Posted on - 3 Comments on A rose is a rose is a rose…but that doesn’t mean that they’re aren’t at least three ways to pitch it

A rose is a rose is a rose…but that doesn’t mean that they’re aren’t at least three ways to pitch it

It’s that charming-but-disorienting season again, campers: time for so many of us set our manuscripts aside in favor of such light-hearted feats as walking into a room with 150 strangers in it and striking up meaningful conversations, sitting through six hours of craft classes a day, and trying to compress a 400-page book into a 2-minute speech.

I refer, of course, to writers’ conference season, when hope flies skyward on the slightest provocation — followed closely by writers’ blood pressure.

Ah, we writers walk into conferences with such high expectations and nervous stomachs, don’t we? The average conference-goer’s wish list carries some fairly hefty items: to meet the agent of his dreams, who will fall flat on the floor with astonishment at his pitch and sign him on the spot; for an editor at a major publishing house to be so wowed that she snaps up the book practically before the writer finishes speaking, and to be whisked off to New York immediately for literary cocktail parties and glowing adulation. Can the New York Times’ bestseller list and Oprah’s book club be far behind?

It’s a lovely dream, certainly, but this is not what actually happens.

I’m absolutely serious about this. In actuality, no credible agent will sign a writer before having read the book in question; all of the major U.S. publishing houses have strict policies against acquiring books from unrepresented writers, and even agented works often circulate for months or more before they are picked up by publishers. Furthermore, there is generally at least a year-long lapse between the signing of a book contract and when that book appears in bookstores.

Translation: even for writers who actually ARE pitching the next DA VINCI CODE, the process takes a heck of a lot longer than the average conference-goer expects.

Even authors of brilliant, super-marketable books do not typically experience the conference fantasy treatment. At most, a great book well pitched will garner an array of, “Gee, that sounds terrific. Send me the first 50 pages,” requests. Yet even with a flurry of initial enthusiasm, months often pass between initial pitch and requests to represent.

It’s important to realize that going in; otherwise, pitching at a conference will almost inevitably feel like a tremendous letdown — or, still worse, like a sight-unseen review of your writing talent.

Worst of all, a belief that the truly talented ARE signed and sold within a matter of nanoseconds leads every year to that oh-so-common writerly misstep, rushing home to send out requested materials within a day or so of receiving the request — and realizing only after the fact that since the mad rush to get the manuscript out the door before that agent or editor changed her mind about wanting to see it meant sending it out without reading the submission IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD.

I can sense my long-time readers of this blog shuddering at the ghastly fate that tends to greet such hastily sent-off submissions.

For those of you who are not yet cringing, let me ask you: how would you feel if you realized only after you’d popped a requested manuscript in the mail that there were four typos on page 1? Or that the margins were the wrong width? Or that you’d forgotten to change your memoir protagonist’s name back to your own after you’d changed it for a blind contest entry?

Ah, now everyone’s shuddering.

Realistic expectations about what conference success does and does not mean, as well as how it would serve you best to respond to the various contingencies, can save you a lot of grief — and I say this as a writer who DID land her agent through a conference pitch, had offers from several agents, AND had a book contract in hand six months thereafter.

But guess what: that probably would not have happened had I not done my pre-conference prep — or if I didn’t know walking in that I shouldn’t just sign with the first agent kind enough to ask me.

That last one caught some of you off guard, didn’t it?

So, what would be a realistic set of goals for a conference? An excellent choice would be to use the conference to skip the very annoying and time-consuming querying stage and jump directly to a request to read your manuscript.

Thus, pitching your work to at least one agent who has a successful track record representing books like yours would be a great goal — and having at least one agent ask you to mail a submission would be even better.

As would having an editor who is empowered to pick up new writers ask to see part or all of the book, or pitching to every publishing professional at the conference who deals in your kind of work. And let’s not forget the less marketing-oriented goals, such as learning a great deal from good seminars.

Or — and too many conference-goers forget to add this to their to-do lists — making connections with other writers, established AND aspiring, who write what you do. Amazing mutual support groups don’t just happen, you know; they are built over years.

If you can pull any or all of that off, you will have achieved conference success.

Not as sexy as the fantasy version, I know, but eminently do-able — and definitely worthwhile for your writing career. After all, skipping the querying stage can cut years from your agent search; think of every pitching opportunity as one less raft of a dozen query letters you are going to have to send out.

Looking a whole lot better now, isn’t it?

Your chances of pitching successfully, however, will be SUBSTANTIALLY higher if you do a bit of prep work before you go. But never fear: for the next few weeks, I shall be guiding you though the steps you need to take in order to walk in confident and prepared.

Fringe benefit: these steps are very useful to marketing any book, anywhere, anytime. If you invest the time in them, you will not only be able to pitch your work verbally; you will be able to talk about it like a pro AND transplant your pitch to your query letters.

Don’t tense up. You can do this. But it is going to take some work.

The first step to a successful pitch is to understand your book’s market appeal. Who is your target reader, and why will your book, out of the tens of thousands a good agent will see this year, satisfy that reader like nothing else currently on the market?

Hey, I told you it wasn’t going to be easy.

The second step to a successful pitch, as for a successful query, is to be familiar with the work of the person to whom you will be pitching. Find out what that agent has sold lately; find out what that editor has bought.

Find out, in short, who at the conference would be receptive to you and your book, so that you may know which to approach and pitch. This will involve some research on your part — which is why I am mentioning this at the BEGINNING of this series, and not toward its end.

I can sense some of you who have already signed up for conferences shifting restlessly in your seats, wondering if you should just skip the next few weeks of posts. “But Anne,” I hear those of you clutching registration forms protest, “I understand doing the prep work if I have a plethora of conferences from which to select, but I’m already registered for my local one. Since I’ve already been assigned a pitch appointment, why should I bother checking up on all of the agent who might eb attending?”

Well, for a couple of reasons. First, any book could be pitched in a number of different ways — and since the goal of pitching is not absolute uniformity between every pitch attempt, but rather to garner a request for pages, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to tailor your pitch to the agent who happens to be listening to it at any given moment, doesn’t it?

And no, I have absolutely no idea why conference literature so often tells potential attendees the exact opposite. I’ll be dealing with the one-size-fits-all pitch concept next week.

For now, suffice it to say that all three pictures above are from the same negative. You probably have a favorite among them; so do I. So would an agent. But they’re all the same angle on the same rose. The only difference is presentation.

Seem cryptic? Trust me, within a couple of weeks, it will seem downright obvious.

The other reason to do some background research on the agents to whom you may be pitching is — brace yourselves; this is a biggie — that it’s far from uncommon for writers to be assigned to pitch to agents who do not represent their kinds of books at all. Which means, practically inevitably, that the pitch will not end in a request for pages.

Yes, you read that correctly. Sit down and breathe deeply until that feeling of dizziness passes.

As anyone who has ever endured the agony of a mismatched pitch appointment can tell you, if your book falls outside the agent or editor’s area of preference, it doesn’t matter how good your pitch is: they will stop you as soon as they figure out that your book is categorically not for them. No amount of argument is going to help you at that point, so advance research is a very, very good idea.

I know, I know: it’s kind of cruel, isn’t it? But in fairness, conference organizers very frequently do not have enough information about prospective attendees to make a good match; most of the time, they simply rely upon the writers’ expressed preferences or — sacre bleu! — assign appointments randomly.

This means, unfortunately, that it is up to the conference attendee to check up on the agents and editors, over and above their blurbs in the conference program. Even those bear double-checking: as my long-time readers already know, the blurb agents and editors write about themselves is not always the most reliable indicator of the type of work they represent. It’s not that they’re trying to be misleading, of course; most just reuse their standard bio blurbs, which tend not to be updated all that often.

So it’s worth your while to check the agents’ websites, standard agents’ guides, Preditors and Editors, the Absolute Write water cooler, and anywhere else that you would normally go to check out an agent you were planning to query. You need to find out who these people are and what they represent.

I hear you groaning: yes, this IS every bit as much work as finding an agent to query. You don’t want to end up pitching to the wrong agent, do you?

Do be aware that since there is usually a significant time lag between when an agent signs an author and when the book hits the shelves (see above), it may be difficult to track down client lists for some agents. This does not necessarily mean that they are not active. The Publishers Marketplace database tracks sales as they happen AND provides client lists, so it’s a great place to check. This site does require a subscription ($20/month), so you might want to buttonhole some of your writing friends and pool the expense.

If you can’t find evidence that the agent to whom you are assigned to pitch is actively representing your kind of book, don’t be afraid to ask to switch appointments. Most of the time, conference organizers will honor this request — but they’ll usually be happier about it if you can suggest an alternative agent for an appointment.

That’s why it’s an excellent idea to check out ALL of the agents scheduled to attend a conference (there’s usually a list on the conference’s website), not just to one to whom you’ve been assigned. Ideally, you will want to try to pitch to anyone who might conceivably be a reasonable fit. And if none of the scheduled agents represent your kind of book, you should think very seriously about taking your conference dollars elsewhere.

Yes, having to do this level of background research is kind of a pain, but if it saves you even one wasted pitch, it’s definitely worth it. The more information you have, the more likely you are to find your best fit.

Doing your homework maximizes the probability that you will be pitching to someone who can help you get published — and not someone who will stop you three sentences in to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t represent that kind of book.”

Remember, not all agents are the same, any more than all editors are (of which more tomorrow); they have both professional specialties and personal preferences. It doesn’t make any more sense to pitch sensitive coming-of-age literary fiction to an agent who concentrates primarily on thrillers than it does to query a NF agency with a novel, does it?

Or to offer a modified purple rose to someone who would prefer a more realistic picture, for that matter.

Much, much more on conference prep and marketing follows in the days to come — and if you don’t mind a bit of motherly advice, PLEASE don’t be too hard on yourself if your learning curve is a bit sharp throughout this series. After all, no one is born knowing how to market a book.

Don’t let the process intimidate you — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The plague of passivity III: please, please, please love me?

The plague of passivity III: please, please, please love me?

Last time, I stirred up the deep waters of controversy underlying the placid surface of many novel, memoir, and creative nonfiction manuscripts by suggesting (and rather forcefully, too) that submissions with scene after scene spent amongst the limpid pools of smooth, conflict-free interaction — particularly if that interaction is merely observed by the protagonist (the boat in the metaphor? A passenger in that boat? A passing seagull?), rather than caused by or integrally involving him — might be less successful, in marketing terms, than ones that set the protagonist adrift amid a storm or two. (Okay, so s/he is IN the boat. Glad we got that settled.)

Oh, heck, I’m going to abandon the metaphor (toss it overboard, as it were) and just say it boldly: passive protagonists tend to bore readers, professional and unprofessional alike.

After this many posts in a row on protagonist passivity, I would hope that doesn’t come as a big shock to anybody out there.

And yet in general, aspiring writers DO tend to be shocked, or even appalled, at the very suggestion that their protagonists aren’t active enough. All too often, they hear critique of their protagonists as criticism of themselves — as if a dull character’s appearance in a manuscript must by extension mean its creator is…well, let’s just say non-scintillating, shall we?

Why? Because, many, if not most, writers have difficulty hearing manuscript critique as critique of — wait for it — their MANUSCRIPTS, rather than of themselves, their self-worth, their talent, and/or their right to be expressing themselves in print at all. (A phenomenon I have dissected at great length in the Getting Good at Receiving Feedback series, conveniently available under the category list at right, should you have happened to miss it.)

This response is equally likely, by the way, whether the manuscript is fiction, memoir, or academic book. I suppose this particular logical leap shouldn’t still give me pause at this late date. Over the years, I’ve seen writers draw similar conclusions from feedback that indicates that their work is slow-paced, too long, hard to market, or even poorly punctuated.

Your protagonist doesn’t do much, does he? seems to be an especially hard critique for many writers to swallow, though, probably since so many first books, fiction and nonfiction alike, tend to be at least partially autobiographical. Not everyone is thrilled to be told that she would be more interesting (or, heaven help us, more likeable) if she were a more active participant in her own life. Or if her life were more interesting in general.

Instead of, say, sitting at home and writing a book about it.

In answer to that very loud unspoken question all of your minds just shouted at me: yes, I can tell you from personal experience that memoirists actually are very frequently told by their agents and editors that their books’ protagonists could get into the game more.

“Wait,” I found myself thinking as my editor and I worked on my memoir, “my publisher is allowed to edit my LIFE? What am I supposed to do, travel backward in time so I may pick a few more fights?”

But I’m getting ahead of myself; writing the real to make it more interesting on the page — without, you know, lying — is near the top of my to-blog list at the moment.

(Now I’ve gone and ruined the surprise. Darn. And I wanted Flag Day to be so special this year.)

But a slight case of identification with one’s own protagonist is not the only reason that some writers squirm at the suggestion that s/he might be a tad on the inactive side. Even for non-autobiographical fiction, the very notion that something that one wrote oneself could possibly be less than marvelous seems to come as an immense shock to many aspiring writers.

I’m quite serious about this. I’m perpetually running into writers in my classes, at conferences, and online who seem to believe that the publishing industry should buy their books simply because they have written them.

“Target market?” these well-meaning souls echo, wrinkling their noses at the inference that a true artiste ever considers why someone out there might want to buy his or her art. “That’s the publisher’s job to figure out.”

Um, yes, in the long term, but in the short term, it’s very much the writer’s job to figure out.

While writing is unquestionably art — some might argue the most inherently creative one, since the writer uses fewer outside materials than other artists to create her effects — if one has any intention of doing it for a living, it just doesn’t make sense not to think about who might buy one’s books and why.

Why not, you ask? Well, would you expect an aspiring doctor to work all the way through medical school without first ascertaining that there were sick people in the world?

Again, perhaps a too-colorful analogy. But you know what I mean.

Yet many, if not most, aspiring writers seem to have genuine trouble seeing their own books as a third party might. That’s a serious stumbling-block to marketing one’s book to agents and small presses, because, let’s fact it, no matter how much a writer adores his manuscript, other people will have to admire it at least at much in order for it to get published.

Again, that’s not TOO great a shock to any of my long-term readers, is it?

So it is perfectly reasonable, and even necessary, to step outside your role as author to try to view your story as an outside reader might. (If you have trouble pulling this off — and the vast majority of writers do — you might want to take a gander at the GETTING GOOD FEEDBACK category on the list at right.)

Specifically, to make an attempt to see your protagonist as a reader might — and from a reader’s POV, an active, decisive character in the driver’s seat of the plot can be a mighty fine thing.

Why, that’s what we’ve been talking about all week, isn’t it? Funny how that worked out.

From a reader’s POV, conflict is not something to be avoided — it’s to be courted, because moving from conflict to conflict is how the protagonist typically moves the plot along. Protagonists who are purely reactive, as popular as they may be in movies (the trailer for half the dramatic films released within the last few years: “Coming soon to a theatre near you: the story of an ORDINARY MAN drawn against his will into EXTRAORDINARY events…”), are frequently frustrating.

“DO SOMETHING!” Millicent is likely to shout in their general direction.

Of course, in most book categories, you don’t want to go overboard in the opposite direction, driving the plot forward so quickly that there’s little time for character development. (Unless, one presumes, you happened to be writing THE DA VINCI CODE.) Non-stop conflict can result in a one-note narrative, one with very few dramatic highs and lows punctuating the story — but in most genres, if a book is going to be consistent, it’s much better to be consistently exciting than consistently low-key.

I’m going to make some of my higher-brow readers cringe by bringing this up, but one of the best recent examples of a protagonist who ostensibly has little control of the forces controlling his life, yet manages to fight back on practically every page is the HARRY POTTER series. (Don’t laugh; many of the English-reading adults currently in their twenties grew up on that series, and thus drew their ideas of exciting pacing from it.)

How does JK Rowling keep the tension high in books that are largely about a child with little autonomy going to school? The old-fashioned way: by including SOME kind of conflict on every page.

But not all of it has to do with fighting He Who Shall Not Be Named. More than half the time (until the last couple of books in the series, at least), Harry is beset not by the forces of ultimate evil, but by teachers who don’t like him, a crush he doesn’t know how to handle, mixed feelings about his elders, and so forth.

All that’s conflict, too.

If it’s important to your story that your protagonist is acted-upon (true in virtually every memoir professional readers see, incidentally, as well as most first novel manuscripts), adding subsidiary action can go a long way toward pepping up the pace. Why not add conflict over something very small and not related to the bigger causes of resentment in a plot, for instance?

Let’s take a story set in an office with an intensely sexist boss of the “Hey, good-looking, why don’t you sit on my lap while I discuss our new policy for file-sharing” variety. Now, our heroine and her cronies could type away in resentful silence while their boss leers at one of them for fifty pages on end, obviously.

But what if, in addition to all of that glorious silent passivity, some of the typers happened to be going through menopause — and started responding to their autocratic boss’ systematic harassment by violently quarreling amongst themselves over where the thermostat should be set during their various hot flashes?

Inherently quite a bit more dramatic, isn’t it? Lots of room for ongoing conflict there.

But not everyone out there is comfortable with this strategy, I’m sensing. “But Anne,” some of you passivity-penners cry, “you told us last time that there were a lot of reasons an agent, editor, or contest judge might take a dislike to a protagonist. Even if mine is just one of several coworkers being nasty to one another, won’t they like her even less?”

Ah, that old bugbear: the belief that a character must be a nice person to be likeable on the page.

Likeability tends to be a sore point amongst fiction writers, especially for those of us who write about female protagonists: when we include characters in our work whose political views are a bit challenging, for instance, or have sexual kinks beyond what the mainstream media currently considers normal, or even pursue their goals too straightforwardly, we fear being told that our characters are not likeable enough. So we tend to self-edit for harmony.

Translation: many writers will deliberately make a protagonist passive, on the theory that if she isn’t, this chick might not play in Peoria, according to someone in a New York agency or publishing house.

Frankly, I think the industry tends to underestimate Peorians, but the fact remains, it actually isn’t all that unusual for an agent or editor to ask a writer to tone down a particular character’s quirks. Usually, though, these requests refer to secondary characters (as in, “Does Tony’s sister really have to be a lesbian?” or “Could the Nazi brother be just a little bit right-wing instead?”) or to specific scenes (“Need she tie Bob down?”).

Occasionally, though, the request is not quite so helpfully phrased: “I liked the story, but I didn’t like the protagonist,” an editor will say. “If you fix her in X, Y, and Z ways, maybe I’ll pick up the book.”

Did I just hear some jaws hitting the floor again?

Yes, Virginia, it has become quite common for editors to ask for major revisions PRIOR to making an offer on a novel. Agents will frequent make similar requests prior to being willing to market a novel to editors. Sometimes several rounds of revisions, even, so the writer is essentially performing rewrites on command for free.

THAT’s how tight the fiction market is right now; ten years ago, most good agents would have laughed at such an editorial request before a contract was signed.

Much of the time, the author responds to such requests by making the character MORE passive — a very bad move, strategically. As I mentioned last week, it’s a common writerly misconception to believe that a passive protagonist is automatically a likeable one.

An interesting conclusion, isn’t it, given how often first novels and memoirs feature at least semi-autobiographical protagonists? Which begs the question: is the common writerly obsession with protagonist likeability at some level a cry to the industry: “Love my character — and me!”?

Bears a spot of thinking about, doesn’t it?

Psychology aside, it’s understandable that writers might mistake a propensity for avoiding confrontation for likeability: Passive Paul the protagonist is a courteous fellow, typically, always eager to step aside and let somebody else take the lead.

Courteous to a fault, he’s always doing nice things for others, generally thanklessly. A good employee, fine son/husband/potential partner, he is dependable. Almost all of his turmoil is in his head; he tends to be polite verbally, reserving his most pointed barbs for internal monologue.

Why, his boss/friend/wife/arch enemy can taunt him for half the book before he makes a peep — and then, it’s often indirect: he’ll vent at somebody else. His dog, maybe, or a passing motorist.

Romantically, Paul’s a very slow mover, too; he’s the grown-up version of that boy in your fifth-grade class who had a crush upon you that he had no language to express, so he yanked on your pigtails. He’s been known to yearn at the love of his life for two-thirds of a book without saying word one to her. Perhaps, his subconscious figures, she will spontaneously decide she likes me with no effort on my part.

And astonishingly, half the time, his subconscious ends up being right about this! Go figure, eh?

A delightful person to encounter in real life, in short; the kind of person you might like to see serving on your city council, library board, or living next door to you in a time of natural disaster.

But think of Paul from a reader’s point of view: he makes so few moves that he’s practically inert.

So why, if you’ll pardon my asking, would someone pay $25 to read a story in which he is the central figure — other than the beauty of the writing, of course?

That may sound like a cruel or dismissive question, but actually, it isn’t — it’s precisely the question that Millicent the screener is going to need to be able to answer if she’s going to recommend that her boss, the agent of your dreams, should read it, right? Isn’t it exactly the case the agent of your dreams is going to have to make to the editor of your fantasies in order to get her to acquire it?

And isn’t it, ultimately, a question your target reader will, at the very least, find of interest between the shelf and the cash register?

Next time, I shall talk a bit more about Passive Paul — and what, short of challenging him to a duel (for which he would probably not show up, we can only assume), his creator can do to get him into the game of his own life a bit more.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on You look strangely familiar…have we met somewhere before?

You look strangely familiar…have we met somewhere before?

Last time, I suggested that if your novel is thick with named characters, it might be a good idea to make a list of who appears when, so you can see where to cull and who may be combined with whom. And cries of “Madness! Madness!” filled the land.

Now, now — it’s actually a very practical suggestion. Think of it as trying to cast a production of Spartacus with a very small troupe of actors: you probably won’t be able to foist many more duties upon the leads, but the bit players could certainly play multiple roles, right?

Knowing who the players are and in what scenes they appear can also alert you to patterns in where characters tend to pile up in your work in general. If you’re the kind of writer who, for instance, leans toward naming everyone at any given party, you will want to be aware of that predilection before you write your next party scene, won’t you?

Won’t you? Lie to me, if not.

If, on the other hand, you tend to emphasize your protagonist’s loneliness by having other characters engage in banter around him, seeing that pattern manifest on a list may lead you to question whether it needs to happen quite so often in the book to make your point — or with quite so many different people.

It can, in short, alert you to point overkill.

If hell is other people, as Sartre suggests, then wedding and funeral scenes in novels almost invariably reek of brimstone. These events are NOTORIOUS amongst professional readers for introducing entire churchfuls of extraneous characters.

Even when all of the masses are not named individually (although you’d be astonished how often 10 or 20 are), it doesn’t take many lines of physical description or multi-party banter to convey the impression that a small, intimate wedding has a guest list to rival that of Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s nuptials.

Allow me to suggest: if behinds are in pews, it might be a good place to start trimming.

Ditto with coffee shops, bars, class reunions, Ellis Island, airplanes/-ports, and party scenes in general. All of these venues seem to attract single-appearance characters as surely as a red carpet attracts celebrity gawkers.

Was that massive sucking noise I just heard a collective gasp of indignation? “But Anne,” the cast of thousands-mongers cry, “you’re asking me to disembowel the collective identity of modern urban life! How can I describe the complexity of the human environment without enumerating the individuals who are part of it?”

Describe away — and if you’re into enumerating, I’m not going to stop you, although your agent and/or editor may well. All I’m suggesting here is that you not insist on introducing each of the bystanders to the hapless reader as if she were the mother of the bride in a receiving line.

Not only does it tend to get a mite tedious and slow the pace of the narrative to the proverbial crawl, to a professional reader, a group scene where everyone is named down to the last poodle and great-grandfather reads as though it were simply an account of something that actually happened to the author. When the guest lists are long and specific, the jaded reader will think, “Great — when do we get back to the fiction?”

Or the memoir, or the historical account, as the case may be.

Of course, this is not always a fair conclusion, but there is some basis for it: as I mentioned yesterday, when writers lift scenes from real life into their novels, they do tend to include direct one-to-one correlations between the actual people and the fictional ones.

The names may change, but if Aunt Bessie, Aunt Cassie, and odd Cousin George appear in the text so fleetingly that they don’t make an impression upon the reader, it’s a pretty good tip-off to someone who reads a lot of manuscripts that the author is blessed with two aunts and a cousin who might reasonably be expected to buy the book when it is published.

And that is a problem to professional and casual readers alike. Such references, in code or not, can be very amusing for readers familiar with the fine folks mentioned in the book, as well as their kith and kin, but generally speaking, unless a minor character plays an actual role in the plot — as in contributing some action or information that moves the story along — he will not be memorable to readers who do not already know the correlates in question.

