Author! Author!

Is everyone getting excited for Querypalooza this coming weekend? I hope so; although I frequently teach query letter-development boot camps, I’ve never before done a weekend seminar here on Author! Author! The timing really couldn’t be better, however: as we had discussed early last month, most of the NYC-based publishing world goes on vacation from the end of the second week of August through Labor Day. So there really wasn’t much point querying recently.

Especially for those of you devoted to querying via e-mail. I’m not a big advocate of electronic querying in general, unless the agent of your dreams absolutely insists upon it: it’s significantly less time-consuming to reject via e-mail. That’s especially important to realize around this time of year, for just as e-queries sent between Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to pile up, to be read in droves when Millicent the agency screener is back from vacation, August-sent e-queries usually end up being read in an unusually great hurry (even by Millie’s standards). And since the quickest way to clear an e-query out of her inbox is to reject it…

Human nature, I’m afraid. Who doesn’t rush through the backlog on one’s desk after a few days out of the office?

What wisdom may we derive from this set of depressing observations? Well, for starters, it’s a safe bet that our Millicent is going to be pretty swamped right after Labor Day — so whatever you do, campers, do not send out an e-query between now and then.

Trust me, you do not want your query to be the 512th in her inbox. If you must e-query, wait a few days, until her inbox no longer looks like it was the RSVP site for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.

So much for today’s cautions. On to the fun part: awarding a prize.

Today, I shall be discussing the 2010 Author! Author! Award for Expressive Excellence in Memoir winner, Jennifer Lyng’s NORMAL IS WHAT YOU KNOW. As with the three other A!A!AEE winners this year, Jennifer also won the Grand Prize in the Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest.

After yesterday’s very technical discussion on the merits and liabilities of the A!A!AEE winner in Adult Fiction, I thought it might make for a nice change of pace to discuss this entry on a more visceral level — which is, not entirely coincidentally, the level at which the judges most enthusiastically responded to it. And, while we’re at it, to talk a little bit about how differently memoir tends to be evaluated from fiction at the submission and contest-judging stages.

For starters, as I hope most of you memoirists are already aware, the vast majority of memoirs currently acquired by publishers in the United States are sold via a book proposal, not an entire manuscript. That means, in effect, that a memoirist not have to have a complete draft in hand before beginning to query; technically, all that’s required is a book proposal and a beautifully-polished sample chapter or two.

Does that giant collective gasp mean that some of you had heard otherwise? I’m not entirely surprised; misinformation on this subject has been circulating rampantly around the writers’ conference circuit for at least a decade. But as an author who has successfully garnered publication offers for two memoir book proposals, I’m living proof that the you-must-write-the-whole-thing rumor just isn’t true.

For those of you who are already sprinting toward the archive list at right, you’ll find the guidance you’re seeking under the aptly-named HOW TO WRITE A BOOK PROPOSAL and HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK PROPOSAL categories. You’re welcome.

To be fair, though, one does encounter memoir agents who state categorically in their submission guidelines that they will only read the work of first-time memoirists, but that certainly is not an industry-wide preference. Prudently, these agents want to make sure before they sign a new writer that (a) she has a gripping book-length story to tell (not always apparent in the first draft of a proposal), (b) she has the writing chops to tell it well (ditto), and (c) she is already aware that writing a truly revealing memoir is awfully hard work, emotionally speaking.

Obviously, it is a whole lot easier to tell whether any or all of these thing are true if the writer has already produced a full draft. No imagination required: the potential of the book may simply be evaluated on the manuscript page, like a novel.

But even after a manuscript proves itself on (a), (b), and (c) levels, the acquiring agent will probably expect the by-now-exhausted writer to toss off a book proposal, anyway. That’s how memoir is sold in this country, you know.

(a), (b), and (c) are not the only reasons a cautious agent might want to see the whole thing right off the bat, though. Many a promising memoir heralded by an excellent book proposal has never seen the light of day as a book. And not just because first memoirs by non-celebrity writers have become significantly harder for agents to sell in the post-A MILLION LITTLE PIECES literary world. As I mentioned above, the darned things are emotionally draining to write.

Even for those lucky memoirists whose books’ publication is not stymied by threatened $2 million lawsuits. (Long-time readers, can you believe that as of last month, my A FAMILY DARKLY has been on hold for FIVE YEARS?)

The trouble is, a memoirist may not realize just how draining the process can be until he’s well into the writing process — which is to say, for a memoir sold on a proposal, perhaps not until after he’s penned the proposal or even sold the book. It can take a while to reconstruct one’s own past substantively enough to be able to write about it, after all. Unfortunately for personal happiness, but fortunately for the emotional truth of memoir, the brain and the body do not always make a strong distinction between a vividly-recalled event and one that is actually happening in the moment.

Please think about that, the next time you pick up a beautifully-written memoir on a searingly painful subject. The author had to walk through fire twice in order to tell you about her experience.

Which brings me back to Jennifer Lyng’s powerful entry. Frankly, the judges had not originally planned to have a separate memoir category in the Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest; when I set up Category II: Adult Fiction and Memoir, I had anticipated simply including any winning memoirs in the general adult category.

Then we read Jennifer’s entry. It was clear right away that memoir deserved its own category.

Actually, I probably should have designed the contest that way in the first place: after all, as we discussed above, memoirs are not usually submitted in the same manner as novels. Yes, grabbing Millicent by the bottom of page 1 is still important, but let’s face it, if she has to plow through 30-50 pages of marketing material before she gets to it — sample chapters are placed at the end of proposals, typically — she’s probably not going to make it to page 1 if she is not already at least slightly interested in the subject matter.

That’s why for this contest, the judges read the memoir entrants’ brief book descriptions prior to turning to the first page, instead of the other way around. The result was a reading that more closely resembled how Millicent would approach the first page of a memoir.

Happily, Jennifer’s description was a lulu. So much so, in fact, that one of the judges immediately suggested, “Maybe you should run this on the blog to show queriers that it is actually possible to intrigue a reader with a one-paragraph description.”

Good idea, judge. Here it is, in all of its glory:

How does a child live with the man she believes killed her mother? My book, a combination of memoir and true crime, will answer that question, as well as detail the murder trial that took 17 years to unfold — one with no body, weapon or eyewitness.

Wow. You already want to pick up that book, right?

It also — and this is remarkable in a blurb this short — answers one of the first two questions the pros invariably ask about a non-celebrity memoir: is this a story that only this author could tell? If not, why is this author uniquely qualified to tell it in this particular way? Jennifer addresses these salient issues even more fully in her one-page description:

Sends chills up your spine, doesn’t it? If you were Millicent, wouldn’t you run, not walk, to the first page of the sample chapter, to see how well the person who lived through this remarkable set of events can write?

As it happens, quite well. Here is Jennifer’s first page, precisely as the judges saw it.

What do you think? More importantly for submission purposes, if you were Millicent and basing your decision whether to read on solely upon the descriptions above and this first page, would you? And if you were Millie’s boss, what conclusions would you leap to about (a), (b), and (c)?

The judges felt (and I concur) that this first page has a lot of promise — but not for the same reasons that a similarly-written novel opening might. Remember, the single biggest way in which fiction and nonfiction first pages are read differently is that it is ASSUMED that the nonfiction manuscript will be rewritten to the acquiring editor’s specifications. It is still to be written: the proposal is in essence the job application the writer submits to the publishing house in hopes of being paid to write it. A novel, on the other hand, is expected to be print-ready by the time the writer submits it to an agency.

Admittedly, agents often ask novelists for significant revisions after the representation contract is signed. So do editors, either before or after they acquire a manuscript. That may seem odd, given that they expect fiction to be polished to a high shine before they see it, but it makes abundant sense from a professional point of view: a writer who has the skills to perfect a submission, they reason, is the best candidate for making good revisions.

Part of the point of selling a memoir — or any nonfiction book, for that matter — via a book proposal, rather than a manuscript, is that the publisher will be able to tell the writer how it should be written. Although book proposals always include an annotated table of contents, it’s not at all unusual for an acquiring editor to ask for different chapters to appear in the finished book, for instance. It’s not even all that uncommon for the editor to request slight changes in authorial voice.

I mention all this in part because I suspect some of you novelists are going to be a smidge shocked when I show you how Millicent might respond to this first page on a sentence-by-sentence level. She’s expecting it to be revised between now and publication, so why not go to town on the feedback?

(If you’re having a spot of trouble reading the comments, try enlarging the image by holding down the COMMAND key while pressing the + button. And no, I hadn’t realized that the light in this room was so very golden.)

Most of these points are pretty self-explanatory — beginning the page with the moment of dread, for instance, rather than showing a moment of normalcy first for contrast — but I want to take a minute to talk about the ones that turn up most often in memoir. I would have flagged the percussive repetition of my mother on any first page, but does anyone have a wild guess about why this redundancy is especially dangerous on the first page of a memoir?

Give up? It’s because virtually every first-time memoirist consistently refers to relatives as my mother, my father, my sister, and so forth, just as they would in a verbal anecdote. That’s fine in speech, but on the printed page, a constant reminder of characters’ relationship to the narrator quickly becomes tedious for the reader.

“What’s wrong,” Millicent fumes, “with referring to all of these people by NAME? They’re characters in a book, for heaven’s sake!”

That objection is relevant even in a case like this, where the single most likely name to replace the relationship marker is Mom. Believe it or not, simply changing two of the three my mothers to Mom would make most Millicents like it better.

The moral, should you not already have shouted it toward the sky: the little stuff matters. Especially on page 1.

It’s also both common and dangerous for a memoir to open with a sentence in the passive voice. As this one does: It was a crisp, overcast fall day… Any guesses why this simple statement of fact might raise Millicent’s hackles?

If you immediately cried, “Because it’s in the passive voice, by jingo!” give yourself a gold star for the day. As we have often discussed, the overwhelming majority of professional readers have been trained to regard the passive voice as poor writing. While that’s not quite fair — plenty of very good established authors use the passive voice all the time, after all — it is a belief worth noting.

In fact, I’m going to lay it down as an axiom: never, unless you are actually quoting someone else, use the passive voice on page 1 of a submission. And never, ever, EVER use it in the first sentence of a manuscript, or in the first sentence of any paragraph within the first few pages.

Why is the use of the passive voice more likely to make Millicent’s molars grind if they occupy those particular positions within the text? The first sentence of any paragraph is the one most likely to catch a skimmer’s eye. And if Millicent reads nothing else on page 1, she will take a gander at the first sentence.

