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What was that again?

For the past week or so, I have been talking about ways to self-edit your work in order to pick up the pace. In pursuit of that estimable goal, I went on a tear yesterday about redundancy, particularly word and phrase repetition. Today, I shall shift gears a little, to focus on concept repetition.

I dealt with this obliquely a few days ago, in my posts on eliciting telling little details. Again and again in manuscripts, I see good narratives sidetracked by a compulsion to explain what has just occurred, as though the author did not believe that the specifics of an incident, exchange, or character revelation could possibly have conveyed his intention for the scene.

Or, less common but still worth mentioning, summarizing what is about to happen BEFORE the scene occurs, as in, “I had no way of knowing that the events of the next day would shatter my childish innocence forever.” Personally, as a reader, I like to be surprised when childish innocence is shattered — don’t warn me in advance.

At base, both of these kinds of summary are based in an authorial lack of trust in the reader, I think: to a professional reader’s eye, they demonstrate that the writer is having a hard time believing that his target reader can follow the prevailing logic.

Thus, he explains what is going on, just to be sure. As in:

Shuddering, Hermione turned her back upon the human sacrifice. It offended her sensibilities as a civilized person. Where she came from, people seeking celestial intervention merely scolded God in private for not helping them more swiftly.

I may be leaping to unwarranted conclusions here, but I would assume that the number of potential readers whose sensibilities would NOT be offended by the sight of a human sacrifice is small enough that a contemporary writer might safely regard their critique as negligible. Personally, I am apt to assume that my readers are not given to sacrificing human, goat, or anything else that wiggles, so I would trim this passage accordingly:

Shuddering, Hermione turned her back upon the human sacrifice. Where she came from, people seeking celestial intervention merely scolded God in private for not helping them more swiftly.

Has the passage genuinely lost meaning through this edit? I think not — but it has lost a line of text, and believe me, when your agent calls you up and tells you, “The editor says she’ll take the book if you can make it 5,000 words shorter!” you’ll be grateful for every single expendable line.

Sometimes, the author’s mistrust of the reader’s level of comprehension is so severe that he go so far as to recap a particular set of facts’ importance as if the paragraph in question were in the synopsis, rather than in the text. For example:

“I canb he-ah you vewy wew,” Doris said, wiping her nose for the tenth time. She was prone to allergies that stuffed up her nose and rendered her vision blurry; moving here with her husband, Tad, her two adorable children, Newt (6) and Stephanie (8), and their pet ocelot Rex into a house in the middle of a field of mustard flowers, then, had probably been a poor idea.

Such a paragraph might work very well in a synopsis, serving as an agent or editor’s first introduction to Doris and her family, but in a manuscript, it reads awkwardly. (Try reading it out loud.) Since so much information is crammed into so few lines, it does not flow very well, so this passage would be a poor choice for the opening of a novel, or even the beginning lines of a chapter.

Yet if it appeared later in the text, wouldn’t the reader already know that Doris was married, had two children and an ocelot, and had moved recently? Wouldn’t this information be redundant, in fact? Besides, as any comedian can tell you, nothing kills a good joke so quickly as too much explanation.

Such global statements pop up in mid-text more often than you might think in submissions, though. There’s a reason you wouldn’t think it, if you read a fair amount: editors at publishing houses tend to leap upon this particular species of redundancy with all the vim of Rex pouncing upon a nice piece of red meat; as a result, one doesn’t see it much in published books. All the more reason to excise similar passages from your submissions.

Look how much snappier poor Doris’ plight is with the background trimmed:

“I canb he-ah you vewy wew.” Doris wiped her nose for the tenth time, ruing the day she had bought a house in the middle of a field of mustard flowers. It doesn’t matter if the scenery is magnificent when your eyes are too blurry to discern either distant mountains or your own driveway.

Partially, I think, reiterative over-explanation turns up in manuscripts because our ears have been trained by movies and TV to EXPECT redundancy. Almost any important clue in a screenplay will be repeated at least once, and often more, just in case some poor slob in the audience missed it the first time.

There is a long theatrical tradition of this stripe of redundancy, I’m told: in ancient Greek drama, a chorus provided frequent recaps of what had happened so far in the play. My college classics professor opined that this handy service, a sort of 5th century BC Cliff Notes, made it easier for spectators to nip out to have compact affairs with temple dancers and their neighbors’ wives; they could always catch up on the plot when they returned.

It’s amazing what one retains from long-ago lectures, isn’t it? You should have heard what he thought those figures cavorting on the sides of vases were doing.

But readers have an important advantages over the audience of a play — or at least they did before TiVo and rewind-able videotapes: books are cleverly designed so you may turn pages forward OR backward. Thus, if a reader has forgotten a major fact already mentioned in the text, she can flip back and look for it, right?

The moral: trusting in your reader’s intelligence — or at any rate her ability to figure out where to find information revealed earlier, even if she cannot recall it in detail — is an important key to keeping your pacing tight. If your plot requires additional explanation here or there because you’ve moved too swiftly, believe me, an agent or editor will will be happy point it out to you.

More tips on weeding out insidious pace-slowers to come next week. In the meantime, try not to stress out too much about your income taxes, US-based readers; at least this year, they are not due on the anniversary President Lincoln’s assassination, as they usually are. Now THAT’s a decision that cries out for further explanation, isn’t it?

Keep up the good work!

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Vary your word choices!

That ripple of titters you hear out there in the cosmos, dear readers, is the sound of every soul for whom I have ever critiqued a manuscript guffawing: the title of today’s post is something that I have been scrawling in the margins of manuscripts authored by writers living and dead since I first started proofing galleys in my early adolescence. Today’s piece of self-editing advice comes deep from the lair of my most fire-breathing editorial pet peeve: repetition.

It is not an uncommon source of annoyance amongst professional readers; as any good line editor can tell you, a tendency to become a trifle miffed in the face of writing that could be better is, while perhaps a handicap in polite society, a positive boon in his line of work. I was, of course, trained to react to it from my cradle: in my family, developing a strong editorial eye was considered only slightly less important than learning to walk; it was simply assumed that the children would grow up to be writers. My parents would not so much as commit my name to a birth certificate without first figuring out how it would look in print.

It’s true. Ask the nurse who kept trying to get them to fill out the paperwork.

I come by my pet peeves honestly, in other words, and believe me, this one gets some exercise, especially now that computer use is practically universal amongst writers.
Why? Word and phrase repetition is substantially harder to catch on a computer screen than in hard copy, even on the great big editor’s model currently gracing my desk. I’ve seen 25-pound Thanksgiving turkeys carried on smaller surfaces, but even so, I prefer to edit on paper. And even then, I still read the final version out loud, to check for flow and repetition problems.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant with me now: NEVER let a submission tumble into a mailbox until after you have read it in its ENTIRETY, in HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD. There are manuscript problems that simply cannot be diagnosed any other way.

I had a hard lesson in this truth myself recently, after I had spent a couple of months working on a book proposal. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of trying to market a nonfiction book, a proposal is as nit-picky a document as they come. Rather than demonstrating that the proposed book is interesting and well-written by, say, handing the finished book to editors, the book proposal limits the actual chapters seen to only one or two — and even those come at the end.

What comes first? A lengthy description of what the book is about, why the author is the best current inhabitant of the earth’s surface to write it, and how it is going to blow every other similar book on the market out of the water. The author is expected to name the volumes to be thus trajected into the air specifically, critiquing them with the full knowledge that the editors who worked on them might well be reading the proposal imminently. Next follows a raft of marketing information, identifying the target readership, naming every mortal organization that might conceivably welcome a speaker on the topic, and so forth. After this exercise in tact, the hapless author is expected to come up with entertaining, well-written descriptions of chapters that have not yet seen the light of day.

THEN comes the sample chapter.

In other words, the NF writer has to prove, over the course of 50 or so pages of discussion of matters inherently less interesting than the subject matter of the book itself, that she can write. Piece o’ cake. It is a format in which a typo is both more important and harder to catch — because, let’s face it, the less fascinating a document is, the more the brain wants to skim through it.

By the time I began printing out the 15 copies for submission, I was relatively certain that the proposal was typo-free, so I did not proof it in hard copy. That was not purely an ego-based decision: there were other readers, too. I am writing the book with a very accomplished woman who lives on the other side of the country, in that OTHER Washington, so every draft of every page has flown back and forth electronically dozens of times. My agent (who wrote a great blog post on THE ROAD the other week, by the way. Would I be represented by someone UN-opinionated?) is an excellent line editor in his own right, and he had given feedback on two versions of it. Surely, I was safe.

You can see this coming, can’t you?

So there I am, printing up copy 12. (I like to print all the physical copies of my work that my agents will be circulating, so I can check each page individually. If a photocopier mangles pg. 173, it’s hard to catch.) Out of habit, I read the latest page out of the printer — and realized with horror that for some reason, three lines on page 47 were in 11-point Times New Roman, not 12-point.

It was a difference so subtle that only a professional reader would have caught it — and then only in hard copy. None of the three of us had noticed in the electronic versions, and I have no idea at what point the switch could have occurred, but that typeface change did subconsciously make those lines seem less important. Since it was a page in the middle of the proposal, though, fixing it would require reprinting ten pages of every single copy I had already printed.

Oh, please — was there even a second of viable suspense here? Of course, I reprinted it. I could always use the discarded pages for scratch paper, and then recycle them. Heck, I could even use them to print up a hard copy draft of the next manuscript I’m planning to send to my agent, so I can check for this kind of mistake properly.

My point is, no matter how sharp-eyed you are, or how smart — my proposal had been read numerous times by two people with Ph.D.s AND an agent, recall — you’re better off proofing in hard copy. A fringe benefit: on paper, it is far more apparent when you’re overusing certain words and phrases.

Which brings me back to my pet peeve. Editors hate repetition for a very practical reason: text that repeats a particular word, phrase, or even sentence structure close together is more tiring for the eye to read than writing that mixes it up more.

Why? Well, let me give you an illustration, as well as I can on a computer screen. Try to read through the coming paragraph as quickly as you can:

Without turning in her seat, Mandy suddenly backed the car into the garage. The garage door closed, sealing her and the car inside. The car was warm, cozy, a great place to die. No one would come into the garage for a week, possibly more, and the children never came in here at all. Thinking of the children, Mandy sank back into her seat, the car’s solidity as comforting as a sturdy umbrella in the midst of a sudden downpour. Without thinking, Mandy pushed in the car’s lighter, heating its coils for the benefit of some future cigarette that might never be smoked.

Okay, stop. Notice anything about how your eye moved down the lines? If you’re like most quick readers, your eye tried to jump from the first use of Mandy’s name directly to the next; it’s a very efficient way to skim. If you’re a more sensitive reader, the repetition of “the garage” twice within four words and “the car” twice within five might have led you to skip the next line entirely.

Apart from encouraging skimming — the last thing you want an agency screener to start doing to your work, right? — word and phrase repetition gives a professional reader the impression that the target market for the book in question is not as well-educated than more diverse set of word choices would indicate. (This is true, incidentally, even if a repeated word is polysyllabic, although to a lesser extent.) The more literary your writing, the more problematic such a perception can be.

The average adult novel is aimed at roughly a tenth-grade reading level; literary fiction tends to assume a college-educated reader, and uses vocabulary accordingly. So whenever you see those ubiquitous Mark Twain and Somerset Maugham quotes about never using a complex word when a simple word will do, realize that both wrote for audiences that had not, by and large, shifted the tassel on a mortarboard cap.

There is yet another reason to avoid word and phrase repetition whenever possible: it tends to slow down the pace of a scene. Let’s take another look at poor Mandy’s final moments with all of those redundant words removed and replaced with specific details — note how much snappier her trip to meet her Maker is in this version:

Without turning in her seat, Mandy suddenly backed into the garage. The door closed, sealing her inside. The car was warm, cozy, a great place to die. No one would come to this end of the mansion for a week, possibly more, and the children never ventured in here at all. She sank back into the rich leather upholstery, the Mercedes’ solidity as comforting as a sturdy umbrella in the midst of an unexpected downpour. Without thinking, she pushed in the lighter, heating its coils for the benefit of some future cigarette that might never be smoked.

It’s definitely a smoother read, isn’t it, without all of those eye-distracting repeated words? Yet look how many more character-revealing specifics I was able to incorporate — why, Mandy moved up several tax brackets in the second-to-last sentence alone. And although it reads more quickly and comfortably, it’s actually not substantially shorter: the original was 103 words, the revised version 97.

If weeding out repetition in just one paragraph can yield this kind of dramatic result, imagine all of the room you could clear for telling little details if you eliminated similar redundancies throughout an entire manuscript. You might want to print out a copy of your book — perhaps on the back of all that paper I had to discard from my proposal — and try it sometime.

There are, of course, many flavors of redundancy to torment editorial souls. Next time, I shall dive into another very common species that, in its most virulent form, has broken the tension of many an otherwise worthy scene. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

PS: Congratulations to long-time reader Brian Mercer, who has just sold an article to Llewellyn Publications. Way to go, Brian!

(And please, everybody, remember to keep sending in news of your triumphs, so we can all celebrate. I love reporting good news about my readers’ writing careers!)

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More fun with marking pens

For those of you joining this series in progress, I’ve been writing for the last week or so about keeping the pacing of your work tight. Slow manuscripts make editors grind their teeth and agents shake their heads in private, yet astonishingly few writing books and seminars address the issue at all, except to opine that for the purposes of submission, faster is, on the whole, better than slower.

There are a couple of good reasons for this genteel avoidance of an unpleasant subject, I suspect. First, editing for length and pace IS an unpleasant subject for contemplation where dear self is concerned, isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but most of the writers of my acquaintance (including, I’ll admit it, yours truly) get kind of annoyed when an agent or editor says, “Love your writing! How about giving us 15% less of it?”

Or, to take what used to be a stock agents’ pronouncement a few years back, when we are told that a first novel should be more than 100,000 words, regardless of what might actually work best for the text. (That’s 400 pages in Times New Roman, by standard estimation techniques.) The truism on the subject has become a little more lax in the past year or two, thank goodness: now, pronouncement-mongers tend to say anywhere between 80,000 (320 pages) to 120,000 (480) is usually fine.

As someone who attends quite a few writers’ conferences in any given year, I, for one, was pretty darned relieved when the wisdom du jour changed. During the arbitrary 100,000 period, I always hated that inevitable moment when someone stood up and asked an agent how long was too long for a manuscript. The air of gloom that descended upon the room at the reply was palpable.

As much as I object to arbitrary standards — 125,000 words strikes me as less arbitrary, because binding costs do get higher at that point — I have to say, like most of us who edit for a living, I’m a fan of the tightly-paced manuscript. I practice what I preach, too: in the novel currently in my agents’ capable hands, I cut 20 pages entirely through eliminating individual lines.

So believe me, I feel your pain, self-editors. But like most people who read manuscripts by the score, that doesn’t mean that I don’t start muttering, “Get on with it.” Sorry.

The second reason I think the issue of manuscript-tightening doesn’t get much attention in conference classes, writing seminars, and publications aimed at writers is that just as it’s genuinely difficult to say with any precision how long a book one has never read should be, it’s also hard to give general advice about pacing that applies to every manuscript. Every writer has different ways of slowing down or speeding up text.

Thus my asking you to take marking pens to your manuscript. To identify what could use trimming, you need to recognize your particular writing patterns.

So back to the nitty-gritty. Yesterday, I asked you to sit down with some of your favorite chapters throughout your book and differentiate by colored markings abstract vs. concrete sentences. Obviously, every manuscript needs both, and the appropriate ratio of abstract to concrete varies quite a bit by genre.

Think about it: could you really get away with a summary sentence like, “She had legs that stretched all the way from here to Kalamazoo,” in a genre other than hardboiled mystery, bless its abstraction-loving fan base? (All right, I’ll admit it: one of the all-time best compliments I have ever received came from a writer of hardboiled; he commented on a dress I was wearing by telling me I looked like trouble in a B movie. I cherish that.)

However, it is worth noting that agents and editors see a WHOLE lot more summary sentences in the course of any given day of manuscript-screening than concrete ones — which renders a genuinely original telling detail quite a refreshment for weary professional eyes.

So generally speaking, if you can increase the frequency with which such concrete details appear, you’ll be better off.

Dig up those yellow-and-red pages from yesterday and pull out that yellow highlighter again. This time, mark all the sentences where your protagonist (or any other character whose thoughts are audible to the reader) THINKS a response to something that has just happened, instead of saying it aloud or the narrative’s demonstrating the reaction indirectly.

These kinds of sentences are harder to show out of context, so bear with me through a small scene. The sentences destined for yellow overcoats are in caps. (Sorry about that; one of the limitations of the blog format is the difficulty in incorporating italics and other such frivolities to designate certain text.)

I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE SAID THAT, BERTRAND THOUGHT.

WHY WASN’T HE ANSWERING? “What’s wrong?” Emintrude asked, rubbing her tennis-sore ankles. “Are you feeling sick to your stomach again?”

OH, WOULD ONLY THAT HIS ONGOING DISSATISFACTION WITH THEIR MARRIAGE STEMMED FROM A SOURCE AS SIMPLE AS NAUSEA. WAS HIS WIFE HONESTLY SO SOULLESS THAT SHE COULDN’T FEEL THEIR WELL-MANICURED LAWN CREEPING UP THE DOORSTEP TO SMOTHER THEM IN SEDUCTIVE NORMALCY? “No,” Bertrand said. “I just had a long day at work.”

Again, you’re not judging the quality of writing by determining what to highlight, or sentencing any given observation to the chopping block by marking it. You are simply making patterns in the text more visible.

Finished? Okay, now humor me a little and get a third color of pen — let’s say green, and complete the Rastafarian triumvirate — and mark any sentence where your protagonist’s reactions are conveyed through bodily sensation of some sort. Or depicted by the world surrounding him, or through some other concrete detail. You’re probably going to find yourself re-marking some of the red sentences from yesterday, but plow ahead nevertheless.

Starting to notice some narrative patterns? Expressing character reaction via physicality or projection is a great way to raise the telling little detail quota in your manuscripts.

Does this advice seem familiar? It should, for those of you who regularly attend writing workshops or have worked with an editor. It is generally expressed by the terse marginal admonition, “Get out of your character’s head!”

I wish feedback-givers would explain this advice more often; too many writers read it as an order to prevent their characters from thinking. But that’s not what “Get out of your character’s head!” means, at least not most of the time. Generally, it’s an editor’s way of TELLING the writer to stop telling the reader about the character’s emotional responses through dialogue-like thought. Instead, (these feedback-givers suggest) SHOW the emotion through details like bodily sensation, noticing a telling detail in the environment that highlights the mood, or… well, you get the picture.

In other words, it’s yet another way that editors bark at writers SHOW, DON’T TELL. What will happen to your manuscript if you take this advice to heart?

Well, among other things, it may well be more popular with professional readers — because, believe me, protagonists who think rather than feel the vast majority of the time disproportionately people the novels submitted to agencies and publishing houses. Thus, a novel that conveys protagonist response in other ways a significant proportion of the time will enjoy the advantage of surprise.

