Increasing your chances of winning that contest!

In my just-completed (and oddly non-consecutive) series on picking the right literary contest for you, I suggested a number questions you should ask before you invest the time in entering a contest. Entering every contest for which your work is remotely qualified is a surprisingly common practice amongst aspiring writers, and can cost the unwary entrant hundreds of dollars per year in entry fees alone, not to mention the significant expenditure of time, postage, and anxiety.

Like the costs of querying, it adds up. So paring back to only those contests that are most likely to serve you is definitely a smart move. Once you’ve picked your contest, though, it all comes down to the writing, right? The best writing invariably wins, doesn’t it?

Well, not always. As I mentioned in my last post, many contests are structured to disqualify as many entries as quickly as possible, to streamline the judging process. To narrow the field down to potential finalists, he first screeners in almost any contest are specifically looking for reasons to disqualify any given entry. But, to be fair, the majority of entries do rush to disqualify themselves within the first couple of pages. As both a veteran contest-enterer (and winner) and an experienced contest judge, I’m going to tell you how to avoid the most common pitfalls.

If you are going to enter contests, the first premise you need to accept is that it is an inherently nit-picky business – and it’s your job to make sure you have followed every nit-picky rule set out by the contest requirements. Impeccably, and to the letter.

No matter – how shall I put this delicately? – how miniscule, unprofessional, or even downright harmful to all the principles of good writing those requirements actually are in practice. Because if you do not, no matter how excellent your reasons, you don’t really stand a chance of winning.

Naturally, this means you should proofread your entry within an inch of its life: this is not a forum where good-enough is going to fly. Ever, unless you happen to be the final judge’s nephew or favorite bridge partner. Even the best conceivable writing is not going to stand a chance if it is not technically perfect. The competition is not amongst all entries, but amongst those who have first passed the technical bar.

Within the context of a contest, technical perfection is measured by two standards: adherence to what the individual judge reading your entry believes to be standard industry format for the genre (I shall discuss tomorrow where their notions often deviate from the actual règles du jeu), up to and including an absolute absence of typos, and WHAT THE CONTEST RULES HAVE ASKED ENTRANTS TO DO.

Of the two, the latter is far and away the most important. How important, you ask? Well, do you remember how the Catholic Church felt about folks who ate meat on Friday prior to Vatican II?

Pay attention now, because I’m only going to say this once: THE SINGLE BEST THING YOU CAN DO TO IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING OR PLACING IN A CONTEST IS TO FOLLOW THE STATED RULES TO THE LETTER. Even the ones that seem arbitrary, or even stupid, because (as I mentioned yesterday) the more senseless the requirement, the more likely it is to be used to disqualify entries.

This is just common sense, if you’re trying to maximize disqualifications: almost every writer who has ever taken a writing class or read a writers’ publication knows work should be double-spaced, for instance, but no one spontaneously places his first chapter and a synopsis in a bright blue folder, having first made the left-hand margin 1.5 inches to accommodate the brad, and makes sure that the name of the work, page number, and name of the contest is in the upper right margin in 10-point type.

That’s a real set of contest requirements, incidentally.

Such an array of demands is brilliant, from a weeding-out point of view: the first-round judges don’t even have to open a folder that is, say, purple or navy, nor do they have to take the time to read entries with 1-inch left margins.

Is that rumbling noise I’m hearing out there the sound of everyone who has ever entered a contest with such requirements leaping to his feet and crying, “Wait – you mean they might not have READ my entry? After they cashed my $50 check?”

It is very, very possible, alas. Obviously, it would be generous-hearted of contest organizers and judges everywhere to gloss over, say, the odd typo or the entrant who feels it artistically necessary to print some portion of the entry manuscript single-spaced, if the quality of writing is high. But think about it: if you have been handed fifty entries to read in your spare time (screeners and first-round judges are almost invariably volunteers), and you could toss aside twenty-eight of them after a page or two, wouldn’t you start disqualifying entries on technical grounds?

I’ll take your murmured “yes” as given.

Again, try to clear your mind of the notion that this is just a matter of personal nastiness in the readers. Most of the time, even the most liberal-minded contest judge will be REQUIRED to reduce the rating of an entry that violates even one of the basic rules as stated in the entry requirements.

Which means, in practical terms, that whether you read the rules carefully can mean the difference between making the finals and not, even if you are the most gifted writer since Sappho first put pen to parchment. Here are the most common rule violations:

1. Neglecting to add a slug line (the title of the work and page number, located in the top left-hand corner) on EVERY page – or adding a slug line to the first page if the contest rules forbid it.

2. Shrinking the typeface so that the submission fits within the stated page limits. (Oh, come on – you didn’t think they’d notice that your submission was shrunk to 91%, when it is surrounded by 150 other submissions printed in 12-point type?)

3. Not numbering the pages (VERY common)

4. Non-standard margins.

If you have ever even considered committing any of these sins in a contest entry, you can raise your chances of making it to the finalist round exponentially through one simple act: never make any of these mistakes again.

Go forth, my child, and never sin again.

These missteps are, of course, violations against the rules of standard format, too, so their perpetrators are probably not receiving too warm a reception at agencies and publishing houses, either. (Long-time readers, chant it with me now: the proper format for manuscripts is NOT identical to what one sees in published books!) So in enforcing these strictures, contest judges actually are, in their own twisted way, conforming to the standards of the industry. And trying to urge you, if with the subtlety of an anvil dropped upon a foot, to do the same.

Kinda sweet, isn’t it?

Tomorrow, I shall talk a bit about how contest entrants inadvertently violate the more esoteric rules. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Picking the right contest, part VII: choosing to jump through only the NON-flaming hoops

Welcome back to my resumption of the absorbing topic of literary contests. Next week, I shall be going into fine detail about technical tweaking you can give your entries that will make them more likely to end up in the finalist pile, but today, I want to finish up my series of questions you should ask yourself about a contest before you invest your time, money, and hope in entering.

In my last post, I discussed the pitfalls of contests that require entrants to devote extensive time to filling out entry forms, especially those that require information that should be positively irrelevant in a blind-judged contest. (Personal references? Huh?) You can also save yourself a lot of time if you avoid contests that make entrants jump through a lot of extraneous hoops in preparing a submission.

Some of these requirements have to be seen to be believed. Specific typefaces, if they differ from the ones required by standard manuscript format. Fancy paper (three-hole punched, anyone?). Bizarre margin requirements. Expensive binding. An unprintable entry form that must be sent away for with a SASE — presumably because the contest organizers have yet to hear of the internet — and need to be filled out by typewriter, rather than by hand. (Does anyone out there still OWN a typewriter?)

Each of these will eat up your time and money, without the end result’s being truly indicative of the quality of your work. Because, really, all conforming with such oddball requirements really shows is that an entrant can follow directions.

I’m sorry to shock anyone, but my notion of a literary contest is one where the entrant proves that she can WRITE, not that she can READ. But I suppose that could be my own absurd little prejudice.

I don’t enter contests anymore, of course — most agents frown upon their clients’ entering them, and really, pros skew the scoring curve. But when my clients ask me whether a particular contest is worthwhile for them to enter, my rule of thumb is that if they can pull together a contest entry with already-written material within a day’s worth of uninterrupted writing time, I consider it reasonable. I like this standard, because the more time you have to write, the more entry-ambitious it encourages you to be.

So if a contest requires time-consuming funky formatting, or printing on special contest forms, or wacko binding, you might not want to bother. To my contest-experienced eyes, such requests are not for your benefit, but the contest organizers’.

How do I know? Because — and hold onto your hats, everybody, because I am about to reveal a deep, dark secret of the contest trade here — the primary purpose of these elaborate requests for packaging is to make it as easy as possible to disqualify entries. As a matter of simple probability, the more that they ask entrants to do to package an entry, the more ways an entrant can get it wrong. By setting up stringent and easily-visible cosmetic requirements, the organizers maximize the number of entries they can simply toss aside, unread.

Yes, you read that right: it’s so they don’t have to read all of the entries in full. Interestingly enough, many of the organizers of contests that establish these demands are quite open about its being merely an exercise in rule-following — and that they do it in order to preserve that most precious of commodities in this industry, time.

Not that you’d have to be Einstein, Mme. de Staël, and Confucius rolled into one to figure it out. Think about it: if contest organizers really only were only seeking uniformity amongst the entries, they could easily just say, “We will only accept entries in standard manuscript format.” No fuss, no bother, and besides, all of their entrants who want to get published should be using standard format, anyway, right? (If you are not already aware of the requirements of standard format, do yourself a favor and check out the FORMATTING MANUSCRIPTS category at right. Manuscripts not conforming to standard format tend to be rejected unread in both contest situations and in agents’ offices.)

Instead, the organizers in this type of contest can merely assign some luckless intern or volunteer to go through the entries before the judges see page 1 of them, plucking out any that are in the wrong type of folder, printed on the wrong type of paper, don’t have the right funky margins… well, you get the idea. Voilà! The number of entries the judges have to read has magically decreased!

I find this practice annoying, frankly, and not being crystal-clear about the costs to the entrant of deviations from these non-literary requirements despicable. Over-adherence to nit-picky presentation issues provides the organization with the illusion of selectivity on bases that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. And that, my friends, is unfair to writers everywhere.

Which brings me to a specialized question aimed at those of you who are contest entries: how much of your writing time is being eaten up by contests these days? If you have been entering quite a few (and we’ve just finished a season of deadlines for contests and fellowship applications, and are about to enter another), would your time be better spent by passing on the next one?

Yes, a contest win or fellowship award looks great on your query letters, but it is possible to spend so much time on them that you are left with very little time to write. I once met a writer at an artists’ colony — we’d both won a competition to get in, one with a VERY involved application that I wouldn’t recommend anybody take the time to fill out — who spent literally three weeks of our month-long retreat there applying for other retreats, filling out grant applications, and entering contests. Apparently, this was her standard MO.

The result: a resume crammed to the brim with impressive contest wins and prestigious fellowships — and a grand total of two short stories and a few chapters of a novel completed in 9 years’ time. In her frantic quest to fund her writing habit, she had turned herself into a non-stop entering machine with no time or energy to write anything new.

There are so many literary contests out there that if you entered them all, you would never have a chance to get down to serious writing. Equally seriously, if you have a finished piece that you should be marketing to agents and/or small presses, it is very easy to tell yourself that entering contest after contest — at the expense of devoting that time to sending out queries — is a time- saver, in the long run. Unfortunately, that isn’t always true.

Yes, a win (or place, or finalist status) in a reputable contest can indeed speed up your agent-seeking process exponentially. I would be the last to deny that, as I met my agent as a direct result of winning the Nonfiction Book/Memoir category in the PNWA contest in 2004. It CAN lead to the fast track, and you should definitely enter a few for that very reason.

However — and this is a serious consideration — I meet a LOT of aspiring writers who turn to the contest route as a SUBSTITUTE for querying, and that can definitely slow the road to publication to a crawl. It’s understandable, of course — sending out query after query is discouraging, and in the current ultra-competitive writers’ market, it can sometimes take years to pique a good agent’s interest.

Not that it will take my readers years, of course. You’re one market-savvy bunch.

However tired of the querying grind you may be, PLEASE do not fall into the trap of using contests as a complete substitute. For one thing, the turn-around time for contest entries is significantly longer than the response time for even the least organized agencies: four to six months is common, and if you have a finished novel or NF book proposal in hand, that’s FAR too long to wait.

Also, if you hang all of your hopes on a contest win, even if you enter a plethora of contests, you are relying upon the quirky tastes of people you have never met to determine your fate.

Oh, yes, I know — that’s true when you send a query to an agent as well, but as I shall demonstrate next week, there are a great many reasons a submission might get knocked out of a contest competition that have little to do with the actual marketability — and sometimes not even the writing quality — of your work. To make it to the finalist round in a contest, you have to avoid every conceivable pet peeve that the initial screeners might have.

And, believe it or not, contest judges tend to have MORE pet peeves than agency screeners.

Mind-blowing, isn’t it? But true. With first readers at agencies (who are seldom the agents themselves, recall), you can at least rely upon certain basic rules. Standard format, for instance, is not a matter of individual whim, and you’re not going to have your submission tossed out on technical grounds if you follow it.

But in a contest, if you hit a volunteer first reader whose college English professor insisted that semicolons are ALWAYS an indicator of poor writing — yes, such curmudgeons do exist, and their erstwhile students abound — your work is likely to be knocked out of consideration the first time you use one. Ditto with the passive voice, or multiple points of view. You never can tell who is going to be a contest judge, so the outcome even for very good writing is far from predictable.

So please, keep sending out those queries while you are entering contests — and if you find that the time to prep contest entries are starting to be your excuse for not sending out more queries, stop and reevaluate whether you are making the best use of your time in your pursuit of publication.

If for no other reason that that I would really, really like to be able to gloat when your first book comes out. I ask for so little; humor me.

Happy weekend, everybody. Keep up the good work!

Picking the right contest, part VI: hanging with the disreputable

I’m shifting gears today, from the slow and steady pace appropriate to successful querying to the adrenaline-pumping deadline panics and nail-biting award-announcement waits endemic to contest entry. To ease the transition, today I am going to talk about the widely differing time commitments necessary to meet contest criteria.

It often comes as something of a shock to those new to entering contests just how time-consuming many of them are. Some allow you just to pop your work in the mail in pretty much the same form as you would use to send it to an agent; some require you to fill out extensive forms to accompany the work; some specify such stringent formatting requirements that you cannot use the work submitted to them for any other purpose.

Today, I’m going to give you some tips on navigating the waters of these requirements without eating too deeply into your hard-won writing and marketing time.

The time criterion (see earlier posts in this series for other criteria) is perhaps the most important factor to consider in evaluating a contest — other than whether your writing is ready to face competition, of course. Unlike the other criteria, which mostly focused upon the contest itself, this consideration is about you and your resources.

Parenthetically – because I am constitutionally incapable of not following an interesting line of thought when it comes up, apparently — isn’t it amazing, given how much uncompensated time we all invest into our art, just how often time has been coming up in this blog as the single most common decision-making determinant? You should sent out simultaneous queries because your time is too valuable to expend the extra years single-shot querying can take; agents don’t give rejection reasons because they don’t have the time to give substantive feedback to everyone (I like to call this the Did You Bring Enough Gum for the Whole Class? defense); your queries need to be pithy from the get-go because agency screeners only spend seconds upon each.

And now, as you’ve probably figured out, I’m about to advise you to look very carefully at the requirements of any contest you are considering entering and asking yourself – before you invest ANY time in prepping the entry – “Is this honestly going to be worth my time?”

Why do I keep harping on the importance of valuing your time, in the face of a publishing industry which, to put it very gently indeed, doesn’t?

Precisely because the industry doesn’t. While dealing with agents who take three months to respond to queries, and editors who take a year to pass judgment on a submission, if you don’t treat your time as a precious commodity, it’s all too easy to conclude that the industry is right: writers’ time is as vast as the sea, and as easily replenished as a tidal pool adjacent to a beach.

I don’t think so.

I measure time by the standards of a professional writer: every waking minute spent away from my current writing project, or from editing my clients’ writing projects, is expensive. More expensive, I think, than the equivalent minutes in the average agent’s or editor’s quotidian lives, because they are not typically creating new beauty and truth in every spare nanosecond they can steal. What writers do is important, not only to the writers themselves, but to humanity.

So there.

Since we writers control so little else along our paths to publication, I’m a great advocate of controlling what we can. Unfortunately, there are few contests out there, especially for longer works, that simply require entrants to print up an already-existing piece, slide it into an envelope, write a check for the entry fee, and slap a stamp upon it.

How few, you ask? Well, off the top of my head, thinking back over the last dozen years or so, I would estimate that the grand total would be roughly…none.

At minimum, any blind-judged contest is going to require that you prepare a special rendition of your manuscript devoid of your usual slug line – because your slug line, of course, includes your name. Translation: you can’t just photocopy or print your current MS and mail it to a contest. And anything beyond that is, alas, time-consuming.

Pretty much every contest requires the entrant to fill out an entry form – which can range from requests for ultra-simple contact information to outright demands that you answer actual essay questions. (Applications for fellowships and residencies virtually always include essay questions, FYI.) And yes, Virginia, misreading or skipping even one of these questions on the entry form generally results in disqualification.

I hate to be pedantic here, but it does need to be said: do be aware that every time you fill out one of these forms, you are giving tacit consent to being placed upon the sponsoring organization’s mailing list. As with any information you submit to people you do not know, be careful not to provide any data that is not already public knowledge. Every piece of information you share here is subject to resale to marketing firms, unless the contest sponsor states outright on the form that it will not do so.