The third common first memoir characteristic I’d like you to notice is much subtler than the first two: the emotional distance between the narrator and what is going on. On the first page of a memoir — and in memoir-writing in general — the more the reader can feel that he is observing the action from within the narrator’s body and psyche, the better.

Didn’t expect another axiom so soon, did you? Hey, I was on a roll.

Are some of you having trouble spotting the emotional distance, given how nicely Jennifer has set up the suspense here? A professional reader would appreciate the tangible sense that something awful is about to happen, but would note that while we’re seeing the narrator’s thoughts and reasoning in detail, the narrator is not telling us much about her own feelings, fears, or even physical sensations.

Yes, she mentions needing to go to the bathroom, but is that honestly the most character- or situation-revealing physical sensation the narrative could bring up here? At the risk of overloading this post with axioms, I would like to see this narrative be the protagonist’s head a bit less and in her body and emotions a bit more.

Jennifer’s in luck here: as she has presented this situation, it is particularly rich in opportunities for working in this kind of telling detail. The narrator could have a visceral reaction to the unexpected sensation of the doorknob fighting her hand, or to the sight of the “Sorry we missed you” sign. She could feel a rush of comfort when the dogs bark. Heck, she could even feel the cold coming through her jacket as she stood outside longer than she had expected.

Or — and this would be my first stop, revision-wise — the narrative could give us a peek at the most awful thing that 13-year-old could have imagined resulting in the door’s being locked. Given what the book description has led us to expect, the contrast between the normal fears of a kid and what is about to become her new reality would probably be quite poignant.

But you want to turn the page to find out, don’t you?

That, my friends, is the best possible evidence that a first page is a grabber — and yes, what constitutes a grabber does in fact often vary between fiction and nonfiction. Already, in just this page and her one-paragraph description for her query letter, Jennifer has made it clear that she has a fascinating story to tell, has the writerly tools to tell it well, and is ready to embrace the memoir-writing experience.

It’s as clear as (a), (b), (c), right? Congratulations on a job well done, Jennifer — the judges can’t wait to read the rest of the book.

In future posts, we shall continue apply what we’ve been learning all summer to the great first pages of more contest winners. (You did realize that’s what we’ve been doing, right?) Think of it as a master class in seeing submissions from Millicent’s perspective.

That noble effort will have to wait, however, until after Querypalooza — after so much craft, we’re all ready for a marketing weekend, right? Keep up the good work!

Yes, it’s been a lengthy process, campers, unexpectedly attenuated by my car crash earlier this summer, but today, at long last, I shall begin presenting you with the winning entries in the Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest. For the rest of this week, I am delighted to be sharing with you the winning entries in Category II: Adult Fiction and Memoir.

And if you’re not careful, as the pundit Fat Albert used to say, you might learn something before it’s done.

Why start with Category II, you ask, instead of the more numerically logical Category I? Well, Phoebe Kitanidis, author of the HarperCollins’ new YA release, Whisper will be joining me after Labor Day to give feedback on the Category I: YA entries. We have some surprises in store that I hope will be worth another few days’ wait.

Speaking of treats lurking in your future: in celebration of the end of the long annual NYC- based publishing world’s vacation, slated to lurch to a close after the upcoming Labor Day weekend, I shall be devoting this weekend to Querypalooza, a crash course in everything an aspiring writer needs to know in order to write a solid, compelling, professional-looking query letter..

Do I sense the rise of both extreme excitement and grave trepidation out there in the ether? “Um, Anne?” a few of you murmur, “Just how crash a course is Querypalooza going to be? Will I require a protective helmet of some sort?”

That depends upon your capacity for swift absorption of in-depth analysis over a three-day period. Beginning at 10 am this coming Saturday, September 4, I shall be posting sterling how-to advice on querying once every 8 hours.

Why so quickly? So in theory, a conscientious reader who knew little or nothing about the querying process at the onset of Labor Day weekend could potentially wake up on Tuesday, September 7th with a really good query letter, just in time to send it off to all of those fresh-from-vacation Millicents.

Hey, they don’t call it Labor Day for nothing. Tune in to join the fun.

But enough projection into the future. Let’s concentrate on the now, and Jennifer Sinclair Johnson’s winning first page, the opening to a manuscript she described for the judges thus:

What if Dorothy landed in Hollywood instead of Oz? DIVIDED STATES spins a new twist on Cozy Mysteries as a Midwestern insurance adjuster arrives, finding her coworker in earthquake rubble. Navigating natural disaster and local rules with more cracks than sun-baked Nebraska clay, she brings fresh perspective to light.

First off, kudos to Jennifer for winning not only the Grand Prize for Adult Fiction in the Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest, but also this year’s Author! Author! Award for Expressive Excellence. For those of you who missed the initial contest announcement, I had decreed that the contest would have two levels: a straightforward competition for the most intriguing opening page for a manuscript, and an optional award level, if the judges felt that Grand Prize in the former was not sufficient to record their reactions to an entry.

I’m delighted to report that the judges required this extra outlet for their feelings not once, but four times in this contest. You shall see why in the days to come.

Jennifer’s was the Adult Fiction entry that elicited the more enthusiastic plaudits from the judges. Before I tell you why, let’s take a gander at what made them cheer until the rafters resounded. (If you are having trouble reading it, try holding down the COMMAND key while hitting +.)

The writing here is good, of course, crammed to the gills with telling details, but as we know from our summer of craft, there’s more to creating a great first page than collecting a series of strong, well-constructed sentences. In order to grab the reader — particularly a professional one like a contest judge or our old pal, Millicent the agency screener — a fiction first page needs to present the protagonist as an interesting person in an interesting situation.

Check. What else renders this first page so compelling?

If that question leaves you a trifle stumped, you’re not alone. Most aspiring writers know what they like, but have only a vague notion of what makes a first page compelling, marketable, accessible, and/or grabbing. There’s an excellent reason for that, of course: unlike professional readers, who read thousands upon thousands of page 1s in any given year, the overwhelming majority of aspiring writers have never read any manuscript’s first page but their own.

Or, at best, a writer friend’s. It’s not likely, in short, to be an impartial reading. While active members in a regularly-meeting critique group gain more exposure to the possible range of openings, participation in such groups is rarer than one might think.

But how is the isolated aspiring writer to learn what works on page 1? Typically, the average writer’s conception of what a good opening is comes from precisely the same source as any other readers’: what he’s seen in published books. As we have discussed, though, what an established writer can get away with on page 1 and what someone trying to break into the biz could slip past Millicent are often quite different things. Ditto with what might have caught an agent’s eye 5 or 10 years ago vs. now.

That’s why, in case you had been wondering, we have been spending so much time this summer concentrating on first page revision. I’ve been trying to move your conception of what makes a strong opening beyond a simple combination of what you like and what you have seen authors you respect do; all of these posts have been attempting to help you read more like a professional.

So let’s go ahead and turn to the pros for advice on how to assess today’s page 1. Specifically, let’s recall from last time the agent-generated list of qualities they like to see in a first page. How well do you think the example above meets these criteria?

1. A non-average character in a situation you wouldn’t expect.
Oh, do you see many stories about insurance adjusters newly transplanted to earthquake zones? Admittedly, it is not immediately apparent here whether our narrator is a man or a woman, but there isn’t much doubt that s/he is interesting, is there?

As we have discussed, as well as slice-of-life writing can work in short stories, plays, and novellas, it’s difficult to grab a novel reader — particularly a professional one like Millicent — on page 1 with a protagonist who is aggressively ordinary. A savvy writer is usually better off emphasizing what is unusual about his characters in an opening scene.

2. An action scene that felt like it was happening in real time.
This isn’t an action scene, so this one is not applicable. Remember, not all of these criteria will work for every opening.

3. The author made the point, then moved on.
In many first-person narratives, the self-analysis in page 1 would have extended for the rest of the page, if not beyond. Here, Jennifer has been quite restrained, moving the reader swiftly out of the protagonist’s head and into observation of the environment. That well-handled pacing will prevent Millicent from feeling that the story isn’t beginning fast enough.

4. The scene was emotionally engaging.
This lies largely in the eye of the beholder, of course. Perhaps a better way to approach this issue: based on this first page alone, do you want to read the rest of this book?

The judges did, unanimously. And if a quick scan of page 1 does not seem like an entirely fair basis for making a determination on an entire manuscript, bear in mind that Millicent often reads less than that before making up her mind.

5. The narrative voice is strong and easy to relate to.
Again, this is quite subjective, but the judges found this narrative voice quite likable. With a protagonist engaged in a work project on page 1, it would have been very easy to load the narrative voice down with industry-specific jargon. Jennifer has steered clear of that danger, offering us instead a narrator who seems swept up in the details of the beauty of her new environment.

The only sentence that gave any of the judges pause on a voice level was The earthquake that hit Hollywood with the bang of a summer blockbuster’s opening had cast me into new territory. Opinions were divided over whether using Hollywood and cast so close together was intended as a pun based on the double meaning of cast (to throw/to be given a part in a play or movie). Since the pun, if intentional, was not very funny, the judges expressed the hope that the word choice would be reexamined.

6. The suspense seemed inherent to the story, not just how it was told.
This is a subtle one. It’s clear that something is about to happen here, isn’t it? The reader isn’t sure what, but the suspense is palpable.

Again, some of the judges had a quibble with one of the sentences: After the way my new boss had sent me to the property before my flight finished taxiing along the tarmac, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find destruction akin to the aftermath of Armageddon. The ending image is strong, but the reader has to interpolate some action in order to make the first part make sense: since airline passengers are currently not allowed to use cell phones while the plane is in the air, and there’s no indication that the story is not taking place in the present, the narrator must have turned on her phone as soon as allowed, after the plane touched down.

So did her boss call her the second she powered up the phone? That would be the only way that the timing of his having issued the order could have conveyed urgency all by itself, but the narrative is in such a hurry (understandable, on a first page) that it leaves the reader to fill in the blanks.

Amid those blanks lies a logical question: how did he know that she had just turned it on? Is he psychic? Or — and this seems substantially more likely — had he been calling every five minutes since he thought her plane could possibly have landed? That in turn begs another question: did he call her, or did she turn on the phone, hear his 47 messages, and call him right away?

Yes, that is a whole lot of questions to have about a single event, now that you mention it. But that’s not an uncommon reaction to a page 1 where the narrative has left out logical steps in the interests of streamlining. Frankly, from a professional reader’s perspective, both that paragraph and that joke would have worked better if it hadn’t all been crammed into a single sentence.

That’s a small quibble, however, one likely too tiny to put off most Millicents. Even the judges who made it recognized that.