Why are characters who think their responses so VERY common? One theory is that we writers are so often rather quiet people, more given to thinking great comebacks than saying them out loud. (A girl’s best friend is her murmur, as Dorothy Parker used to say.) Or maybe we just think our protagonists will be more likable if they think nasty things about their fellow characters, rather than saying them out loud.

That, or there are a whole lot of writers out there whose English teachers made them read HAMLET one too many times, causing them to contract chronic soliloquization.

Whichever it is, most manuscript would be better received if they exhibited this type of writing less. Done with care, avoiding long swathes of thought need not stifle creative expression. Let’s revisit our little scene of domestic tranquility from above, this time grounding the characters’ reactions in the flesh and the room:

By the time Ermintrude was midway through her enthusiastic account of the office party, Bertrand’s stomach had tied itself into the Gordian knot. The collected swords of every samurai in the history of Japan would have been helpless against it.

“Bertrand!” Ermintrude’s back snapped into even greater perpendicularity to her hard chair. “You’re not listening. Upset tummy again?”

He could barely hear her over the ringing of his ears. He could swear he heard their well-manicured lawn creeping up the doorstep to smother them in seductive normalcy. The very wallpaper seemed to be gasping in horror at the prospect of having to live here any longer. “No,” Bertrand said. “I just had a long day at work.”

See the difference? The essentials are still here, just expressed in a less obviously thought-based manner.

Go back and take another look at your marked-up manuscript. How yellow is it?

All of the types of sentence you just identified are in fact necessary to a successful narrative, so ideally, you have ended up with a very colorful sheaf of paper. Using too many of one type or another, believe it or not, can be boring for the reader, just as using the same sentence structure over and over lulls the eye into skimming.

If you don’t believe this, try reading a government report sometime. One declarative sentence after another can be stultifying.

The telling details of your manuscript will be nestled in those red- and green-marked sentences — note how frequently they appear in your chapters. If you find more than half a page of yellow between those Christmas colors, you might want to go back and mix it up more.

If you find any pages that are entirely yellow, I would suggest running, not walking, to the nearest used bookstore, buying three or four battered paperback editions of books that sell well in your chosen genre, and carting them home to perform the three-marker experiment on them. Could you revise your manuscript so that the yellow-to-color ratio in it replicates that in those books?

Yes, this is time-consuming, and a test like this is rather nerve-wracking to apply to your own work, but it’s a great way to start getting in the habit of being able to see your pages as someone who does not know you might. (If you want to get a REALLY clear picture of this, trade chapters with a writer you trust, and apply the same experiment.) Good self-editing takes bravery, my friends — but I know you’re up to it.

Keep up the good work!

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Decorating beyond the front door

No, I was not kidnapped by the Easter Bunny, the Passover Pine Martin, the Equinox Ferret, or any other furry critter puzzlingly associated with the rites of spring: after last week’s twin furors, I thought it might be a dandy idea to — gasp! — take a couple of days off. In a row.

I know; radical.

Last time, I wrote about those telling little details that bring joy to the eyes of agents, editors, and contest judges everywhere when they appear nestled in a manuscript — particularly on the first page of the text, where they act like miniature neon signs reading, “Hello? This one can WRITE!” making the reader sit up and say, “Hey, maybe I should NOT toss this in the rejection pile.”

As eliciting this reaction is, there is more to catching a professional reader’s attention than a charming and detailed first page, I’m afraid. Of course, it’s a necessary first step to that reader’s moving on eagerly to the second, and the third, and so forth. But an initial good impression is not enough, however much writing teachers emphasize the importance of including an opening hook: in order to wow an agent into asking to see the entire manuscript, or into reading the entirety of the one you’ve already sent, the impressive writing needs to continue consistently throughout.

Was that chill I just felt the cumulative effect of all of you first page-perfecters out there going pale? “I just spent eight months on my first five pages,” I hear these wan wraiths stammer. “If I brought the entire book to that level of polish, I would need to live to be 112. I doubt that I’ll still be up to a book tour by then.”

I hate to be the one to tell you this, O pale ones, but most writers revising for submission stop the high gloss treatment far too soon. Around page 50, on average, because we’ve all been told that’s the first chunk an agent will ask to see.

The result is a whole lot of manuscripts that raise tremendous expectations in screeners’ breasts — only to lapse into what is fairly obviously less worked-upon writing around page 52.

While it is true that having brilliant early pages is one of the best calling cards a book can have, consistency is a far more appreciated writerly skill than writing advice-givers tend to imply. (And before the quote-mongers who emblazon famous thoughts on calendars start shouting that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, let me remind you that the early part of the quote is almost always omitted: the original read, “A FOOLISH consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

So there.)

Back to my point: a book’s audition period can go on for most of the manuscript. An excellent agent of my acquaintance, for instance, tells me that he reads the first 185 pages of any manuscript he is considering actively looking for reasons to reject it. Beginning on page 186, he is looking for reasons to ACCEPT it, because he’s already invested so much time in it.

So, naturally, whenever I meet a writer who is planning on querying him, I say, “Psst! Make sure your pp. 150-200 are magnificent!”

Why might a professional reader toss aside a book after having loved it for, say, 190 pages? Usually, a lack of consistency in the writing: great writing early in the book raises expectations for the writing later in the book, necessarily. In the industry, a book that achieves this difficult feat is declared to have lived up to the promise of its first chapter.

Naturally, this is a little unfair, but after one has read approximately 7 million early chapters chock-full of telling little details, one has generally become resigned to seeing their frequency diminish later in the text — but not like it. It’s kind of a letdown, like when that the terrific conversationalist with whom you had three great dates blurts out on Date #4 a glowing paean to a politician whom you consider, at best, a corrupt megalomaniac.

We’ve all been there, I’m sure.

I must admit it: as an editor, once I have seen evidence that a writer possesses the twin gifts of observation and the ability to handle detail deftly, I have been known to mutter angrily at the manuscript before me, “You’re a better writer than this! Give me your best work!”

So now that I have scared you to pieces about the importance of consistency, how can a revising writer tell if, say, the proportion of telling little details falls off throughout a manuscript enough to start enough to displease a professional reader’s eye?

Try this experiment: print out three chapters of your manuscript, the first, one from the middle, and one toward the end of the book. (Don’t use the final chapter; most writers polish that one automatically, doubtless the effect of our high school English teachers making us read the final pages of THE GREAT GATSBY so often.) Make yourself comfy someplace where you will not be disturbed for a few hours, and start reading.

While you are reading, highlight in nice, bright yellow every time the narrative gives information about a character in summary form — everything from “Angelique felt envious” to “Georgine was a shop welder of immense proportions” to “Edward was a compassionate soul, drawn to injured children, limping dogs, and soup kitchens.”

Got that? Now use a different color of pen — red is nice — to underline any character-revealing information that the narrative conveys indirectly, through specific detail or speeches that demonstrate a characteristic or an environment that is reflective of a character’s internal mood. Remember, you are not judging the quality of the sentences here — what you are looking for are passages that encourage the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about what the character is like.

To revisit the trio from above, red-marked sentences might include, “Unable to contain herself, Angelique surreptitiously poked her rival with a pin,” “Georgine’s broad shoulders barely fit through the doors to her metal shop,” and “Edward was late for work again, having been sidetracked by a child’s scraped knee, a search for the same little girl’s lost cocker spaniel, and the absolute necessity to track down and fund the homeless person he had been forced to overlook yesterday because he’d already given away the last dollar in his pocket.”

Beginning to see patterns here? Good.

Now that you’ve identified these different species of sentences, here’s a helpful little editorial trick to apply: be sure to double-check immediately before and after the indirect indicators in red for summary statements telling the reader precisely how these dandy little details should be interpreted — such summaries tend to lurk in their environs. When you find them, ask yourself, “Is this summary necessary here, or does the indirect statement cover what I wanted to say?”

Applied consistently, this question can strip a lot of unnecessary verbiage from a manuscript relatively painlessly. It’s a good strategy to know, because it’s often difficult for a writer to notice redundancy on a page — from our POV, saying something in two different ways often just looks like creative emphasis.

Or — and this is more common — we may not trust the reader to draw the correct conclusion from the more delicate indirect clues, and so rush to provide the logical extrapolation. But readers are pretty smart, especially those lovers of good writing who dote on telling little details.

Okay, I need to sign off for today, but please don’t throw those marked-up pages away: I have more plans for them. Yes, going through your manuscript with a fine-toothed comb is a whole lot of work, but believe me, when your book is on the uphill side of page 185, and the agent of your dreams is trying to decide whether you have the consistency of style to pull off an entire book, you’ll be very, very glad you bought those marking pens.

Keep up the good work!

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Characters an agent might like — but your mother might not

I’ve been writing for the past couple of days about the desirability of structuring your submissions to avoid that most subjective of pitfalls, being boring. The problem is, a lack of tension — an extremely common cause of agency-habitué boredom — is one of the hardest traits for a writer to spot in her own work.

Partially, I think, this is the result of our working so hard on plotting. The protagonist needs to get from Point A to Point B in a scene, and if the narrative gets her there in a fairly expeditious and plausible manner, we tend to be satisfied.

For the first draft, anyway.

I suspect, too, that most of us worry about making our protagonists seem like nice people a touch too much, at the expense of other, more risky character development. As I mentioned the other day, manners are certainly delightful and desirable in individuals, but when courtesy takes over dialogue for any length of time, the result can be deadly. Take, for example, this sterling bit of prose:

Everett lifted his hat, a well-creased Homburg inherited from his father, a man known all across the greater Boston area for his impeccably-groomed head.
“I’m delighted to meet you, Maude.”

“Likewise, I’m sure.” Maude waved him to a chair. “May I offer you anything to drink? Coffee, perhaps?”

Everett scanned the tiny dorm room; it contained neither refrigerator nor hot plate, and the ambient smell, while possibly at one time food-related, did not suggest grounds. “Nothing, thanks.”

Maude began to burrow in her purse. “I suppose you are curious about why I asked you here.”

“I am, rather.”

Okay, I’m going to stop here and ask couple of pertinent questions: first, did you notice how the pace of the scene stopped DEAD after Everett thanked Maude? There was a palpable lull, from which the reader was only saved by all of that purse-rummaging.

I tell you, lovely manners can be death to a scene. Minimize their appearance.

Glance over the micro-scene again. Are you curious about what happens next? Do you want to hear more about either of these characters? To be blunt about it, have you in fact learned anything from that group of 78 words (yes, I checked) that could not have been easily conveyed in all of its glory in the following 36?

“Coffee?” Maude asked.

Everett scanned the tiny dorm room; it contained neither refrigerator nor hot plate, and the ambient smell, while possibly at one time food-related, did not suggest grounds. “Why did you ask me here?”

See how much snappier the second version is? Partially, this is due to my having used a tried-and-true editors’ trick: not having the characters answer questions just because they are asked. While of course it is polite in the real world to respond directly and promptly to the queries put to one, a narrative that exhibits a slavish adherence to having all questions answered the very instant after they are put — and having characters answer them absolutely directly, truthfully, and completely — can get boring FAST.

Why? Well, characters who do this — as most characters in most novels submitted to agents and editors do — are the last thing you want an interesting character to be: predictable. REALLY predictable.

Take another gander at the shortened scene: does Everett come across as particularly impolite? Not really — both characters still come across as relatively nice people, but now, the reader is not invited to dwell on their manners — which, by definition, are impersonal, rather than habits that reveal individual character, right? — but instead is drawn into the mystery of why Everett has been asked to this strange dorm room.

Let me repeat something I just said parenthetically, because it may be on the final exam: manners, like clichés, are reflections of social norms, not individual characteristics. Therefore, while showing a character deviate from good manners or mangle clichés can be effective character development, cliché-spouting (dangerous even as a comic device, in a submission) and courteous speech actually do not tell the reader much about the characters who emit them.

So when your protagonist shows what a nice guy he is by saying please, thank you, and asking about acquaintances’ mothers’ respective healths, he is not actually revealing who he is as a person. He might be revealing something about the people who raised him — while no one can deny that part of Elvis’ complicated charm was that he called people older than himself “sir” and “ma’am,” the fact that he habitually did so was certainly his parents’ and teachers’ doing — but part of the point of good manners is that they are used socially to avoid insulting anyone.

Which for most people means concealing a part of their true identities, at least for the moment. Complete honesty tends not to be polite — and, as anyone who has spent 20 consecutive minutes with a small child can tell you, politeness is the learned skill, not truth-telling.

And while absolute truth-telling is actually rather rare in adult life, except in small bursts — please tell me that no one is shocked to hear me say that — small, inadvertent pieces of self-revelation are lovely, aren’t they? I love to find them in a new writer’s work, as evidence of a good eye and a sharp insight into human nature.

I am not alone in this; telling little details are beloved by professional readers, partially because a manuscript peppered with ’em is actually rather a rarity to encounter. A shame, really — but let me turn the question around to you:

Given the choice, would you rather read a page of dialogue that showed a protagonist SAYING one polite thing after another? Or a page that showed the protagonist talking about something else entirely, perhaps engaging in conversation that reveals something about his relationship with the person sitting across from him, or a passion of his own — and then showed him leap to his feet, without even thinking about it, to give his seat to his grandmother?

Put like that, the choice is kind of obvious, isn’t it? Sounds like the first cousin of those old workhorses “show, don’t tell” and “actions speak louder than words.” Or the now seldom-used adage from before the crowned heads of Europe began to tumble, “You can tell a lot about a man by the kind of lace edging his shirt.”

How can self-editing writers tell if the manuscript in their trembling little hands incorporates enough of this kind of telling little detail? Ah, that is one of the great burning questions of the writing life — and a subject for tomorrow, my friends.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Is that line really necessary?

Yesterday, I waxed poetic on the subject of boredom — not your usual garden-variety ennui, but the more specific type of “Get ON with IT!” impatience that tends to infect agents, editors, and their screeners if a manuscript drags for more than, say, a quarter of a page — which is, as I’m sure has already occurred to you, an absurdly short amount of text upon which to base any judgment whatsoever. As I pointed out in my last post, the standards by which the rest of the world, including that large segment of it that happens to read books, gauges boredom is not really applicable to your manuscript.

Your submissions will ultimately be more successful if you edit them with an eye to the industry-specific tolerance for slowness. It’s just a fact.

Did I just hear a groan of disbelief out there? “Wait just an agent-boring minute,” I hear some of you who favor slower pacing cry, “I can’t open three books at my corner bookstore without finding pages upon pages of slow build-up. I’ve read award-winning novels where positively nothing happened until p. 42 — and even then it was subtle. So there must be agents and editors out there who appreciate slower work.”

You’re right; there are — a couple. And if your pacing tends to be on the slow side, I cannot urge you strongly enough to run, not walk, back to the bookstore where you found those gently-paced novels and take another look at them. I’d bet a nickel that they all share at least one of the following characteristics:

*The book in question is not the author’s first published book.
*The book in question was not written by an author who is still living now.
*The book in question was first published outside the United States.
*The book in question isn’t a novel.

Or, if none of these things is true, then:

*The book is self-published.
*The book was represented by an agent who picked up the author more than ten years ago.

Why am I certain? Let me take them one by one, reserving the most common for last.

If the book is older, wildly different standards of pacing used to apply, because the readers at whom new books were aimed had quite a bit more time on their hands. Remember, until the 1990 census, the MAJORITY of Americans did not live in cities. How are you gonna keep ’em down on the farm without a good book?

Now, the publishing industry aims very squarely for city- and suburb-dwellers. Commute readers, for instance, and the fine folks who listen to books-on-tape in their cars. These people have less time to read than, well, pretty much any other human beings in the whole of recorded history, as well as more stimuli to distract them, so agents and editors are now looking for books that will keep the interest of people who read in shorter bursts.

At least, US publishers have swung in this direction. In other countries, different standards prevail. Why, in the U.K., it’s considered downright stylish for nothing to happen for the first 50 pages, a pace that would make anyone in a Manhattan-based agency reject it by page 4.

One also encounters slower pacing — and more uneven pacing in general — in nonfiction books. This is often true even if the author is as American as apple pie, his agency as New York-oriented as Woody Allen, and his publisher as market-minded as, well, an NYC publisher. So why the tolerance for a slower NF pace?

Simple: nonfiction is not generally sold on the entire book; it’s sold on a single chapter and a book proposal. Thus, the agent and acquiring editor commit before they have seen the final work. This allows slower-paced books to slip through the system.

Which brings me to the first on my list (and the last in our hearts), the comparatively lax pacing standards applied to books by writers who already have a recognized fan base. Established writers have leeway of which the aspiring can only dream with envy.

The kind of dream where one rends one’s garments and goes on frustrated rampages of minor destruction through some symbolically-relevant dreamscape.

As I am surely not the first to point out, the more famous the writer, the less likely his editor is to stand up to him and insist upon edits. This is why successful authors’ books tend to get longer and longer over the course of their careers: they have too much clout to need to listen to the opinions of others anymore.

A writer seeking an agent and publisher for a first book, particularly a novel, does not have this kind of clout. Indeed, at the submission stage, the writer does not have any clout at all, which is why I think it is so important for writers’ associations to keep an eye on how their members are treated. (At a good conference, for instance, the organizers will want to know IMMEDIATELY if any of the attending agents or editors is gratuitously mean during a pitch meeting.)

Since the first-time writer needs to get her submission past the most impatient reader of all, the agency screener, she doesn’t have the luxury of all of those extra lines, pages, and chapters. The writing needs to be tight. Because only first-time authors ever hear that tedious speech about how expensive paper, ink, and binding have become.

In short, for a new novelist to break into the biz, most of the books currently taking up shelf space at her local megastore are not a particularly good guide to pacing.

The pacing bar has definitely risen in recent years. Five years ago, the industry truism used to be that a good manuscript had conflict on every single page – not a bad rule of thumb, incidentally, while you are self-editing. Now, the expectation is seldom verbalized, but agents, editors, and their screeners routinely stop reading if they are bored for even a few lines.

Particularly, as we saw in the Idol series last fall, if those few lines are on the first page of the submission.

This may seem like an odd thing to say, coming so close on the heels of last month’s series on industry faux pas, but of all the writerly sins encountered by agents, the manuscript that bores them is the most common — and among the most hated. So here’s a most sensible request for you to make of your trusted first readers, the ones to whom I sincerely hope you are showing your work BEFORE submitting it to the pros:

“Would you please mark the manuscript any time you began to feel bored for more than ten seconds?”

Such a question is not a mark of insecurity — it’s an indicator that a writer is being very practical about the demands of the publishing world now, rather than ten years ago. Or a century ago. Or in the U.K.

Keep up the good work!

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Being chatty — in the right way

After the unpleasantness that prompted my last post (not resolved, but I am following up on it), I thought a nice, helpful post on craft would prove soothing to everybody. Although, in keeping with my newly-discovered rumored status as a Dangerous Iconoclast and Annoyer of the Mighty, I have decided to take on a craft-related topic I have literally never seen addressed in a conference or a class: keeping your pages interesting.