You indignant gaspers are getting restive again, aren’t you? “Yes, yes,” you mutter impatiently, and who could blame you? “It’s not the most efficient means of storytelling; I already know that. But I fully intend to rectify that by making Aunt Bessie the gas station attendant in Chapter 47, Aunt Cassie the librarian in Chapter 12, and Cousin George the second corpse who rises from the dead on the honeymoon. Happy now?”

Not necessarily, no. Even if the characters in a crowd scene do appear elsewhere in the book, it can still be pretty tedious for the reader if the narrative engages in a full roll-call. Or even a partial one.

At least when the characters in question are not integral to the action of the crowd scene. Bystanders are not, by and large, memorable to the average reader, but all too frequently, it’s not clear which of the cast of thousands in a scene is the one (or dozen) that the reader is supposed to remember.

If, indeed, it’s important to the plot to remember any individuals among them at all. Even in a memoir, it often isn’t, from a pure storytelling perspective.

And writers, as any editor can tell you, tend to forget that. Every editor in the biz has at one time or another been confronted by an author angrily waving a manuscript in her face and shouting, “What do you mean, where did this character come from? Alice was a guest at Ben’s wedding in Chapter Two, for heaven’s sake!”

Invariably, the irate author is right: the character will indeed have been mentioned by name in passing, as in,

The bridesmaids, Greta, Elaine, and Alice, were dressed in an eye-searing chartreuse that left Ben wondering just what these old friends had done to his bride back in junior high school.

200 pages later, out of those three never-again-mentioned bridesmaids, the author expects the reader to remember Alice.

At the risk of seeming impertinent, why?

“Wait just a minute,” I hear some of you say. “If Millicent finds she’s forgotten who a character is, she has a perfectly easy way to find out — her boss asked that I send a synopsis along with my submission. All she has to do is flip to the back of the packet. Or are you saying that if I have a lot of characters in my opening scenes, I should place my synopsis FIRST in the packet?”

In a word, no — at least, not unless an agency specifies in its submission guidelines that it prefers that order. Long-time readers, chant it with me now: a submitter should always send a requesting agent PRECISELY what s/he asked to see. No more, no less.

Yes, even if she asked for the first 50 pages and your chapter ends a paragraph into page 51.

To which I will add a corollary: any hyper-specific submission guidelines that deviate sharply from the rules of standard manuscript format that an agency might post on its website or an agent might specify at a conference — like, say, specifying that submissions may only be in Helvetica or that they should be bound, both usually no-nos — should be treated as applicable to THAT AGENCY ALONE, rather than to every association of authors’ representatives currently walking the earth.

At least until you’ve done some research on what other agencies are asking to see. Sometimes, an individual preference is just an individual preference.

Aspiring writers often forget that. (And, as always, if you’re unfamiliar with how professional manuscripts differ from printed books or other commonly-scene formats, please see the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS and/or STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories on the list at right.)

If you put the synopsis at the front of your packet, Millicent is just going to toss it aside and go straight to the first page of your manuscript. If dear Millie reads all the way through your submission and likes what she sees, THEN she will read the synopsis.

Maybe.

You’re hoping that I’m kidding, aren’t you? Bizarre but true, typically, not every employee at an agency will take the time to read the synopsis they asked a writer to send prior to sitting down with those first few pages to see whether s/he can write.

Seriously — ask at the next writers’ conference you attend.

There’s a certain logic to this, at least for fiction. After all, if a book made it to the submission stage; presumably, the novel’s premise was deemed acceptable by the query screener or the agent to whom the writer pitched it; the only reason to read the synopsis at the submission stage, then, would be to find out what happens AFTER the last submission page.

And anyway, if Alice’s appearance in Ch. 2 was brief enough, chances are that she won’t have made an appearance in the synopsis the first time around, anyway.

So unless a character is central enough to what’s going on in a scene to warrant development, you might want to consider whisking her out of Millicent’s sight, at least for the time being.

“For the time being?” I hear some ambitious character-generators out there piping hopefully. “Does that mean I can bring Aunt Cassie back elsewhere?”

Sure — just because you take a few (or a few hundred) characters out of your submission draft of a novel doesn’t mean that you can’t reinsert them later in the publication process. There is no law that says that an author can’t offer a stripped-down, swiftly-moving version of her novel to agents and editors — and then, after the ink is dry on the relevant contracts, say to your editor, “You know, I’ve always thought that there should be more bridesmaids in Chapter 2. Like, say, 47. How would you feel about Alice’s being one of them?”

Remember, no manuscript is set in stone until it’s actually in print between covers. (And sometimes not even then.) Keep your options open, keep copies of EVERY major revision of your manuscript, so you can revisit the Alice issue again down the road.

And, of course, keep up the good work!

P.S.: hey, I realized I hadn’t nagged you all about this in a while, but today would be a dandy time to make back-ups of your writing files, wouldn’t it? Especially if you haven’t made another electronic copy since, well, ever?

I hope you never experience the trauma that is a computer meltdown, but I would urge you to make back-ups frequently, just in case. Computer repair facilities see countless writers rending their garments and exclaiming, “But I NEED you to get into my fried hard drive! What do you expect me to do, retype my novel from scratch – and from memory?”

Trust me, you do not want to be one of these people. Make back-ups.

If you’re a PC user unfamiliar with your backup options, intelligent and insightful long-time reader Chris Park has generously wrote an EXCELLENT post on his blog on data loss, back-up solutions, and other nifty save-my-manuscript-from-oblivion ideas — all written in blessedly clear, direct layman’s terms. I would highly recommend its perusal.

Posted on - 7 Comments on Guest blogger Joel Derfner: I need permission to what?

Guest blogger Joel Derfner: I need permission to what?

Hello, gang –

Anne here. In writing yesterday’s post, I think I strained something while stretching to make yesterday’s analogies work. My credulity perhaps, or yours. That will teach me not to rush off and write a post the instant after I receive bad news, eh?

The timing couldn’t be better for me to take a day off, though — FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Joel Derfner, better known to us here as witty commenter and fabulous blogger Faustus, MD has graciously written us a guest post for today.

And on a lulu of a topic I seldom address, too: getting permission to quote songs in your book.

Was that giant sucking nose I just heard your collective gasp at the realization that you might conceivably need such permission — and that obtaining it might be the author’s responsibility? Read on, MacDuff.

But first, for those of you who missed my crows of joy last week, Joel’s second book, Swish: My Quest to Became the Gayest Person Ever has just been released by Broadway Books, a division of Random House. And hoo boy, has it been garnering some enviable reviews. Lookee:

“Whether recounting his stint at New York’s cheerleading squad or the eye-opening week he spent undercover at a North Carolina “ex-gay” ministry, his inner terrain of hope and devastation is recognizable to anyone who has felt the scrutiny of peers. In one typically sidesplitting passage Derfner leads his step aerobics class, seemingly with unflappable confidence, while harboring private fantasies of boosting student morale with a tray of homemade brownies.

“‘I have these moments of insecurity quite often,’ Derfner admits. ‘If you can point to your flaws in a way that reveals them to be universal, then your flaws are not unattractive — just human.’ Whether he’s the next Noël Coward or a male Bridget Jones, one thing is clear: Queer America needs Derfner. In a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit.” — Out.com

“These witty, fun and poignant essays knocked me on my ass more than once. I desperately want to hang out with him.” — Booksplosion!

“The ultimate swish-quest, indeed, though it makes for more than a delightfully breezy, campy read, for the humorous anecdotes morph into movingly evocative memoirs when, for instance, he recalls his liberal, civil-rights-activist parents’ response to his teenage coming out: Not At All Good. His mother never accepted it, and he and she never achieved more than an uneasy détente. Thus this superficially facile book becomes more than the sum of its parts, as Derfner indicates when he observes, ‘Writing about my quest to become the gayest person ever led me to realize I was actually on a quest to become myself.’” — Booklist

May all of our books be greeted with such delighted enthusiasm. (And make sure to let me know when they do — I love gloating over readers’ successes.) Both Swish and Joel’s hilarious first book, Gay Haiku are available on Amazon, or for those of you who prefer to deal with independent bookstores, Powell’s.

Take it away, Joel!

 

You know how you open a book and there are quotes from song lyrics all over the place? And how you figure the author just sent the manuscript in and somebody at the publishing company took care of getting permission to quote those lyrics?

You’re wrong.

I mean, you may not be wrong as far as, say, Stephen King is concerned. I don’t know. But excepting extraordinary cases the author is usually contractually obligated to get licenses for anything s/he quotes. (S/he is also contractually obligated, by the way, to pay for licenses for anything he quotes.)

Okay, I thought when I discovered this as I was finishing my book, that’s a hideous miscarriage of justice, but worse things have happened in the world. I mean, it’s not like I have to go camping or anything. It was in this frame of mind that I submitted my manuscript, which quoted lyrics from nine songs. I’d even taken the time to footnote songwriters and publication dates, just so Random House would see how diligent I was being.

But when my editor gave me his feedback, one of the things he said was, “Getting permissions can sometimes be tricky, so you might want to cut some of these. Actually, you might want to cut all of them.”

To appease him I went through the manuscript and cut as many of the lyrics as I could, replacing them with non-copyright-infringing prose references to the songs in question. Of course I knew he was worrying needlessly, but I am nothing if not accommodating (okay that’s totally a lie I’m not accommodating at all but I worry that if I don’t obey him he’ll stop giving me chocolate every time I show up at his office), so I didn’t have a problem doing this. In the end there was only one lyric I felt couldn’t be cut without doing real damage, “Without You” on pages 115-6.

THANK ^%$*ING GOD.

I tell you, I might as well have been trying to get my hands on the Hope Diamond.

At first it wasn’t so difficult. After a half hour or so with the Internet I figured out that the copyright was owned by a company (we’ll call it Company A) in Britain. My editor’s assistant called them (because I live in the ghetto and have a ghetto phone plan that would sooner let me destroy its headquarters in a rain of fire than allow me to call a country in Europe) and got the name of the guy I needed to talk to about permissions.

So far, so good.

I e-mailed the guy— I’ll call him Guy A, though over the course of time I would find many more names for him—asking him what I needed to do. He e-mailed back the next day and said I needed to get in touch with Company B, which managed Company A’s licensing in the U.S. I went to Company B’s website and put in a licensing request on their convenient licensing request page.

A week later I’d heard nothing. I was not particularly concerned; I assumed that the workings of Company B, like the workings of most companies, functioned at the speed of stalactite creation. But since I hadn’t even gotten an automated response I figured I might as well check in. “Oh, you’ll hear back a week or two from now,” said Guy B when I called.

Three weeks later I’d heard nothing. “You’ll hear back soon,” said Guy B. When I asked whether I could speak to the person in charge of licensing just in case, he said, “Okay, I’ll transfer you to Gal C.” I ended up leaving a very friendly message on Gal C’s voice mail asking her to call or e-mail me.

Two weeks later, no word.

I e-mailed Gal C again.

Nothing.

I cced Guy A at Company A asking him whether he had any suggestions. His response was, “I’m sorry, I have no ideas for you.”

Guy A can go jump in a lake, I thought.

Finally I e-mailed Gal C and cced Guy A, hoping that he was in some nebulous position of authority over her and that this move would inspire her to action. Whether because of my e-mail or not, she wrote back and asked for a few pieces of information, which I sent immediately.

I e-mailed again a month later.

And again a week and a half later.

I called again a week after that but when Guy B answered the phone he said, “We’re moving offices, so she doesn’t have a phone now.”

“Well,” I said, “can I just leave her a voice mail?”

“She doesn’t have voice mail either. Can I take a message for her?”

I left one, not believing for a moment it would do any good.

A few weeks later, I was visiting friends in Los Angeles and had the brilliant idea of actually going to the physical headquarters of Company B and asking to speak with Gal C. She wouldn’t be able to ignore me if I was standing in front of her.

So of course the office was closed. Nobody was there. At 11:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

I e-mailed Gal C again a week later (ccing Guy A again)—oh, God, you know what? This is so incredibly tedious I can’t even bring myself to go on. Suffice it to say that I finally got permission from Gal C at Company B to use the lyrics (for $300).

Then like two months before publication I got an e-mail from my editor’s assistant saying that so-and-so in the legal department wanted to know whether this permission applied to Canada as well or just the United States. Company B said no, it was just for the U.S., and they had no idea who I should talk to for Canada. Company A said the same thing.

In the end I had to call Guy D and Gal E at Companies C and D in the U.S. (neither of them knew the answer to my question, and Gal E actually began explaining the basics of copyright law to me as if I were twelve, except she kept getting things wrong). Then I called Guys F, G, and H at Companies E, F, and G in Canada.

By this point it was too late to make any changes to the book, so all I could do was show that I was making a good-faith effort to secure permission, so I asked Gal I from Company G to have Gal J e-mail me saying that they’d received my request. Gal J did so and I forwarded the e-mail to my editor’s assistant.

To get permission to quote twelve lines of one lyric has taken me six months, countless phone calls, and probably two years of my lifespan. And $300 plus whatever Company G says I owe them.

I am never, ever, ever going to quote any copyrighted material in anything I write ever, ever again.

Addendum:

I just got an e-mail from Gal J at Company G. I have permission to use the lyrics in Canada.

Once I send them $755.

Remember that I had to pay Company B $300.

Right now I have $34.62 in my bank account.

On the one hand, I believe that Company G is much, much better at its job than Company B.

On the other hand, Company G’s superiority obviously consists not only in communicating much more responsibly but also in getting its clients much more money.

I am never, ever, ever going to quote any copyrighted material in anything I write ever, ever again.

  

Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and Gay Haiku author Joel Derfner is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard. A year after he graduated, his thesis on the Abkhaz language was shown to be completely wrong, as the word he had been translating as “who” turned out to be not a noun but a verb. Realizing that linguistics was not his métier, he moved to New York to get an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts.

Musicals for which he has written the scores have been produced in London, New York, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he joined Cheer New York, New York’s gay and lesbian cheerleading squad, but eventually he had to leave because he was too depressed. In desperation, he started knitting and teaching aerobics, though not at the same time. He hopes to come to a bad end.

  

Posted on - 2 Comments on The nuts and bolts of revision — and a long-time reader gets PUBLISHED!

The nuts and bolts of revision — and a long-time reader gets PUBLISHED!

Before we begin what I hope will be a rather lengthy and fruitful headlong dive into craft issues, may I have a drumroll, please? Long-time Author! Author! reader Arleen Williams’ memoir, The Thirty-Ninth Victim, has just been published by Blue Feather Press!

Congratulations, Arleen! Here’s the book’s official blurb:

The Green River murders were headline news throughout the 1980s. By the time the perpetrator was sentenced in 2003, at least 48 young women had met an untimely death at his hands. What started as as string of local killings in Seattle became a national nightmare before it was over. In homes all across America, television news programs and newspapers large and small carried feature stories about the ever-growing list of victims.

Now imagine that during this time, someone you love — your baby sister, a beautiful young woman of 19 –suddenly goes missing. The police are at best unhelpful, and at worst, seemingly uninterested in what’s happened to her. And then comes word you hoped you’d never receive: your youngest sister’s remains have been found. She is yet another victim of the Green River killer. With amazing candor, Arleen Williams tells the story of her family’s journey, before and after the Green River killer murdered her sister Maureen and left her body in a stretch of wilderness off the west side of Highway 18.

As insightful as it is heart-wrenching, The Thirty-Ninth Victim gives you a window into the family dynamics that contributed to this life-altering tragedy. This is a memoir unlike any other. The author set out to tell Maureen’s story, but in doing so, she tells bits and pieces of every family’s story. You cannot read this profoundly personal and cataclysmic tale and come away unchanged, nor will you ever view your own family in quite the same way. You will applaud Ms. Williams’s courage in sharing this recounting of her family’s trauma through one of the most atrocious streaks of serial killings in American history. And like the family, you will never forget The Thirty-Ninth Victim.

I’m always thrilled when one of our community makes the leap into print, but in this case, I’m particularly tickled. I read an early draft of Arleen’s memoir a couple of years ago — and even as recently as last week, driving past the lovely forested hills east of Seattle, where poor Maureen’s remains were discovered, I still got chills, remembering some of the scenes in this book about the intense fragility of human life and collective memory.

What struck me most about this memoir is that, unlike so many books about particularly horrific crimes, the victim here comes alive on the page. Not as yet another in an almost unimaginably long list of murdered women (so long, in fact, that it sparked the nationwide Take Back the Night rallies) or as merely an object to be acted upon with violence, but as a vibrant light suddenly snuffed. And as part of a family so deeply attached to its own self-image as normal that even a daughter’s disappearance is allowed to disrupt it.

Chilling stuff. And powerful.

So please join me in giving Arleen a great big round of applause for pushing an unusually brave piece of writing to publication. THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM is now available on Amazon or at a slightly lower price on Blue Feather’s website.

That was invigorating, wasn’t it? Makes you just long to chat about editing your own manuscript, eh?

No? Okay, let’s warm up first by talking about a controversial subject amongst manuscript editors: editing for style.

As a freelance editor, I can tell you: much of what an editor does is fairly straightforward; the average manuscript abounds in non-standard usage, grammar, and spelling that would not, to put it kindly, make the soul of Noah Webster sip his lemonade happily in literary heaven.

Any editor would make these kinds of changes in almost exactly the same way; these matters are relatively non-negotiable.

I’m talking about good editors, of course — not the ones who neither like prose nor know how to fix its problems. (Don’t even get me started about the ones who aren’t well enough read to be editing in the first place. Because I am a very tactful individual — no, really — I shall eschew mention of the not-very-experienced editor who, in handling a certain memoir at an imprint that shall remain nameless — even though it went out of business last year when its parent company was bought out by a larger concern — spied the name Aristotle in the text and scrawled “Who?” in the margin.)

Contrary to popular opinion, though, editing for style, in either someone else’s manuscript or one’s own, is significantly slipperier than the good-writing-is-good-writing aphorism-pushers would have you believe.

Why? Well, every editor — just like every writer, every agent, and every reader in North America — was taught something slightly different about what makes a paragraph well-written.

And not only do we all THINK we are right about our particular favorites — we all actually ARE right about it. Style is very much a matter of taste. Obviously, certain tastes prevail at any given time in any given genre, but that does not mean that every reader in the genre will like the same stylistic choice.

Do I hear some grumbling out there? “Wait just a gosh-darned minute,” I hear some of you cry, the ones who have taken a whole lot of writing classes, attended more than your share of writers’ conferences, or wrote your way through an MFA. “I’ve always been taught that good writing is good writing, period. My teacher/mentor/that guy who ostensibly had a background that justified his yammering at me for an hour at a literary conference told me that there’s actually not a whole lot of variation amongst different styles of good writing, just what each particular market will embrace. Good writing, I have always been given to understand, is good writing, across venues.”

Ah, that old bugbear — yes, grumbling readers, you are quite correct to point out that experts thither and yon are indeed prone to saying things like this. The mere ubiquity of a saying, however, is not necessarily proof of its truth.

If you doubt this, I sentence you to a couple of hours contemplating all of the disparate things, people, and concepts tagged with “That’s hot!” over the last couple of years.

This is one of those translation issues, yet another instance where industry truisms are subject to misinterpretation if one listens to the actual words being said. What publishing professionals actually mean when they say that good writing is good writing is twofold: every format demands CLEAR writing, and standard format is standard format across venues.

In that respect, yes, good writing is good writing: standard manuscript format demands specific structures, norms for spelling and grammar, preferred typefaces; clear writing that says what the writer wants it to say AND is easily comprehended by others on a first read.

Go back and read that last paragraph again, because it’s awfully important: these, dearly beloved, are the minimum standards for professional writing.

If a manuscript does not adhere to this standard, it will invariably have problems making its way through an agency, publishing house, literary contest, or good English program. Thus, mastering these basics is the necessary first condition to producing a marketable manuscript.

Period, unless you are a celebrity on some other basis. And even then, chances are good that your publishing house will assign you a ghost who is VERY proficient in the basics.

Why am I bringing up this distinction at the beginning of a series on self-editing your work, you ask? Because unless a manuscript is clearly-written, perfectly formatted, and free of technical problems, revising for style is not going to render it publishable.

Want some time to go back and read that last sentence again? Go ahead; I’ll wait.

As a professional book doctor, I would STRONGLY recommend that any aspiring writer contemplating large-scale revisions perform a basic-level clarity-and-grammar editorial sweep through the manuscript FIRST.

Yes, I’m fully aware that this level of revision will be no fun whatsoever. Do it anyway, not only because it needs to be done if you ever intend to sell the book in question, but also because cleaning up the non-negotiable points will clear the decks for higher level revisions.

THEN you can begin to think about style.

And promptly fall into a quagmire, at least if you happen to be a person who likes to follow the current trends of writing advice.

What constitutes good style is quite subjective. This is why, in case you were curious, you can walk virtually into any good writing program and hear at least a couple of people arguing over whether good writing can be taught.

Writers quibble a lot amongst themselves over this. I have always thought that this question was formulated incorrectly: it really should be whether style can be taught, or whether talent can be learned.

Certainly, the mechanics and forms of the base level of good writing can be taught, or at any rate learned: it is hard to imagine someone absolutely new to the craft spontaneously electing to set up a manuscript in accordance with standard format. Its strictures are rather counter-intuitive, aren’t they, to those of us who read published books from time to time? And any good listener willing to take critique can learn to be, if not a clear writer, at least a clearer writer.

Which brings us right back to the good old basics.

While the basic level of good writing may not seem particularly ambitious — not worth, say, the years of alternated stomach-churning submission stress and nail-biting waiting to bring to publication — it is a truism of the industry that the VAST majority of submissions agencies and publishing houses receive do not rise even to this level.

Again, you might want to take a second gander at that last sentence.

I cannot stress this enough: no amount of personal flair or innovative insight will permit a technically problematic manuscript to clear the minimum standards hurdle. Agency screening guidelines, contest judging rules, and editorial expectations are almost invariably set up to prevent it.

That massive moan you just heard, new readers, the sound so like all of the banshees of the world complaining about their respective stomach aches, was my long-time readership anticipating my dragging them yet again through the logic behind standard manuscript format.

Actually, I’m going to spare you that march through grimness for the time being (but if you have even the smallest doubt on the subject, please run, don’t walk, to the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS category in the list at right). For now, suffice it to say that I tend to harp on the basics because, frankly, the basics, not matters of style, are where most manuscripts meet their Waterloos.

This was not always true. In the not-so-distant past, when agents were not required equipment for fiction and editors were able to spend more of their time on editing and less on acquisition, it was not uncommon for the Writer With Promise’s first work to be taken on, with the intention that over time, the editor would work with the author to help that promise ripen into something beautiful.

These days, however, agents and editors both see enough technically perfect manuscripts in their submission piles that the decision to reject the technically imperfect ones is considered a no-brainer. Today’s Writer With Promise, then, needs to be producing impeccable basics before s/he can get a serious read for style.

Hmm, where have I heard that before?

I wish this were more widely known, or at any rate that if agents and editors MUST use form letters, they would have a version that reads, “Your style is promising, but unfortunately, this manuscript has too many technical errors for us to be able to consider it as is. Please consider getting a whole lot of good feedback or taking a professional formatting class, revising it, and sending it to us again.”

But that’s not writers are told, is it? No, we hear “this manuscript does not meet our needs at this time,” or “I just didn’t fall in love with it enough to take it on.”

Leaving many an aspiring writer to wonder: what do these generic phrases mean with respect to MY manuscript? Was it rejected because it had typos, due to running afoul of a common agency screeners’ pet peeve, or because Millicent the screener did not like the style?

Left with this kind of ambiguity, the average writer will almost invariably conclude that the problem was stylistic. Yet until she has done a basic clarity/format/grammar edit, how can she be sure?

More to the point, how can she possibly even begin to guess what she should change in order to make her work more marketable?

In practice, she typically can’t: most writers will just send out the same manuscript every time an agent or editor requests it. Or, if it gets rejected several times, they might tweak their submissions stylistically and send it out again, without correcting the technical problems that got them rejected in the first place.

Anyone but me sensing a vicious cycle here?

Here is my hope for all writers: if we are going to be rejected, let it be because an agent, editor, or browser in a bookshop legitimately doesn’t like our style. Not because the margins are the wrong size, or we’ve used a bizarre typeface, or we really didn’t understand how a NF book proposal should be put together, but because each of our voices is so strong that it comes down to whether the individual reader LIKES it or not.

Because at that point, my friends, we will all be marketing our work like professionals, building our individual stylistic choices upon a firm foundation of clarity, literacy, and a thorough understanding of how the industry works.

Don’t make me take that metaphor any further. I’m fully capable of constructing that metaphorical house right up to the rafters.