Oh, come on — did you think those offers from Writers Digest and The Advocate just found their way into your mailbox magically?

How do you know if what is being asked of you is de trop? Well, a one- or at most two-page application form is ample for a literary contest; a three- or four-page application is fair for a fellowship or residency. Anything more than that, and you should start to wonder what they’re doing with all of this information.

A contest that gives out monetary awards will need your Social Security number eventually, for tax purposes (yes, contest winnings are taxable), for instance, but they really need this information only for the winners. I would balk about giving it up front.

I have seen contest entry forms that ask writers to list character references, especially those contests aimed at writers still in school. It’s an odd request, isn’t it, given that the history of our art form is riddled with notorious rakes, ne’er-do-wells, and other social undesirables who happened to write like angels? Some awfully good poetry and prose has been written in jail cells over the centuries, after all. I don’t believe that a contest should throw out the work of a William Makepeace Thackeray or an H.G. Wells because they kept mistresses…or to toss Oscar Wilde’s because he didn’t.

Or, for that matter, close its entry rolls to a shy kid whose high school English teacher doesn’t happen to like her.

In practice, reference requests are seldom followed up upon, and even less frequently used to disqualify entries before they are read, but they are occasionally used as tie-breakers. A good literary contest is not going to refuse to read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s entry because of that bottle of laudanum he was fond of carrying in his pocket, or disqualify Emily Dickenson’s poetry submission because her neighbors noticed that she didn’t much like to go outside.

No, they’d wait until the finalist round to do that.

I have questioned contest organizers why they ask for references, and they claim they do it solely so they can rule out people whose wins might embarrass the organization giving the award – basically, so they do not wake up one day and read in the newspaper that they gave their highest accolade to Ted Bundy. So they might well gently shove aside an entry whose return address was a state or federal prison, to minimize the possibility of handing their top honor to someone wearing manacles and accompanied by a guard.

Call me zany, but personally, I would prefer to see potential and former felons turn their entries to the gentle arts of the sonnet or the essay over other, less socially-useful pursuits like murdering people with axes, embezzlement, or arson of public buildings, but evidently, not every contest organizer agrees with me. Again, I’m not sure that they have an ethical right to limit entries this way but as I believe I have made clear in the past, I do not run the universe.

The moral: if you don’t have friends as disreputable as you are to vouch for you in a reference-requiring contest, you need to get out more – or at least graduate from high school. Join a writers’ group.

I must admit, though, that my suspicious nature rears its paranoid head whenever I see requests for references; back in my contest-entry days, I tended to avoid these contests. If an entrant lists one of the contest judges as a reference, is the entry handled differently? If I can list a famous name as a reference, are my chances of winning better?

Only the conference organizers know for sure.

Contest entry forms frequently ask you to list your writing credentials, which I find bizarre in contests where the judging is supposed to be blind. Again, perhaps I am suspicious, but I always wonder if entries from authors with previous contest wins or publication credentials go into a different pile than the rest. They shouldn’t, if the judging is genuinely blind.

But to quote the late great Fats Waller, “One never knows, do one?”

I’m not saying that you should rule out contests that make such requests – but I do think that the more personal information the organization asks for, the more careful your background check on the contest should be. When I see a request for references, for instance, I automatically look to see if the listed judges and/or their students have won previous competitions. A lot of the requesters are indeed on the up-and-up, but there is no surer waste of an honest writer’s time, talent, and resources than entering a rigged contest – or one with a demonstrable bias.

But do not despair, dear readers: there are plenty of literary contests – and fellowships, too — out there that are absolutely beyond reproach. By keeping your eye out for warning signs before you sink your valuable time into filling out extensive applications, you will be keeping your work – and your entry fees – out of the hands of the greedy.

And hey, any of you out there who may be considering committing a felony in the days to come: take my advice, and take up short story writing instead. I assure you, everyone will be happier in the long run.

There! That’s another day of crime prevented. Keep up the good work!

Picking the right contest, part V: The fringe benefits

I have been writing for the last couple of posts about entering literary contests, and how to maximize your entry fee dollar. There are basketfuls of good reasons to enter contests in general – the writing resume candy, the query letter boasting rights, and the opportunities to promote yourself to conference-attending agents, to name but a few – but not all contests are created equal. Some will help you more than others, so it is very much to your advantage to choose your contests wisely.

This is particularly true for novelists and nonfiction writers who enter contests; poets, essayists, and short story writers have exponentially more contest venues, and entry fees tend to be correspondingly lower. If you write in any of these shorter formats, you have only to open any issue of Poets & Writers to find dozens of contests just crying out for your work – contests that often include publication as part of the prize. The greater scope of opportunity renders these contest wins a trifle less valuable in the eyes of agents and editors, but still worthwhile.

True, the adulation tends to be greater for winners of categories rewarding entire books, but the fact is, the vast majority of contests ask for short pieces, for the simple reason that it requires much, much less effort on the sponsoring organization’s part to process them. Book-length writers have many fewer contest fora at their disposal, and those that exist tend not to ask that the whole book be submitted, but only the first chapter and a synopsis, at most.

Writers whose ideas expand beyond 25-page limits can feel discouraged by this, or even discriminated against, and with reason.

Writers of book-length pieces also enjoy the considerable comparative advantage of being paid astronomically more for their work when it sells – you’d have to place a tremendous number of poems in paying venues to make ends — so don’t feel too sorry for them, writers of shorter works. But the fact that the contest universe is hugely biased toward producers of shorter pieces makes it significantly harder for novelists and such to chalk up a contest win.

If you write in the longer formats, yet are comfortable in the shorter, you might want to consider polishing a single short story, poem, or essay to a high luster and sending it on the contest circuit, to try to rake in a win you can add to your credentials list. No one is going to hold it against you that the credential you used to catch an agent’s attention was for a gorgeously terse poem, while the book you were pitching was a three-volume work of science fiction.

There is an unfortunately pervasive rumor on the writers’ conference circuit that every agency screener in the land has been instructed to toss any book-pushing query letter that contains reference to poetry, even if it brings up a major contest win, directly into the trash. This is not true, and as nearly as I can tell, has never been widely true: it’s an exaggerated way of saying that poetry contest wins are not an automatic entrée into the publishing world.

Which makes some sense, actually: being able to write a good poem does not necessarily translate into being able to write a good book.

Personally, I feel that the short story and the novel are also quite different art forms, as different as painting in oils and sketching in charcoal – witness the number of writers who publish several short stories in venues like THE NEW YORKER, and publish them in collections, only to find after they have signed a novel contract that they don’t have a novel in them. Short pieces are about the surprise of instant revelation; novels (and book-length memoirs, and nonfiction books) are about character and argument development. Mastering the skills of one does not necessarily prep an author to produce the other
.
I know a lot of writers disagree with me on this subject — including, I should mention, virtually everyone who has ever taught in an M.F.A. program — so you should feel free to try your hand in more than one format. However, if shorter work is not your forté, it probably is not worth the expenditure of energy and angst to stop writing on your longer work in order to pull something short together for a contest.

But if you do, make sure that anything you enter in a contest is your best writing.

If you are the kind of writer who sticks single-mindedly to a long project until it is finished, it is a good idea to look upon contests not merely as rolls of the dice to try to win the jackpot of recognition (and, the common writerly fantasy goes, an agent and major book deal immediately thereafter), but as tools to learn how to improve your work. Because – and I’m letting you in on a literary judge secret here – most of the time, contest judges are not so much judging the quality of the writing in an entry as assessing its marketability.

Yes, you read that correctly. A great idea with huge market potential, presented in a clear and professional manner, will often edge out a beautifully-written piece aimed at a tiny market niche.

Someone pick Virginia up; I think she has fainted again.

Marketability is not the primary orientation of every contest that accepts book-length work (or portions thereof), naturally, but it’s true more often than not. It’s not unusual for the final judges of a contest to be the exact same agents and editors who appear at the attached conference – and if there is anything that THEY’re looking for, it’s marketability. Great writing is always a plus, but to win a contest, it isn’t always enough.

Knowing this can save you a LOT of grief at contest time. If your work is not particularly mainstream, select contests that cater to your niche, rather than hoping your work will fly in a more general contest.

Look up on it as a learning experience. If you ultimately want to make your work appeal to the largest segment of the reading population as possible, select contests where the judges give feedback on entries – it’s some of the least sentimental, least punch-pulling marketing advice you will ever receive. If you approach it in that spirit, you can learn a great deal – especially if you are new to querying and aren’t sure why your work keeps getting rejected.

Which brings me, at long last (phew!), to the last on my list of questions to ask yourself before entering a contest: does it have advantages for non-winning entrants?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but almost no one wins the first contest he enters. Contest entrants experience a fairly sharp learning curve, for reasons I shall be covering later in this series; there are many, many simple mistakes that frequently disqualify inexperienced entrants outright, even with otherwise well-written entries. Even if your entry is a monument of precision and contest-rule adhesion, you may have to enter a few times to learn the rhythms and preferences of a contest before you win.

So it is very much in your interest to make your first contest entries ones that will help you even if you don’t win. For instance, if you are new to the game, it is a better use of your contest-entering buck to go for contests that recognize semi-finalists, as well as finalists. That way, you maximize your probability of garnering boasting rights from those entries.

Contests that offer significant feedback to contest entrants are very, very useful when you are first starting out, as you may use them to learn how to polish up future entries. PNWA contest judges, for instance, have to fill out a questionnaire about every entry they read, explaining precisely how they thought the entry did or did not meet the contest criteria. The entrants receive these forms after the competition is ended, so they may study them for hints on how to improve their entries.

In other contests for novel-length work, an entrant would need to engage in serious bribery to obtain that type of information.

To sum up: there is a whole range of benefits that can accrue from contest entry beyond winning the grand prize. By selecting the contests that meet your current needs, rather than entering blindly or with an all-or-nothing attitude, you can maximize the good entering will do you.

And, of course, you might win!

I’m going on hiatus for the next couple of days, because I have a novel revision that an editor at a major publishing house would very much like for me to pop in the mail on Tuesday, but after I’ve accomplished that (phew!), I shall give you some tips on navigating the waters of contest requirements successfully. In the meantime, enjoy the holiday weekend, and keep up the good work!

Picking the right contest, part IV: But what’s in it for me?

If I had to pick a single piece of advice to summarize yesterday’s blog, it would be this: if you are going to hang your hopes – and your resources – on an array of contests, it honestly does pay to be selective. In this series, I have been going over what you can do to figure out which contests are and are not for you.

Obviously, the ideal outcome of your winning a contest would be a situation like mine: talent and hard work recognized one second, signing with an agent the next…but I am sorry to tell you, my results were not the norm. Contests that support their winners to the extent that the PNWA does are EXTREMELY rare.

I was, in a word, lucky. Thank you, Whomever.

Well, okay, it wasn’t JUST luck. Since I had done my homework before I entered the 2004 contest, I had learned that the PNWA has a reputation for bending over backwards to help its contest winners hook up with agents and editors. Not only are finalists clearly and vibrantly marked at the conference with rainbow-colored ribbons so agents and editors know who they are, but the winners are invited to have breakfast with all of the agents and editors, and each winner can stand up and give a universal pitch. Also, the top three entries in each category are displayed in the lobby at the conference, where everybody can read them.

(Tip to all PNWA attendees: one of the best places to troll for agents is at this reading table between 8 and 9 a.m. on the morning after the award ceremony: after the breakfast, the hallway is generally packed with grazing agents. The fact that each winning entry is in a clearly-marked folder gives you an automatic conversation-starter: “Oh, I read that genre entry – wasn’t it terrific? Since you’re interested in my genre, may I give you my 30-second pitch?”)

This level of support is unusual, however. I’ve been to many conferences where contest finalists are not marked at all, and other conference attendees are far more likely to meet a finalist than any of the attending agents. This is counter-intuitive, as most conference-related contests actively encourage their finalists to trek to the awards ceremony; you’d think that they’d take the extra step of making a few critical introductions, but often, they do not.

This is why it is a very, very good idea to check out a conference over and above its formal offerings before you attend it. Because – and I hate to say this, because good literary conferences are a blessing to humanity, and the volunteers who pull them together deserve candy and roses from all of us – there are conferences out there that exist primarily for the self-aggrandizement of their organizers.

Call me zany, but if I’m going to plunk down the dosh to attend a conference, particularly one far away, I don’t particularly want to be relegated to the kids’ table while the organizers hobnob with the agents and editors at the Important People’s table. Or are whisked off to private parties on some board member’s yacht, far away from anyone who might conceivably have come to the conference to pitch.

I’ll get down off my soapbox in a minute, but first let me say: the free mingling of the insiders and the undiscovered at conference bars is one of the great democratic institutions, and I am always sorry to see pernicious exclusivity sap its vital energy. Long live ice-fueled conversations.

Back to practicalities. If the entry fee to a conference-affiliated contest tied is high, I would advise checking out the contest description very carefully, to make sure it is worth your while. And there is no rule against dropping an e-mail to the organizers before entering and asking politely if there are secondary benefits to being a winner or a finalist. Or if your name badge at the conference will be delivered to you pre-marked. Should bring your own big blue ribbon to attach to it?

A sneakier way to find out how winners are treated in a conference-tied contest is to talk to NON-finalists who have attended the conference in question. Where the winners are treated extremely well, other attendees tend to notice – sometimes to the extent of being unhappy about what they perceive to be biased treatment. If your mole says, “My God, the agents there wouldn’t give the time of day to anyone who didn’t have a top ten entry!” it’s a good bet that the winners get some enviable perks.

I’d enter that contest – but not attend the attached conference unless I was up for a prize. Because, really, why? There are conferences that will demonstrate my profit motive in pursuing my writing equally well, where I will get more out of the experience.

And, honestly, didn’t all of us experience enough negative contact with cliques in junior high school to last us a lifetime?

It’s also a good idea to check out the list of your category’s winners from three or more years ago: how many of these writers can you find on a basic web search or by checking Amazon? More to the point, do any of them show up as clients on agency websites? Or as debut book sales on Publishers’ Marketplace?

In other words, are this contest’s winners getting published afterward? How past winners fared is an excellent indication of how you might make out if you win. However, try not to be overzealous: checking last year’s winners, or the ones from two years ago, is not entirely fair, as publication seldom occurs in less than a year after a book deal is signed.

An organization that supports its contest winners will usually be proud of them, so the successes of past winners is generally quite easy to obtain. If the sponsoring organization does not have a website listing member and past winner triumphs, try to scare up a chatty volunteer in the organization’s office.

Hint: ask the volunteer what she writes, and if she has ever entered the contest herself. If she has, you’ll probably get an earful; it’s a safe bet that anyone who volunteers for a writers’ organization writes, but almost nobody thinks to ask the receptionist. (This same logic applies at most political campaigns, by the way: everyone who calls wants to speak to the bigwigs, but for organizational dirt, you can hardly do better than chatting up the dear retiree who devotes four hours per week to licking envelopes.)

This may seem pushy, but most contest-running organizations will have a volunteer or staffer return phone calls and e-mails as a matter of course — see if you can elicit boasting about their post-contest success stories. Ask who their favorite winner was, and why. Ask if the organization sponsors readings for the winners, publishes excerpts, or offers other goodies to successful entrants.

All of this research will help you determine whether the contest is worth the entry fee and your prep time. As a writer – especially as a writer with a full-time job – you need to treat your writing time as precious. Three days or a week spent agonizing over a contest entry is necessarily time taken away from your actual writing, and the more expensive contest fees tend to run around the same amount as a good writing seminar. Weigh your options carefully.

Next time, I shall talk about evaluating the benefits contests offer non-winners – which, like the contests themselves, vary wildly. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Picking the right contest, part III: making the tax man happy

I have been writing for the last couple of days on how to determine whether to enter any specific contest or not. I intimated, in my patented winsome way, that it would behoove you to do a little background research before you invest time and money in entry fees.

I hinted gently that before you plunk down the green, you might want to ask yourself a few pointed questions. Is the contest credible, for instance? If it’s run by an organization, does it have a track record for awarding outside its membership? Do the judges win their own contests? Is it plagued by scandals? How good are the benefits for the winners? Would winning or placing in this contest give you notoriety or resources that are worth the investment of entering?

In short, I suggested yesterday that you begin to think of entering literary contests as an investment in your future as a writer, rather than as a gamble that may pay off big time. There are good investments, and there are bad investments, so select carefully.