7. “Good opening line.”
Professional readers are notoriously fond of first sentences that contain some element of paradox. This opener does not disappoint.

8. ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.”
Well? Did you think there was?

What is the benefit of presenting a layered reality over a completely straightforward one, when clarity is also so highly valuable on page 1? Simply put, a narrative that implies that there’s more going on that immediately meets the eye is a better reflector of reality. The protagonist appears to be inhabiting an actual world, rather than just a tale.

As fine as all of those criteria are for evaluating a first page, the judges in our contest were looking for a bit more. For instance, in a submission, as we have discussed, it’s vital to give some indication from the very top of page 1 what the book is about. Based on Jennifer’s opening, would you or would you not expect some intrigue to arise from the earthquake site her narrator’s boss is so eager to get her to see?

How did we judges know whether this was representative of the rest of the book? Advance thought, my dears: as some of you may perhaps recall, one of the contest requirements was a brief teaser, indicating the subject matter, book category, and what the manuscript to follow would add to the current offerings in that category. Here’s what Jennifer told us:

What if Dorothy landed in Hollywood instead of Oz? DIVIDED STATES spins a new twist on Cozy Mysteries as a Midwestern insurance adjuster arrives in Los Angeles to find her coworker lying unconscious in earthquake rubble. Navigating natural disaster and local rules with more cracks than sun-baked Nebraska clay, she brings fresh perspective to light.

Quite a close match with the opening, isn’t it? Millicent would appreciate that. So did the judges: all of them commented on how beautifully this page 1 fulfilled the promise Jennifer had made in the book’s description.

I can already sense literal-minded readers thinking about raising their hands. “But Anne,” these detail-oriented souls point out, “the protagonist doesn’t discover her coworker in the rubble on page 1, nor do we hear much about the differences between Nebraska and Los Angeles. So in what sense does her page 1 fulfill the promise of the description?”

Glad you asked, literal-minded ones; aspiring writers often confuse the imperative to let Millicent know right away what the book with an expectation that page 1 would be crammed with backstory. Usually, though, backstory-heavy openings are slow — your garden variety NYC-based Millie tends to prefer manuscripts that open with conflict (or at least the potential for it), with the backstory filled in later.

Jennifer’s page 1 contains several different species of conflict — we learn right away that her protagonist is a fish out of water, coming into an inherently dangerous situation with an already-tense boss breathing down her neck. Furthermore, it appears that the last person sent to do her job ran into some serious difficulties. That’s a pretty rich set of possibilities for a single page of text, no? But rather than stop the action short to explain what precisely happened to her predecessor that necessitated flying our heroine out from Nebraska, the reader gets to figure out the situation along with the narrator.

Thus, how this page fulfills the promise of the premise is not by resolving all of the questions it raises on page 1, but by (a) giving the protagonist hints about what the conflicts in store for her are and (b) doing so in a manner that allows the readers to speculate — yes, even by the bottom of page 1 — how she is going to be drawn into those conflicts-to-come.

Of course, as the organizer of this contest, I enjoy a considerable advantage in anticipating those conflicts. I had the power to ask for a longer description of the book:

The judges were also looking for page 1 to present a narrative voice appropriate to the intended target audience. Here, Jennifer is showing us a very literate, likable, thoughtful voice, appropriate for a high-end cozy mystery or women’s fiction.

Wisely, she has not designated this voice as literary fiction, as many aspiring writers would have done: it’s an excellent example of well-written genre fiction. Rather than trying to pitch the book on the writing alone, though, she has made the market-savvy choice of categorizing her manuscript by its subject matter.

The hyper-literal have raised their hands again, have they not? “But Anne, are you saying that the judges — or, even worse, Millicent — would have liked this page less had it been categorized as literary fiction? To my admittedly less experienced eye, the writing has literary sensibilities.”

In a word, yes. In several words, that’s to be expected, isn’t it?

Miscategorized submissions are, after all, among the easiest for Millicent to reject. As we have discussed many times before, no agent (or editor, or publishing house, or even most contests) handles every conceivable kind of writing. They specialize.

So when Millicent is confronted with even a very well-written submission that does not seem to fit comfortably into a book category that her boss represents, it just doesn’t make sense for her to keep reading once she’s determined it’s not something her agency is going to pick up. Even if she positively loves it, she is not in a position to help that book come to successful publication.

She has only one option, unfortunately: “Next!”

Starting to gain a better sense of what kind of first pages don’t provoke that response? If not, don’t despair — you’re going to get quite a bit of practice over the next week or two, as we continue to go over contest winner’s first pages. Except for the days during which we shall be taking a brief-but-content-heavy detour for Querypalooza, of course.

Lots of action in store at Author! Author! Tune in tomorrow for more first page high jinks.

Well done, Jennifer — and as always, everybody, keep up the good work!

That’s right, gang: the long-anticipated day has arrived. Today, I’m going to announce the winners of the Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest. Winners will receive an extensive critique of their first pages in this very forum, courtesy of yours truly and FAAB Phoebe Kitanidis, author of the HarperCollins’ new YA release, Whisper.

Hmm, why does that title sound so very familiar? You must have seen the cover someplace.

Why did it take such a long time to judge this contest, you ask? Well, several reasons, up to and including the fact that I’m typing this one-handed, due to my recent injuries. Also, the response to this contest was quite a bit more enthusiastic than either the judges or I had anticipated; as a contest without an entry fee, it wasn’t as though we could simply hire staff to deal with the additional entries.

Beginning to understand why the vast majority of literary contests charge fairly hefty entry fees? Contest administration is time-consuming.

Not that I’m complaining, of course — there were many great entries, and a tidy array that rose to the rank of fabulous. So many, in fact, that it was exceptionally difficult for the judges to agree on the final awards.

But of that, more below. First, I want to talk about a couple of the widespread entry problems.

To be blunt, it was not exceptionally difficult was to disqualify the full one-third of entries that disregarded the rules — and that’s not even counting the 90% of entries that did not adhere to standard format for manuscripts. Come on, people — there were only four rules!

What can we learn from disturbing statistic? Something that any veteran contest judge or agency screener could have told you: a significant proportion of aspiring writers evidently do not take the time to read contest rules and submission requirements.

That’s sad, because — again, as anyone mentioned above could tell you — if an entry or submission does not follow the rules, it will almost always be rejected, regardless of the quality of the writing.

Period. End of story. No appeal. Or, to put it another way: not taking the time to read the rules hurts only you.

Ditto with not following the rules of standard format for manuscripts — although so many entrants broke one or more rules that the judges had to downgrade the importance of formatting in the judging. This meant, in practice, that we ended up considering (and even giving a prize or two) to first pages that Millicent the agency screener probably would not have bothered to read at all.

Hey, we were being nice. But expecting Millicent to exercise that level of leniency would be foolish.

In case I am being too subtle here to catch the average rule-skimmer’s eye: READ THE RULES. LEARN THE RULES. FOLLOW THE RULES. REPEAT AS NEEDED UNTIL YOUR BOOK GETS PUBLISHED.

Seriously, submitting an improperly-formatted manuscript is precisely like sending a contest entry that ignores the stated rules: the writer is depending, foolishly, upon the kindness of the reader to overlook a lack of professionalism. Submitting an improperly or — even more common — inconsistently formatted manuscript is, to put it bluntly, usually a waste of the writer’s time.

Why? Chant it along with me, long-time readers of this blog: because agencies and contests typically receive so many perfectly-formatted, impeccably rule-following manuscripts that they don’t need to bother with those that are not professionally presented. Therefore, not taking the time to learn how to format a book manuscript properly because you are trying to get it out the door faster is self-defeating.

Again, it really is that simple. Fortunately, all any aspiring writer has to do to learn how to format a manuscript properly is take a swift peek at the aptly-named HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT category on the archive list on the bottom right-hand side of this page.

Given how much blog space I routinely devote to proper formatting, I was genuinely surprised at how few entrants had evidently checked their formatting against the literally hundreds of practical examples I have posted on this very blog in recent years. Short of coming to your respective houses and formatting your work for you, I don’t see how I could possibly have made it easier for entrants to this contest — or submitters to agencies, for that matter — to get the formatting right.

I just mention. While I’m typing one-handed. Don’t make me pull out any more guilt-inducement than that.

Oh, and something else almost everybody who entered did: titled the entry document along the lines of Anne Mini contest, Author! Author! contest, first page contest…in short, in a manner that, while convenient for finding it again on THEIR hard drives, required my renaming virtually every entry before I could save it to mine. Because, honestly, when confronted with 43 (seriously) entries called ANNE MINI CONTEST, how else was I supposed to tell them apart?

Aspiring writers do this all the time in electronic submissions and contest entries. Strategically, it’s a bad idea to inconvenience Millicent, even a little.

How should a request for an attachment be titled, you ask? Either with the writer’s last name (Smithentry.doc would have worked beautifully on my end; SmithCatIIentry.doc would have been even better) or — and this was the most popular choice in the contest — with the title of the piece. (TheWayWeWere.doc would be hard to mix up with VenusVampires.doc, after all.)

So much for the multi-part lecture. On to the announcement of the winners. First, the grand prizes.

The 2010 Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence and Grand Prizes in the Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest go to:

Adult Fiction: Jennifer Sinclair Johnson, DIVIDED STATES

Young Adult Fiction: Juniper Ekman, TROUBLE COMES

Actually could fit in either adult fiction or YA, but the judges agreed they would have awarded it a grand prize in either: Cole Casperson, INDOMITVS

Memoir (not an official category, but we received a lot of great entries): Jennifer Lyng, NORMAL IS WHAT YOU KNOW

But wait — there’s more! Judging the finalist round was quite tough. Because we received such a lot of exciting, well-written entries, the judges and I talked it over, and we decided that it might be a lovely idea for me to post and discuss the first, second, and third-prize entries as well. (Not that I’ll be doing it immediately, mind you; prize fulfillment will take place when my hands are once again up to full blogging strength.)

So, bearing that prize upgrade in mind, let’s also hear it for the entries that placed:

The Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better, Category I: Young Adult

First Prize, YA: Natalie Hatch, BREEDER

Second Prize, YA: Suzi McGowen, A TROLL WIFE’S TALE, and Sherry Soule, DARK ANGEL

Third Prize, YA: Janine A. Southard, WHICH STAR MY DESTINATION

The Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better, Category II: Adult Fiction

First Prize, Adult Fiction: Curtis Moser, PERDITION, and Jens Porup, THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR

Second Prize, Adult Fiction: David A. McChesney, SAILING DANGEROUS WATERS, and Ellen Bradford, PITH AND VINEGAR

Third Prize, Adult Fiction: David Jón Fuller, BARK AT THE MOON; Linda C. McCabe, THE LEGEND OF THE WARRIOR MAID AND THE SARACEN KNIGHT, and Carolin Walz, GOTHIC WARS.