All of which was a lengthy preamble for this: starting tomorrow, I’m going to start talking about how to diagnose and make stylistic changes to your manuscript. Throughout, I shall be focusing mostly upon novels, but much of the techniques will be applicable to creative nonfiction and memoir as well.

But fair warning: I shall be operating on the assumption that the manuscript you are looking to revise is already crystal-clear, perfectly formatted, and free of technical errors — because if you want to make a living as a writer, you need to begin thinking of that level of polish as the BEGINNING of the revision process, not its end.

Yeah, I know: I have high standards for your work. Aren’t your ideas worth it? Believe me, on this point, I am cruel only to be kind; I would much, much rather be announcing the publication of your first book than consoling you after a rejection.

I’m funny that way.

Congratulations again, Arleen, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Getting good at incorporating feedback, one last time: my eyes! My eyes!

Getting good at incorporating feedback, one last time: my eyes! My eyes!

This may be a short post today, I’m afraid: my blogging program just upgraded to new software, and every single page of the administrative side of this site is now blindingly, glaringly, is-that-my-composition-page-or-have-I-died-and-am-approaching-heaven white, with rather pale blue type. A pale yellow background in parts varies the page where one reviews comments, but overall, the effect is like trying to write at high noon in the middle of Death Valley without a hat.

Oh, the new software has benefits, too. But seriously, I may have to don sunglasses to use it.

So let’s proceed quickly to today’s lesson, before I give in to the urge to run straight toward that bright light to embrace my long-gone loved ones and run smack into my monitor.

Back when I was teaching at a big university (I would give you the hint that it was a big football school whose mascot was a vicious carnivore, but that would hardly narrow it down, would it?), I had a policy that my students could always rewrite their term papers with an eye to improving their grades, even if the class was not a writing class per se.

Why did I allow and even encourage this? Three reasons: first, few students who were not taking writing classes had much opportunity to revise their work — and thus kept making the same kinds of argumentative mistakes without learning how to correct them. Since I required that they submit the revision within a couple of weeks, in theory they would be better equipped to argue by the time the next term paper was due.

Second, as anyone whose pages have passed under my editorial pen can tell you (sometimes shaking with shock), I’m an inveterate asker of follow-up questions. By revising the paper, the student could address these questions and end up with a better understanding of the essay topic.

(Or a related one. Because I had occasionally been known to throw an argumentative curveball — thank goodness I grew out of THAT — I would routinely ask my students to turn in the original, commented-upon paper along with the revision, so I wouldn’t scrawl in the margins of the new, “Why on earth have you gone of on THIS tangent?”)

Third — are you sitting down? — many of my students were turning up at college apparently without having ever been taught some of the basic rules of grammar.

If my marginalia on his papers was the first time a college sophomore had had the rule governing there, their, and they’re explained to him — a real-life example, by the way — well, I felt the least I could do was give the guy the opportunity to put that new-found knowledge into practical application toute suite.

Did I hear some of my readers who graduated from high school before 1969 choke a little during those last couple of paragraphs? “What do you mean?” some of you demand, clutching your chests. “Why didn’t he learn the rules in high school?”

Oh, you’ve stumbled into a contentious subject: when I was teaching in the 1990s, my colleagues at the university asked that particular question all the time. As did I. But when I asked high school teachers about it, they said that in our state, at least, high school composition lesson plans were predicated on the assumption that the students would learn the specific rules in college. And when I asked junior high teachers, they said the students would be taught that material in high school.

Thus the sophomore in my class who had spent years just guessing which one was right.

Is this still the case? I honestly don’t know; I hope not. But at the time, I certainly was not the only teacher who routinely passed out lists of grammatical rules when the lecture was on, say, Confucius.

One term, I had a student who was struggling with the material — let’s call him Lance Corporal, because he was in ROTC. Lance was a bright enough kid, if not particularly motivated. Not all that unusual in that particular class, admittedly, as it was a common distribution requirement, but still, most of the students seemed to manage to do enough of the reading to get by, or at any rate to fake it during discussion sections.

Not so Lance: he invariably sat silent throughout every class. Again, not a terrific surprise: ROTC students, in addition to promising to serve in the military after graduation, typically carry a pretty heavy course load over and above their army-navy-air force classes, so I didn’t begrudge ‘em the odd snooze in class, as long as they kept up with the work.

On the day before the final, Lance appeared in my office, bearing revisions of both of the papers assigned so far in the class — and this time, he did surprise me. Tears in his eyes, he confessed that if he did not raise his grades, he was going to be thrown out of ROTC.

Since I had barely heard his voice in the past nine weeks and the first versions of his term papers revealed that he hadn’t done much of the reading, I suppose I should have been a bit sterner with him — technically, the deadline for submitting either revision was long past. But heck, I didn’t want the kid to lose his scholarship just because he couldn’t read a calendar very well.

Even then, I thought of deadlines more like a writer than a professor, obviously.

So I pocketed his revisions for later grading, giving them back to him at the next day’s final. “Are you sure you want me to grade these, Lance?” I asked him after he’d turned in his bluebook. “It looks as though all you did was make the grammatical and spelling corrections I hand-wrote on your original paper.”

He stared at me blankly. “Yeah? Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?”

“Well, not only that. I had expected you to answer at least some of the questions I wrote in the margins.” In the face of his incredulity, I figured trying to get him to understand that he should have answered ALL of them was a lost cause.

Confusion was the most socially-acceptable expression of the many on his face. “I thought you just wanted me to think about those questions before the final.” And then he started explaining to me all over again — unnecessarily, I felt — that he was dangerously close to being thrown out of ROTC because of his grades.

Evidently, Lance felt that I had filled the margins and in some cases the back of his pages with commentary because I was just feeling chatty.

Why am I telling you this story at the end of a series on how writers can learn to take feedback well, you ask? Well, Lance made a couple of errors of judgment common amongst writers dealing with agents and editors for the first time.

First — and I’m sure that you’ve figured this one out already — he was too literal in incorporating feedback. Surprisingly, writers will often make the editorial changes scrawled on the manuscript without a murmur, yet neglect to address the larger issues the agent or editor may have suggested in, say, the cover letter that accompanied the marked-up pages.

Remember couple of weeks ago, when I mentioned that hell hath no fury like a critiquer who feels she has expended her feedback-giving time in vain? Well, the overly-literal reviser tends to elicit a similar reaction.

Why? Professional feedback is usually more concerned with identifying manuscript problems than with micro-managing how the writer should solve them.

Or, to quote my excellent agent: “You’re the writer; you figure out how to fix the manuscript.”

Actually, I have always found this rather empowering — it certainly raises the reviser’s ability to negotiate compromises over contested revision points if the critiquer is not married to the details of a suggested change. But when a revising writer is thinking super-literally, he’s implicitly expecting, like Lance, to be told precisely how to change the manuscript in every particular.

I can certainly understand why someone new to the biz would want guidance — but frankly, the mere idea of a writer’s abdicating control of a manuscript to the extent that he would even consider making ALL requested changes blindly simply because he was told to do so…well, I can’t imagine doing that myself.

I was going to say that it made me feel slightly faint, but I believe the ambient glare is responsible for that. Perhaps it is just a heat-induced illusion, but my cat just staggered across my desk, meowing, “Water…water!” like a refugee from a remake of BEAU GESTE.

But I digress. Let me lead the cat to the nearest oasis, then I’ll get back to the topic at hand.

Being reasonable about incorporating feedback does not mean rolling over and playing dead. It means being a good listener, a thoughtful considerer, and a grateful acceptor of critique, no matter who gives it. But ultimately, you are responsible for what you submit.

Lance’s second tactical error was also one aspiring writers frequently stumble upon: he gave his feedback-giver reason to regret having tried to help him in the first place. Not only did he wait until the last possible second to ask me to regrade his papers, but he was astonished that merely incorporating what was after all my revision work into his text wasn’t sufficient to raise his grade. By not thinking through his request for help thoroughly before he made it, he made the issue whether I liked him enough to bend the rules for him.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant the rule along with me now: if you want people in the industry to help you, it’s your job to make yourself as easy to help as humanly possible. And if someone does take the time to give you a hand, you should never leave him or her in any doubt of your abiding gratitude.

So did I allow Lance to rework his papers again during finals week? Well, let me put it this way: I’ve been worrying about him since the war began. But the last time I saw him, his officer’s uniform looked very nice on him.

But if I’d been an agent or editor who had asked writer Lance for changes in a manuscript, would I have been that kind? Maybe, maybe not. But is it really in a writer’s interest to take that gamble?

Basta. Next time, we shall move on to the wonderful world of manuscript problems — beginning with increasing conflict on the page, since you asked so nicely, Gordon — or that’s not Rudolph Valentino riding toward me across the shifting sands.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Just when I thought the getting good at incorporating feedback series had wound to a close, Dave brings up another good issue

Just when I thought the getting good at incorporating feedback series had wound to a close, Dave brings up another good issue

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There I was, my friends, happily contemplating the spring rain cascading over the new blooms on my pear tree and what few tulips the destructive-but-invaluable construction crew left in my back yard, when it popped up on my screen: a comment left by incisive longtime Author! Author! reader Dave:

I’m of the opinion that incorporating feedback at any level is easier if a writer realizes two things. One, that no matter how good one’s writing is, it can be better. Two, whether pending changes are the result of self-review, first reader suggestions, or publishing industry directives, they are all meant to improve the work.

Gnash went my teeth — because, dear readers, not only is Dave right on both of these salient points, but the first is particularly applicable to the series in question. In a flash, I realized that even as I had been patting myself on the back about how thoroughly we’d gone over the plight of the feedback-recipient, I had merrily skipped over a couple of rather important details.

It’s already time to revise the series, in short. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood — and by golly, I’m going to backtrack and try to travel both.

The first point that seems to have slipped under my radar may be lifted more or less verbatim from Dave’s observation:

No matter how good one’s writing is, it can be better.

Or, to stand it on its head and paint its toenails before we shove it onstage to tap-dance:

Receiving revision requests on a manuscript does NOT necessarily mean that it isn’t well-written — or that its author doesn’t have scads of talent.

Hoo boy, is that ever a hard concept for most writers new to the biz to swallow!

Why? Well, professional opinions vary, but here’s my theory: because a manuscript represents SO much of its writer’s time, energy, love/soul/whatever you want to call it, it’s extremely difficult for the writer to think of it as a product-in-development, rather than a finished piece of art.

Do I hear some harrumphing from veterans of earlier posts in this series? “Yeah, yeah,” these battle-hardened toughs say, “we already know: if a writer is querying with or submitting a book to agents and editors, it’s a product that s/he is trying to sell. A manuscript is not merely an extension of its author’s personality, and we writers should not respond to feedback as though we were being criticized on our own characters. I thought you said that you were going to share something NEW.”

Ooh, tough crowd. Okay, here goes: the new part has to do with how we writers think of our talent as we take it to market.

When an aspiring writer prepares a manuscript for submission — but wait, I’m assuming that the writer we’re discussing is industry-savvy enough to differentiate between preparing a work for submission to agents and editors and simply writing the book in the first place.

The latter is about the creative process, expressing oneself, and all of the rest of the time-consuming delights of the first draft; the former is concerned with polishing up those ideas so they’re ready for an agency screener’s notoriously merciless peepers.

Or, to put it a bit more crudely, when writing the first draft of a manuscript, the writer is generally composing to please herself, primarily; in prepping the manuscript for submission (or revising based on solid feedback), the writer is seeking to please a potential reader.

I’m just full of aphorisms today, amn’t I?

Most aspiring writers do not make the distinction between these two states of manuscript preparation, alas, and it shows in what they submit to agents, editors, and literary contests: pages rife with grammatical problems, misspelled words, under-thought plot twists, etc.

Within the first couple of pages, even.

I mention this last point partially as a lead-in for the discussion I had planned to begin today, on common manuscript problems that often lead to rejection. (In preparation for which I have, as the sharper-eyed among you may already have noticed, already added a new category to the list at right, AGENCY SCREENERS’ PET PEEVES OF THE NOTORIOUS VARIETY.)

As I MAY have mentioned, oh, eighty or ninety times before, and at least a dozen times within this particular series, professional readers do not read like other people. Especially within the first few pages of a submission, they tend to read from line to line, or at most from sentence to sentence: if the first one in a paragraph contains a problem, they simply do not move on to the next.

Sentence, that is, not paragraph. Speaking of tough audiences.

Which is to say, they most assuredly do not read like writers, and especially not like writers reading their own work with a kindly eye. They will not, for instance, gloss over a typo in the name of a place with merely a muttered, “Oh, I’ll need to go back and fix that,” think that {and} repeated four times within a single sentence gives a marvelously evocative feeling to the narrative, or assume that an opening similar to THE LOVELY BONES is an invariable sign that the rest of the manuscript will be as good.

They are disappointingly likely, in fact, to leap to the prosaic and unflattering conclusions that the submitting writer just didn’t know how to spell Berkeley in the first place, adores run-on sentences, and that THE LOVELY BONES was her favorite book, respectively.

Echoing my phantom critics at the top of this post, the professional reader sees such opening and cries: show me something NEW, something I haven’t seen before. And show it to me in a clean manuscript.”

A clean manuscript, in case you were wondering, is the term for a submission that is absolutely free of spelling snafus, grammatical errors, and the kind of typo I mentioned above as likely to be noticed as only a minor annoyance by the writer I mentioned above. The ability to proofread adequately technically shouldn’t have anything to do with talent, yet the two run hand-in-hand enough that they might as well be related, in the eyes of the publishing industry.

Why? Well, no one’s really sure who first made that particular correlation, but if I had to guess at the underlying logic, it would run something like this: an aspiring writer who understands the distinction between writing a book and prepping it for submission is both (a) more likely to proofread than one who doesn’t and (b) more likely to have some conception of how the industry works — and is thus (c) more likely to be good at taking feedback well, meeting deadlines, and generally living up to the other rather high standards of good behavior to which they expect successful writers to conform.

If I had to guess.

From the publishing industry’s point of view, a well-written submission by a good writer is like a talented actor auditioning for a play. Many gifted performers may audition, but only one can ultimately play the part. The one cast as Hamlet may not actually be more talented than the others, but he does have particular qualities and skills that the director wants.

Now, if the auditioning actor (let’s call him Bertie, to personalize him a little) walks into the audition believing that raw, natural talent is the only thing the director is assessing during the audition, not getting the part is going to seem like a judgment on whether he should be acting at all, right?

Sound a bit familiar? It should — it’s roughly equivalent to what many, if not most, writers feel the first time they have a manuscript rejected. Or even when they encounter substantive feedback.

And if they have, as is so often the case, not made the distinction between writing a book at all and polishing it up for submission, that conclusion isn’t all that surprising. Constructive feedback is, after all, predicated upon the assumption that the writer INTENDS to take that second step of prepping the manuscript for eyes other than her own.

If that is NOT the writer’s intention — if, in other words, she believes that she is so talented that her work should be published as is and regardless of any technical problems it may have — this assumption is incorrect, badly so. Pretty much by definition, to a writer whose primary goal is to please herself, any outside criticism is going to seem at least a little bit outrageous.

And personal.

Because, you see, to a writer who has set herself up as her own best reader — and thus only legitimate judge — a critique of her manuscript is not only a dig at the quality of her writing, but also a slam at her skills as a {reader}. From there, it’s not such an implausible step to its being an attack on her intellect, her taste…in short, upon her as a person.

Again, if I had to guess.

Of course, few aspiring writers who respond to feedback as if they were being criticized personally would reproduce their logic this way. We’re talking about something pretty instinctive here, as I mentioned earlier in the series, about whether the brain perceives critique as a threat deserving a fight-or-flight response.

My point here — indeed, a large part of my point in inaugurating this series in the first place — is that it’s possible for a writer to prepare herself for hardcore critique well enough that the fight-or-flight response need not be triggered at all.

Let me tell you from experience, the less adrenaline is rushing through a writer’s system while she’s trying to incorporate feedback, particularly take-no-prisoners professional feedback, the easier the experience will be for her. And on her.

Two of the best ways to minimize that initial rush of adrenaline: first, acknowledging the distinction between writing a book and preparing it for market; second, being aware BEFORE receiving the feedback — or even before asking for it — that good feedback is aimed at the latter, and thus not at the writer personally.

While that bitter pill is sliding down the gullet, let’s return to our actor friend, Bertie.

Through repeated auditions, Bertie has now developed a slightly tougher skin, you’ll be delighted to hear: he no longer feels each time he loses a part that he shouldn’t be acting. Yet without hearing specific feedback on why Actor X got cast in this part instead of him, it’s easy for Bertie to start to make up his own (possibly erroneous) explanations: oh, the director wanted a blond all along, Bertie thinks, rubbing his dark locks; he was looking for someone taller than I am; no one is casting serious character actors right now.

Again, does this sound familiar? It should, especially to those of you who have spent much time at writers’ conferences or on online writers’ forums: it’s essentially what many a writer who has been querying or submitting for a while can begin thinking. The rejections must all have been for superficial reasons.

And maybe they were. But maybe, just maybe, the query letter was just a touch unprofessional, or there’s a common agency screeners’ pet peeve on page 1.

The maybes can stretch into infinity, eating up months and years of speculative energy — or the writer could conceivably try to diagnose the problem by getting some good feedback.

To show that in Bertie’s terms, this would be the equivalent of his finding a really good acting teacher, someone who can help him even out that occasional sibilance he didn’t realize he exhibited, to learn how to walk differently for each character, and bring additional depth to his line readings. Think he’s going to have a better chance the next time he’s up for a part against another actor with superficially the same characteristics?

Even better, isn’t a director more likely to take a chance and cast someone OTHER than the person he’d originally pictured in the role if Bertie DOESN’T exhibit the odd whistling s?

Just a few more bees to stick under your bonnet, of course, to see if they can’t come up with some honey for you. Thanks, Dave, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Guest blogger Anne Cushman: but what if they think it’s ME on the page?

Guest blogger Anne Cushman: but what if they think it’s ME on the page?

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I have another Sunday treat for you campers: Anne Cushman has given in to my blandishments to share her insights on the writing life with us here at Author! Author!

I’m very excited about Anne’s guest blog — and not just because she has a fabulous novel coming out this week. Enlightenment for Idiots is due to be released on April 15by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of Random House.

You may perhaps have heard of them.

The book’s already for sale on the publisher’s website (at a slight discount over bookstores). It’s also available on Amazon, of course, as are the many books in which her excellent nonfiction has been anthologized:

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The lady has some serious writing chops, in short, and the advance press for the novel shows that she’s been using her writing time wisely. Take a gander:

“A hilarious take on the quest for truth that manages to respect the journey while skewering many of the travelers… Cushman brings devastating wit and a thorough knowledge of her subject to her first novel, evoking an India that fills the senses and stirs the spirit even as it occasionally turns the stomach.”
~Publishers Weekly

“Cushman brilliantly interweaves snippets of Buddhist teachings with the mishaps and successes of their journey, infusing the book with wisdom and humor.”
~Booklist, starred review

“Cushman’s send-up of the New Age American dream is both thoughtful and wise.”
~The Shambhala Sun

The amazing thing about this first novel is that you feel as though you are reading about your own life. The details are so honest; the writing so clear and sure-footed, sprinkled with great humor. Kudos to Cushman–this is a wonderful debut.”
~Natalie Goldberg, author of Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir and Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.

Whetted your interest, haven’t they? Here’s a brief synopsis:

Nearing age thirty, Amanda thought she’d be someone by now. Instead, she’s just herself: an ex-nanny, wannabe yogini who cranks out “For Idiots” travel guides just to scrape by. Yes, she has her sexy photographer boyfriend, but he’s usually gone—shooting a dogsled race in Alaska or a vision quest in Peru—or just hooking up with other girls. However, she’s sure her new assignment, “Enlightenment for Idiots,” will change everything; now she will become the serene, centered woman she was meant to be. After some breakup sex, she’s off to India to find a new, more spiritual life.

What she finds, though, is an ashram run by investment bankers, a yoga master who trashes her knee, and a guru with a weakness for fashion models. She escapes a tantra party at the Taj Hotel, has a nasty argument outside the cave where the Buddha used to meditate, then agonizes through the ten-day meditation retreat that’s supposed to make her feel better.

No, India is not what she’d pictured. But she finds a friend in Devi Das, a red-headed sadhu who refers to himself as “we.” And when a holy lunatic on the street offers her an enigmatic blessing, Amanda realizes a new life might be in store for her—just not the one she was expecting.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? As if all that were not enough, Anne’s also running an essay contest to celebrate the book’s release. So if any of you out there have a great yoga romance story to share, scuttle on over to her website with all possible dispatch.

Please join me, everybody, in welcoming guest blogger Anne Cushman. Take it away, Anne!

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A few weeks ago — right around the time it really began to sink in that my novel, Enlightenment for Idiots, was going to hit the stores soon, and that people might actually be going to read it, including such people as my ex-husband, my fellow Buddhist meditation teachers, and my 86-year-old Catholic retired-Army-general father — I had a vivid anxiety dream.

In the dream, I was skating around a roller rink on white fur-trimmed roller blades, dressed only in a black velvet bikini. I caught a glimpse of myself in a floor-length mirror, and — at 44 years old — I looked totally hot.

But two thoughts flashed through my mind — is this get-up really suitable for this stage of my life? And what are my colleagues at Spirit Rock Meditation Center going to think of it?

As I scribbled the dream in my notebook the next morning, I clearly saw the fear it reflected. As a longtime practitioner and teacher of Buddhist meditation and yoga, was it really appropriate for me to be publishing a sexy, irreverent romp about a screwed-up young wannabe yoga teacher looking for enlightenment in India while stumbling through an increasingly disastrous love life?

It was bad enough that the novel poked fun at many of the sacred cows of the spiritual world, including some of its most august teachers. It was even worse that just about every one of my ex-boyfriends would imagine that he recognized pieces of himself in Matt, the main character’s charming, creative, and noncommittal lover.

But what if people actually thought that the protagonist, Amanda — a funny but painfully insecure young woman who is desperately seeking a spiritual band-aid for her chronic sense of emptiness — was based on me?

But the dream also points to one of the basic principles of good writing. If you’re going to touch people in any way — and particularly if you’re going to make them laugh — you have to risk revealing yourself. You have to forget about what’s appropriate, and what other people might think, and be willing to be ridiculous in your honesty and vulnerability.

If you stay in the safety zone, your words will never reach below the surface, and the most you can hope for is a superficial chuckle.

When I’m writing, the voice I aspire to is the voice I use when I’m hanging out with my very best friends — the ones to whom I can say absolutely anything and know that it will be heard, if not agreed with. It’s that intimate, self-revealing voice that speaks the truth — even when it’s totally making things up.

Because even fiction — especially fiction — works best when it rings true.

While the plot and characters of “Enlightenment for Idiots” are invented, the novel was, paradoxically, an opportunity for me to speak more honestly about the absurdities of the spiritual journey than I’d ever been able to in my nonfiction work.

So as a writer, how do you find that intimate, honest voice? For me, one shortcut is to write to my best friends — literally.

When I first began writing personal essays (after years as a journalist), each draft began as an email to someone I loved and trusted — most often, to my older sister Kathleen, who’s also a writer. “I’m not sure how to tell this story,” I’d begin. “But I’d really like to write about the time that I…”

And off I’d go, telling my story to someone who loved me, and who would continue to love me even when I shared with her my most embarrassing moments, my most inappropriate desires, my wackiest observations.

After a few emails on that subject, I’d cobble the pieces together, cut off the fat, and — presto — an essay that made people feel like they were hanging out on their bed with their best buddy, laughing, bitching, and crying about their all-too-human lives.

Of course, I’d have to do some filtering at that stage — and for that, it’s good to have someone who will act as a reality check before you send your finished piece off to your editor.

For instance, maybe I really don’t want to tell you — a bunch of total strangers — about the time in my 20s I sat in my car before knocking on my date’s door (a last-minute dinner invitation that I hadn’t had time to dress for) and decided that I should probably take off my ratty old bra now, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed by it if he undressed me later. So I removed my bra and dropped it behind my car seat, and then went in for my date; but unbeknownst to me, the bra hook snagged on my sweater, so I walked into his living room trailing my bra behind me like a grubby tail.

Maybe that story’s just too embarrassing, and should be cut. On the other hand, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s a story I can give to a fictional character. Or maybe I won’t give the story itself, but just the feeling behind the story — and then invent the details that go along with that story.

In fact, maybe that’s what I already did. As a reader, you’ll never know.

But one thing I know for certain: as a writer, you’ll never get anywhere if you censor yourself before you write something down.

