Steering between the Scylla of over-confidence and the Charybdis of under-confidence, or, a Thanksgiving meditation on the blessings of interactive gratitude

Yes, yes, I know: this is a national holiday, and by all that is right, patriotic, and holy, I ought to be lying prone on some big, well-upholstered piece of furniture, moaning about how much turkey I managed to stuff down my gullet over the course of the day, rather than posting here. But I’m still convalescing, thank you very much, a state not very conducive to reveling with pie.

This is also the first Thanksgiving within the span of my memory when I haven’t at least helped with the cooking, so I burn to be useful. Don’t get up off the couch; I’ll just lecture you from afar.

My charming SO has spent the last hour telling me that I can — and, presumably, should — take at least a few days off a year from burning to be useful, lest I find myself reduced to a Joan of Arc-style pile of cinders (which, frankly, didn’t look awfully good on her, and probably wouldn’t look any better on me). But one of the first things any editor learns upon getting into the advice-giving business is that writerly angst doesn’t take holidays.

Lest you doubt this: when I sat down to write tonight, I found no fewer than three e-mails from writer friends in my inbox, asking for advice. (I knew that they must be from friends, because mere acquaintances would have waited to send them until tomorrow.)

So: back to business. For those of you just joining us after a long winter’s nap, I’ve been yammering for the last couple of days about the desirability of SIOA — Send It Out, Already! — when one is faced with a request for pages, rather than revising and revising the manuscript for so long that the window of opportunity closes on the agent’s request.

Yesterday, I gave a pep talk to those good writers who find themselves currently in the painful throes of SIOA-avoidance, as well as laying the conceptual groundwork so writers who have not yet encountered “But is it REALLY ready?” turmoil will be prepared for it when it comes. Because, frankly, at one time or another, fear of submission has struck every successful writer I have ever known.

Okay, not EVERY: some are blessed with a superabundance of self-confidence, but in the publishing industry as in so many others, the hugely confident tend to be the folks who leave the air in their wake positively blackened with the smoke of their burning bridges.

Give me a worried nail-biter any day, I say. (Well, perhaps not on Christmas… or my birthday… but I can walk away from my e-mail any time, I tell you.)

The most confident writer I have encountered was a cookbook author who blandished me a couple of years ago (around Christmas, as a matter of fact) into introducing her to my agent and helping her with her book proposal practically to the point of co-authorship, only to pretend that she didn’t know me as soon as the ink dried on her book contract. She never seemed to doubt for an instant that the world needed her book — and apparently, a publisher agreed with her, because it’s out now.

For some reason, the agented encounter this stripe of bizarre super-confidence amongst favor-askers all the time: evidently, the shy, self-effacing, and polite are substantially less likely to approach us. (Which is one reason, in case you’re curious, that I respond so enthusiastically to those of you who post questions as comments here — here, I can answer a question once for the benefit of many, rather than one at a time privately.)

The persistence of the over-persistent ought to annoy the polite a little, because the boundary-pushers make it harder for everyone in the long run. For instance, one of the reasons that published authors tend to be reluctant to give feedback to hopeful strangers is that such a favor so often engenders not the gratitude it should, alas, but a detailed (and not always courteous) explanation from the overly-confident about how the kind author’s advice could not possibly be anywhere near the ballpark of correct.

Why, just the other day, the excellent and hilarious Bob Tarte, FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! blog) and animal life memoirist extraordinaire, sent me this illuminating anecdote on the subject:

A writer who had read Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather emailed and asked me questions about how to write her query, attaching a copy of the query. I answered the questions and made suggestions about re-writing the query. The response from the writer: a detailed argument about my suggestions. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no authority on queries, but it seems to me that if you ask an author for input, then you should probably accept or dismiss the suggestions — and ask additional questions if you need to — but don’t argue with a person who is trying to help you out.

I’m with you, Bob: I can’t even count the number of times that writers have asked for my advice on a particular point — not infrequently by buttonholing me at a social event to ask me to summarize, essentially, an entire category’s worth of blog posts — and then came back to tell me with evident glee that they decided that it wasn’t worth taking, for the following fourteen reasons…

If I’m the only habitual advice-giver who doesn’t find it especially satisfying to be thanked this way… well, I won’t complete that thought, because I know for a fact that I’m not.

And how do I know that? Because spend an hour at any gathering of established authors, agents, editors, writing teachers, and the like (at, say, the bar at a writers’ conference), and you will almost certainly hear at least three complaints (often in the form of hilariously-embellished anecdotes, complete with mimicked voices) about this kind of behavior.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: while it’s perfectly fine to ask an author you admire for advice — because, after all, s/he always has the option of saying no — if the author is generous enough to respond, recognize that granting you a one-time favor does not imply an invitation to a lifetime of debate.

Simple thanks would do. Flowers would be nice, of course, but not strictly speaking necessary.

Sometimes, though, the super-confident camouflage argument under the cover of thanks. I once had a writer friend hit me up for detailed advice on a contest entry. After I gave it, he was so good as not only to explain to me in vivid Technicolor why my advice was misguided, but go on to hit up my mother (also a writer and editor) for feedback on his entire manuscript.

Wait — there’s more. Over my gasps of disapproval, my dear old white-headed mother was generous enough to ignore the fact that the book was half again as long as novels in that genre generally were and gave it some gentle analysis.

Need I even tell you that the writer responded promptly by sending her an EXTENSIVE letter, ostensibly thanking her for her trouble, but also meticulously addressing each point she had raised to demonstrate that she didn’t know what she was talking about? Or that many of the issues he raised there were ones for which I had already established well-defined categories here on the blog?