To paraphrase the most frequent exclamations from folks in the industry about it, via a quote from Nietzsche: “Against boredom, even the gods struggle in vain.”

While I think we can all agree Nietzsche would have made a lousy agency screener, this might be a good adage to bear in mind while preparing your manuscripts for submission. For one very simple reason: the average agent or editor’s maximum tolerance for boredom in a manuscript is approximately well under a minute.

Not a lot of room for fudging there. So if you’ve ever heard yourself saying, “Just wait until page 15 — it really picks up there,” you might want to give some thought to how to make your submissions more user-friendly for a reader with the attention span of an unusually persistent mosquito.

And THAT is why, in case you were curious, writing gurus urge students to begin their works with a hook, to establish interest right away. But capturing a reader’s interest — particularly a professional reader’s interest — is not like tag: once you’ve hooked ’em, they don’t necessarily remain hooked. Think of maintaining interest as being akin to love: no matter how hard someone falls for you at first, if you do not keep wooing, that interest is going to flag sooner or later.

Too many aspiring writers take their readers’ interest for granted, an often-costly assumption. So let’s talk wooing.

In the industry, the standard term for what keeps a reader turning pages is tension. All too frequently, tension is confused with suspense, and thus taken less seriously as a writing necessity by writers in other genres. Suspense is plot-specific: a skillful writer sets up an array of events in such a way as to keep the reader guessing what will happen next. In a suspenseful plot, that writing-fueled curiosity keeps the reader glued to the page between plot points.

Suspense, in other words, is why one doesn’t get up in the middle of a Hitchcock film to grab a bag of baby carrots from the fridge, unless there’s a commercial break. You want to see what is going to happen next.

Tension, on the other hand, can stem from a lot of sources, mostly character-generated, rather than plot-generated: the reader wants to know how the protagonist is going to respond next, a different kettle of fish entirely. Sometimes tension-rich dilemmas are plot points, but not always — and this gives the writer a great deal of freedom, since it’s a rare plot that can maintain a major twist on every page.

Or even every other page. (THE DA VINCI CODE, anyone?)

Some of the greatest contemporary examples of well-crafted, consistent tension in novels are — don’t laugh — the HARRY POTTER books. (Yes, I know that they’re for children, but children grow up, and it would behoove anyone who intends to be writing for adults ten years from now to be familiar with the Harry Potter pacing.) Actually, not a lot happens in most of the books in this series, particularly in the early chapters: kids go to school; they learn things; they have difficulty discerning the difference between epoch-destroying evil and a teacher who just doesn’t like them very much; Harry saves the world again.

Of course, the lessons they learn in the classroom ultimately help them triumph over evil, but that’s not what makes the HARRY POTTER books so absorbing. It’s the incredibly consistent tension.

I’m quite serious about this. If J.K. Rowling’s publisher infused each page with heroin, rather than with ink, her writing could hardly be more addictive; there’s a reason that kids sit up for a day and a half to read them straight through. With the exception of the first 50 pages of the last book (hey, I’m an editor: it’s my job to call authors on their writing lapses), the tension scarcely flags for a line at a time. Technically, that’s a writing marvel.

This miracle is achieved not by magic, but by doing precisely the opposite of what the movie and TV scripts with which we’re all inundated tend to do: she gives her characters genuine quirks substantial enough to affect their relationships and problems that could not be solved within half an hour by any reasonably intelligent person.

Rather than making the reader guess WHAT is going to happen next, well-crafted tension lands the reader in the midst of an unresolved moment — and then doesn’t resolve it immediately. This encourages the reader to identify with a character (usually the protagonist, but not always) to try to figure out how that character could get out of that particular dilemma. The more long-term and complicated the dilemma, the greater its capacity for keeping the tension consistently high.

A popular few: interpersonal conflict manifesting between the characters; interpersonal conflict ABOUT to manifest between the characters; the huge strain required from the characters to keep interpersonal conflict from manifesting. Also on the hit parade: sexual energy flying between two characters (or more), but not acted upon; love, hatred, or any other strong emotion flying from one character to another, spoken or unspoken. Or even the protagonist alone, sitting in his room, wondering if the walls are going to collapse upon him.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad rule of thumb for judging whether a scene exhibits sufficient tension: if you would be comfortable living through the moment described on the page, the scene may not provide enough tension to keep the reader riveted to the page. Polite conversation, for instance, when incorporated into dialogue, is almost always a tension-breaker.

“But wait!” I hear some of you slice-of-life aficionados out there cry.
“Shouldn’t dialogue reflect how people speak in real life?”

Well, yes and no. Yes, it should, insofar as good dialogue reflects plausible regional differences, personal quirks, and educational levels. I’ve heard many an agent and editor complain about novels where every character speaks identically, or where a third-person narrative reads in exactly the same cadence and tone as the protagonist’s dialogue. Having a Texan character use terms indigenous to Maine (unless that character happens to be a relative of the president’s, of course) is very likely to annoy a screener conversant with the dialect choices of either area.

Yes, Virginia, the pros honestly do notice these little things. That’s one of the many, many reasons that it is an excellent idea for you to read your ENTIRE submission IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD before you mail it off; it really is the best way to catch this flavor of writing problem.

But it’s just a fact of the art form that the vast majority of real-life dialogue is deadly dull when committed to print. While the pleasantries of manners undoubtedly make interpersonal relationships move more smoothly, they are rote forms, and the problem with rote forms is that utilizing them absolutely precludes saying anything spontaneous. Or original.

Or — and this is of primary importance in a scene — surprising. Think about it: when’s the last time someone with impeccable manners made you gasp with astonishment?

Even rude real-life conversation can be very dull to read. If you don’t believe this, try an experiment: walk into a crowded café alone, sit down at a table near a couple engaged in earnest conversation, and start taking notes. Then go home and write up their actual words — no cheating — as a scene.

Read it over afterward. 99% of the time, even if the couple upon whom you eavesdropped were fighting or contemplating robbing a bank or discussing where to stash Uncle Harry’s long-dead body, a good editor would cut over half of what the speakers said. If the two were in perfect agreement, the entire scene would probably go.

Why? Because real-life conversation is both repetitious and vague, as a general rule. It also tends to be chock-full of clichés, irrelevancies, non sequiturs, jokes that do not translate at all to print, and pop culture references that will surely be outdated in a year or two.

In a word: boring to everyone but the participants. It’s an insult to the art of eavesdropping.

“Boring,” of course, is absolutely the last adjective you want to spring to an agency screener’s mind while perusing your work. Even “annoying” is better, because at least then the manuscript is eliciting a reaction of some sort.

But once the screener has a chance to think, “I’m bored with this,” if the next line does not re-introduce tension, chances are that the submission is going to end up in the reject pile.

That’s the VERY next line; you can’t count upon your manuscript’s ending up on the desk of someone who is going to willing to be bored for a few paragraphs. As a group, these people bore FAST.

How fast, you ask? Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, my friends, but many of the fine people currently reading submissions across this great land of ours are disconcertingly capable of becoming bored within the first paragraph of a novel. Or, at the very most, by the bottom of the first page.

While we could talk all day about the ethics of agencies and publishing houses employing screeners and assistants with attention spans comparable to the average three-year-old’s — and I’m talking about a three-year-old who has just eaten two big slices of birthday cake here — I have to say, I’ve read enough manuscripts in my time to understand why: most manuscripts suffer from an ongoing lack of tension.

And dull dialogue that does not reveal interesting things about the characters saying it is a primary cause. I know, I know, being courteous SEEMS as though it should make your protagonist more likable to the reader, but frankly, “Yes, thank you, George,” could be spoken by anyone. It doesn’t add much to any scene. And reading too many pages of real-life dialogue is like being trapped in a cocktail party with people you don’t know very well for all eternity.

“Deliver us from chit-chat!” the agency screeners moan, rattling the chains that shackle them to their grim little desks clustered together under those flickering, eye-destroying fluorescent lights. “Oh, God, not another attractive stranger who asks, ‘So, have you been staying here long?'”

Eliciting that kind of reaction — now THAT’s the kind of agent and editor annoying-tactic I think is worth investing some serious energy into exploring. But then, that’s just my opinion.

More on tension next time. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Increasing your contest chances: but wait, there’s more!

Increasing your contest chances: but wait, there’s more!

Again, pardon my racing through the areas where contest entries tend to lose points, but I want to cover as many as humanly possible before those of you entering the PNWA contest pop those envelopes (triple-checked for content completeness, of course) into the corner mailbox. So onward and upward:

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

1. Socrates was a man.
2. Socrates was wise.
3. Therefore, men who want to be wise should not wear socks.

Clearly, there is some plank of the argument missing here, right? In order to prove Proposition 3, the writer would first have to show that (a) Socrates did not wear socks (I have no idea if this is true, but hey, Greece is a warm country, so it’s entirely possible), (b) non-sock wearing had some tangible and demonstrable effect upon his mental processes that cannot be explained by other contributing factors, such as years of study or having a yen for conversation with smart people, and (c) the bare ankle experiment’s success was not dependent upon some exogenous variable, such as the fact that socks would have looked really stupid worn with a toga.

It would make sense, too, to establish that Socrates is a proper role model for modern men to emulate, as opposed to scruffy old sock-wearing moral thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps the book could even include a compare-and-contrast of the intellectual achievements of famous sock-wearing individuals versus those of the air-blessed ankles.

My point is, by the end of such a disquisition, the reader might well become converted to the author’s premise, and cast his footwear from him forever with a cry of grateful liberation.

Think this seems like a ridiculous example of skipped steps, one that could not possibly occur in a real manuscript? Oh, bless your innocent eyes: you’ve obviously never been a judge in a literary contest. (Or advised an undergraduate thesis, for that matter.)

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

Nietzsche allegedly wrote the work in a three-day frenzy while confined to an insane asylum due to a particularly virulent case of syphilis, so perhaps it is not fair to expect world-class coherence from him. The average literary contest entrant, however, does not have so good an excuse, and should not expect the judges to cut him any slack.

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

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

Notice that I specified a DELIBERATELY-PROVOKED laugh. An unintentional laugh, what moviemakers call “a bad laugh” because it springs forth from the audience when the filmmakers do not want it to occur, will cost points.

We’ve all recognize bad laughs in movies, right? My personal favorite was in the most recent remake of LITTLE WOMEN: Jo, played by Winona Ryder, has sold her long, lovely hair in order to help the family, and one of her sisters cries out, “Oh, Jo! Your one beauty.” The theatre positively rocked with laughter, because Ms. Ryder arguably possesses the kind of face that artists over the centuries have willingly mortgaged their souls in order to depict. The script chose to feature that particular bad laugh TWICE.

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

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

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

Finally, there is one more criterion that falls into the Presentation category, what I call the
Ta da! factor. It’s hard to define precisely, because it’s when a manuscript exudes the sort of mercurial charisma that Elinor Glyn (author of one of the first of the great sex novels, THREE WEEKS) dubbed It when it occurs in human beings. (Thus Clara Bow, the It Girl, an Elinor Glyn discovery.) As Madame Glyn argued, we may not be able to define what It is, but we all seem to drool over those who have It.

Like It, the Ta da! factor makes a manuscript shine, practically demanding that the judge give the entry high marks. In fact — although you are not hearing this from me — a healthy dose of the Ta da! factor might even prompt a judge to fudge a little in the other categories, so as to assure the entry a point total that will launch it into the finalist round.

To achieve the Ta da! factor —

Well, if I could tell you that, I would chuck the blogging business entirely and establish myself as the world’s most expensive writing guru. I do know that mere professionalism is not enough. Yes, all of the technical aspects of the work need to be right, as well as the execution. The writing style needs to be strong and distinct, and it helps a lot if the story is compelling.

Beyond that, it’s a little hard to say how precisely the Ta da! factor gives a manuscript its sheen, just as it’s difficult to pin down just what makes a great first line of a book so great. Perhaps it’s rhythm, and a certain facility for telling detail. Here’s a definite example of the Ta da! factor in action:

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

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

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

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

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

Because, my friends, it exudes the aura of the Ta da! factor as distinctly as a Buddhist temple exudes incense.

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

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

A few years ago, a member of my writing group, a mystery writer, submitted a chapter, as we all did, for the group to read. In this draft (we has seen earlier ones), the first two paragraphs were gaspingly beautiful, so full of the atmosphere of the Sierra Nevada mountains that I not only to this day picture his opening in my mind as clearly as a movie — I remember it as though I had actually been there.

After reading this opening, the group grew rather quiet, so we could all chew on the imagery, the sentence structure for a while. It was so imbued with the Ta da! factor that there hardly seemed to be any point in discussing the rest of his chapter.

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

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

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

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

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

PS: Now that the contest deadline is looming ever-closer, more and more readers have been sending me personal e-mails with questions. Please do not do this, no matter how close your deadline is — answering these requires time. Cumulatively, this array of small questions takes literally hours out of my day.

Although I have a posted policy about such e-mailed questions (please see “What If I Want One-on-One,” right), still, these questions continue to roll in. That is time filched from my clients’ work and my own writing — and I assure you, hardly a week passes without some manuscript I am handling facing some major deadline.

However, the comments function is ALWAYS here for you to post questions. It is rare that it takes me more than 24 hours to respond to any question posted there, which is more than reasonable. If you feel you need a more extensive response, or a quicker one, please read the one-on-one policy page and proceed accordingly. (And contrary to popular opinion, offering to take a publishing professional out to lunch or coffee in order to pick her brain about your submission is much akin to inviting a doctor to dinner and expecting him to take out your appendix in gratitude.)

Also, PLEASE do not e-mail me if my blog’s server is malfunctioning. It apparently went down for a few minutes yesterday morning — and 12 people e-mailed me about it. Every server requires service from time to time, and honestly, I am the last person in the world to be able to provide it. Alerting me to a problem will not get it fixed any faster, I promise you — it just fills my inbox.

Posted on - 2 Comments on Increasing your chances, part II: the triumph of the nit-picker

Increasing your chances, part II: the triumph of the nit-picker

Yesterday, I was talking about the predictable frequency with which contest entries are knocked out of finalist consideration purely for reasons of format: specifically, for reasons of standard format. Because, when it comes right down to it, a contest entry, like a manuscript submitted to an agent or editor, should NOT slavishly resemble a published book. Manuscripts have rules, and you will be better off if you follow them.

I know my long-time readers have seen these words so often here that the syllables have probably burned themselves into their retinas, but ignorance of standard format is, due to its instant recognizability to industry insiders, invariably one of the top reasons any agent will cite for why manuscripts are rejected, and THE top reason contest judges give. The reason for this, most of the time, is simple unfamiliarity with the norms of the industry. So until every single aspiring writer within visual range of my blog is aware of it, I am going to keep harping on the matter, thank you very much.

I implore you, for your own sake: unless a contest’s rules or an agent’s requests specifically tell you otherwise, NEVER submit ANY pages ANYWHERE that are not in standard manuscript format. Simply put, it is the difference between your work’s looking professional and not.

Note that “unless” clause, however. If a contest’s rules tell you to print everything in purple ink, with 2-inch margins, and in a typeface legible only to readers on the Planet Targ, do it. And do it without fudging, because, as I said yesterday, entries that ignore such directives stand no chance of winning.

Rather clearer when it’s put that way, isn’t it, than the often bizarrely prolix wording of contest entry forms? What do these organizations do, have them written by the same good folks who write the instruction manuals for DVD players?

Here is another little piece of advice that will increase your chances of reaching finalist status exponentially: before you start preparing your contest entry, sit down and read the rules through twice. Admittedly, these rules are frequently buried at the end of the entry materials, but by all means, dig them out. After you’ve had a good chuckle at their esotericism, take a nice, clean sheet of paper and make a checklist of every requirement, no matter how small or self-evident.

Actually, ESPECIALLY these. The small and self-evident ones are actually the most often missed.

Then read the rules again, to make sure you didn’t miss anything. This list is your lifeline in climbing the contest mountain: you need to be absolutely sure that it will not fail. Have some trustworthy soul – a clergyman, your best friend, a city council member, whoever’s at hand – read the rules and your checklist side-by-side, to assure their remarkable similarity.

Once you are positive it is accurate, follow this checklist as if your life depended upon it. As you go through the process of preparing your submission, tick off each requirement. After you have finished, go back and double-check that you have indeed done each of the things on the list. Finally, give the rules one last gander just before you seal the envelope: is it possible that you missed anything?

Does this advice seem to be advising a level of self-scrutiny bordering on the obsessive-compulsive? Good; you have the right idea. Because, as any contest judge who has read even a handful of entries can tell you – or would tell you, if confidentiality agreements did not forbid it — few of the entrants in any given contest seem to have READ the requirements in their entirety.

Frankly, from the judges’ perspective, this can be downright depressing. I remember only too well reading a truly well-written entry in a contest where I was a first-round judge (no, I can’t tell you which contest). It was an interesting, beautifully-written story told from two POVs, and personally, I would have been overjoyed to see to advance to the finals. However, it had one big technical problem: the contest rules had specified the use of a single typeface throughout, and the author of this entry had chosen to use different typefaces for each of the POVs. So, unfortunately, despite well-nigh perfect scores in every other category, I had to recommend that it be disqualified.

I felt terrible for a week, but what could I do? It would have been knocked out unread at the next level, anyway, and if I had pushed for an exception, it would have damaged the chances of the other excellent entries that I was able to send to the next round.

Not all judges or screeners are so tender-hearted, of course: many report becoming positively angry after reading the fourth or fifth entry that doesn’t follow the rules. Try not to blame the judges too harshly for this — it’s not their fault that entries get ruled out on technicalities; in most contests, scorers are not given much, if any, wiggle room. And, charming people that these volunteers tend to be, each of them would honestly like to be the first person who read the winning entry and cried, “My God! This is brilliant!”

Just how common is it to ignore the rules? Well, let me put it this way: back in my graduate school days, I used to teach discussion sections in gargantuan undergraduate lecture classes. After each test, the teaching assistants (for such we were called) would get together and set out grading criteria. What did each student need to say in order to answer each question at an A level? A B level? And so forth. We’d get together again after grading to compare how our students did. Invariably, the graders’ most oft-repeated complaint: what we came to call RTFQ!

It stands for Read The Question! (The additional F was an unspoken bow to the graders’ annoyance the thirtieth time they saw the same mistake.) There is something about a timed test that apparently makes students skip the vital step of reading the exam question carefully, to figure out what precisely they are being asked. Oh, they skim it – but in the skimming, they usually miss some crucial element of the question. Their grades go down accordingly.

And so it is with contest-entry pressures, evidently: the mere necessity of meeting a contest entry deadline tends to have the same panic-inducing effect upon entrants. They skim the rules, or ignore them altogether. And it is disastrous for them.

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

And that renders entering just a waste of your time and money. But if you’re in it to win, you need to start thinking, not just like a writing professional, but like a contest judge.

This contest judge is here to tell you: if you follow the rules to the letter, yours will be in the minority of entries, and the bigger the contest, the more it will shine. So have a little mercy upon all of those nice judges out there, sit down well before the contest deadline and make a checklist of the contest’s requirements. Check it twice, just like Santa, to make absolutely certain that you have met every tiny, nit-picky technical requirement. Then you can seal the envelope and drive like a maniac it to the post office to get it postmarked by the deadline.