And then, if what you say is too revealing — if it crosses the line where the readers sense of sympathy with you or your character turns into pity and revulsion — your trusted best-friend reader, the one you’re emailing your drafts to, will let you know.

But don’t worry about that now.

For now, put on that black bikini. Try on those roller skates. Know that we all have cellulite, just like you — like you, we all worry that our thighs are too fat, our breasts too small, our butts too droopy. And when we see you out there, skating around in that rink in all your human imperfection, it gives us incredible joy.

Thanks for those lovely and inspirational words, Anne!

Remember, everybody, Anne Cushman’s Enlightenment for Idiots (Shaye Areheart Books, 2008) will be coming out this week. You can read more about it at www.enlightenmentforidiots.com, or race on over to Amazon to buy it.

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ac-photo.jpg As a writer and teacher of yoga and meditation, Anne Cushman explores the poignant intersection between the lofty ideals of spiritual practice and the gritty, comical, and heartbreaking details of ordinary life. She is a contributing editor to both Yoga Journal and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and the coauthor of From Here to Nirvana, a seeker’s guide to spiritual India.

Her essays have appeared in the the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Salon.com, and have been anthologized in Best Buddhist Writing 2004 and 2006, A Woman’s Path: Best Women’s Spiritual Travel Writing, Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Tales, and other books. She co-directs the Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation Training Program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California; and lives in nearby Fairfax with her seven-year-old son, Skye.

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Posted on - No Comments on Getting good at incorporating feedback: oh, dear

Getting good at incorporating feedback: oh, dear

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Today, thank goodness, is the last installment of my series on how to deal with revision requests — and buckle your seatbelts, everybody; it’s going to be a bumpy night.

I have been dealing with this topic at length, because for all of the complaints one hears amongst writers about unreasonable editorial demands, writers actually do not tend to talk much amongst themselves about practical means of accommodating or rejecting requested changes.

Yet another area, I suspect, where fear of appearing less accomplished than other writers (“Of course, I can make those changes! In my sleep! Hanging upside-down from my toes like a bat!”) keeps us from sharing common experiences.

Also, most published writers are too nice (or too reputation-savvy) to discuss the problems their books have encountered on the way to publication, even in the relative safety of a writing class or literary contest. So their published comments on the subject tend to sound as though they’ve just joined a major sports franchise: “Everyone here has been wonderfully supportive. I’m just trying to do my best for the team.”

Understandable, of course, but not as helpful to constructing aspiring writers’ expectations of the publishing process as it might be.

Especially for a first book. If you are new to the writing game, you are, unfortunately, far more susceptible to micro-editing than a better-established author; from the editor’s prospective, you have fewer bargaining chips, and from yours, you do not yet have the market experience to be able to put your foot down with credibility.

To put it bluntly, you do not yet have a comeback to that all-too-common editorial comment, “Look, I know what sells, and you don’t.”

While it definitely behooves a new author to recognize that this statement is usually true, today, we’re going to tackle the worst-case scenario for when it isn’t: what do you do if your agent or, still worse, your editor has asked you to make a major textual change that you genuinely feel would be harmful to the book AND every polite, professional means of demurring has failed?

Before I move on to the final steps of the process, I want to repeat my earlier disclaimer: please do NOT take the steps advised below before taking the ones described in my last post — or, indeed, the ones from throughout this entire series. Starting the delicate negotiation process in the middle will not speed your efforts; it will, however, greatly increase the probability of insulting your editor and/or agent, upon whose good opinion your work is largely dependent.

Take it slowly, and remember to be polite at all times.

If you have taken the steps in order, by the time you are ready to proceed to the more serious argumentative steps below, you will have learned enough about your critiquer to be able to avoid his pet peeves in argument. You also will already have taken the minor points off the table, in order to concentrate on the primary issues; Steps 1 — 10 (explained in my last posts) will achieve that.

Even if you cannot resolve all of your contested points, you will at least have learned a great deal about WHY the editor wants the changes — and how flexible he is. If he’s a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy, or if he is terrified of symbolism, or if he’s a point-of-view Nazi, you’re MUCH better off knowing that early in the editing process.

This may not, in short, be someone accustomed to compromise.

From here on out, I am going to assume that you have been a model of restraint and courtesy throughout your dealings with the poor advice-giver. Let’s move on to what you do when your editor or agent has refused to fall in with your first genteel indications of displeasure.

(11) Make the changes you have already agreed to make — then reassess.

It’s a good idea to wait a few days, deadlines permitting, before implementing ANY changes you conceded in your earlier discussions. It’s been my experience that my clients tend to feel rather let down if they make the changes right away, as though they had lost the fight entirely. Taking some time to let the intense feelings subside permits you to reassess the text calmly.

Then take a look at the remaining contested points: is there any way at all that you could make those changes, now that you have won some of the concessions that you wanted? In other words, are you sure that you want to push this fight to the next level?

(12) Make your case — but do not, under any circumstances, resort to ultimatum.

I know, I know: so far, this has been a list of dos, rather than don’ts. I mention this because it’s almost always the first thing a writer wants to do at this juncture.

Heck, for many writers, it’s the first thing they want to do when any conflict arises with their agents or editors; I’ve known writers who have threatened to dump agents who went three days without answering an e-mail.

I can’t imagine how writers gained a reputation for being a hypersensitive bunch.

I’m not bringing up our collective reputation flippantly — it does affect how folks in the industry respond to our e-mails when we’re angry. It’s not all that uncommon for an agent to hold off on answering a writer’s anguished outcry for a few days or even a week, waiting for this author to calm down.

Unfortunately, many writers interpret silence as rejection. (Can’t imagine why they would leap to that conclusion, can you, when some agencies now no longer bother to inform submitters that their manuscripts have been rejected?) After a few such missives, upping the ante to an ultimatum may well appear to be the only means to get an agent or editor’s attention.

Don’t do it.

Even if you are 100% right, engaging in a pitched battle with your editor after the book is often like a Mini Cooper’s contesting the right of way with a Mac truck: legally, the truck may have to yield to the Mini, but if it does not, the Mini is going to be far more damaged than the truck, right?

As I MAY have mentioned before, the steps to come are to be reserved for ONLY those situations where you have tried several rounds of tactful, non-confrontational approaches to ironing out your differences with your editor or agent FIRST. If you escalate the conflict too early in the discussion process — as, alas, too many writers do — before you have tried the preliminary steps, you run the risk of being dismissed as unable to take criticism.

At worst, your passion in defense of your book may come across to your editor as an ultimatum: take my book as is or not at all. Or, in the case of a revision request impasse with an agent, as an implied threat: stop asking me to change my manuscript and start sending it out to editors, or I’ll take it to another agency.

Bad, bad, BAD idea. This is not an industry that takes well to ultimata. They’re far too likely to say, in the words of the immortal Noël Coward, “Pack up your talent; there’s always plenty more.”

Yes, even with the author of a book they love. Most standard publishing and agency contracts are specifically written to make it far from difficult for an editor to dump an uncooperative writer.

So do try your utmost not to allow the situation to degenerate into ultimatum-flinging. You may be hopping mad, and thus have to do violence to your emotions in order to take the early non-confrontational steps I advised earlier, but trust me, it’s honestly in your best interest to be as sweet as pie socially while you are raising hell textually.

(13) Separate the fact-based issues from the opinion-based issues, and demonstrate that you are correct about the facts.

This may seem as though you should have done it at the beginning of the process, but providing someone who regards himself as an authority on a book with evidence that he is flat-out wrong is actually a fairly confrontational move. Few of us like admitting that we are wrong, and occasionally, one does meet an editor or agent who is on, as we say on this coast, his own little power trip. Even if you absolutely have to prove your contentions, it’s best not to humiliate your opponent.

Be very clear about whether it is the fact in your book your critiquer is contesting or your interpretation of them — an issue very likely to be muddied in a memoir or other nonfiction book. If you have done your homework and can back up your claims, the should be non-negotiable; if it is the facts, quietly provide photocopies of reputable print sources for your contentions. (Print sources are better than electronic ones in this instance, as the printed word has greater power in the publishing industry than does electronica.)

On questions of grammar, for instance, simply photocopy the page in one of the standard editing guides — you own a copy of Strunk & White, right? — and mail it to your critiquer. Write a nice cover letter, of course, saying, “Hey, after our discussion about this, I thought I should double-check my facts, and…”

Don’t gloat, and don’t negotiate: you are sending this corroboration as a courtesy, not as persuasion. This evidence is merely your way of explaining why you will NOT be making the requested factual or grammatical changes. Do it politely, and finish your cover letter with an assurance that you’re already busily working on the OTHER changes he’s requested.

At the end of this step, you should have a list of all of the remaining contested issues that are purely matters of opinion. Again, reassess: are the remaining points worth a fight?

(14) Bring in outside help, if appropriate.

If you have an agent, this is a great time to turn the matter over to her — the situation has gone beyond your ability to negotiate. Your agent may well know more about this editor than you do, or about editorial imperatives within the publishing house. There may be more going on here than you realize — such as, for instance, the hiring of a new senior editor who has just declared strong opposition to the kind of argument you are making in your book.

If you do turn the issue over to your agent, you must recognize that you are no longer one of the negotiators. As such, you must accept the outcome.

Think of it like the electoral college: technically, you are not voting for a presidential candidate, but for an elector who has PLEDGED to vote for that candidate. Like delegates taking the primary and/or caucus results from their states to the national elections (who are bound to vote for particular candidates only on the first ballot, FYI; the media seem a little fuzzy about how that fact might conceivably affect the Democratic nomination this year), electors can in fact change their votes in a pinch.

In other words, your agent may come back with a compromise that does not please you.

If the agent is the one making the suggestions, however, or if you do not have an agent and are in dispute with an editor at a small press, you may need to explore other options for outside help.

Running the remaining suggestions past your first readers, for instance. Your bargaining position will be marginally stronger if you can legitimately go back to your critiquer and say,

Hey, I know that you are pretty firmly committed to my removing the Ellen character, but none of my 15 first readers drew the same conclusion you did about her. Your concern was about male readers, and half of mine were men. Would you be open to reading a revised manuscript that did retain Ellen, to see if any of the compensatory changes I made alters your dislike of her?

If you are writing nonfiction, consider calling in an expert in the field to back you up. Having spent many years teaching in a university, I can tell you that most academics will very happily devote half an hour to talking to any writer who is interested in their life’s work.

You may have trouble tracking down a famous professor to corroborate your points, but it is often surprisingly easy to get to one of the top people in the field. Offer to add a footnote or a line in your acknowledgments in exchange.

If the expert supports your view, resist the urge to gloat. Call your agent or editor and say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said about point X, and you raised an excellent point.” (Even if he didn’t.) “I thought I should double-check, so I contacted…” (Refer to your expert by every title she has ever held.) “And SHE says…”

Few editors or agents would continue to argue with you at this point. You will have given them a piece of proof that they can use if higher-ups at the publishing house raise the concern.

(15) For the opinion-based suggestions, recognize that you are dealing with someone else’s OPINION, not fact, and you may not be able to change his mind.

If the editor/agent categorically refused to negotiate certain points (or all of them), you may have found yourself reduced to steps #13 and #14 rather quickly. Once you have winnowed out all of the fact-based objections and tried to prove that you are not alone in believing as you do, you just have to face that your critiquer may not actually have any rational reasons for certain of his objections. Something in your book may have rubbed him the wrong way, and he wants it out.

“In all matters of opinion,” Mark Twain wrote, “our adversaries are insane.”

It is seldom worth the energy to debate the merits of a personal dislike, but if you try, keep your tone respectful. Frequent use of such phrases as, “I respect your opinion, but…” and “I can see what you mean, but I think…” will go a long way toward keeping the conversation civil.

In an extremity, you can always go the Gaslight route — implying gently that the fault is not in the text, but in the beholder — but I warn you, it can provoke anger. Tread carefully as you say: “I’ve been over all of Ellen’s dialogue several times now, and I’m afraid I still don’t see where it is overtly political. If you can identify it, I’d be happy to take out any particular phrase that strikes you as untoward.”

You can fight the good fight for only so long, though, so do not allow this kind discussion to go for many rounds. Try to keep the squabbles brief, so that they do not come to dominate your relationship with your editor or agent.

(16) Know when to stop arguing. Either walk away or give in — but either way, keep a copy of your original version.

Ultimately, you cannot move forward in the publication process unless your agent and editor approve of your work. Period. If you have done everything possible to make sure that you understand how and why your agent or editor thinks they are necessary, and you still genuinely feel that incorporating the last of the requested revisions will ruin the book, take your book and go home.

Or — and once most authors ponder it a little, they tend to prefer this route — go ahead and make the changes. If your agent is indeed right about the book’s being more marketable that way, it may well be worth trying. (You can always discuss the possibility of changing it back with the acquiring editor after she picks it up, after all.)

What you should NOT do is allow the conflict to drag on for months or even weeks after both sides have made their positions clear. It’s not in your interest, and it’s almost impossible not to sound whiny at that juncture.

Nor should you try the surprisingly common reviser’s trick of just skipping certain parts of the requested revisions. Once you have discussed it and lost your appeal, you do need to keep up your end of the deal. Trust me, although you can sometime get away with not making minor changes that were not the bones of contention, I can assure you that your critiquer WILL notice if you do not make the major ones.

If, after you make your case as persuasively as you can while still remaining polite, and you have exhausted your other options for proving your point, prove that the book, and not the passage, is most important to you. Make the changes.

Yes, I know it’s awful, but your only other viable option remaining would be to produce precisely the ultimatum I advised you above to avoid at all costs: take my book as is or forget it. Strategically, it’s always a poor idea to offer a this-or-that choice unless you are comfortable with BOTH of the options you are presenting.

With an agent, this may well be a choice you are willing to offer — although it is not one that you should consider lightly, in light of how hard it is to land an agent these days. If you have another book in the drawer that your agent might interested in representing, this might be a good time to pull it out.

With an editor who has already bought your book, however, you have considerably less leeway. Given how VERY likely it is that an affronted editor will drop the book, and how very much harder it will be for your agent to re-sell it, now that it has a history of conflict, do make very sure that you’re willing for the answer to be, “Fine — go ahead and take the book away.”

Many unpublished writers have romantic conceptions about the purity of their visions, but honestly, I have seen very few books where the entire point of the book was lost due to a stupid editorial decision. Consider this: you need to get your book published before you can make a name for yourself as an author.

If the disagreement between you becomes a pitched battle, you are inevitably the loser in the end. Do not allow the argument to go on long enough or become vicious enough that the editor considers dropping the book — or your agent considers dropping you.

Just get on with it — and move as swiftly as possible from revision to working on your next book.

(17) Be proud that you handled it professionally, regardless of the outcome — and move on with your life.

After you decide to play ball, get the manuscript off your desk as soon as humanly possible; don’t give yourself time to continue to agonize. No need to send a cover letter admitting that you’ve thrown in the towel — a polite note accompanying the manuscript, saying that you have revised it, along with a numbered list of major changes, will suffice.

I know this all sounds like a nightmare for your reputation, but often, poor editorial choices harm the author less than you’d think within the industry. Forced editorial changes that are bad ideas are a well-recognized phenomenon, after all: most reasonable folks in the publishing industry will merely shrug sympathetically and believe you when you mention in later years that your did not want to make the changes in question.

If you make sure to keep a copy of the original version of the book, the one before any of the hateful changes, you can always reinstate your vision in future editions — or, and this actually isn’t terribly far-fetched, if the editor is replaced anytime in the near future. Editors move around a great deal these days, you know.

In the shorter term, notice what has happened here: although it may not feel like it at the time, you are actually better off than you were at the beginning of the revision process. By being polite and professional, you will have established yourself as being reliably pleasant under pressure, a trait publishing house like to know that their authors have before sending them on publicity tours. By going through the steps methodically, you probably will have gained at least a few concessions, so you will be better off than you would have been if you had just kept quiet and made them all.

You will definitely be better off than the many, many writers who, upon being faced with nasty editorial demands, just throw up their hands and hide for months on end, procrastinating about dealing with the book at all. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have heard agents and editors complain bitterly about writers who do that.

Instead, you kept your dignity and worked through the problem like a professional. Bravo! (Or brava, as the case may be.)

I hope that you will never be in a position to need this advice, of course — but now you are prepared if you ever should. Starting next week, I shall be moving on from this ultra-depressing topic to lighter, more congenial matters, such as increasing conflict in a storyline and how to kill off your characters with aplomb. A relief for everyone, I expect, including your humble correspondent.

And since you have all been such brave little troopers throughout this disturbing series, I have a treat in store for you tomorrow. So make sure to tune in — and keep up the good work!

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Getting good at incorporating feedback: tiptoeing through the tulips…and land mines

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For those of you joining us mid-series, I have been writing for the last couple of days about the unfortunately not unheard-of dilemma of a writer’s being asked by an agent or editor to make changes that the writer not only does not want to make, but believes might do serious harm to the book. Again, I sincerely hope that none of you find yourselves in this situation, but it happens to enough writers — especially first-time ones — that anyone currently on an agent hunt or with a book in editorial circulation should be aware of the possibility.

Why? Well, are you familiar with the old truism about a camel’s being a horse put together by a committee?

As I pointed out earlier in this series, a LOT of people are going to have an opportunity to comment upon a book between the time a publishing house acquires it and when it actually comes out. The editor who acquires it, for instance. Her assistants, who will probably read it before the editor does. Other editors on the committee that approves the acquisition. Their bosses. The marketing department. Advance reviewers.

And, increasingly, agents. Now that agents are expected to have books and book proposals all but print-ready by the time editors see them, they are starting to get the reputation for being rather nit-picky readers, too.

With all of these individuals with widely divergent personal tastes making suggestions on how to make a book more marketable, no wonder authors often become confused — and begin to feel downright embattled.

If this happens to you, take a great deep breath. This is not a situation with which you should be dealing in the heat of anger, which will only render misunderstandings more likely.

And there’s a LOT of room for misunderstanding in any feedback situation — as clever and insightful reader Faustus, MD pointed out yesterday, when first confronted with a list of requested changes, the writer may not necessarily know just how or why the agent or editor is asking for any given revision point.

One reason to go through ALL of the steps we’ve been discussing over the last couple of days is to maximize the probability of any honest-to-goodness misunderstandings coming to light — which I can virtually guarantee you that they will not if the writer storms into a meeting with an agent or editor in a rage.

Hey, let’s take another look at those steps, shall we?

(1) Go through the requested changes one more time, and make sure that you understand what you are being asked to do.

(1a) Print up the editorial memo or letter from your agent and go through the requested changes one by one, highlighting those that seem reasonable enough to make without further discussion.

(1b) Go back through the revision request document again and highlight the requests about which your considered reaction is merely tepid, rather than raising your blood pressure to dangerous levels.

(2) Go through the manuscript and make every change you highlighted. Right away.

(3) Go through the suggestions you have not yet highlighted and ranked them in order of distastefulness.

(3a) Write down a few specific arguments for and against doing each of the suggestions on the I Don’t Wanna list — text-based arguments, rather than merely the fact that you hate the suggestion in question. Be as specific as you can.

(3b) Go through the I Don’t Wanna list, concentrating particularly on the suggestions that you ranked low in noxiousness and the ones that you have determined would not require major manuscript overhauls. Could you see your way clear to making those changes now?

(3c) Make as many of the changes on the list as you can bear, reserving a couple of particular bugbears for further discussion, if you must.

(4) CALMLY and PROFESSIONALLY, ask your editor or agent for clarification of the contested points, mentioning first that you have already made the bulk of the requested changes.

(5) After politely soliciting this further feedback, reassess.

(6) If suggestions remain that you feel you cannot in good faith implement, THEN prepare to negotiate by selecting the 1-3 points you feel are most important.

A necessary disclaimer before I launch into point 7: Before taking ANY of the further steps I am about to discuss, I would STRONGLY suggest going back and read my last two postings in their entirety, because today’s advice is to be reserved for ONLY those situations where you have tried tactful, non-confrontational approaches to ironing out your differences with your editor or agent FIRST.

If you leap to these later steps — as, alas, too many writers do — before you have tried the preliminary ones, you run the risk of being dismissed as unable to take criticism. Trust me, you don’t want that.

If your objections to the advice you’ve been given are justified (and you will have to judge for yourself whether they are), the book will be best served by your clearing the discussion of all extraneous elements; Steps 1 — 5 (explained in my last two posts) will achieve that for you. From here on out, I am going to assume that you have already done that, and have been a model of restraint and courtesy throughout your dealings with the poor advice-giver.

Okay, so now you have been so reasonable that you feel as though your head is going to burst if you have to be polite for a single additional second. What do you do if all of this has not been enough to get your powerful critiquer to drop his most ill-conceived demands?

(7) Present your case for a couple of points — calmly, politely, and in a tone that implies that you are consulting a trusted authority figure for much-appreciated advice.

Please note that I have NOT advised your arguing the point until this step. Up until now, you have been as cooperative as humanly possible, right? All you did before was ask for clarification, thus leaving your critiquer a face-saving way to back down from the advice you consider silly. Since that did not work to your satisfaction, you are well within your rights to make a sane, well-organized argument in favor of your position.

PROVIDED that you pick only a couple of points to argue. I’m quite serious about this — more, and you’re going to sound as though you’re rejecting the whole shebang out of hand.

Be polite in your discussion, and reiterate up front (and without whining) that you have already made the bulk of the requested changes. Identify each change that you have already made in the text (aren’t you glad now that you took my advice and generated a revision list?), then explain precisely what it is you think you have been asked to alter, and give your reason for believing each will not help the book.

Even if you think the effort is going to kill you, it’s IMPERATIVE that you state our case without making your critiquer seem stupid for having suggesting such a ludicrous thing. Try, for instance, to avoid using words like disembowel, destroy, or decimate; they inflame tempers on both sides of the discussion.

Instead, state your fears about what such a change will do to the integrity of the book.

Let’s say you’ve been asked to remove a strong secondary character, Ellen, because twice in the course of the plot, she makes feminist statements (yes, it happens). When you asked your editor to explain why in Step 4, he said that the character was too political, and that male readers would not like her. He advised, instead, that your 40-year-old protagonist, Natasha, should have an extremely non-threatening teenage sister who resembles Natalie Portman in many significant physical respects, in order to make your novel more filmic.

Your original instinct, I’m guessing, might have been to frame your answer rather like this:

You sexist idiot, you have missed the entire point of my novel! What are you going to suggest next, that the courtroom scene take place in the middle of a Girls Gone Wild video taping?

While undeniably emotionally satisfying in the moment, such a response is unlikely to elicit the kind of let’s-work-together vibe conducive to long-term problem-solving.

It would serve both you and the book better if your answer went something like this:

I’ve finished almost all of the revision that you asked me to do, but I am still having difficulty conceiving how I can remove Ellen from the plot entirely. She is the voice of ethics in the plot, and as a neurosurgeon, she is able to speak with authority about their mother’s dementia. If Ellen were a high school senior, I fear that her statements about brain chemistry might lack credibility. I would welcome any bright ideas you may have for getting around this problem.

BE BRIEF, refrain from invective, and ALWAYS end with a request for advice.

Why that last bit? Asking shows respect, and even if you don’t understand how your editor could possibly have graduated from a decent elementary school, given his language skills, you need to maintain professional respect.

Unless you already have a well-established working relationship with the agent or editor requesting the changes, it is almost always easier to make these points in writing, rather than on the phone or in person. Most of the writers I know prefer expressing themselves in writing, anyway, and it permits you to state your case in its entirety before your agent or editor has a chance to interrupt you.

(8) Suggest alternatives.

For each requested change, offer to make a DIFFERENT change that you think will better achieve the goal. If you are presenting your arguments in writing, it would make tremendous sense to incorporate this step with the previous one.

Be practical, and offer your editor a smorgasbord of appetizing choices, so he can feel good about changing his mind. Could a scene that was not cut go instead of the cut one, for instance? Could your book’s argument be made stronger if you simply added another example, instead of deleting a point?

Do be up front about any plot or argumentative problems these changes will cause — and never, ever, EVER suggest any change that you are not willing to make. (Yes, Virginia, writers occasionally do.)

In the case of the novel about Ellen’s sister, you could simply add a paragraph to the previous one:

I have been considering giving Ellen a husband and a couple of children, to make her more sympathetic to the male readers you mentioned. This would require substantial revision of the timeline of the flashback sequence, where Natasha and Ellen are children together, which I am not sure I can complete by our two-week deadline. (Were you anticipating the flashback being cut entirely if I incorporated a teenage sister? If Ellen is 25 years younger than Natasha, they could not have been children together.)