What are the practical advantages of thinking of it as an investment? Well, prepping the average entry usually involves quite a bit more effort than merely printing out your first chapter and already-existing synopsis. There are generally formatting restrictions and length requirements that render it advisable to spend some fairly serious time tailoring the pages to the contest’s standards.

That’s time you could be using writing. Or querying. Or even having a life, as I’m told that non-writers do. If you choose to spend it entering a contest instead, make sure that the potential returns are worth the sacrifice.

Then there’s the money. Entry fees can be quite hefty, especially cumulatively, and not all contests give much in the way of tangible rewards, even to the winners. A high entry fee may be worth it if, say, the judges provide written feedback (as is the case with PNWA) or contest winners are If you enter many contests (or attend many conferences, or send out rafts of cover letters…), you might want to have a chat with your tax advisor about establishing your writing as a small business, so you can claim all of those entry fees as deductions.

Hey — contest entry is legitimate promotion for your work. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t necessarily have to make money writing in any given year in order to take tax deductions on writing-related expenses.

And this sometimes comes as something of a surprise to the average tax preparer; I know many writers who have been told point-blank by their consumer-minded tax guys not to bother filing a Schedule C until the first advance check arrives. So you might want to bone up on the facts a bit before you enter into that particular discussion with your tax advisor; here’s a nice brief summary.

I’m told by thems as know, though, that the IRS has changed its thinking about how quickly to expect artists to make money, recognizing that many talented writers NEVER make a profit on their writing, or even break even, yet still have legitimate business expenses. Printer cartridges, for instance. Reams of paper. The most recent agents’ guide. Conference fees. And so forth. (Poets & Writers online has a good article on recognizing what your writing expenses actually are.)

What they look for, I’m told, to differentiate between the hobbist writer and the professional, is evidence of a “profit motive” — proof that you are pursuing your writing in a professional manner, with the ultimate goal of selling your work for profit. Basically, they want to have some reasonable assurance that you WOULD be selling your work if anyone would buy it.

What kind of proof do they like? Well, again, you should ask a tax pro familiar with artists, but high up on the hit parade is evidence that you write on a regular basis and tangible evidence that you are consistently trying to find an agent and/or a publisher for your writing. So they not only don’t begrudge writers’ deducting the cost of stamps and envelopes – they regard buying the makings of SASEs as a mark of serious, potentially taxable effort.

It’s nice that someone does, no? Perhaps the IRS would send a representative to explain your profit motive to your carping coworkers who keep asking when your book is coming out.

Another way to prove that you really are writing with the intent to sell it, honest, is thorough making demonstrable efforts to increase your professional skills – which, for a writer, means not only learning better craft, but learning how to market as well. Continuing education efforts such as going to conferences and promotional efforts like entering contests fit very clearly within the profit-seeking rubric.

I mention this not only so you can make some inquiries in the months between now and tax time, but also to encourage you to apply the concept of the profit motive to any writing-related expense you may be considering. In the case of a contest, for instance, you might want to ask: how will winning it help you get my book published?

In other words, is entering this contest an efficient way to pursue my profit motive as a writer?

And I’m not just talking about ANY contest win here: I’m talking about any PARTICULAR contest you may be considering entering. The adulation and opportunities offered the winners vary so widely from contest to contest that it is almost impossible to generalize about any benefit accruing to all winners OTHER than boasting rights in query letters. If you do some basic checking in advance, you can save yourself quite a bit in entry fees by avoiding the contests that will not help promote you and your work.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about how to go about accomplishing that. In the meantime, enjoy the rare snow, Seattlites, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Picking the right contest, part II: weeding out the duds

Yesterday, I horrified the innocent Virginias of the world by pointing out that in the average literary contest, the impartiality emperor might, to put it delicately, be under-dressed. Today – my 150th post on the new blog site (and 359th since I first began blogging), another major milestone – I shall give you a few pointers on how to figure out which contests are most likely to serve you best.

What makes this particularly appropriate, of course, is that here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re experiencing an unusually blustery winter. So I actually have been writing these posts in sleet, hail, and dark of night – like the intrepid mail carriers of the U.S. Postal Service, nothing stays this blogger from her appointed rounds.

And, by the way, if you’re still casting about for your first good deed of the new year, what about thanking your mail carrier? S/he ensures that your queries, manuscripts, and other writing necessities travel back and forth in a reliable manner. And when we’re talking 8-pound manuscripts, that’s no mean feat. It’s a tough job, involving far more interaction with dogs’ bared teeth than I would be comfortable dealing with on a daily basis, and they definitely deserve to be thanked.

Back to the topic at hand, picking a contest with care. Yesterday, I brought up the possibility that not all contests are blindly judged.

I shall never forget the looks on the faces of everyone at the awards ceremony of a QUITE respectable Southern conference when the teenage daughter of two of the contest judges carried off the Young Writer award — and, as I recall, a not insignificant check, derived, no doubt, from the entry fees of hundreds of trusting high school students whose parents were not regularly having drinks with the judges. Had Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Bob the Builder all been hauled out of the room by DEA agents for peddling narcotics to kids, the attending writers’ expressions could hardly have expressed more shocked disgust.

Now, that particular year, the winner’s parents had actually been judging in other categories, not hers, but since they had been her first readers and were rather chatty people, it is beyond the bounds of belief that the judges in her category would not have some inkling which entry was hers. I’m not saying that the contest was rigged, per se; I’m just saying that her mother won in the nonfiction category.

The general rule of thumb for avoiding this type of situation: enter contests sponsored by organizations, not cliques. The writers’ grapevine can really help you here. Ask other writers about particular contests before you spend time and money on entering them. Poets & Writers magazine, which lists literary contest deadlines in each issue, does a pretty good job of screening, so if a contest seems a bit shady to you, check if it is listed there.

And, of course, if you check out a list of the last few years’ winners (and you should), and you see the same last names recurring, or see that the judges themselves seem to carry off prizes on a fairly regular basis, you might want to think twice about sending in your entry check.

The next question you should ask yourself before mailing off an entry check is: how good are your chances of winning?

Yes, any contest win or place will look nice on your writing résumé, but obviously, some contests are more prestigious than others. Less prestigious ones can actually be a better bet, if they are legitimate.

“Wha..?” I hear some of you exclaiming. “Isn’t bigger always better?”

Not necessarily. You might be better off with a less well-known contest your first few times out, for an exceedingly simple reason: your odds of making the finals are significantly higher in a small entry pool than a large one. Big-ticket contests attract stiff competition; contests with large cash prizes attract a higher percentage of professionals amongst the entrants.

Also, your chances of winning are higher if your writing resembles that of past winners. This is true for another exceedingly simple reason (they are abounding today, aren’t they?): contest judges tend to be loyal folk, returning to the task with a tenacity a spawning salmon would envy. In most writers’ organizations that offer contests, the first round of reading is performed by volunteers – the same volunteers, year after year.

And, miraculously, their literary tastes don’t change all that much in the intervening twelve months between judging cycles.

Thus, if the volunteers of a particular contest have historically favored Gothic romance, and you write futuristic fantasy, and there is only one novel category, you’re probably better off going for a different contest, one that favors your type of work. The more specialized your genre, the more it behooves you to check in advance whether a conference’s complement of judges tend to treat it with respect.

Or (to take a purely hypothetical case that couldn’t possibly refer to any contest run in my local area, or in which I might have taken a high prize in years past) if the top mainstream fiction category prizes in a prestigious competition are carried off year after year by literary fiction writers, you might want to think twice about entering fiction that is, say, particularly mainstream. But if you happened to write on the literary side of romance, or are an unusually descriptive SF/fantasy writer, you might stand a good chance.

How can a potential entrant tell what the judges’ preferences are, short of taking them all out to lunch individually and asking them? Most contests will list past winners on their websites, tucked away in a corner somewhere; check them out. If the sponsoring organization publishes winning entries – and many have small magazines — read a few. If your writing style is radically different from what has won in the past, the contest is probably not for you.

In any contest with celebrity judges (i.e., famous writers who make the final selections from amongst the finalist pool), this goes double, or even triple. If your writing doesn’t resemble the famous judge’s in form, think twice before bothering to enter.

Even if you’re lucky enough to find a celebrity judge who is well-read outside of his own subgenre – and willing to reward work unlike his own — the bigwigs virtually never read all of the entries; commonly, they read only the finalists. That means that those crusty volunteers I mentioned above screen the entries first – and all too frequently, edge out good entries that do not resemble the celebrity’s, on the well-intentioned theory that our writing tends to reflect our reading tastes. They’re just trying to save the celebrity some time.

Finally, if the contest is attached to a conference where the awards are given (and many are), are the agents who typically attend that conference ones who might be interested in your work?

I can tell you from personal experience: while having a contest win, place, or show under your belt is great query letter candy, being a finalist at most conferences confers a good deal more than just a nice ribbon attached to your name badge. It marks you out as someone with whom, for instance, an agent might want to pause and have a hallway conversation, or ask, “So, what do you write?” during otherwise pitch-free social time in the bar.

In other words, it’s a great little conversation starter. As such, you might want to target contests attached to conferences that your dream agent attends.

The internet is your friend here: pretty much every conference will list which agents they cajoled to it last year and/or those who will be blandished into being there this year. Also, the standard agents’ guides tend to list which conferences agents from any given agency habitually attend.

As I said yesterday, there’s more to using contests to your benefit than sending in a well-written entry: there’s strategy. Tomorrow, I shall turn this question on its head, talk about what you can get out of entering a writing contest.

In the meantime, happy 150th, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Increasing your chances of making it to the finals in a literary contest, or yes, Virginia, there is more to a winning entry than great writing

Literary contest season is just around the corner, so by popular demand, I’m going to revisit one of my favorite omnibus topics, what differentiates a contest entry that makes it to the finals from all the others. What criteria do contest judges use, and how may a clever writer gear an entry to cater to them?

Was that great collective gasp I just heard from those new to contest entry? “But wait!” the neophyte entrant cries, “why should my entry be judged upon ANY criterion other than pure quality of writing? If not…“ and here, tears well up in the neophyte’s harp seal-like eyes, “how can we be sure that the best writing will always win?”

That roar you just heard, dear readers, was the chuckle of everyone currently alive on the planet who has ever been a contest judge. As both a former contest winner and a veteran judge of literary contests, I am here to tell you: no, Virginia, winning isn’t just about the quality of the writing. It’s about the writing AND playing the contest game well.

Which means — hold onto your hat here, Virginia, because this is a big one — that the best-written entry does not necessarily always win. The best-written entry that meets the judging criteria doesn’t even necessarily always win. But without a shadow of a doubt, a brilliantly-written entry that does not meet those criteria, or that violates contest rules, will virtually never make it to the finals.

Of course, there are criteria: as with any other art form, the assessment of quality is in the eye of the beholder, so there would be absolutely no way to standardize judging across entries if there were no pre-set criteria. And these criteria are not limited to matters of style and expression, but technical matters as well. Anyone out there care to guess why?

I can already my long-term readers chanting the answer: for exactly the same reason that agencies are so eager to use technical criteria to reject submissions – time. Since the vast majority of entries are rife with technical errors, it’s the single quickest way to thin the stacks of submissions.

Sorry about that, Virginia. And when you’ve got a second, I have some bad news about Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, unless you have had the foresight to have volunteered to serve as a contest judge for years before you enter your first contest – not a bad idea, incidentally; contests are always seeking new judges, and it’s one of the least expensive crash courses in why most manuscripts get rejected you’ll ever find – it’s rather hard for the average entrant to learn what precisely the relevant criteria are. And, as those of you who have been reading this blog for a while already know, I think the practice of keeping this kind of useful knowledge from aspiring writers is, well, let’s not say despicable; let’s call it counter-productive.

So in this series, I shall be dispensing bona fide tips on how to maximize your chances of winning a writing contest, as well as guidelines to navigate your way amongst the dizzying array of contests out there. You’re welcome.

Why do I feel so strongly that you need to have this information at your fingertips? Experience. For those of you new to my blog, I am the poster child for literary contests: I actually did have every writer’s fantasy come true. I won the Zola Award for Nonfiction Book/Memoir at the 2004 PNWA conference, met my fabulous agent within 12 hours after receiving the blue ribbon, and signed a publication contract with a NYC publisher before the 2005 contest winners were announced rolled around.

While such speedy results are not the norm for contest winners, winning or placing in a well-respected contest can definitely kick open a few doors. Agents pay attention to that kind of credential; it makes your query letters jump out of the daily pile. Most queriers list no writing credentials at all, so a writer with publication credits and/or contest wins automatically looks more professional than most.

Even if those credits or wins are in wildly different genres than the book being pitched: agents like to be the SECOND person to recognize a writer’s talent, after all.

There are a LOT of contests out there, as anyone who has ever Googled “writing contest” is aware. Most, unfortunately, do not offer cash prizes, but many do offer publication. (In fact, contests are a not uncommon way for literary magazines just starting up to rake in a whole lot of good writing for free.) Almost all, however, charge an entry fee, sometimes a hefty one.

As I have mentioned before, there is now an entire industry devoted to offering help to aspiring writers, and like seminars and conferences and how-to books, what the contests offer writers who enter varies widely. So just as you should learn all you can about a writers’ conference before you slap down the registration fee, before you pay to enter a contest, it would behoove you to do a little bit of homework.

The first question you should ask: is the contest credible?

There has been quite a bit of controversy within the last couple of years over how various literary contests are judged. Not all are blind (meaning that the judges do not know whose entry is whose), and not all contests that claim to have blind judging actually do.

I know, Virginia, I know. Just hold that cold compress to your head, and the dizziness should subside soon.

Why should a prudent entrant worry about how a contest is judged? Because selective judging may favor certain entries, rendering it harder for a newcomer to break into the finalists’ circle. It is not unheard-of, for instance, for organizations to solicit entries from outside their memberships, but have an established track record of only awarding prizes to their own members.

Check the fine type of the contest rules, as well as the hometowns of the finalists and semifinalists of years past: if they cluster too much, wonder if the locals have an edge.

Nor is it at all unusual for contests ostensibly for the unpublished to allow published writers to submit their work-in-progress for judging alongside the work of the less experienced. (Check last year’s winners’ list for the moderately well-known: if John McPhee has won their short story category any time since 1955, they’re probably not too careful about keeping out those with hefty publishing credentials.)

Not to mention the scandal a few years back when a major writers’ magazine happened to notice that the students of the writers who were judging contests seemed to be winning major awards on a fairly regular basis.

Ready for another shock, Virginia? After the scandal broke, absolutely nothing bad happened to the judges who were favoring their students in competition. Some of them are still regularly judging contests.

Obviously, this kind of pseudo-blind judging is grossly unfair to the other entrants, but the moral of this story is not that not all contests are squeaky-clean. It is no secret that there are many contests out there that solicit widely for entrants primarily as a fundraising effort, rather than a sincere attempt to discover heretofore unsung talent.

The moral: let the entrant beware.

Tomorrow, I shall give you some tips on how to go about bewaring. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Details, details, Part II: avoiding a fulsome fate

“God is in the details,” architect Mies van der Rohe allegedly wrote.

I’m not a big fan of his buildings, to tell you the truth, but I do think that this aphorism applies to writing in spades. It’s quite clear to us as readers, usually — walk into any crowd of writers, and you’re sure to find at least one on-going discussion of So-and-So’s stylistic choices. There are writers whose use of semicolons makes me swoon, thank you very much, and as brilliant Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has pointed out, for most of us writers, there are fictional characters who have affected us more than most flesh-and-blood human beings.

But for the vast majority of aspiring writers who write in isolation, without significant contact with other people who speak the creative language, keeping sight of the huge weight small touches carry in their own work is harder. And this is a pity, because the little, unique details are often what catches an agent’s eye — and the misbegotten details definitely catch agency screeners’.

It pays to pay attention to the little things, therefore. Yet time and again, I hear submitting writers speak of the submission process as though the little things — spelling all of the words correctly, for instance, or formatting pages in accordance with standard format — don’t matter. It’s the overall writing, these fine folks argue, that will make or break one’s chances with an agent or editor.

Well, yes and no. If the writing is absolutely beautiful, but the formatting is all akimbo and the spelling is lousy, there’s an outside chance that someone at an agency might be in a saintly enough mood to overlook the problems and take a chance on the writer. However, virtually all of the time, an agent, editor, contest judge, or screener’s first reaction to such a manuscript is the same as to one that is dull but technically perfect: rejection. And with few exceptions, the rejectors will not even take the time to scrawl, “Take a formatting class!” or “Next time, spell-check!” on the returned manuscript.