Hey, I wasn’t kidding about a plethora of great entries! Congratulations to all of the winners — watch this space to hear more from them.

And, as always, keep up the good work!

Before I launch into today’s celebratory post, I want to alert those of you interested in the future of storytelling and/or fantasy to an event that promises to be fascinating: The Mongoliad is set to make its first public appearance tomorrow (Tuesday, May 25) from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the SF AppShow. So should any of you happen to be in the general vicinity of San Francisco — or, even better, the specific vicinity of the 111 Minna Gallery, located at, you guessed it, 111 Minna St., San Francisco, CA, I would highly encourage you to check it out.

Why make the trek, you ask with bated breath? Because, I suspect, the Mongoliad project will not only test the boundaries of traditional publishing — it’s a fascinating experiment in renegotiating the relationship between storyteller and reader. It’s “a sort of serialized story,” according to its creators, that “will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.”

Even more exciting, the slate of initial authors behind it is top-notch. The premise is the brainchild of Neal Stephenson, author of The Baroque Cycle, but the writing represents a collaboration amongst a veritable Who’s Who of creative talent: Hugo and Nebula award-winning Greg Bear (Quantico, City at the Edge of Time,Anvil of Stars ), Mark Teppo (Heartland, Lightbreaker), and the ever-fabulous Nicole Galland (The Fool’s Tale, Revenge of the Rose, Crossed). Down the line, though, readers will be involved in the creation of new installments of the serial.

Have the possibilities begun roiling in your mind yet? To keep up the simmer, here’s the official blurb:

The Mongoliad is a rip-roaring adventure tale set 1241, a pivotal year in history, when Europe thought that the Mongol Horde was about to completely destroy their world. The Mongoliad is also the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity.

Our story begins with a serial novel of sorts, which we will release over the course of about a year. Neal Stephenson created the world in which The Mongoliad is set, and presides benevolently over it. Our first set of stories is being written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other authors; we’re also working closely with artists, fight choreographers & other martial artists, programmers, film-makers, game designers, and a bunch of other folks to produce an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can’t be done in any single medium.

Very shortly, once The Mongoliad has developed some mass and momentum, we will be asking fans to join us in creating the rest of the world and telling new stories in it. That’s where the real experiment part comes in. We are building some pretty cool tech to make that easy and fun, and we hope lots of you will use it.

People will be able to get The Mongoliad over the web and via custom clients for mobile devices – we’re going to start out with iPad, iPhone, Android, and Kindle apps, and will probably do more in the not too distant future.

Stay tuned. Fun stuff coming!

Okay, so the italics were my addition; I didn’t want any of you fabulous fantasy writers out there to miss just how magnificent a creative opportunity this may end up being. Even if you can’t make it to the unveiling tomorrow (for which tickets may be reserved here, you might want to consider signing up for updates via the Mongoliad’s Facebook page.

As if that were not more than enough excitement for one Monday, campers, I noticed something over the weekend: today marks my 1,200th blog post. Hooray!

That’s a whole heck of a lot of gratuitous advice-giving in just under five years, is it not? And that’s not even counting the literally thousands of questions answered in the comments. I tremble to think how many pages it would all add up to in standard format; at first glance, I would venture to say that if I printed it all out, I could insulate my attic with it. Possibly a few neighbors’ attics as well.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I have come up with two presents: one for you, one for me.

First, you know how the deadline for the Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest are supposed to be time-stamped by midnight in your time zone tonight? Well, in celebration, I’m extending the deadline by another week.

That’s right: entries are now due by midnight (your time) on May 31, 2010.

For the benefit of those of you whose hearts did not just leap with gladness: this is a contest genuinely worth entering — and even more worth winning. It’s what you might call a practical prize: Phoebe Kitanidis, author of the newly-released WHISPER, and I will critique the lucky winners’ first pages here in this very forum in June.

Your actual first pages, mind you — this is most emphatically not one of those literary contest that expects writers to jump through a few dozen time-consuming extra hoops. Entering honestly couldn’t be simpler:

1. Polish the first page of your manuscript to a high gloss and save it as a Word document.

2. Make sure that page is properly formatted.
If you don’t know what standard format is, or indeed that a professional standard exists, please see the HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT category in the archive list at right.

3. On a separate page of the Word document, write a BRIEF (<50 words) explanation of how this manuscript will add something new and exciting to its book category.

4. On the same page, include your contact information.

5. Make sure to mention which category you are entering.
The two possibilities Category I (YA) or Category II (Adult Fiction and Memoir).

6. To be on the safe side, re-read the complete rules, to make sure you’ve included all necessary information.
Oh, you expected me to dedicate another half-page of post to explaining each of the rules at length? My extensive earlier explanation will have to suffice, I’m afraid.

7. Attach the Word document you’ve created to an e-mail and send it to contest@annemini(dot)com by midnight on May 24, 2010 May 31, 2010.

I’m looking forward to reading many, many of your first pages — not only to select winners, but also to glean inspiration for future blog posts on craft and formatting. (Was that a sufficiently broad hint to those of you hesitating to enter because you don’t consider your openings sufficiently polished. I’m here to help, you know, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting writing dilemmas.)

So much for my first gift du jour. The second is that I’m going to sign off early today, to rest my back.

You didn’t think my chiropractor was overjoyed about my having leapt back into my grueling posting schedule already, did you? Good luck polishing those entries, everybody — and, as always, keep up the good work!

I’m taking a break in the midst of our ongoing series on juggling multiple protagonists to announce some joyful news about a long-time Friend of Author! Author! blog: FAAB Phoebe Kitanidis’ first YA novel, WHISPER came out from HarperCollins this week! WHISPER is now available in bookstores, Amazon US, Amazon Canada, and Amazon UK, as well as directly from the publisher. For those of you who prefer to purchase from independent booksellers, here’s WHISPER’s Powell’s page.

Congratulations, Phoebe! To get a sense of why I’m so very excited about this urban fantasy YA novel, take a peek at the browsable version at HarperTeen.

Phoebe’s precisely the kind of hard-working career writer I love to see break the fearsome first novel barrier, one who has taken the time not only to hone her craft, but also gives back to the writing community. In addition to being my cohort in the late lamented Pitch Practicing Palace — a free forum in which aspiring writers could try out their conference pitches on already-agented writers in a safe environment and receive constructive feedback — Phoebe’s recent posts on her blog, subplot, make some pretty fascinating reading for anyone who ever contemplates having a novel of her own coming out.

I wish more authors did this — how are aspiring writers supposed to learn how the publication process works unless authors are generous enough to give a peek behind the glamorous curtain? In a publishing environment where first-time authors are increasingly expected to be the primary promoters of their own books, that’s vital information. I really, really appreciate the rare authors like Phoebe who are willing to share their experiences.

WHISPER is also a testament to the value of a writer’s getting to know her target audience extremely well: Phoebe knows her ‘tweens, and it shows in her tangibly realistic prose. A contributor for six years to Discovery Girls Magazine, she is also the author of Fab Girls’ Guide to Friendship Hardship.

But enough about her past achievements — I’m here today to celebrate her latest. Let’s take a gander at the publisher’s blurb:

I’d love a cup of coffee. . . I wish she didn’t hide how pretty she is. . . I hope she didn’t find out what Ben said about her. . . I wish I knew how many calories were in a bite of muffin. . .

Joy is used to Hearing Whispers. She’s used to walking down the street and instantly knowing people’s deepest, darkest desires. She uses this talent for good—to make people happy and give them what they want. But for her older sister, Jessica, the family gift is a curse, and she uses it to make people’s lives—especially Joy’s—miserable. Still, when Joy Hears Jessica Whisper I want to kill my Hearing dead, and kill me too if that’s what it takes, she knows she has to save her sister, even if it means deserting her friends, stealing a car, and running away with a boy she barely knows—a boy who may have a dark secret of his own.

This is a fair summary of the premise, but frankly, I think it doesn’t really capture the fresh charm of WHISPER’s narrative voice. Remember my last post, when we were talking about how sometimes, describing the plot doesn’t necessarily convey the essence of the book? Especially in a well-drawn character-driven novel like this one, it’s the protagonist that really charms the reader.

“Whisper is a story about communication,” Phoebe says, “especially within families–and yes, there’s some adventure in the last 1/3, but mostly it’s a character story.”

I have to say I agree — and I think those authorial choices serve the story well. But you needn’t take my word for it; take a gander at this enviable sheaf of reviews:

“Whisper was an edge of the seat, nail-biter of a read.”
– The Book Scout

“Whisper is an outstanding debut novel that I did not want to put down…This is an engaging and engrossing read that leaves the reader continuously guessing at what is going to happen next. The paranormal aspect blends flawlessly with the normal, everyday life making me wonder if it is possible for there to be families out there like Joy’s. The family interactions are part of what makes this novel so fabulous. It is realistic and heartwarming to read about these girls having to overcome so much just to be kinda like everyone else.
– The Neverending Bookshelf

“Whisper was an addicting and fast paced debut novel chronicling one girl’s journey through a superhero type ability- hearing people’s wants and desires, otherwise known as whispers…a book that I’m sure will be flying of the shelves come its April release, and a read I highly suggest to fans of the paranormal genre, because, let me tell you, Ms. Kitanidis is a great new voice in the that genre!”
– Lauren’s Crammed Bookshelf

In short, I’m pretty thrilled to be recommending this book to all and sundry — and sending copies of it to many creative-minded girls of my acquaintance. (Oh, you’re surprised to hear that I’m a one-woman literature-pushing machine?)

But I promised you a contest, didn’t I? And a fabulous one at that.

The Author! Author!/WHISPER Great First Page Made Even Better Contest
Ever long to have a pro peruse the first page of your manuscript and give you feedback for free? Now’s your chance — enter your first page and win a full professional critique on a future Author! Author! blog.

That’s right: you’ve been begging for this for a long time, readers, and now a lucky few of you are going to get it.

It’s an especially great opportunity for YA writers: Phoebe Kitanidis, author of WHISPER, will critique winners’ first pages — either identified by name or anonymously, as you prefer — on this very forum. (Being me, I shall probably chime in, too.)