Alternatively, if the deadline is indeed firm, I could give Ellen a wacky hobby, such as beekeeping in her attic, to make her bon mots come across more as a general sense of humor, rather than political commentary. Do you think this is a good idea? I am not convinced that the head of neurosurgery at Manhattan General would have the time (or the attic space) for such a hobby, but that could be part of the humor.

If you cannot come up with alternatives that please you, offer trade-offs from the lower rungs of your I Don’t Wanna list. If you make a less detestable change, can you retain a plot element that your heart is set on keeping? If length is the issue, is there something else you could cut that would allow you to keep your favorite scene?

What you’re trying to do here, of course, is to see the book from the editor’s perspective: is the change he is suggesting at all likely to make it impossible to keep a part he particularly liked? Is there a compromise you can suggest that would allow both of you to be partially pleased with the outcome?

Here’s a strategic solution to the Ellen problem that would make everybody happy:

Since Ellen’s medical expertise saves much exposition in the book, I am reluctant to remove her entirely. If I don’t have a fairly significant character working at the hospital, I don’t know how I can justify keeping that scene in the nurses’ locker room; as we both agreed, it is a highlight of the book, but for the joke to work, a female doctor has to walk into the room. However, I have had a bright idea that would allow keeping that scene and give the book a teenage girl character without eliminating Ellen: what if I gave Ellen a Portman-esque teenage daughter who is a candy striper?

(9) Be receptive to — and grateful for — suggestions for resolving the contested issues.

Listen carefully to your editor or agent’s response. If you are contesting a major point in the critique, you probably will not gain a total victory, but you will probably pick up some minor concessions along the way. Don’t turn your nose up at these; they add up.

Make absolutely sure to express gratitude for any concessions you do win. This may not seem necessary in the moment, but trust me, your agent or editor will remember it the next time s/he’s warming up to giving you feedback again.

(10) Document your agreement.

If the previous steps involved verbal discussion, it’s a good idea to send an e-mail the next day, recapping what you believe the mutual decisions to have been. It’s not a bad idea to do this even if the back-and-forth was in writing.

That way, you minimize the possibility of — chant it with me now, everybody — misunderstandings about what you have been asked to do.

Keep it brief — you really do not need to present more than a numbered list, accompanied by a preamble about wanting to double-check that you have understood correctly — and again, be as polite as humanly possible. Thank your agent or editor profusely for taking the time to discuss these points.

In the vast majority of cases, following these will get an author to a point where she can live with the suggested revisions, without engaging in bloody battles for dominance. In my next post, I shall discuss the hair-raising possibility of dealing with an editor or agent who — sacre bleu! — refuses to negotiate.

So may sleep tonight: rest assured, those cases are exceedingly rare; everyone concerned is ostensibly on the same side here, right?

Keep up the good work!

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Getting good at incorporating feedback: getting your revision moving in the right direction

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Last time, I raised everyone’s blood pressure a little by talking about an issue that we writers seldom discuss openly except amongst our closest friends: receiving a forceful recommendation from an editor or agent to make manuscript revisions that the author feels are a bad idea. Heaven forefend that this should happen to you, of course, but it is a common enough occurrence that I did not feel right about concluding this series on incorporating feedback without discussing how to deal with it.

Before I do, however, let me share the saga of Mr. Fennel.

Mr. Fennel was my sixth-grade reading teacher — thankfully, in my middle school, different teachers taught reading and writing. Why thankfully, you ask? Because even to an eleven-year-old, it was pretty apparent that Mr. F should not be giving feedback to impressionable young writers.

And not merely because his sole comment on my book report on THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO was, “Did you read it all?”

He was…well, distracted much of the time, to the extent that much of our classwork bordered on the surreal. Some days, he would simply stare into space whilst a child stumblingly read aloud, ignoring the mispronounced words, attempts to sound things out, and sometimes even questions from my little classmates. On others, he would bring stacks of mimeographed sheets containing lyrics to pop songs with strategic words left out, à la Mad Libs, then play records at us for an hour on end so we could fill in the missing lyrics.

Ostensibly, this exercise was supposed to develop our listening skills, but the songs all seemed to contain eerily similar lyrics: your eyes have a mist from the smoke of a different fire; the angel in your arms this morning is gonna be the devil in someone else’s arms tonight; your cheatin’ heart is gonna make you weep; you can go your own way; you’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good, baby, you’re no good.

Mr. Fennel had some problems at home, I’m guessing.

It wasn’t until years later, once I started teaching at the university level, that it occurred to me that perhaps he had imported this absurd busywork so that he would have fewer papers to grade. If you ship the class’ fastest readers off to the library for six weeks to design a floor plan for Toad Hall of a level of specificity that would make most architects weep with envy, you’re going to end up with fewer book reports to grade, after all. If you assign the class three straight weeks of poetry readings, followed by two weeks of filmstrips on such literary luminaries as Johnny Tremaine and Paul Revere, the paperwork would drop even more precipitously. And if you devote periods and periods of class time to the silent memorization of nonsense limericks…well, you get the picture.

I didn’t make up any of these examples, by the way. I can still reel off several of those silly limericks at the drop of the proverbial hat. I might have preferred to use my brain space for something ELSE, Mr. Fennel.

I’m not bringing this up to rag on someone who must now be collecting a well-earned teachers’ pension or ignoring schoolchildren in that great public middle school in the sky — okay, not ENTIRELY to rag on him — but because, in a way, Mr. Fennel made a wise strategic decision: when he was in no fit emotional state to be scrawling commentary in the margins of papers, he stopped doing it.

Unfortunately, most professional readers do not have that luxury. Come sleet, hail, dark of night, or break-up of marriage, they still need to plow through all of those manuscripts. Is it so surprising, then, that they might occasionally scrawl a comment or two that is a bit off the wall?

I mention this because writers very seldom stop to consider the possible mindset of the feedback-giver when contemplating requested revisions. We tend to treat every word — nay, every syllable! — an agent or editor says about our work as though it were as carefully thought-through as a doctoral dissertation, a perfect representation of what the commenter would think about the manuscript in question today, tomorrow, or fifty years hence.

Sometimes it is, of course — but agents and editors, like everyone else, are only human. Consider the possibility that a particularly outlandish suggestion may have been the result of a momentary abstraction. Or even (perish the thought) a non-writer’s vague idea about how to improve a manuscript.

Is the editorial mind-changing I mentioned a few days back starting to make more sense now?

But I digress; when I left off yesterday, I was going through a series of steps for dealing reasonably with a set of requested revisions that seems less than reasonable. Following these steps can help minimize the probability of hard feelings, botched revisions (oh, it happens), AND getting into a screaming fight over something a feedback-giver may have mentioned at a Mr. Fennel moment.

Let’s take another look at those first couple of steps:

(1) Go through the requested changes one more time, and make sure that you understand what you are being asked to do.

(1a) Print up the editorial memo or letter from your agent and go through the requested changes one by one, highlighting those that seem reasonable enough to make without further discussion.

(1b) Go back through the revision request document again and highlight the requests about which your considered reaction is merely tepid, rather than raising your blood pressure to dangerous levels.

(2) Go through the manuscript and make every change you highlighted. Right away.

Everyone happy with those? Well, perhaps not happy per se, but at least clear on why they might be more productive than shooting off a vicious e-mail to the critiquer? Good. Let’s move on.

(3) Go through the suggestions you have not yet highlighted and make them into a I Don’t Wanna list, ranked in descending order of distastefulness.

This step is really for you. Ranking them will force you to reexamine just how much you actually object to each — and to consider each individually, rather than as part of an egregious whole. Are there some changes that you would be willing to make if you did not have to make others?

Yes, I am gearing up to say what you think I’m gearing up to say: often, a writer is able to negotiate on one or two specific points — but seldom the whole shebang. Basically, Step #3 is an exercise in figuring out which battles to pick.

(3a) Write down a few specific arguments for and against doing each of the suggestions on the I Don’t Wanna list — text-based arguments, rather than merely the fact that you hate the suggestion in question. Be as specific as you can.

Make realistic estimates about how long each would take, for instance, and what else in the book would have to change in order to accommodate each one. Remember, agents and editors are usually not writers themselves — what may appear to a reader to be a perfectly straightforward change may look to a writer as if it would require changing the running order of the entire book.

(3b) Go through the I Don’t Wanna list, concentrating particularly on the suggestions that you ranked low in noxiousness and the ones that you have determined would not require major manuscript overhauls. Could you see your way clear to making those changes now?

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? At most, you’re going to be able to debate 2-3 points productively — so the more of the other suggestions you can clear off the bargaining table, so to speak, the better.

If all appear equally distasteful to you, or if you find yourself getting resentful even considering them, STOP. Take a break; get some outside perspective. This is not an assessment a writer can make productively without a cool head.

(3c) Make as many of the changes on the list as you can bear, reserving a couple of particular bugbears for further discussion, if you must.

Yes, you really should make the changes you can live with before you discuss the rest. Believe me, your arguments will carry more weight if you can demonstrate you tried to comply before attempting to negotiate.

Also — and this is no small consideration — your manuscript will undoubtedly be different after these changes; it will no longer be precisely the same book it was when your agent or editor critiqued it. By muddling through the partial revision, you will make yourself intimately familiar with the new and improved version.

Who better, then, to discuss it?

(4) CALMLY and PROFESSIONALLY, ask your editor or agent for clarification of the 2-3 most distasteful points, mentioning first that you have already made the bulk of the requested changes.

Now that you have singled out a few specific points out of the array of suggested changes, it is time to double-check that you haven’t just misunderstood what you are being asked to do — and to give your feedback-giver the opportunity to clarify vague suggestions.

Make it non-confrontational, and do try, if at all possible, to single out one of the suggestions you already implemented for praise, as in, “Wow, I wouldn’t have thought that changing my protagonist’s lesbian sister to a straight brother would have worked so well.”

Note that I did NOT say to construct a long, impassioned e-mail, giving all of your reasons against implementing the last few suggestions. This is merely a request to for more information: simply say (POLITELY) that you do not understand the purpose of some of the suggested changes, and ask for clarification on these two or three specific points.

Then stop typing. Or talking.

Why stop? Because if you keep going, the urge to start making your case is going to become overwhelming — and that is not the purpose of this step. Right now, all you are doing is making sure that you understand what you are being asked to do.

Before you pooh-pooh the importance of this step, remember Mr. Fennel: it’s possible that the suggestion you hated most was not exactly what the critiquer meant to say. (You’d be surprised how often an editor miswrote a suggestion in the margins, asking for change A when he really wanted change H.)

One last thing: I ALWAYS advise making this request via e-mail, so you have a written record of the afterward. But if you are making this request of an editor, consider discussing the situation with your agent first, if you have one. Your agent may well want to handle this situation for you.

(5) After politely soliciting this further feedback, reassess.

Carefully note any changes in what you are being asked to do, and make any subsequent revisions that seem reasonable RIGHT AWAY. That way, you have demonstrated yet again that you are a reasonable author, willing to work with your editor or agent — which will place you in a stronger position in future negotiations on the remaining points.

Take another look at your list of unacceptable changes. Does anything on it still need to be addressed, or can you now finish revising your manuscript in peace? Have you won enough concessions that you could live with the rest of the changes?

Take a few days to linger on this step, deadlines permitting, because it is an extremely important one.

Why? Well, you are deciding whether your remaining objections are worth a fight with your agent or editor, two people whom you really do want to be fond of you and your work. If you have any suspicion that your objections to the remaining points are based in your pride being hurt, rather than fear that your BOOK will be hurt, make sure you understand your own motivations.

Incidentally, if pride is the issue, I think it is perfectly acceptable for you to go back to your agent and editor and say, “You know, I really appreciated your feedback on the book, but I noticed that I had a hard time with the way it was presented. It may just be my personal pet peeve, but I hear constructive criticism much better if it’s put as X, rather than as Y.”

This is not being whiny; it’s clarifying the conditions under which you work best. The more information you can give your agent and editor about how best to communicate with you, the less of everyone’s time and energy will be wasted on missed signals.

(6) If suggestions remain on the I Don’t Wanna list that you feel you absolutely cannot implement in good faith, THEN try to negotiate.

If you decide that the remaining point(s) are so detrimental to the book that they are worth a battle royale, now is the time to start the negotiation process. In tomorrow’s blog, I’ll give some practical tips on that step.

Most of the time, however, it doesn’t need to come to that.

I have walked a lot of clients through this process, and I can tell you from experience that no matter whether you decide to push forward with your objections or not, if you have gone through the first five steps in a spirit of honesty, dedicated to the integrity of your manuscript, you will earn a reputation for being a level-headed, reasonable writer eager to revise.

That’s no mean feat, considering that you began the process in fundamental disagreement with your agent or editor. It’s a laudable goal, though, because a smart writer wants to remain on good terms with agent, editor, and everyone involved in the publication process.

As always, it’s in your best interest, ultimately, to right the urge to turn the feedback-giver into the enemy. Remember: no matter how misguided you feel the suggested revisions may be, the critiquer is on YOUR side — and your book’s. Or should be.

Keep up the good work!

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Getting good at incorporating feedback: there’s reasonable, and then there’s REASONABLE

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Congratulations, everybody: we have now made it through protracted and sometimes painfully self-revealing discussions of something writers seldom discuss amongst themselves, learning how to become better hearers, readers, and incorporators of feedback on our manuscripts. A round of applause to all of you for being brave enough to hang in there all the way through it.

From this point through the rest of the series, we’re going to be upping the ante a little, to talk about a common feedback situation that almost invariably stresses out even the best-prepared writer new to the biz. Today, I would like to talk about how to handle authoritative revision requests, the ones that are — or at least appear — non-negotiable because they come from your agent (or prospective agent) or editor.

Before we begin, however, a word or two of caution.

I know that I’ve been harping on this for the entire series, but I would like to reiterate yet again: it is VITALLY important that you do not blow up when first asked to change your work. At least, that you do not blow up in front of the person asking for the changes — and the farther you and your manuscript move along the bumpy road to publication, the more vital this is.

While it would be merely impolite to snipe at a well-meaning critiquer of your work within the context of a writers’ group, it might well harm your reputation if you snarl back at an agent (even after you have signed with her) or an editor, NO MATTER HOW WELL JUSTIFIED YOUR RESPONSE MAY BE.

I’m quite, quite serious about this: just don’t do it. Even when confronted with the world’s biggest buffoon screaming in the world’s loudest voice, if you reply in kind, it is YOUR reputation that will be hurt, not the critiquer’s.

You need to maintain the reputation of being an easy-to-work-with writer, because it is a selling point for any future book you write. In the shorter term, being calm in the face of criticism will also bring rewards. You want your agent to send your work out eagerly and to speak of it positively, don’t you? You would like your editor to look upon your next draft with favor, don’t you?

However friendly your agent and/or editor may be, until you are a relatively well-established writer, they honestly do have power over you. So please, don’t insult them if you can possibly avoid it.

Among other plusses, if you remain pleasant when criticized, you will have the element of surprise on your side. As I hinted the other day, as a group, agents and editors tend think of us as people who will instantly begin howling with outrage if they suggest that we change so much as a semicolon of our precious work.

(This is one of the reasons, by the way, that it is easier for writers with even the most minor journalistic experience to find agents and sell their work. Journalists, the publishing world believes, have learned through hard experience how to take critique without quibbling. See why I keep urging you to try to place pieces in your local community paper as eye-catching query letter candy?)

Writers have a simply TERRIBLE reputation amongst agents and editors as crybabies, whiners, and folks who just don’t seem to understand that publishing is a BUSINESS, people. They believe, in short, that most of us so fall in love with our own words that we bleed when they are cut.

We have all met a few writers like that, of course; they pop out of the woodwork regularly at writers’ conferences. You’ve met them, haven’t you? They are the ones who tell horror stories about how an agent — get this! — had the nerve to ask for the book to be revised! Clearly, the agent was an idiot who did not understand the brilliance of the book.

They are the ones who sent out a query letter once, got rejected, and never sent another because they were too furious. Clearly, there is a conspiracy to keep great work off the shelves.

They are the ones who unstrategically begin their pitches with, “Well, I know you’re going to say that this is too radical/too conservative/too original ever to sell, but…”

They are, in a word, inflexible.

I can feel some of you squirming in your desk chairs. “All right, already, Anne,” I hear some of you muttering. “I GET it: I need to present myself as a super-reasonable person to my agent and editor, even when I’m secretly seething. I’m sure I’ll be able to control myself when the time comes.”

Not that my faith in my readers isn’t close to infinite, but…are you positive about that?

We all like to think of ourselves as reasonable people, but here’s a hypothetical that should make your toes curl: what if you, after struggling for months or years to make your work market-ready, receive an e-mail from your agent or an editorial memo suggesting something that you firmly believe, after you have thought about it long and dispassionately, that you feel will ruin the book if you complied with it?

I would love to be able to tell you that this never happens, but sometimes it does. Just as not every agent will be the best advocate of your work, not every editor will have the judgment to maximize its potential. Yours might be that editor’s first book, or the first book of its type, or the editor’s heart might not be in it.

That’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. I have — and I tremble to say this, but its true — actually seen friends’ and clients’ work CHANGED by an untalented editor from being grammatically correct to being grammatically incorrect.

No, that wasn’t a misprint. Not so long ago, I had had a rather pointed argument with an otherwise reasonable editor at a major NYC publishing house who insisted that “everyone and his Uncle George” was wrong. He thought it should be “Everyone and their Uncle George.” I referred him to Strunk and White, of course, and privately cursed his high school English teachers, but my point here is that it is not very uncommon for the writer to have a better grasp of the rules of grammar than junior editors.

I know. It’s awful, and the universe really should not work that way. Shame on it.

While you can always part company with an agent who seems to misunderstand your work, after a press buys it, you will have considerably more difficulty walking away from an editor with whom you do not click. You do not want to earn the reputation of being a contract-breaker, any more than you want to be known as someone who blows up over every suggested change.

So how can you handle this ticklish situation?

Let’s assume that you have already exercised the patience of a saint, and not immediately said, “Wow, that’s the worst idea I have every heard — did you even read the book?” when the authority figure first vouchsafed the suggested changes. Let’s further assume that you gave yourself a few days to calm down before re-reading the contested passages, and generally adhered to the guidelines we’ve been discussing for incorporating any set of feedback.

What should you do next?

Here are some practical steps to take — and do make them in order:

(1) Go through the requested changes one more time, and make sure that you understand what you are being asked to do.

Yes, even if you have already gone through each and every step in the strategies we’ve discussed so far. The ante is high enough here that it’s truly in your best interests to make absolutely certain that there’s NO chance that you’re misinterpreting the purport of the requested changes.

As we saw earlier in this series, it is awfully easy for the writer to overreact to manuscript critique, or at the very least, allow a few criticisms to burgeon mentally into a damnation of the entire work. Receiving a hostile editorial memo or other set of negative feedback from an agent or editor renders this stripe of self-destructive reaction even more likely.

Take a nice, deep breath. Chances are, that’s not what your editor or agent meant to convey. Give yourself a little time to cool down — then proceed to step 1a:

(1a) Print up the editorial memo or letter from your agent and go through the requested changes one by one, highlighting those that seem reasonable enough to make without further discussion.

I’m not using highlighting in its metaphorical sense here — dig up an actual pen and physically mark the pages.

Why? Because until you separate the changes you don’t mind making from the ones that engender insensate rage, you can’t even begin to gain a true sense of how reasonable this set of feedback actually is; being blindsided by even a single request for major changes usually seriously jaundices the writer’s eye to even the most sensible small suggestions that flank it.

Make a separate list of everything you highlighted. These are the textual changes you’re going to make without a murmur.

I know, I know: you’re going to want to fight about it all, but trust me, there’s a good strategic reason to pick your battles here. (More on that later in this series.)

(1b) Go back through the revision request document again and highlight (either in a different color or not, as you choose) the requests about which your considered reaction (rather than your first one) is merely tepid, rather than raising your blood pressure to dangerous levels.

This is a particularly wise course of action if the feedback came in the form of notes in the margins of your manuscript. A LOT of editors have particular words that they like or dislike intensely; don’t take it personally if your critiquer crossed out a bunch of your words and replaced them with synonyms.

Most of the time, accepting such alterations will make little difference to the quality of the manuscript overall. If you don’t care much one way or another, this is an easy concession to make.

Making two passes over the manuscript will help clarify in your mind whether the requested changes that so outraged you at first are worth a fight. If you are going to get into an argument with someone who has power over you and your work, it’s a good idea to narrow your focus down to what is truly objectionable, rather than the critique in its entirety.

If you’ve received feedback in memo form, the same principle applies: if you’re going to have to wrangle over some of the suggested changes, it’s vital that you have a list in hand of what you’re willing to concede.

Yes, even if you’re not happy about it.

(2) Go through the manuscript and make every change you highlighted. Right away.

This is the single best thing you can do to preserve your reputation as a hard-working, reasonable writer. That way, you establish firmly that you are willing to revise the text; it is the CONTENT of certain changes that disturbs you, not the fact of being criticized.

Granted, it may take a little time to plow through them all, but if there was ever a moment in your career not to procrastinate, this is it.

It’s tempting to set the work aside, hoping that your critiquer will change his mind. It’s tempting to think that if you sit on the manuscript for a while, a magic solution that requires no effort will occur to you. Unfortunately, many, many writers before you have faced this temptation, too, and fallen before it.

Agents and editors complain constantly about writers who suddenly disappear for half a year at a time, ostensibly revising. However good the writer’s reasons may be, in the publishing industry, such a delay is considered passive-aggressive and annoying.

Go ahead, allow that irony to sink in for a moment. In an industry where it routinely takes a month to respond to a query, several months to consider a manuscript for representation, and months on end to read a manuscript with a eye to purchasing it, the writer who goes mute upon being asked to revise work is singled out as passive-aggressive.

Go figure.

There are more steps to come, naturally, but since I’m recommending a pretty emotionally-difficult course of action here, I’m going to stop for today, to let you catch your breath. Get a good night’s sleep, everyone, and keep up the good work!

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Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: getting right down to the wire

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At long last, a light at the end of the tunnel: this will be the last set of generalized advice on incorporating written feedback, at least for the nonce; since I’ve gotten you all thinking about revision, I’m eager to get back to some hands-on self-editing tips.

Has this series seemed kind of, well, dark? Having plowed through it, I certainly have a better understanding of why so few writing gurus seem to tackle it — since everyone’s level of sensitivity is different, it’s genuinely hard to give advice that’s going to be helpful to most, let alone everyone.

And yet, interestingly, writers tend to speak the same way about suggested revisions, regardless of the actual level or intensity of the feedback: at first, it’s all pretty outrageous and unreasonable, right? Just as the querier frustrated after sending out five queries vents in more or less the same terms as the querier frustrated after a hundred, rendering it difficult for the listener to understand the situation without follow-up questioning, writers faced with all kinds of change requests often express their feelings about them in the same terms.

Why is that potentially problematic? Well, it complicates the professional lives of those of us who help writers incorporate such changes, for one thing, and for another, it renders critique groups less able to support their members through revisions. It even makes it hard for writer friends to sympathize with one another.

If you doubt that last part, at your next literary conference, try eavesdropping on conversations amongst the agented. I can virtually guarantee you that in any group of five agented writers actively marketing their work, at least two of them will be quite happy to complain to their buddies about the ASTONISHING things their agents or editors have recently asked them to do to their manuscripts — a quandary that, let’s face it, most agent-seeking writers would gladly giver their toes to have.

Of course, the primary negative effect of this phenomenon is that old bugbear we’ve kept seeing crop up throughout this entire series: over the years, it has given the fine folks in the publishing industry the impression that writers as a group are simply unwilling to alter the ways they arrange words at all.

Which can make even the most reasonable author-initiated discussion about suggested changes sound at best like negotiation and at worst like whining.

Sorry about that. I just report the news; I don’t create it. Unfortunately, most writers new to the biz are entirely unaware of this stigma.

I believe it’s only fair to tell writers up front about our collective reputation for being, um, resistant to feedback, if only so they will learn to become strategic in venting. For a writer become known as an exception, s/he has to be ostentatiously reasonable and cheerful about revision requests.

In that spirit, let’s take a fond last gander at the strategies we’ve been learning to incorporate feedback in a way that defies expectations:

1. Don’t argue about the feedback with the feedback-giver.

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

5. Don’t use an industry professional as the first — or only — reader of your manuscript.

6. Don’t expect your readers to drop everything to read your work. Especially if they happen to work in or with the publishing industry.