You can’t be first across the finish line if you are disqualified in the first lap, my friends. Be extremely careful, and your chances of contest victory will rise. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on The passive protagonist, part II

The passive protagonist, part II

Yesterday, I went on a rampage about one of the most common of manuscript megaproblems (after show, don’t tell, the top pick on almost any professional reader’s hit parade), the passive protagonist, the main character who is primarily an observer of the plot, rather than an active participant in it. Things happen to the passive protagonist, rather than his internal drives moving the plot along.

The passive protagonist is easily recognizable by the characteristic stripes of the species. He’s a courteous fellow, typically, always eager to step aside and let somebody else take the lead. Almost all of his turmoil is in his head; he tends to be rather 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.

The passive protagonist is a fellow who has taken to heart Ben Franklin’s much-beloved maxim, “He in quarrels interpose/must often wipe a bloody nose.” He just doesn’t want to get INVOLVED, you know?

Oh, he SAYS he does, and certainly THINKS he does, but deep down, he’s a voyeur. All he really wants is for the bad things happening to him to be happening to somebody else four feet away.

As a result, he watches conflict between other characters without intervening, as if they were on TV. Frequently, he takes his gentlemanly reticence even farther, solving mysteries by showing up, being recognized (often as “that troublemaker,” amusingly enough), and having people he has never met before blurt out their entire life stories, or at any rate the key to the plot.

But that’s not all the passive protagonist doesn’t do — often, he’s a charming, well-rounded lump of inactivity. He sits around and worries about a situation for pages at a time before doing anything about it (if, indeed, he does do anything about it at all). He talks it all over with his best friend for a chapter before taking action (see parenthetical disclaimer at the end of the previous sentence). Even in the wake of discovering ostensibly life-changing (or -threatening) revelations, he takes the time to pay attention to the niceties of life; he is not the type to leave the family dinnertable just because he’s doomed to die in 24 hours.

Romantically, he’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. (It’s amazing, isn’t it, how many adults never seem to outgrow that phase?) 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!

Or, even better, perhaps a personal or life-threatening disaster epidemic will sweep through Metropolis, and that woman I am afraid of because

(a) she is smart
(b) she is beautiful
(c) she is rich
(d) she is from the other side of the tracks
(e) she is afflicted with that movie script iciness that always seems to accompany post-graduate degrees on film, and/or
(f) the plot requires it

will suddenly either come to me for help (“Got a match, Mr. Hardboiled Detective?”) or we will have to save the world together. In the midst of conflict that is bigger than the both of us, we will inevitably fall in love — because, really, we won’t have the time to fall in love with anybody else, what with saving the world and all.

You’ve seen that movie a million times, right? So have agents, editors, and contest judges. And they, like most of us, probably have their moments of adolescent yearning when they long to have the entire universe rearrange itself around them, in order to get them what they want.

But the fact is, as appealing as that fantasy is, it is very hard to turn into an exciting plot. So hard, in fact, that it’s not uncommon for agency screeners to be told to use the protagonist’s passivity for more than a page as a reason to reject a submission.

Yes, you read that correctly: more than a PAGE.

Given the dislike the industry exhibits toward this manuscript megaproblem, you’d think agents and editors would tell writers about it more — but once again, this is a phenomenon about which folks in the industry complain early and often, but seldom to writers.

As is the case with so many basic facts of publishing, they DO talk about it at conferences — but usually in terms that you’d have to read 50 manuscripts a week to understand. “I didn’t identify with the character” is a fairly common euphemism for Passive Protagonist Syndrome, as well as, “I didn’t like the main character enough to follow him through an entire book.” That, and, “There isn’t enough conflict here.”

“Wait just a minute!” I hear some of you out there protesting. “There’s an entire universe of reasons that a reader could feel alienated from a protagonist, and most of them have nothing to do with passivity. Why would these phrases necessarily signal that the underlying problem was that the protagonist was not involved enough in the action?”

Good question, imaginary readers, and one with a pretty straightforward answer: you’re right; sometimes these excuses do refer to other problems in a submission. However, since protagonist passivity is SUCH a common manuscript megaproblem, these phrases have come to be identified with it.

Because there are other possibilities, though, it’s a good idea to ask yourself an array of questions about a scene where you suspect your protagonist is not taking an active enough role in, well, his own life. If you can honestly answer yes to all of them, chances are good that you don’t have a passivity problem on your hands.

Fair warning: they’re not the questions most novelists would most like to hear asked of their books, but trust me, it’s better to ask them yourself (or have a reader you trust ask them) than to have an agent, editor, or contest judge snarl them at your submission when you’re not in the room. No, as I can tell you from long experience, they’re the kind of questions good writers get huffy about when a freelance editor or writing group member asks them — and then go home and ponder for a month. I’m just trying to speed up your pondering process.

(1) Is it clear why these events happening to my protagonist, rather than to someone else?  (Hint:  “Because the book’s ABOUT my protagonist!” is not an insufficient answer, professionally speaking.)

(2) Does the scene reveal significant aspects of my protagonist’s character that have not yet been seen in the book? Does it change the protagonist’s situation with respect to the plot? If not, is this scene absolutely necessary?

(3) Is there conflict on every page of this scene? Is my protagonist causing some of the conflict?

(4) Does the conflict arise organically? In other words, does it seem to be a natural outcropping of a person with my protagonist’s passions, skills, and background walking into this particular situation?

(5) Is my protagonist doing or saying something to try to affect the outcome or change the relationships here?

To put it another way, assuming that either the plot or the interrelationships between the characters is somehow different after the scene than before it (and if it isn’t, you might want to look into tightening up the plot), was the protagonist integrally involved in that change, or merely an observer of it?

(6) If my protagonist is not saying much (or anything), does he care about what’s going on? If he doesn’t feel that the situation warrants intervention yet, are the stakes high enough for the reader to worry about the outcome of this conflict? If not, is this scene necessary to keep?

This last may seem like a harsh assessment, but make no mistake about it, to someone who reads hundreds of submissions, a protagonist who observes conflict, rather than getting actively involved in it, seems as though he doesn’t care very much about what’s going on. Or, to translate this into the language agents and editors use: if the protagonist isn’t passionate about what’s going on here, why should the reader be?

To be fair, this assumption may not have as much to do with your manuscript as with the last fifty manuscripts the screener read, half of which opened with slice-of-life vignettes that demonstrated conclusively that the protagonist was a really nice person who did everything she could to avoid conflict. After a couple of dozen of these, rude and pushy starts to seem rather refreshing.

Agents and editors like to see themselves as people of action, dashing swashbucklers who wade through oceans of the ordinary to snatch up the golden treasure of the next bestseller, preferably mere seconds before the other pirates spot it. Protagonists who go for what they want tend to appeal to them.

More, at any rate, then they seem to appeal to most writers. After many years of reading manuscripts, I have come to suspect that writers identify with passive protagonists much, much more than other people do. There’s good reason for it, of course: we writers spend a lot of time and energy watching the world around us, capturing trenchant observations and seeing relationships in ways nobody ever has before.

So we tend to think of people who do this as likeable. Not, as folks in the industry tend to think of hyper-observational characters, as boring.

And, come on, admit it: one of the great fringe benefits of the craft is the delightful ability to make one’s after-the-fact observations on a situation appear to be the protagonist’s first reactions. That, and recasting people who are mean to us as villains in our books. (Not that any of the people who’ve been threatening my publisher over my memoir are turning up in my next novel or anything.)

And while both are probably pretty healthy responses, emotionally speaking, it’s also the kind of passive-aggressive way of dealing with the world that doesn’t work so well when a protagonist does it. We all tend to have some residual affection for our own foibles, don’t we?

The cumulative effect of writerly affection for characters who are acted upon has been, alas, a veritable ever-flowing Niagra Falls of submissions containing passive protagonists. And that is why, boys and girls, agents, editors, and contest judges have gotten pretty tired of them.

If only they could motivate themselves to DO something about it. Oh, well, if they wait around and resent it for long enough, the phenomenon’s sure to change by itself, right?

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Get your characters into the game!

Get your characters into the game!

My, how conducive having one’s computer out of the house is to intensive reading:  even during the last few days’ power outages, I have been spending much of my time huddled by a window or endangering my eyebrows by bending over a sputtering candle, in an effort to throw enough light upon my book.  I’ve been feeling like Abraham Lincoln, studying in his log cabin.

Windstorms, the source of the recent, lengthy power outages in my neck of the woods, were very common in the small vineyard town where I grew up.  (A child’s living a mile and a half from the nearest potential non-sibling playmate is also very conducive to intensive reading, as it turns out.)  Wind-toppled live oaks took out fences, garages, etc, all the time.  Consequently, I always know where my candles are, and how to find the matches in the dark.

When I was a senior in high school, one especially salutary windstorm brought a tree branch down upon the object I hated most in the world:  the 20-foot-high sign that I, as the luckless Commisioner of Publicity and Assemblies (the things we’ll do for college application candy, eh?) was doomed to mount with a ladder every week to post notices of upcoming football games, musicals, spelling bees, and other events not likely to be of interest to the tourists driving along Highway 29, searching for wineries with offering free tastings.  The morning after the storm, the sign was such a mangled mess that I could not even wrest most of the hand-high metal letters off it.

Gravity is sometimes a very lovely thing.  It took weeks for the school to erect a replacement sign.

That was not the only miracle that occured during that particular windstorm.  Another occured at the religious retreat center just outside of town. (Or, to be accurate, at ONE of the religious retreat centers, the establishment owned by the same church that until fairly recently owned a monk-administered winery in town, not the Moonie encampment or the former commune inhabited by a guru who, a few short years later, would abscond to Tahiti with most of the ashram’s money and one of his youngest devotees.) A charming clearing in the midst of a thicket of oak and eucalyptus trees housed a marble statue of — well, let’s just say Somebody’s Mother.  The morning after the sign-destroying windstorm, the tidying groundsman walked into the clearing to discover that four trees had fallen into it.

Somebody up there must be awfully fond of statuary, or at least like it a whole lot better than garages, for all four missed Good Ol’ Mom by a matter of inches.

I’ve thinking of that pale little statue over the last couple of days, just standing there, pensively witnessing the carnage around her, helpless to do anything to save herself from falling timber — and not just because of the windstorms.  No, she popped to mind as an exemplar of a common companion issue submissions with my last post’s Manuscript Megaproblem (show, don’t tell) often have as well:  the protagonist who remains passive in the midst of plot-moving action and/or character-revealing conflict, merely observing it.

Or, to put it in the language of the Idol rejection reasons (see October 31rst’s post, if that reference means nothing to you), that little statue was afraid to speak; she opened his mouth, but nothing came out; she didn’t trust herself enough to reply; she sat there, waiting for the information to sink in. All of these phrases are common enough signposts of a passive protagonist that, as we saw on the Idol rejection, they are now regarded as cliches in their own right.

This is not to say that passivity does not frequently occur in real life — it undoubtedly does.  TV, sports, and movies have certainly encouraged us all to be mere observers of life around us. But that doesn’t mean that it will work on the printed page.

In fact, it usually doesn’t.  A protagonist who is more of an observer than a doer can slow a novel’s pace down to a crawl — and in the early pages of a submission, a plot’s not maintaining at least a walking pace can be fatal.

And the sad thing is, writers seldom make their protagonists passive on purpose, any more than they tend to wake up in the morning, stretch, and say, “You know, I think that I should be telling rather than showing in my writing today!”

Here’s how it usually happens in otherwise solid, well-writen submissions.  The writer has established the protagonist as an interesting character in an interesting situation — well done.  The protagonist encounters a thorny problem that requires thought or discussion to solve.  (Writers LOVE working through logical possibilities in their heads, so their protagonists seldom lack for mulling material.) So the protagonist dons her proverbial thinking cap…

…and two pages later, she’s still running through the possibilities, which are often very interesting.  Interesting enough, in fact, that they would have made perfectly dandy scenes, had the author chosen to present them as live-action scenes that actually occurred.  Instead, they are summarized in a few lines, told, rather than shown.

Uh-oh.

Or the protagonist encounters another character, one with whom there is genuine, organic conflict — again, well done.  But instead of speaking up, the protagonist just THINKS about how annoying/wrong/murderous the other character is, effectively deferring the conflict to another scene.  So instead of the protagonist’s anger/rightness/suspicions fueling the scene in a way that moves the plot along, the protagonist watches as the plot moves past him.

Um, shouldn’t the protagonist have caught that bus?

In both cases, action happens TO these characters, rather than the characters’ passions influencing the action, driving the plot along.

Agents, editors, contest judges, and even members of book groups complain frequently and vociferously about passive protagonists —  and as an editor, it’s a pet peeve of mine, too, I must admit.  I suspect this feeling is shared is shared by many bloggers:  for every thousand readers of a post, perhaps 4 or 5 post comments — and of those, at least two are commercial links to other websites. As a result (and if you visit many writers’ sites on the web, you’ve probably already noticed this), bloggers tend over time to gear their content to the responders more than to the more passive members of their readerships.

If a blogger posts in the middle of the woods, and nobody responds, did the post make any noise?

But I digress. Protagonists who feel sorry for themselves are particularly prone to being mere observers: life happens to them, and they react to it.  Oh, how lucidly they resent the forces that act upon them, while they wait around for those forces to strike back at them again!  How redolent of feeling do the juices in which they are stewing become!

This is fine for a scene or two, but remember, agents, editors, and contest screeners are not noted for being fond of reading for pages and pages to find out where the plot is taking them.  Try to avoid toying with their impatience for too long.  Remember, professional readers measure their waiting time in lines of text, not pages.

To say that they bore easily is like saying that you might get a touch chilly if you visited the North Pole without a coat:  true, yes, but something of an understatement, and one that might get you hurt if you relied upon it too literally.

When in doubt about how long is too long, ask yourself this:  is there something my protagonist could DO here, however small or misguided, that would affect the status quo?  If I had him do it, would the part where he thinks/talks/worries about the situation for X lines/pages/paragraphs be necessary, or could I cut it?

I hear some grumbling out there (we bloggers have to develop superhuman hearing in order to hear those of you who don’t post comments, you know):  yes, there are plenty of good books where the protagonists sit around and think about things for chapters at a time.

But before you start quoting 19th-century novelists who habitually had their leads agonize for a hundred pages or so before doing anything whatsoever, ask yourself this:  how many novels of this ilk can you name that were published within the last five years?  Written by first-time novelists?  Okay, how about ones NOT first published in the British Isles?

Come up with many?  If you did, could you pass their agents’ names along to the rest of us with all possible speed?

Because, honestly, in the current very tight fiction market, there aren’t many North American agents who express this preference — and still fewer who act upon it in establishing their client lists.  They see beautiful writing where not much happens more than you might think.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an agent out there who would be fascinated by a well-written, first-person narrative from the point of view of that little marble statue in the middle of that wooded retreat.  Her thoughts as she stood there, motionless, as hundred-year-old oaks crashed down around her might well be priceless.  However, at some point, even the most patient agent — or editor, or contest judge, or screener — is going to want her to get the heck off her static pedestal and DO something.

Tomorrow (or whenever the local windstorms allow me the necessary electricity to post again), I shall talk about how to tell if your protagonist needs to get a more on.  In the meantime, watch out for falling trees, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Show, don’t tell, or, what The Da Vinci Code movie can teach writers about constructing a narrative

Show, don’t tell, or, what The Da Vinci Code movie can teach writers about constructing a narrative

When a writer’s computer is in the shop, she is forced, alas, to try to figure out the mysterious phenomenon known as leisure time. What is it for, and how does one fill it?

For a serious writer under normal circumstances, the equation is very simple: time not absolutely dedicated to positively unavoidable pursuits — such as eating, sleeping, resenting one’s coworkers, etc. — is automatically writing time. But were you aware that there are people out there who DON’T use every second of their spare time to create things?

I know. Incomprehensible, isn’t it?

Apparently, people who don’t write fill their time in other ways — and not always with reading, as much as we might like them to do so in order to create demand for our books. No, they do things like having conversations with their significant others, watching television, playing sports, and climbing Mt. Kilamanjaro. The array is honestly dazzling.

At least, if my significant other is to be believed while he’s still in shock at seeing me outside my studio more than twice per day. Witnessing a minor miracle can play havoc with one’s reasoning skills.

In order to introduce me to this sort of “normalcy,” he rented the movie THE DA VINCI CODE — since I essentially spent the entire summer either locked in my studio or away at writers’ conferences, or writing this blog, I had missed the hype about it, which apparently was considerable. Now, I haven’t read the book, so I did not walk in with preconceptions about the story (other than the complaints one always hears about mega-sellers on the writers’ grapevine), but I must admit, I have never forgiven Ron Howard for A BEAUTIFUL MIND. It seems to me that if you’re going to tell the story of a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and you profess to present his most famous theory on screen, you have at least a minor ethical obligation to present that theory correctly. Oh, and not to change a real-life story to encourage women to place their children in life-threatening situations on a daily basis. Little things like that.

But I digress — you see what mixing in the real world does to you? In any case, I wasn’t expecting much, other than perhaps some nice ranting opportunities for Sir Ian McKellen, who doesn’t seem to be hurting for them these days.

Little did I anticipate, therefore, what a gold mine of writing advice the movie would be! I didn’t start keeping track until about 20 minutes in, of course, but according to my informal hash marks, a good 90% of the relevant plot elements were given verbally by one of the characters, rather than shown by action. The plot was so reliant on spoken details that the screenplay could, with practically no modifications, have been used as a radio play.

Seldom, if ever, have I seen on screen a better illustration of the oft-given writing advice SHOW, DON’T TELL. This movie was positively aversion therapy for writers who favor telling their stories indirectly. As a writer on writing, if not as a viewer, I was in ecstacy.

Why is shoving most of the relevant plot elements into the characters’ mouths problematic? Leaving aside for the moment that film is, after all, a visual medium, and thus film buffs might reasonably be expected to be given information via, say, images or action, it’s just boring for the audience to receive so much of the important details through their ears.

In writing, as in film, it’s more entertaining if the author mixes up the means of conveying information. If interesting things are happening offstage, for instance, why not show the viewers that offstage scene, instead of making us listen to a summary of it? If an element important to the plot happened in the dim past, why not show a scene set in that dim past, featuring actual characters, rather than forcing the audience to sit through a silent version narrated by a voice-over?

The problem of telling a story indirectly arises very, very frequently in fiction manuscripts: all too often, essential plot points are conveyed either in narrative summary bursts or, even more frequently, by the protagonist’s going and finding someone to tell him or her a long-winded story that provides the relevant background.

The long, Spielberg-like explanatory exposition from a character who isn’t in fact central to the plot is particularly popular in novels. Call me sheltered, but in my experience, strangers seldom blurt out their most closely-held secrets to the first person who asks them, whatever happens in detective movies. To a professional reader’s eye, if a character appears in a manuscript a grand total of once, spills the beans, and disappears, it’s generally a sign of a plot that’s light on action and high on static verbiage.