Why can they afford to be so caviler? Long-time readers, chant along with me now: because they receive enough technically perfect AND well-written manuscripts that they don’t need to worry about the rest. If a writer is truly talented, they figure, she’ll mend her ways and try again.

All that being said, let’s return to yesterday’s list of standard formatting restrictions, shall we?

(9) The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page.
That’s twelve single-spaced lines, incidentally. The chapter name (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the first line of the first page, but then nothing else should appear until a third of the way down.

This means that the title of the book, “by Author’s Name,” and/or your contact information do NOT belong on this page — all variations of a classic rookie mistake. Including any of this information on this page (other than in the slug line) will simply make the submission appear unprofessional.

But of that, see the next entry.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.
Yes, you should ALWAYS include a title page with ANY submission of ANY length, including contest entries and the chapters you send after the agent has fallen in love with your first 50 pages. Even when a contest does not specify that you should (and no, it doesn’t count toward page count; the first page of the first chapter is page 1).

Literally every manuscript that any agent in North America sends to any editor will include a title page, yet around 92%) seem to be unaware that including it is industry standard. On the bright side, this means that if you are industry-savvy enough to include a professionally-formatted title page with your work, your submission automatically looks like a top percentile ranker to professional eyes from the moment it’s pulled out of the envelope.

It’s never too early to make a good first impression.

If you do not know how to format a proper title page (and yes, Virginia, there IS a special format for manuscripts), please see the Your Title Page category at right.

(11) The beginning of each paragraph should be indented five spaces — no exceptions — and nothing you send to anyone in the industry should EVER be in block-style business format.

To publishing types, any document with no indentations, skipping a line between paragraphs, and the whole shebang left-justified carries the stigma of (ugh) business correspondence, which is to say that they regard it as a symptom of creeping illiteracy.

Just don’t do it.

Yes, yes, I know: published books — particularly mysteries, I notice — often begin chapters and sections without indentation. Trust me, that lack of indentation was the editor’s choice, not the author’s, and copying the style here might get your work knocked out of consideration. At minimum, you won’t get any points for style.

Pop quiz: which do you think is going to strike format-minded industry professionals as more literate, a query letter in business format or one in correspondence format (indented paragraphs, date and signature halfway across the page)?

Uh-huh. Don’t you wish that someone had told you THAT before you sent out your first query letter?

(12) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.
This one is for all of you bloggers and business letter-writers out there. The whole darned manuscript should be double-spaced, and paragraphs are all indented, so there is no need to skip a line to indicate a paragraph break.

The ONLY exception is that you may skip an extra line to indicate a section break in the text.

(13) Words in foreign languages should be italicized.
The logic here is very straightforward: don’t want the agent of your dreams to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

You may also use italics for emphasis, book titles, song titles, etc. — and just so you know, anyone who follows AP style will tell you to underline these. DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE TEMPTERS: AP style is for journalism, not book publishing. They are different fields, and have different standards.

In a submission for the book publishing industry, NOTHING should be underlined. Why? The reason is actually very practical: underlining uses more ink than italics in the book production process. Thus, italics are cheaper.

(14) All numbers (except for dates) under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.

I’m surprised how often otherwise industry-savvy writers are unaware of this one, but the instinct to correct it in a submission is universal in the industry.

Here is how charmingly archaic the industry is: this formatting rule was originally for the benefit of the manual typesetters. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

Again, be warned, those of you who have been taught by teachers schooled in the AP style: they will tell you to write out only numbers under 10. Yes, this is true for newspaper articles, where space is at a premium, but it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG in a manuscript.

Did I mention it was wrong? And that my aged eyes have actually seen contest entries knocked out of finalist consideration over this particular issue?

(15) Dashes should be doubled — rather than using an emdash, with a space at either end. Hyphens are single and are not given extra spaces, as in self-congratulatory.
Yes, I know: my blogging software will not allow me to insert a doubled dash here, and any Microsoft product will automatically change a doubled dash to the longer emdash.

Change it back. Seriously, any agent would make you do this before agreeing to submit your manuscript to an editor, so you might as well get into this salutary habit as soon as possible.

Microsoft may actually have a point here: I fully admit that doubling the dashes is a monumental pain, and the practice is archaic. Books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy; many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. An AP-trained teacher will tell you to use the longer emdash, as will the Chicago Manual of Style.

In this, however, they are wrong. Standard format for manuscripts is invariable upon this point.

And heck, MS Word’s grammar checker has more than once told me to replace the correct form of there, their, or they’re with an incorrect one. Who are you gonna believe, me or Bill Gates?

(16) The use of ANY brand name should be accompanied by the trademark symbol, as in Kleenex™.
If you catch an agent under the age of 30, or one who doesn’t have a graduate degree, you may get away without including the trademark symbol, but legally, you are not allowed to use a trademarked name without it. Writers — yes, and publishing houses, too — have actually been sued over this within the last few years, so be careful about it.

There you have it: the rules. Literally every page of text you submit to an agent, editor, or literary contest (yes, including the synopsis) should be in standard format. Oh, and it’s a good idea to make sure everything is spelled correctly, too.

Yes, these are all small details, but this is an industry that thrives on details. There’s a reason, after all, that the term “nit-picker” is more or less synonymous with “editor.” Not only should you read your ENTIRE submission IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD before you even think of popping it in the mail — you should give serious thought to allowing some trusty soul to proofread it for you.

Why is another pair of eyes a good idea? Because not all manuscript errors are typos. Here’s an illustrative anecdote, to show you why.

When I was in grad school, I was a teaching assistant for a professor who longed beyond all things to be an inspiration to her students. You know, the kind who spur their students to the kind of DEAD POETS SOCIETY minor free thinking that’s not particularly dangerous to the status quo/

And how did she choose to inform her students of this fact? Frequently, during undergraduate lectures, she would soften her habitual chiding of a narrow-minded student by throwing her arms wide and exclaiming, “Be as intellectually wide-ranging as possible! I want all of you to lead fulsome lives!”

Every time she did it, we teaching assistants arrayed at the back of the room would have a terrible time keeping straight faces. Because, you see, the professor had made a very common mistake: she believed fulsome was a synonym for full. She had, she said, heard many people use it this way. But just because a usage is common doesn’t mean it is correct.

Fulsome means noxious, noisome, loathsome. So, inadvertently, she was urging all of her students to have perfectly hideous lives.

God is in the details; sometimes all of us need an extra pair of eyes to remind us of that.  Keep up the good work.

Is that dialogue I see before me?

I was called in as a last-minute replacement contest judge — yes, it happens; regularly-scheduled judges drop out all the time – at a time I shall simply designate as recently, so it will not be apparent which contest it is. (But it was really, really recent.) I highly recommend stepping up to judge a contest from time to time; there’s nothing like spending a long weekend with a small mountain of entries to get a very tangible sense of what agency screeners face each and every day.

I refer, of course, to the constant joy of revelation. Oh, and so much repetition that spontaneous combustion starts to seem marginally attractive, just to have some diversion.

I was in a fiction category this time, not my usual donnybrook. Most of the time, I step up for NF categories, because, generally speaking, it’s far harder to find experienced judges for NF. But this time, it was a couple of dozen 15-page (max) novel excerpts. After such a lengthy short chapter orgy, I felt I could not exist another instant on this terrestrial sphere without passing along the following piece of gleaned wisdom:

It is a whole lot easier than one might suspect to bore someone who has just read twenty manuscripts. All your really have to do, should you aspire to it, is to write like everyone else. The easiest way to do this, apparently, is to construct dialogue.

Remember a month or two ago, when I went on a rampage about the drawbacks of the ever-popular dialogue-only scene? (Okay, I could be referring to several different posts here: this is a pet peeve of mine as an editor and as a blogger.) I suggested gently, if memory serves, that such scenes tend to be frowned upon by many professional readers: if you want to make your points entirely through dialogue, the industry wisdom runs, write a play.

Novels, on the other hand, have been known to include such decorative details as character development and environment description. Little things like that. Yet most of us were taught at some point in our writing development that GOOD dialogue should reveal so much about the characters from whose mouths it is ostensibly falling that description is, well, kinda superfluous.

As someone who spent quite a few years teaching, let me let you in on a wee teaching secret: exaggeration is often a very effective way to make a point. You might want to take tutorial truisms with a grain of salt, therefore. As in one that you might purchase at Costco, and a forklift would deliver it to your car.

To put it another way, if you had just finished reading your 1500th 10th-grade story where every character says things angrily, sadly, or scornfully, you might well feel that some extreme measures were called for to reduce the sheer number of adverbs your eyeballs might be forced to scan in future. You might conceivably say tell your students to avoid them like the proverbial plague.

Yes, I am saying what you think I’m saying here: many, many dialogue-only pushers are not motivated merely by a love of spareness, or even a hatred of intra-text description. Much of the time, they are trying to cut down on all of those adverbs – and the tag lines they grace. (You remember tag lines, right? They’re the he said and she exclaimed part of the dialogue. A surprisingly high percentage of the time, most professional readers will tell you, they’re not necessary.)

In running full-tilt from the Scylla of over-reliance upon adverb-laden tag lines, however, many writers run smack into the Charybdis of over-terseness in their dialogue. As in pages at a time where there is nothing but dialogue as far as the eye can see. No softening indications of tone or body language; no indications of the room where the dialogue might conceivably be taking place, or indeed that the conversation is taking place in a tangible location at all; not even a hint that every speaker might not be telling the truth 100% of the time.

Because, of course, in real life, everyone speaks in a monotone while holding perfectly still, standing in a featureless, all-white room while doing it, and says everything that crosses his mind with perfect candor. Can’t throw a cupcake at a single party in North America without hitting someone engaged in THAT type of conversation.

And heavens, does this make contest entries (and submissions) similar! I hate to break anyone’s bubble here, but I have it on pretty good authority that after the fifth or sixth such dialogue scene in a row, the underdeveloped characters in one might conceivably start to seem a heck of a lot like the underdeveloped characters in the next. In fact, it is not at all hard to imagine a situation where such characters might begin to blur together after a while.

I’m not saying that every judge or screener would read so quickly that this would happen, of course. Just the ones with, you know, lives. Think about it: what professional reader has time to take a 15-minute break between reading projects to clear her head?

Actually, I think play-like dialogue in novels has quite a few significant drawbacks, over and above how common it is. First, it encourages the kind of real-life exchanges that, while undoubtedly a reflection of how people speak in authentic situations, is deadly dull on the page. Unless you’re Samuel Beckett (who wrote PLAYS, people!), you’re going to have an uphill battle trying to get the average reader (let alone a professional one) to sit through sterling exchanges on the order of:

Sonia: Is the tea ready?
Simon: Yeah.
Sonia: I had to buy the tea myself today, you know. Didn’t you see the note on the refrigerator?
Simon: No. Isn’t there any sugar?
Sonia: No, there isn’t, because time, in case you haven’t noticed, is not infinitely flexible. I do not have the eight extra hours in the day you seem to think I have, nor do I have jet packs installed in my feet. You, on the other hand, work in a grocery store. Is it too much to ask for you to reach into Aisle 2 from time to time to grab a tin of tea?
Simon: Ah. Good tea.

Second, as I mentioned above, it pushes narrative character development out of dialogue-based scenes, which strikes me as something of a waste of a good scene. Third, such dialogue rests upon the logical fallacy that human beings just blurt out everything relevant about a situation in ordinary dialogue. (I would explain the problem with this, but in the interests of space conservation, I shall instead refer my readers to anyone who has ever had a conversation with an unpleasant boss, a coworker with B.O., a relative with political views different from oneself, or who has ever heard a eulogy or a toast at a wedding. Absolute truthfulness is simply not the norm for human interaction.)

The fourth reason is really a corollary of the third: as a matter of craft, dialogue-only scenes render depicting undercurrents between people, if not impossible, then at least far more difficult than it needs to be. As the Idol agents pointed out, scenes that have more than one thing going on in them are far more eye-catching (and interesting) than those that deal only in the obvious.

Dialogue-only scenes convey the impression that there is precisely nothing going on between the discussants but the subject of the conversation. The reader may well know different from earlier, non-dialogue parts of the book, but within the context of the discussion shown, the speakers have no bodies to speak of, apparently, no emotions worth mentioning, evidently, and no motivations, ulterior or otherwise, that they would not be more than happy to bellow at the nearest bystander.

Personally, I have never been in on such a conversation, but hey, they must exist: recently, I read fifteen of them in a row. I can’t imagine where. Or how recently.

Regardless of whether such conversations do actually occur in real life, or whether you (or your revered writing teachers) are fond of seeing them in print, consider this: is reproducing such an incredibly common writing technique really the best way to make your contest or submission stand out in the crowd?

I leave it up to you to decide. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Contest submissions revisited

The streets may be icy, but here I am, all cozy and warm, going through the backlog of reader questions posted via the COMMENTS function while I was going over the Idol list for lo! those many weeks. My, there have been some great questions posted, and I’m pleased to be getting back to them. Some of my best blogs have come from reader questions, so keep sending ‘em in, everybody!

For those of you who don’t know how to post a question (skip this paragraph if you already do), go to the bottom of any post. There, after the “Posted in…” category information, you will find green type that says either “No Comments” or a number of posted comments listed. Click on the word COMMENT. This will both bring up a page with the blog in question and any comments that have already been posted. At the bottom of this new page, you will find a section entitled “Leave a Reply.” Fill in your chosen screen name (pseudonyms are dandy), your e-mail address (this is not posted; it’s just to cut down on spammers), and your website, if any (and if you want to share it). Then type your question or comment in the little box provided and hit the “Submit Comment” button.

It’s that simple! The nifty blogging program lets me know whenever anyone posts a comment, so feel free to comment on months-old posts.

All right, enough technicalities for today. On to the questions. Serenissima wrote:

“I was wondering if it would make sense to enter an annual contest with a revised version of a piece one had submitted before. Do organizations such as PNWA have the same judges from year to year?”

Here’s the short answer: yes, it would, and yes, they do. Next!

No, but seriously, it does make sense to enter a revised manuscript in a subsequent year’s contest: writers do it all the time. In a contest like the PNWA’s, where entrants receive feedback on their submissions, it’s actually encouraged.

Do read the rules of any contest VERY carefully before you pop your entry into the mail, though, because not all contests allow repeat submissions. In fact, it’s a great idea to go over the rules with the proverbial fine-toothed comb anyway, because the single best thing you can do to improve your chances of winning or placing in a contest is to follow the stated rules to the letter.

Why? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, you would be astonished – at least, I hope you would – at just how few of the entrants in any given contest seem to have READ the contest’s rules. Often, these rules are buried at the end of the entry materials, but by all means, seek them out. Follow them as if your life depended upon it, because let me tell you, a volunteer judge’s patience is likely to become scanty by his fifth entry of the evening.

Rule non-followers are very, very easy targets for a begrumbled judge’s momentary ire.

The second reason is rather more sinister, and definitely less widely-known. As with submissions at agencies and publishing houses, any well-respected contest (translation: a contest prestigious enough that it would help your writing career to win) receives so many well-written entries that choosing the finalists is generally quite hard. It saves judges a LOT of time if they can simply rule out the entries that did not follow directions; if an entry contains a disqualifying element, the judge is usually instructed to stop reading, and for most contests, a rule violation results in automatic disqualification.

Do the math: over the course of a few hundred entries, even a 5% disqualification rate would equal a substantial reduction in reading time. So how many entries would a contest have to get every year before adding additional rules designed to trip up the entrant would start to seem worthwhile?

I have to be honest with you: even as a contest judge, I often find contest rules poorly-written, difficult to understand, and sometimes downright arbitrary. It’s been my experience, though, that the more senseless the requirement, the more likely it is to be used to disqualify entries. In fact, it is not unheard-of for very popular contests to employ initial screeners, whose SOLE function is to check the entries for rule violations before the non-rule breaking entries are passed along to the judges.

Please, tread with care. If you find yourself too sorely tempted to skip any specific requirement listed – such as, say, the information that must appear on the title page, an often-fudged requirement – save yourself some time and money, and just don’t enter the contest. Use the money to take a writing class, or to enter another contest, because if you don’t follow the rules, your chances of winning plummet to practically zero.

On the re-entry issue, it pays to be a rule-hugger. Many contests specify that you cannot enter EXACTLY the same manuscript in subsequent years, but they usually leave it up to the author to decide just how much revision constitutes significant change. (If memory serves, the Faulkner contest is the only major one in the country whose rules actually specify how much must have changed from last year — although I do know a very good poet who won third place with identical poems in the Faulkner two years back-to-back. So I don’t know how seriously they enforce it.)