That’s not to say that those of you who write fiction for adults or memoir should feel left out, however. In Category II, I shall be critiquing winners’ novel or memoir first pages in a future blog. Knowing me, those critiques are likely to be quite specific.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you potential entrants asking, “what happens if you receive an entry that does not need any critique at all? What if mine, for instance, is completely marvelous?”

That fortuitous entry will receive the most coveted prize of all: the Author! Author! Award for Expressive Excellence: Great First Page. There is no finer query letter candy, is there?

Jumping up and down from excitement yet? I hope so. Here are the rules:

1. Polish the first page of your manuscript to a high gloss and save it as a Word document.
Submissions should consist of the actual first page of a manuscript as you would submit it to an agent or editor, not simply a page’s worth of writing. The judges want to see the opening of your book in precisely the same format as Millicent the agency screener is likely to read it. That way, our feedback can be useful for future submissions.

Only a single page will be accepted. Even if your first page ends mid-sentence, please do not include additional text. However, if you have been vacillating between two different openings, please feel free to enter each as separate entries.

No more than two entries per entrant, please, and previously published material. Contest winners will benefit most by submitting recently-written work.

2. Make sure that page is properly formatted.
All entries must be in standard manuscript format. (If you don’t know what standard format is, or indeed that a professional standard exists, please see the HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT category in the archive list at right.)

Please format your entry page precisely as you would the first page of a submission to an agency or publishing house, including slug line, skipped lines at the top of the page, and any necessary chapter designation. For an example of what a properly-formatted first page should look like, please see this post from my most recent series on standard format.

3. On a separate page of the Word document, write a BRIEF (<50 words) explanation of how this manuscript will add something new and exciting to its book category.
In other words, what is fresh about your book? (Hint: this question will be significantly easier to answer if you mention what your book category of choice is.)

4. On the same page, include your contact information.
Name, address, and e-mail address will suffice.

5. Make sure to mention which category you are entering.
The two possibilities Category I (YA) or Category II (Adult Fiction and Memoir).

Entrants may enter more than one category, but please, do not enter the same page as both YA and Adult Fiction. Please submit each entry in a separate e-mail.

6. Attach the Word document you’ve created to an e-mail and send it to anneminicontest@gmail(dot)com by May 24, 2010 May 31, 2010.
Yes, I did just give you an extension out of the goodness of my heart — happy spring!

Please include FIRST PAGE ENTRY in the subject line, and mention the category you’re entering in the body of the e-mail. Contest entries must be date-stamped by midnight in your time zone. No exceptions.

That’s not too complicated, is it? Phoebe and I are really looking forward to seeing your first pages, and may the best openers win!

And as always, keep up the good work!

Welcome back, campers –

Take it away, Sophia!

A single tear trickled down the sad and crumpled face, carving a path in the layer of grime and dust. Matt, a boy of thirteen, bit back his sob while wiping the tear angrily away. Men did not cry.

He panted heavily as he continued to shovel away furiously at the hard packed earth. The hole he was standing in was already three or four feet deep. He wouldn’t have to dig much longer.

At his side lay a cheap wooden box made crudely out of plywood. Wood was scarce now, but Matt felt that Leal deserved whatever luxury he could procure. Here, in his barren and dirty backyard, with darkness falling fast, Matt could hardly see the coffin anymore, but he couldn’t keep himself from picturing his beautiful Labrador retriever, old and worn, in that cold coffin.
It was not like his day could get much worse, Matt decided gruffly. His English paper had been returned to him with an F for “inappropriate content” although all it had really said was that the rights of the students were being utterly repressed at his school. That paper, averaged to the rest of his rebellious collection, averaged his grade out to a D. His father would not be happy when he heard about this.

Matt’s eyes were brimming with unshed tears of anger and grief. He thrust the shovel into the dirt aggressively, determined to forget his troubles. The shovel, driven into the ground with force, clunked against something.

Angrier still for this complication, Matt began to dig around what he knew must be a rock. His anger dissolved when he realized he could use the stone as a grave marker for Leal. If nobody knew, he might even be able to write something on it.
Excited, Matt eagerly dug the stone out and lifted it out of the hole. Only then did he notice, catching his first real glimpse of it in the dying light, that it was not a rock at all but a small metal box. Matt felt a sting of disappointment, but he was determined not to let it ruin his friend’s funeral.

After he had lowered the coffin into the deep hole, Matt filled the grave with a feeling of dread. Each shovelful of dirt flung onto that wooden box was shutting Leal out from the world of life and light with a finality that was hard to avoid. Not even the handful of daisies that Matt placed reverently on the fresh earth could ease the sense that he was abandoning his friend.

Dragging his feet, Matt returned to his one story house which he shared with his dad. With the shovel slung over his shoulder and the strange metal box tucked under his arm, Matt began to wonder for the first time what the box might contain. It would be easy enough to open, for it had only a simple latch to keep it closed. A curious box indeed.

After he had taken a shower, Matt lay under the sheets of his bed with the box, cleaned under the heavy jet of the shower, in front of him. It almost seemed to be looking back at him out of two flower-like eyes that blended in with the decorative carvings in the box. Turning it over, he saw a tiny set of letters in the far right corner.

Made in China ©2008

2008? Matt stared at the box in amazement. That was over two hundred years old! He wondered eagerly what it could contain, then bit his lip in hesitation, his hand already on the lid. He was supposed to be in mourning, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself, did it? Tentatively, he lifted open the lid.

An old pen (who used those things nowadays, anyway?), a marble figurine of a dog, a faded picture (it wasn’t digital!), and a small stack of papers met his eyes. Taped on the inside of the lid was a piece of paper that declared it to be “Lauren’s Time Capsule, 2008.”

Well, that wasn’t very exciting, Matt thought as he flipped gloomily through the paper stack. There was an article on the government, clearly cut out from a newspaper, and a paper written by Lauren apparently on… censorship? Matt was momentarily baffled, but then he saw the neatly scribbled note from the teacher, congratulating her on her improvement and giving her an A minus for the overall paper. She must have been proud of the work, Matt decided.

Carefully separating the paper from the article and tossing the paper clip aside, he began to read.

The Constitution of the United States of America [he read] includes the right to freedom of speech, press, assembly, and expression in the Bill of Rights. Throughout history, cases such as Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 and New York Times v. US in 1971 expanded these rights, but many of the privileges expressed in the first amendment do not apply to underage student. An attempt to expand the rights of students was made in 1969 in the case of Tinker v. Des Moines, but it has done little to curtail the power of schools and adults to restrict the freedom of speech for students. The cases of Bethel and Hazelwood, for instance, allowed administrators to censor student speeches containing sexual language and student newspapers that contained “sensitive” material. Children and young adults who are still in the developing stages of their life are, in the Court’s opinion, often in a separate category than adults when freedom of speech and press is concerned.

Underage students do not yet have the right to vote and can therefore not vote for a new law to be passed to help their cause. For young people to therefore change policy, they must rely on presenting a case to the court and having a particular law or restriction overturned. However, most students do not have the financial means or commitment (as some cases take years to go through the court system) to challenge every unreasonable restriction placed on them, resulting in censorship on essays, school magazines or newspapers, and general self-expression. Students must conform their essays in a way that dulls the sharp edge of individuality. They thus must fall into the conventional pattern the school establishes for them so that thoughts expressed in their works are not theirs at all but the school’s. How can the public, parents or otherwise, understand what these young people truly think if, upon picking up a school newspaper or listening to a student speech, they learn only what the administration, the “editors,” think?

Schools are not the only problem point in our society for young, underage adults. Contests and blogs also often have restrictions on what young people can and can’t write. The requirement of no vile language, for example, hampers the author who thinks a character must swear for effect. Even if the author were to swear incessantly and use the crudest language, it should be their choice to write this and those who are opposed to the style of writing should simply not read it. However, this brings up the point of necessary censorship, rules, and restrictions. How will a person know what contains excessive inappropriate language? It would not be unreasonable to have an author’s note of warning in these cases. Rules can again be helpful and even desirable in formatting unless, as is it may be in a poem, individual formatting is necessary to express the mood of the poem. Otherwise, unitary formatting makes it easy for judges, fellow writers and readers, as well as potential publishers to read.

The most gruesome and erroneous type of censorship [Matt noticed a smiley face from the teacher here because of the interesting word choice] is the subtle censorship that society imposes on young a blossoming writers. Society is an expectant tiger waiting to pounce on those who stray from the path of conformity. In Dead Poets Society, for example, a group of boys who show a spark of individualism are berated by not only the school administrators but also by fellow students and parents. The mob-like mentality of people infuses them with a desire to please society. For young authors, this means writing about what friends think are “cool” topics and perhaps even developing a style that is pleasing to peers. The mind becomes restricted by invisible barriers and the desire to live up to one’s own expectations as well as society’s.

Whether it’s in the rules established by schools and other institutions or the yearning to fit into society, young writers often show the world a different side of who they really are, a fabrication of sorts. Fused together by the ideas of others and restrictions in our society, this fabrication can never convey to the public what the young populace think, feel, or want.

Matt put the paper down with a sigh. He had always thought the future he lived in was a better place, more advanced with its hover cars and reusable fuel cells, but it appeared that when one really examined the facts, censorship and restrictions on the freedom of writing for teenagers had always existed in one form or another. And with a society as protective and majoritarian as America’s was, he suspected it always would.

Sophia Gorgens was born in Washington D.C to German diplomats Lutz and Ulrike Gorgens. Along with her family, including two brothers and an older sister, she moved to Bonn, Germany; Boston, Massachusetts; Ankara, Turkey; and Atlanta, Georgia, where she currently resides. Sophia has acquired a love for traveling and has visited over twenty countries and most of the United States. She is currently attending Woodward Academy high school as a rising junior. She enjoys reading, writing, skiing, participating in marching band, and spending time with her Bernese Mountain dog and cat. She has started bee-keeping and quilts in her remaining free time. She is currently working on two novels, Dagger: A Horse’s Tale and Rebel Angels.

Hello again, campers –

What does he do with the rest of his time, you ask? Read on…

For the past five years I’ve spent three mornings a week cleaning tennis courts at a private athletic facility. Tennis balls are covered in pale green fuzzy stuff that flies into the nether at a glance. Striking one of these lime colored orbs with a racquet, or letting it to bounce off the sandpaper-like surface of the court causes wholesale shedding. The fuzz doesn’t drift away and disappear, but settles on the court’s surface. Depending upon air currents, it also collects in various corners and turns into phosphorescent green dust bunnies.