The problem with conveying too much information this way, as THE DA VINCI CODE illustrates so beautifully, is that lengthy speeches are easy for a reader or viewer to tune out. People standing there talking can get old very fast. If you have a scene or two like this in your manuscript, it’s worth asking yourself: could any of this all-spoken explanation be replaced by an active scene?

To add insult to the injury to the reader’s intelligence, often, in spoken exposition scenes, the protagonist doesn’t even ask good questions to elicit the information necessary to move the plot along. Non-specific queries like “I need to know the truth” and “What do you mean?” are not, after all, staples of the hard-core interview. Nor does it make for very interesting — or particularly life-like — dialogue.

What it does make for is novel dialogue that reads as though it came out of a movie, and conflict that feels as though it’s second-hand.

Summarizing essential plot twists in narrative form, rather than showing the plot actually twisting by including the relevant conflicts in a scene, carries many of the same liabilities. Obviously, you will need to summarize from time to time, to avoid the problem of needing to describe every step a character took to cross a room, but in most cases, an active scene will be more engaging — and more memorable — than a mere explanation of the same activity.

Think about it: which are you more likely to remember tomorrow, someone at your work telling you about her brother-in-law’s narrow escape from a car crash, or seeing the near-miss between the cars yourself?

There is, as there so often is in dealing with the publishing industry, also a strategic reason to avoid telling important parts of your story indirectly: SHOW, DON’T TELL is widely regarded amongst agents, editors, and contest judges as one of the most damning critiques possible for a submission — and one of the most common. In the industry, writing that tells instead of shows is more or less synonymous with writing that needs serious revision.

And I think most of you are already aware of how agents tend to feel about manuscripts like that. If it were a movie, they would walk out of it.

But you’re all better writers than that, aren’t you? You know to read through your manuscripts carefully before you submit them, to catch this kind of static scene, right?

If you didn’t, you do now. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XIV: the over-stuffed bird

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XIV: the over-stuffed bird

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The turkey is in the oven now, and I have taken a break between making the cardamom carrots and the cinnamon-honey sweet potatoes in order to write to you. So don’t ever think that you don’t rate.

Here is something for which we should indeed be thankful: I shall be going over the last of the Idol rejection reasons (see post of October 31, if this reference seems cryptic) today! Even in this extensive list of fairly subjective criteria, I have saved the most subjective for last – in fact, this set is so couched in individual response that I have reported them all within quotation marks. For these, my friends, are the rejection reasons defined entirely by the reader’s response to your work:

64. “Overkill to make a point.”
65. “Over the top.”
66. “Makes the reader laugh at it, not with it.”
67. “It’s not visceral.”
68. “It’s not atmospheric.”
69. “It’s melodramatic.”
70. “This is tell-y, not showy.”

“Unbelievable” also came up a lot, but usually in conjunction with other reasons. This is telling: basically, whether a situation is believable or not is largely dependent upon the reader’s life experience, isn’t it? Since my childhood strongly smacked at times of having been directed by Federico Fellini, I would expect that I would tend to find a broader array of written situations plausible than, say, someone who grew up on a conservative cul-de-sac in an upper middle-class suburb, attended to a minor Ivy, and was working at my first job in Manhattan while my parents paid a significant portion of my living expenses.

Which is to say, of course, that I would probably be a more sympathetic reader for most manuscripts than the average agency screener or editorial assistant. No matter how sophisticated you expect your target audience to be, remember, the first person who reads your submission at an agency or publishing house is probably going to be new to the milieu you are painting in your book. (Sometimes, this shows up in surprising ways. Recently, I found myself dealing with a well-respected publishing professional who was surprised to learn that couples often pay for their own weddings now, rather than relying upon their parents. Apparently, she was not yet old enough to have many friends well-heeled enough to run their own shows.)

However, the numbered reasons above speak to less personal-experiential approaches to judgment. #64, overkill to make a point, and #65, “over the top,” usually refer to good writing that is over-intense in the opening paragraphs. And this can be counter-intuitive, right, since most of us were taught that the opening needs to hook the reader?

The trick to opening with intensity is to get the balance right. You don’t want to so overload the reader with gore, violence, or despair that she tosses it aside immediately, nor do you want to be boring. Usually, though, it is enough to provide a single strong, visceral opening image, rather than barraging the reader with a lengthy series of graphic details.

Before half of you start reading the opening page of THE LOVELY BONES to me, allow me to say: I know, I know. I don’t make the rules, after all: I just comment upon them.

All I can say is this: there is no such thing as a single book that will please every agent and editor in the industry. If you are worried that your work might be too over the top for a particular agency, learn the names of four or five of their clients, walk into your nearest well-stocked bookstore, and start pulling books from the shelves. Usually, if your opening is within the intensity range of an agency’s client list, your submission will be fine.

#69, “It’s melodramatic,” and #66, “Makes the reader laugh at it, not with it,” are the extreme ends of the believability continuum. What’s the difference between melodrama and drama? The pitch at which the characters are reacting to stimuli – if your protagonist bursts into tears because her mother has died on page 1, that will generally feel real, but if she throws a tantrum because there is no milk for her cornflakes on page 1, chances are good that you’ve strayed into melodrama.

Need I even say that the rise of reality TV, which is deliberately edited to emphasize interpersonal conflict, has increased the amount of melodrama the average agency screener encounters in submissions on any given day?

Usually, melodrama is the result of the stakes of the conflict not being high enough for the characters. As a general rule of thumb, it’s dramatic when a character believes that his life, welfare, or happiness is integrally involved with the outcome of a situation; it’s melodramatic when he ACTS as though his life, welfare, or happiness is threatened by something minor. (And no, “But the protagonist’s a teenager!” is not an excuse that generally works within the industry.)

So if you open with a genuine conflict, rather than a specious one, you should be fine.

And this goes double if you are writing comedy, because the line between cajoling the reader into laughing along with the narrative and at it is a fine one. Overreaction to trifles is a staple of film and television comedy, but it’s hard to pull off on the printed page. Especially on the FIRST printed page, when the reader is not yet fond of the protagonist or familiar with his quirks – much sitcom comedy relies upon the audience’s recognizing a situation as likely to trigger character responses before the character realizes it, right?

Generally speaking, comedy grounded in a believable situation works better in a book opening than a scene that is entirely wacky, or where we are introduced to a character via his over-reactions. The more superficial a situation is, the harder it is for the reader to identify with the protagonist who is reacting to it.

#71, “It’s not visceral,” and #72, “It’s not atmospheric,” also share a continuum. The latter deals with a sense of place, or even a sense of genre: if a reader can make it through the first page and not be sure of the general feeling of the book, you might want to rework it before you submit. Not that you should load down your opening with physical description – that was a bugbear described earlier on the Idol list, right? Just provide enough telling details to make the reader feel as if he is there.

And, if you can, do it through action and character development, rather than straightforward narrative. That way, you will avoid pitfall #70,“This is tell-y, not showy.”

Let me let you in on a little secret gleaned from years of hanging out with agents and editors at conferences: after they’ve had a few drinks, most of them will start describing the manuscripts they long to pick up in much the same way as a hungry person describes meat. They want something they can sink their teeth into; they want a satisfying sensual experience; they want to savor flavors they’ve never tasted before. They want to be seduced, essentially, by the pleasurable shock of stepping into a ready-made world that is not their own.

Piece o’cake to pull that off on a first page, right?

The visceral details are often crucial to pulling off this magic trick. As I have bemoaned repeatedly in this very forum, the prominence of film and TV as entertainment has led to a positive plethora of submissions that rely exclusively upon visual and auditory details to set their scenes. (During the reign of radio, I am told, sound played a more important role in the average manuscript.) This may be hard to believe, but out of every hundred manuscripts a screener reads, perhaps two will include solid, well-described sensual details that are not based upon either sight or sound.

Movies and television limit themselves to these two senses for a very good reason: it’s all they have. But a book can work with all the senses – even that sixth one, the one that senses danger and picks up unspoken vibes. If you can work at least one of these other senses into the first few paragraphs of your submission, you will be sending a signal to that screener that perhaps yours is the book that will seduce her boss this week.

And that, my friends, is something to celebrate.

If you doubt your ability to do this, try this exercise: sit down late tonight and write a description of your Thanksgiving dinner using ONLY the senses of vision and hearing. Then set it aside and write another one that uses only smell, taste, touch, and interpersonal vibration. Tomorrow, read them both: which tells the story better? Which makes the reader feel more as though she had been sitting at the table with you?

Speaking of which, I have some sweet potatoes to season.

But before I go, since a lot of people like to take stock of their lives this time of year (partially, I suspect, to construct the dreaded New Year’s resolution), allow me to suggest something: when you are assessing how far you have progressed toward achieving your writing goals and what you would like to achieve by this time next year, don’t use the yardstick of an author who is already on the bestseller list. Chances are, it took that writer years of patient, frustrating effort to get to that point, and really, the ultimate goal of successful publication, or the interim goal of landing an agent, are not the only desirable achievements for a writer.

Here is the standard I like to use: am I a better writer than I was two years ago? (Two years is better than one year, as it often allows consideration of more than one project.) Have I added skills to my writer’s bag of tricks in the last two years? Have I found friends, connections, resources that can help me on my way in that time? If my work is being rejected, am I getting better rejections? And what can I decide to do in the year to come to improve my work still more?

I am very, very lucky, my friends: I started this blog 15 months ago, and it has undoubtedly made me a better writer, both because it has forced me to take a long, hard look at the premises under which our industry operates and because I have had the opportunity to answer questions from writers at all levels. I have met many wonderful writers, agents, and editors over the past two years, and I have taken continuing education classes to hone my skills. I have exchanged work with very good writers from backgrounds different from mine, and have benefited from their advice. I have finished manuscripts, and I have revised them.

And all of this, believe it or not, is actually a better indicator of my progress as a writer than the fact that I have sold a book to a publishing house in the last two years, or that I have a novel under serious consideration at another house right now. Why? Because these activities sharpened my writing and marketing skills; successfully marketing my books was my excellent agent’s achievement, ultimately. For all of this, I am grateful.

My gut feeling is that all of you who read this blog regularly have been doing some fairly hefty writer’s toolbag refurbishment, too. Don’t forget to pat yourselves on the back for that.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part VI: fabricated suspense and other ways to annoy an agency screener without really trying

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part VI: fabricated suspense and other ways to annoy an agency screener without really trying

Sorry I missed posting yesterday — an editing client had a last-minute deadline rush. I’ll do an extra-long post today, the kind that will more than make up for that unpaid overtime your boss made you work last week, to make up for it. (Oh, as if no one ever surfed the net at work. It’s what we Americans get instead of coffee breaks.)

Dealing with other people’s deadlines is just a fact of life in the freelance editing business, and, indeed, in the publishing world in general. Much to the chagrin of plan-ahead people like me, sudden “Oh, my God, I need it by Wednesday!” deadlines abound in the industry. The publishing world is a serious underwriter of overnight shipping.

So it seems like a good time to remind you, my friends: cultivate flexibility. And really fast-typing fingers. You’re going to need both in spades, if you’re going to stick around the industry for the long haul.

After my last post on opening paragraph problems, a reader was kind enough to pass along an amusing factoid, gleaned from a recent Seattle Post-Intelligencer trivia spot: the first sentence of Charles Dickens’ OLIVER TWIST apparently contains 98 words, seven commas, and three semicolons. Somehow, I doubt any of the Idol panelist agents would have made it even halfway through!

Speaking of the list of Idol rejection reasons, let’s get back to it. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, please see my post for October 31.) Going over it is providing a lot of useful insights, isn’t it? More than I expected, I have to admit: the fact is, the first pages of our novels are not what writers tend to sit around and talk about when we get together. And all of us would like to think that an agent who liked our pitch or query well enough to request the first 50 pages would have the patience, if not the courtesy, to commit to reading at least the first 5 of those pages…

Ah, well, live and learn. I’m sure that some great cosmic record-keeper in the sky is keeping tabs on which side of the book-producing process is the more courteous. Go, Team Creative!

Today, I would like to concentrate upon the rejection reasons that have to do with how that latte-drinking, lunchtime date-awaiting, radically underpaid agency screener who is only doing this job for a few years to learn the business does and doesn’t get drawn into the story. (Yes, yes, I know: from a writer’s point of view, talking about how much a reader could possibly get pulled into a story between, say, line 2 and line 3 of page 1 is kind of ridiculous. Bear with me here.) Specifically, I would like to introduce you to the oft-cited concept of being pulled out of the story by something in it.

“Wha–?” I hear many of you cry.

Being pulled out of a story is industry-speak for when you are reading along, happily following a story line — and then you encounter something that you do not like. A jarring or anachronistic element, for instance, or an unexplained switch in perspective or tense; it is very much in the eye of the beholder. Whatever instigates it, the reader’s mind starts wandering off the storyline and onto other matters — usually, to the fact that this particular element is annoying and distracting.

Let me give you a concrete example, so you may recognize the phenomenon when you spot it in the wild: “Caleb Williams stood on the still-smoldering deck of Her Majesty’s Ship Wasp, contemplating the ruins of the ship that had sheltered him since he was a cabin boy. What had become of Beatrice, his long-suffering fiancêe? He peered through the smoke, shouting for her, but the dying man clinging to his leg was slowing his search efforts considerably. Impatiently, he drew a Ginsu knife from his Georgio Armani tool belt and slit the man’s throat, so he could move forward unimpeded through the brine seeping up from below. Too soon, however, he tripped over a bloated mass floating before his knees: Beatrice, his heart cried, or just another bos—un’s mate?”

Okay, I know it was subtle, but was there a point where you stopped following Caleb’s saga, wondering for a nanosecond or two what the author was thinking? Yup. In that moment, you were pulled out of the story.

Universally, agents, editors, and their screeners cite being pulled out of the story as a primary reason to stop reading a submission on the spot. This is why, in case you’re curious, agents at conferences so often give the same tired suggestion for evaluating where to revise a novel: “Take a pen,” they advise, “or better yet, have a reader take a pen, and run it vertically down the side of the page as you read. Every time you look up, or your mind starts to wander, make a horizontal line on the page. Then, after you’ve finished reading, go back and revise any spot with a horizontal line.”

Now, in my rather lengthy editing experience, this does not work particularly well as a pre-revision technique; basically, all it spots are boring bits and places where you’re pulled out of the story, and it penalizes those of us who like to read our work in public places (Oh, yeah, like you don’t look up when someone cute walks by) or who live near firehouses. For a good revision, you need to pay attention to more than just flow.

However, it is an incredibly good way to try to see your submission from an agent’s point of view. Instead of drawing the horizontal line, however, just stop reading. Permanently.

Obviously, then, you would probably like to avoid including elements that will pull the reader out of the story on your first page. Here are the reasons on the Idol list most closely affiliated with this phenomenon:

16. The opening has the protagonist respond to an unnamed thing (e.g., something dead in a bathtub, something horrible in a closet, someone on the other side of her peephole…) for more than a paragraph without naming it, creating false suspense.
17. The characters talk about something (a photo, a person, the kitchen table) for more than a line without describing it, creating false suspense.
19. An unnamed character (usually “she”) is wandering around the opening scene.
20. Non-organic suspense, created by some salient fact being kept from the reader for a long time (and remember, on the first page, a paragraph can be a long time).
27. The book opened with a flashback, rather than with what was going on now.
28. Too many long asides slowed down the action of an otherwise exciting scene.
29. Descriptive asides pulled the reader out of the conflict of the scene.

The last two, #28 and #29, are fairly self-explanatory, aren’t they? Basically, these are pacing problems: the agent wanted to find out what was going to happen with the story, but the narrative insisted upon describing every third cobblestone on the street first. (I’m looking at YOU, Charles Dickens!) Or the narrative gave too much background between pieces of action or dialogue (don’t you try to slink away, Edith Warton!), or our old bugbear, the narrative stopped the action cold in order to describe the room, what the protagonist is wearing, the fall of the Roman Empire, etc., in between showing the plot in action. (You know I’m talking to YOU, Victor Hugo!)

The others on the list are a trifle more subtle. Pop quiz, to see how good you are getting at thinking like an agency screener: what underlying objection do all of the remaining reasons have in common?

Give up? They all reflect a serious aversion to being tricked by a manuscript. While a casual reader might not object to early-on plot, structural, or naming choices that encourage him to guess what is going on, only to learn shortly thereafter — gotcha! — that those assumptions were wrong, an agent or editor is more invested in the storyline (and, arguably, dislikes being wrong more). So that gotcha! moment, instead of impressing them with how very clever the author is, tends merely to pull them out of the story.

And we all know what happens when that occurs, right? Straight back into the SASE for that submission. Moral of the story: folks in the industry like being right too much to enjoy being tricked.

Go ahead, have that inspiring axiom tattooed on your mousing hand, so you will never forget it. I’ll wait.

So why, given that your average agency screener loathes first-page bait-and-switches with an intensity that most people reserve for thermonuclear war and tax day, do so many writers elect to trick their readers early on? Unfortunately for our team, many of us were taught at impressionable ages that lulling the reader into a false sense of security, then yanking the rug out from under him, is a great format for a hook. It can work well later in a story, certainly, but as a hook, it tends not to catch many fishes at an agency, if you catch my drift. (My, I am being nautical today, amn’t I? Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!)

Mostly, though, I think most writers don’t think of these strategies as reader-tricking at all. Take, for instance, #27, opening the book with a flashback, rather than in the present reality of the rest of the book. Now, there might be many perfectly valid narrative reasons to do this, right? (A word to the wise: if you are going to flash back briefly first, don’t italicize the flashback to differentiate it from the rest of the text: most screeners will automatically skip over openings in italics, on the theory that they aren’t really germane to the opening scene.) You’re making an interesting commentary on the nature of human memory, perhaps: no one of at least average intelligence, you probably think, is at all likely to be tricked by this.

Not to cast aspersions on anyone in the industry’s smarts, but frankly, they just don’t see it this way, because — actually, no: you take a shot at thinking like a screener, for the practice. On your marks, take a sip of that scalding latte, and GO!

If it occurred to you that the screener might resent being drawn into the action of one scene (the flashback), then expected to switch gears to become involved in another (the present of the book), give yourself high marks. If you also thought that the screener might get a tad testy because, after getting comfortable in one timeframe (the flashback), the time shifts to the present of the book, give yourself extra credit. But really, if you came up with any flavor of, “Hey, this narrative tricked me! I hate that!” or “Hey, that switch pulled me out of the story!”, you’re doing pretty well.

Now that you’re getting the hang of it, figuring out the problem the screener would have with #19, an unnamed character (usually “she”) wandering around the opening scene, should be relatively simple. Here’s a hint: this one usually pulls the screener out of the story the second time the pronoun is used. Why?

Oh, you’re getting so good at this: a gold star to those of you who realized that what pulled the reader out of the story in this case is the reader’s own annoyance with the character’s not being identified by name. “Who is this chick?” the screener cries, eyeing her watch as her lunch date ticks ever-closer. “And why the heck can’t I know her name?”