7. Don’t try to do it all at once.

8. Make a battle plan, setting out reasonable deadlines for each step.

9. Allow some room in your battle plan –and time in your schedule — to respond to inspiration, as well as to experiment.

10. Make sure that you’re not over-estimating the critiquer is requesting.

11. When in doubt about what a critiquer expects you to do, ASK.

12. Avoid making the same mistake twice — at least for the same feedback-giver.

13. Keep excellent records about what you have done to the manuscript — and keep both hard and soft copies of EVERY major version of the book.

I fully realize that collectively, or even individually, this is a tough group of guidelines to follow with a smile, particularly on a tight deadline — or, as so often happens these days to newly-agented writers, when the agent keeps demanding changes to that manuscript that s/he praised as remarkable when s/he first read it. Ten years ago, it was relatively rare for an agent to get heavily involved in pre-circulation editing, but now that the market is so very tight in most fiction categories, the practice has exploded.

Much to the chagrin of the writers concerned, naturally…which leads me to my next strategy:

14. Vent to other sources early and often — preferably including at least a handful who have been in your situation.

Does this seem like a contradiction of Strategy #1? Actually, these tips work remarkably well together — and the farther a manuscript is along the road to publication, the more these two practices bolster each other.

Naturally, receiving critique — particularly of the notoriously blunt kind favored by the time-pressed industry — is going to generate some pretty intense feelings, but as I’ve been pointing out throughout this series, the feedback-giver is the LAST person at whom the writer should be venting.

If the writer plans on continuing to have a working relationship with the critiquer, at any rate.

Yet as we have seen with some of our exemplars, bottling up those feelings doesn’t necessarily assist either the writer or the revision process. So to whom should a writer vent?

Remember my GETTING GOOD FEEDBACK series (easily accessible in the category list at right, in case you’re interested), where I suggested that your nearest and dearest — personal friends, coworkers, family members, and anyone who has ever shared your bed, however briefly — do not make the best first readers for a manuscript? Well, it turns out that they are perfectly delightful at acting as sounding boards for writerly angst.

Before you begin breathing fire, however, I would suggest that you lay down one ground rule — and the closer you are emotionally to your sounding board, the more important it is that you establish it. Preface your venting with something along the lines of, “Honey, I value your opinion, and I really appreciate that you’re willing to let me unload about this. However, to make this easier on both of us, I want to make it clear that I am not asking for advice on how to handle this situation — I just need to talk about it.”

Why take this reasonable precaution? Because the world of writing and publishing is downright opaque to those not involved with it, my friends. The more a non-writer hears about how a critique group operates (“What do you mean, you sit around and tear one another’s writing to pieces?”), how the writer and the agent seldom share an opinion on when a manuscript is ready to market (“Wait — doesn’t your agent work for YOU? Why would the timing on submitting your book to editors be his call?”), how much control the editor and publishing house have over the final book (“It’s your book — why don’t you just say no?”), and how much of the burden of promotion now falls on the author (“I always thought that authors were paid to go on book tours.”), the more incredible it seems.

In my experience, mid-revision is not the best time to hear, “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

So to whom do you turn for advice? Ideally, writers who have trodden this path before you — or at any rate writers, who will at least understand the power relationships between authors and the various parts of the industry.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again: writing is an isolating avocation, and simply not knowing whether one’s own situation is normal can generate a fair amount of stress. In a requested revision situation, this is especially true.

So believe me when I tell you: while you are struggling to incorporate a whole raft of suggested changes is NOT the time to bury yourself in your burrow.

Work time into your revision schedule to talk to other writers, either in person or online, on a regular basis. Think of it as mental health insurance. Vent your frustrations; get some sense of being a part of a community of people under similar pressures.

A fringe benefit to reaching out at the point when most writers withdraw: the writer friends willing to hold your hand through a revision are almost always the ones who end up making the best promoters for your book after it is published. These are the folks who don’t mind calling up bookstores and asking if they carry your novel, or turning your book face-out on the shelf, so it’s more likely to be picked up by a browser, or even carrying your memoir around Barnes & Noble for a while, then placing it conspicuously on one of the bestseller tables.

Bless ‘em.

15. Don’t confuse resentment over being asked to revise the manuscript at all with disliking the content of the revision request.

We dealt with various stripes of this one in the first part of this series, on taking verbal feedback well, but it bears repeating here: a writer’s emotions tend to run high in the wake of any text-based feedback other than, “Wow, this is the best novel about lust since TOM JONES.”

Normal and natural, of course. And of course, it’s normal and natural to want to ask the critiquer who has the gall to tell you differently, in ways as subtle as pointing out misused semicolons or as broad as advising you to rearrange the running order of the plot, who the heck s/he thinks s/he is.

I’ve already expended quite a lot of blog space on why precisely voicing that natural impulse would not be good for your writing career. Right now, though, I want to turn the question on its head and ask those of you in the throes of critique shock a fundamental question:

If you’re really, really honest with yourself, how much of your reaction to the feedback is actually a response to your feelings being hurt?

As unpleasant as such self-scrutiny may be to face, this is a crucial question to keep asking constantly throughout the revision process, especially if some of the feedback strikes you as completely off the mark. On days when the answer is above 50%, consider leaving the manuscript alone that day.

I’m not just suggesting this as a means of giving those emotions time to cool, either — resolving to keep a weather eye on how you’re feeling toward the revision is a means of granting yourself permission for those feelings to fluctuate.

And trust me, they will.

16. Remember, no-holds-barred critique is the industry’s unique way of complimenting talent.

Strange but true.

These days, if an agent or editor doesn’t think a manuscript has publication potential, she will generally get it off her desk so fast it doesn’t even leave a dent on the piles of papers already on her desk. But if a pro likes those pages enough to want to see them make it into print, she’s not going to waste a gifted writer’s time by sugar-coating her opinions on what could be improved.

As much as the writer might prefer that she would.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this practice would apply exclusively to professional feedback? I’m here to tell you, though, that many of us who have been mucking about in the trenches for a good long time tend to absorb this attitude, apparently by osmosis.

In fact, I would go so far as to posit this as an axiom: the longer someone’s been in the biz, the less likely s/he is to waste valuable critique time on a manuscript that doesn’t reveal genuine talent and carry a strong probability of publication success.

Remember, TIME is one of the most valuable commodities in the publishing industry — an easy thing to forget from our end of the biz, as writers are routinely expected to invest vast quantities of time and effort gratis toward the creation and promotion of a book.

But when someone who is in the habit of reading half a page of a submission before rejecting it — and does so 700 times per week — takes the time to read your work closely enough to come up with specific ways to improve it, that’s a compliment. As is thinking of the writer who produced the manuscript as enough of a pro to understand the value of such a donation of time.

I like to think of this kind of scrutiny in terms of stage lighting. The literary market is a three-ring circus, with masses going on at any given moment. While much of the action is potentially interesting, the professional reader — or one who’s been kicking around the industry long enough to be — has only one spotlight at his command with which to follow the action.

(Stop chortling; you’re going to scare the elephants. This analogy is going to make sense in a second.)

He can focus that spotlight on only one small part of the big top at a time, right? So he swirls it around the rings, trying to get a sense of what’s there. Out of the cast of thousands, he finds a solitary performer who interests him deeply: he captures a tightrope walker in his light for a full minute before moving on.

In the glare of his scrutiny, of course, quite a bit of the glamour of tightrope walking evaporates. The super-bright light reveals where sequins have fallen off the costume, where dust has gathered on tights, arm gestures that could be better executed, and so forth.

For the tightrope walker, that minute is going to be darned uncomfortable, unavoidably — the bright intensity of a spotlight can be pretty blinding. Her costume might seem a bit shabbier under that glare than it did under shadier conditions.

She could, of course, just live in fear of that spotlight’s ever falling upon her again. Or, if she sewed on the extra sequins that the light revealed were necessary, practiced her arm swoops until they were perfect, and dusted from her knees the residua from previous falls, she might become a star.

Which would mean, essentially, doing her act CONSTANTLY under a spotlight.

And that, my friends, is why the pros are often a bit mystified by the intensity of writers’ reactions to straight-to-the-point feedback; they’re assuming that a talented tightrope walker WANTS to perform under a constant spotlight.

Anyway, at what point would a reasonable person prefer to be told that she needs to tack on a few more sequins, when there’s still time to make improvements — or when the reviewers show up?

Bears a bit of thought, I think. Keep up the good work!

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Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: you say tomato, I say, “Please don’t throw it.”

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You’ll be delighted to hear, I expect, that today will be the next-to-last installment in my series on ways to ease the difficulties of incorporating written feedback. Later in the week, I shall be tackling the specific problems associated with dealing with a critiquer who has the power to enforce a change request — your agent, for instance, by not sending your manuscript out to editors until he’s certain the latest version will fly, for instance, or the editor who acquires it. This can be tricky, especially if one does not happen to agree with the feedback in question.

Hey, I warned you at the beginning of the series that we would be building up our feedback-incorporation muscles. At the risk of repeating myself (and repeating myself, and repeating myself…), it is not merely for the sake of maintaining peace in a writing group or friendships between more casual first readers that it behooves writers to add good listening and critique-accepting skills to their tool belts: these skills come into play at every stage of a writing career.

Seriously, your future agent, editor, publicist, and probably anyone who happens to be frequenting your domicile when your first book’s reviews start rolling in are going to bless the time you put in now developing a measured response to literary criticism. So will you.

Your very pets will be happier for it, because you will be less stressed when you need to incorporate editorial feedback on your tenth book. Not UNstressed, mind you — I’ve been doing this for years, and even my backyard raccoons get a mite testy when I’m on a short revision deadline — but certainly able to manage even the most extensive revision request in your stride.

You can do this, I promise.

For now, though, let’s keep swimming in the relatively less shark-infested waters of dealing with written feedback in general. To review the tips so far:

1. Don’t argue about the feedback with the feedback-giver.

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

5. Don’t use an industry professional as the first — or only — reader of your manuscript.

6. Don’t expect your readers to drop everything to read your work. Especially if they happen to work in or with the publishing industry.

7. Don’t try to do it all at once.

8. Make a battle plan, setting out reasonable deadlines for each step.

9. Allow some room in your battle plan –and time in your schedule — to respond to inspiration, as well as to experiment.

10. Make sure that you’re not over-estimating the critiquer is requesting.

11. When in doubt about what a critiquer expects you to do, ASK.

12. Avoid making the same mistake twice — at least for the same feedback-giver.

Phew — that’s a heavy list, isn’t it? Let no one say that being a tolerant and wise recipient of feedback is the proverbial walk in the park. Moving on…

13. Keep excellent records about the changes you have made to the manuscript — and keep both hard and soft copies of EVERY major version of the book.

Having grown up in a family of writers — ones who were fighting the good fight back in the golden days of typewriters, no less — I was STUNNED to learn that most revisers do not keep copies of each draft. Seriously, the first time I met a writer who didn’t, I thought he was joking.

Why is it such a jaw-dropper, from a professional point of view? Quite simply, either the writer or the editor might conceivably change his or her mind.

Remember last week, when I mentioned that writers tend to be the only ones involved in the publishing process to cherish the illusion that a book is DONE until it’s actually been printed and is for sale at Borders? Well, that mindset of continual modification is not, some of you may be alarmed to hear, necessarily a one-way process.

That’s right: critiquers’ opinions have been known to vacillate from time to time. They also — please don’t throw anything heavy at my head; I’m just the messenger here — been known to forget that the aspect of Draft #2 they liked least was in fact something they asked the writer to do after reading Draft #1.

Or — and I’m already ducking under my desk — be displeased with a writer’s specific solution to a vaguely-phrased concern.

Did you feel that lurch your stomach just took? The goal of Strategy #13 is to avoid that feeling’s ever being associated with your manuscript, by providing concrete records through which you can retrace your revising steps.

While the maid is mopping up all of the soggy tomatoes my readers just lobbed in my general direction, let’s concentrate on the first problem on the list: just because a critiquer suggested last month that you kill off your protagonist’s sidekick does not necessarily mean that she will prefer the revised, sidekick-free storyline.

Because I love you people, I’m not going to go into detail about how much farther a writer’s stomach can displace itself when the stakes are higher — when, say one’s agent or editor changes her mind. I suppose I could describe what the moment of hearing one’s agent say, “Sandy, I’ve been thinking about it, and your first running order was better,” means to a Sandy who has been simply saving each new change in the same Word file, but frankly, gut-wrenching, sustained groaning is hard to convey in words.

And even if Sandy’s agent/editor/first reader DIDN’T later backtrack, how is Sandy supposed to figure out three months after a revision whether Scene Q worked better in draft #1 or #2?

Especially if — as is, I’m still stunned to report, very frequently the case — Sandy hasn’t kept a meticulous list of what has changed between those drafts?

A wise reviser ALWAYS maintains the ability to check both versions side by side — and a clever one records the major changes separately, keeping it handy for future reference.

Why, you ask? Well, several reasons, potentially. Many, many books go through many, many drafts, for starters; do you really want to be rending your garments two years from now because you can’t remember whether Draft #3 or Draft #4 included Cousin Max’s funeral? Or at what point you realized that Dennis and Denise’s names scanned too similarly, and readers might get confused if you didn’t rechristen one of them?

Also — and this may come as something of a surprise, after my recent diatribe about how critiquers tend to notice when writers haven’t taken their advice on previous drafts — especially if the same feedback-giver has followed the book through several versions, he might not always remember what precisely he asked the writer to do.

Is that gagging I hear out there? “But Anne,” some of you sputter, “aren’t we talking about dealing with WRITTEN feedback here? Surely, there’s no question about what has been said after, say, an editor requests a textual change in an editorial memo.”

How shall I put this delicately…

Professional readers go through a LOT of manuscripts in any given month; it wouldn’t be surprising if some of the details began to blur a bit would it?

And honey, if your nerves will stand calling up the editor who’s just acquired your book and saying, “Hey, I’m calling foul — your last two memos contradicted each other,” well, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

I can also tell you right now that ol’ Gunga Din’s agent is going to throw what used to be called a conniption fit immediately after that act of bravery — because from the editorial end of that phone line, that statement might very well have sounded like a declaration of war.

Hey, I’m not the only message-bearer who fears the wrath of the angry tomato-thrower.

Instead, think about how much more smoothly the exchange might have gone has our pal Gunga instead been able to whip out both the list of suggested changes (prepared, perhaps, in response to Strategy #8) and the roster of what he had changed between drafts in preparation for such a discussion.

Armed with such tools, perhaps Gunga could have blunted the potential for confrontation even further by prefacing his remarks with, “I think I’m confused. From what you said in the memo, it sounds as though I may have misunderstood what you were asking for last time. Or are you asking for something completely different now?”

In short: keep good records of changes, and make it as easy as possible for yourself to revert to an older version, if necessary and appropriate.

Whew, I think we could all use a nice, long nap after that little exercise in hypothetical horror, couldn’t we? The rest of the strategy list will be much less stomach-wrenching, I promise.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 5 Comments on How do two people write a novel together? by guest blogger Stanley Trollip

How do two people write a novel together? by guest blogger Stanley Trollip

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Hello, readers –

Anne here, with a real treat for you today: a guest blog by Stanley Trollip, one-half of the writing team readers will soon know as Michael Stanley.

I’m always thrilled when a good author gives in to my blandishments to write a guest post: since the road from concept to publication is often long and arduous for even the best and most market-savvy of aspiring writers, it’s great to see one of us — or, in this case, two of us — make it at last!

And how! Their first novel, A Carrion Death, will be released in the US and UK this coming week, so I’m tickled the proverbial pink that Stan was willing to take time out of his hectic signing schedule to give us here in the Author! Author! community some tips on writing collaboratively, the revision process (appropriate timing, eh?), and the about-to-be-published life in general.

The book sounds like a hoot, incidentally. Here’s the low-down:

Smashed skull, snapped ribs, and a cloying smell of carrion. Leave the body for the hyenas to devour—no body, no case. But when Kalahari game rangers stumble on a human corpse mid-meal, it turns out the murder wasn’t perfect after all. Enough evidence is left to suggest foul play. Detective David “Kubu” Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department is assigned to the case. From the sun-baked riverbeds of the Kalahari to the highest offices of an international conglomerate, he follows a blood-soaked trail in search of answers. Beneath a mountain of lies and superstitions, he uncovers a chain of crimes leading to the most powerful figures in the country—influential enemies who will kill anyone in their way.

Sounds exciting, eh? Should any of you be planning to write query letters in the foreseeable future, THAT’s what a terrific, attention-grabbing summary paragraph looks like.

A Carrion Death is already available for pre-order on Amazon for US readers, Amazon for Canadian readers, and Amazon in the UK.

I mention all three, not just to make ordering easier, but also because the first Amazon is carrying editions with the left-hand book cover above, and the other two are offering versions with the cover on the right. Go figure.

Just between us, this book — whatever cover may happen to be on it — has been receiving some pretty stellar advance reviews. Seriously, Publishers Weekly doesn’t give starred reviews to just any book — this is the stuff of which writerly daydreams are made. Take a gander:

“The intricate plotting, a grisly sense of realism and numerous topical motifs …make this a compulsively readable novel.”
(Publishers Weekly, February 25th, 2008)

“[A] fast-moving story… Rich with the atmosphere of modern Botswana, and peopled with interesting and well-drawn characters, this is an exciting debut.” (Booklist, February 1, 2008)

“This well-plotted debut introduces a new mystery series and will enthrall readers.” (Library Journal, March 1, 2008)

“The police procedural story line is superb…” (Genre Go Round Reviews, February 9, 2008)

May we all be blessed with reviews that good!

For all of these reasons, I’m pretty psyched to welcome our guest blogger today. Take it away, Stan!

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It’s an exciting month for us. Our first mystery novel, A Carrion Death, introducing Detective Kubu will be launched by HarperCollins on the first of April in Minneapolis. Two days later, Headline releases it in the UK. The us is Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip:

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and we use the (rather obvious) pen name of Michael Stanley:

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I divide my time between Minneapolis and the coastal town of Knysna in South Africa, while Michael lives in Johannesburg. So this collaboration is long distance. Many people are surprised by a successful jointly written mystery story at all, let alone one where the authors are at least a thousand miles apart most of the time. Yet we’re told — even by people who know us well — that it is hard to attribute a piece of writing to one of us or the other, and that the flow is smooth and has no disturbing changes of style. So how did we do it?

Well, let me say up front that when we started, we knew little about writing fiction and, if we had understood all the predicted problems around writing collaboratively, we might not have embarked on this adventure! But on our travels, we’d been talking about a detective story set in the African bush for many years, and when Michael suddenly wrote a chapter rather out of the blue in the middle of 2003, it seemed like great fun.

And that’s how we approached the whole project: having fun together. We had no great expectation of the novel ever being published, and we wrote and rewrote it many times as we started to learn the ropes of working together and, more importantly, as we developed our writing and plotting skills.

It was a dreadfully inefficient process. We each wrote several chapters that the other didn’t like at all resulting in a lot of material being thrown away. The plot kept changing of our own volition, as well as the result of the invaluable input of professionals like our agent, Marly Rusoff, and our editors at HarperCollins and Headline. We were also very fortunate to get honest (and often painful) feedback from some of our reader friends. More changes! The book seemed to get too long, too fast, too slow.

I guess that most new novelists experience these types of problems. The wonderful thing about collaboration with someone you know and trust is that you have an immediate, interested and very critical reader for everything you write. Education theory is clear on the value of collaborative learning. Why should learning to write fiction be an exception? Both of us have experience with collaborative writing of non-fiction; both of us enjoyed it and were reasonably successful. So, again, why should fiction be an exception?

So let me try to answer the question of how we write together. Of course, collaborative work is going to depend on the partners, their styles, and interests. Still, there are a few ground rules which must be pretty universal:

— You have to leave your ego behind. You have to be willing to take immediate and possibly quite sharp criticism of your ideas, your characters and your writing. However, wouldn’t you prefer a partner provide such feedback, rather than an editor or a critic?

— You need to agree on the basic direction and structure of the plot. Of course, the characters will take over to some extent, but you need to know generally where you’re heading.

— You have to watch carefully that the characters behave consistently, whoever’s writing. The issue we had was that as we developed characters, their early appearances became less convincing. This must be a problem facing most authors writing a first novel.

I’ll describe how we went about writing our second Detective Kubu novel — The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu. It’s due for relese in 2009. By the time we started, we had rubbed off most of the rough edges that arose from our inexperience rather than from anything to do with our collaboration. A Carrion Death will see the light of day almost five years after we started writing it, Second Death will be closer to three. That is the benefit of experience.

Our major lesson was to structure the plot really carefully first. The synopsis we sent to our agent when we started the book is still close enough to describe the final version, although the details have changed quite considerably as the characters and texture developed. We spent sometimes frustrating weeks writing nothing and talking the plot through together.

Here it was important to be together and brainstorm, while always being ready to catch an inconsistency arising from the other person’s enthusiasm for his idea. Michael has a habit of killing off characters when we paint them into a corner; I try to resist this for humanitarian reasons if nothing else!

The writing we divide, each picking up pieces where we have ideas and mind pictures of how the scene will work. Obviously this means working on different chapters of the book at the same time. That’s not a problem as long as it’s agreed how the piece will fit with the overall structure. And the great thing is that as soon as the piece is written, there is someone excited and keen to read it immediately, albeit with a critical eye and —track changes’ generating washes of colored notes.

All of that needs to be discussed and worked through — from the basic approach to the exact wording — and so the piece goes through multiple drafts. Skype is a huge boon here; hours of discussion take place over each chapter — sometimes with Michael in South Africa and me in the USA. Email is a given; it would be unthinkable to do this by fax, let alone snail mail!

So it’s put together, we have a draft of a part and settle down to read it, seeing how it flows, how the characters work, whether the plot moves forward. Often we will each find different things needing improvement. We change and polish, and Skype runs hot.

At the end we look back and think about what fun we’ve had and how lucky we are that other people seem to share that. And we wonder why one would want to write fiction alone?

We are also often asked how we went about getting an agent. Did we have one lined up before we started writing? Did we submit our book without letting people know Michael Stanley was, in fact, two people? Or were we up-front about the dual authorship?

We began writing without any thought of agents. After all we were doing it for fun. And my research led me to believe that no agent would be interested in considering a partial manuscript from an unknown author. So it was only when we had a decent draft of the book that we started looking for an agent. And we did so with a clear plan in mind.

We devised our plan by putting ourselves in the position of an agent. Our mental picture was of an agent’s desk piled high with manuscripts — an overwhelming sight each morning. We hypothesized that the agent would then try to reduce the piles as quickly as possible by discarding any manuscript that had a “problem”. A generic query letter? Into the trash! A query letter that was too long or didn’t provide the specified information? Into the trash! A query line that didn’t grab attention? Into the trash! A typo? Into the trash! A dog-eared page? This manuscript had been sent to someone else before coming here! Into the trash!

And so on. Our philosophy was to give an agent no excuse for trashing our submission without reading it. We realize that our mental picture may be incorrect, but it forced us into paying meticulous attention to detail. Every query letter we sent out met every requirement or guideline of the agent. No exceptions.

We were also upfront about Michael Stanley being the pen name of two authors. We had nothing to hide and, if anything, people would be intrigued by fiction being written collaboratively. So our query letter started “We would like to bring to your attention our recently completed mystery novel, entitled A Carrion Death.”

For the most part we approached agents who accepted queries via email. We sent out about 40 queries in a couple of waves. About a third of the agents never bothered to respond. About a third were immediately not interested. And about a third wanted to read the first few chapters.

We ended up having two agents wanting to represent the book. We were so fortunate. We ended up choosing the wonderful Marly Rusoff as our agent. And she has done us proud with contracts with HarperCollins, JC Lattès in France, and Sonzogno in Italy. ref=”http://www.crime-files.co.uk/”>Headline in London bought the UK rights from HarperCollins.

Now the waiting begins. Will readers enjoy our tale? Will they want more? Or is our only reward going to be that Michael and I had so much fun writing together and are better friends now than when we started?

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/ms_bw_small.jpgMichael Stanley is the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, both South Africans by birth. Both are retired professors who have worked in academia and business, Sears in South Africa and Trollip in the USA. Their love of watching the wildlife of the African subcontinent has taken them on a number of flying safaris to Botswana and Zimbabwe. A Carrion Death is their first novel.

/stanley-trollip-small.jpgSouth African-born Stanley Trollip lived in the United States from 1971 until his retirement in 2003. Now he divides his time between Minneapolis and Knysna, South Africa. As a professor he was interested in how computers can facilitate teaching and learning. He is also a pilot and has enjoyed many flying safaris through the countries of southern Africa.

/michael-sears-small.jpgMichael Sears was born in Johannesburg, and grew up in Cape Town and Nairobi, Kenya. He is a mathematician by training. At the end of 2007, he retired from the Anglo-American corporation where he managed a remote-sensing group. He has traveled widely in Southern and Central Africa, with Botswana always being a special favorite.