I’m bringing this up not to complain (okay, not ONLY to complain), but because over-confident writers often extend this type of behavior to agents and editors at publishing houses as well. Calling an agent to pitch on the phone, for instance. Or e-mailing a flame-mail response to a thoughtful rejection letter. Walking up to a rejecting agent or editor at a conference and demanding, “Why did you reject that manuscript I sent you six months ago?”

Or, the engenderer of many an embellished cocktail party anecdote, shooting back a letter to a rejecting agent jumping on one of the standard industry euphemisms: “What do you mean, you just didn’t fall in love with it? HOW doesn’t my book fit our needs at this time?”

This just isn’t good long-term career strategy.

Why am I harping upon the outrages upon etiquette committed by the tiny fraction of aspiring writers who happen to be blessed (or cursed, depending upon how you look at it) with complete confidence that they are so extraordinarily talented that everyone in the publishing industry not only should be delighted to help them — and that within seconds of having formed the acquaintance, or even before — but should confine their critique to Gee, your query letter/pitch/manuscript is magnificent. Don’t change a thing?

Because it doesn’t take very many such approaches to render the approached wary of ALL aspiring writers, including the 80% who would never dream of being so rude. Bombarded with many such approaches, as agents are, often from aspiring writers who have not learned enough about the industry to be aware that there IS any other way to try to market a book, wariness can turn fairly quickly to standoffishness toward the hopeful.

An attitude that, alas, is very discouraging for the shy. Having witnessed it in action– as a coldly-worded form rejection letter, perhaps, a slow response to a submission, or a “Well, that kind of book just isn’t selling right now” response to a pitch — the sensitive writer can fall prey to frightening fantasies about, say, how nasty the next rejection may be.

Or how mad that agent is going to be that three months have passed, and I haven’t sent those requested materials yet. Oh, it’s going to be terrible; maybe I’d better not send them out at all.

Starting to sound familiar? The over-confident’s dream transforms into the under-confident’s nightmare: the pushiness of the former feeds the environment that in turn feeds the fear of the latter.

Perhaps I’m overly-optimistic, but I believe that if more writers took the time to express gratitude for the help we DO get — and no, I’m not fishing — there would, in time, be more help available. I’ve met plenty of folks involved in publishing who honestly do like to lend a hand — and would do so happily, if not for the fear that the extended hand was going to be used as a ladder.

But this is a change that’s going to happen incrementally, through a lot of small acts of kindness in return for kindness.

Case in point: Bob Tarte sent me a really helpful anecdote to use here on the blog, and I’m grateful. So not only am I going to mention that I REALLY admire his writing — he is genuinely funny, not praise I bestow lightly — but I’m going to go ahead and post his book jackets here, for ease of recognition in a bookstore:

/snapshot-2007-11-23-00-24-39.tiff /snapshot-2007-11-23-00-26-24.tiff

Heck, I’m even going to add a plug for his new project, a weekly 30-minute podcast on exotic pets (anything other than cats, dogs, and livestock) on the aptly-named PetLifeRadio.com. The show is called, much to my amusement, What Were You Thinking? and he co-hosts it with his lovely wife, Linda.

Okay, so it’s a small thing, but it gets the ball rolling.

And illustrates perhaps the best argument I can possibly give to the super-confident about why their tactics may not serve them in the long term: you don’t see me plugging the work of that forgetful cookbook author here, do you?

As my beloved first writing teacher, Philip K. Dick, liked to say: “Never screw over a living writer. You’ll only end up as material.”

Keep up the good work!

Book Marketing 101: is it too much to ask to find someone nice?

I was thinking about you yesterday, readers, as I was taking scones to the poll workers. (For those of you reading this outside the U.S., yesterday was Election Day.) I usually take bagels — I volunteered as a poll worker once; it’s a 15-hour day — but a new bakery’s just opened up in the neighborhood, and what better way to introduce ‘em to the locals?

Why did this remind me of you, you ask? Because no matter how many election days see yours truly and partner coming through our local high school’s absurdly heavy double doors with goodies, the poll workers are always surprised to be treated with kindness. In the midst of dealing with the super-rushed, the resigned, and the confused, they always seem shocked that anyone would recognize that their job is a hard one.

I constantly see this same “What do you mean, you’re going to treat me like a human being?” weariness in the eyes of aspiring writers who have been querying for a good long time.

It’s completely understandable, of course. After a couple of dozen form-letter rejections — basically, being told by a faceless entity that one’s work is not good enough, but not being told how or why — it’s very, very easy to start to believe that agencies and publishing houses are staffed by writer-hating ogres, leering loreleis who cajole writers into sending in their hopes and dreams, purely for the pleasure of smashing them into the ground.

But the fact is, this just isn’t the case. There are a few mean people, of course, as in any profession, and I suppose it’s not out of the question that some perversely masochistic hater of the written word might choose to torture herself by becoming an agency screener.

For the most part, though, if you have the opportunity to talk to an agent, editor, or one of their overworked screeners, you will discover someone who genuinely adores good writing and is sincerely eager to promote the interests of those who produce it.

Stop laughing; it’s true.

Not everyone agrees on what constitutes good writing, of course — one doesn’t have to hang around the industry very long to realize that there are folks out there who apparently don’t make too strong a distinction between what is marketable and what is well-written — but contrary to cynical rumors perennially circulating on the writers’ conference circuit, it’s rare to find an agent or editor who genuinely regards writers as merely the necessary evil behind a successful book.

So why do so many of their form-letter rejections, conference speeches, websites, and even statements in agency guides convey, to put it politely, the opposite impression?

An array of reasons — absolutely none of which have anything to do with you or your writing. Please, please do no fall into the trap of taking it personally.

In the first place, form-letter rejections are now the norm in the industry. Period. Even for submissions — yes, even when an agent or editor has asked to see the entire book. It’s annoying as heck for the writer who receives them, of course, but the fact is, boilerplate rejections are the industry’s reaction to the incredible rise in queries since the advent of the home computer.