You’ve hit the nail on the head, though, Serenissima, in identifying the primary problem of the repeat entrant: the only way that she would get caught repeating a submission would be by a returning judge. Most contests’ judge rolls are swollen with those who have done it before – which is to say, the pool of those who have both the reading chops and the time to donate (in virtually every contest in the country, even the very expensive ones, the first-round judges are volunteers, not paid staff) is relatively small.

Judging is a big time commitment, after all, and not one to be undertaken lightly. In the PNWA contest, each first-round judge is asked to read at least 10 full entries, as well as provide both extensive written feedback for the entrant AND a separate write-up for the section chair; in years where there is a shortage of volunteers, they may read as many as 20 each. Multiply that by, say, a 25-page page limit, and judges are facing reading a fairly hefty book, cumulatively.

However, which judge gets which entry is randomly assigned, so the chances of a judge getting the same submission two years in a row are rather slim. It does happen, though — in fact, it has happened to me as a judge, and in that contest, I was not required to return the repeat entry for reassignment. Rereading isn’t necessarily a problem, especially in contests where entrants receive written feedback — seeing one’s advice followed is, after all, rather gratifying — but if the judge who gets an entry twice happens to be a habitual Big Old Grump, he might not be very nice about it.

My, did I just suggest that not everyone who volunteers to be a contest judge does so to assuage a rampant love of literature alone? Could I have been implying that some judges, such as the BOG mentioned above, do it because they like the power? And is it remotely possible that I might be hinting that if your entry ends up in the beefy hands of a BOG, you are likely to receive some pretty nasty criticism, whether or not BOG has seen it before?

Nah, I couldn’t mean any of that, could I? Every contest judge is an angel incarnate, and literary contests are judged on demonstrated writing talent alone. A judge’s personal bias, bad day, or annoyance at reading the same entry twice knocking a good entry out of prize consideration is as uncommon as — well, snow in Seattle in November.

In a nutshell: if the rules do not explicitly exclude resubmission, I say go ahead and resubmit. You can’t entirely rule out the possibility of your entry’s landing on the same BOG’s desk twice, but the chances of it are rather low. (And incidentally, readers: if you encountered a BOG who was gratuitously mean on your last year’s entry feedback forms, you should let the contest-giving organization know as soon as possible. The PNWA, at least, does try to weed out the BOGs. They’re bad for repeat business.)

As we get closer to PNWA entry time, would you like for me to run another series on contest dos and don’ts? Drop me a note via the COMMENTS function (now that everyone knows how to use it!), if so, and I’ll start cranking up the insight mill. And, as always, keep up the good work!

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XI: More technicalities

My flight has been delayed for an hour (due to leprechauns? Wing demons? The flight crew’s suddenly having been spirited off to Oz? No explanation appears to be forthcoming), so I am taking advantage of the unexpected time to write to you. Now that all of my liquid possessions are safely trapped in the now-mandatory clear plastic bags (since airline security is now apparently being handled by the Glad corporation), my feet are clad in seasonally-inappropriate shoes (because heaven forfend one should hold up the security line to deal with anything with laces), and having successfully wrestled with the question of whether to check the 50-year-old phone I needed to bring along for my interview (don’t ask) or carry it on, I am happy to use my remaining time in limbo to revisit more of the Idol rejection reasons (see my post of October 31).

By the way, I’ve been doing the dialogue experiment I suggested to you yesterday here in the airport, and I was mistaken in telling you that 99.9% of overheard conversations would not work in print. Based on today’s sample, I radically overestimated how much would be useable.

Which brings me to #32 on the Idol list, real-life incidents are not always believable on paper. I’ve blogged about this fairly recently (see my post for September 6, for instance, and a series in the second week of October), so I’m not going to dwell too long upon why any writer who includes a true incident within a fictional story needs to make ABSOLUTELY certain that the importation is integrated seamlessly into the novel. Or do more than nudge you gently about making sure that the narrative in including such incidents is not biased to the point that it will tip the reader off that this IS a real-life event. I’m not even going to remind you that, generally speaking, for such importations to work, the author needs to do quite a bit of character development for the real characters — which most real-character importers neglect to do, because they, after all, know precisely who they mean.

No, today, I’m going to concentrate on the other side of including the real, the way in which the Idol panelists used it: the phenomenon of including references to current events, pop culture references, etc. in a novel. The advice that utilizing such elements dates your work is older than the typewriter: Louisa May Alcott was warned to be wary about having characters go off to the Civil War, in fact, on the theory that it would be hard for readers born after it to relate to her characters.

Many, many writers forget just how long it takes a book to move from its author’s hands to a shelf in a bookstore: longer than a Congressional term of office, typically, not counting the time it takes to find an agent. Typically, an agent will ask a just-signed author to make revisions upon the book before sending it out, a process that, depending upon the author’s other commitments — like work, sleep, giving birth to quintuplets, what have you — might take a year or more. Then the agent sends out the book to editors, either singly or in a mass submission, and again, months may pass before they say yea or nay. This part of the process can be lengthy.

Even after an editor falls in love with a book, pushes it through the requisite editorial meetings, and makes an offer, it is extraordinarily rare for a book to hit the shelves less than a year after the contract is signed. Often, it is longer.

Think how dated a pop culture reference might become in that time. Believe me, agents and editors are VERY aware of just how quickly zeitgeist elements can fade — so seeing them in a manuscript sends up a barrage of warning flares. (Yes, even references to September 11th.)

About five years ago, I was asked to edit a tarot-for-beginners book. I have to say, I was a trifle reluctant to do it, even before I read it, because frankly, there are a LOT of books out there on the tarot, so the author was shooting for an already glutted market niche. (If memory serves, tarot books were at the time on the Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published list of books NOT to write.) So this book was heading for agents and editors with one strike already against it.

The second strike was a superabundance of references to the TV shows of the year 2001. In an effort to be hip, its author had chosen to use characters on the then-popular HBO show SEX & THE CITY to illustrate certain points. “In five years,” I said, “this will make your book obsolete. Could you use less time-bound examples?”

The author’s response can only be characterized as pouting. “But the show’s so popular! Everyone knows who these characters are!”

She stuck to her guns so thoroughly that I eventually declined to edit the book; I referred her elsewhere, and eventually, about a year and a half later, she managed to land an agent, who did manage, within the course of another year, to sell the book to a small publisher. The book came out at almost exactly the time as SEX & THE CITY went off the air.

The book did not see a second printing.

My point is, be careful about incorporating current events, especially political ones. Yes, I know: you can’t walk into a bookstore without seeing scads and scads of NF books on current events. Take a gander at the author bios of these books: overwhelmingly, current events books are written by journalists and the professors whom they interview. It is extraordinarily difficult to find a publisher for such a book unless the writer has a significant platform. Being President of Pakistan, for instance, or reporting on Hurricane Katrina for CNN.

One last point about pop or political culture references: if you do include them, double-check to make sure that you’ve spelled all of the names correctly. This is a mistake I see constantly as a contest judge, and it’s usually enough to knock an entry out of finalist consideration, believe it or not. Seriously. I once saw a quite-good memoir dunned for referring to a rap band as Run-DMV.

Half of you didn’t laugh at that, right? That joke would have slayed ’em in 1995. See what I mean about how fast pop culture references get dated?

Okay, my plane has finally arrived, so I am going to sign off now. Happy trails, everyone, and keep up the good work!

A major milestone, and the return of the Point-of-View Nazis!

I have two reasons to celebrate today: first, my major novel revision is in the mail, on the way to my agent (and they said a year’s worth of revisions couldn’t be done in a month!); second, this is my hundredth post on my new blog site! Hooray!

For those of you new to my ramblings, this might be a touch confusing, seeing the 1600 pages or so (figured in standard format, naturally) of material on this website. Until mid-July, I was the Resident Writer for the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association, dispensing advice on their website, before I struck out on my own. So while there are obviously more than hundred posts archived here, only the last hundred were written for here.

I’d like to ask two favors to mark the occasion. First, please do tell your writing friends that this blog is here; since it switched locations rather suddenly last summer (and the PNWA’s new Resident Writer would not allow me to post a goodbye message, or even my new URL, for quite some time), some readers got lost in the transition.

Second, if you have been reading for a while but have never posted a comment, please consider chiming in. Start a discussion; join a discussion; ask a question. The more I know about my readers, the better I can tailor the blog to fit their needs. I know a LOT of folks in the industry; if I don’t know the answer to your question, chances are good that I know someone who does.

Back to the day’s business. For the last few posts, I have been tossing around the term “Point-of-View Nazi” in passing, while discussing the differences between what is a hard-and-fast rule in the industry (like, say, 1-inch margins all around) and what is a matter of style (like, for instance, whether to put character thought in italics). As I’ve mentioned over the last few days, not every writing guru makes a sharp distinction between the two. Nor, typically, do agents and editors speaking at conferences make a point of telling listeners which of their rejection criteria are widely-regarded bloopers, and which merely their personal pet peeves.

And that can be very confusing to those on the querying trail, can’t it? We’re all left wondering if that agent’s diatribe about how swiftly she rejects submissions written in the first person plural means that:

(a) every agent in the industry feels the same way,
(b) the agent in question just tends to market to editors who prefer another type of narrative voice,
(c) the agent in question was in an MFA program with some really annoying writer who insisted upon writing in NOTHING but the second person plural, and she never wants to hear it again as long as she lives,
(d) a wandering Greek chorus attacked the agent when she was a child, so first person plural brings back all kinds of bad memories, or
(e) the agent just didn’t like THE VIRGIN SUICIDES much.

Unfortunately for us all, every single one of these options is equally plausible. The moral: choose your dogmas with care.

Which brings me to the garden variety Point-of-View Nazi, a fellow with whom long-time readers of the blog are already familiar. Typically, he’s the most strident voice in any “only an amateur would do THAT” crowd.

No, I did not invent the term: it’s fairly widely-known industry jargon for any self-styled writing expert who will tell you — and anyone else who will listen — that his particular stylistic preferences are the only ones any sane writer could possibly pick. And, contrary to the experience of anyone who has actually spent any time leafing through volumes in the fiction section of a relatively well-stocked bookstore, a Point-of-View Nazis will often, like the disparager of italics, insist that any manuscript that does not follow his dictates has the proverbial snowball in Hades’ chances of being published.

Sound familiar yet?

Allow me to define the term more specifically. A Point-of-View Nazi (POVN) is a reader — often a teacher, critic, agent, editor, or other person with authority over writers — who believes firmly that the ONLY way to write third-person-narrated fiction is to pick a single character in the book or scene (generally the protagonist) and report ONLY his or her (usually his) thoughts and sensations throughout the piece. Like first-person narration, this conveys only the internal experience of a single character, rather than several or all of the characters in the scene or book.

Now, of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this style of narration, inherently: it combines the advantages of a dispassionate narrator with the plotting and pacing plusses of a single perspective. It permits the author to sink deeply (or not) into the consciousness of a chosen character without losing the emotional distance of an omniscient narrator. Since no one else’s POV is depicted, it can render the later actions of other characters more surprising to the reader, which can in turn help build suspense and conflict on the page.

It is not, however, the only third-person narrative possibility — a fact that drives your garden-variety POVN mad with rage.

All of us have our own particular favorite narrative styles, naturally, and many of us have been known to lobby for their use. What distinguishes a POVN from a mere POV enthusiast is his active campaign to dissuade all other writers from EVER considering the inclusion of more than one POV in a third-person narrative.

Just ask one — trust me, he would be more than glad to tell you so. He would like multiple-consciousness narratives to be wiped from the face of the earth with all possible speed. He has been known to tell his students — or members of his writing group, or his clients, or the writers whom he edits or represents — that multiple POV narration in the third person is, to put it politely, terrible writing. It should be stamped out, by statute, if necessary. Feh.

So much for most of the fiction currently being published in the English-speaking world, I guess. And so much for Jane Austen and most of the illustrious third-person narrative-writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who used multiple perspectives to great effect.

I bring up our forebears advisedly, because one of the reasons that POVNs are so common is that in the post-World War II era, the prose stylings of the 18th and 19th centuries tended to be rejected as old-fashioned (and therefore bad) by writing teachers. “Downright Dickensian,” many a POVN has cried, covering her students’ first forays into fiction with gallons of red ink. “How can we possibly follow the story, with so many characters’ perspectives?”

I should stop here and make a distinction between the POVN and a good reader or editor who objects when a narrative that HAS been sticking to a single POV suddenly wanders into another character’s head. That can be genuinely confusing to any reader, regardless of preexisting belief systems. If a book has been looking out of the protagonist’s eyes, so to speak, for 147 pages, it is a little jarring for the reader to be abruptly introduced to another character’s thoughts. The implication is that the protagonist has magically become psychic, and should be benefiting, along with the reader, from hearing the thoughts of others.

A POVN, however, is not merely the kind of well-meaning soul who will point out this type of slip to aspiring writers. No, a POVN will jump upon ANY instance of multiple perspective, castigating it as inherently unacceptable, even unpublishable writing — and will rather smugly inform the author that she has broken an ironclad writing rule by doing it. They believe it, too. Many of today’s more adamant POVNs are merely transmitting the lessons they were taught in their first good writing classes: for years, many English professors set it down as a general rule that multiple POVs were inherently distracting in a third-person narrative.

Take that, CATCH-22.

Pop quiz, all of you who have read my posts over the last few days: is the POVN’s view on perspective a matter of format, and thus a rule to be observed religiously, or is this a matter of style, to be weighed over thoughtfully while deciding what narrative voice would tell your story best? (Hint: the POVNs will tell you it is one, and I will tell you it is the other.)

Personally, I think the focus of the narrative voice is a stylistic choice, up to the writer, rather than something that can be imposed like the Code of Hammurabi on every novel wavering on human fingertips, waiting to be written. I like to read an author’s work and consider whether her individual writing choices serve her story well, rather than rejecting it outright because of a preconceived notion of what is and isn’t possible.

To be fair, though, as an inveterate reader of literary fiction, I have a special affection for authors whose talent is so vast that they can pull off breaking a major writing commandment from time to time. Alice Walker’s use of punctuation alone in THE COLOR PURPLE would have caused many rigid rule-huggers to dismiss her writing on page 1, but the result is, I think, brilliant. (Fortunately, she already had an agent when she wrote it.)

Similarly, I had always been told that it is a serious mistake to let a protagonist feel sorry for himself for very long, as self-pity quickly becomes boring, but Annie Proulx showed us both a protagonist AND a love interest who feel sorry for themselves for virtually the entirety of THE SHIPPING NEWS (and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, come to think of it), with great success.

And so on. I love to discover a writer so skilled at her craft that she can afford to bend a rule or two. Heaven forfend that every writer’s voice should start to sound alike — or that writing should all start to sound as though it dropped from a single pen.

Which is precisely what hard-and-fast rules of narrative style tend to produce, across a writing population. One effect of the reign of the POVNs — whose views go through periods of being very popular indeed, then fall into disuse, only to rise anew — has been the production of vast quantities of stories and novels where the protagonist’s POV and the narrator’s are astonishingly similar.

(And, wouldn’t you know it, those POVs are overwhelmingly upper-middle class, college-educated thinkers rather than doers. The kind of people who might, say, have the time and resources to go through a low-residency MFA program. Astonishing coincidence, eh? Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the POVN’s teachers were also the ones who kept barking, “Write what you know!” could it?)

The POVNs have also given us a whole slew of books where the other characters are EXACTLY as they appear to the protagonist: no more, no less. The rise of television and movies, where the camera is usually an impersonal narrator of the visibly obvious, has also contributed to this kind of “What you see is what you get” characterization, if you’ll forgive my quoting the late great Flip Wilson in this context.

The result: often, I find myself asking while reading a manuscript, “Why wasn’t this book just written in the first person, if we’re not going to gain any significant insight into the other characters?”

I suspect that I am not the only reader who addresses such questions to an unhearing universe in the dead of night, but for a POVN, the answer is abundantly obvious. The piece in question focused upon a single POV because there is no other way to write a third-person scene.

Tomorrow, I shall, I suspect, take issue with this. Keep up the good work!

My class on — you guessed it! — manuscript format

As those of you who read yesterday’s post already know, I spent this last weekend at the Flathead River Writers’ Conference — a big hello to those of you whom I met there who are checking in to the Author! Author! blog for the first time. And to everyone else, too, of course.

For those of you new to the blog, the rules of this little online community are very simple: since the primary purpose of this forum is to help writers navigate the often difficult and confusing waters of the publishing industry, I have tried to make it as easy for writers to find answers to their questions as possible. Since there is a LOT of information on this site, please feel free to peruse the category headings at right (and for those, thanks to the fabulous Brian Tanaka, who set up this lovely website in record time this summer!) or send me questions via the COMMENT link at the bottom of every post.