Posted on - 12 Comments on Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: is that a dagger I see before me?

Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: is that a dagger I see before me?

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Welcome back to Part II of my series of tips on how to accept feedback with a minimum of angst, mutually hurt feelings, and/or swordplay. Since we have a lot to cover today, let’s rush right into reviewing our tools so far for dealing with written manuscript critique:

1. Don’t argue about the feedback with the feedback-giver.

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

5. Don’t use an industry professional as the first — or only — reader of your manuscript.

Oh, look — here’s a corollary to #5:

6. Don’t expect your readers to drop everything to read your manuscript. Especially if they happen to work in or with the publishing industry.

To put it another way, just because an agent, editor, or friend expresses an interest in reading your book does NOT imply either that (a) s/he has nothing else to do but sit around until you cough up the manuscript OR (b) s/he is planning to drop everything else s/he currently has on her plate in order to read it from beginning to end the nanosecond it arrives in the mail.

But try explaining that to an aspiring writer who has just received such a request from a pro for the first time.

Because this is such a common set of misconceptions, those of us in the biz see them manifest in quite a variety of ways. Let’s see if we can’t unearth another examplar or two to show how:

Written feedback meltdown #4: Tatiana’s agent, Ulrich, pitched her novel, PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOW! to editor Vivienne in last November — and now, at the end of March, Vivienne still hasn’t yet vouchsafed an opinion on it.

Tatiana is going nuts with anticipation. She wants to be a good client, yet she can’t resist sending Ulrich e-mails every few days, asking if there’s been any word yet.

No? How about now? Or…now?

He answers every third tersely: “What makes you think that I would keep that kind of news from you?”

She knows that he has a point, of course. She tries to restrain her anxiety, but she’s a novelist, after all — she’s an inveterate situation-dissector. Her brain is hard-wired to make up motivations.

So on Monday, she attributes the delay to Vivienne’s difficulties in gathering an editorial committee so close to Easter; on Wednesday, she is depressed into a stupor because she’s convinced that Vivienne has passed on the book, and Ulrich just doesn’t know how to break the news to her; by Saturday, she’s frantically re-editing the manuscript, absolutely certain that Vivienne has spent the last three months unable to make it past the first page.

Long-time readers, would you care to guess where that’s manuscript actually been for most of the intervening period?

That’s right: under three other manuscripts-to-be-read on Vivienne’s coffee table, competing for her time and attention with the editor’s significant other, work, meetings, her sister’s impending wedding (not another puce bridesmaid’s dress!), desire to make it to the gym occasionally, desire to sleep occasionally, the ambient noise of New York, and any TV show she might happen to watch on a regular basis.

None of which have anything whatsoever to do with Tatiana or her book, of course.But in the throes of worried speculation, the author simply cannot see that. Maybe if she tweaks that dodgy section in Chapter 10 one more time, something good will happen.

This is what we literary types like to call magical thinking.

Those of us who know and love Tatiana send our best wishes her way, along with sincere hopes that Vivienne will get around to reading that manuscript before the author starts sleepwalking, muttering that all the perfumes of Arabia won’t sweeten that little hand of hers.

That’s right: Lady Macbeth went nuts because she was an aspiring writer waiting for professional feedback.

(Think about it — it’s not as though the play gives a really convincing alternate explanation for why she cracks at that particular moment. And if you think turn-around times are slow today, what must they have been in the 11th century, when rejection letters would have been traveling on horseback — or, for an editor really in a hurry, via the local witch’s broomstick? )

Not seeing the moral? (Other than DON’T MURDER YOUR DINNER GUESTS, that is.) Let’s try another.

Written feedback meltdown #5: after many months of querying, Xerxes is elated to receive a request from agent Yarrow to submit the first 50 pages of his memoir, AND THEY SAID I WAS WASHED UP IN 480 BC: RECOLLECTIONS OF A COMEBACK KID.

Like so many frustrated aspiring writers, he interprets this request as an implied command to throw work, sleep, relations with loved ones, flogging the slaves, and personal hygiene to the winds until those pages are safely in the hands of the fine folks at FedEx.

Hey, those slaves aren’t gonna flog themselves.

Do I see some of this blog’s long-time readers with their hands raised, jumping up and down to capture my attention? “Wait just a Babylon-invading minute!” I hear these sharp-eyed protesters roar. “Did Yarrow ASK him to overnight his submission? If not, didn’t Xerxes just waste a fair amount of money?”

Well caught, readers: take a hoplite or two out of petty cash.

(Okay, I’ll admit that the jokes in this post are starting to get just a tad esoteric. Trust me, readers of Thucydides would have found that last one a real thigh-slapper.)

You’re quite right, in any case: there is absolutely no reason to shell out the dosh for overnight shipping for a submission. But hey, this was the guy who had his troops beat up the Hellespont when his bridge across it collapsed during a storm.

A bridge made of flax and papyrus; our pal Xerxes isn’t exactly the king of reasonable.

Having sent off his pages with the greatest possible swiftness, Xerxes naturally takes a week off work to rotate nervously between checking his e-mail every ten minutes, pacing outside to examine the contents of his mailbox every half-hour, and picking up his telephone receiver to make sure there’s still a dial tone every time the second hand clicks.

Yet amazingly, Yarrow does not get back to him before he runs out of vacation days. (Being king of Persia carries fewer fringe benefits these days than in ancient times. Back then, he would have had time to take a vacation long enough to discover the New World twice, if he’d wanted.)

By the time she asks to see the rest of the manuscript a month later, Xerxes has become a mere shadow of his former self: listless with chronic lack of sleep, he’s even too tired to rends the papyrus of his next book into 50,000 pieces and feed it to the palace dogs himself; he has the army do it.

But when an agent asks to see pages, pages be sent, right? So he gulps down a few handfuls of vitamin capsules, puts his entire scribe brigade on round-the-clock inking duty, and is able to send out the entire work in record time.

Once again, the wait is long, at least as far as Xerxes is concerned. “Criminy,” he grumbles. “Conquering Babylon took less time. How is she reading it, three words per day and six on Sundays?”

His patience pays off, Baal be thanked: Yarrow asks to represent him!

After the agency contract is signed, Yarrow tells her new client that she has a few pages’ worth of small tweaks that she would like him to make in his manuscript. “Nothing major,” she assures him on the phone. “Shouldn’t take you long at all.”

Exhausted by his extended vigil, yet eager to get his book into print, Xerxes rushes to his e-mail, rapping his fingertips nervously on his desk until Yarrow’s list of revisions arrives. He opens it — and ye gods, it must have a hundred points!

Overwhelmed, he begins to bash his head rhythmically upon his gold-encrusted desk, bringing his retainers running. How can he possibly do it all?

Catching my drift here? No? Okay, let’s try again:

Written feedback meltdown #6: Zelda has written what she modestly believes and hopes is the best novel in human history, MY HEART ON A PLATE. While not at all autobiographical, she assures every agent she queries, it is the story of a woman who went to her alma mater, holds her current day job, and was apparently married to her first husband.

The schmuck.

After much querying, leads to a handful of requests for pages and no offers of representation, she realizes that she is no closer to her goal of publication than she was at the beginning of her queryfest, for the simple reason that no one she has approached has actually told her anything about her book.

Other than, “We’re sorry, but it doesn’t meet our needs at this time.”

Perplexed, she begins reading every how-to book she can find on the writing life, only to find that most of their advice is of the pep talk variety; it’s not telling her why HER book isn’t getting published. But she does the suggested breathing exercises, makes a voodoo doll of herself and places it strategically within a carefully-arranged diarama depicting a packed book reading, and sacrifices a goat or two to the Muses.

As she’s been told many successful authors do.

She begins haunting writers’ conferences and surfing the net, looking for better answers. One day, she stumbles across a blog where a freelance editor was threatening to chain herself to a rock and expose herself to sea serpents unless all of her readers agreed to get some feedback on their manuscripts before shipping them off to agents and editors.

“Eureka!” Zelda cries, digging around in that nifty tote bag she got in return for her $500 literary contest registration fee. Surely, she jotted down contact information for a few of the nicer writers she met there.

She e-mails the one she liked best, Zippy (I don’t have the energy to go through the alphabet again, people; sorry), asking if he would like to exchange manuscripts.

Zippy responds that he would indeed like that very much, but he is about a month away from polishing off the latest draft of his novel, NOT AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY EITHER, REALLY, the tender story of an accountant striving to be a novelist.

“But I’ll have quite a bit more time on my hands after tax season,” he assures her.

Delighted, Zelda immediately e-mails her entire book to her new friend — and is nonplused when Zippy writes back a few days later to suggest that they exchange physical manuscripts, for ease of reading, rather than each expecting the other to print up 700 pages or so.

Shaking her head at his unreasonableness — he sounds just like her ex, Xerxes — Zelda digs up her last rejected copy and hands it over.

A month passes with no more word than a quick note from Zippy saying that his revision is taking a bit longer than he’d anticipated. “Turns out taxes are due in April,” he informs her cheerfully. “Who knew?”

No matter, Zelda thinks: a slow read means more thoughtful feedback, right?

Another month goes by, however, and Zippy is still not ready to exchange: last week’s horoscope told him that he was too stressed out, so he took a much-needed break from revision to take up curling. “But I am reading yours,” he writes apologetically between slides across the ice. “I’m enjoying it very much.”

Zippy has an unexpected crisis at work — his client Tatiana is being audited — pushing back his projected completion date still further. By this time, Zelda has gnawedher fingernails down to the quick: she really needs this feedback.

Still, she knows that he’s doing her a favor, one that he hasn’t yet made it possible for her to return, and tries to be patient. Is it possible, she wonders, that he isn’t aware that she can’t query again until she’s weeded out any problems with her work?

Yes, long-time readers, I saw your hands shooting into the air: Zelda SHOULD have kept querying all throughout this process. She also should have found more than one first reader, made sure that he had time to give her feedback, and made specific requests about how she would like to receive it and when.

But then, she hasn’t had the advantage of having read the posts in my GETTING GOOD FEEDBACK series (conveniently available in the category list at right, Zelda), and you have.

At three and a half months, she writes and asks Zippy to lunch the following Saturday. “Maybe,” she suggests brightly, “we could talk about my novel?”

“Don’t have time,” he writes back. “Sea monsters have just carried off my favorite writing blogger.”

Losing her temper completely, Zelda sends him a lengthy, tear-stained explanation about why she had sought out feedback in the first place. “If you hate it,” she concludes, “or if you never intend to finish reading it, just tell me so. It’s kinder than toying with my feelings. My God, it’s been like Acts II-IV of Macbeth — all I’ve been able to do is wait!”

Contrary to what some of you cynics out there may have concluded, Zippy actually HAS read her novel; he genuinely is extremely busy. (Sea monsters can’t be relied upon to hack off their own heads, obviously.) So he tosses together a few supportive-sounding paragraphs saying how much he liked the book and sends them to her.

Delighted to have critique in hand at last, Zelda opens it — only to find that he has not given her ANY specific suggestions about how to improve her manuscript, only some vague statements about liking this character, not liking that plot point, and so forth. Her howls make all the cats of the neighborhood rush for cover.

Clearer now? Yes, each of today’s exemplars stumbled in several ways (heaven forefend that I should ever provide an illustration of only a single point) in facing genuinely frustrating situations over which they had virtually no control.

But Tatiana, Xerxes, and Zelda greatly exacerbated their own suffering by walking in with unrealistic expectations about when others would read their work. (And, in Zelda’s case, not setting up sensible ground rules for exchange before anyone so much as thought about budging a manuscript.)

As I MAY have mentioned seventy or eighty times before, agents and editors are REALLY busy people. If you imagined most of them buried up to their delicate necks in paper, you wouldn’t be far off about how much they have to read.

Yet most writers expect to hear back more or less instantaneously — and if they don’t, come up with all kinds of explanations except for the single most likely one: the agent or editor hasn’t had time to read it yet.

Why do unrealistic timing expectations make incorporating feedback harder when it actually does come? Because the writer has already expended so much vital energy in fretting over the differential between how quickly she wanted to hear back and when she did, energy that would have been much better spent, say, drafting the first chapter of her next book.

You can’t fool me about why Lady Macbeth went mad, Bill Shakespeare: you didn’t give her anything to do after Act I but wait around for her husband to slaughter half of Scotland. A long wait is an open invitation for an imaginative mind to prey upon itself. No wonder she started strolling the battlements at midnight, moaning.

Of course, she shouldn’t have told her husband to kill the king, either, but hey, no one’s perfect.

Since you’ve all been so very good, we’re going to take a break from this series tomorrow for a post on something completely different — and trust me, it will be a treat. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: looking both ways before you cross the street

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Throughout this week, I have been talking about strategies to help a writer accept written feedback — you know, the kind that editors scrawl in margins after they have acquired your manuscript — with aplomb, professionalism, and a minimum of self-destructive blood-letting. Or at the very least to discourage writers from applying the leeches of self-torture to themselves with too liberal a hand.

Yes, I’m perfectly aware that’s a disturbing image. After one has spent years holding writers’ hands through crises of literary faith, one’s standards of disturbing rise considerably. And it’s not as though I posted a photo of a leech, right?

While having one’s baby subjected to ruthless examination in the name of improving it is undoubtedly a rather traumatic experience (many authors never really get used to it), developing good listening, consideration, and response skills can render the process substantially less painful.

Experience, of course, is how most professional writers become acclimated to dealing with the take-no-prisoners clarity of professional critique. However, as I’ve been arguing for the past couple of weeks, a writer’s usually better off not waiting until after selling that first book or even signing an agency contract before beginning the toughening-up process.

Today’s paradoxical truism-of-the-trade: the more sensitive a talented writer is to critique, the earlier in her writing life she should start to seek it out.

Before I launch into elaboration upon that rather cryptic statement, let’s revisit the strategies we’ve discussed so far:

1. Don’t argue about the feedback with the feedback-giver.

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Give a shout if any of those are still puzzling you, please. In the absence of anguished bellowing from my readership, I’m going to move on.

5. Don’t use an industry professional as the first reader of your manuscript. Get other feedback first.

Seems like a strange thing for a freelance editor to say, doesn’t it? Yet the more time I put in as a book doctor, the more I’m convinced that this is a good idea.

The vast majority of aspiring writers do not agree with me, however — or so I surmise from the astonishing high percentage of manuscripts that are apparently blithely sent off to agents and editors without any human eyes save those belonging to the writer having scanned them.

Heck, in submissions with many typos, a professional reader is sometimes tempted to wonder if even the {writer’s eyes} wandered over it between the moments of composition and submission.

It’s appealing on a fantasy level, isn’t it? A writer works in secret for years on end, polishing a manuscript to the nth degree of perfection whilst his obtuse coworkers, ungrateful friends, and/or monstrous family meander through their lives, unaware that they are under the merciless scrutiny of an author extraordinaire.

The writer sends off queries and submission in secret, mentioning his ambition to no one (because, naturally, NO ONE UNDERSTANDS HIM) until the happy day when he can burst into his workplace/favorite bar/dysfunctional home, book contract in hand, and announce, “Hey, bozos, you’ve underestimated me for all these years!”

Whereupon everyone who has ever been mean to him promptly shouts, “Touché, Frederick. Guess I’ve been wrong about you all along. Let me spend the rest of our collective lives making it up to you.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I’ve sold two books and published many shorter pieces without inducing any ex-friends, ex-lovers, and enemies (to lift a line from the great Joe Jackson) to tumble out of the woodwork and apologize for their general schmuckery.

Try as I might, I have never been able to negotiate that particular stipulation into my publishing contracts.

In practice, not showing one’s work to people one knows prior to submission to judgmental total strangers such as agents and editors generally results in bad news for the writer, even when the response is good, by professional standards: if the manuscript is rejected, the writer doesn’t have a context in which to understand why, and if it is accepted, the writer suddenly finds herself on the receiving end of a whole lot of quite blunt professional feedback.

Hard to wrap your brain around, isn’t it? In this biz, it’s the really good work that’s singled out for critique.

Elementary school certainly did nothing to prepare any of us for that eventuality.

To tell you the truth, I’ve always thought that the no-win situation faced by writers who eschew pre-submission feedback was a pretty disproportionate punishment for being shy — the most popular reason for not hitting up all and sundry for manuscript evaluation. After all, few, if any, agencies post advice on their websites about the desirability of seeking out non-threatening first readers. How on earth is the writer new to the biz supposed to find out?

In a word: experience.

Personally, I suspect a whole lot of human misery could be avoided if those of us farther along in the process sat aspiring writers down and leveled with them — on a blog, for instance. In that spirit, I’m going to share just a scant handful of the bushel of very, very good reasons NOT to make a pro your first reader:

a) It doesn’t give the writer a chance to learn about unspotted writing or formatting problems before an agent or editor sees it.

b) Since form-letter rejections are now the norm, submission only to agencies is unlikely to yield feedback that will enable the writer to improve subsequent drafts of the manuscript.

c) It encourages the writer to begin to regard professional acceptance as the single standard of quality, ignoring the fact that the literary market is notoriously mercurial, seeking out very different kinds of books at different times.

This is not a complete list, of course — I brought this up at greater length and in exhaustive detail a few months back, in my GETTING GOOD FEEDBACK series (see category at right, if you missed it). My goodness, though, those three are enough, aren’t they?

“But Anne,” I hear some of you call out, and not unreasonably, “why tell us this in the context of a discussion about taking written feedback well?”

Prompt jumping on that cue, faceless chimers-in; your check is in the mail. For yet another reason plucked from the aforementioned bushel:

(d) When the writer receives her first professional feedback, she’s too likely to treat every syllable of it as Gospel. Even if that feedback is merely a form-letter response to a query letter.

The most common result: the writer feels crushed.

That’s because she’s set herself up. Deciding in advance that any single sentient being — be it agent, editor, best friend, mother, or Creature from the Black Lagoon — is going to be the sole arbiter of whether her work is any good places far, far too much power in that person’s hands. It can elevate what is in fact a personal opinion (which any rejection is, ultimately) into a final referendum upon whether the submitter should be writing at all.

If the writer-designated deity du jour happens to be the editor handling the manuscript or the editor who acquires it, the results can be even more ego-devastating. Suddenly, the affirmation of talent implied in the agency or publication contract seems to fade in the face of the first critique the manuscript has ever faced.

In that moment, how prepared would you expect that author to be to listen critically to feedback? Or to evaluate its usefulness?

Uh-huh. And yet that author would never DREAM of crossing a busy street without first checking both ways to see if there are any vehicles about to barrel down upon her.

Don’t get caught in that trap, I implore you. Get enough pre-submission feedback to have some sense of your manuscript’s strengths and weaknesses before you submit it to the tender mercies of the pros.

Whew, that was a dense one, wasn’t it? Don’t worry; I’ll select tomorrow’s with an eye to making it easier to swallow. And if you’re very good indeed, on Sunday, I’ll give you a special reward for virtue in working through this difficult series.

No, no hints: it’s a surprise, I tell you, a lulu. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

(PS: the original of today’s image appears courtesy of the fine folks at FreeFoto.com.)

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Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: hello? Hel-lo?

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Sometimes, the universe just rushes to provide material for this blog. Who am I to stop the flow?

After yesterday’s impassioned (but unillustrated by examples) argument against giving in to the urge to argue with someone who has just given you a slew of written feedback on your manuscript, I received a telemarketing call from PRECISELY the type of knee-jerk disputer I’d been talking about, the sort who acts as though a kindly-put no is tantamount to a yes.

Or, at the very least, that it’s an indicator that the person saying no couldn’t possibly be qualified to express an opinion on the subject.

To add SOME enjoyment to what was actually rather an unpleasant exchange, I’ve spiced up the dialogue a little — because, as long-time readers of this blog know, dialogue lifted directly from real life tends to come across as deadly dull, vague, and prolix on the page. I’ve also changed various names, to protect the guilty. (They already know who they are, after all.)

(Phone rings upstage left. Seated at her desk deleting the day’s crop of 250 spam would-be comments on her blog, ANNE tries to ignore it. As it keeps ringing insistently, she trips over three cats, several stacks of unbound manuscripts waiting to be read, and a small mountain of as-yet-to-be-recycled junk mail to answer it.)

ANNE (breathlessly): Hello?

BOB (in the tone one typically uses for chats amongst intimate friends): Hi. Is George there?

ANNE: No, I’m afraid he’s at work. May I take a message?

BOB: You must be his wife.

ANNE (considering then discounting the possibility that this is an old friend of George’s who has somehow missed all news of him over the past 14 years): I mustn’t, actually.

BOB (talking over her): I’ve got a great deal on heating vents for the two of you. Why don’t I swing by and…

ANNE: Why are you talking in such a familiar tone, when it’s perfectly obvious this is a telemarketing call? Please take us off your…

BOB (feigning surprise marginally well): But you’re on my list.

ANNE: The only list we’re on is the National Do Not Call Registry.

BOB: That’s impossible.

ANNE: I can report your company for calling us.

BOB: We vet our lists against theirs. Your husband must have…

ANNE: Are you seriously suggesting that George snuck behind my back and removed our number from the National Do Not Call Registry?

BOB: He might have called us for information about heating vents.

ANNE: I can assure you that he’s not interested. Nor am I. Go away.

BOB: I’ll call back later; he might get mad if we take him off our list.

ANNE: Break up many relationships with that line?

BOB (evidently taking this as encouragement): If you’ll just let me send him some information…

PHONE: Click. Buzz.

(Curtain.)

Some of you recognize Bob in his writerly form from conferences, critique groups, and pretty much everywhere else writers gather, right? He’s easy to spot in the wild: his constant cry is, “Oh, they just don’t understand my work.” It’s invariably the same excuse, whether they refers to other group members, agents who have rejected him, or editors who spurn his agent’s advances.

Rather than, say, “Oh, maybe I should check my work for typos or continuity problems before showing it to other people” or “You know, my agent may have a point there.”

As I mentioned yesterday, unfortunately for the collective reputation of writers everywhere, the Bobs of the literary world are also the ones who respond to form rejection letters with phone calls and e-mails to agents, explaining PRECISELY why the agency was wrong to reject their work.

Which, in case you’re pondering adopting it as a means of winning friends, influencing people, and/or selling heating vents, has never, ever worked. Unless, of course, Bob’s true goal is to give the target of the argument yet another anecdote about someone who just wouldn’t take no for an answer.

In which case, I must say he’s succeeding brilliantly.

Yes, an aspiring writer DOES need to be persistent — but in a strategic manner, in ways that don’t result in slamming doors through which a writer might want to slip someday.

Remember, when a writer approaches an agent or editor, she’s not merely offering a book — she’s offering herself as the author of it. Since it’s practically unheard-of for a manuscript to undergo NO revisions between first submission to final publication, both agents and editors are going to expect an author — ANY author, even Bob — to be able to incorporate their feedback quickly, creatively, and with a minimum of drama.

In that spirit, let’s recap yesterday’s first couple of suggestions on how to respond to written feedback gracefully:

1. Don’t argue

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

Got those firmly ensconced in your brain, because you are better, more talented, and smarter in every way than Bob? Good. Let’s move on.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

In a way, this is the first cousin to #2: as I argued yesterday, the first flush of shocked emotion is not particularly conducive to long-term planning. All too often, normally perfectly reasonable writers will overreact in the heat of the moment, lashing back at the critiquer. (Which, as we have seen throughout this series, can have some pretty unpleasant consequences for everyone concerned.)

Others will rush to embrace the opposite extreme, deciding in a flash that such a barrage of feedback must mean that the book is not salvageable. Into the trash it goes, if not actually out the window.

Neither course is likely to do either your writing career or the manuscript any good. In the cooler light of subsequent reflection, it’s a heck of a lot easier to see that.

I know, I know — when the adrenaline is flowing fast, every fiber of your being wants to spring into action right away. But revision is a painstaking process; you’re going to need a carefully thought-out plan. That’s going to take some time and mature reflection to produce.

Give yourself permission to stew for a while — privately, where no one even vaguely affiliated with the publication of your book can see or hear you. Get all of that resentment out of your system. Journal. Join a kickboxing class. Frighten the pigeons in the nearest park with your guttural roars.

THEN, when your blood pressure is once again low and your hopes high, go back to the project. You may be surprised at just how much more reasonable that page of critique has become in the interim.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side.

Hoo boy, do a lot of writers seem to find this hard to remember immediately after receiving feedback! To hear ‘em talk about (or heaven help us, to) the folks who wrote up that editorial memo, agent’s critique, freelance editorial report, etc., you’d think that expressing opinions about how to improve a manuscript and/or render it more marketable was an act of outright aggression.