Like so many other puzzling aspect of the submission process, it can be explained by the agents’ desire to save time. Which, as long-time readers of this blog know, can be darned hard in an agency that receives 1000 queries per week.

See why I don’t think you should take it personally?

And while reason tells us that it would take only a few seconds per query for the agent or screener to scrawl a couple of words of explanation in the margin of a pre-printed rejection (which does happen occasionally, if a screener has mixed feelings about the rejection), the sheer volume of envelopes on Millicent’s desk tends to discourage it.

Do I hear some disgruntled murmuring out there? “But Anne,” a few lone voices cry, “this isn’t what I’ve heard. I’ve always been told — sometimes by agents speaking at writers’ conferences — that if I have been querying for a while and receiving only form rejections, I must be doing something terribly wrong.”

I’ve heard that one, too — and interestingly, I’ve sometimes heard agents who use form-letter rejections heavily say it. So my first response is: poppycock.

This is, in fact, an outdated notion. Gone are the days when only those illiterate queries and submissions without a prayer of being salvaged were brushed off in this manner — although, to tell you the truth, since the invention of the photocopier, there have always been more agencies and publishing houses using boilerplate rejections than was generally recognized.

It’s just too good a way to plow through the day’s mail.

To understand why, place yourself in Millicent’s moccasins for a moment: she’s been screening submissions all day, and she wants to go home on time in order to crank out those grad school applications sitting on her desk at home. (Oh, she dreams big, our Millicent!) Standing between her and the door are the 150 query letters that arrived in the morning mail — probably more, if it’s a Monday — and she knows that another 150 or so will be dumped on her desk tomorrow.

Isn’t it in her interest to get through each of those queries as quickly as humanly possible?

This is precisely what she does, of course. For a bone-chilling insight on just how draconian that process can be written by an actual Millicent, I highly recommend the excellent Rejecter blog, but those of you who have followed this Book Marketing 101 series already have a basic idea of the carnage that follows, right? “Dear Agent” letters and queries for book categories her agency doesn’t represent are rejected unread, of course, as are letters that fail to conform to the norms of submission. (For a crash course on just what those norms are, please see the HOW TO WRITE A QUERY LETTER category at right.) For each, she stuffs the agency’s boilerplate rejection into the accompanying SASE.

Those are quick; the more professional ones take a little longer. But almost all of them are going to go.

And that, too, is partially a function of time. Think about it: since an acceptance requires a personalized letter or e-mail, it takes longer to accept a query than to reject it, right? And if Millicent has already decided to reject a query, which is she more likely to do when she’s trying to get out of the office, give a detailed explanation why, or just reach for that pile of rejection letters?

Would it affect your answer to know that take the easy route might save her a full two minutes? Not a lot of time in the life of the writer who has poured years into writing the book being queried, I’ll allow, but the sheer volume she faces precludes lingering. (150 queries x 2 minutes/query = 300 minutes, or 5 hours)

If she works at an agency that accepts e-mailed queries — still not the norm, but becoming more common all the time — her rejection rate is probably even faster, and she is probably using pretty much the same boilerplate.

This seems to come as a surprise to many habitual e-queriers: after all, how long could it possibly take to give a sentence or two of actual feedback?

We writers tend to forget this, but to most of the earth’s population, the transposition of thought into written sentences is a time-consuming and sometimes even painful process. A good reader is not always a good, or even adequate, writer.

Which is a nice way of saying that Millicent is unlikely to reinvent the wheel each time she taps out an e-rejection. It’s much more time-efficient to paste the same surface-kind language her agency has been cramming into SASEs for years.

To experienced eyes, the same stock phrases — and often even the same sentences — are evident in pretty much every boilerplate rejection, be it electronic or paper-based. I’m sure you recognize them: Your manuscript does not meet our needs at this time. We are only accepting clients selectively. I just didn’t fall in love with it.

And that’s just from the agencies that bother to respond to e-queries; increasingly, I’ve been noticing, agencies that accept electronic queries have started to state outright on their websites that the querier will only hear from them if they are interested, a level of brusqueness practically unheard-of for mailed queries. Presumably, then, they prefer e-queries primarily for the ease with which they can be deleted.

Personally, I find this practice kind of appalling: with a form-letter rejection, at least, the writer can be sure that the query reached the agency; without a response, how can she ever be absolutely sure that her missive didn’t just go astray?

Not to mention the fact that the human eye tends to skim on the screen, zipping across even the most beautiful prose with a rapidity it never would on paper. (See why I habitually discourage e-querying?) And since e-querying and e-submission is substantially less expensive than paper querying for writers based outside the US (to query an agency here, the stamps on the SASE need to be in US currency, which can be quite spendy to track down abroad; to buy them online at face value, try the USPS website), I worry that foreign writers might be encouraged by the relative cheapness of e-querying to place their queries at a competitive disadvantage.

Okay, I’ll admit it: all of this may not be the best way to make my point that most agents and editors are really rather fond of writers and their work. My point is that precisely because such practices — form-letter rejections, non-response rejections, writing in blurbs — are impersonal by definition, it doesn’t make sense, logically, to read them as a reflection upon your work.

Seriously, there is nothing to read into a statement like I’m sorry, but this does not meet our needs at this time, other than a simple, unnuanced No.

Which, admittedly, is lousy enough to hear — but it certainly is not the same as hearing, “You know, I really liked your premise, but I felt your execution was weak,” feedback that might actually help a writer improve the next query or submission. And it’s definitely better than hearing what so many writers read into such statements, hostility that amounts to ”Take it away — this is loathsome!”

At minimum, it should NEVER be read as, “Since I’m saying no, no one else will ever say yes.” Just note the response — and send out the next query immediately.