Which brings me to the most popular reader-tricking tactic on the list, the creation of false suspense (also known as non-organic suspense, if you want to get technical) by the narrative’s withholding necessary information from the reader. Again, this can work as a long-term plotting strategy (and is one of the reasons that many novelists find maintaining tension easier in a first-person narrative, as the reader learns things at the same rate as the narrator, thus necessitating withholding information from the reader), but done too early in a book — in this case, on the first page — it can come across as a trick.

And we all know by now how agents and editors feel about those, right?

Again, in most submissions, tricking the reader is the farthest thing from the author’s mind: usually, she’s just trying to create a tense, exciting opening scene. Yet consider the following rejection reasons, and think how these well-meant tension-building techniques went awry:

16. The opening has the protagonist respond to an unnamed thing (e.g., something slimy in her shoes, something dead in the back seat of her car, a particularly hateful program on the TV set in the room…) for more than a paragraph without saying what the responded-to thing IS.
17. The characters talk about something (a book, another character, a recent trip one of them took to Antarctica, or, the most popular option of all, a recent trauma or disappearance) for more than a line without describing what the discussion topic IS.
20. Some salient-yet-crucial fact being kept from the reader for several paragraphs, such as the fact that the protagonist is on trial for his life or that Rosebud is a sled.

Place yourself in the tattered jeans of that agency screener, my friends, then chant along with me why all of these choices are problematic: they pull the reader out of the story, in order to wonder what IT is.

But that response — which is usually what the agent gives as a reason for rejecting tactics like these — tells only half the story. Engendering reader speculation can be a very good thing indeed, so what’s the real objection here? Simple: the agent fears that she is being set up to be tricked later on.

She doesn’t like that, you know; worrying about whether she is guessing right tends to pull her out of the story. Keep her in it as long as you possibly can — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part III: will someone hold this massive grain of salt for me?

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part III: will someone hold this massive grain of salt for me?

The last couple of days’ posts have been kind of in-your-face, haven’t they? Sorry about that — it’s the nature of the beast, when the ruling out of submissions is the subject. It makes us all feel as if we’ve been mauled by wildebeests.

Still, there’s no need to despair: to succeed in this business, all you need to do is make your initial pages technically perfect, fresh without being weird, and not hit either any of the pet peeves listed on the Idol list (see Halloween post) or personal ones that the agent in question might have. Your characters need to be original, your premise interesting, and your plot riveting, beginning from Paragraph 1. Oh, and you need to be lucky enough not to submit your brilliant novel about an airline pilot on the day after the agent/screener/editorial assistant/editor has had his/her heart broken by one.

Piece o’ proverbial cake, right? Well, my work is done here. Let me know how it all turns out!

Okay, so it’s not such a piece of cake: it’s a genuinely tall order, and a long list of don’t can be very, very intimidating. Before you throw up your hands in despair, let’s break down the Idol list of rejection reasons into bite-sized chunks.

The first thing to realize about this list of agents’ pet peeves is that some of them are, in fact, personal pet peeves, not necessarily industry-wide red flags. The trick is recognizing which ones. Right off the bat, a cursory glance at the list identified these as probably personal, rather than endemic:

15. The opening had a character do something that characters only do in books, not real life.
25. The first lines were dialogue.
33. Agent can’t identify with the conflict shown.
37. The story is corny.
42. The opening scene is too violent (in the example that generated this response, a baby’s brains were bashed out against a tree).
43. Too gross.
44. There is too much violence to children and/or pets.
46. The story is written in the second person.
47. The story is written in the first person plural.
48. The narrator speaks directly to the reader (“I should warn you…”), making the story hyper-aware of itself qua story.

How do I know these are not widely-shared rejection criteria? Well, experience, but also, critical analysis. Allow me to explain.

Before I start dissecting them, however, one caveat: just because these particular pet peeves are agent-specific does not mean that you should simply disregard them. If you are planning to submit to any of the agents on that particular panel, it would behoove you to take them very seriously indeed: one of the reasons that savvy writers go to conferences, after all, is to pick up information about the specific likes and dislikes of particular agents, right? Use this information strategically, to help target your queries and submissions to the agents most likely to enjoy your work.

When you’re listening to such a panel, there are a couple of signals that will alert you to something being an individual’s pet peeve, rather than a general rule. First — and this happens surprisingly frequently — the person uttering it will actually say, “Maybe it’s just my pet peeve, but…” or “It really bugs me when…” It’s a pretty safe bet that what is said next is a personal preference.

I know: it’s subtle.

Also — and this happened on the Idol panel — sometimes an agent will express an opinion, and the other agents will guffaw at him, fall over backwards in surprise, slap him across the face and tell him he’s an idiot, etc. Again, all of these are pretty good indicators that we’re not talking about a widely-recognized agency norm here.

Take, for instance, #25, when agent Daniel Lazar’s having flagged a submission because the first lines were dialogue. Now, this is a pretty sweeping criticism, isn’t it? A lot of very good books open with dialogue. So how did the people in the Idol audience know it was his pet peeve? Well, he began his critique with, “Maybe it’s just me, but…” And after he said it, the agent sitting next to him turned to him and said, “Really?”

Starting to get the hang of this?

I know I’ve been saying it a lot lately, but it bears repeating: no matter how much talk there is about how agents all want to represent the same kinds of books, it’s just not the case — they are individuals, with individual tastes. And thus, logically, if your submission is rejected by one, you have most emphatically NOT been rejected by the entire industry: you’ve been rejected by one individual within it. Learn what you can from the experience, then move on.

This can be very, very tough for writers who have just spent a small fortune on a conference, pitched to five agents, and had requested materials rejected to do. Yet at even the best conference, no group of agents small enough to fit in the same room, much less on the same panel, are a representative sample of how the entire industry will react to your work. I know it’s discouraging, but it just doesn’t make statistical sense to throw up one’s hands after a single round of rejections.

To put this in perspective, it’s not uncommon for an agent to submit a client’s work to as many as 50 different editors. If #48 says yes, that’s a win, just as surely as if #1 did. Should you really be any less tenacious in marketing your book to agents than you would expect your agent to be in marketing it to editors?

Now that you know why it is so important to differentiate between what you absolutely must change on your first page and what you should change for a particular agent’s eyes, let’s go back to our list of rejection reasons. When in doubt, ask yourself, “Why is that particular one problematic?” Often, the most obvious answer will be that it’s the agent’s personal opinion.

Let’s apply this test to #15, the opening had a character do something that characters only do in books, not real life. On the panel, Rachel Vater cited this reason quite often, but neither of the other agents mentioned it. (Did that make your personal-preference antennae perk up, campers?) She gave those who were listening another clue: a couple of times, she cast this objection as,
“Well, I’VE never done what the character does here…” Ding ding ding!

Even if she had not been kind enough to flag this as a personal preference, we probably could have figured it out. In this context, she specifically singled out a character who shook his head to clear an image or bring himself back to reality, as in, “he shook his head to clear the cobwebs.” Now, as an editor, I do have to admit, this is an action that one sees occur with GREAT frequency in manuscripts; in fact, I suspect one could make a pretty good case without trying very hard for labeling it as a cliché.

However, this is not how the rejection reason was phrased, was it? No, it was cast as “this is something a normal person would not do.” Unless we’re talking about psychopathic behavior, a statement like this is almost certainly based upon personal experience. Everyone’s opinion of normal is different.

So what this critique is really saying is, “People in my circles and from my background don’t do such things.” Fine; good to know: now we can target the submission away from the agent who cannot imagine doing such a thing and toward an agent who can.

Getting the hang of this yet?

The same logic test can be applied, with the same result, to #33 (agent can’t identify with the conflict shown, which is obviously based upon personal taste) and #37 (the story is corny, which must be based upon the observer’s background and worldview). Note the preference, and move on to the next agent.

If you get the same response from a few different agents, it might be worth a second look at your opening pages for plausibility. For the sake of your future success, it is probably worth bearing in mind that an awfully high percentage of agents and editors are from upper-middle clad backgrounds, and thus graduated from rather similar English departments at rather similar liberal arts colleges, mostly in the northeastern part of the country. Their brothers (and sisters) dated one another’s sisters (and brothers). If you can’t imagine reading from such a point of view, it might behoove you to find a first reader who can, to subject your manuscript to the Minor Ivy Plausibility Test.

The personal preference test, believe it or not, can also be applied to reasons associated with voice choice. Yes, I know: since it’s a technical matter, it seems as though rules should govern whether it’s acceptable, right? Not really. There are plenty of agents and editors who don’t like the first person voice much, and, as we saw on the list, other voices may raise hackles: 46. The story is written in the second person; 47. The story is written in the first person plural. What could such statements be OTHER than personal preferences?

#48 (the narrator speaks directly to the reader, making the story hyper-aware of itself qua story) is also a personal preference about narrative voice, albeit a more subtle one: for some readers, including the agent who cited this rejection reason, a first-person narration that breaks the third wall is jarring, a distraction from the story. However, there are plenty examples of published books that have used this device to great comic or dramatic effect: I would not send the agent that expressed this preference THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, for instance.

Now, I suspect that those of you intrepid souls out there devoted enough to literary experimentation to write a narrative in the first person plural (like THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) or second person (like BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY) are probably already aware that your work will not be to everyone’s taste, any more than excellent fantasy writing will be to the taste of an agent who prefers hard-bitten realism. But this doesn’t mean that the experiment isn’t worth trying, is it? Just choose your querying targets accordingly.

I should wrap up for today, but before I do, I want to take a quick run at another group of reasons, #42 (the opening scene is too violent), #43 (the opening scene is too gross), and #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets). The first two are obviously in the eye of the beholder: a quick look at any bookstore will tell you that there is no shortage of violent material. So it can’t possibly be an industry-wide rule, right?

However, pay close attention when an agent draws a line about this: this is not an agent to query with a violent piece, and he’s doing the people who write violent pieces a favor by being up front about it. (For instance, an agent who asks that I do not mention him here — see post of May 10, 2006 for explanation — routinely tells conference attendees not to send him children-in-peril stories; he doesn’t like them.) Do be aware that although most of us have had writing teachers beat into our brains that a story needs an opening hook, to draw the reader in, it is possible to go too far.

And because 99% of the writers out there have had this advice beaten into their brains, too, agents see a LOT of shocking things on first pages. A super-violent opening scene, then, will not necessarily make your submission unique.

Which is why I slipped in #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets). Yes, this is a matter of personal preference — how much violence is too much and how much is just right is in the eye of the beholder, just as much as ideal porridge temperatures were on the tongues of the Three Bears — but this one happens to be a preference that at LOT of editors share, and for good reason: it can be very hard to market a book that features a lot of violence against wee ones. And don’t even get me started about how hard it would be to sell a cozy mystery with a dead cat in it…

My overall point has, I hope, become clear. Everyone chant together now: “Never kill off the detective’s pet kitty.”

Well, yes, that’s a pretty good rule of thumb, but I was really thinking of a broader point about submission and conference lore: not everything that pops out of an expert’s mouth should be regarded as a hard-and-fast rule. Use your judgment, or you might end up staggering under the weight of such a heap of pronouncements that you’ll be terrified of breaking a rule every time you sit down at your keyboard.

I’ll try to demystify more of the Idol rejection reasons tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The return of the Point-of-View Nazis, part II: let’s see you try that with Jane Austen, buddy

The return of the Point-of-View Nazis, part II: let’s see you try that with Jane Austen, buddy

As a follow-up to my series on differentiating between absolute rules of the trade (e.g., double-spaced, single-sided manuscript submissions) and stylistic advice (e.g., ideally, dialogue should be revealing enough that littering the text with adverb-heavy tag lines should be unnecessary), I was discussing Point-of-View Nazis yesterday. I’m eager to move along to my much-anticipated series on what new wisdom I gleaned at the two conferences I attended this month, but POVNs are such a beautiful example of writing advice-givers who apparently do not make the smallest distinction between Thou Shalt Do This dicta and style tips that I wanted to spend today giving you a concrete look at what a difference taking such advice as absolute can do.

For those of you coming to the discussion late, POVNs are those fine folks who go around telling other writers that there are, in effect, only two possibilities for narrative voice: the first person singular and a tight third person singular, where the narration remains rigidly from the point of view of a single actor in the drama, usually the protagonist. Philosophically, I have to admit, I find the idea that these are the only ways to tell a story troubling. In my experience, there are few real-life dramatic situations where everyone in the room absolutely agrees upon what occurred, and even fewer conversations where all parties would report identically upon every nuance. (Watch a few randomly-chosen days’ worth of Court TV, if you doubt this.) I think that interpretive disagreement is the norm amongst human beings, not the exception.

And the disagreement amongst writing experts on this point tends to support my argument, doesn’t it?

I also believe that there are very, very few people who appear to be exactly the same from the POV of everyone who knows them. Most people act, speak, and even think rather differently around their children than around their adult friends, just as they often have slightly (or even wildly) different personalities at home and at work. If anyone can find me a real, live person who acts exactly the same in front of his three-year-old daughter, his boss’ boss, the President of the United States, and a stripper at a bachelor party, I would be quite surprised.

I would also suggest that either the person in question has serious social adjustment problems (on the order of Forrest Gump’s), or that perhaps the person who THINKS this guy is always the same in every context is lacking in imagination. Or simply doesn’t know the guy very well. My point is, almost nobody can be completely portrayed from only a single point of view — which is why sometimes narratives that permit the protagonist to be seen from the POV of other characters can be most illuminating.

Admittedly, my own experience trying to get a truthful memoir onto shelves near you has undoubtedly sharpened my sense that points of view vary. As some of you know, my memoir has been in press for the last year and a half, held hostage by a (the last I heard) $2 million lawsuit threat. At no point has anyone concerned suggested I was lying about the events in my book: the threatened lawsuit has been purely about whether I have the right to present the story of my family from my point of view, rather than someone else’s – like, say, the people who want the $2 million.

So I have seriously been forced to spend the last year and a half defending the notion that a rather well-known neurotic might have acted differently around his long-term friends than he did around, say, his own seldom-seen children or interviewers he barely knew. Why, the next thing you know, the POVNs huff, writers like me might start implying that people act differently when they’re on drugs than when they’re sober! Or that perhaps celebrities and their press agents do not always tell the absolute truth when promoting their work!

I can only refer you to your own experience interacting with other human beings for the most probable answers to these troubling questions. I only ask — and it’s a little request; it won’t hurt anybody — that those who believe that there is only a single way of looking at any person, situation, or institution occasionally admit the possibility that the whole complex, wonderful world is not reducible to a single point of view, that they would not try to silence those who do not see the world as merely a reflection of their own minds. Or at least that they would not insist that anyone who sees something from a different perspective should be hounded.

Enough about me and my books, however — let’s get back to how POVNs can affect you and yours.

Regardless of your own POV preferences, it’s important that you know that there are people out there who will want to impose their stylistic preferences upon yours, because they turn up with some fair frequency in agencies, as contest judges, as editors, and as critics. They are statistically more likely to be Baby Boomers than Gen Xers or Gen Yers, however, so they are less likely to be agency screeners than in years past. (Being a manuscript screener is generally someone’s first job in the business, not one kept for decades.) Nevertheless, they do turn up, sometimes in agents’ chairs and behind editorial desks, so it’s best to be prepared for them.

To make it clear what the stakes are, I would guess that roughly 2/3rds of fiction submissions are written in the third person, so obviously, the question of POV choice in third person narrative is thrust upon agents and editors on a practically hourly basis. Of those 2/3rds, a hefty majority will include more than one POV in the narration. So, really, a POVN reader has a significant advantage in rejecting the day’s submissions speedily: if you were willing to stop reading the moment a second character’s impressions show up, you could reject most manuscripts before the middle of page 2.

This is not to say that you should abandon multiple perspectives if you love them, or that you should systematically strip your submissions of any insights but the protagonist’s, out of fear of rejection by a POVN. Again, personally, I don’t believe that a single POV does most characters or situations justice, so I tend toward a broader narrative view, particularly for comedy.

Call me wacky, but if I want to hear a single POV, I reach for a first-person narrative.

These are merely my personal preferences, however; I am perfectly willing to listen to those who disagree with me. And there I differ from the POVN, who wishes to impose his views upon everyone within the sound of his voice, or reach of his editorial pen. To put it in terms of my posts of the last few days, the POVN wants all of us to regard his preferences as hard-and-fast rules.

When your work is attacked with phrases like, “well, it’s more or less impossible to pull off an omniscient narrator,” resist the temptation to throw the entire Great Books fiction shelf at the speaker. Recognize that you are dealing with a POVN, and take everything he says with a gargantuan grain of salt. You can’t convince a true believer; you’ll only wear yourself out with trying. Cut your losses and move on.

But before you do, consider the possibility that the critique may be useful to apply to your manuscript of the moment.

You’re surprised I said that, aren’t you? But really, POVNs do occasionally have a point: too-frequent POV switches can be perplexing for the reader to follow. One of the more common first-novel megaproblems is POV switching in mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence — and therein lies the POVN’s primary justification for dismissing all multiple POV narratives as poor writing.

But heck, that’s what the RETURN key is for, to clear up that sort of confusion, isn’t it? When in doubt, give each perspective its own paragraph. It won’t protect you from a POVN’s rage, of course, but it will make your scene easier for your reader to follow.

Let’s take a look at how the POVN works in practice, so you may recognize him in the wild, to decide whether you want to join forces with him or not. Suppose that Jane Austen took the following paragraph from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to her writing group, which contained a cabal of POVNs:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

As an editor, I might quibble about Austen’s use of semicolons here, but it’s not too difficult to follow whose perspective is whose, right? Yet, as the POVNs in her group would be the first to point out, there are actually THREE perspectives rolling around promiscuously together in this single brief paragraph, although there are only two people involved:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry…” (Elizabeth’s POV)

“but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (the POV of an external observer)

“Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her…” (Darcy’s POV)

Now, a POVN in our Jane’s writing group would undoubtedly urge her to pick a single perspective (Elizabeth’s would be the logical choice) and stick to it consistently throughout the book; a POVN agent would probably reject PRIDE AND PREJUDICE outright, and a POVN editor would pick a perspective and edit accordingly — or, more commonly, send out an editorial memo saying that he MIGHT consider buying the book, but only if Jane revised it so all of the action is seen from Elizabeth’s perspective only).

Let’s say that Jane was cowed by the vehemence of the POVNs and scuttled home to take their advice. The resultant passage would necessarily be significantly different from her original intention. It would probably ending up reading rather like this:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody. Darcy remained silent.”

My gut feeling is that Jane would not be particularly satisfied with this revision, both because some characterization has been lost and for plotting reasons. At this rate, the reader is not going to know how Darcy feels until Elizabeth learns it herself, many chapters later. This would, of course, mean that his proposal would be a greater plot twist, coming out of the blue, but the reader would also end up with absolutely no idea how, beginning from initial indifference, Elizabeth charms began to steal over Darcy, over his own objections. Which would mean, really, that the title of the book should be changed to just PREJUDICE.

