) and nonfiction about popular culture, which between them comprise the big, two-hearted river of my whole career. 
     So, said my client, “This should be an inspirational ‘keep trying’ video that everyone shares on Twitter for discouraged people.”
       I’m dubious about the Twitter thing, because you actually have to watch eight whole minutes of my humiliating self-evisceration before you get to the inspirational part. But I get what she’s saying. 
       Honestly, I’m not sure what concrete advice I should pull out of this experience. If you’re not getting anywhere doing what you think you’re supposed to do then...do something ridiculous? Do something you’ll make people cringe and laugh at decades later? Or maybe just...do something. Then do another something. And another something. And another something. Until one of those somethings actually turns into something.