I sense some lightening of writerly hearts out there, but still, some strategic-minded spirits are troubled. “But Anne,” I hear a few quiet voices saying, “this is all very well as encouragement, but why are you telling us this in the midst of a series of posts on how to build a querying list?”

Because, sharp-minded questioners, in working with my clients and preparing these blog posts, I reading through quite a few listings, websites, conference blurbs: in short, I have been sifting through what a writer trying to glean some sense of a particular agent’s preferences might find. And over the years, I haven’t been able to help but notice that just as many aspiring writers read a certain hostility into form rejections, they sometimes read a coldness into the listings and blurbs themselves.

I don’t think this is in the writer’s best interest, as far as pulling together a querying list goes. Here’s why.

While some agencies seem to go out of their way to be encouraging, others come across as off-puttingly intimidating. Most of the time, it’s just businesslike advice: Query first by mail. Include SASE. Query before submitting. No e-mail queries. A bit terse, perhaps, but nothing to cause undue dismay.

Sometimes, though, these statements — which are, the shy writer thinks, how the agency is choosing to promote itself to potential clients — can come across as positive discouragement to query at all.

Chief among these, naturally, are the ones that actually ARE intended to discourage queriers: We do not accept submissions from previously unpublished writers. New clients considered by recommendation only. Does not consider science fiction, fantasy, or mysteries. Or my personal favorite from the first page of the guide currently at my elbow, Although we remain absolutely dedicated to finding new talent, we must announce that until further notice we can no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. We also cannot accept queries or submissions via e-mail.

While a thoughtful peruser might be left wondering, in this last case, how precisely the agency in question acts upon the absolute dedication it mentions, having so emphatically cut off the most logical manners of exercising it, it is usually best to take such statements at face value. If an agency isn’t considering books like yours, or if it relies upon its existing client list to recruit new writers for them (not all that unusual), querying them isn’t going to be a very efficient use of your time, anyway.

Similarly, when a listing or blurb includes a simple statement of preference, along the lines of No phone calls or Include first five pages with query, this information can be very helpful to the writer. It’s worth seeking out. After all, practical information like We never download attachments to e-mail queries for security reasons, so please copy and paste material into your e-mail is always worth following.

Hey, I’m all for anything that keeps Millicent’s itchy finger away from that delete button.

Frankly, I consider specificity a very good sign in a listing; as anyone who has flipped through one of the standard guides can tell you, it’s fairly rare. Whenever I see a website whose organizers have taken the time to give the logic behind their preferences, I think, “Wow, this agency has given the process some thought. Vive la difference!”

But listings, websites, blurbs, and even conference speeches that bark advice at the writer — and, once notice, it tends to be the same advice, over and over again — can be harder to decipher. Does the assertion that I do not take on books described as bestsellers or potential bestsellers, for instance, mean that the agent is specifically looking for less commercial work, that he doesn’t like to see target market demographics in an e-mail, or just that he’s tired of receiving boasts? Does This agency prefers not to share information on specific sales mean that they don’t have many big names on their client list, that they tend to sell to smaller presses, that they are too new an agency to have many clients’ books on the shelves yet — or just that the guy whose job it was to fill out the questionnaire was in a hurry?

Here, too, the impulse to read character into the responses can easily run amok — but what a temptation some of agencies do provide! For example, does the order Be professional! mean that the agency stating it is interested in working with a writer new to the business, or doesn’t it? And why, the nervous would-be querier wonders, does this agency immediately leap to the conclusion that I intend to be unprofessional in my approach?

Keep reminding yourself: this is generic advice, not intended for your eyes alone. Nor is it a personality evaluation for the agent who wrote it — again, probably not a professional writer.

There are a couple of reasons for the barked advice — the first of which is, perhaps not surprisingly, the same as the primary justification for form-letter rejections: an attempt to save themselves some time. An agent doesn’t have to receive very many phone calls from aspiring writers before she notices that each takes up quite a bit more time than reading a query letter, after all, or be buried under an avalanche of unrequested manuscripts before establishing a policy that she will read only what she has asked to see.

In practice, though, you are probably not the target audience for these bits of advice. The terser listings and blurbs tend to focus upon what NOT to do or send, after all. This implies a focus upon the avalanche of queries they receive, not on the plight of the sender of this week’s 657th letter.

In my experience, the habitual readers of the standard agency guides — at least the ones who are predisposed to follow directions — are not the ones who need to be told always to include a SASE, or never to send an unsolicited manuscript; these are the wholly admirable souls who have done their homework, bless ‘em.

But the overwhelming majority of generic queries — and pretty much all of the much-deplored “Dear Agent” variety — come from aspiring writers who have not taken the time to learn the rules of the game. (Unlike, say, you.)

So when a listing strikes you as off-putting, ask yourself, “Is this snappish list of don’ts aimed at me — or at the nameless person who sent a query without knowing to include a SASE? If it’s the latter, I’m just going to glean this listing or website for what applies to me.”

“I can understand why an agent might want to give generic querying advice at a conference or on a website,” you argue, and cogently, “but the standard agency guides have entire articles about how to query, for goodness’ sake! Do we really need 74 agents also reminding us to query before sending a manuscript?”

Good point, oh skeptical one. But it brings me back to my earlier point: most agents are not writers. Thus, few of them have ever queried a book of their own.

This sounds like a truism, but actually, I don’t think that aspiring writers tend to think about its implications much. It means, among other things, that the average agent may not be aware of just how hard it is for even the best manuscript to attract representation these days. (Tell the truth now: if someone had told you how hard it was before you tried it yourself, would YOU have believed it?) They may not realize that it is now quite common for a very good writer with a truly fabulous book to NEED to query 50 or 100 agents before finding the right fit.

Which makes it entirely safe to conclude that they are not given to thumbing through the nearest agency guide in their odd leisure moments. I seriously doubt most of them are aware just how much repetition there is.