(I’m assuming for the purposes of my argument here that every single one of you has read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, which is perhaps not a warranted assumption. However, if you are even vaguely interested in writing humorous scenes in the English language, you really should do yourself a favor and check Aunt Jane’s work out of the library.)

Yet if I may pull up a chair in Jane’s writing group for a moment (oh, like this whole exercise wouldn’t require time travel), allow me to point out how easily a single stroke of a space bar clears up even the most remote possibility of confusion about who is thinking what:

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody.

“Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

The moral here, my friends, is once again that you should examine writerly truisms very carefully before you accept them as invariably true in every case. Grab that gift horse and stare into its mouth for a good, long while. You may find, after serious consideration, that you want to embrace being a POVN, at least for the duration of a particular project; there are many scenes and books where the rigidity of this treatment works beautifully. But for the sake of your own growth as a writer, make sure that the choice is your own, and not imposed upon you by the beliefs of others.

To paraphrase the late Mae West, if you copy other people’s style, you’re one of a crowd, but if you are an honest-to-goodness original, no one will ever mistake you for a copy.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Writing the real, part III, in which I both stress the importance of dramatic emphasis and illustrate what you might not want to do at a conference if you want to win friends and influence people

Writing the real, part III, in which I both stress the importance of dramatic emphasis and illustrate what you might not want to do at a conference if you want to win friends and influence people

Pardon my Dickensian title today: I’m returning to the topic of including real-life incidents in your work, and I realized that my point here is AT LEAST twofold. Truth in advertising, don’t you know. Today, I am going to continue my conference story AND my blather about the importance of maintaining dramatic emphasis in order to make a real-life incident work on paper. Which brings me at long last to the conference anecdote I’ve been threatening to tell you for the last few days.

At a recent conference that shall remain nameless, a novelist of an apparently heavily autobiographical novel was telling me about her book. At some length. As in geological time. Admittedly, I wasn’t terribly surprised by this: this was, after all, the dear soul who had filled me with glee during the screenwriting class; when called upon to give her three-line pitch, she talked for twelve minutes nonstop. I had to give her points for personal style.

So I dispatched the other attendees waiting to ask me questions with promises to listen to them at length later and let the lady hold forth. She was an entertaining storyteller, and has evidently had quite the exciting life. Her storytelling style was a tad episodic, however, and somehow in telling, she veered off from her first novel into her second, in order to tell me a series of anecdotes about her maternal grandmother.

As one does.

Her grandmother, I am sorry to say, was one of those souls whom one had to know in order to love. The best way of pleasing her seemed to be not to end up in her gun sites. In these stories, the author was always presenting her as the heroine, yet somehow, in every instance, she seemed to be acting awfully villainish…

Okay, pop quiz: what am I doing wrong in telling this story? (You thought you were going to be able to sit back and enjoy the story, but no: I have a didactic purpose here.) A little hint: what am I doing that the vast majority of true story-tellers do when they include anecdotes?

Well, for starters, I’m telling you about this situation, instead of showing it — which, admittedly, is probably the way I would tell the anecdote verbally. Almost every writer falls into this trap when she first starts writing about the real: what works in a water cooler conversation will work on paper, right?

Not necessarily, and actually, not very often. Flesh out the details.

I am also assuming, within the context of this telling, that not only are you, my readers, going to have enough experience teaching at writers’ conferences that you will be able to provide context (because THAT’S such a common background to have…) without my telling you about it, but also that you will understand that as the teller, I am actually the protagonist here, rather than the old lady. My reaction to her is, in fact, the star of the story.

Like telling-not-showing, these are vintage traps of the real-life anecdote: like the first, it leads to under-writing the scene; I’m not presenting the situation vividly enough for you to get a real sense of what was going on. The last two are assumption problems, every bit as much as including a stereotype in your work. What the writer pitches, the reader does not always catch.

To give you some idea why agents and editors tend to break out in hives when confronted with this kind of anecdotal telling, let’s do a little role-playing, shall we? You play the agent, and I’ll play the author of the piece above. Let’s say you confronted me with the underwriting, and I immediately cried, “But it happened this way in real life!” Technically, I would be justified, you know; this did in fact occur.

What would you say in response? A bit tricky, isn’t it, without launching into a governessy diatribe that either implies that the writer’s craft is poor or that she shouldn’t be relying upon her own experience at all?

And that, my friends, is why you will seldom hear agents and editors talk about this problem at conferences. It makes them sound hostile. This reluctance to talk about the problem does not, however, prevent them from routinely rejecting manuscripts that have it.

I know; it’s dreadfully unfair to judge people by standards that they don’t know exist. That’s why I’m broaching the subject here. Because here is an instance where including a real-life anecdote may well be the best, or even the only, way to help writers walk a mile in an agency screener’s proverbial moccasins.

Tomorrow, I shall deal with the more subtle problems such anecdotes often have. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Writing the real, part II: dramatic emphasis

Writing the real, part II: dramatic emphasis

Yesterday, I was talking about the dangers of including actual incidents in fiction submissions. Why are the real-life scenes so often problematic, from the point of view of a professional reader, you ask? Because they tend to be under-explained in manuscripts, as though the incidents involved were so inherently telling that they required no further justification beyond a bare description of what occurred — or even enough detail beyond the skeletal facts of the case to allow the reader to mirror the protagonist’s (or, even more commonly, the narrator’s) response to the scene. In order to begin to discuss how to fix that problem, I am going to bring up a concept that tends to make serious writers grumble: the importance of dramatic emphasis.

It’s easy to forget to see our submissions from the point of view of the people who will be judging them, isn’t it? We all like to think (come on, admit it) that our writing is so good that simply any English-speaking reader currently alive would automatically fall in love with it, but the fact is, both target market readers and professional readers have individual tastes.

Two tastes that virtually all readers share, however, are a taste for clarity and a taste for being entertained.

“Yeah, yeah,” I hear some of you out there muttering, “you told us yesterday that we shouldn’t have anything in our submissions that we would want to be standing next to the reader explaining, because that’s just not how the submission process works. All that matters is what’s on the page, you said, and we should never assume that our readers will automatically share our worldviews. Fine. But what does dramatic emphasis have to do with either clarity or assuming advance knowledge in my audience?”

Plenty, if you are submitting novels. Agency screeners, editorial assistants, agents, editors, and contest judges all tend to read in a tearing, line-skimming hurry until they decide that the manuscript in front of them is a good one — and if the story isn’t keeping their interest, they have a nasty habit of edging it toward the rejection pile without further ado. Since the acceptance/rejection decision is often made in a split second, it’s vital that your submissions bring your best ideas (and your best writing) to the fore.

If the screener does not make it to page 15, it actually doesn’t matter, alas, how beautiful the writing is on pg. 16 and beyond. You want your first scene to be dramatically interesting enough to draw the professional reader — not just your target reader in the general public, who is usually quite a bit more tolerant of build-up — into wanting to read on.

I’ve said it before, and knowing me, I’ll doubtless say it again: if the first five pages of your book are not gripping, rearrange your submission so that the first five pages of IT are. (And that, if you’re curious, is the reason why so many novels these days begin with a brief prologue consisting of a scene late in the book. It’s a way to get a dramatically interesting, well-written scene under the screener’s eyes first.)

Yes, sometimes this means changing the running order of the book for the purposes of submission; you can always change it back again after the publisher buys the book. Remember, industry types don’t consider a novel finished until it is actually in print and sitting on a shelf at Powell’s — they EXPECT authors to rearrange things based upon their feedback. No one is going to yell at you for tweaking a submission in a way that you might not a finished book.

Since you often only have the first few pages of a submission to establish that you are an interesting, exciting writer that any agent would be a fool to overlook, you are going to want to select the raw materials of your first few pages with an eye to drama, right? Here’s a radical idea: lead with your strongest storyline, what people in the screenwriting biz call your A-story, rather than a subplot. (An AMAZINGLY high percentage of submissions begin with B-stories, or even C-stories.) Dramatically, it will be easier to draw the reader into your fictional world.

“Okay,” I hear some of you muttering, “I understand that it might be in my best interests to be strategic in my running order. But Anne, what does any of this have to do with writing real-life incidents in a fiction book?”

Again, plenty. Since, as I was mentioning yesterday, real-life scenes tend to be harder for the writer to assess in print — that old song, “But it really happened that way!” can wallpaper over a multitude of storytelling sins in the writer’s mind, and preclude dramatically-necessary revisions in the name of sticking to What Really Happened — may I be so bold as to make a suggestion? If you want to include such scenes, try to use them later in the book, rather than in the early pages of your submission.

Why? Because the real-life anecdote problem is so very well-known in the industry that quite a lot of agency screeners and editorial assistants will use it as a reason to shove a manuscript into the reject pile. It’s just safer not to do it in the early pages of your submission — wait until they have fallen in love with your voice before you start taking this kind of risk.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you cry, “it’s a NOVEL! How on earth are they going to know what is fact-based and what isn’t?”

Oh, you’d be surprised at how often real-life scenes have a big flag over them, proclaiming, “But this really happened!” One dead give-away of such scenes to professional eyes is that the reader is very obviously expected to take the narrator’s (or protagonist’s) side automatically in them. In such scenes, the protagonist is ALWAYS presented as in the right for every instant of the scene, a state of grace quite unusual in real life. It doesn’t ring true — and it’s simply not as interesting as more nuanced conflict.

A particularly common flavor for such scene: a minor character walks into the room, and is obstructive in some very minimal way to the protagonist; thereafter, the protagonist (and usually the narrative as well) responds to that character as if she had burned down half the buildings in Western states AND slaughtered a basketful of kittens. To professional eyes, such a character in a book might as well be depicted with a forehead tattoo reading, “Co-worker of the author.”

I heard the gasps out there — did you really think you were the only writer in the history of the world to do this? Honeys, if I had a nickel for every manuscript I have read that contained scenes where the reader is clearly supposed to be incensed at one of the characters, yet it is not at all apparent from the action of the scene why, I could buy a take the entire readership of my blog out to dinner in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and Tierra del Fuego on consecutive nights, flying all of you in between on my fleet of private jets.

The sad part is that these scenes tend not to work even when they are well-written: the problem here is that a lack of perspective leads the writer to believe, inaccurately, that the reader will inhabit the scene as vividly as he did at that moment. However, readers are dependent upon the writer’s placing them there — these scenes actually tend to be LESS life-like than more fully-realized fictional ones where the author has let the reader in on the sights, smells, and tastes of the environment.

Let me posit a general rule: figuring out where to place the dramatic emphasis of a scene requires a certain amount of authorial detachment. Invariably, when professional readers flag these scenes, the writer is always quite astonished that his own take on the real-life scene did not automatically translate into instantaneous sympathy in every conceivable reader — or that his-stand-in in the scene is not necessarily all that likeable from the reader’s perspective, in that particular moment.

Or that the scene might not be all that funny. Remember, just because everyone on the airplane laughed when the beverage cart got loose and went shooting down the aisle, smashing into the cockpit door and spraying everyone in first class with a fragrant cocktail of soda, bloody Mary mix, and rapidly cooling coffee, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a fictional retelling of the scene will also be funny. As the author, it’s your job to MAKE it funny on the page — and if it isn’t, and your book is comic, it should not be in the first few pages of your submission.

My point is, be aware that often, writers’ judgment of scenes based upon their personal experiences is not as clear and unbiased as the same writers’ views on their wholly fictional scenes. Get an outside opinion of it — FROM SOMEONE WHO DID NOT WITNESS THE INCIDENT IN QUESTION — before you submit such a scene to the pros. Writing the true is a virtuoso trick, my friends: it may not take more craft to tell a real-life anecdote well, but it certainly requires a few more authorial steps backward to keep it in perspective.

Practical examples follow tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Manuscript revision VIII: har de har har har

Manuscript revision VIII: har de har har har

My, I went on a tear yesterday, didn’t I? Well, better get comfy today, too, folks, because this is going to be another long one. Although, as a writer of comic novels on serious topics (my latest is about when the first AIDS death happened at Harvard, hardly inherently a chuckle-fest), the topic du jour is very close to my heart: making sure the funny parts of your manuscript are actually funny, and revising so they will be.

Why, you may be wondering, am I taking up this topic immediately after the issue of freshness of voice? Well, to professional readers, humor is often a voice issue. Not many books have genuinely amusing narrative voices, and so a good comic touch here and there can be a definite selling point for a book. The industry truism claims that one good laugh can kick a door open; in my experience, that isn’t always true, but if you can make an agency screener laugh out loud within the first page or two, chances are good that the agency is going to ask to see the rest of the submission.

Hey, there’s a reason that my novel, THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB, opens with the death of the protagonist’s grandmother in a tragic bocce ball accident in Golden Gate Park. (After consultation with his fellow players, the murderer is allowed to take the shot again, with no penalty.) The smile raised by it buys the novel good will with editors for pages to come.

But if a submission TRIES to be funny and fails — especially if the dead-on-arrival joke is in the exposition, rather than the dialogue — most agents and editors will fault the author’s voice, dismissing it (often unfairly) as not being fully developed enough to have a sense of its impact upon the reader. It usually doesn’t take more than a couple of defunct ducks in a manuscript to move it into the rejection pile.

All very technical, I know. But as I’m relatively certain I’ve said before (about 7000 times, if memory serves), the more you can put yourself in your dream agent or editor’s reading glasses while you are revising your submission, the better off you will be in the long run.

Humor is a great way to establish your narrative voice as unique, but it can be a risky strategy. Why, you ask? Well, unless you are lucky or brave enough to be a stand-up comic, or have another job that allows you to test material on a live audience — okay, I’ll admit it: back when I was lecturing to college students, I used to try out jokes on my captive audience all the time — you honestly cannot tell for sure if the bits that seemed hilarious to you in the privacy of your studio would be funny to anyone else.

Trust me on this one: your first test of whether a joke works should NOT be when you submit it to the agency of your dreams.

So how can you know what works and what doesn’t? Personally, I read every syllable of my novels out loud to someone else before even my first readers or agent see them. If an expected chuckle does not come, I flag the passage and rework it, pronto.

Now, this isn’t a completely reliable test, because I have pretty good delivery (due to all of those years honing my comic timing on helpless college students, no doubt), but it does help me get a sense of what is and isn’t working. Reading out loud is also one of the few ways to weed out what movie people call bad laughs, the unintentional blunders that make readers guffaw.

This strategy only works, of course, if you are open to the possibility that the sentence that you thought was the best one-liner penned in North America since Richard Pryor died is simply not funny, and thus should be cut. Admittedly, this kind of perspective is not always easy to maintain: it requires you to be humble. Your favorite line may very well go; it’s no accident that the oft-quoted editing advice, “Kill your darlings,” came from the great wit Dorothy Parker.

But be ruthless: if it isn’t funny, it should go — no matter how much it makes you laugh. As any successful comedy writer can tell you, in the long run, actually doesn’t matter if the author laughs himself silly over any given joke: the reaction that matters is the audience’s. (And no, the fact that your spouse/mother/best friend laughed heartily does not necessarily mean a line is genuinely funny. It may mean merely that these people love you and want you to be happy.)

Lacking an audience, it is still possible to weed out the unfunny. There are a few common comic mistakes that should set off warning bells while you are editing — because, believe me, they will be setting off hazard flares in the minds of agents and editors.

First, look for jokes that are explained AFTER they appear in the text. Starting with the punch line, then working backward, is almost never as funny as bits told the other way around: a good comic bit should produce a SPONTANEOUS response in the reader, not a rueful smile three lines later. (And to an agency screener, explaining a joke after the fact looks suspiciously like the bit fell flat in the author’s writing group, and the writer scrambled to justify the joke in order to keep it in the book.) If background information is necessary in order to make a joke funny, introduce it unobtrusively earlier in the text, so the reader already knows it by the time you make the joke.

Second, ANY real-life situation that you have imported because it was funny should be read by other people before you submit it to an agent or editor. No fair telling it as an anecdote — have them read it precisely as you present it in the text. Keep an eye on your victims as they read: are they smiling, or do they look like jurors on a death penalty case?

The humorous anecdote that slayed ‘em at the office potluck VERY frequently rolls over and dies on the page. Just because everyone laughed when Aunt Myrtle’s prize-winning carrot-rhubarb pie fell onto your dog’s head at the Fourth of July picnic doesn’t necessarily mean that it will inspire mirth in the average reader. Especially if that reader doesn’t already know that Aunt Myrtle’s pies are renowned for making Mom swell up from an allergic reaction, so Dad generally arranges to have some tragic pie-related incident occur every year — which brings us back to problem #1, right?

Again, this is an assumption problem: there’s a reason, after all, that the language includes the phrase, “you had to be there.”

Don’t feel embarrassed, please, if you find that you have included such a scene: even the pros make this mistake very frequently; you know those recurring characters on sketch comedy shows, the ones that are only funny if you’ve seen them a couple of dozen times? Often, those are real-life characters pressed into comic service. (In the extremely unlikely circumstance that good comedy writer Ben Stiller will one day upon this message in a bottle: honey, that bit with the guy who keeps saying “just do it” has NEVER worked. It wasn’t funny in the often-hilarious THE BEN STILLER SHOW; it still wasn’t funny a decade later, in the not-very-funny STARSKY & HUTCH. Kindly stop telling us how funny it was when the guy did it in real life — it’s irrelevant.)

Third, you should also take a very, very close look at any joke or situation at which a character in the text is seen to laugh immoderately. (And if, after you reread it, you find yourself tempted for even 35 seconds to exclaim, “But everyone laughed when it happened!” go stand in the corner with Ben Stiller.) I like to call this the Guffawing Character Problem; it is ubiquitous in first novels, so much so that agency screeners often just stop reading when it occurs.

Why? Well, to professional eyes, having characters whoop and holler over a joke reads like insecurity on the author’s part: like the laugh track on a TV series, it can come across as merely a blind to cover a joke that actually isn’t very funny. It makes the reader wonder if, in fact, she’s being ORDERED to laugh. Agents and editors don’t like taking orders from writers, as a general rule.

The device also sets the funny bar unnecessarily high: the broader the character’s response, the more pressure on the poor little joke to be funny. If the character’s laugh is even one millisecond longer than the reader’s, it’s going to seem as though the writer is reaching.

Fourth, excise any jokes that you have borrowed from TV, movies, radio shows, other books, or the zeitgeist. And definitely think twice about recycling comic premises from any of the above. This is a freshness issue: by definition, a joke that has been told before by someone else isn’t fresh, right?

This may seem like rather strange advice to those of you who have just spent summer conference season being told endlessly by agents and editors that they are looking for books like this or that bestseller, but honestly, copycat books usually don’t sell all that well. (Witness how quickly chick lit fell off agents’ hot lists, for instance.) As Mae West liked to say, there are a lot of copies out there, but if you’re an original, no one can mistake you for someone else. No one remembers the copies.

Don’t believe me? Okay, name three books patterned after COLD MOUNTAIN. Or SEX IN THE CITY. Or, if you want to go farther back in time, CATCH-22. I thought not.