Seriously, I DO want you to post questions — I would MUCH rather that you asked me, say, a vexing formatting question BEFORE you sent out a submission to an agent than after. My readers post such good questions that I often write entire blogs — or even series of blogs — in response to them, so it honestly is true that this blog runs on reader input. Also, feel free to engage in discussions via the COMMENT link — I want this to be a community where far-flung writers may exchange views on our common craft.

Since I have harped so much on standard format for manuscripts in this forum, it was rather a surprise to me to realize when I was prepping for my conference class that I actually had not posted on it since June! High time for me to revisit it, then.

Every time I teach a class on manuscript formatting, I am amazed afresh at how few writers — good ones, well-educated ones, the kind who are very conscientious about learning as much as they can about what agents and editors like to see in a submission — have been taught that there IS a standard format for manuscripts, much less what it entails. Properly formatting a manuscript is yet another one of those magical skills that the industry just seems to assume that every writer is born possessing.

But we’re not, and I, for one, don’t think it’s fair to judge writers by standards that are not widely known. So please, long-time readers, think of my incessant (okay, once every few months) harping on the subject my own small effort to make these standards as widely known as possible.

So, for those of you who do not already know: standard manuscript for manuscripts is NOT the same as standard format for books, and agency screeners, agents, editors, and contest judges are fairly uniformly taught to regard submissions formatted in any other way as either unpolished (if they’re feeling generous) or unprofessional (if they’re not). In either case, an improperly-formatted manuscript seldom gets a fair reading by the aforementioned, and often is not read at all.

And why? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: because agencies and publishing houses get so many submissions that their PRIMARY goal is to weed out the one they are reading at the moment. The faster they can do that, the better for them.

Don’t give ’em half a chance. The more professional your manuscript looks, the more likely it is to be taken seriously by people within the industry. Period.

Here are the rules of standard format — and no, NONE of them are negotiable:

(1) All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced, with at least one-inch margins on all sides of the page, on 20-lb paper or better.

No exceptions, unless someone in the industry (or a contest’s rules) SPECIFICALLY ask you to do otherwise.

The reason for the nice paper is that a submission often passes through three or four hands in the course of its road to acceptance. Lower-quality paper will wilt after a reading or two; 20-lb or better will not. Bright white, please, and use a new printer cartridge: you want the black-white contrast to be as sharp as possible.

(2) All manuscripts are printed on ONE side of the page.
Again, unless you are asked to do otherwise — and yes, this IS criminally wasteful of paper. The entire publishing industry is one vast paper-wasting enterprise, and there doesn’t seem to be much that we writers can do about it. To make matters worse, most agencies do not even recycle…

I assure you, if I ran the universe, this would not be the case. Also, writers would all be awarded seven extra hours in a week, be given free domestic help, and a freshly-baked pie on Truman Capote’s birthday every year. But since the unhappy reality is that I do NOT run the universe, we all just have to live with it.

(3) The text should be left justified ONLY.
A lot of writers squirm about this one. They want to believe that a professional manuscript looks exactly like a printed book, but the fact is, it shouldn’t. Yes, books feature text that runs in straight vertical lines along both side margins, and yes, your word processing program will replicate that, if you ask it nicely. But don’t: the straight margin should be the left one.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New.
These are plain, not-too-pretty fonts, but they are in fact the standards of the publishing industry; it’s a throwback to the reign of the typewriter, which came in two typefaces, pica (a Courier equivalent) and elite (Times). As I’ve explained before, queries and manuscripts printed in other fonts are simply not taken as seriously.

If you want a specific font for your finished book, you should NOT use it in your manuscript, even if you found a very cool way to make your Elvin characters’ dialogue show up in Runic. The typeface ultimately used in the published book is a matter of discussion between you and your future editor — or, even more frequently, a decision made by the publishing house without the author’s input at all. If you try to illustrate the fabulousness of your desired typeface now, you run the risk of your manuscript being dismissed as unprofessional.

If you write screenplays, you may ONLY use Courier. Most screenplay agents will not read even the first page of a script in another typeface — which means that most contest judges will follow suit.

(5) No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the ENTIRE manuscript in the same.

Industry standard is 12-point. Again, no exceptions, INCLUDING YOUR TITLE PAGE.
There is literally no reason, short of including words in languages like Greek that have different scripts, to deviate from this. If you are a writer who likes to have different voices presented in different typefaces, or who chooses boldface for emphasis, a submission is not a forum where you can express those preferences freely. Sorry. (See disclaimer above about proprietorship of the universe.)

(6) Do not use boldface anywhere but on the title page.
You may place your title in boldface, if you like, but that’s it. Nothing else in the manuscript should be in bold.

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered.
This one is generally an automatic rejection offense, if violated. Few non-felonious offenses irk the professional manuscript reader (including yours truly, if I’m honest about it) more than an unnumbered submission — it ranks up there on their rudeness scale with kicking someone’s grandmother and beginning a query letter with, “Dear Agent.”

Why do they hate it so much? Gravity, my friends, gravity. Because manuscripts are not bound, and they have been known to get dropped from time to time.

Trust me, no employee currently working within any aspect of the publishing industry is going to be willing to waste twenty minutes figuring out from context which unnumbered page you wanted to follow which.

The standard way to paginate is in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page… of which, see point 8.

(8) Each page should a standard slug line in the header, listing AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/ABBREVIATED TITLE/page #.
The safest place for this is left-justified, but you can get away with right-justifying it as well. And the header, for those of you who don’t know (hey, I’m trying to cram as much information into this as possible), is the 1-inch margin at the top of the page.

(9) The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page.
That’s twelve single-spaced lines, incidentally. The chapter name (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the first line of the first page, but then nothing should appear until a third of the way down the page.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.
A surprisingly high percentage of aspiring writers (I’m told it’s around 92%) seem to be unaware that ANY submission of ANY length (including contest entries) should include a title page. On the bright side, this means that if you are industry-savvy enough to include a professionally-formatted title page, your submission automatically looks like a top percentile ranker to professional eyes from the moment it’s pulled out of the envelope.

If you do not know how to format a proper title page (and yes, Virginia, there IS a special format for manuscripts), please see the Your Title Page category at right.

(11) The beginning of each paragraph should be indented five spaces.
Yes, I know that published books — particularly mysteries, I notice — often begin chapters and sections without indentation. Trust me, that was the editor’s choice, not the author’s, and copying the style here might get your work knocked out of consideration.

Why? Well, to people in the publishing industry, non-indented paragraphs are the hallmark of (ugh) business correspondence, which is to say that they regard it as a symptom of creeping illiteracy. Just don’t do it.

So, pop quiz, to see if all of you are getting just how seriously folks in the industry take formatting choices: which do you think is going to strike them as more literate, a query letter in business format (no indentations, skipping a line between paragraphs, the whole shebang left-justified) or one in correspondence format (indented paragraphs, date and signature halfway across the page)?

Uh-huh. Don’t you wish that someone had told you that before you sent out your first query letter?

(12) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.
This one is for all of you bloggers and business letter-writers out there. The whole darned manuscript should be double-spaced, and paragraphs are all indented, so there is no need to skip a line to indicate a paragraph break. The ONLY exception is that you may skip an extra line to indicate a section break in the text.

(13) Words in foreign languages should be italicized.
Including Elvish. You don’t want the agent of your dreams to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

You may also use italics for emphasis, book titles, song titles, etc. — and just so you know, anyone who follows AP style will tell you to underline these. DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE TEMPTERS: AP style is for journalism, not book publishing. They are different fields, and have different standards.

In a submission for the book publishing industry, NOTHING should be underlined. Why? The reason is actually very practical: underlining uses more ink than italics in the book production process. Thus, italics are cheaper.

(14) All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.
Here is how charmingly archaic the industry is: this was for the benefit of the manual typesetters. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

Again, be warned, those of you who have been taught by teachers schooled in the AP style: what they will tell you to do is write out only numbers under 10. Yes, this is true for newspaper articles, where space is at a premium, but it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG in a manuscript.

Did I mention it was wrong? And that I have seen contest entries knocked out of finalist consideration over this particular issue?

(15) Dashes should be doubled — hyphens are single, as in self-congratulatory.
Dashes should also have spaces at each end — rather than—like this.
Again, I know: an AP-trained teacher will tell you to use the longer emdash, as will the Chicago Manual of Style. However, both are incorrect, as far as standard format for submissions to the publishing industry are concerned.

I fully admit that doubling the dashes is a monumental pain. Books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy; many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them, and any Microsoft product will automatically change a doubled dash to the longer emdash.

But standard format is invariable upon this point — and heck, MS Word’s grammar checker has more than once told me to replace the correct form of there, their, or they’re with an incorrect one. Who are you gonna believe, me or Bill Gates?

Assuming you decided to believe me, go back and change it. It’s a pain, true, but is it really worth annoying an agent over?

(16) The use of ANY brand name should be accompanied by the trademark symbol, as in Kleenex™.
If you catch an agent under the age of 30, or one who doesn’t have a graduate degree, you may get away without including the trademark symbol, but legally, you are not allowed to use a trademarked name without it. Writers — yes, and publishing houses, too — have actually been sued over this within the last couple of years, so be careful about it.

There you have it: literally every page of text you submit to an agent, editor, or literary contest (yes, including the synopsis) should be in standard format. Trust me, your work will be treated better if you follow these rules. Think of it as a gesture of courtesy to the new community you hope to join, an indication that you have taken the time to learn their strange ways and traditions and are making the effort to adhere to them.

And in an industry where accept/reject decisions are often made on a split-second basis, courtesy definitely pays. A manuscript in standard format looks to the critical eye like a couple dressed in formal wear for a black-tie event: yes, it is possible that the hosts will be too nice to toss them out if they show up in a run-of-the-mill casual suits or jeans, but the properly-attired couple will be admitted happily. By dressing as the hosts wished, the couple is showing respect to the event and the people who asked them to attend.

Yes, I know that I sound like your mother, but nevertheless, it’s true. Dress your work appropriately, and it will be a welcome guest at an agency or publishing house.

And, as always, keep up the good work!

Manuscript Revision V, and the dreaded summer sabbatical

Well, it’s official: the annual exodus of the publishing world from Manhattan has begun. From now until after Labor Day, it’s a no-man’s land, a desert where underpaid agency interns rule the office for a couple of weeks and it’s well-nigh impossible for an editor who has fallen in love with a book to pull together enough bodies for an editorial meeting to acquire it.

Not everyone in the industry is on vacation, of course, but most are. Let’s just say that if you yodeled in my agency right now, the echo would astonish you.

What does this mean for writers, in practical terms? Well, agencies are not going to be getting around to a whole lot of submissions over the next couple of weeks, so if you haven’t sent your post-conference queries or submissions out, and the agent you’re querying isn’t low man on the totem pole at the agency (often the one who is left behind to guard the fort in August), you might want to take a couple of weeks to revise before sending it. And if you HAVE sent a submission, it’s very, very unlikely that you will hear back before Labor Day week.

Yes, even if you sent it a month ago.

And yes, they’re doing this to everybody. And oh, yes, they ARE aware that they’re dealing with people’s dreams. Doesn’t stop ‘em from going on vacation.

Back to matters that we writers CAN control. On Wednesday, I was talking about the importance of freshness in your manuscript, discussing what the industry does and does not consider fresh enough to get excited about in a submission. Over the next couple of days, I want to discuss factors that can kill the perception of freshness faster than an agency screener can shout, “NEXT!”

To introduce you to the first good-feeling assassin, let me tell you a story.

In the mid-1990s, a professor at Harvard Law School took a sabbatical and joined the faculty at Georgetown for a year. After he had been installed in his new office for a week, he realized that he was lonely. He’d had tenure for so long at Harvard that he no longer remembered what it had been like to be the new guy in the faculty lounge — and it was miserable.

One day, determined to make friends, he walked into the faculty lounge, sat down next to another law professor, and introduced himself. His new acquaintance seemed friendly enough, but the Harvard professor was pretty rusty at small talk. When they had exhausted discussion about the latest Supreme Court ruling (not too exciting, but hey, they were law professors), he cast his mind back to the last time he had been the new guy, back in the early 1970s, and resuscitated a question that had worked like a charm in the faculty lounge then: “So, what does your wife do?”

The Georgetown professor broke into a fit of uncontrollable giggles, as if the Harvard prof had just made the funniest joke in the world.

The Harvard professor didn’t know whether to be piqued or amused. “I’m sorry — I don’t get the joke. Doesn’t your wife work?”

“Oh, she does,” the Georgetown prof replied dryly, fixing our hero with a glance of singular disdain. “You might possibly have heard of her work, in fact.” The Harvard professor had been talking for the last half an hour to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s husband.

Now, the story may be apocryphal (although I had it from someone who claimed to have been the first professor’s research assistant), but the moral is clear: when speaking to strangers, it behooves you to watch what you say, because you do not necessarily know what their backgrounds or beliefs are. Keep those feet far away from your mouth.

Translation for those submitting to agencies or publishing houses: NEVER assume that your reader will share your sex, gender (yes, they mean different things, technically: sex is biological, gender is learned), ethnicity, generation, social class, educational background, sociopolitical beliefs, political party affiliation, views about the Gulf War, or familiarity with pop culture. Because, you see, it is entirely possible that the person who will end up screening your submission will not be akin to you in one or more of these respects.

Nothing hits the reject pile faster than a manuscript that has offended its reader — unless it is one that an agency screener believes will offend book buyers.

In many ways, this is counterintuitive, isn’t it? As everyone who has ever walked into a bookstore knows, controversy can fuel book sales tremendously. (Well, okay: everyone who has ever walked into a bookstore EXCEPT my publisher knows this.) Once controversial works are out, they tend to sell well — readers, bless their hearts, will often buy books they know will make them angry enough to debate. However, writing on controversial subjects often has a substantially harder time finding a home with an agent – and rather seldom wins contests, I have noticed.

I am not saying that dull, safe writing on mainstream subjects invariably carries off all the trophies — far from it. You can write about child abuse, neglect, murder, and rape until you’re blue in the face without most contest judges becoming offended, and certainly without raising a blush in the average agent. We’ve all read so much about these grisly topics that while the individual stories remain shocking, the concept isn’t; at this point, they’ve become such familiar scenarios that the trick is presenting them in a fresh way. You can write about losing your virginity, cheating on your taxes, and defrauding investors — and agents and editors will merely want to hear how your take on these once-taboo subjects is different from what’s already on the market.

You cannot, however, get away with presuming that any given reader (read: agent, editor, or contest judge) will share your political or social beliefs, however — or, for that matter, anything else in your background or mindset. You can try, like the Harvard professor, to pull off assuming that everybody else’s wife is like your own, but like him, you run the risk of being dismissed as ignorant, insensitive, or worse.

I am most emphatically NOT suggesting that you gut your work of any controversial content, nor am I talking about (and I hate this term) political correctness. I am talking about its being very much in your interests to explain your views thoroughly for the sake of readers who might not share your life experiences or views.

Or who, alternatively, might be VERY familiar with your subject matter, just as the unknown Georgetown professor was unexpectedly knee-deep in Supreme Court lore. Make sure that your submission is respectful of readers at both ends of the familiarity spectrum.

Recognize that your point of view is, in fact, a point of view, and as such, naturally requires elucidation in order to be accessible to all readers.

And do be especially aware that your submission may as easily be read by a 23-year-old recent college graduate with a nose ring and three tattoos as by a 55-year-old agent in Armani. Ditto for contest entries: I can’t tell you how many entries I’ve screened as a judge that automatically assumed that every reader would be a Baby Boomer, with that set of life experiences. As a Gen Xer with parents born long before the Baby Boom, I obviously read these entries differently than an older (or younger) person would. As would a judge, agent, or editor in her late 60s.

See what I mean?

We all have different takes on what we read, and, perhaps more importantly for the sake of your book, different ideas of what is marketable, as well as notions about to whom it might be sold. If an agent or editor thinks that your take on a subject might offend the book’s target market, s/he is unlikely to fall in love with your book enough to want to pick it up.

There are a few simple ways you can minimize the possibility of triggering either the highly sensitive oh-no-it-will-alienate-readers response or an agency screener’s personal hackles. Avoid clichés, for starters, as those tend to be tied to specific eras, regions, and even television watching habits. They date you, and in any case, as most agents will tell you at length if you give them the opportunity, the point of submission is to convey the author’s thoughts, not the common wisdom.