Again, useful for the writer who is predisposed to reading character into trifles (and what novelist isn’t?) If you approach those pithy little bursts of advice recognizing that their producers could conceivably believe that this listing might well be the first time anyone has ever heard of a SASE, they make considerably more sense.

Whew, this is a long post, isn’t it? And yet, amazingly, I still have a bit more to say on the subject of how to read agency listings; saving up my thoughts for intermittent posts has evidently produced a backlog in my brain. More follows after I have rested up a bit.

Keep up the good work!

Form-letter rejections revisited

Throughout my recent series on all of the many complex reasons that agents and their screeners often reject submissions based upon the first page alone (ulp!), I have caught myself thinking over and over again: how much better it would be for everyone concerned if those doing the rejecting took the ten seconds required to scrawl a reason on a form rejection before stuffing a manuscript back into a SASE. This does happen, on occasion: I’ve seen fairly detailed rejection excuses hand-written on the query letter itself, or with the cover letter for the submission.

But not often.

The vast majority of the time, even submissions that only missed being picked up by a hair will be greeted with that pet peeve of writers everywhere, the form letter rejection. If you’ve been brave enough to send your work out on a regular basis — and hurrah for you if you have — I’m sure you have received at least one of these annoying responses. They tend to run something like this:

“Dear author:
Thank you for submitting your work to us. Unfortunately, it does not meet our needs/does not fill an obvious market niche/I do not feel confident I can sell it at this time. Best of luck in your future writing career.”

Even though this response was clearly mass-produced, and thus could not possibly have been a heartfelt piece of reader feedback, getting it probably made you feel every bit as lousy as if it had been a personal response. Let me guess: you wavered between disbelief (“How could this happen to me? I slaved over that submission for months!”) to fury (“Did the agent even read it?”) to despair (“It must have been so bad that the agent couldn’t bear to comment upon it.”) But you kept your fluctuations to yourself, brave little trooper that you are, picked yourself up, and sent out another query immediately.

At least, I hope you did. Or perhaps you reworked the entire manuscript before you sent it out again. Or became too discouraged to send it out again at all.

What you probably didn’t do, unfortunately, is grab the form letter and go running to your writing buddies, to see if they had ever been brushed off in this way. And why not? Because there is a pervasive myth within the writing community that only poor writers get form letter rejections — which renders owning up to receiving one embarrassing.

The prevailing wisdom lags far behind the reality – and for good reason. If you’ve been to a few conferences, you have probably heard at least one agent assert the old truism that good writers don’t get form letter rejections; they get personalized rejections, thoughtful, in-depth analyses about what needs to change in the work before it is market-ready. The personalized rejection (known amongst my friends as “the rave rejection”) is thus a sort of twisted compliment, a reason to hope, a sign from an often-intimidating industry that a writer is doing something right.

In fact, I heard a fairly prominent agent (I name no names, of course, but if I did, his might rhyme with Meff Spinezam) spout this dogma as recently as last month: if you send out ten rejection letters, he told his already-discouraged audience, and get only form responses, there must be something wrong with your submission. Probably, he opined, the writing, but then, he is an agent who likes to receive the first five pages of the book along with the query –so he can put them through exactly the scrutiny we’ve been discussing in the Idol series. If your work were truly good, he said, some agent would have asked to see the book, or at the very least, a few of those rejections would have been personalized.

Perhaps he honestly does take the time to write personalized rejections to promising writers. If he does, however, he is out of step with the industry, which now rejects both very good and very bad queries and submissions with a single boilerplate letter.

Yet in the prevailing view, echoed by this agent, the form letter rejection is reserved for those benighted souls who haven’t the vaguest idea what they are doing. It is never, we are assured, sent to a writer with talent and a firm handle on craft. It is, these agents are fond of telling captive audiences at writers’ conferences — who are, after all, there to be told what they are doing wrong — the industry’s way of telling the author to go out and get some serious help, pronto.

Poppycock. If you had gone crying to your friends about your first form letter rejection, you would have found that every good writer you know has received scads of them. Including, incidentally, yours truly.

The fact is, form letter rejections have been the norm since the invention of the photocopying machine. They are used in order to save the rejecting agent or editor time — period. And yes, Virginia, it is positively common for an agent who enthused over a pitch at a conference to send precisely the same form rejection to the writer over whom she gushed as to a writer to whom her invitation to submit was at best lukewarm. Form letters save time precisely because they require so little energy to use.

Why is this desirable, from the agent’s point of view? Because in recent years, the sheer volume of queries the average agency receives has risen astronomically. In an agency that received fifty or a hundred queries per week (as was common twenty years ago), it would actually be possible for some kind soul to write a personal message back to every aspiring writer. In an agency that receives a couple of hundred queries per day, as the big agencies do, it would require a full-time employee just to tear open the query letters, sort them into possibles and impossibles, and send out one preprinted form letter to the folks in Stack A and another to the folks in Stack B.

And that’s assuming dealing with the incoming queries is all that particular employee has to do that day.

Let’s consider the math for a second. Presumably, any query or submission that does not meet agency criteria would automatically go into Stack B, the rejection pile, unread. There are apparently a whole lot of these: if you’ve been to more than one writers’ conference, I’m sure you have heard at least one agent’s tirade about how writers often don’t read the write-ups in the agent listings closely enough to send EXACTLY what the agency prefers in its submissions; it seems to be a rather wide-spread pet peeve.

Also going straight to Stack B would be any query letter that was obviously poorly written, or pitched a genre that the agency did not represent, or, to reproduce another pet peeve that one hears agents complaining of at conferences, begins “Dear Sir/Madam,” rather than being addressed to a specific name. (And yes, even agents who routinely send out “Dear Author” form rejections object to being addressed impersonally. Ironic, isn’t it?) All of these, then, would be returned in the accompanying SASE with the standard Stack B rejection letter, which probably resembles the one above.