Pushing a heavy court sweeper for two or three miles before most people are awake requires a certain amount of physical stamina, but demands on my intellect are minimal. I use a battery-powered sweeper-vacuum machine to rid the playing surfaces of the accumulated fuzz. The chore is somewhat akin to mowing a lawn as it involves walking around in circles while ensuring I don’t miss a spot and clean another one seventeen times.

Because I work early, my lunch break occurs at a time when most “normal” people first leave home for the day. I’m not usually hungry but enjoy the relaxation a break affords me. I kick my shoes off, drink a cup of coffee and read. After finishing nearly all of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, for once following the order of Hornblower’s career, I felt compelled to re-work a story I had originally written in high school.

The hour and a half it takes to clean the tennis courts lets me turn loose a large portion of my imagination and come up with characters, plots, and scenes for the story. I’m not always satisfied with what I arrive at, but I’ll be back at the same task in a day or two and can revisit and revise to my heart’s delight. The biggest difficulty is remembering my thoughts until I have a chance write them down. Even if I don’t remember things word for word, I usually retain the basic idea. These times also allow me to mentally compose query letters, conceive face to face pitches, and consolidate all I am learning about being a writer.

Having a unique story I want told in a singular way, I must conform my personal creativity to several sets of rules. If I disregard the basic rules of writing, how easy will others find it to read my work? Do I spell as I see fit, or punctuate as I desire, it makes it more difficult for the reader to comprehend my intended thoughts. The basic rules of writing establish common ground between readers and writers, enabling them to “speak the same language.” The more difficult it is to read a particular work, the more likely a reader will become frustrated and set it aside. I do not want anyone to quit reading what I have penned, until, of course they have reached “the end.” If I want people to read my work, I must also adhere to the rules of publishing. I need to understand the conventions of the book-selling world.

Within these guidelines, I do have choices. In making my selections, I effectively establish a third rather fluid set of rules. These can apply to a single work or to everything I write. I might change them within a particular work if doing so better tells the story. All the while I must ensure my personal rules don’t run afoul of pre-established conventions, nor befuddle any readers.

Long fascinated with the sailing navies of two centuries ago and a devoted reader of C. S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian, and others, I write Naval Adventure. The story that has become or is becoming the Stone Island Sea Stories has bounced around in my cranium for decades. Over the years a fantasy angle has manifested itself, largely because of certain self-imposed conditions. In the original story the island was small; a mere pinprick on the map, so it was easy to pass off as being undiscovered. But as ideas for future stories grew, so did the island. It got big enough that I couldn’t justify or explain its existence in this world.

Realizing that Stone Island exists in an alternate and somewhat parallel world also allows me the freedom to tinker extensively with history than if my imagination had remained in this world alone. Other writers sometimes alter history to fit their stories or have characters perform historically significant acts attributed to real individuals, but I dislike doing so. I prefer that events and characters in my stories contribute an additional dimension to what really happened.

While the fantasy angle creates a unique story situation, it also causes problems with marketing. If I pitch the first book as “Fantasy, cleverly disguised as Naval Adventure,” the intrigued agent scans the first fifty pages and asks, “Where’s the Fantasy? I had to read the synopsis to find it.” If I promote it as Naval Adventure or Mainstream Fiction, I am told that the Fantasy aspect might be a turn-off for those who buy what they think is a traditional nautical novel. I have pitched and queried Beyond the Ocean’s Edge extensively over the past few years and admit a certain amount of frustration with the process. I get an ego boost when a professional reader praises my writing, but I feel equally depressed when in turn that reader indicates difficulties in placing my work in today’s marketplace.

I tell the Stone Island Sea Stories in a linear fashion, centering the tales on a single protagonist. I wrote the original in first person, not because I see it through his eyes, but because of a paradox I wanted to include in the original ending. Coming to know Edward Pierce better, I cannot picture him relating his adventures in detail, which he would theoretically be doing if I wrote in first person. Third person allows me a bit of flexibility with point-of-view; although I sometimes hear critical comments from those a dear friend calls “POV Nazis.” Rigidly maintaining a “close third person” point of view can be cumbersome when I want readers to see the situation from other perspectives.

While I write these stories for the adult market, I believe they will appeal to younger readers as well. I discovered Horatio Hornblower in my first year of high school. My daughter had read the entire series by the time she reached that same age. Yet I understand C. S. Forester meant these stories for adult readers. When Commodore Hornblower was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post it contained the first fictional account of adultery published in that magazine.

With the possibility of younger readers, I limit “adult” content and language in the Stone Island Sea Stories. I don’t feel it is needed and believe certain mature situations can successfully be implied, rather than described in throbbing detail. Having served for twenty-two years as a U. S. Navy Bluejacket, I personally have no problem with the use of “colorful” language, yet such words and phrases might not be appropriate for younger readers. (Would these readers object, or would it be those who monitor what younger people read?) Therefore, as I began the first book I determined that I would not use certain words and phrases.

However, about a third of the way into the second volume a situation arises where the protagonist’s most natural reaction would be to use one of those “forbidden” words. Feeling his use of this particular word would be appropriate, I altered my rules to let a very angry Pierce say, “At your earliest opportunity, do look as I have, at the very underside of the keel, amidships and aft. Then we both might know why this vessel did not so easily show her heels to those (expletive deleted) frigates!”

Having loosened my restrictions regarding this particular word, I might have peppered the remainder of Sailing Dangerous Waters with it. I may have gone back to earlier scenes or even the first book to include it or other “forbidden” words where they might seem essential to the story. I did not because I did not eliminate the rule. I merely gave myself a little leeway in enforcing it, and if truth be told, I use the particular word a time or two again near the end of the second book.

I’d like to believe that my choices in writing are mine, but I know many are based on what others expect. In setting forth the stories dwelling in my mind, I inadvertently combined two different genres. To be published by the traditional industry, do I need to pick one and confine myself to it? Do I maintain a level of artistic integrity and keep the stories as I envision them while seeking out alternative routes to publication? In like fashion, are my choices regarding person, tense, and viewpoint, the way I really see the stories, or are they an attempt to conform? Should there be sufficient objections to the decisions I have made, do I alter my style, or do I stand by it as it is written? Do I choose to avoid detailed descriptions of “adult” behavior and limit certain language because it is what I really want, or do I limit them to avoid possible controversy about my stories? Are my views as to what is acceptable really my own, or are they the result of what society as a whole has imposed upon me? These are questions that I do not have answers for. My lack of responses means I will always have something to think about as I clean pale green tennis ball droppings from the courts.

American writers do not face actual punishment for what they write, yet we are expected to follow certain guidelines. Those who step outside of these established boundaries find it more difficult to have their works published. In essence they are forced to write what the public supposedly demands the way the publishing industry wants.

Following a twenty-two-year US Navy career, D. Andrew McChesney continues a passionate interest in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century naval history. Long fascinated with USS Constitution, he was privileged to be aboard “Old Ironsides” for a turn-around cruise in Boston Harbor. A tour of HMS Victory in Portsmouth, England while serving aboard USS Forrestal provides further inspiration as he crafts a series of naval adventures having fantasy elements. Beyond the Ocean’s Edge and Sailing Dangerous Waters are complete. Work is underway on Darnahsian Pirates.

Dave inherited his parents’ love of reading and developed a strong imagination, spending his comparatively isolated early childhood on a homestead forty-one miles outside Fairbanks, Alaska. Creative and imaginative play kept him and his younger sister busy and entertained. Once in the “lower forty-eight” and exposed to television, series such as The Swamp Fox on Walt Disney Presents kindled an interest in history ranging from the American Revolution through the War of 1812. Interest in the later conflict developed when his grandfather gave him a drawing of Constitution made by a friend during the frigate’s visit to Puget Sound in the 1930s. Discovery of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower in high school solidified Dave’s interest in that era’s naval history.

He writes, edits, prints, and distributes the Rear Engine Review, the monthly newsletter of the Inland Northwest Corvair Club. Dave is currently President of Spokane Authors and Self Publishers (SASP), and also belongs to the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA).

He resides in Spokane, Washington with his wife Eva, daughter Jessica, a 1962 Corvair Rampside pickup known as “Tim,” and a 1965 Corvair Monza coupe identified as “Ralph.”

Hello, campers –

Take it away, Auburn!

Cecile Martine was fixed on two thoughts as she sucked in her final breath: Darn that person for walking on my clean floor and How could I have missed that huge dust bunny behind the toilet?

She’d always heard that one’s final moments are splendid with golden light and an instantaneous remembrance of every detail from the moment of one’s birth. Apparently, that was not so. Cecile was disappointed to be denied her life’s account. She’d always wanted to tick off those events and qualities that shaped her as a woman. A simple woman. One who could locate the tiny curl of pleasure that resides in the gleam of another woman’s silverware, one who noticed every errant speck of dust.

A cleaning woman.

She had once written an article that outlined how home had an influence which was stronger than death. It was a law to the heart, binding its occupants with a spell which neither time nor change could break; the darkest villainies which disgraced humanity could not neutralize it.

After one trembling attempt to publish that smartly-written article in the Monthly Home Manager’s Guide, Cecile disappointedly gave up writing. Holding up a rejection letter as proof of her ineptitude, she vowed from that moment on to concentrate on improving the only thing left — cleaning for others. She anointed herself a Home Management Professional, although the fancy title didn’t change the fact that someone didn’t love her writing, that someone didn’t think the title, “Home Doctoring for the Modern Age” would contain a compelling read.

Now, more than anything, Cecile wanted her final accounting. She wanted to know that, although she’d lived a hard life and that she’d failed to capture that one magazine editor’s imagination, she was nonetheless a glorious writer living a peasant’s life. It wasn’t fair that she turned out a simple cleaning woman, dying on a bathroom floor, with a dust bunny peering back at her from behind the toilet.

Somehow, though, a smile tilted the corners of her lips. She found the one glad and notable thing within that moment; a small, yet unnerving sound that wound into the dark whorls of her rapidly closing ears—the tiny squeak of rubber soles on a still-damp floor. With gleaming eyes, she saw a man’s dark silhouette retreating from the bathroom, leaving her to the beauty of knowing that, in the end, she’d not failed as a cleaning woman. Perhaps, yes, she’d failed as a writer. Certainly, she’d failed to perform the next thing on her list — polishing Mrs. Connor’s silverware to an everlasting glint.

Still, she’d not failed as a Home Doctor.