But think about it: these people aren’t the enemy; it just feels that way in the moment. In fact, in the vast majority of instances, they’re trying to HELP the writer.

Okay, to the Bobs of this world, it can feel like a sneak attack by an enemy pretty much all the time, as well as for the hypersensitive. To the fellow who won’t hear no, anything but an instantaneous and unqualified YES represents a barrier to be overcome through persistence; for those who have trouble differentiating between their egos and their manuscripts — a very, very common conflation — every rejection, however minor, feels like a referendum upon their very worth as human beings.

I want to talk to the vast majority of writers who fall into neither camp — or who at least pay only short visits to either extreme.

Listen: professional readers are trained not to mince words — as those of you who have queried or submitted may have noticed, rejection letters are TERSE, typically. So is most professional feedback — so much so, in fact, that agents and editors tend not to give any feedback at all unless they think the submission is pretty good.

So when a pro takes the time and trouble to give substantive feedback on a manuscript, as opposed to a form-letter rejection, it’s almost always in the hope of assisting its writer to improve it. That’s almost always the ostensible goal of critique groups as well, and even of those generous first readers who take the time to read your works-in-progress.

When a writer responds to such efforts as though any desire to change the book must stem from an unadmitted and nefarious source — jealousy of talent is a popular choice in such accusations, as is lack of familiarity with what makes literature readable and just plain shallowness — the kindly-motivated feedback-giver feels burned.

Unfortunately for us all, it typically doesn’t take all that many outraged reactions before a feedback-giver starts to feel that it’s not worth it. Why expend the energy, she thinks, to try to help someone who blames the messenger?

Multiply that burned feeling by tens of thousands, and you can start to understand why most agencies choose not to give individualized feedback in rejection letters.

I can hear the better-behaved among you getting restless. “But Anne,” these models of propriety cry, “I am nothing but restrained in my dealings with professional readers. I treat them with respect: I approach them as they wish to be approached, wait patiently for them to read my work, and don’t lash out at them when they reject me. So why treat ME as though I’m as volatile as folks you’ve described?”

Good point, angelic ones. One simple reason: time.

Yes, it would be dandy if they could respond to each and every query as if no angry writer had ever sent them a flame-mail response to a rejection letter. But — and I think it’s been a while since I’ve pointed this out — the average agency receives upwards of 800 queries a week. Plowing through them all is very time-consuming…and form rejection letters save valuable minutes in fresh composition.

Open SASE, slip in pre-prepared photocopy, and whoosh — the response is on its way back to the writer.

In a way, obviously pre-packaged form rejections are kinder to writers than the same boilerplate pasted into return e-mails — since rejections tend to be so short, it’s tempting for the writer to conclude that those words AREN’T what that particular agency sends to everyone. It almost always is — why, from an agency screener’s point of view, should they expend the time personalizing each? — but every agent in the biz has received flame-mail from outraged Bobs who want to know EXACTLY how that generic critique applies to THEIR queries or submissions.

Which brings me to to the reason OTHER than time-savings that agencies are so fond of form-letter rejections. As annoying as those blandly identical form letters are to their recipients, the very fact that they are generic means — or so the logic goes — that they are less likely to provoke an angry response than a letter geared more to actual problems in the query or submission.

Okay, they’re less likely to provoke an angry response that makes it all the way back to the agency. As most of us know from personal experience, they cause plenty of storms in writers’ living rooms across the world.

Which sets up something of a vicious circle, doesn’t it? A few hotheaded writers excoriate their rejecters, causing the denizens of agencies to fear writerly backlash — so they produce maddening generic rejections that, over time, have led many aspiring writers to conclude that the industry is hostile to new talent. Every so often, some frustrated soul just can’t take it anymore — and shoots off a missive that confirms every fear the agency workers had about writerly response to rejection.

Let’s agree here and now that we here at Author! Author! are going to do our part to try to stop that unproductive and soul-curdling cycle. Let’s commit to being the writers that agents dream about representing, the ones who can and do take feedback professionally, incorporate it well, and use critique to make our manuscripts into the best books they can possibly be.

A bit ambitious, true. But someone’s got to start the counter-movement.

Whew, that was a lot of advice to absorb in one sitting, wasn’t it? Rest assured, it’s not my final word on the subject — we’ve barely scratched the surface of techniques for handling feedback. If today’s array doesn’t work for you, relax: one of the subsequent suggestions probably will.

Keep up the good work!

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Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: the written rules

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Welcome back to my series on developing that most essential of professional writer skills, taking critique well. As I’ve been explaining in various ways for the past week or so, the oh-so-common aspiring writer’s fantasy that a manuscript — any manuscript — will require no further changes once the author declares it finished is very much at odds with the way the path to publication is actually constructed. Many, many other parties have a right to stick in an oar and start rowing.

Contrary to the horror stories with which we writers like to scare one another around literary conference campfires — okay, around the bar that is never more than a hundred yards from any such conference — the overall result of outside feedback is generally GOOD for the book in question. Not every suggestion will be stellar, of course, but every manuscript in existence could use a second opinion.

Yes, I’m aware that last statement made half of you squirm. Nevertheless, it’s true.

After I completed yesterday’s post on what can happen when writers respond poorly to written feedback, I realized that logically, it would have made a dandy lead-in to the first strategy on this week’s list. I also realized that, due to a slight brain malfunction on my end, I neglected to mention why you might want to be preparing yourself for WRITTEN feedback in particular.

Most of the major decision-makers in the U.S. publishing industry are concentrated in a very few places in the country: New York, Los Angeles, to a lesser extent the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Apart from a few scattered presses elsewhere, that’s about it.

Most of the writers whose books they produce do not live in one of these places.

As a result, the common aspiring writer expectation that signing with an agent or selling a book to an editor means copious in-person contact is seldom accurate. These days, communication between author and agent or editor is usually by e-mail, supplemented by telephone conversations.

In fact, it’s actually not unheard-of for an author never to meet her agent in the flesh at all.

Manuscript critique is still usually performed in the margins of the manuscript, with larger-scale requests conveyed via editorial memo or in the body of an e-mail. Obviously, then, most of the feedback a writer could expect to receive from her agent and editor, not to mention the publishing house’s marketing department, PR people, etc. would be in writing.

Before the shy among you breathe too great a sigh of relief at the prospect of being able to receive necessary change requests at an emotionally safe remove, cast your mind back over yesterday’s examples. Responding to written feedback is not necessarily easier than face-to-face; it merely requires a different set of coping mechanisms.

This is not to say that you should throw last week’s set of guidelines out the window the moment you receive an e-mailed critique; you shouldn’t. In many instances, those strategies will also be helpful for written feedback.

This week, however, I’m going to be tackling some of the more virulent knee-jerk responses to written critique, and giving you some tips on heading them off at the past.

Ready? Here goes:

1. Don’t argue.

Oh, I know: it’s tempting to tell off the agent who’s asked you to kill off your favorite secondary character or the editor that is apparently allergic to words of more than two syllables, but trust me on this one — it’s a waste of energy AND it won’t help preserve your artistic vision.

That last bit made some of you trouble heaven with your bootless cries, didn’t it? “In heaven’s name,” anguished voices moan, “why?”

Well, several reasons. First, as we discussed last week, generally speaking, feedback-givers offer critique with an eye to improving the book in question, not as the initial salvos in an ongoing debate. The critiqued writer may take the advice or leave it, but from the point of view of a reader concentrated on the quality of the end product, what’s said ABOUT the book doesn’t really matter, except insofar as it helps make the book better.

The important thing is what ends up on the PAGE.

The closer one’s manuscript gets to publication, the more likely this is to be the critiquer’s expectation — and, like so much else in this wacky industry, that’s partially a function of time. Agents and editors are busy, busy people, often working on rather short and overlapping deadlines: they don’t really have time to mince words. (That’s the official reason that professional feedback tends to be so terse, anyway.)

Because they feel rushed pretty much all the time, they tend to prefer to hand a list of suggested changes to the author and walk away, secure in the expectation that the writer will weigh each point carefully, make appropriate changes to the text, and return with a much-improved manuscript.

When a writer gives in to that initial urge to argue about the changes — and for those of you who have not yet experienced the receipt of professional-level feedback, the desire to respond can feel as imperative as a sneeze — a debate is inevitable. And debate, my friends, is a great eater of time.

This is not to say that you should not be willing to fight for the integrity of your work — you should. Later in this series, I shall talk at length about what to do if, upon mature consideration, a PARTICULAR piece of feedback seems impossible or inadvisable to incorporate.

In practice, however, writers who accede to the temptation to snipe back are seldom responding to a single questionable suggestion — they’re usually lashing back at the very notion of changing the book at all. Sound familiar?

Honestly, I’ve seen quite a few of these diatribes (usually when a sobbing author is seeking help in appeasing a much-offended agent or editor), and they tend to make it quite apparent that the writer is rejecting the proffered advice in toto. Generally, these missives are phrased in such a way as to render future compromise on the most important change requests significantly more difficult than if the author had just kept mum.

If your first impulse is to come up with 47 reasons that the suggested changes could never work, fine: write it all down. But don’t do it as an e-mail, and don’t send it to your critiquer.

Some of you out there just HATE this advice, don’t you? “But Anne,” I hear the rambunctious mutter, “you seem to expect us just to roll over and play dead.”

As a matter of fact, I don’t. What I DO expect you to do is be strategic in how you make your case, picking your battles, and proceeding in a way that protects the best interests of the book, not authorial ego — and certainly not in a manner that achieves nothing but venting at precisely the wrong people.

How might one go about this? The next tip is a good place to start.

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

Not to cast aspersions on anyone’s reading comprehension skills, but it’s been my experience that writers’ first reads of critique tend to be just a touch inaccurate. Completely understandable, of course: at first blush, it’s very, very easy to be angered by certain trigger words and phrases — and once the kettle of the brain is already boiling, it’s hard to consider further suggestions with anything remotely resembling detachment.

Read it once, then run off and punch a pillow. Repeatedly. Stomp. Scream. Christen the closest stuffed animal within reach with the name of your feedback giver and read it the riot act. Just do not, whatever you do, respond directly to the critiquer. (See rule #1.)

After you’ve had a chance to calm down — and whether that will take an hour, a week, or a month varies wildly from writer to writer — go back and print the critique. Read it again; you will probably be surprised at how many fewer changes it’s requesting than you initially thought.

Set it aside again, returning to it at a point of blessed calm, when you will not be interrupted. Go through the feedback line by line, making a list of what it is actually asking you to do. Then take the initial missive, fold it twice, and stash it away somewhere, safe from human eyes.

Or, if you’re still boiling, hand the list to a good reader whom you trust implicitly and as HIM to make out a list.

When you first approach the manuscript, have the list by your side, not the critique in its original form. (I know it sounds wacky, but seeing the change suggestions in one’s own handwriting often seems less threatening.) Read through the ENTIRE manuscript, noting on the list where the pages and chapters where the requested changes would be applied.

Note, please, that I have not yet said anything about deciding whether to APPLY the feedback or not. At this juncture, you’re merely gathering information. Be as impartial as you can.

Call it a fact-finding tour of the manuscript.

Those of you reading this while facing tight deadlines can probably feel your blood pressure rising at this juncture, can’t you? “But Anne,” I hear these stressed-out souls cry, “this will take FOREVER. I need to make these changes NOW, don’t I?”

Not necessarily — writers almost always underestimate how much time they have to respond to revision requests, assuming imminence simply because they haven’t asked point-blank for a due date. (Don’t worry, stress-mongers: I shall be discussing the ticklish business of deadline-setting later in the week.)

The simple fact is, though, that no matter how tight the actual deadline may be, a writer in the throes of critique shock is in no shape to make critical decisions affecting his manuscript. He needs to calm down first — and calming down takes time.

No, seriously. Ask a doctor: once the body is revved up, those weirded-out stress hormones don’t just vanish in a puff of smoke merely because the brain decides it has work to do.

Wait.

If, after a week or two, you still aren’t calm enough to be able to approach the suggestions or your manuscript in a constructive frame of mind, consider asking a writer friend (other friends probably will have a hard time understanding the power dynamics between critiquer and reviser) to read over the feedback and summarize it for you.

Ideally, this would be someone who has already read the manuscript, but who isn’t, say, sharing your bed or workplace on a regular basis. Or who didn’t give birth to you. You want someone who cares about you, but who can be impartial when you cannot.

(Spoiler alert: once you’ve established a good working relationship with your agent, s/he is going to be a great person to ask for perspective when you receive upsetting critique from your editor. But part of setting up that rapport and trust involves the writer’s demonstrating a willingness to respond professionally to feedback.)

Why is finding an impartial second opinion important? Because — and I’m sticking this bug in your ear now, because you may not be able to feel it kicking around your brain immediately in the wake of receiving a raft of feedback — there’s probably some good advice lurking in that morass of critique. You wouldn’t want to reject it wholesale, would you?

Well, actually, in the first moment of receiving it, you almost certainly would. May I suggest that wouldn’t be the most appropriate instant to weigh the quality of the critique, let alone make career-shaking decisions?

More coping strategies follow next time, of course. Keep taking those nice, deep breaths — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on When a writer’s buttons get pushed

When a writer’s buttons get pushed

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No, this lovely, soothing picture of my flower garden (snapped by the equally lovely and talented Marjon Floris) does not mean that my fairy godmother came and waved her wand over my despoiled back yard, alas; the pretty things you see here are from last year, and their descendents still above ground are currently despairing under construction detritus.

In fact, even as I write this, an enthusiastic young man in a backhoe appears to be enjoying himself very much, rolling back and forth across land that was once green. And I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that crash I just heard involved the demise of one of my windows.

But that’s not my focus at the moment. Since we’ve been talking for a week now about coping with the trauma that is receiving and applying verbal feedback, I thought it might be a good moment to remind us all that THINGS GROW BACK.

So far in this series, we have been concerned primarily with how to deal constructively with the kind of feedback writers often receive face-to-face: in critique groups, classes, pitch meetings, public readings to one’s, well, public, workshops, telephone calls with one’s agent, lunches with one’s editor, and occasionally, as we saw yesterday, situations where one is inadvertently saddled with a feedback-giver who doesn’t quite get the story.

Daunting situations, all. You were brave and attentive while we looked them straight in the face; I’m proud of you.

And in the fine tradition of tough love, I’m going to reward you for that courage by testing it a bit more. Today, we begin taking on WRITTEN feedback.

Already, I can feel some of you squirming behind your computer desks. “But Anne,” I hear a vocal minority protest, “that’s comparatively easy critique to take well, isn’t it? I mean, in person, you have to keep your temper, be polite, refrain from bludgeoning the critic with the nearest blunt object, that sort of thing. But with written feedback, I can indulge in primal screaming in the privacy of my atelier. So why worry about the intensity of my response?”

I can answer that in two keystrokes, Mr. Atelier-Owning Smarty-Pants: the DELETE key and the SEND button.

C’mon, admit it — you know precisely what I’m talking about here. No? Okay, let’s introduce a few new exemplars to illustrate.

Written feedback meltdown #1: when Lionel signed with Murgatroyd Literary Associates two months ago, he didn’t know much about how submissions to publishing houses worked. Like many new to being agented, Lionel simply assumed that his agent would start pitching and sending out his novel, LOVE KICKED ME IN THE DIPLOMATIC POUCH, the nanosecond the hard copies arrived in New York.

Give or take a coffee break or two.

Being a conscientious agent who truly believes in Lionel’s book, however, Murgatroyd expresses an interest in seeing the book revised to maximize its marketability before he begins investing in buying coffee and lunch for editors. He promises the incredulous Lionel some feedback, but then the holidays happened, followed by the annual New Year’s Resolution Query Avalanche…in short, he’s only just gotten around to it now, in March. Sorry.

Naturally, Lionel has been chomping at the bit the whole time: he can’t WAIT to quit his day job as Secretary of State to become a full-time writer. But when he begins to read Murgatroyd’s two-page (single-spaced) explanation of what he wants changed, his brain feels like it’s boiling by halfway through the second paragraph.

What does he mean, the title isn’t suggestive enough, or that the instantaneous translators at the UN couldn’t possibly have their mouths at leisure enough for the peanut butter sandwich bonanza in Chapter 12? And how could the plot possibly work without the brigade of tap-dancing baton-twirlers from Nairobi?

By the time he reaches Murgatroyd’s tentative suggestion that perhaps June would be the best time to start circulating manuscripts, Lionel has sprouted two ulcers, the makings of a whopper of a migraine, and a bunion on the third toe of his right foot. Clearly, Murgatroyd wants a completely different novel than the one he’d had in mind.

Shaking, Lionel inches his mouse toward the DELETE key — not to trash the manuscript, although obviously that’s a lost cause, but to eliminate the most remote possibility that he will ever have to gaze upon this emotionally-abusive document again.

Weeks pass, but Lionel is afraid to open Murgatroyd’s subsequent e-mails, for fear of being lambasted. Eventually, they stop coming.

Doesn’t seem plausible that an aspiring writer would bow out of a relationship with a good agent so quickly? Actually, it happens all the time: agents often speak with regret about the talented writer with the great book concept who went away, feedback in hand — only to disappear forever into the Revision Vortex.

Don’t worry; we’re going to make sure that it doesn’t suck you in, I promise.

Okay, that’s one button down. Here’s an example of the other.

Written feedback meltdown #2: Nancy’s first novel, THINGS I COULD NOT TELL MY MOTHER I DID IF THIS WERE NONFICTION, was snapped up fairly quickly by a major publishing house — which is to say, in under a year’s worth of submissions by her agent, Olivia, a period punctuated by our heroine’s e-mailing twice a week and calling three times a month to find out what was going on with her book.

Relieved at the prospect of no longer being on the receiving end of so much angst, Olivia passes along editor Pauline’s e-mail to Nancy, so they may communicate directly, and retires to Bermuda to raise mountain lions. (They’re easier to herd than authors, she says; big cats don’t need continual reassurance that they’re talented.)

At first, Nancy and Pauline’s e-mail exchanges are very cordial: they discuss deadlines, minor changes, information for the marketing department. Then, one day, Nancy sits down at her computer to find what’s known in the biz as an editorial memo, a document briefly summarizing the changes Pauline would like to see in the manuscript before formally accepting it for publication — and, not entirely coincidentally, before paying the second installment of the three-part advance.

Nancy can’t believe her eyes — these change requests are outrageous! What does plausibility even MEAN, in a fictional context? Plenty of girls in her generation were Yo-Yo Ma groupies, and while cellos certainly aren’t common in marching bands, it’s just closed-minded to declare it impossible. And who cares if the subplot about the bassoonists’ conspiracy to replace the conductor with a cardboard cut-out of Jerry Garcia adds four chapters to the book? It really happened that way.

I mean, it happened that way in the book.

But Nancy is a word-oriented person and, she believes, a reasonable one, so she sits down immediately and writes a 27-page response to Pauline, explaining precisely how and why each and every one of these suggested changes is, if not actually idiotic, at least a really, really bad idea.

The next day, she receives a furious phone call from a wildcat farm in Bermuda. “What on earth did you say to Pauline?” Olivia demands over the ambient mewing. “She’s talking about dropping the book!”

Seem extreme? It’s not unheard-of, barring the mountain lion part. But let’s tone the same phenomenon down a little, to show the more common victim of the itch to push the SEND button.

Written feedback meltdown #3: querulous Quentin has been querying his quaint historical romance, THE QUONDOM QUISLING QUAILS, for quite some time now. It might be quixotic, but it has long been his quotidian habit to question other quill-pushers in his critique group about the qualifications of their representatives.

(Okay, I can’t keep it up anymore.)

Having experienced little success by sending Dear Agent queries to everyone he could find on the Internet who claimed to sell books, he hies himself hence to a writers’ conference, because he’s heard that it’s easier to pick up an agent that way.

The first day of the weekend-long conference is disappointing, though: two agents to whom he has been randomly assigned for pitch meetings turn out not to represent his kind of book.

Not that it stops him from continuing to urge them to make an exception in his case.

On Sunday, he approaches Rex, an agent who does take on historical romance. He seems open to Quentin’s book concept; he asks to see the first 50 pages. Delighted, Quentin rushes home and e-mails the chapters that very night, then settles down to the time-honored writerly ritual of counting the seconds until the agent falls in love with his work.

Out of his mind with anticipation by the following Friday, he shoots off an e-mail to Rex, asking if he liked the pages and offering to send more. In passing, Quentin explains that he wants this book to succeed more than anything else he has ever desired in his life.

When Rex has still not responded by the Tuesday after that, Quentin sends another e-mail, apologizing for being so intrusive, but explaining that he (unlike every other writer from whom the agent might conceivably have requested materials, one assumes) is committed to making this book the best it can possibly be.

Fortunately for Quentin, Rex hasn’t bothered to read these subsequent missives, which have automatically been added to the queue (ah, there’s another one) of e-mails for Rex’s assistant Samantha to plow through when she is finished reading the week’s paper submissions.

Samantha, as it happens, shares a 3-room railroad apartment in Brooklyn with Millicent and four other agency screeners. (Have I mentioned that they’re not paid much?) When she gets to Quentin’s submission, she gives it a fair reading. For a paragraph, at any rate.

Then she rejects it with the standard agency boilerplate: Thank you for submitting your novel. Unfortunately, I didn’t fall in love with this story, and the fiction market it too tight at the moment to take on projects in which we do not have complete faith. Best of luck in placing this elsewhere. Sincerely, Samantha J. Powermonger.

Quentin is stunned by this response. Who the heck is Samantha J. Powermonger? Did she steal his manuscript from Rex? Hadn’t he and Rex made a real connection at the conference?

Clearly, there’s been some terrible misunderstanding. To rectify it, he sends off an extensive e-mail to both that Samantha person and Rex, explaining that there must have been a mix-up at the agency.

While he’s at it, he explains precisely why his protagonist is deeply loveable.

Rex does not respond, but Samantha (not having burned her lip on a latte that day) does. She explains patiently that she is Rex’s assistant, and it’s her job to screen submissions. Yes, that really does mean that his submission had been rejected.

Quentin responds five minutes later with a four-page missive, informing her (since she was evidently unaware of it) that he and Rex had an understanding, so she had no right to keep the manuscript from him. Obviously, she knows less than nothing about GOOD literature, so here is another copy of the requested pages. Perhaps this time she could manage to be a good secretary and place them in the right IN box?

When she doesn’t reply within a few hours, he composes a snail mail letter to Rex, explaining what has happened and marking it PRIVATE!!!! Mysteriously, that doesn’t elicit a request for the rest of the book, either.

Clearly, it’s all Samantha’s fault. He’d better send her another e-mail.

(Curtain.)

Now, I would sincerely hope that how each of these exemplars handled feedback on their work — explicit critique in Lionel and Nancy’s cases, implicit in Quentin’s — made you laugh because you would never DREAM of handling professional criticism this way. But the fact is, wildcat farms aside, writers do launch these kinds of responses in the general direction of agents and editors every day.

And that, my friends, is bad for all writers, leading many folks in the biz to roll their eyes and dismiss the whole lot of us as hypersensitive, volatile, and ignorant about how the industry actually works. They tend to attribute this to a desire to cling desperately to our original drafts, as if the arrangement of words on the page were somehow mystically significant, or to a simple refusal to understand that publishing is a business, not an arts-promotion charity.

I don’t think that’s usually what’s going on.

I attribute this kind of overreaction to three causes: (a) lack of skill (and experience) in accepting feedback, (b) conflation of effort expended with quality of writing, and (c) a myopic tendency not to try to see a manuscript (or query) from any point of view other than that of author.

Why bring this up now, in mid-series on feedback acceptance?

Next time, I’m going to start going through a set of strategies any writer can use to present his response to written critique more professionally, in a way that will avoid engendering the astonished and annoyed responses we’ve seen here. Despite what many writers would like to believe, well-written books are seldom produced in a vacuum; ideally, working with an agent or editor should be a collaboration, not merely a division of the labor required to bring a book to market.

But in order to move beyond simply not offending people who wield power over your ability to sell your writing and begin to become truly talented at incorporating feedback, let’s start thinking about (b) and (c) as well.

Why? Because ultimately, a book is not for the author alone — at least, not if the author plans to get it published.

It is also for the audience. And no matter how talented a writer may be, if she can’t place herself in the shoes of her target audience — be it agent, editor, or the reader she believes will eventually be buying her book on Amazon — she’s not going to be a very good reviser, whether based upon outside feedback or her own self-editing instincts. She needs to learn to view her work as other readers see it.

Give it some thought — and keep up the good work!