But your work is better than that: you’ve written a good query letter; you’ve submitted only what they asked to see, and you did your homework about the agency. So how might your submission have ended up in Stack B as a form-letter receiver?

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: there are several possibilities that may well have nothing to do with the quality of your query. You may have addressed an agent who is no longer with the firm, for instance, or sent a submission in a category they no longer represent. Agents move around so much that it is very possible that the particular agent you have targeted will have moved on since the guide you used for research went to press. The agency may have listed more types of book than it actually represents — very small agencies are particularly prone to this, as they do not want to miss out on the next bestseller by listing too-narrow foci in the agency books. Annoying, yes, but not uncommon – and there is no way you could have known about it in advance.

The same holds true for submissions: what an agency was seeking three months ago at a conference may not be what it is seeking now. Think about those poor souls who were marketing memoirs when the A MILLION LITTLE PIECES scandal broke — over the course of a few days, memoirs went from hot to dangerous, in the industry’s collective mind. And I absolutely guarantee you that none of those submitters received a rejection that read, “Gee, we’re sorry, but we decided not to read your submission at all, because the market has just turned memoir-shy. Try again in a year or two.”

No, that would have been too time-consuming. So when they opened their mailboxes and read, “Dear author: Thank you for submitting your work to us. Unfortunately, it does not meet our needs at this time,” naturally, 99% of them thought the problem was with their work, not with the market.

Your writing life will be happier, I suspect, if you avoid the temptation of taking every rejection as if it were a well thought-out professional deliberation upon your future as a writer. Accept what the form letter says — that your work, for whatever reason, does not meet their needs at this time — and query another agent RIGHT AWAY.

As in before you expend a day – or a week, or a month – of your precious writing time seething about it. And before the evil little hobgoblins of self-doubt have a chance to whisper in your ear that the only reason you could possibly have received a form rejection is that your work is lousy. It’s not the only conceivably reason — in fact, it’s not even the most likely reason.

It is not, in fact, useful criticism of your work at all.

If learning that what has been making you miserable is in fact making millions of aspiring writers everywhere miserable makes you even more angry at the sight of the next form rejection than you had been before, you might want to try taking Carolyn See’s advice. Carolyn, whose MAKING A LITERARY LIFE certainly belongs on the bookshelf of every English-speaking writer, counsels writers to send thank-you notes to everyone who rejects them. Instantly, before the anger stops and the inevitable self-criticism begins. It can ease the process of banishing such disrespect from one’s mind.

I have to confess: although I find this advice excellent, I have never actually managed to bring myself to send a thank-you letter in response to a form-letter rejection — or, rather, have never managed to compose a thank-you letter that sounded remotely sincere, or indeed, less than quite sarcastic. I did, however, always force myself to send out a new query within an hour of opening a rejection.

You’ve got to get right back on that horse after a fall, or those hobgoblins are going to come a-running, telling you that you should never try riding again.

I knew to do this, because of a family story I heard many, many times while growing up. When my mother’s first husband was trying to break into the writing biz in the early 1950s, he routinely had fifteen or twenty short stories circulating amongst magazines at any given time. Back then, they did not have the luxury of photocopiers and computer printers: every fresh copy of a short story had to be retyped afresh before it could be sent out again.

One day, after a couple of years of hard writing and hopeful submission, my mother went to check the mail — and discovered 17 rejected manuscripts scattered all over the miniscule front porch, every single one of which containing a scrap of mimeographed paper that began, “Dear author: Thank you for submitting your work to us, but…” The tiny mailbox had not been able to hold that much negativity.

Did she and her husband sit down and cry? Did they take it as a sign from the universe that he would never get published? Did they rend their hair and trouble the heavens with their bootless cries?

No: they acted like writing professionals. They opened each envelope carefully, ironed the travel-wrinkled short story within into some semblance of respectability, and sent all 17 out again that very day.

The rejected party, incidentally, is now arguably the world’s most famous science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. And a movie version of one of those rejected stories did pretty well a few years back: it was called, if memory serves, THE MINORITY REPORT.

As Julius Caesar was fond of saying, don’t let the bastards get you down. Keep your work moving. And keep up the good work!

P.S.: Don’t forget — long-time reader and FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Brian Mercer will be talking about his book, MASTERING ASTRAL PROJECTION on the radio show, The Darkness on the Edge of Town. The radio show will air THIS Sunday at 10 PM Central Standard Time at 1470 AM (for those of you in the greater Minneapolis area) or streaming live via the show’s website.

The blessings of Ataraxia, or, How to be a dream client

I sat down to write about agencies again today, but to be absolutely honest with you, I had to stop halfway through, because I’ve been having a genuinely upsetting day. Since we writers have to be so tough to make it in this business, it’s easy to forget that we are actually finely-balanced musical instruments. It’s hard to create when we’re thrown for a loop. Today’s loop-generator was a fairly common one for givers of feedback, professional and friendly both, so I think it would be useful for me to write about it. (And if not, hey, I blog pretty much every day, so if it turns out that I’m just being self-indulgent today, I can always be purely useful again tomorrow, right?)

Because I am EXTREMELY selective about whose work I read (I have been exchanging chapters with my first readers for years, and professionally, I will only work with clients I feel are bursting with talent, but even then, if the subject matter or genre is not a good fit with my tastes, or if I don’t think I can help a writer get published within a reasonable amount of time, I will refer him on), the vast majority of the time, my interactions with other writers are a joy. Really. I enjoy giving feedback quite a bit, even when I am charged with the task of helping a client incorporate not-very-sound advice from an agent, editor, or dissertation advisor in such a way that it will not destroy the book.