Alone now, Cecile crumpled to the floor. She lay on her right side, one hand under her cheek, the other across her thigh. Her fingers — splayed open like a fluttering opera fan — seemed the only indication of her physical agony. She felt as if she were falling, sinking, being crushed by a great weight. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Cecile thought. Any first rate housekeeper knows one never mixes bleach and ammonia in the same container. Even a beginner is aware of this obvious fact. My goodness, she’d even written that fact in her article — the one turned down by that editor. How ironic can this be? Killed by a warning that was never published.

Her breath was ragged now; not much left of it. She wanted to push herself high upon her elbows, to rise above that gaseous, noxious mixture that was draining the life from her. But the burning in her nose, her throat, her lungs, was more than she could bear. Her body reacted by flooding her lungs with moisture. She was drowning in her own fluids. Cecile opened and closed her eyes, wondering if the next time she opened them, they would find a different sight. A sight of loveliness. Something she could hold onto, something that would carry her through this concrete moment. But the blink of her eyes didn’t make the horror any different. There was no question that she was on a bathroom floor, chlorine gas rising from a plastic mop bucket, her life slowly and exquisitely leaving her body.

She hadn’t expected to die today, but she was ready. Lord knows life hadn’t been easy. What with her husband, Darrell, and all and his heavy-handed ways, her father’s recent passing, her mother so close to death as well. Certainly, Cecile knew the fragility of life more than anyone. She simply didn’t know that today was her day to be fragile.

Her elbows slid downward on the wet, sticky floor.

It was such a pity that today was the day to die, because with her mother’s impending death, Cecile would finally have been rewarded for all her years of hard work, endless days of sore knees and reddened hands; her lifetime of serving others. She would have enjoyed an inheritance that far surpassed anything she ever needed. She didn’t even mind sharing it with Darrell. Of course, that all meant nothing now as her last, wild inhalation was nothing more than a faint whisper.

All that was liquid within Cecile now issued forth. All on her clean floor. Except now she remembered, it wasn’t her clean floor. That stupid, stupid, stupid person who had mixed the bleach and ammonia together (because they didn’t read the warning in her unpublished work) was the same person who had carelessly mopped over the floor — over an unswept floor, no less. It was the same person who had carelessly missed that laughing dust bunny in the corner behind the toilet.

On the still-damp bathroom floor, Cecile seemed to alternate between pain and pleasure, pride and disenchantment. She felt as if she’d been tossed into a diminishing wintry night’s fire without enough fuel left to continue flying its red sparks skyward. Her body’s warmth was pulled into the cool of the room, beginning with her feet and hands, spreading slowly until the cold reached the core of her heart.

Oh, thank the heavenly stars, Cecile thought as her eyes turned blank and blood began to pool on the underside of her body. Yes, thank the heavenly stars she’d been a rejected writer. Who knows what would have happened had she sent out another query letter? Had she been published, she might never have turned to the womanly art of cleanliness. She never would have found honor as a Home Management Professional.

She never would have noticed that dust bunny floating in the breeze of her last breath.

Auburn McCanta is a Pacific Northwest girl gone south. After growing up literally surrounded by her mother’s prized Portland roses, McCanta now lives in Phoenix with her husband, one Golden Retriever and one impossible Labradoodle. She’s become accustomed to the Sonoran Desert with its occasional neighborhood coyote and scorpion rout.

After the 1994 removal of a sizeable brain tumor, McCanta found writing as a source of therapy. Her early work appeared in Cruising World, Hobie Hotline, California Cat, as well as the Sacramento Bee and Arizona Republic newspapers. Much to her amusement, McCanta’s first work of full-length fiction received a fourth place award from the National Writers Association. In 2007, her second novel was a Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary finalist. She was honored in 2008 with a third place award for poetry by PNWA.

Prior to last year’s presidential election, McCanta was selected from thousands of hopefuls by Huffington Post to serve as a Citizen Journalist. She continues to regularly write for HuffingtonPost.com. She also blogs at DancingBirds.com.

When not writing or undergoing yet another surgery, McCanta enjoys the tradition of her distant Irish heritage by eating potatoes.

Hello, campers –

Take it away, Gerard!

I’m black but I don’t wear it on my sleeve. With a post-racial president in the White House it’s not the chic thing to do anyway but inevitably when I write, query, do all of those decidedly non-author tasks like considering audience and marketing, I find myself at an all too familiar fork in the path — a choice between what I think is acceptable for a writer of my genus-blind talents and what the publishing and literary magnates are slobbering (or, more often, not slobbering for) from a writer like me. I make a choice between the branches because I have to, going with my gut. Not surprisingly, I write to match.

In addition to my race, I’m also the gambling sort who often mistakes his recklessness for confidence, but I feel neither reckless nor over-confident by claiming a fraternity among authors. Authorship is a solitary path but far from peculiar. If you’re reading this then surely at some point in your journey you’ve come to a similar fork in the path — you’ve made a choice. We all have. Maybe you recognized when it happened and maybe you didn’t, but the capital A Author you dreamed of being as a child and the adjective author you’ve become as an adult are two separate authors altogether. Be it romance, sci-fi, black, [fill in the blank with whatever your group is, italics please], or, for the special major among us with many affiliations, MFAs (multiple flouncing adjectives) — whatever the case may be we are a family so lost in the winding forest of specialization and genre and the subtle censorship it employs that our readers need prescriptive directions on how to find us. Conversely, despite all that flouncing, the adjectives make us that much easier to ignore.

The reasons for this I will leave for an anthropologist to explain (perhaps from the fossilized remains of another unheard traveler who has died along the way) but I recall a famous adage about authors striving to remove themselves from story. This guides my decision at the fork but presents a dilemma when art meets market and the gatekeeper at the conference is saying, “The writing’s beautiful, but [your group]… they don’t necessarily constitute a book-buying majority, do they?”, and I’m saying, stifling my anger because what I’ve written has implications beyond the group(s) I nominally represent, “How do you know that?”, and they’re replying, definitively, “BookScan, of course. Seventy percent of all hard cover book sales.”

When you’re faced with that kind of irredactable evidence of what the market will support how do forget about the MFA author that you’ve become? And how do I, when the black, male, married without children, thirty-one year old cheese grits lover that I am says so much about what I should be writing, and what I shouldn’t?

I am, of course, being facetious about BookScan and any other self-corroborating market analysis that willfully ignores the chicken-or-the-egg paradoxes their numbers represent. That’s a mouthful so allow me to translate: self-doubt’s a predator in these here woods, and if I spent my energy viewing the future from an outpost constructed from the past I would’ve succumbed to the nighttime caterwauls and weariness a long time ago. Instead I prefer to believe in a different future, a different world where possibility, even in publishing, is not restricted to those things that can be plotted on a moving average trend chart. I prefer to be as delusional in my belief as the gatekeepers are willfully ignorant and trusting in their data. I prefer, in short, to believe in truth that is stranger than fiction.

Just the same, though, as any unpublished author is told to do, I pay attention to national and regional bestsellers lists, and stay abreast of deal making through Publishers Marketplace. I read the bets that are being made by independent and major bookies alike; I recognize the regurgitation of theme and plot and an infatuation among many for old stories newly told. I’ve become aware through observation of something I never expected when I was learning to read with Dick and Jane — storytelling as the original green industry.

And I have my moments of weakness. Gatekeepers want comparables so they can link historical data and establish precedence, but book and author are inseparable entities. My novel can be similar to another but I have yet to find an author whose passion for cheese grits matches my own, and that difference (among others) invalidates the comparison, and possibly the sell. Not so in post-racial America, you say, but I’ve been told fiction is a subjective category, and in matters of subjectivity I have to wonder when and where the data parsing stops.

Which makes me linger occasionally at the fork in the road when most of the time the choice is unconscious. There’s a way to end this interminable wandering, a novel I could write. I see pieces of it through the undergrowth down the other path, the byproduct of scientific prognostication and market-savvy adjective art run amuck: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man…with fangs.

This high concept novel may be self-explanatory but allow me to translate anyway: are you telling me in this perilous market climate that some literary honcho wouldn’t clear his or her schedule to read about a teenage, 1930s vampire in an inter-racial relationship (meticulously researched, of course) whose need for blood is just as conflicting as his need for social justice? Is that your stance?

Wait. Before you answer, someone in the peanut gallery just keeled over from The Wiz revulsion. For those who don’t know, The Wiz revulsion is a gag response brought on by an acute sense of entertainment embarrassment that makes your unprocessed food want to get on down get on down the road…

But I’ve lingered at the fork too long. In truth, the shunned path is neither commonplace nor unremarkable and it’s a lazy man’s game classifying it as such — it’s a personal choice. Like everything else in these woods the difference between something familiar and something merely cliché is subjective. I, like every other traveler, must make that distinction and I’ve made it, following a creative process the US Banking system could’ve benefited from, booking my value as an artist on my ability to be original rather than derivative, an A Author rather than a MFA author. Oh that I have chosen wisely and there is a sigh in this for me somewhere ages hence. I don’t know that there is — I don’t know if there can be. I have a feeling, though, that if there is, I’ll rejigger the facts in hindsight à la BookScan and say my choice made all the difference.

According to family lore, F. Gerard Jefferson’s claim of “always wanting to be a writer” dates back to kindergarten when, after the first day, he came home upset because he still couldn’t read. He would follow a more traditional arc after this — writing for enjoyment in spiral notebooks, becoming yearbook editor his senior year in high school, fleeing the craft because of the sobering fiscal realities of becoming an artist — but the “I still can’t read!” episode is, by far, the most telling expression for the ambition that defines F. Gerard Jefferson’s life and, hopefully, his writing.

After a five-year hiatus in college mastering electromagnetism, thermodynamics, and other logical pursuits with guaranteed earning potential, F. Gerard Jefferson returned to language arts in 2002 to recover a missing part of his soul. In addition to winning an Author! Author! Expressive Excellence Award, he was also recently honorable mention in the Obama Millennium Awards competition in New Millennium Writings. He lives north of his native Georgia in Cleveland, Tennessee with his wife and is working on a soft science fiction novelization of “The Road Not Taken.”

Well, it’s been a long, hard road, everybody, but we’ve finally made it: this is my 1000th post. That’s almost four years of nearly non-stop yammering on topics both dear to writerly hearts and frustrating to writerly brains, a veritable cornucopia of advice on how to write a book, format it as the pros expect, approach an agent in writing or in person, work with an agent once you’ve signed with her, work with an editor once you’ve signed with him, promote your published book, and generally lead a happy existence as an author at every stage of success.

Boy, are my fingers tired.