#5 is really a subset of #4, but it is common enough to warrant its own warning: if you use clichés for comic effect, make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you have used them correctly. You would not BELIEVE how common it is for writers to misreproduce clichés. (I would not believe it myself, if I had not been a judge in a number of literary contests and edited hundreds of manuscripts.) If you’re going for a recognition laugh, you’re far more likely to get it with “It’s a dog-eat-dog world” than “It’s a doggie-dog world.”

Trust me on this one. An incorrectly-quoted cliché will kill any humorous intention you had deader than the proverbial doornail. So make sure that your needles remain in your haystacks, and that the poles you wouldn’t touch things with are 10-foot, not 100-foot. (How would you lift a 100-foot pole without the assistance of a dozen friends, anyway?) When in doubt about the proper phraseology, ask someone outside your immediate circle of friends — your own friends may well be making the same mistake you are.

Even better, leave the clichés out altogether. Most agents and editors dislike clichés with an intensity that other people reserve for fiery automobile crashes, airplane malfunctions, and the bubonic plague. They feel (as do I) that a writer worth rewarding with a publishing contract should be able should be able to make it through 50 pages of text without reverting to well-worn truisms, even as a joke.

If you are new to writing comedy, allow me to let you in on a little secret: many jokes that garner chuckles when spoken aloud fall flat in print. This is particularly true of the kind of patented one-liner people on the street are so fond of quoting from their favorite sitcoms, movies, and sketch comedy shows. Take a gander, for instance, at these zingers out of context:

From the 1970s: Excu-u-use me!
From the 1980s: You look mahvelous!
From the late 1990s: I don’t know karate, but I do know cah-razy.

Now, if you close your eyes and conjure up vivid images of Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, and Owen Wilson, respectively, saying these lines, these old chestnuts might still elicit the odd chuckle. Go ahead and chuckle your head off, if you are given to atavistic clinging to the popular culture of your past, but please, I implore you, do not make the (unfortunately common) mistake of reusing these kinds of once-popular catchphrases in your writing. Not only are such bits seldom funny out of context, but it will date your book: what is humor today probably will not be in a decade, and one generation’s humor will not be another’s.

In fact, if you aspire to perfecting your comic voice, it might behoove you to take a good, hard look at the careers of Mssrs. Martin, Crystal, and Wilson — and Mssr. Stiller and Madame Mae West, for that matter. All of them started out as comedy writers, writing material for themselves and others, and all became progressively less funny (in this writer’s opinion) as soon as they started performing comic material written by other people.

An accident? I think not. They became less funny because their individual comic voices had gotten lost.

Oh, the people who were writing for them have tried to recapture their quite distinct original voices, but the copy is never as vivid as the original. Why any of you stopped writing your own material is a mystery to me. But I digress…

And so will an agency screener’s mind digress, if you drag gratuitous pop culture references into your submissions. People tend to have very strong associations with particular periods in their lives, and for all you know, the reference you choose to use may be the very one most favored in 1978 by your dream agent’s hideously unkind ex, the one who lied in court during the divorce proceedings and hid assets so cleverly that their daughter’s college fund had to be used to pay those unexpected medical bills of Mother’s. Then the car broke down, and all of those checks bounced, and the orthodontist tried to repossess Angela’s braces…

See what happened? One little pop culture reference, and POW! You’ve lost your reader’s attention entirely.

So even if you are using pop culture references to establish a particular period, do it with care. Be sparing. Even if your teenage son quoted SHANGHAI NOON endlessly for six solid months while the entire family cringed in a Y2K fallout shelter, do be aware that your reader might not have the associations you do with those jokes. There are a myriad of associational possibilities — and almost none of them will make YOUR work more memorable or seem fresher.

Which brings me full-circle, doesn’t it? One of the advantages to using humor in your submissions is to demonstrate the originality of YOUR voice — not Owen Wilson’s, not Steve Martin’s, and certainly not that anonymous person who originated that joke your best friend from college just forwarded to you. If your individual voice is not inherently humorous, don’t try to force it to be by importing humor from other sources. Lifting material from elsewhere, even if it is genuinely funny, is not the best means of establishing that YOU are funny — or that yours is a book well worth reading.

Or better still, remembering AFTER having read and offering to represent or publish.

People still remember Mae West, my friends, not her hundreds of imitators. Here’s to all of us being originals on the page — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Manuscript revision VII: never assume a universal reaction

Manuscript revision VII: never assume a universal reaction

In my earlier discussion of freshness and why your want you manuscript to convey the subtle-yet-vivid impression that it has just popped out of the cultural oven — or at any rate isn’t a Twinkie that’s been sitting in the back of a cupboard for the last five years — I brought up the need to avoid incorporating stereotypes into your submissions, lest you offend someone on the reading end of your query. (Hint: not everyone in New York is straight, for instance, or white, or male, or…)

Today, though, I want to talk about how stereotyping and other authorial assumptions of mutual understanding with the reader can water down the intended impact of a manuscript, even when the assumptions in question are not inherently offensive to the reader.

If I have not already made this clear, even amongst agents and editors who are not easily affronted personally, stereotypes tend not to engender positive reactions. Why? Well, in a new writer, they’re looking to see is originality of worldview and strength of voice, in addition to serious writing talent. When you speak in stereotypes, it’s extremely difficult for a reader new to your work to tell where your authorial voice differs markedly from, say, the average episodic TV writer’s.

It’s just not as impressive as hearing from you directly.

Which is why, in some cases, marked personal prejudices may actually lend verve to a voice. This is nowhere more true than in the world of blogs. We bloggers are SUPPOSED to be absolutely open about our pet peeves and quirky interpretations of the world around us: one of the points of the medium is to be as subjective as possible. Think about it: wouldn’t Andrew Sullivan’s blog about politics (well worth reading, if you haven’t) be far less interesting if he didn’t make his personal views so VERY apparent? Or, for that matter, wouldn’t this very blog be rather uninteresting without my pronounced (albeit charming, I hope) personal slant?

That’s why the mainstream news’ attempts at establishing themselves as legitimate voices in the blogosphere have tended to fall so flat, I think: their voices are the products of PR research; the individual bizarreness has been utterly ironed out.

Which is, by the way, one of the most common critiques of MFA programs, and even writing groups. In some of these settings, the criticism goes, books end up being, if not written, then edited by committee: the authorial voice is nipped and tucked to conform to so many people’s opinions of what the work should be that the originality of the voice gets lost. In the industry, books like these are known as “an MFA story” or “workshopped to death.”

Does it surprise you that I, the queen of hogtying writers and forcing them to get an outside opinion of their work before they submit it, would bring this up? Ah, but as Aristotle tells us, true virtue lies in not taking a desirable trait to its most extreme form, but rather in practicing goodness in moderation. A fresh voice is an original voice, and just as adhering to stereotypes can muffle the originality of the writer’s worldview on the page, so can editing too much for what you think your readers want to hear — even if those readers are agents and editors.

In other words: make sure that your manuscript’s voice always sounds like YOU.

As with any rule, there are major caveats to sounding like yourself, or course. The first rule – and one of the ones most commonly broken by those new to writing – is that in order for your reader to be able to appreciate the nuances of your voice, you need to provide enough information for the reader to respond spontaneously to the action of the piece, rather than being informed that this is funny, that is horrible, etc.

Those of you who have taken writing classes are probably familiar with this rule’s most famous corollary: show, don’t tell.

The second cousin of this axiom is less well known: not everything that happens in real life is plausible on paper. And that’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? As Virginia Woolf tells us, “Good fiction must stick to the facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction.” While that is often true, what are we to make of the real-life experience that seems made-up when it’s translated into print?

Simple: fiction tends to adhere to rules of dramatic structure and probability; real life doesn’t.

So when you are looking over your manuscript with an eye to revision, remember this: “But it really happened!” is not an excuse that professional writers ever use — or that most agents and editors will ever accept. Why? Because it’s the writer’s job to make everything in the book seem plausible, whether or not it really happened.

Most writers don’t like hearing this, but not everything that strikes you personally as funny, outrageous, or horrifying is necessarily going to seem so in print. And it’s very, very common problem in novel submissions — common enough that I’m going to add it to the dreaded Manuscript Mega-problems list — for the author to assume that the opposite is the case.

Personal anger masked as fiction, for instance, usually does not work so well on the page. If the average agency screener had a dime for every manuscript she read that included a scene where a minor character, often otherwise unrelated to the plot, turned up for apparently no purpose other than annoying the protagonist, she would not only own the agency — she might be able to rival the gross national product of Haiti.

I cannot even begin to count the number of novels I have edited that have contained scenes where the reader is clearly supposed to be incensed at one of the characters, yet it is not at all apparent from the action of the scene why. These scenes are pretty easy for those of us in the biz to spot, because the protagonist is ALWAYS presented as in the right for every instant of the scene, a state of grace quite unusual in real life. It doesn’t ring true — and it’s not as interesting as more nuanced conflict.

Invariably, when I have asked the authors about these scenes, the incidents turn out to be lifted directly from real life. The writer is always quite astonished that his own take on the real-life scene did not automatically translate into instantaneous sympathy in every conceivable reader.

This is an assumption problem, every bit as much as including a stereotype in your work. But what the writer pitches, the reader does not always catch.

Many writers assume (wrongly) that if someone is annoying in real life, and they reproduce the guy down to the last whisker follicle, he will be annoying on the page as well, but that is not necessarily true. Often, the author’s anger at the fellow so spills into the account that the villain starts to appear maligned. If his presentation is too obviously biased, the reader may start to identify with him, and in the worst cases, actually take the villain’s side against the hero. This revenge has clearly not gone as planned.

Yes, I called it revenge, because revenge it usually is. Most writers are very aware of the retributive powers of their work. As my beloved old mentor, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, was fond of saying, “Never screw over a living writer. They can always get back at you on the page.”

Oh, stop blushing. You didn’t honestly think that when you included that horrible co-worker in three scenes of your novel that you were doing her a FAVOR, did you?

“But wait!” I hear some of you out there crying, especially those of you who are veterans of a lot of writing classes. “I’ve always been told that the key to good writing is to tap into my deep emotions, to let them spill onto the page. Are you saying that’s not true?”

Good question. No, I’m not saying that you should write with your emotional flow valve permanently set on low. I think there can be a lot of value in those writing exercises that encourage the opening up of the writer’s emotional memory. In revision, it is often useful to bring in some of those techniques to increase the emotional potency of a scene, just as a Method actor might use a traumatic memory from her childhood to inform her performance of a character in pain.

However, I do think that there is a fundamental difference between trying to express your deeper emotions in an exercise and trying to convey a CHARACTER’s emotional response in a book. In the first case, the point is to concentrate the feelings as much as possible. In writing a novel or short story, however, or even a memoir, unmitigated emotion is often confusing to the reader, rather than character-revealing.

What do I mean? Well, I’m going to stop telling you, and show you.

I try not to do this very often, but to illustrate, I am going to revive an anecdote I told on my former PNWA blog last winter. (My apologies to those of you who have heard the story before, but its illustrative value outweighs my dislike of repetition.) While you read it, consider the question: what helps a writer to include in a text, and what does not?

My most vivid personal experience of writerly vitriol was not as the author, thank goodness, but as the intended victim. A few years ago, I was in residence at an artists’ colony. Now, artistic retreats vary a great deal; mine have ranged from a month-long stay in a fragrant cedar cabin in far-northern Minnesota, where all of the writers were asked to remain silent until 4 p.m. each day to a let’s-revisit-the-early-1970s meat market, complete with hot tub, in the Sierra foothills. They’re sort of a crapshoot.

This particular colony had more or less taken over a small, rural New England town, so almost everyone I saw for a month was a painter, a sculptor, or a writer. Of the 60 or so of us in residence, only 12 were writers; you could see the resentment flash in their eyes when they visited the painters’ massive, light-drenched studios, and then returned to the dark caves to which they themselves had been assigned. I elected to write in my room, in order to catch some occasional sunlight, and for the first week, was most happy and productive there.

When I go on a writing retreat, I like to leave the emotional demands of my quotidian life behind, but not everyone feels that way. In fact, several artists had come to the colony with their significant others, also artists: writer and photographer, painter and writer, etc. One of these pairs was a very talented young married couple, she a writer brimming with potential, he a sculptor of great promise. (Although every fiber of my being strains to use their real names, I shall not. Let’s call them Hansel and Gretel, to remove all temptation.)

Sculptor Hansel was an extremely friendly guy, always eager to have a spirited conversation on topics artistic, social, or his favorite of all, sensual. No one in the dining hall was really surprised at how often he brought the conversation around to sex; honestly, once you’d sat through his slide show of sculptures of breast, leg, pudenda, buttocks, and breast, you’d have to be kind of dense not to notice where his mind — or his eyes — liked to wander. He was amusing enough, for a monomaniac. We had coffee a couple of times. I loaned him a book or two.

And suddenly, Gretel started fuming at me like a dragon in the dining hall.

Now, I don’t know anything about the internal workings of their marriage; perhaps they liked jealousy scenes. I don’t, but there’s just no polite way of saying, “HIM? Please; I DO have standards” to an angry lover, is there? So I sat at a different table in the dining hall for the next couple of weeks. A little junior high schoolish, true, but better that than Gretel’s being miserable or my being distracted from the writing I had come there to do.

The fellowship that each writer received included a requirement that each of us do a public reading while we were in residence. Being a “Hey – I’ve got a barn, and you’ve got costumes!” sort of person, I organized other, informal readings as well, so we writers could benefit from feedback and hearing one another’s work. I invited Gretel to each of these shindigs; she never came. Eventually, my only contact with her was being on the receiving end of homicidal stares in the dining hall, as if I’d poisoned her cat or something.

It was almost enough to make me wish that I HAD flirted with her completely unattractive husband.

But I was writing twelve hours a day (yes, Virginia, there IS a good reason to go on a retreat!), so I didn’t think about it much. I had made friends at the colony, my work was going well, and if Gretel didn’t like me, well, we wouldn’t do our laundry at the same time. My friends teased me a little about being such a femme fatale that I didn’t even need to do anything but eat a turkey sandwich near the couple to spark a fight, but that was it.

At the end of the third week of our month-long residency, it was Gretel’s turn to give her formal reading to the entire population of the colony, plus a few local residents who wandered in because there was nothing else to do in town, and the very important, repeated National Book Award nominee who had dropped by (in exchange for an honorarium that can only be described as lavish) to shed the effulgence of her decades of success upon the resident writers. Since it was such a critical audience, most of the writers elected — sensibly, I think — to read only highly polished work, short stories they had already published, excerpts from novels long on the shelves. Unlike my more congenial, small reading groups, it was not an atmosphere conducive to experimentation.

The first two writers read: beautifully varnished work, safe stuff for any audience. When Gretel’s turn came, she stood up and announced that she was going to read two short pieces she had written here at the colony. She glanced over at me, and my guts told me there was going to be trouble.

Her first piece was a lengthy interior monologue, a first person, present-tense description of Hansel and Gretel — helpfully identified BY NAME — having sex, in vivid detail. Just sex, without any emotional content to the scene, a straightforward account of a mechanical act IN REAL TIME that included — I kid you not — a literal countdown to the final climax (his, not hers).

It was so like a late-1960’s journalistic account of a rocket launch that I kept expecting her to say, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”

Now, I certainly have no objection to writers who turn their diaries into works for public consumption, but this was graphic without being either arousing or instructive. However, the painters in the back row hooted and hollered, so maybe I just wasn’t the right audience for her piece.

Still, looking around the auditorium, I didn’t seem to be the only auditor relieved when it ended. (“Three…two…one.” That’s a QUOTE, people!) Call me judgmental, but I tend to think that when half the participants are pleased the act described is over, it’s not the best sex scene imaginable. And let’s just say that her husband probably would have preferred that this real-time telling had taken longer than six minutes to read. A classic case, one hopes, of the real-life incident being better than its telling on paper.

Gretel’s second piece took place at a wedding reception. Again in the first person, again with herself and her by now shattered husband identified by name, again an interior monologue, this little number had some legitimately comic moments in the course of the first page. As I said, Gretel could write.

Somewhere in the middle of page 2, a new character sashayed into the scene, sat down at their table, picked up a turkey sandwich — and suddenly, the interior monologue shifted, from a gently amused description of a social event to a jealously-inflamed tirade. Because I love you people, I shall spare you the details, apart from that fact that the narrative included the immortal lines, “Keep away from my husband, bitch!” and “Are those real?”

Gretel read the piece extremely well; her voice, her entire demeanor altered, like a hissing cat, arching her back in preparation for a fight. Fury looked great on her. And to her credit, the character that everyone in the room knew perfectly well was me — that’s not just paranoia speaking, I assure you; her physical description would have enabled any police department in North America to pick me up right away — never actually said or did anything seductive at all; her mere presence was enough to spark almost incoherent rage in the narrator. And Hansel sat there, purple-faced, avoiding the eyes of his sculptor friends, until she finished.

There was no ending to the story, no “three…two…one” this time. She just stopped, worn out from passion. I’m not even convinced that she read everything written on the page.

I was very nice to her during and after this hugely embarrassing event; what else could I do? I laughed at her in-text jokes whenever it was remotely possible — especially when they were against me — congratulated her warmly on her vibrant dialogue in front of the National Book Award nominee, and made a point of passing along a book of Dorothy Parker short stories to her the next day.

Others were not so kind, either to her or to Hansel. The more considerate ones merely laughed at them behind their backs. Others depicted her in cartoon form, or acted out her performance in the dining hall after she had dumped her tray; someone even wrote a parody of her piece and passed it around. True, I did have to live for the next week with the nickname Mata Hari, but compared to being known as the writer whose act of fictional revenge had so badly failed, I wouldn’t have cared if everyone had called me Lizzie Borden. And, of course, it became quite apparent that every time I was nice to Gretel after that, every time I smiled at her in a hallway when others wouldn’t, it was only pouring salt on her wounded ego.

Oh, how I wish I could say this was the only time I have ever seen a writer do something like this to herself…

But the fact is, it’s downright common in novels. Rest assured, though, that revenge fantasies tend to announce themselves as screamingly from the pages of a submission as they did from Gretel’s podium. If you’re still angry about an event, maybe it’s not the right time to write about it for publication. Your journal, fine. But until you have gained some perspective — at least enough to perform some legitimate character development for that person you hate — give it a rest. Otherwise, your readers’ sympathies may ricochet, and move in directions that you may not like.

And that can be deadly in a submission.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s always a good idea to get objective feedback on anything you write before you loose it on the world, but if you incorporate painful real-life scenes into your fiction, sharing before submission becomes ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE. If you work out your aggressions at your computer — and, let’s face it, a lot of us do — please, please join a writing group. Find good readers you can trust to save you from looking like a junior high schooler on a rampage — but who won’t tone down your marvelously original voice.

And Gretel, honey, in the unlikely event that you ever read this, you might want to remember: revenge is a dish best served cold. Or, as Philip used to say, never screw over a living writer. You never know who might end up writing a blog.

Hey, I’m only human. And yes, this incident did really happen — and that’s why I am writing about it here, not in my next novel, tempting as that might be.

Keep up the good work!