Okay, I’ll grant you, it doesn’t SOUND like a whole lot of fun. But usually, it is: I love good writing, and like any competent editor, the sight of anything that detracts from good writing’s presentation makes me foam at the mouth and reach for a pen.

Every so often, though, I’ll run into someone who thinks I’m just making up the rules of standard format, or norms of academic argumentation, or even the usual human expectation that within a story, each subsequent event will follow logically upon the one before it. (Blame Aristotle’s POETICS for that last set of rules, not me.) This morning, I was lambasted at length for having had the gall to point out that someone’s Chapter Two might not be utterly clear to a reader that did not have the author reading over his shoulder, explaining verbally the choices made on the page.

Long-time readers of this blog, sing along with me here: when you submit a manuscript, all that matters is what is on the page. If ANYTHING in your first 50 pages is not perfectly comprehensible without a “Yes, but I explain that in Chapter Four”-type verbal clarification, rework it.

Please. Thank you.

Now, since it’s my job – or ethical obligation, in cases of volunteer feedback-giving – to point out precisely this sort of problem wherever it appears in a manuscript, I am always a trifle nonplused when I encounter a writer who thinks I’m only flagging it out of some deep-seated compulsion to be hurtful. Again, I am very selective about whose pages I read, and I burn to be helpful: it’s not uncommon for my commentary on a book to be longer as most of the chapters. I try to be thoughtful, giving my reasons for any major suggested change with a specificity and completeness that makes the Declaration of Independence look like a murmur of vague discontent about tea prices.

Obviously, this level of feedback is not for everybody; one of my best friends in the work refers to me affectionately as a manuscript piranha, but still, she lets me read her work. Because, honestly, is there anything worse than handing your work-in-progress to someone who just says, “Oh, it was fine,” or “Oh, it just wasn’t my kind of book,” without explaining WHY? I think completeness of feedback implies a certain level of devotion on my part to making the manuscript in question the best book it can possibly be.

Yet I was told this morning that, to put it mildly, I was incorrect about this. Apparently, I only suggest changes as a most effective means of ripping the author’s heart from his chest, stomping upon it, pasting it back together, sautéing it in a nice balsamic vinegar reduction, then feeding the resulting stew to, if not the author, than at least the neighbor’s Rottweiler.

Imagine my surprise.

This was for a manuscript I LIKED, incidentally. I had made a grand total of ONE suggested change, in the midst of oceans of praise.

So what did I do? What editors and agents moan privately to one another about having to do for their clients all the time, be preternaturally patient until the “But it’s MY work! It MUST be perfect!” tantrum petered out. Until then, further discussion was simply pointless.

Because, in the first moments after receiving critique, creative people are often utterly, completely, fabulously unreasonable about it. They not only want to shoot the messenger – they want to broil her slowly on a spit over red-hot coals like a kabob, and THEN yell at her. Fear of this stripe of reaction, in case you were wondering, is the most common reason most people will give only that very limited “Oh, it was fine” feedback after reading a friend’s manuscript. They’re just trying to keep their heads attached to their bodies, rather than skewered upon some irate writer’s pike.

It’s also the usual excuse — which you may believe or not, as you see fit, considering the source — that most agents give for why they send out form letter rejections, rather than specific, thoughtful replies to requested submissions. Their stated reason for form letter responses to queries, of course, is sheer volume: they don’t have time to reply to each individually. But obviously, if they have the time to read 50 pages, they have time to scrawl a couple of lines about how it could be improved. The fact is, they don’t want to: they don’t want to engender an angry response that might turn into an endless debate about the merits of a book they’ve already decided, for whatever reason, that they do not want.

Since most writers are peaches and lambs and every other kind of pacific, cooperative kind of entity you can think of most of the time, this fear is perhaps overblown. Most of us are perfectly capable of taking a little constructive criticism in the spirit it is intended. But every so often, some author loses it – and for that author’s display of temper, alas, we all pay.

That’s the official logic, anyway.

So now you know: if you want to establish yourself as a dream client in the eyes of the average agent or editor, who tends to hide under a chair after giving even the mildest feedback to her clients, greet the first emergence of any feedback with apparent tolerance; give yourself time to calm down before you argue. To buy yourself time, say something like, “Wow, what an interesting idea. I’ll have to think about that. Thanks.” Then take the rest of the day off, and don’t so much as peek at your manuscript again until you’ve had a chance to calm down.

Say this, even if in that moment, the suggestion proffered seems to you like the worst idea since Hannibal decided to march all of those elephants over the Alps to get at Rome. Because at that precise second, you are not just an individual writer, concerned with the integrity of your own manuscript: you are representing all of us. Show that, contrary to our stereotype in the industry as touchy hotheads unwilling to consider changing a single precious word, most of us really are capable of taking a little criticism.

Admittedly, my readers all acting this beautifully in the fact of critique probably sounds better to me right now than it might had I not just been scathed for trying to help out. Whenever I am confronted with a defensive critique-rejecter, I must confess, I seldom think of cooperative, thoughtful revisers with any abhorrence.

Feedback, though, and the revision process in general, ought to be treated with more respect by everyone concerned. There really ought to be a muse, if not an ancient Greek goddess, of manuscript revision, someone to whom we can pray for patience and tolerance in getting feedback on our work.

A muse of revision might conceivably make better sense to court than a muse of inspiration. Few of us writers like to admit it, but if we write works longer than a postcard, we all inevitably worship in private at this muse’s altar. Why should the initial inspiration gals get all the credit, when so much of the work that makes a book wonderful is in the re-editing?

Editing gets a bad rap, and self-editing even worse. You can’t spend half an hour in a gathering of more than three serious writers without hearing someone bitch about it. Oh, it’s so hard; oh, it’s so tedious. Oh, I’m sick to death of revising my manuscript. If I have to spend another instant of my life reworking that one pesky sentence, I shall commit unspeakable mayhem on the nearest piece of shrubbery.