As some of you may recall, my blogging life did not start out with such lofty goals. When I first began blogging, as the Organization That Shall Remain Nameless’ Resident Writer, I had thought this would be a weekly gig that went on for a year, at most. In fact, I’d originally been solicited to fill the position for only a couple of months, as my volunteer contribution to North America’s largest writers’ association. I thought it would be a great place to reach some good writers just learning the ropes.

And how.

Before my year there was out (for those who are interested, you may find those posts in the archives here), I was fielding questions from writers all over the world. It turned out that a whole lot of writers were curious about practicalities.

I can’t really claim that as a blogging success, because, truth be told, the space on the OTSRN’s site is not now and has never been an actual blog: technically, it was (and is) an online column.

What’s the difference, you ask? Well, instead readers being able to post comments, questions, and outright challenges directly as they may here at Author! Author! — part of the fundamental definition of a blog, right? — they had to e-mail their comments to me. Although I, all three volunteer webmasters who maintained the site, and quite a few readers protested that this limited give-and-take was not a true blog, the OTSRN overruled us all. A column it was, and a column it remains to this day. (Although the last time I checked, there had not been a fresh post since May, 2007.)

Why did all of us object? If I so chose, I could post reader input on the site. Or I could not. Essentially, I held the power to create the illusion that nobody ever disagreed with so much as a syllable I’d ever written there.

Ah, the power! The pageantry! The insufficiency as a learning tool!

And how fundamentally undemocratic. I don’t ask that my readers take every syllable that falls off my fingertips as revealed Gospel — in fact, I discourage it. While there are certain undeniable rules about constructing a manuscript or approaching an agent (conveniently grouped by category on the archive list at the lower right-hand side of this page, for your reading pleasure), I don’t want aspiring writers to do things my way just because I say so; I want to give all of you enough explanation about, for instance, why writing tends to be better received if presented a certain way. so each of you may consider all of the arguments out there and decide for yourselves.

When I first started blogging, I didn’t understand that this was a radical concept.

Oh, but it was, if the reactions of the higher-ups at the OTSRN were any indication. I was told quite firmly that my posts were too long — a critique also proffered by my mother, incidentally — that I over-explained, that there were already many, many books and websites on the planet explaining the fundamentals. Why didn’t I just plug the most recent books published by members of the organization?

Not my style — or my mission. When I suggested, for example, that agents’ and editors’ blurbs in conference guides do not always contain all of the information that someone brand-new to the biz might need in order to select which one to approach, and endeavored to remedy that by researching all of the sales the fine folks scheduled to attend the OTSRN’s annual conference (a bouquet of posts that may be read under the AGENTS/EDITORS WHO USED TO ATTEND THE CTSRN — Conference That Shall Remain Nameless — category at right), you should have heard the uproar. Although everything I posted was already a matter of public record, the OTSRN’s board told me that it was insulting to agents for writers thinking about querying them to do any advance research at all.

Of course, they didn’t tell me this until a year after they’d summarily tossed me off their website.

The official reason my tenure as Resident Writer ended was because I refused to allow them to charge full conference fees to five already-agented volunteers scheduled to staff the late lamented Pitch Practicing Palace at the CTSRN, generous, stalwart souls willing to put in four 12-hour days helping those new to pitching refine what they were going to say to agents. Oh, the OSTRN allowed us to provide the service (on condition that we not use the restrooms or drink any of the coffee provided to conference attendees), but on the following Monday, I found my password to the OSTRN’s website blocked.

I wouldn’t have minded so much, except at least some of my readers who had attended the conference presumably had received requests to send materials to agents and editors. Call me zany, but I’m guessing that some of them might have been looking to their usual source of information at that stressful juncture.

All this is water under the proverbial bridge, of course, and I wouldn’t be bringing it up again except for one thing: in the summer of 2006, when I suddenly had to construct my own website (or, more accurately, throw myself on the mercy of two sympathetic computer geeks of my acquaintance, who had Author! Author! operational by the end of the week, bless their rapidly-typing fingers), I had not yet realized that there are two fundamental schools of thought amongst those who give advice to aspiring writers. Since so many of you have written in to ask why sources on the web — or in classes, or at conferences — don’t all give identical advice, familiarizing yourself with the underlying philosophies can help clarify the advice-taking process.

The first school, at which yours truly holds lifetime tenure, is devoted to the proposition that nobody, but nobody, is born knowing the ropes of the publishing industry, and that consequently, it is good and kind of those of us who’ve been swinging on them for a long while to show the talented newcomers where the toeholds are. Not only do we not believe that extending a helping hand to those lower on the ladder does not just add to our own competition — good authors breed more readers, right? — but we hold this truth to be self-evident: that the literary world, that literature itself, will always be better off welcoming new voices than turning its collective back on them.

So if any of you have been wondering why I’ve devoted so many of this spring’s posts to censorship, subtle and otherwise, you have your answer.

The second school of thought appears in many forms at all levels of the writers’ world, but may be summed up as this: the cream will inevitably rise to the top. That being the case, and since the vast majority of aspiring writers will never land an agent or see their work published, why bother to share the secret handshakes? Any TRULY talented writer will land an agent, right?

Although simple observation over the course of many annual writers’ conferences demonstrates this to be untrue — plenty of genuinely gifted writers spend years, even decades, searching for the agent who will get their work, or for the editor who will understand its market appeal — advocates of this school exhibit everything ranging from mild pity to outright hostility to those of us who try to help aspiring writers speed up the necessary learning curve by not making them guess, for instance, why Millicent the agency screener might react worse to an emdash than to two dashes with a space at either end in a submitted manuscript.

And you can’t really blame them, I suppose, since proponents of this school tend to believe that the best way to help writers in general is to promote the work of the already-established author. Because good authors breed more readers, right?

So if you’ve ever been at a writers’ conference and thought, “Gee, this session isn’t providing me with all that much concrete guidance in how to refine or market my manuscript — in fact, all that it’s really achieved is to allow the speaker to promote his own published books,” well, that’s probably not an accident.

It’s philosophy in action.

Why am I dredging all this up today, on the occasion of my 1000th blog post? Well, for several reasons — and I’ll cop to it: some of them are self-congratulatory.

First, in my humble opinion, the first 1000 posts of Author! Author! have proven magnificently that good writers everywhere are longing to learn the ropes — and that those ropes are genuinely hard to figure out, let alone climb, even for the most gifted of writers. A lot of the rules are counter-intuitive; there’s a ton of conflicting information out there. Hardly a week goes by without my hearing from a reader who says, “I had no idea what I was doing wrong.”

So to those who said that a nuts-and-bolts blog like this couldn’t possibly build and sustain a readership, I have only four words for you: nyah nyah nyah nyah.

Second — and brace yourself, because I’m going to be patting myself on the back in this one, too — aspiring writers who do put their shoulders to the proverbial wheel and take the time to learn the ropes do succeed. Author! Author!’s readers land agents; they get books published; they self-publish happily; they win and place in literary contests. Perhaps most importantly, they gain the knowledge they need to treat their talent with the respect it deserves, rather than guessing what Millicent wants to see.

Those are HUGE accomplishments for any writer — and as anyone who has played this game for a lifetime could tell you, surviving the writing life happily means celebrating not just the big achievements, the book launches and Pulitzer Prizes, but the smaller victories along the way. If this blog has played any small role in helping any good writer earn such a celebration, I think that’s cause for public rejoicing.

Or, to put it another way: nyah nyah nyah nyah, naysayers.

Third, I think that sharing not only knowledge and the fruits of experience, but our hopes and fears, helps build a writerly community beneficial to all. This is a hard road, especially now; the more we can cheer one another along the way, the better.

So my deep, heartfelt thanks to all of you who have contributed to making this little corner of the writers’ world such a warm and supportive place. And for asking all of those great questions.

Finally, when it comes right down to it, I don’t believe that book sales or even publication are the only — or the best — tests of a writer’s talent. Let’s face it, we’ve all read bestsellers and wondered, “How on earth did this make it into print?”; we’ve all been mystified by why this manuscript and not that one got picked up by an agent or publishing house. Even when the publishing industry was in relatively good shape — and it’s going to the gym like crazy now, trying to squeeze into a wedding dress four sizes too small — books by first-time authors never exceeded about 4% of the releases in North America in any given year.

Those are tough odds, irrespective of the talent involved. So as much respect as we all harbor for the printed word — and I’ve never met a writer worth her salt who didn’t practically worship it — those of us in the game for the long haul need to consider the possibility that courting the muse well means more than just getting a manuscript into print. Or perhaps something different.

Doesn’t it? I’m honestly asking.

I don’t have to ask whether there are marvelous writers out there whose work ought to be published; I’ve seen evidence with my very own eyes. You don’t have to take my word for it, either — I’m going to be devoting part of the week to come to sharing the winning entries in the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. (That’s what the explosive E above is for, by the way: excellence.)

But don’t worry — as much as I enjoy bringing you guest posts and award winners, Author! Author! is not going to mutate into merely a celebration of authors who are already, let’s face it, doing pretty well for themselves. Nor am I going to join the legions of vocal mourners for a publishing industry that’s regularly been pronounced dead at least once every fifteen years since the American Revolution.

That’s not my philosophy. I’m here to help talented newcomers learn the ropes.

Which means that this summer, you’re going to be seeing more of what I believe this blog does best. We’re going to be talking about craft — not just the basic truisms we’ve all had flung at us in writing classes, but discussions of the nuts and bolts that add up to style. We’re going to be talking about ways to squeeze more out of the scant writing hours you’ve fought so hard to carve out of your busy schedules — and yes, Virginia, that is going to include those tips on tracking down and winning fellowships to writing retreats that I’ve promised to share with you, but have been just too exhausted since I returned from my last (very productive) retreat to share. And we’re also going to be talking about, you guessed it, how to query and pitch your work to agents.

Yes, we’ve talked about it before in this forum; we’ve discussed these matters often. But as long as writers want to see their work in print, I’m not going to leave them guessing how to get past the gatekeepers of the printing press.

A zany, quixotic endeavor, as the board of the OTSRN sneered at me on my way out the door? Maybe. Will it make the world a better place for writers? I hope so.

You know what else will contribute toward that laudable goal? All of you continuing to pursue your dream of expressing yourself via the written word, engaging in what I feel is one of the highest pursuits of which the human mind is capable. Telling your story is what it’s ultimately all about, right, not just winning a game that we’re all aware is set up to place new players at a competitive disadvantage?

As Maya Angelou put it so well, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” Keep striving to tell those stories well, everyone — and, as always, keep up the good work!