If you can get feedback on your submission from a few readers of different backgrounds than your own, you can easily weed out references that do not work universally before you send the work out. Most writers learn this pro’s trick only very late in the game, but the earlier you can incorporate this practice into your writing career, the better.

Does this seem inordinately time-consuming? It need not be, if you are selective about your readers and give them to understand that they should be flattered that you want their input.

I speak from experience here: I do practice what I preach. I routinely run every chapter of my novels past a wonderful writer who is not only 20 years older than I am, but also grew up in a different country. When I am writing about the West Coast, I garner input from readers raised out East. My female protagonists always traipse under the eyes of both female and male first readers. Why? So I am absolutely sure that my writing is conveying exactly what I want it to say to a broad spectrum of readers.

Third, approach your potential readers with respect, and keep sneering at those who disagree with you to a minimum. (Which is surprisingly common in manuscripts.) I’m not suggesting that you iron out your personal beliefs to make them appear mainstream — agents and editors tend to be smart people who understand that the world is a pretty darned complex place. But watch your tone, particularly in nonfiction, lest you become so carried away in making your case that you forget that a member of your honorable opposition may well be judging your work.

This is a circumstance, like so many others, where politeness pays well. Your mother was right about that, you know.

Finally, accept that you cannot control who will read your work after you mail it to an agency or a publishing house. If your romance novel about an airline pilot happens to fall onto the desk of someone who has recently experienced major turbulence and resented it, there’s really nothing you can do to assuage her dislike. Similarly, if your self-help book on resolving marital discord is screened by a reader who had just signed divorce papers, no efforts on your part can assure a non-cynical read. And, as long-term readers of this blog already know, a tongue just burned on a latté often spells disaster for the next manuscript its owner reads.

Concentrate on what you can control: clarity, aptness of references, and making your story or argument appeal to as broad an audience as possible.

Keep up the good work!

Scoring Criteria, Part XI: Logic, Provoking the Genuine Laugh, and the Ta Da! Factor

Hello, readers —

Today really will be the last installment of my series on literary contest judging criteria, I promise. This topic has been hard to leave, because it really is a microcosm of how books are viewed by publishing professionals. However, I promised you blogs on how to write a bio, and those you shall have.

Back to Presentation category problems. Another common problem in contest entries, one that affects both coherence and continuity, is skipping logical steps in arguments or plots, assuming that the reader will simply fill in the gaps for herself. This results in logic that appears from the reader’s POV to run like this:

1. Socrates was a man.

2. Socrates was wise.

3. Therefore, men who want to be wise should not wear socks.

Clearly, there is some logic missing here, right? In order to prove Proposition 3, the writer would first have to show that (a) Socrates did not wear socks (I have no idea if this is true, but hey, Greece is a warm country, so bear with me here), (b) non-sock wearing had some tangible and demonstrable effect upon his mental processes that cannot be explained by other contributing factors, such as years of study or having a yen for conversation, and (c) the bare ankle experiment’s success was not dependent upon some exogenous variable, such as the fact that socks would have looked really stupid worn with a toga. It would make sense, too, to establish that Socrates is a proper role model for modern men to emulate, as opposed to scruffy old sock-wearing moral thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps the book could even include a compare-and-contrast of the intellectual achievements of famous sock-wearing individuals versus those of the air-blessed ankles. By the end of such a disquisition, the reader might well become converted to the author’s premise, and cast his footwear from him with a cry of liberation.

Think this seems like a ridiculous example of skipped steps, one that could not possibly occur in a real manuscript? Oh, my poor friend, bless your innocent eyes: you’ve obviously never been a judge in a nonfiction contest or advised an undergraduate thesis.

In nonfiction, I can do no better than to refer my faithful readers to Nietzsche’s THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA as an illustration of this phenomenon. (I know, I know; I’m on a philosophy kick today, but it’s such a sterling example that I simply can’t resist.) Following the narrative of this book is like watching a mountain goat leap from crag to crag on a blasted mountainside; the goat may be able to get from one promontory to another with no trouble, but those of us tagging behind actually have to walk up and down the intervening gullies. The connective logic between one point and the next is frequently far from clear, or even downright wacko — and in a book that proposes that the writer and reader both might be logically superior to other people, that’s a serious coherence problem.

Okay, Nietzsche allegedly wrote the work in a three-day frenzy while confined to an insane asylum, so perhaps it is not fair to expect world-class coherence from him. The average literary contest entrant, however, does not have so good an excuse.

If a judge ever has the opportunity to write “connective logic?” in one of your margins, your presentation score is sunk. Make sure you’re filling in the relevant gullies.

Nietzsche did one thing in THUS SPAKE ZARTHUSTRA that would help him win back points in the Presentation category: include genuinely funny lines. It’s actually quite an amusing book, coherence problems aside (and not only because of them), and very, very few contest entries are funny. A funny manuscript, or even a funny joke in a serious manuscript, feels like a gift to your average tired contest judge. A deliberately-provoked laugh from a judge can result in the reward of many Presentation points, and often additional points in the Voice category as well.

Notice that I specified a DELIBERATELY-PROVOKED laugh. An unintentional laugh, what moviemakers call “a bad laugh” because it springs forth from the audience when the filmmakers do not want it to occur, will cost points. We’ve all recognize bad laughs in movies (my personal favorite was in the most recent remake of LITTLE WOMEN: Jo, played by Winona Ryder, has sold her long, lovely hair in order to help the family, and one of her sisters cries out, “Oh, Jo! Your one beauty.” The theatre positively rocked with laughter, because Ms. Ryder possesses the kind of face that artists over the centuries have willingly mortgaged their souls in order to depict accurately), but literally the only way for an author to discover them in her own book is to have someone else read it.

Do not, whatever you do, make the extremely common mistake of including guffawing onlookers to mark where the reader is supposed to laugh, as that will cost you points as well. This is another one that writers seem to have picked up from movies or television: whenever a joke appears in the dialogue, the reader is told that someone nearby laughs in response. Contrary to the author’s apparent expectation, to an experienced professional reader, this additional information detracts from the humor of the scene, rather than adds to it; the bigger the onlookers’ reaction, the less funny it seems.

Why? Well, to a judge, agent, or editor who has been around the block a few times, the onlooker’s guffaw is a flag that the author has some doubt about whether the joke is actually funny. It’s a marker of discomfort, a peek behind the scenes into the writer’s mind, distracting from the story at hand. And once the reader suspects that the writer isn’t amused, it’s only a small step to the reader’s not being amused, either.

The moral: you can lead a reader to funny, but you can’t make him laugh.

Finally, there is one more criterion that falls into the Presentation category, what I call the Ta da! factor. It’s hard to define precisely, because it’s when a manuscript exudes the sort of mercurial charisma that Elinor Glyn dubbed It when it occurs in human beings. (Thus Clara Bow, the It Girl.) Like It, the Ta da! factor makes a manuscript shine, practically demanding that the judge give the entry high marks. In fact, a healthy dose of the Ta da! factor might even prompt a judge to fudge a little in the other categories, so as to assure the entry a point total that will launch it into the finalist round.

To achieve the Ta da! factor — well, if I could tell you that, I would chuck the blogging business entirely and establish myself as the world’s most expensive writing guru. I do know that mere professionalism is not enough. Yes, all of the technical aspects of the work need to be right, as well as the execution. The writing style needs to be strong and distinct, and it helps a lot if the story is compelling. Beyond that, it’s a little hard to say how precisely the Ta da! factor gives a manuscript its sheen, just as it’s difficult to pin down just what makes a great first line of a book so great. Perhaps it’s rhythm, and a certain facility for telling detail:

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and four chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train.”

That’s the opening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Truman Capote’s masterpiece that incidentally someone really ought to make into a movie some day, because the Audrey Hepburn version bears only a passing resemblance to it. (For instance, the original novella concerns a friendship between a woman and man in their late teens; the movie is about a love story between a man and a woman in, if you look at George Peppard charitably, their late thirties. Oh, and the endings are quite different.) But just look at the use of language here. You could sing this opening; it’s positively bursting with the Ta da! factor.

Perhaps, too, a certain sense of showmanship is required. Bask in this one:

“He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. There was no tallying the gifts of Charvet handkerchiefs, art moderne ash-trays, monogrammed dressing-gowns, gold key-chains, and cigarette-cases of thin wood, inlaid with views of Parisian comfort stations, that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for with the money of unwitting husbands, which is acceptable any place in the world.”

That, my friends, is the opening to Dorothy Parker’s DUSK BEFORE FIREWORKS, and let me tell you, if a short story like that fell onto my desk as a contest judge, I would not only shower it with the highest possible marks (yes, even though I do not agree with all of Ms. Parker’s punctuation choices in this excerpt); I would nag the category chair about pushing it into the finalist round. I would go to the awards ceremony, cheer if it won, and make a point of meeting the author. I might even introduce the author to my agent. Because, my friends, it exudes the aura of the Ta da! factor as distinctly as a Buddhist temple exudes incense.

I mention this, not to cow you with examples of writing by extremely talented writers, but to fill you with hope, after this long discourse on all the technical ways you can gain or lose points in the contest judging process. Ultimately, talent does supersede almost every other consideration, as long as the work is professionally presented.

This is not to say that you should not go to great lengths to avoid making the point-costing mistakes I have pointed out in the last two weeks — you should, because genuinely talented writers’ work is knocked out of competition (and into agents’ rejection piles) all the time for technical reasons. When talent is properly presented, though, the results are magical.

A few years ago, a member of my writing group, a mystery writer, submitted a chapter, as we all did, for the group to read. In this draft (we has seen earlier ones), the first two paragraphs were gaspingly beautiful, so full of the atmosphere of the Sierra Nevada mountains that I not only to this day picture his opening in my mind as clearly as a movie — I feel that I was actually there. After reading this opening, the group grew rather quiet, so we could all chew on the imagery, the sentence structure for a while. It was so imbued with the Ta da! factor that there hardly seemed to be any point in discussing the rest of his chapter.

“One of the miracles of talent,” Mme. de Staël tells us, “is the ability to knock your readers out of their own egoism.” (Another favorite writer of mine; every woman who writes should read her brilliant novel CORINNE at some point. She wrote it in 1807, but apart from the travelogue sections, it’s still fresh as piping-hot cinnamon rolls today.) The Ta da! factor does just that, grabs the reader’s attention and simply insists upon this book’s being read, right now.

Under the sway of all of the publishing fads continually buffeting us, it’s all too easy for writers to forget what power really good writing has. If only the publication of a truly exciting book were taken up with the verve and intensity that the media has devoted to the controversy over James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. “But is it well written?” the commentators should cry, and then go into questions of factual accuracy.

Publishing fads, like fashions in beauty, come and go. Talent doesn’t. Just as so many of the actors held up as exemplars of beauty now would not have been considered especially attractive in, say, the Italian Renaissance, or even a hundred years ago, I believe that many of the books published today will not be considered essential reading a hundred years from now. But the work of some authors — Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Mme. de Staël, for instance — has something about it that elevates it above the passing fad, just as there are some actors who, it is perfectly obvious to us all, would have been considered absolutely lovely in any period of human history.

“Oh, Jo! Your one beauty!” notwithstanding.

Keep your chins up, my friends, through all the hard work of perfecting your manuscripts and contest entries; you’re toiling in a noble vineyard. Real talent is not necessarily measured in the short term. Keep up the good work.

 

– Anne Mini

Scoring Criteria, Part X: Scoring Criteria, Part X: Continuity, Coherence, and the Big Surprise

Hello, readers —

Today, I think, will be the last installment of my series on what contest judges use as evaluation criteria; I want to move on to my long-promised tutorial on how to write an author bio. Like so much else, constructing an author bio is a skill that every writer is expected to have in her tool bag, regardless of what else she writes. I don’t want you to get blindsided by this routine request down the line, so I’ll show you how to write one.

Yesterday, I talked about how issues of coherence and continuity can cost entries points in the Presentation category, including a spirited complaint about how movies and television prompt us not to explain motivations and to perpetuate clichés. I pointed out how the good writer should be wary of the unanswered question the story may raise for the reader, particularly if it is a rather obvious one. I implied, and none too gently, that watching low-quality screenwriting in action has led many writers to be lazy on these points.

It serves me right, therefore, to have seen a very good movie last night that prompted a very, very big unanswered question. Screenwriters everywhere have my apologies: maybe it has something to do with the medium. Thank you very much for providing me with such a marvelous example of how unanswered questions can vitiate even the best-crafted story.

 

The film was LOVE LIZA, with the generally excellent Philip Seymour Hoffman (of CAPOTE fame; I still haven’t recovered from THAT screenplay’s changing the identity of the murderer from the one who committed the bulk of the mayhem in the book IN COLD BLOOD) and the dependably wonderful Kathy Bates. As the movie makes clear over and over, the title refers to the closing of a letter — so if you’re wondering why the title is missing the grammatically necessary comma in the middle, you’re in good company.

Maybe it’s a command.

The approximately two-minute silence that opens the film (I didn’t realize at first that I should be clocking it, so pardon my imprecision) let the viewer know that this was going to be Art with a capital A, so I settled in for a good, old-fashioned depressing film about the human experience. And boy, did I get it: the protagonist (Hoffman), who has just lost his wife to suicide, takes up sniffing gasoline and related petroleum products with a vim that most people reserve for the first course of Thanksgiving dinner. So engaged is he in mourning-through-inhalants that he cannot manage to open the suicide note his wife left for him, cleverly hidden under the pillow of a man who obviously thinks laundering sheets is for sissies. Because he’s afraid that the letter will blame him in some way that he cannot imagine (it’s hard to imagine much with a gasoline-soaked rag clutched to your face, I would guess), he carries the note with him everywhere he goes for most of the film — and believe me, he gets around.

Okay, a quick quiz for all of you novelists out there: what’s going to happen in the final scene? What, in fact, did we know was going to happen in the final scene as soon as he did not open the letter the first time it appeared?

But as I say, this was a good film, so I was willing to waive objections on this point. However, the moment he slit the envelope open, my writer’s mind went haywire. Why, I asked myself, would a woman bent upon doing herself in within the next minute or two have bothered to fold up the note and stuff it in an envelope? She and her husband lived alone; he was equally likely to be the first to see it if she had left it unfolded on the kitchen counter as hidden under a pillow in an envelope.

Those of you who read yesterday’s post already know the answer, don’t you? BECAUSE THE PLOT REQUIRED IT, that’s why — how could the protagonist tote around the Visible Symbol of His Loss for an hour and a half UNLESS it was in a sealed envelope? Evidently, the late lamented Liza was considerate enough to have read the script before doing herself in.

Thus was yet another good story well presented scuttled by the unanswered question. Remember, “because the plot requires it” is never a valid motivation; stories are invariably improved by ferreting out the answers before showing the work to an audience.

In this case, for instance, if someone — say, the unbiased reader I always recommend you show your work before loosing it upon the world — had asked the screenwriter the unanswered question, a genuinely touching scene could have been added to the movie: the letter is sitting on the kitchen counter (or under the unwashed pillowcase still, if you prefer); the protagonist takes those full two minutes at the top of the movie to become aware enough of his environment to find it, and when he does, the prospect of being blamed terrifies him so much that he uses kitchen tongs to stuff it into a Manila envelope, unread. Then HE could seal it, thus giving further resonance to his inevitable decision to unseal it in the final scene.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a demonstration of what a good editor can do for your story. Or a good writing group, or indeed any truly talented first reader. Not only can outside eyes alert you to problems you might not otherwise catch; they can help suggest specific ways to make your book better.

Okay, time to move on from unanswered questions. Often, writers fail to provide information necessary to understanding a situation until after it has occurred, resulting in many lost points in contest scoring and rending of readers’ garments. One of the most common of lapses is the post-explained joke, a surprise or one-liner that is only funny if the reader knows certain information in advance — but the reader is not given that information in advance. There are vast graveyards of jokes that died hideous and protracted deaths because their authors did not set them up properly — and then sought to save the situation by adding a line or a paragraph of explanation afterward.

I don’t quite get this — does the author intend that the joke will be funny the SECOND time someone reads the book? Or is it in response to some kind reader having pointed out that the joke sans explanation was not at all funny? Or — and a creeping sensation up my spine tells me that this is the most plausible explanation of all — has the author just read over that particular scene so many times that the time-space continuum in which a reader would experience it has dissolved as a consideration?

However it may be, it’s a sure way to lose points in the Presentation category.