We don’t describe the initial rush to write that pesky sentence that way, though, do we? Our muse leaps out at us, flirts with us, seduces us so effectively that we look up a paragraph later and find that six hours have gone by. Our muse is the one that gives us that stunned look in our eyes that our loved ones know so well, the don’t-call-me-for-breakfast glaze that tells the neighborhood that we will not be available for normal human interaction for awhile.

Ah, but the muses of initial inspiration don’t always stick around, do they? No, the flighty trollops too often knock you over the head with a great idea, then leave you in the lurch in mid-paragraph. Do they call? Do they write? Don’t they know we worry ourselves sick, we writers, wondering if they are ever going to come back?

Not so Ataraxia, the muse of revision. (Hey, I came up with the notion, so I get to name her. According to the ancient philosopher Sextus Empiricus — I know, I know; you can’t throw a piece of bread at a party these days without hitting someone chatting about Sextus Empiricus, but bear with me here — ataraxia is the state of tranquility attained only at the end of intense self-examination. Ataraxia is the point at which you stop second-guessing yourself: the ultimate goal of revision, no?)

Ataraxia yanks you back to your computer, scolding; she reads over the shoulder of your dream agent; editors at major publishing houses promise her their firstborn. While being a writer would be a whole lot more fun if completing a good book could be accomplished merely by consorting with her flightier muse sisters, party girls at heart, sooner or later, we all need to appeal to Ataraxia for help.

Best to stay on her good side: for starters, let’s all pledge not to scream at the kind souls who give us necessary feedback. Yes, I suspect Ataraxia would really enjoy that sort of sacrifice.

I’ll confess, I have not always treated Ataraxia with respect myself. How tedious revision is, I have thought from time to time, inventing reasons not to sit down and put in a few hours of solid work on a project. What a bore, to have to go back to a book I consider finished and tweak it: hour after hour of staring at just a few sentences, changing perhaps an adjective or two every ten minutes. Yawn.

Over time, though, I have started to listen to what I was actually telling myself when I complained about revision. It wasn’t that I objected to putting in the time; there have been few days in the last decade when I haven’t spent many hours in front of my computer or scribbling on a notepad; I’m a writer, so that’s what I do. It wasn’t that I felt compelled to rework my novel for the fiftieth time, or, in cases where I’ve been incorporating feedback, that I thought the changes would be bad for the book.

No, my real objection, I realized, is that I expected the revision process to bore me to tears. Am I alone in this?

But Ataraxia watches over even the most ungrateful of writers, so she whacked me over the head with an epiphany: a manuscript is a living thing, and to allow it to change can be to allow it to grow in new and exciting ways.

So now I know: whenever I start procrastinating about necessary revisions, it is a pretty sure sign that I had been thinking of my text as something inert, passive, a comatose patient who might die if I inadvertently lopped off too much on the editing table. What if, instead of thinking of revision as nitpicking, I used it to lift some conceptual barriers within the book? What if I incorporated my first readers’ suggestions about my memoir in a way that made the book better? Not just in terms of sentences and paragraphs, but in terms of content?

Just a suggestion: instead of regarding feedback as an attack upon the book, a foreign attempt to introduce outside ideas into an organically perfect whole or a negative referendum upon your abilities as a writer, perhaps it would be more productive to treat critique (your own included) as a hint that maybe the flagged section could use an influx of fresh creativity.

Try to move beyond just making grammatical changes and inserting begrudging sentences where your first readers have asked, “But why is this happening here?” If you have stared at a particular sentence or paragraph for hours on end, changing it and changing it back — c’mon, you know we all do it — naturally, you’re going to get bored. Naturally, you are going to loathe that kind of revision.

But the next time you find yourself in that kind of editing loop, set the text you’re working on aside for a few minutes. Pick up a pen (or open a new document) and write that section afresh, in new words, as if for the first time. No peeking at your old text, and no cheating by using sentences you recall writing the first time around. Allow yourself to use different analogies, to reveal character and event differently. Give yourself time to play with your ideas and the way you want to say them before you go back to the original text.

Then walk away for ten minutes. Maybe you could do some stretching exercises, to avoid repetitive strain injuries, or at least take a stroll around your house. Feed the cat. Plot a better way to get legions of elephants over the Alps. Anything to get your eyes off the printed word for awhile.

And then, when you return, read the original version and the new. You probably will not want to substitute one for the other entirely, but is there any part of the new version that could be incorporated into the old in an interesting way? Are there sentences that can be switched productively, or some new ones that could be added to the old? Are there arguments or character points in the new that would enliven the old?

What you’re doing with this exercise is transforming revision from a task where you are fine-tuning something essentially finished into an opportunity to infuse the manuscript with fresh ideas at problematic points. Conceptually, it’s a huge difference, and I guarantee it will make the revision process a lot more fun.

As Ataraxia wants it to be, I suspect.

Okay, I feel less self-indulgent now: I think I have wrested some good, practical advice out of my very, very bad day. And naturally, unlike your garden-variety agent or editor, I’m not going to give up on this writer because of a single loss of temper. Nor, unlike the average writer’s friend with a manuscript, am I going to let the one writer who implied that my feedback on his work was the worst idea since Stalin last said, “I know! Let’s have a purge!” discourage me from giving feedback to others.

But please, the next time you are confronted with feedback that makes your blood boil, take a deep breath before you respond. Think about me, and about Ataraxia, and force yourself to say, “Gee, what an interesting notion. May I think about it, and we can talk about it later?” Then go home and punch a pillow 700 times, if you must, but please, don’t disembowel the messenger.

She may be bringing you a news flash from Ataraxia. Keep up the good work!