Jokes, alas, are not the only writing phenomena where the set-up tends to come after the fact. I tremble to tell you this, but often, big surprises pop up in entries without any prior indication that (a) this is not the outcome the characters were expecting, (b) this was not the logical outcome of events thus far, and/or (c) how such a turn of events might affect other people or events in the book.

“But it’s a SURPRISE,” writers will often whine when people like me (kindly souls devoted to improving the art form) gently suggest that perhaps a skillful writer might want to reveal some inkling of (a), (b), or (c) in advance, so the reader’s sense of the import of the moment will be greater. “I don’t want to give the whole thing away.”

Obviously, a writer who says this is not thinking of doing as my ilk and I advise, introducing the relevant information in a subtle manner, perhaps even piecemeal, in the pages prior to the big revelation. I say obviously, because if she were thinking of being subtle about it at all, the surprise would not be spoilt. No, she is thinking of what I like to call “a lazy man’s edit,” just lifting the explanation she’s already written and plopping it down earlier in the text, as is.

It never fails to astonish me just how far some writers will go to avoid real, in-depth revision. They fall so deeply in love with their own sentences that the very idea of cutting some of them and revising others seems like sacrilege.

That’s fine, if it makes them happy to approach their work that way, but it is an attitude that judges, agents, and editors can spot a mile away. They can sense it in a manuscript, pouncing on it like a drug-sniffing dog zeroing in on trace amounts of heroin. “Whoa,” they say, quickly pushing the manuscript aside. “This is an author who would be difficult to work with.”

I’m not saying that all writers who give after-explanations are impervious to input, of course, but it is a fairly common conclusion for professional readers to draw. This is why it is so important to avoid making this mistake in a contest entry: it doesn’t come across as a simple editing problem, but as a matter of authorial choice. For some reason of his own, they conclude, the author chose to minimize this joke or that dramatic moment. Go figure.

Why would they leap to such an extreme (and writer-hostile) conclusion, you ask? Come closer, and I’ll tell you a little secret: many, if not most, judges, agents, and editors assume that by the time they see a piece of writing, it HAS received feedback from other people.

Clearly, then, if such a glaring continuity problem as after-explanation was not corrected, one of two things must have happened: either the author got bad feedback (in which case the manuscript should be rejected until such time as the author learns to get better at her craft) or the author got good feedback and ignored it (in which case the author is difficult). Either way, they’re not rushing to embrace the author who does it.

So, for your contest entries, if it is comically or dramatically necessary for the reader to have some piece of information in order to be able to have a spontaneous reaction to a given line, make sure that the reader has the information first.

Well, I guess I shall have to push off my treatise on crafting the author bio until next week, because I find that I have a lot more to say about continuity and coherence in contest entries. Not to mention the fact that I seem not to have gotten to the promised topic of humor in entries at all. Here is one distinct advantage the blogger has over the contest entrant: what the entrant promises in the synopsis, she must deliver in the chapter, at least in part.

As a blogger, though, I can merely retreat to the tried-and-true methodology of the old serials: tune in tomorrow to find out how the story ends. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

P.S. to Bob and all of the others out there who have tried without success to find links to my October, November, and December archived postings: no, there is not a link to them yet; they disappeared into the ether when the website switched servers. More news as it develops. But if I can’t figure out how to remedy the problem soon, as a personal favor to you, Bob, for bringing it to my attention, I’ll post the piece on Point of View Nazis again.

Nonfiction book categories (and no, I couldn’t think of a catchier title for it)

Hello, readers –

Here we are at our last installment of book category choices, the nonfiction array. Granted, most of the sections of the PNWA contest are devoted to various flavors of fiction, but as a memoirist myself, I would be the last to slight all of you brave and excellent writers of nonfiction.

Like genre, NF categories are the conceptual boxes that books come in, telling agents and editors roughly where it would sit in a bookstore. By telling an agent up front which category your book is, you make it easy for her to tell if it is the kind of book she can sell.

In a way, nonfiction writers have an easier time boxing their books, for the nonfiction categories give a much rougher indication of shelf location than the fiction. In fact, the categories used in the publishing industry are not necessarily the same as those used by bookstores. In my own area, for instance, I have noticed that Barnes & Noble tends to shelve biography, autobiography, and memoir together; Amazon lumps memoir into the autobiography category. Go figure.

As when you are querying fiction, the category designation belongs in the first paragraph of your query letter, as well as on the title page of your book and as part of your verbal pitch.
As an aside, do bear in mind that the first things an agent or editor now tends to look for in a NF book query is not just a great idea, but the platform of the writer. Platform is the industry term for a writer’s credentials or background to write a particular book. Your job in the query letter will be to sell yourself as the world’s best-qualified person to write this book.

So if, hypothetically speaking, you were entering the nonfiction/memoir category of a major regional writers’ contest, do you think it would be to your advantage if your synopsis gave some indication of your platform?

On to the categories. Fortunately, most of the them are pretty self-explanatory.

ENTERTAINING: no, not a book that IS entertaining; one ABOUT entertaining.

HOLIDAYS: a book about entertaining people at particular times of year.

PARENTING AND FAMILIES: this includes not only books about children, but books about eldercare, too.

HOUSE AND HOME: so you have a place to be PARENTING and ENTERTAINING your FAMILIES during the HOLIDAYS. This is for both house-beautiful books and how-to around the home. At some publishing houses, it also includes GARDENING.

HOW-TO: explains how to do things OTHER than house- and home-related tasks or cooking.

SELF-HELP: a how-to book for the psyche. If you have ANY platform to write one of these, do so. These are the books that can land you on Oprah if you’re NOT James Frey.

COOKBOOK: I suspect that you’ve seen one of these before, right?

NARRATIVE COOKBOOK: where the recipes are presented as part of a story, most often a memoir. Ruth Reichl’s COMFORT ME WITH APPLES is the usual example given, but my favorite narrative cookbook is Sylvia Thompson’s FEASTS AND FRIENDS.

FOOD AND WINE: where you write ABOUT the food and wine, not tell how to make it.

LIFESTYLE: Less broad than it sounds.

HEALTH: body issues for laypeople. If your book is for people in the medical professions, it should be classified under MEDICAL. Diet books are sometimes listed here (if there is a general philosophy of nutrition involved), sometimes under FOOD (if it is less philosophical), sometimes under COOKBOOK (if there are recipes), sometimes under FITNESS (if there is a substantial lifestyle/exercise component).

FITNESS: exercise for people who consider themselves to be out of shape. Usually includes diet tips, as well as exercise.

EXERCISE: fitness for people who consider themselves to be in relatively good shape, and thus do not need many diet tips.

SPORTS: exercise for competitive people in all shapes.

HISTORICAL NONFICTION: Your basic history book, intended for a general audience. If it is too scholarly, it will be classified under ACADEMIC.

NARRATIVE NONFICTION: THE hot category from a few years ago. Basically, it means using fiction techniques to tell true stories; while IN COLD BLOOD is the classic example simply everyone gives, it would today be classified as TRUE CRIME.

TRUE CRIME: what it says on the box.

BIOGRAPHY: the life story of someone else.

MEMOIR: the life story of the author, dwelling on personal relationships.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: the life story of the author, focusing on large, generally public achievements. The memoirs of famous people tend to be autobiographies.

ESSAYS are generally published in periodicals first, then collected.

WRITING: technically, these are HOW-TO books, but editors love writing so much that it gets its own category.

CURRENT EVENTS: explanations of what is going on in the world today, usually written by journalists. In this category, platform is especially important. Why? Well, if you are not already a recognized expert in a current event field, your book probably will not be rushed to market, and thus perhaps will not be on the market while the event you have chosen is fresh in the public mind. Bear in mind that most books are not published until over a year after a publisher buys the book. This really limits just how current the events a first-time writer comments upon can be.

POLITICS: About partisan ideology.

GOVERNMENT: about the actual functions, history, and office holders of the political realm.

WOMEN’S STUDIES: a rather broad category, into which history, politics, government, and essays related to women tend to migrate. Logically, I think it’s a trifle questionable to call one book on labor conditions in a coal mine in 1880 HISTORY, and call a book on labor conditions in a predominantly female-staffed shoe factory in 1880 WOMEN’S STUDIES, but hey, I’m not the one who makes the rules.

GAY AND LESBIAN: Much like WOMEN’S STUDIES, this category includes works from a varied spectrum of categories, concentrating on gay and lesbian people. Again, were I making the rules…

LAW: This includes books for the layman, as well as more professionally-oriented books. Some publishers compress this category with books about dealing with governmental bureaucracies into a single category: LAW/GOVERNMENT.

ARTS: a rather broad category, no? Books on the history of painting or ballet go here.

PHILOSOPHY: thought that is neither overtly political nor demonstrably spiritual in motivation.

RELIGION: books about the beliefs of the major established religions.

SPIRITUALITY: books about beliefs that fall outside the major established religions. Often, the Asian religions are classified under SPIRITUALITY, however, rather than RELIGION. Go figure.

EDUCATION: books about educational philosophy and practice. (Not to be confused with books on how to raise children, which are PARENTING AND FAMILIES.)

ACADEMIC: books written by professors for other professors. Tend not to sell too well.

TEXTBOOK: books written by professors for students. Tend to sell quite well.

REFERENCE: books intended not for reading cover-to-cover, but for looking up particular information.

MEDICAL: books for readers working in medical fields. (Not to be confused with HEALTH, which targets a lay readership.)

ENGINEERING: I’m going to take a wild guess here – books written by and for engineers?

PROFESSIONAL: books for readers working in white-collar fields that are not medical, legal, or engineering.

TECHNICAL: books intended for readers already familiar with a specific field of expertise, particularly mechanical or industrial. Unless the field is engineering, or computers, or cars, or medical…

COMPUTERS: fairly self-explanatory, no?

INTERNET: again – speaks for itself.

AUTOMOTIVE: I’m guessing these aren’t books for cars to read, but to read about cars. (Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything remotely funny to say about this. I’m pretty stressed today.)

FINANCE: covers both personal finances and financial policy.

INVESTING: finance for those with more than enough money to pay the rent.

BUSINESS: this is another rather broad category, covering everything from tips for happy office interactions to books on executive manners.

CAREERS: books for people who are looking to break into a field. Includes books on how to find a job, how to interview, how to write a resume…

OUTDOORS AND NATURE: again, rather broad, as it logically encompasses everything outside a building that does not involve SPORTS, EXERCISE, FITNESS…

TRAVEL: books on how to get there and what to do when you do get there. I used to write these, once upon a time, so if you want to know how to scrawl copy for a tight deadline while balancing a camp light on a rickety picnic table and simultaneously watching out for bears, I’m your gal.

TRAVEL MEMOIR: first-person stories about someone who went somewhere.

PHOTOGRAPHY: both books about and books of.

COFFEE TABLE BOOK: books with big, gorgeous pictures and relatively little writing.

GIFT BOOK: small books, intended as impulse buys.

Looking at this list, it strikes me as rather incomplete set of categories to explain all of reality. However, these are indeed the major categories – and as with fiction, you definitely need to specify up front which your book is.

One final word on the contest front: typically, nonfiction categories are underrepresented; most of the entries in your garden-variety NF contest will be either memoirs, history, or narrative nonfiction. Where are the cookbooks? the contest judges cry. Where is the really well-written how-to book?

I just mention. Don’t write off literary contests just because your work may not be, well, traditionally literary. A well-written book is a well-written book, and I, for one, would not be inclined to sneeze in its general direction.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Contests, Part IV: But is it worth it?

Howdy, campers —

 

Welcome to Part IV of my holiday present to my loyal readers: a multi-part series on how to make literary contests work to your best advantage. Soon, I shall be moving on to tips that will give you a technical edge in most writing competitions, but first, I want to continue my discussion of how to decide whether any particular contest is going to be worth your entering.

 

This criterion (see earlier blogs from this week for the other criteria) is perhaps the most important factor to consider in evaluating a contest — other than whether your writing is ready to face competition, of course. Unlike the other criteria, which mostly focused upon the contest itself, this consideration is about you and your resources.

 

The fifth question to ask yourself: will entering the contest take up too much time?

 

Unfortunately, there are few contests out there, especially for longer works, that simply require entrants to print up an already-existing piece, slide it into an envelope, write a check for the entry fee, and slap a stamp upon it.

 

Pretty much all require the entrant to fill out an entry form — which range from ultra-simple contact information to outright demands that you answer essay questions. Do be aware that every time you fill out one of these, you are tacitly agreeing to be placed upon the sponsoring organization AND every piece of information you give is subject to resale to marketing firms, unless the sponsor states outright on the form that it will not do so. (Did you think those offers from Writers Digest and The Advocate just found their way into your mailbox magically?) As with any information you send out, be careful not to provide any information that is not already public knowledge.

 

How do you know if what is being asked of you is de trop? Well, a one- or at most two-page application form is ample for a literary contest; a three- or four-page application is fair for a fellowship. Anything more than that, and you should start to wonder what they’re doing with all of this information. A contest that gives out monetary awards will need your Social Security number eventually, but they really need this information only for the winners. I would balk about giving it up front.

 

I have seen contest entries that ask writers to list character references — an odd request, given that the history of our art form is riddled with notorious rakes. I’m not sure I believe that a contest should throw out the work of a William Makepeace Thackeray or an H.G. Wells because they kept mistresses… or disqualify Emily Dickenson’s poetry submission because her neighbors noticed that she didn’t much like to go outside.

 

I have asked contest organizers why they do this, and they claim that it is so they can rule out people whose wins might embarrass the organization giving the award — basically, so they do not wake up one day and read that they gave their highest accolade to Ted Bundy. Frankly, I would MUCH rather see mass murderers, child molesters, and other violent felons turning their energies to the gentle craft of writing than engaging in their other, more bloody pursuits; some awfully good poetry and prose has been written in jail cells. I do not, however, run an organization fearful of negative publicity.

 

My suspicious nature rears its paranoid head whenever I see requests for references. If an entrant lists one of the contest judges as a reference, is the entry handled differently? If I can list a famous name as a reference, are my chances of winning better? Only the conference organizers know for sure.

 

Contest entry forms frequently ask you to list your writing credentials, which I find bizarre in contests where the judging is supposed to be blind. Again, perhaps I am suspicious, but I always wonder if entries from authors with previous contest wins or publication credentials go into a different pile than the rest. They shouldn’t, if the judging is genuinely blind, but to quote the late great Fats Waller, “One never knows, do one?”

 

I’m not saying that you should rule out contests that make such requests — but I do think that the more personal information the organization asks for, the more careful your background check should be. When I see a request for references, for instance, I automatically check and see if the judges and/or their students have won previous competitions. A lot of the requesters are indeed on the up-and-up, but there is no surer waste of an honest writer’s time, talent, and resources than entering a rigged contest.

 

You can also save yourself a lot of time if you avoid contests that make entrants jump through a lot of extraneous hoops in preparing a submission. Specific typefaces. Fancy paper. Odd margin requirements. Expensive binding. All of these will eat up your time and money, without the end result’s being truly indicative of the quality of your work — all conforming with such requirements really shows is that an entrant can follow directions.

 

My general rule of thumb is that if I can pull together a contest entry with already-written material within a day’s worth of writing time, I consider it reasonable. If a contest requires time-consuming funky formatting, or printing on special contest forms, or wacko binding, I just don’t bother anymore, because to my contest-experienced eyes, these requests are not for my benefit, but theirs.

 

Because — and I am about to reveal another secret of the contest trade here — the primary purpose of these elaborate requests for packaging is to make it as easy as possible to disqualify entries. By setting up stringent and easily-visible cosmetic requirements, the organizers have maximized the number of entries they can simply toss aside, unread: the more that they ask you to do to package the entry, the more ways you can go wrong.

 

Interestingly enough, many of the organizers of contests that establish these demands are quite open about its being merely an exercise in rule-following. Think about it: if they really only wanted standardization amongst the entries, they could easily just say, “We will only accept entries in standard manuscript format.” No fuss, no bother, and besides, all of their entrants who want to get published should be using standard format, anyway, right? (If you are not already aware of the requirements of standard format, do yourself a favor and read my posting of December 8. Manuscripts not conforming to standard format tend to be rejected unread in both contest situations and in agents’ offices.)

 

Instead, the organizers in this type of contest can merely assign some luckless intern or volunteer to go through the entries before the judges see them and pluck out any that are in the wrong type of folder, printed on the wrong type of paper, don’t have the right funky margins… well, you get the idea. Voilà! The number of entries the judges have to read has magically decreased!

 

I find this practice annoying, frankly; it provides the organization with the illusion of selectivity on bases that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. And that, my friends, is unfair to writers everywhere.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini