Posted on - 2 Comments on A double-take to reexamine title pages — and a brief detour into why WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW still isn’t a bad idea

A double-take to reexamine title pages — and a brief detour into why WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW still isn’t a bad idea

Before I launch into the intro to today’s topic — and yes, I’m aware that a preamble to a prologue intended to introduce a re-run post is a tad confusing on the temporal front, especially in a medium as couched in the now as a blog — I can’t resist doing something that I very rarely do here: reviewing a movie. Since presumably you, dear readers, presumably visit this blog (and, I hope, revisit often) to peruse my observations on writing, submission, and the author’s life, I tend to assume, perhaps wrongly, that you’re not necessarily interested in my opinions of, say, every movie I see or play I attend. And even if you did, it’s seldom that I feel compelled to comment on a first-release movie, even if, as in this case, I saw in a film festival a couple of months prior to its release.

Bottle Shock, however, happens to be set in the Napa Valley, where I grew up — to be precise, it’s set about ten miles from the Zinfandel vineyard that surrounded my house. It’s about winemaking, my father’s profession. Heck, it’s largely set in a winery where he used to work, and ostensibly, at least, about people who used to cheer at my 4th-grade softball games.

So I don’t feel entirely unqualified to point out that this may well be the least-accurate story ever made about winemaking, from a technical perspective — including, believe it or not, the episode of Falcon Crest featured winery owners rushing out into the vineyards in $200 designer jeans to pick grapes (which leave permanent stains). Or the howls of laughter at A Walk in the Clouds, where winery owners rushed out into the vineyards to waft warm air onto grapes that were almost ready to pick, exclaiming that the crop would be ruined. (As it might have, if the frost in the film had occurred two seasons before, when the vines were in bud.)

So why, in the face of such robust competition, does Bottle Shock win my vote for worst of all time? Well, let me put it this way: the gaffes in the other stories were merely improbable; characters did things in Bottle Shock that would not only have ruined the wine that (spoiler alert) was destined to make the winery in question famous — they broke laws that would have brought the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms running into the cellar, warrants a-blazing.

Seriously, the filmmakers seemed to be unaware that wine is ever aged in bottles, or that grapes need to ripen before being harvested. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, are state secrets, even in California.

As it that weren’t enough, someone had apparently told most of the actors that the purpose of tasting wine was to have it in one’s mouth for as short a time as humanly possible and never smell it at all — which made the always-excellent Alan Rickman and genuinely talented Freddie Rodriguez, who evidently took the time to learn how the experts they’re playing actually DO taste wine, just look ridiculous. Poor Mssr. Rodriguez (whose casting is, as nearly as I can tell, the film’s sole acknowledgment that most of the actual physical labor involved in winemaking is not done by blonds) is even at one point forced to syphon a bottle’s worth of red wine from a barrel STORED IN DIRECT SUNLIGHT (as opposed to the deep, dark, cool cellars those in the trade favor) directly into an ALREADY-LABELED BOTTLE that already has a capsule on it, carry it about 20 paces away, and pour it into a pair of glasses, as if he had no idea what a cork is for.

And he’s supposed to be the film’s GOOD winemaker. I sincerely hope your next role treats you better, sir.

Actually, I think that novelists who set their books in glamorous-but-unfamiliar settings can learn quite a lot from this movie — and not merely that the old saw write what you know is darned good advice.

Technical gaffes like this are NOTORIOUSLY common in submissions: accountants don’t seem to know much about tax law; policemen parrot the Miranda warnings then proceed to violate them by interrogating suspects who have invoked their rights to remain silent and/or speak to an attorney; senators and presidents don’t even have an eighth-grader’s understanding of how the Constitution defines their offices.

I’m not saying that only working surgeons or nurses should write books set in hospitals, of course. But if you’re writing about a profession with which you are unfamiliar, your manuscript is much, much less likely to provoke bad laughter if you do a spot of research before you write.

People who work in wineries tend to be friendly, you know; they’d probably answer a question or two, if a screenwriter or director asked politely.

Another good rule of thumb, as often violated on the page as on the screen, is to make sure that your characters honor the rules of the profession and environment in which you’ve placed them — especially if you’re going to have a character or the narrative tell the reader what those rules are.

Seriously, storytellers violate this precept all the time. In Bottle Shock — to pick an example out of thin air — the viewer is told frequently (and correctly) that it will harm fine wine to shake it, but that doesn’t seem to stop several of the characters from doing it. In fact, in a scene during which the reliably talented Mssr. Rickman gives an impassioned speech to a crowd of onlookers about the vital importance of handling bottles gently, another character who AGREES with him makes his point while, you guessed it, waving a bottle of wine destined for competitive tasting wildly in the air while he pleads.

I swear that I’m not making that up.

Inconsistencies like this can cost a storyline more than the occasional guffaw from an expert — they can knock the reader out of the story. “Wait just a second,” Millicent is likely to say, hastily flipping back fifteen pages, “didn’t Horatio mention in the last chapter that the building would explode if he did what I’ve just seen him do without consequence on page 45?”

Sounds like another great reason to READ YOUR ENTIRE MANUSCRIPT IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD, doesn’t it?

Okay, I think I’ve hammered on the consistency anvil enough for one day. Let’s move on to the topic at hand.

For the last couple of days, I have been showing examples of title pages, as part of my ongoing series on standard format for manuscripts. After I posted yesterdays exemplars, I realized that it had been quite a few months since I had explained the logic behind the professional title page. It seemed, then, like a good time to run through it again.

Don’t worry — this doesn’t mean that I’ve abandoned the What Does Standard Format Look Like, Anyway? series; it will be back a few days hence, I assure you.

In the meantime, enjoy!

I want to spend today talking about the very first thing an agent or editor will see IN your submission: the title page.

Yes, Virginia, EVERY submission needs one, as does every contest entry. Even if you are sending chapters 2-38 after an agent has pronounced herself delighted with chapter 1, you should send a title page with every hunk of writing you submit.

I know, I know: pretty much nobody ASKS you to include one (although contests sometimes include it explicitly in the rules), but a manuscript, even a partial one, that is not topped by one looks undressed to folks in the publishing industry. So much so that it would be completely out of the question for an agent to submit a book to a publishing house without one.

Why? Because, contrary to popular belief amongst writers, it is not just a billboard for your book’s title and your chosen pen name. It’s the only page of the manuscript that contains your contact information, book category, and word count.

In words, it is both the proper place to announce how you may best be reached and a fairly sure indicator of how much experience you have dealing with the publishing industry.

Why the latter? Because aspiring writers so often either omit it entirely or include the wrong information on it. You, however, are going to do it right — and that is going to make your submission look very good by comparison.

You’re welcome.

There is information that should be on the title page, and information that shouldn’t; speaking with my professional editing hat on for a moment, virtually every manuscript I see has a non-standard title page, so it is literally the first thing I, or any editor, will correct in a manuscript.

I find this trend sad, because for every ms. I can correct before they are sent to agents and editors, there must be hundreds of thousands that make similar mistakes. Even sadder, the writers who make mistakes are their title pages are very seldom TOLD what those mistakes are. Their manuscripts are merely rejected on the grounds of unprofessionalism, usually without any comment at all.

I do not consider this fair to aspiring writers — but once again, I do not, alas, run the universe, nor do I make the rules that I report to you. If I set up the industry’s norms, I would decree that every improperly-formatted title page would be greeted with a very kind letter, explaining precisely what was done wrong, saying that it just doesn’t count this time, and inviting the writer to revise and resubmit.

Perhaps, in the worst cases, the letter could be sent along with a coupon for free ice cream. Chances are, the poor writer is going to be shocked to learn that the title page of which he is so proud is incorrectly formatted.

But I digress.

The single most common mistake: a title page that is not in the same font and point size as the rest of the manuscript.

Since the rise of the personal computer and decent, inexpensive home printers, it has become VERY common for writers to use immense type and fancy typefaces for title pages, or even photographs, designs, or other visually appealing whatsits.

From a creative point of view, the tendency is completely understandable: if you have 50 or 100 fonts at your disposal, why not use the prettiest? And while you’re at it, why not use a typeface that’s visible from five feet away?

For one extremely simple reason: professional title pages are noteworthy for only two things, their visual spareness and the consequent ease of finding information upon them.

It’s rare, in fact, that any major US agency would allow its clients to send out a title page in anything BUT 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier for a submission, since these are the standards for the industry.

Why these fonts? The logic is complicated here, but in essence, it boils down to an affection for the bygone days of the typewriter: Times is the equivalent of the old elite typeface; Courier is pica. (I know, I know: there are other explanations floating around the Internet, but as this is what people in the industry have actually said when asked about it for the last 25 years, I’m going to continue to report it here.)

More to the point, agents and editors are used to estimating word counts as 250 words/page for the Times family and 200/page for the Courier family. When a submitting writer uses other fonts, it throws off calculations considerably.

Mind you, in almost every instance, an actual word count will reveal that these estimates are woefully inaccurate, sometimes resulting in discrepancies of tens of thousands of words over the course of a manuscript. But if you check the stated word counts of published books from the major houses, you’ll almost always find that the publisher has relied upon the estimated word count, not the actual.

Unless an agency or publishing house SPECIFICALLY states a preference for actual word count, then, you’re usually better off sticking to estimation. Trust me, everyone concerned is already aware that the estimates are a reflection of length on the page, rather than the total you would have reached had you been making a hash mark every time you typed a word.

I wish that this were more often made clear at literary conferences; it would save masses of writerly chagrin. When an agent or editor at conference makes everyone in the room groan by announcing that she would have a hard time selling a novel longer than 100,000 words, she is generally referring not to a book precisely 100,012 words long, but a 400-page manuscript.

Is that hoopla I hear out there the rejoicing of those of you who tend to run a mite long? Or perhaps those who just realized that unless an edit cuts or adds an entire page to the manuscript, it isn’t going to affect the estimated word count? These are not insignificant benefits for following industry norms, are they?

So let’s take it as given that your title page should be in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier. All of it, even the title. No exceptions — and no pictures, designs, or other bits of whimsy. You may place the title in boldface, if you like, or in all capitals, but that’s as elaborate as it is safe to get.

DEFINITELY do not make the title larger than the rest of the text. It may look cool to you, but to professional eyes — I hate to tell you this, but better you find out from me — it looks rather like a child’s picture book.

Do I hear disgruntled voices out there? “Oh, come on,” I hear some of you saying, “the FONT matters that much? What about the content of the book? What about my platform? What about my brilliant writing? Surely, the typeface choice pales in comparison to these crucial elements?”

You’re right, of course — it does, PROVIDED you can get an agent or editor to sit down and read your entire submission.

Which happens far less often than aspiring writers tend to think. Ask any agent — it’s not at all uncommon for a submission to be rejected on page 1. So isn’t it better if the submission hasn’t already struck the screener as unprofessional prior to page 1?

Unfortunately, this is a business of snap decisions, especially in the early stages of the road to publication, where impressions are often formed, well, within seconds. If the cosmetic elements of your manuscript imply a lack of knowledge of industry norms, your manuscript is entering its first professional once-over with one strike against it.

It seem be silly — in fact, I would go so far as to say that it IS silly — but it’s true, nevertheless.

Even queries in the proper typefaces tend to be better received. If you are feeling adventurous, go ahead and experiment, sending out one set of queries in Times New Roman and one in Helvetica, and see which gets a better response.

As any agency screener will tell you after you have bought him a few drinks (hey, I try to leave no stone left unturned in my quest to find out what these people want to see in submissions, so I may pass it along to you), the Times New Roman queries are more likely to strike agents (and agents’ assistants, once they sober up again) as coming from a well-prepared writer, one who will not need to be walked through every nuance of the publication process to come.

Yes, I know — it seems shallow. But think of conforming to title page requirements in the same light as following a restaurant’s dress code. No one, not even the snottiest maitre d’, seriously believes that forcing a leather-clad punk to don a dinner jacket or a tie will fundamentally alter the disposition of the wearer for the duration of the meal. But it does guarantee a certain visual predictability to the dining room, at least insofar as one overlooks facial piercings, tattoos, and other non-sartorial statements of individuality.

And, frankly, setting such standards gives the maitre d’ an easy excuse to refuse entry on an impartial basis, rather than by such mushy standards as his gut instinct that the lady in the polyester pantsuit may be consorting with demons in her off time. Much less confrontational to ask her to put on a skirt or leave.

Sending your submission into an agency or publishing house properly dressed minimizes the chances of a similar knee-jerk negative reaction. It’s not common that a submission is rejected on its title page alone (although I have heard of its happening), but an unprofessional title page — or none at all — does automatically lower expectations.

Or, to put it another way, Millicent the screener is going to be watching the guy with the tie a whole lot less critically than the guy with the studded leather dog collar and 27 visible piercings, and is far less likely to dun the former for using the wrong fork for his salad.

Tomorrow, I am going to go over the two most common formats for a professional title page — and, if my newly-learned computer trick works, give you some concrete examples. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on What does standard format look like, anyway? Part II, or, ’tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before

What does standard format look like, anyway? Part II, or, ’tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before

Hello, campers —

Still coughing up a storm on my end, so I’m going to keep today’s intro short, if not precisely sweet: here, for your comparing pleasure, are examples of properly-formatted title and first pages of manuscripts. Please take a good, hard look at ‘em, so you may gain a sense of just how obvious the differences are to Millicent (of whom more follows below) and her submission-scanning cronies.

Why am I showing both, rather than merely positive examples? Because until a writer has seen many, many professionally-formatted book manuscripts, he may not grasp how something as small and seemingly insignificant as a font choice might make a HUGE cosmetic difference. What may seem like a miniscule deviation from standard format to you honestly will leap off the page at Millicent.

Allow me to repeat that, because it’s important: because professional book manuscripts all look the same way, Millicent is not going to have to strain at all to pick up on ways in which the submission in front of her differs. She can spot formatting problems from several paces away.

Don’t believe me? Read on.

Yesterday, I began a compare-and-contrast exercise, showing common examples of the first pages of submissions and fine-tuning your binoculars so you might see how our old friend Millicent the Agency Screener might view them. As I sincerely hope those of you who read the post can attest, it was pretty obvious that the professionally-formatted title page won the beauty contest hands-down.

Yet after I posted it late last night, I heard wee pixie voices bearding me. “But Anne,” I heard these winsome creatures pipe, “aren’t you assuming that Millicent’s pretty shallow? Whenever I’ve heard agents and editors asked at conferences or on their websites about whether cosmetic issues can get a manuscript rejected, they always disclaim the notion with scorn. Isn’t it the writing that matters, ultimately?”

Well, yes and no, querying sprites. Naturally, the writing matters MOST — but it is not, as many aspiring writers assume, the ONLY issue in how a professional reader will perceive the polish of a manuscript.

It is, however, generally the one that colors a first reading most. Although one does hear of cases where a kind, literature-loving agent has looked past bizarre formatting in order to see a potential client’s, well, potential, one also hears of isolated cases where a manuscript rife with spelling and grammatical errors gets picked up, or one that has relatively little chance of selling well in the current market. The age of miracles has not entirely passed.

But — and this is a BIG but — these cases are talked about because they are exceptions, and rare ones at that. 999 times out of 1000, any of these problems will result in, if not instantaneous rejection, then rejection upon Millicent’s lighting upon the next manuscript problem.

So why don’t aspiring writers hear that more often at conferences?

I suspect that’s not just because a sane, sensible individual with a reputation to protect is unlikely to stand up in front of 500 eager potential submitters and say, “Look, if you’re planning to submit a grimy photocopy of your book, or insist upon presenting it in 10-point type, or not indenting your paragraphs, just don’t bother to query me.” Instantly, 500 pens would scrawl on 500 programs, DO NOT QUERY THIS ONE; SHE’S MEAN.

Which would rather defeat the agent’s purpose in coming to the conference to recruit new clients, wouldn’t it?

There’s another reason that they tend be careful: an agent or editor doesn’t have to speak at many conferences (or blog for very long) before recognizing that anything they about submissions is likely to be repeated with the éclat of a proverb for years to come amongst the writing community. I’ve heard offhand comments made from the dais, or even jokes, being debated for hours in conference hallways, and some of Miss Snark’s pronouncements have been more commented upon than St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.

Okay, so that last is a slight exaggeration. My point is, such speakers are in extreme danger of having everything they say quoted back to them as an inflexible rule.

Which is why, I have to say, I don’t feel too many qualms about presenting the rules of standard format as inflexible rules. We are talking, after all, about an industry that both values creativity and considers submitting a book proposal in anything but a black folder dangerously radical.

Presentation issues definitely do matter — which is, again, not to say that the quality of the writing doesn’t. But — and this is a BIG but — rejection decisions are often made on page 1 of a manuscript. Sometimes even within the course of the first paragraph. If the manuscript is hard to read, due to a funky typeface or odd spacing or just plain poor print quality, it may not be read at all.

While these facts are indisputable, the person who announced them this baldly from the dais at a literary conference would be covered head to foot with flung tomatoes in twenty seconds flat.

Again, to the eye of someone who reads manuscripts for a living, professional formatting is simply the least distracting way a book can possibly be presented. Perversely, adhering to the industry’s cosmetic expectations renders it MORE likely that an agent or editor will concentrate upon the beauty of the writing, not less.

So instead of thinking of the rigors of standard format as a series of unimportant (or even silly) superficial choices, try regarding them as translating your calling card, a means of catching Millicent’s tired eye and informing her that this is a manuscript that should be taken seriously.

Because she can’t fall in love with your good writing until she reads it, can she?

Last time, I showed how the first page of text does not, from a professional perspective, make an adequate substitute for a title page. Instead of being a replica of a hoped-for book cover, as many submitters produce, or a shouted-out declaration of the book’s title and who wrote it, the properly-formatted title page is a quiet, practical piece of paper, containing a specific set of marketing information. It should look, in case you missed it, like this:

Like everything else in the manuscript, the title page should be entirely in 12-point type, unless an agent or contest SPECIFICALLY requests otherwise. I’m quite serious about this. No matter how cool your title page looks with 24-point type, resist the urge, because Millicent will be able to tell from across the room if you didn’t:

Take a look at the first example again, then the second. Notice any other dissimilarities?

If you said that Mssr. Smith’s title page included both a slug line (the author’s name and title in the upper right margin of the page) and a page number in the bottom right corner, give yourself a gold star for the day. Add whipped cream and walnut clusters if you mentally added the reason that those additions are incorrect: because the title page is not the first page of text. Technically, it should not be numbered.

This means, incidentally, that the title page should not be counted as one of the 50 pages in those 50 pages the agent of your dreams asked you to submit, either. Nor would it count toward the total number of pages for a contest entry.

On both the title page and elsewhere, I would highly recommend using either Times, Times New Roman, or Courier typefaces, both here and in the manuscript as well, as these are the standards of the industry.

I know, I know: another cosmetic weirdness. But like some of the other strictures of standard format, there’s a pretty good reason for this one: word count estimation is predicated upon these typefaces. The Times family is estimated at 250 words/page; Courier at 200. So a 400-page manuscript in Times New Roman is assumed to be roughly 100,000 words. (To make the math clear, 400 x 250 = 100,000; for further explanation, please see the WORD COUNT category on this list at right.)

Now, in actual fact, it’s probably closer to 115,000 words; as any writer who has compared the estimated word count for her book with the total her word processing program provides, they tend to differ wildly. But word count, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder: a novelist whose title page reported, accurately, that her 400–age novel was 115,000 words might well see it rejected out of hand on the grounds that it was too long.

Why? Well, math may not have been Millicent’s best subject (the inmates of agencies were overwhelmingly English majors), but she can do third-grade math in her head: 115,000 words at 250 words/page would equal a 460-page manuscript.

That’s quite a bit longer than editors tend to expect first novels in most genres to be. In other words, next!

“But Anne,” I hear you cry, “why is Millicent estimating at all? If she wants to know how long it is, why doesn’t she just flip to the last page and check the page number?”

I could give you a long song and dance about how much her wrists hurt from opening all those query envelopes all day, or how her secret midnight e-mail orgies have rendered pinching a torture, but in practice, the answer is far less personal: because the industry doesn’t work that way.

Also, how exactly could she manage to turn to page 400 of a manuscript, when her boss requested that the writer send only the first 50?

Let’s turn to the first page of the submission, to see how much of a difference font and typeface make at first glance. Here’s a correctly-formatted page 1 in Times New Roman:

Pretty spiffy, eh? And definitely not how this opening would appear in a published book, right?

Just for giggles, let’s take a peek at the same page, also correctly formatted, in Courier. Note how many fewer words per page it allows:

Got both of those firmly imbedded in your brainpan? Good. Now format your first pages that way for the rest of your natural life.

Well, my work here is obviously done.

Okay, okay — you want to see why it’s a good idea, don’t you. Take a gander at the SAME first page, not in standard manuscript format. See how many differences you can spot:

Interesting how just a few small formatting changes can alter the presentation, isn’t it? It’s exactly the same WRITING — but it just doesn’t look as professional.

To Millicent, who reads hundreds of pages per day, the differences between the three could not be clearer.

And yet, if we’re going to be honest about it, there were really very few deviations from standard format in the last example. For those of you playing at home, the typeface is Georgia; the chapter title is in the wrong place, and there isn’t a slug line. Also, the page is numbered in the wrong place — the default setting, incidentally, in many word processing programs.

Again, none of these infractions against the rules of standard format are serious enough to cause Millicent to toss a submission aside as soon as she notices them. But when poor formatting is combined with literary experimentation — like, say, that paragraph-long first sentence ol’ Charles managed to cough up — which do you think she is going to conclude, that Dickens is a writer who took the time to polish his craft, or that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing?

Yup. Don’t tempt her to draw the wrong conclusion.

Of course, there is the occasional exception — if you answered that it all depends upon whether Millicent reading it before Dickens is a household name or after, give yourself a gold star for the day. Unless you happen to be famous, I wouldn’t advise taking the risk.

And that, my friends, is why you should pay attention to the little details. The longer you remain in the business, the more those little things will strike you as just, well, matters of right and wrong. As, fortunately or not, they do Millicent and her ilk.

More show-and-tell follows tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on So what does standard format look like, anyway?

So what does standard format look like, anyway?

Hello, campers –

Has everyone recovered from this weekend’s inoculation of professional formatting? It may have left a bit of a sore place, but much better a quick sting than engendering years of rejection without knowing why, I always say. Once you’ve gotten exposed to the correct way to format a book manuscript, chances are that you’ll be immune to formatting problems in the future.

In fact, once you get used to how a professional manuscript looks, any other formatting is going to look downright strange to you.

Stop laughing — I’m quite serious about this. And to prove it to you, I’m going to spend the next few days re-running a series of posts designed to let you see precisely HOW different standard format appears to the pros.

The usual caveats: if the agent of your dreams (or the agent with whom you are currently signed, if they don’t happen to be the same person) has expressed a strong preference for his clients formatting in a manner opposed to what you see here, run with that — but only for submission to that particular agent. Yes, deviations from this format are uncommon, but you’re not going to get anywhere telling an established agent that no one else’s clients are using 18-point Copperplate Gothic Bold, I assure you, and part of working with an agent entails trusting that he knows more about marketing books than you do.

If he doesn’t, you wouldn’t WANT to be working with him, right?

And before my last statement sends anyone out there into that time-honored I’ve-just-signed-but-what-if-I-chose-the-wrong-one? panic, remember this: if you’ve done your homework before you signed, and thus are certain that he has a solid recent track record selling books in your category, you have every reason to have faith in your representative.

The other caveat — and it’s a big one — is that the format I am showing here is for BOOK manuscripts, not articles or short stories. All too often, advice-givers to aspiring writers will conflate the format for one with the other, resulting in a first page that will look incorrect to either. (Although, generally speaking, such guidelines tend to stick closer to the short story format than to the book.)

Let’s hear it for visual aids! Enjoy!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been quiet for the last few days, having recently returned from giving a completely different talk: a species of my favorite class to teach to writers, a blow-by-blow on how VERY different a professional manuscript looks from, well, any other stack of paper an agent or editor might receive in the mail. I love teaching it.

Admittedly, it’s a trifle depressing to watch the inevitable cloud of gloom descend upon my students as they begin to realize just how many small mistakes there are that can result in a manuscript’s getting rejected — but it’s a pure joy to watch those brows unfurrow and those shoulders unclench as their owners learn that there is something they can DO about improving their books’ chances of success.

Over the next few days, I am going to attempt a similar trick at a distance and, like the Flying Wallendas, without a safety net. Drum roll, please: in the spirit of that old chestnut, SHOW, DON’T TELL, I shall demonstrate just how different a manuscript that follows the rules looks from one that doesn’t.

Hold on tight.

Writers often overlook odd formatting as a reason that a manuscript might have been rejected. Certainly, other reasons get a lot more airplay, particularly at writers’ conferences. If you want to take a long, hard look at some of the better-discussed reasons, I would urge you to gird your loins and plunge into the FIRST PAGES AGENTS DISLIKE category at right. For those of you who missed it, last autumn, I went over list of instant-response rejection reasons given by a group of agents going over a stack of actual submissions at a conference, one by painful one.

Yet surprisingly little conference time seems to be devoted to the most common mistakes of them all, deviations from standard format for manuscripts.

Not to be confused with what is correct for published books.

In answer to all of the cries of “Huh?” that elicited from readers new to this site, a professional manuscript SHOULD differ from the published version of the same book in a number of subtle but important ways. All too few aspiring writers realize this, a fact that is unfortunately quite obvious to an agent, editor, contest judge, etc., from practically the moment their eyes light upon a submission.

Why is it so very apparent? Because much of the time, writers new to the business clearly go out of their way to format their submissions to resemble published books, in the mistaken belief that this will make their work seem more professional.

The opposite is generally true — and often, it’s apparent in a professional reader’s first glance at the first page of a submission.

(If the implications of that last assertion made you dizzy — if, for instance, you found yourself picturing our old pal Millicent the agency screener pulling a submitted manuscript out of its envelope, casting a critical eye over the first page, hooting, and stuffing the whole thing into the handy SASE — try placing your head between your knees and breathing deeply. I’ll wait until you recover.)

And then follow up with a hard truth: the VAST majority of submissions are rejected not only on page 1, but within the first few lines of page 1. Clearly, Millicent arrives at her conclusions rather quickly.

How can she? Because, unfortunately, aspiring writers so often render rejection very, very easy by submitting manuscripts that simply scream out, “Here’s someone who would benefit from a better knowledge of how publishing works.”

The most common initial signal is the absence of any title page whatsoever. Many submitters, for reasons best known to themselves, omit the title page altogether — often, I suspect, because they are unaware that a professional book-length manuscript ALWAYS has a title page.

For one very, very simple reason: a properly-formatted title page tells an agent PRECISELY how to contact the brilliant author who wrote it — and tells an editor PRECISELY how to contact the agent who represents her. But of that, more below.

To set your minds at ease, forgetting to include a title page almost certainly won’t prevent Millicent from reading your submission at all; she tends to read even the most bizarrely-formatted submissions for at least a line or two. But that initial impression of an author’s lack of professionalism — or, to call it by a kinder name, of having a lot to learn about how the publishing industry works — does often translate into a rather jaundiced reading eye for what comes next.

Why? Well, let’s take a peek through her reading glasses, shall we? The first thing Millicent sees when she opens the average requested materials package is something like this:

Or like this:

Or, heaven help us, like this:

So tell me: why might Millicent take one look at these and conclude that their respective submitters could use a good class on manuscript formatting?

I see all of you long-term blog readers out there with your hands in the air, jumping up and down, eager to tell everyone what’s wrong with this as a first page of text — and you’re absolutely right, of course. We’re going to be talking about precisely those points in the days to come.

For now, however, I want you to concentrate upon how this example has failed as both a title page and a first page of text: by not including the information that Millicent would expect to see on either.

What makes me so sure she would find this discovery, at best, disappointing? Because what she (or her boss agent, or an editor, or a contest judge) would have expected to see on top of that pile of paper was this:

This is a standard manuscript title page for the same book — rather different, isn’t it? Visibly different, in fact, from several paces away, even if Millicent isn’t wearing her reading glasses.

Again, submitting the first example rather than the second would not necessarily be instantly and automatically fatal to a manuscript’s chances, of course. Most of the time, Millicent will go ahead and plunge into that first paragraph of text anyway.

However, human nature and her blistering reading schedule being what they are (for those of you new to this screener’s always-rushed ways, she has a stack of manuscripts up to her chin to screen — and that’s at the end of a long day of screening queries; manuscript submission is in addition to that), if she has already decided that a submission is flawed, just how charitable an eye do you think she is likely to cast upon the NEXT problem on the page?

Uh-huh. To use her favorite word: next!

To be fair to Millicent, while it may well be uncharitable of her to leap to the conclusion that Faux Pas’ or Ridiculous’ manuscript is likely to be unpolished because they did not include a proper title page, agencies do have a vested interest in signing writers who present themselves professionally. For one thing, they’re cheaper to represent, in practical terms: the agent doesn’t have to spend as much time working with them, getting their manuscripts ready to submit to editors.

And no agent in his right mind would send out a manuscript that didn’t include a standard title page. It serves a number of important — nay, vital — marketing functions.

Let’s take another look at the professional version, shall we? So you don’t have to keep scrolling up and down the page, here it is again:

How is this sheet of paper a better piece of marketing material than Faux Pas or Ridiculous’ first page?

Well, right off the bat, it tells a prospective agent or editor what kind of book it is, as well as its approximate length. (If you do not know how to estimate the number of words in a manuscript, or why you should use an estimate rather than relying upon your word processor’s count, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.) Both of these are pieces of information that will tell Millicent instantly whether the submission in her hand would meet the requirements of the editors to whom her agency tends to sell.

For instance, if her boss had decided not to represent Action/Adventure anymore, or if editors at the major houses had started saying that they were only interested in seeing Action/Adventure books longer than 90,000 words, Rightly Stepped would be out of luck.

But then, being a savvy submitter, ol’ Rightly would also want his work to be represented by an agent who just ADORES very long Action/Adventure novels — and regularly goes to lunch with scads and scads of editors who feel precisely the same way, right?

The standard title page also tells Millicent precisely how to contact the author to offer representation — and that’s a very, very good thing for everyone concerned. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: it’s ALWAYS in an aspiring writer’s interest to make it easy for an agent to help her.

I might be wrong, of course, but I suspect that NOT forcing Millicent to forage through the mountain of paper on her desk to find a misplaced cover letter with your phone number on it MIGHT be a good start.

By contrast, Faux Pas’ first page doesn’t really do anything but announce the title of the book and leap right into the story. That’s one underachieving piece of paper.

Some writers attempt to consolidate the proper functions of the title page and first page of text into a single sheet of paper. This format is particularly common for contest entries, for some reason. Let’s take another look at Ridiculous and Faux Pas’ submissions:


While such a top page does indeed include the requisite information Millicent or her boss would need to contact the author (although Faux Pas’ does it better, by including more means of contact), cramming it onto the first page of text doesn’t really achieve anything but saving a piece of paper. It doesn’t even shorten the manuscript or contest entry, technically speaking: the title page is never included in a page count; that’s why pagination begins on the first page of text.

I shall go into what DOES belong on the first page of text tomorrow, with accompanying visual aids. For today, let’s keep it simple: all I ask is that you would look at the proper title and the unprofessional examples side by side.

Got all of those images firmly in your mind? Good. Now weigh the probability that someone who reads as many manuscripts per day as Millicent — or her boss, or the editor to whom her boss likes to sell books — would NOT notice a fairly substantial difference in the presentation. Assess the probability of that perception’s coloring any subsequent reading of the manuscript in question.

Kind of obvious, once you know the difference, isn’t it?

Before I sign off for today, and while you’ve got R.Q. Snafu’ sexample still in the front of your mind, let me briefly address the still surprisingly common writerly belief that the industry will automatically take a submission by a woman more seriously if the author submits it under her initials, rather than under her given first name. J.K. Rowling aside, this just isn’t true, at least in fiction circles.

So unless you have always hated your parents for christening you Susan, you won’t really gain anything professionally by using initials in your nom de plume instead. And even if you did, why not publish under a name you actually like instead?

That’ll show your Susan-loving parents.

I just ruffled a few feathers out there, didn’t I? “But Anne,” I hear an initialed purist exclaim, “I don’t want to be judged as a FEMALE writer — I want to be judged as a WRITER. What’s wrong with removing gender markers altogether?”

Well, there’s nothing wrong with it per se, Susan, except that these days, it almost invariably results in Millicent’s seeing such initials and thinking, “Oh, this is a female writer who doesn’t want to be identified as one,” rather than “Gee, I wonder who this mystery person without a first name is. I’m just going to leap right into this manuscript with no gender-based expectations at all.”

Why will Millie have this reaction, you ask? Because female writers — and only female writers — have been submitting this way for a couple of hundred years now. It’s not all that hard a code to crack.

Also, it’s logic that historically, male authors have virtually never used — except, of course, that hugely prolific and apparently immortal author, Anonymous. Even during periods when the most popular and respected novelists have been women (and there have been quite a few in the history of English prose, contrary to what your high school English textbook probably implied), when someone named Stanley Smith wrote a novel, the title page has generally said so.

Because, you see, even back then, readers would have assumed S. Smith the novelist was a nice lady named Susan.

Something else for initial-favoring fiction writers to consider: in North America, women buy the overwhelming majority of novels — and not just women’s fiction, either. Literary fiction readers (and agents, and editors) tend to have two X chromosomes — and some of them have been known to prefer reading books by Susans rather than Roberts. I just mention.

All that being said, the choice to initial or not is entirely up to you — or, more accurately, to you and your agent. Some sets of initials look cool in print, just as some names look better than others on book jackets. Or so claimed my father, the intrepid fellow who demanded that the maternity ward nurse convey him to a typewriter to see how my name looked in print before committing to filling out my birth certificate. (And yes, for those of you who have wondered Anne Mini IS in fact my given name; it just happens to look great in print, thanks to a little forethought.)

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Standard format, part III: RIP, Aleksandr Isaevich.

Standard format, part III: RIP, Aleksandr Isaevich.

Hello, campers –

Yes, I’m still dictating my posts — or, to be precise, my commentaries on my posts — and my poor, loyal volunteer typist du jour has been listening to me complain about the press coverage of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s recent death. My primary criticism: if you weren’t already familiar with his work, I don’t think most of the obituaries out there would give you much incentive to start reading him. Which honestly is a shame; he was an intriguing writer.

Think I’m over-reacting? Okay, here’s a test: read, watch, or listen to any of the standard obits out today, and tell me if they give you enough information to answer the truly basic question Did this man write fiction or nonfiction?

Actually, this issue has dogged his work since THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO first came out: it’s a novel, clearly billed as such, yet reviewers, readers, and even academic Sovietologists have a fascinating tendency to respond to the book as if it were a memoir.

Fascinating, considering how much ACTUAL nonfiction he published on the subject.

Think I’m over-reacting again? Check out all of those obituaries that simply describe this truly remarkable book as the story of Solzhenitsyn’s struggle to stay alive during his eight years in a prison camp. Which it is based upon, of course — but if memory serves, a heck of a lot of the novel follows other characters, often on the other side of a rather large country.

So how are we to account for all of those academic articles and books that cite THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO as the NONFICTION source of, say, private conversations between Stalin and his cronies, chats that historically took place (if they took place) when the author was by all accounts firmly locked up over a thousand miles away?

As both a memoirist and a novelist, it fascinates me how frequently readers seem to want to believe that books written as fiction are in fact true stories and books written as memoir are false — a desire that historically dates back practically to the advent of the novel as an art form. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, for instance, was ROUTINELY asked after the publication of FRANKENSTEIN whether her late husband and Lord Byron REALLY raised a corpse from the dead, and one has only to look at the current hyper-critical memoir market to see the great suspicion with which real-life accounts are treated in the post-A MILLION LITTLE PIECES world.

How much of Solzhenitsyn’s novels were autobiographical? Only he can answer that, of course, and now, he’s probably past caring much about his press. But now that we can’t ask him directly, shouldn’t we respect the labels that he placed upon his own work, rather than simply overruling him now that he’s not around to defend his choices?

Enough social criticism. Back to practicalities.

I’ve been revisiting the strictures of standard format for manuscripts, and like many visits from old cronies from childhood, it’s been going on BIT too long. Oh, yes, I said childhood: picture me as a ten-year-old, saying, “But WHY do I have to type my book report when no one else does? And who cares if the margins are precisely 1-inch?” Or as a junior high schooler, shaking my head over a short story upon which my teacher had simply written “Good!” but whose margins were now filled with professional advice from kith and kin how to render it publishable in The New Yorker.

Years of therapy, of course, but I do I ever know how to format a manuscript!

Because I love you people, I’m not going to share just how young I was when my father started urging me to read THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. Years of therapy, indeed.

After a while, the impulse to conform to the rules of standard format becomes second nature, you’ll be happy to hear, a learned instinct quite useful once one begins writing on deadline. To a writer for whom proper formatting has become second nature, there is no last-minute scramble to change the text. It came into the world correct – which, in turn, saves time.

Believe me, there will be times in your career when you don’t have the time to proofread as closely as you would like, when that half an hour it would take to reformat is the difference between making and missing your deadline. The more successful you are as a writer – ANY kind of writer — the more often you will be in a hurry, generally speaking. No one has more last-minute deadlines than a writer with a book contract.

The down side, though, is that once people — like, say, the average agent, editor, or Millicent — have spent enough time staring at professionally-formatted manuscripts, anything else starts to look, well, unprofessional. From that view, it’s a short hop to the industry’s pervasive belief that heck, every writer knows that printed books and manuscripts are supposed to look different.

Although how an aspiring writer who reads a lot but has never seen a professional manuscript is supposed to find that out, I do not know.

So back to the rules. To recap from the last two days:

(1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper.

(2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way.

(3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified. By definition, manuscripts should NOT resemble published books in this respect.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New — unless you’re writing screenplays, in which case you may only use Courier.

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

(6) Do NOT use boldface anywhere in the manuscript BUT on the title page — and not even there, necessarily.

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered EXCEPT the title page.

(8) Each page of the manuscript (other than the title page) should have a standard slug line in the header. The page number should appear in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page.

(9) The first page of each chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title appearing on the FIRST line of the page, NOT on the line immediately above where the text begins.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.

(11) Every submission should include a title page, even partial manuscripts.

Everyone clear on all that? Good. Let’s move on.

(12) The beginning of EVERY paragraph should be indented five spaces. No exceptions, EVER.

To put it another way: NOTHING you send to anyone in the industry should EVER be in block-style business format. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but if you have been submitting manuscripts with block-formatted paragraphs, they probably have been being rejected unread.

I know: maddening. I also know that I mentioned this in passing a couple of days ago, so I suspect that you’re not entirely shocked by this development. Here’s a bit more explanation of this odd phenomenon.

To publishing types, any document with no indentations, skipping a line between paragraphs, and the whole shebang left-justified carries the stigma of (ugh) business correspondence — and that’s definitely not good. Despite the fact that everyone from CEOs to the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena have been known to use block format from time to time(and blogs are set up to use nothing else), technically, non-indented paragraphs are not proper for English prose.

Do you really want the person you’re trying to impress with your literary genius to wonder about your literacy? I thought not.

And which do you think is going to strike format-minded industry professionals as more literate, a query letter in business format or one in correspondence format (indented paragraphs, date and signature halfway across the page, no skipped line between paragraphs)?

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

Trust me on this one: indent your paragraphs in any document that’s ever going to pass under the nose of anyone even remotely affiliated with the publishing industry.

Including the first paragraph of every chapter. Yes, published books — particularly mysteries, I notice — often begin chapters and sections without indentation. But again, that lack of indentation was the editor’s choice, not the author’s, and copying it in a submission, no matter to whom it is intended as an homage, might get your work knocked out of consideration.

(13) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.

The ONLY exception: you may skip an extra line to indicate a section break in the text. The * * * section break is more or less obsolete; no one will fault you for using it, but still, it’s no longer necessary in a submission to an agency or publishing house. (But do check contest rules carefully, because many competitions still require them.)

Really, this rule is just common sense — so it’s a continual surprise to professional readers how often we see manuscripts that are single-spaced with a line skipped between paragraphs (much like blog format, seen here).

Why surprising? Well, since the entire manuscript should be double-spaced with indented paragraphs, there is no need to skip a line to indicate a paragraph break. (Which is, in case you were not aware of it, what a skipped line between paragraph means in a single-spaced or non-indented document.) In a double-spaced document, a skipped line means a section break, period.

Also — and this is far from insignificant, from a professional reader’s point of view — it’s COMPLETELY impossible to edit a single-spaced document, either in hard copy or on screen. The eye skips between lines too easily, and in hard copy, there’s nowhere to scrawl comments like Mr. Dickens, was it the best of times or was it the worst of times? It could hardly have been both!

So why do aspiring writers so often blithely send off manuscripts with skipped lines, single-spaced or otherwise? My guess would be for one of two reasons: either they think business format is proper English formatting (which it isn’t) or they’re used to seeing skipped lines in print. Magazine articles, mostly.

But — feel free to shout it along with me now; you know the words — A MANUSCRIPT SHOULD NOT RESEMBLE A PUBLISHED PIECE OF WRITING.

(14) NOTHING in a manuscript should be underlined. Titles of songs and publications, as well as words in foreign languages and those you wish to emphasize, should be italicized.

Fair warning: if you consult an old style manual (or a website that is relying upon an old style manual), you may be urged to underline these words. And just so you know, anyone who follows AP style will tell you to underline these. DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE TEMPTERS: AP style is for journalism, not book publishing. They are different fields, and have different standards.

Again, DO NOT BE TEMPTED. In a submission for the book industry, NOTHING should be underlined.

Professional readers are AMAZED at how often otherwise perfectly-formatted manuscripts get this backwards — seriously, we’ve been known to sit around and talk about it at the bar that’s never more than 100 years from any writers’ conference in North America. An aspiring writer would have to be consulting a very, very outdated list of formatting restrictions to believe that underlining is ever acceptable.

At this point in submission history, it just isn’t for book submissions. Since your future agent is going to make you change all of that underlining to italics anyway, you might as well get out of the habit of underlining now.

Italics are one of the few concessions manuscript format has made to the computer age – again, for practical reasons: underlining uses more ink than italics in the book production process. Thus, italics are cheaper.

The logic behind italicizing foreign words is very straightforward: you don’t want the agent of your dreams to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

Some authors like to use italics to indicate thought, and others for emphasis. There is no hard-and-fast rule on this, but do be aware that many agents and editors dislike this practice. (Their logic: a good writer should be able to make it clear that a character is thinking something, or indicate inflection, without resorting to funny type.)

However, there are many other agents and editors who think it is perfectly fine – but you are unlikely to learn which is which until after you have sent in your manuscript, alas. You submit your work, you take your chances.

There is no fail-safe for this choice. Sorry.

(15) All numbers (except for dates) under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25. But numbers over 100 should be written as numbers: 1,243, not one thousand, two hundred and forty-three.

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

Translation: not doing it will not help you win friends and influence people at agencies and publishing houses.

Like pointing out foreign-language words with special formatting, this formatting rule was originally for the benefit of the manual typesetters. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

Again, be warned, those of you who have been taught by teachers who adhere in the AP style: they will tell you to write out only numbers under 10.

Yes, this is true for newspaper articles, where space is at a premium, but it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG in a manuscript.

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

(16) Dashes should be doubled — rather than using an emdash — with a space at either end. Hyphens are single and are not given extra spaces at either end, as in self-congratulatory.

Yes, I know: your word-processing program probably changes this automatically, but change it back. Any agent would make you do this before agreeing to submit your manuscript to an editor, so you might as well get into this salutary habit as soon as possible.

Microsoft may actually have a point here: doubling the dashes is a monumental pain (thanks in large part to their auto formatter’s preferences), and the practice IS archaic. Books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy; many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. An AP-trained teacher will tell you to use the longer emdash, as will the Chicago Manual of Style.

In this, however, they are wrong, at least as far as manuscripts are concerned. Standard format is invariable upon this point. And yes, it is a common enough pet peeve that the pros will complain to one another about how often submitters do it.

And heck, MS Word’s grammar checker has more than once told me to replace the correct form of there, their, or they’re with an incorrect one, and it won’t commit to whether to capitalize the first word after a colon (as journalists now do) or not (as book writers do, with the notable exception of JK Rowling).

So who are you gonna believe, me or Bill Gates?

(17) Adhere to the standard rules of punctuation, not what it being done in newspapers, magazines, books, or on the Internet. Especially the rule calling for TWO spaces after every period and colon.

In other words, do as Strunk & White say, not what others do.

I haven’t mentioned this one before, but in recent months, I’ve seen enough deviations from standard punctuation (I’m looking at YOU, JKR!) to believe this rule deserves inclusion on the list.

The primary deviation I’ve been seeing in the last couple of years is leaving only one space, rather than the standard two, after a period. Yes, printed books often do this, to save paper (the fewer the spaces on a page, the more words can be crammed onto it, right?). A number of writing-advice websites, I notice, and even some writing teachers have been telling people that this is the wave of the future — and that adhering to the two-space norm makes a manuscript look obsolete.

At the risk of sounding harsh (and, apparently, contradicting Miss Snark), poppycock.

There is a very, very practical reason to preserve that extra space after each sentence: ease of reading and thus editing. As anyone who has ever edited a long piece of writing can tell you, the white space on the page is where the comments — grammatical changes, pointing out flow problems, asking, “Does the brother really need to die here?” — go. Less white space, less room to comment.

Translation: until everyone in the industry makes the transition editing in soft copy — which is, as I have noted before, both harder and less efficient — the two-space rule is highly unlikely to change.

There you have it: the rules. Practice them until they are imbedded into your very bones, my friends: literally every page of text you submit to an agent, editor, or literary contest (yes, including the synopsis) for the rest of your professional life should be in standard format.

Oh, and it’s a good idea to make sure everything is spelled correctly, too, and turn off the widow/orphan control; it makes pages be an uneven number of lines. Keep up the good work!

PS: if you’re having trouble visualizing how some of these rules might look on the printed page, don’t worry — I’m going to be giving you visual aids in my next few posts.

Posted on - 13 Comments on The single most important thing you can do to get your manuscript taken seriously, part II, or, do I have your attention yet?

The single most important thing you can do to get your manuscript taken seriously, part II, or, do I have your attention yet?

Hello again, campers –

Welcome back to my series on standard format for manuscripts. If you were previously unaware that there IS a professional standard for presenting a book, well. now you know. Kindly raise your right hand (if you have one) and repeat after me: from this day forth, as long as I shall live, I will submit my writing ONLY in standard format.

Yes, it really is that important — and that simple. If you want your submission treated professionally, it needs to look like the manuscripts already-published authors produce.

And yes, yes, I know: I harp on this quite a lot on Author! Author!, but honestly, it breaks my heart to see good writers, even great ones, making the same formatting mistakes year in and year out, getting rejected for reasons that are apparent to professional readers from halfway across the room. Obviously, competition to land an agent and get published is very intense, but I say, if you’re going to get rejected, let it be because an agent or editor legitimately disagreed with your writing choices, not because you didn’t follow the rules.

So there.

Frankly, it’s bad for writers everywhere that these rules are not more widely known. Okay, so it keeps freelance editors like me in business, but it has created a submission environment where poor formatting is generally considered a warning sign of poor WRITING to come.

By Millicent and her ilk, in any case.

And that drives conscientious aspiring writers, the ones who — like you, perhaps — have invested considerable time and sweat in learning something about the trade, completely batty. Because, like so much generalized criticism, the fine folks who take the advice most seriously tend to be the ones who need it least, I know that there are thousands of you out there who stay up nights, compulsively going over their manuscripts for the 147th time, trying to ferret out that one last bit of less-than-professional presentation.

Bless your heart, if you’re one of those. You’re helping raise aspiring writers’ collective reputation within the industry.

One quick caveat before we get started today: the standard format restrictions I’m listing here are for BOOK submissions, not for short stories, poetry, journalistic articles, academic articles, or indeed any other form of writing. For the guidelines for these, you may — and should — seek elsewhere.

Which is a gentle way of saying that the formatting and grammatical choices you see in newspapers will not necessarily work in manuscripts. AP style is different from standard format in several important respects, not the least being that in standard format (as in other formal presentations in the English language), the first letter of the first word after a colon should NOT be capitalized, since technically, it’s not the beginning of a new sentence.

I don’t know who introduced the convention of post-colon capitalization, but believe me, those of us who read the submissions of aspiring book writers for a living have mentally consigned that language subversive to a pit of hell that would make even Dante avert his eyes.

But enough about my fevered fantasies. Let’s get down to the proverbial brass tacks, shall we?

Yesterday, while scores of my long-time readers flung their hands over their eyes and screamed, “No! Not again!”, I started going over the rigors of standard formatting for manuscripts again. Please, even if you are morally certain that you know what you’re doing, take a few minutes for a refresher course.

Why? Because while submitting pages that deviate from standard format MIGHT not result in automatic rejection of otherwise fine writing, it does indeed happen – and often. And not just because our old friend Millicent the agency screener is having a bad day.

Professional-level critique is HARSH; it’s like having your unmade-up face examined under a very, very bright light by someone who isn’t afraid to hurt your feelings by pointing out flaws. In the industry, this level of scrutiny is not considered even remotely mean.

Actually, if your work generates tell-it-like-it-is feedback from a pro, you should be a bit flattered – it’s how they habitually treat professional authors.

Yet the vast majority of submitting writers seem to assume that agents and their staffs will be hugely sympathetic readers of their submissions, willing to overlook technical problems because of the quality of the writing or the strength of the story. Every so often, there is the odd exception that justifies this belief. If the writing is absolutely beautiful, or the story is drool-worthy, but the formatting is all akimbo and the spelling is lousy, there’s an outside chance that someone at an agency might be in a saintly enough mood to overlook the problems and take a chance on the writer.

You could also have a Horatio Alger moment where you find a billionaire’s wallet, return it to him still stuffed with thousand-dollar bills, and he adopts you as his new-found son or daughter.

Anything is possible, of course. But it’s probably prudent to assume, when your writing’s at stake, that yours is not going to be the one in 10,000,000 exception.

Virtually all of the time, an agent, editor, contest judge, or screener’s first reaction to an improperly-formatted manuscript is the same as to one that is dull but technically perfect: speedy rejection.

The trouble is, submitters rejected for this reason are almost never aware of it. With few exceptions, the rejecters will not even take the time to scrawl, “Take a formatting class!” or “Next time, spell-check!” on the returned manuscript. If a writer is truly talented, they figure, she’ll mend her ways and try again.

Call me zany, but I think that the way-mending might go a TRIFLE faster if the writer knew that the manuscript was broken.

I’d like to speed up that learning curve. It’s not as though the strictures of standard format are state secrets, after all. To recap from yesterday:

(1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper.

(2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way.

(3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified. By definition, manuscripts should NOT resemble published books in this respect.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New — unless you’re writing screenplays, in which case you may only use Courier.

One last word on point #4 before I move on: if you want a specific font for your finished book that ISN’T one of these, you should NOT use it in your manuscript. No, not even if you found a very cool way to make your Elvin characters’ dialogue show up in Runic.

Like choices about italicization, bolding, and whether to use a medieval-style fancy first letter at the beginning of each chapter, the typeface ultimately used in the published book is a matter of discussion between you and your future editor — or, even more frequently, a decision made by the publishing house without any authorial input at all.

Oops, I guess I didn’t need to leap on this point yesterday. Oh, well, it bears repeating, since so few aspiring writers seem to be aware of it.

If you try to illustrate the fabulousness of your desired typeface now, you run the risk of your manuscript being dismissed as unprofessional. Don’t. Save it for later discussion.

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

Industry standard is 12-point. Again, no exceptions, INCLUDING YOUR TITLE PAGE, where almost everyone gets a little wacky the first time out. No pictures or symbols here, either, please. Just the facts.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s a term in the industry for title pages with 24-point fonts, fancy typefaces, and illustrations.

It’s “high school book report.”

(6) Do NOT use boldface anywhere in the manuscript BUT on the title page — and not even there, necessarily.

Yes, you read that correctly: you may place your title in boldface on the title page, if you like, but that’s it. Nothing else in the manuscript should be in bold.

This is a throwback to the old typewriter days, where only very fancy machines indeed could darken selected type. Historically, using bold in-text is considered a bit tacky for the same reason that wearing white shoes before Memorial Day is in certain circles: it’s a subtle display of wealth.

(You didn’t think all of those white shoes the Victorians wore cleaned themselves, did you? Shiny white shoes equaled scads of busily-polishing staff.)

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered EXCEPT the title page.

Violating of this rule will result in instantaneous rejection virtually everywhere. Number those pages if it’s the last thing you do.

Few non-felonious offenses irk the professional manuscript reader (including yours truly, if I’m honest about it) more than an unnumbered submission — it ranks right up there on their rudeness scale with assault, arson, and beginning a query letter with, “Dear Agent.”

Why? Gravity, my friends, gravity. What goes up tends to come down — and if the object in question happens to be an unbound stack of paper…

Picture, if you will, two manuscript-bearing interns colliding in an agency hallway. (You may giggle, but anyone who has ever worked with submissions has first-hand experience of this.) After the blizzard of flying papers dies down, and the two combatants rehash that old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial’s dialogue (“You got romance novel in my literary fiction!” “You got literary fiction in my romance novel!”), what needs to happen?

Yup. Some luckless soul has to put all of those pages back in the proper order. Just how much more irksome is that task going to be if the pages are not numbered?

Trust me, it is far, far, FAR easier to toss the entire thing into the reject pile than to spend the hours required to guess which bite-sized piece of storyline belongs before which. Number your pages.

The first page of the text proper, incidentally, is page 1 of the text, not the title page, and should be numbered as such. If your opus has an introduction or preface, the first page of THAT is page 1, not the first page of chapter 1.

Why, you ask? Long-time readers, chant it with me now, please: BECAUSE A MANUSCRIPT SHOULD NOT LOOK IDENTICAL TO A PUBLISHED BOOK.

To run over the other most popular choices for pages to mislabel as page 1: manuscripts do not contain tables of contents, so there should be no question of pagination for that. Also, epigraphs — those quotations from other authors’ books so dear to the hearts of writers everywhere — should not appear on their own page in a manuscript, as they sometimes do in published books; if you feel you must include one (considering that 99.9999% of the time, Millicent will just skip over it), include it between the chapter title and text on page 1.

If that last sentence left your head in a whirl, don’t worry — I’ll show you how to format epigraphs properly later in this series. Yes, including some discussion of that cryptic comment about Millicent.

(8) Each page of the manuscript (other than the title page) should have a standard slug line in the header. The page number should appear in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page.

Most writing handbooks and courses tend to be a trifle vague about this particular requirement, so allow me to clarify: a well-constructed slug line includes the author’s last name, book title, and page number, to deal with that intern-collision problem I mentioned earlier. And the header, for those of you who have not yet surrendered to Microsoft Word’s lexicon, is the 1-inch margin at the top of each page.

This means, in effect, that every page of the manuscript has the author’s name on it — a great idea, should you, say, want an agent or editor to be able to contact you after s/he’s fallen in love with it.

The slug line should appear in the upper left-hand margin (although no one will sue you if you put it in the upper right-hand margin, left is the time-honored location) of every page of the text EXCEPT the title page (which should have nothing in the header or footer at all).

Traditionally, the slug line appears all in capital letters, but it’s not strictly necessary. Being something of a traditionalist, the third page of my memoir has a slug line that looks like this:

MINI/A FAMILY DARKLY/3

Since the ONLY place a page number should appear on a page of text is in the slug line, if you are in the habit of placing numbers wacky places like the middle of the footer, do be aware that it does not look strictly professional to, well, professionals. Double-check that your word processing program is not automatically adding extraneous page markers.

Do not, I beg of you, yield like so many aspiring writers to the insidious temptation add little stylistic bells and whistles to the slug line, to tart it up. Page numbers should not have dashes on either side of them, be in italics or bold, or be preceded by the word “page.” The point here is not to make your slug line stand out for its innovative style, but for your manuscript’s pages to look exactly like every other professional writer’s.

If you have a very long title, feel free to abbreviate, to keep the slug line from running all the way across the top of the page. (Technically, a slug line should be 30 spaces or less, but there’s no need to stress about that in the computer age. A slug, you see, is the old-fashioned printer’s term for a pre-set chunk of, you guessed it, 30 spaces of type.) For example, my agent is currently circulating a novel of mine entitled THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB — 26 characters, counting spaces. Since my last name is quite short, I could get away with putting it all in the slug line, to look like this:

MINI/THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB/1

If, however, my last name were something more complicated, such as Montenegro-Copperfield — 22 characters all by itself, including dash — I might well feel compelled to abbreviate:

MONTENEGRO-COPPERFIELD/BUDDHA/1

(9) The first page of each chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title appearing on the FIRST line of the page, NOT on the line immediately above where the text begins.

That’s twelve single-spaced lines, incidentally. The chapter name (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the FIRST line of the first page — not on the last line before the text, as so many writers mistakenly do. The chapter title or number should be centered, and it should NOT be in boldface or underlined. Don’t panic if you’re having trouble visualizing this — I’ll be giving concrete examples of what the first page of a chapter should look like later in this series.

Why shouldn’t the title appear immediately above the text, as one so often sees? Because that’s where the title of a SHORT STORY lives. I’ve literally never seen a professional book manuscript formatted this way.

Very frequently, agents, editors and contest judges are presented with improperly-formatted first pages that include the title of the book, “by Author’s Name,” and/or the writer’s contact information in the space above the text. This is classic rookie mistake. To professional eyes, a manuscript that includes any of this information on the first page of the manuscript (other than in the slug line, of course) seems term paper-is.

So where does all of that necessary contact information go, you ask? Read on.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.

This is one of the main differences between a short story submission (say, to a literary journal) and a novel submission. To submit a manuscript — or contest entry, for that matter — with this information on page 1 is roughly the equivalent of taking a great big red marker and scrawling, “I don’t know much about the business of publishing,” across it. Just don’t do it.

“But wait,” I hear some of you out there murmuring, “I need a title page? Since when?”

Funny you should mention that, because…

(11) Every submission should include a title page, even partial manuscripts.

This one seems to come as a surprise to a LOT of aspiring writers. You should ALWAYS include a title page with ANY submission of ANY length, including contest entries and the chapters you send after the agent has fallen in love with your first 50 pages.

It is genuinely unheard-of for a professional manuscript not to have a title page: literally every manuscript that any agent in North America sends to any editor will include one. Yet, astonishingly, 95% of writers submitting to agencies seem to be unaware that including it is industry standard.

On the bright side, this means that if you are industry-savvy enough to include a professionally-formatted title page with your work, your submission automatically looks like a top percentile ranker to professional eyes from the moment it’s pulled out of the envelope. It’s never too early to make a good first impression, right?

If you do not know how to format a proper title page (and yes, Virginia, there IS a special format for it, too), please see the Your Title Page category at right. Or wait a few days until I cover it later in this series. Up to you.

Before anyone says it: omitting a title page is too common a mistake to be an automatic deal-breaker — and yes, one does occasionally meet an agent at a conference or one blogging online who says she doesn’t care one way or the other about whether a submission has a title page resting on top. Bully for them for being so open-minded, but even these are not going to toss out a submission BECAUSE it has a properly-formatted title page.

As I point out roughly 127,342 times per year in this forum, how can you be sure that the person deciding whether to pass your submission upstairs or reject it ISN’T a stickler for professionalism?

I’m going to sign off for today, but I hope to finish up the rules of standard format next time, so we may move on to practical examples of what a professional manuscript looks like. Believe me, as tedious as it is to change these things in your manuscript now, by the time you’re on your third or fourth book, it will be second nature to you.

Why, I’ll bet that the next time you sit down to begin a new project, you will automatically format it correctly.

And, more importantly, any submissions you might happen to send out in the near future will look like the work of a pro. Again, call me zany, but I would rather see an agent or editor evaluate your book on the basis of your writing and your story, not your formatting knowledge.

I’m funny that way. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on A topic that just can’t wait, or, I can’t believe that it’s been almost a year since I last went over this

A topic that just can’t wait, or, I can’t believe that it’s been almost a year since I last went over this

Hello, campers –

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with good wishes after my last post — I’m feeling a touch better, thanks. I’m still coughing up a storm, but I couldn’t stand another minute of not filling you in on standard format. Because — and I can hardly believe this myself — it’s been ALMOST A YEAR since I last went over the rules point by point.

I know: time flies when you’re having fun, eh?

Admittedly, my nearest and dearest/medical practitioners/pretty much everyone sane to whom I have spoken about it have suggested that I might want to wait until my temperature normalizes a bit more before I get back to full-tilt blogging again. They are probably right. They also probably didn’t realize that having suggested this renders them prime candidates for being dictation victims indentured servants unpaid labor kind volunteers until my chipper fingers are up to speed again.

In order to render surrogate blogger duty as painless as possible, I’m going to be re-running some older posts on standard format with (I hope) italicized new comments interspersed. Today, I’m starting with a post that not only goes over the hows and whys of professional manuscript format, but does so in a context that illustrates why people like me professional readers tend to focus so very much on technical details when scanning the work of a new writer: evidently, our brains are wired differently than other people’s.

This is a really, really good thing to know BEFORE you submit to an agent or editor: 99.9% of the format isn’t right, it WILL distract any professional reader from even the most beautiful writing.

And that’s not merely a matter of being obsessive-compulsive (although truth compels me to say that in this line of work, OCD is hardly an occupational drawback) — as I shall be showing you later on in this series, to someone who reads manuscripts for a living, deviations from standard format might as well be printed in blood-red ink. Because all professional manuscripts are formatted identically, it’s INCREDIBLY obvious when one isn’t.

So while it may seem tedious, annoying, or just a whole lot of work to go through your submissions with the proverbial fine-toothed comb in order to weed out this kind of distraction.

Remember, too, that IF AN AGENT OR EDITOR REQUESTED YOU TO SEND PAGES, S/HE IS EXPECTING THEM TO BE IN STANDARD FORMAT, unless s/he SPECIFICALLY tells you otherwise.

Indeed, it’s so much assumed that s/he probably won’t even mention it, because most agents and editors believe that these rules are already part of every serious book-writer’s MO. So much so, in fact, that agents who’ve read my blog sometimes ask me why I go over these rules so often. Doesn’t everyone already know them? Isn’t this information already widely available?

I’ll leave you to answer those for yourselves. Suffice it to say that our old pal Millicent the agency screener believes the answers to be: because I like it, yes, and yes.

And please, those of you who have been through this material with me before: don’t just skip these posts, I beg of you. I see manuscripts all the time by experienced writers that contain standard format violations. Until a writer has worked closely with an editor or agent long enough for these rules to become second nature, it’s just too easy to let an exception or two slip by.

My patient dictation-taker du jour is scowling at me, so I’m going to let us get on with the show. Keep up the good work!

I’ve been typing WAY too much lately — not a particularly good idea, for someone who spent nearly two years of the late 1990s doctor-banned from a keyboard. (And trust me, voice-recognition programs at the time were not designed for first sopranos.) The first sign of overuse: lack of grip strength.

After first a water glass, then a teacup shattered on the floor, I betook myself to the safely unbreakable couch to curl up with the equally shatter-proof new Harry Potter for half a day. I’d been saving my copy until all the hype died down, so I could form an unfettered opinion, but I had made a point of paying full price for it, rather than getting it at Costco, because typically, the author’s royalty percentage is lower in a bulk market.

Call me zany, but even if an author can afford a different tiara for every day of the week (“Should I go with the emerald today? Or the star sapphire with ruby clusters?”), I believe it’s important to buy the works of living writers in order to create a world where — brace yourselves — there’s a market for the work of living writers.

I know in my heart of hearts that it’s wrong to give away a book’s big secret before people have had a chance to read it, but spoiler alert: apparently, no one, but no one, proofed the galleys for this book.

Where are all the commas that should inhabit Harry’s world? Did Voldemort wave a wand and spirit them all away? Did the Ministry of Magic legalize run-on sentences? Are sentences featuring colons the new black? Or does JK Rowling have enough money now to buy off the world’s English professors to the extent of changing the rule about the first word after those ubiquitous colons NOT being capitalized?

Naturally, this didn’t stop me from staying up all night to finish the book; she’s an amazing pacer and plotter. But it’s evil magic, indeed, when Scholastic teaches our children that there are four periods in an ellipse, rather than three.

Branded with the Dark Mark, indeed.

My editorial peevishness is well-timed, because yesterday, I threatened — no, make that promised — to revisit the rules of standard format for submissions. Because, you see, I am far from the only professional reader who takes umbrage (not Dolores Umbridge-style umbrage, but close), when manuscripts deviate from certain time-honored restrictions.

To put it bluntly, improperly-formatted manuscripts are often shoved into the reject pile on sight.

Which means that while, yes, this may well be most spectacularly unsexy topic of them all, and perhaps the single most necessary for any aspiring writer to know. At least for anyone who ever intends to submit a manuscript — a group that I have some reason to suspect includes one or two of you.

To begin with the basics: for those of you who do not already know. standard format for manuscripts is NOT the same as standard format for published books. I asked to make this sentence bold this time around, because I’m constantly meeting aspiring writers who are not aware of this fact. Heck, my dictation-taker du jour apparently was not aware of this fact until she read this paragraph.

Nor is it identical to what your word processor’s grammar checker will ask you to do – nor, heaven help us, business format. None of these will look correct to an agent or editor.

It is VERY much to your advantage to be aware of this salient fact.

Why? Well, Since standard manuscript format differs in a number of significant ways from ALL of the above, agency screeners, agents, editors, and contest judges tend to regard submissions formatted in any other way as either unpolished (if they’re feeling generous) or unprofessional (if they’re not). And unfortunately for writers unaware of the rules, a non-standard manuscript is child’s play to spot from the moment a professional reader lays eyes upon it.

Spoiler alert: being identified as not professionally formatted renders a submission FAR more likely to be rejected than any writing-related problem.

Why? Long-time readers, shout it with me now: agencies and publishing houses get so many submissions that a screener’s PRIMARY goal is to weed out the one he is reading at the moment. The faster he can do that, the better, to move through that mountain of paper on his desk.

By logical extension, the more professional your manuscript looks, the more likely it is to be read with interest by a screener in a hurry.

Period. And I don’t know about you, but I’m all for anything that helps a good writer’s work get taken more seriously, especially in the current super-tight submission environment, which is more rejection happy than I’ve ever seen it — and I’ve been listening to writers, agents, and editors complain about the state of the literary market since I was in my cradle.

A couple of disclaimers before I begin. I fully realize that many of the tiny-but-pervasive changes I am about to suggest that you make to your manuscript are going to be irksome to implement. Reformatting a manuscript is time-consuming and tedious – and I would be the first to admit that some of these rules are pretty absurd.

At least on their faces, that is. Speaking as someone who reads manuscripts for a living, I can let you in on a little secret: quite a few of these restrictions remain beloved of the industry even in the age of electronic submissions because they render a manuscript a heck of a lot easier to edit in hard copy — still the norm, incidentally. As I will show later in this series, a lot of these rules are designed to maximize white space in which the editor may scrawl trenchant comments like, “Wait, wasn’t the protagonist’s sister named Maeve in the last chapter? Why is she Belinda here?”

As I said above, this is one line of work where a touch of compulsiveness is a positive boon. Treat it with the respect it deserves.

As I believe I may have mentioned once or twice before, I do not run the universe, and thus do not make the rules. Sorry. No matter how much I would like to absolve you from some of them, it is outside my power.

Take it up with the fairy godmother who neglected to endow me with that gift at birth.

Also, every time I run a series of posts on standard format, I am inundated with comments pointing out that website X advises something different, that this agent said at a conference she doesn’t care what typeface you use, or that a certain manual said that standards have changed from the traditional guidelines I set out here.

I have no doubt that all of these comments are indeed pointing out legitimate differences in advice, but it is not my purpose here to police the net for standardization of advice. If you like guidelines you find elsewhere better, by all means follow them.

All I claim for these rules – and it is not an insubstantial claim – is that nothing I advise here will EVER strike an agent or editor as unprofessional. Adhering to them will mean that your writing is going to be judged on your writing, not your formatting.

And that, my friends, is nothing at which to sneeze. Or cough, although I seem to be managing it.

Here are the rules of standard format — and no, NONE of them are negotiable. Harry Houdini himself would have extreme difficulty sneaking a non-standard manuscript past an agency screener, even though he undoubtedly has the world’s best platform to write a book on extricating oneself from tight situations.

If that last quip didn’t make you groan, if not chuckle, it’s time to brush up on your agent-speak. On to the rules:

(1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper.

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

No ecru paper, no off-white, no Dr. Seuss-type stripes. Yes, buff or parchment can look very nice, but there’s a strategic reason to use bright white paper: very sharp black-white contrast is strongly preferred by virtually every professional reader out there, probably as a legacy of having read so many dim photocopies over the course of their lifetimes.

The ONLY colored paper that should ever go anywhere near a manuscript is the single sheet that separates one copy of a submission or book proposal from the next, so it is easy for an agent to see where to break the stack. (But you don’t need to know about that until your agent asks you to send 15 copies of your book for submitting to editors. Put it out of your mind for now.)

And do spring for a new printer cartridge, and skip the trip to the copy center. Badly-photocopied work is almost never read. Actually, you’d be amazed (at least, I hope you would) at how poor the printing quality is on some submissions; it’s as though the author dunked in a swiftly-flowing river several times before popping it in the mail.

(2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way (again, unless you are specifically asked to do otherwise).

Yes, this IS criminally wasteful of paper, especially when you consider the literally millions of pages of submissions that go flying into the agencies and publishing houses every month. Most agencies do not even recycle; the vast majority of agencies did not even consider accepting e-mailed queries at all until the anthrax-in-envelopes scare. (I swear I’m not making that up.)

I assure you, if I ran the universe, paper conservation would be the norm, and recycling mandatory. Also, writers would all be granted an extra month a year in which to write, excellent and inexpensive child care while writing, a cedar-lined cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan in which to do it, and a pineapple upside-down cake on Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday. Perhaps some hard candies on Agatha Christie’s birthday as well, in affluent years, and dancing on Mme. de Staël’s.

But since the unhappy reality is that I do NOT run the universe (see disclaimer above), we shall all have to live with the status quo.

Which is to say: the publishing industry is one vast paper-wasting enterprise. Sorry.

You’d be surprised at how often writers violate the thou-shalt-not-bind rule, including paper clips, rubber bands, or even binders with their submissions. Since agents always circulate manuscripts without any sort of binding, these doohickies just scream, “I’m unfamiliar with the industry.” SASE, here we come.

The ONLY exception to this rule is a nonfiction book proposal — not the manuscript, just the proposal — which is typically presented UNBOUND in a black folder, the kind with horizontal pockets. (For tips on how a book proposal should be presented, please see the aptly-titled BOOK PROPOSALS category on the list at right.)

To forestall the comment beloved reader Dave usually posts when I bring this up, if you wish to make double-sided, 3-hole-punched, be-bindered drafts for circulating to your first readers for ease of toting around, be my guest. But NEVER submit in that manner to a professional reader.

I’m serious about this. Don’t make me crawl out of this bed to stop you.

(3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified, as published books, e-mails, business letters, and online writing tend to be.

Yes, books feature text that runs in straight vertical lines along both side margins, and yes, your word processing program can replicate that practically effortlessly, if you ask it nicely to do so.

But don’t: the straight margin should be the left one; the right should be ragged, as if you had produced the manuscript on a typewriter.

Many writers find this one nearly impossible to accept, because it is one of the most visually obvious ways in which a professional manuscript differs from a printed book. They believe, wrongly, that anything that makes their submission look more like what’s on the shelves at Barnes & Noble is inherently professional.

Trust me, quite the opposite is true.

And NEVER format a query or cover letter to someone in the industry in business format: indent those paragraphs. More on that later in this series.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New.

Personally, I would never dream of allowing a client of mine to submit a manuscript in anything but Times New Roman, nor would I ever submit any of my work in anything else. It is the standard typeface of the industry.

It’s one of the bizarre facts of publishing life that manuscripts in these fonts tend to be taken far more seriously, and with good reason: these are the typefaces upon which the most commonly-used word count estimations are based. (Psst: if you don’t know why you should be estimating the length of your manuscript rather than using actual word count, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

There are advocates of Courier, too, so you may use it, but I implore you, do not get any wackier than that. If you write screenplays, you may ONLY use Courier. Most screenplay agents will not read even the first page of a script in another typeface — which means that most contest judges will follow suit.

There are a few agents out there who have their own font preferences, so do check their websites and/or listings in the standard agency guides. As ever, the golden rule of dealing with an agent you want to represent you is GIVE ‘EM PRECISELY WHAT THEY ASK TO SEE, not what you would like them to see.

If you are a writer who likes to have different voices presented in different typefaces, or who chooses boldface for emphasis, a submission is not a forum where you can express those preferences freely. Yes, one sees this in a published book occasionally, but I assure you, the choice to indulge in these formatting differences was the editor’s, not the author’s.

Sorry. (See my earlier disclaimer about proprietorship of the universe.)

To forestall the usual question someone brings up at this point: yes, most published books ARE in typefaces other than Times or Courier, but at the risk of repeating myself, MANUSCRIPTS AND PUBLISHED BOOKS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO LOOK THE SAME. Typeface decisions for published books are made by the publishing house, not the author.

Although if you’re very nice, they may listen to your suggestions. They might giggle a little, but they might listen. Ditto with the cover and the title, which are — brace yourselves — almost never under the author’s control.

Why? Good question — because these are considered matters of packaging and marketing, not content.

All of which begs the question, of course: why do they give us so many typefaces from which to choose, if we’re not supposed to use them? Answer: because the people who make word processing programs are not the same people who decide what books get published in North America. Which is why, in case you’re wondering, what Microsoft Word means by word count and what the average agent or editor does are not typically the same thing.

All right, I’ve run very long indeed today, so I’m going to stop here for the nonce. More rules follow tomorrow or whenever I can next blandish someone to take my dictation. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 9 Comments on But what happens if they LIKE my pitch?

But what happens if they LIKE my pitch?

Congratulations to long-time reader Auburn McCanta, who took third place in the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association’s literary contest’s poetry division! Well done, Auburn!

Please join me in a big round of applause to everyone who was nominated, and I’ll keep reporting good news as it rolls in. Or not, as the case may be. But I’m proud of all the finalists, and everyone who was brave enough to enter.

Congratulations, too, to all of you who have mustered up the courage to pitch, query, and/or submit this year. It takes genuine bravery to put yourself and your work out there; I don’t think the writing community gives aspiring writers enough credit for that. I’m proud of you, though.

In an effort to become prouder of those of you who do not have easy access to face-to-face pitching opportunities or — dare I say it? — the vast majority of you who do not have the resources readily available to attend a first-rate writers’ conference, I am going to show you how to apply those lessons we learned in constructing a pitch to crafting a pleasing query letter. I hope you’ll pardon me, though, if I put that worthy topic on hold for a week or so to go over how to put together a submission packet.

I know, I know: I’ve been lavishing a lot of attention on pitching lately, and I freely admit that the timing on this week’s series is all about trying to help those pitching this conference season. However, since all of you, I hope, will be facing the joyous-but-stressful prospect of responding to a request for pages at some point, whether you get there by querying or pitching, I feel justified in dealing with this all-important topic now.

Another reason to leap right into submission packets: for those of you who aren’t already aware of it, much of the NYC-based publishing industry goes on vacation between mid-August and Labor Day — and yes, that includes the staff of the average agency. So if you’re pitching or querying this summer (or already have), you’re better off either sending your submission within the next couple of weeks or waiting until after Labor Day.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to read your pages for submission IN HARD COPY, IN ITS ENTIRETY, and OUT LOUD, might want to take advantage of the annual August break to do that. Ditto if you have yet to get good feedback from first readers outside of your circle of family and close friends (who tend to have a hard time giving unbiased feedback, no matter how gifted they are as readers; for more on the hows and whys of selecting good first readers, please see the GETTING GOOD FEEDBACK category at right).

But I see that mad light in some recent pitchers’ eyes — some of you are determined not to sleep, eat, or take your multivitamins until you get those requested materials out the door, right?

Okay, let me tackle your dilemma…but wait; what is that strange whirling object floating in the air before you? You are getting sleepy, I tell you. Sleepy…

Did it work? I thought not. Worth a try, though, because the single best piece of advice those of you who have pitched or queried successfully recently could get right now is RELAX.

Actually, it’s some of the best advice you could take at any point of the marketing process: you are relaxing, I tell you, RELAXING in the face of your upcoming pitching appointment…your only goal is to get these people to ask to see your work…you are buttonholing agents in at conference events and successfully giving your hallway pitch…you are calmly going through your 2-minute pitch to an agent who is delighted to hear it…your only goal is to get these people to ask to see your work, and you are thrilled when they do…

So let’s assume for the moment that the mantras I’ve been chanting at you for the last few weeks have worked, and an agent or editor has asked to see the first chapter, the first 50 pages, or even the entirety of your manuscript. What do you do next?

In the first place, you should send your submissions simultaneously to everyone who asked for them, for reasons I explained via example over the weekend: it’s in your best interest to do it..

Your heart may tell you to give that dreamy agent who was so nice to you an unrequested exclusive, but believe me, your brain should be telling you to play the field. Don’t tell me that love is blind. Wear your glasses, for heaven’s sake.

Second, you should send precisely what each agent asked you to send.

The first 50 means just that: the first 50 pages in standard format. Under no circumstances should you round up or down, even if pp. 49 or 51 is the last of the chapter.

Yes, even if that means stopping the submission in mid-sentence. (And if you aren’t absolutely positive that your manuscript IS in standard format or if you were not aware that manuscripts are NOT formatted like published books, please run, do not walk, to the FORMATTING MANUSCRIPTS category at right. Or wait a few days until I run over the rules again.)

No slipping in an extra five pages because there’s nifty writing in it, no adding a videotape of you accepting the Congressional Medal of Honor, no cookies or crisp $20 bills as bribes.

Need I say that I know writers who have done all these things, and now know better? Remember, showing the beauty and innovation of your writing is not the only purpose of submission — part of the point of this exercise is to show that you can follow directions, a rather desirable attribute in a potential client who might be expected to meet sudden deadlines or make surprise revisions down the line.

Believe me, an agent who decides to sign a writer will be issuing a LOT of directions between that initial handshake and sending out that book or proposal to editors. A writer who cannot follow basic packaging directions (such as “Send me the first 50 pages, please.”) is inherently more time-consuming to represent.

Is that really the first impression you want your submission to convey?

If you’re asked for a specific number of pages, don’t count the title page as one of them — but no matter how long an excerpt you have been asked to send, DO include a title page.

I shall be going over how to construct one in a few days, but if you’re in a hurry and if you don’t know how to format a professional title page, or even that there is a professional format for one, please wend your way to the YOUR TITLE PAGE category at right. (You see, I really have been preparing my readers for this moment.)

If asked for a synopsis, send one; do not enclose one otherwise. Ditto for an author bio (don’t worry; I’ll be talking about how to build one soon; if you’re in a hurry, check out the AUTHOR BIO category on the list at right), table of contents (unless you’ve been asked to submit a book proposal), illustrations, letters of recommendation from your favorite writing teacher, and/or the aforementioned cookies.

Just send what you’ve been asked to send: no more, no less. With two exceptions: you should include a SASE, industry-speak for a stamped (not metered), self-addressed envelope for the manuscript’s safe return, and you should include a cover letter.

Why the cover letter? Well, in the first place, render it as easy as humanly possible to contact you — the last thing you want is to make it hard for them to ask for more pages, right? But also, you should do it for the same good, practical reason that I’m going to advise you to write

(Conference name) — REQUESTED MATERIALS

in 3-inch letters on the outside of the envelope: so your work doesn’t end up languishing in the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts (which are, incidentally, almost invariably rejected).

Agents and editors hear a LOT of pitches in the course of the average conference; no matter how terrific your book is, it’s just not reasonable to expect them to remember yours weeks after the fact (which it almost certainly will be, by the time they get around to reading it) simply by its title and your name.

Thus, it is in your best interests to remind them that they did, indeed, ask to see your manuscript.

Be subtle about the reminder — no need to state outright that you are worried that they’ve confused you with the other 150 people they met that day — but it is a good idea to provide some context. Simply inform the agent or editor him/her where you met and that s/he asked to see what you’re sending. As in,

Dear Mr. White,

I very much enjoyed our meeting at the recent Conference X. Thank you for requesting my fantasy novel, WHAT I DID TO SAVE THE PLANET.

I enclose a SASE for your convenience, and look forward to hearing from you soon. I may be reached at the address and phone number below, or via email at…

Regards,

A. Writer

That’s it. No need to recap your plot or re-pitch your concept. Just simple, clean, businesslike.

But do NOT, I beg you, present it in block-indented business format, as the rigors of blog format have forced me to do above — indent your paragraphs. Why? Well, many folks in the industry regard business format as only marginally literate, at best.

Trust me, they don’t care what you do in the multi-million dollar factory you run: indent those paragraphs whenever you are dealing with anyone in publishing.

Oh, and if other agents or editors requested pages, say that others are also looking at it. No need to be specific. This is considered good manners, and often gets your submission read a bit faster.

The other reason that mentioning where you met is a good idea is — and I tremble to tell you this, but it does happen — there are some unscrupulous souls who, aware that pitch fatigue may well cause memory blurring, send submissions that they CLAIM are requested, but in fact were not.

“Oh, like he’s going to remember ANY pitcher’s name,” these ruthless climbers scoff, stuffing first chapters into the envelopes of everyone who attended a particular conference.

Such scoffers occasionally receive a comeuppance redolent with poetic justice: VERY frequently, the roster of agents and editors scheduled to attend a particular conference changes at the last minute. How well received do you think a, “I enjoyed our conversation at last weekend’s Conference That Shall Not Be Named,” letter goes over with an agent who missed a plane and didn’t show up at that particular conference?

Tee hee.

Do remember, though, for the sake of your blood pressure, you do NOT need to drop everything and mail off requested materials within hours of a conference’s end. The standard writers’ conference wisdom advises getting it out within three weeks of the conference, but actually, that’s not necessary.

Especially this time of year. Had you heard that the publishing industry pretty much shuts down from early August until after Labor Day, anyway?

And no, an agent or editor’s perceived friendliness during the pitching session should NOT be regarded as a legitimate reason to rush a submission out the door willy-nilly. As I believe I said half a dozen times in the week leading up to the Conference That Shall Not Be Named, a nice conversation with an agent or editor at a conference is just a nice conversation at a conference, not a blood pact.

Nothing has yet been promised — and it can’t have been. As I have mentioned several dozen times throughout this series, no agent is going to sign you on a pitch alone; no matter how good your book concept is, they are going to want to see actual pages before committing.

Why? Consult that old industry truism: “It all depends upon the writing.”

By the same token, you are not bound to honor the request for materials instantaneously. And no, the fact that you said you would send it the moment you got home from the conference does NOT mean that you should send it off without proofing and performing any necessary revisions; unless they asked for an exclusive, they do not expect you to send it within a day or two, or to overnight it.

Besides, it is very much to your advantage that they see your work at its absolute best, after all, not as our work tends to be before a hard-copy proofing.

Long-time readers, chant it with me now: take the time to read EVERY page you intend to submit to ANYONE in the industry in hard copy, out loud, every time.

There is no better way to weed out the mistakes that will strike you a week later as boneheaded (for real-life samples of these, see the archived Let’s Talk About This on the subject), and the extra couple of weeks fixing any problems might take will not harm your chances one iota.

Trust me, agents and editors meet too many writers at conferences to sit around thinking, “Darn it, where is that Jane Doe’s manuscript? I asked for it two weeks ago! Well, I guess I’m just going to reject it now, sight unseen.”

A common writers’ negative fantasy, but it just doesn’t happen. These people are simply too busy for that. If you wait 6 months to send it, they may wonder a little, but 6 days or 6 weeks? Please.

So unless you already have the manuscript in apple-pie order (which includes having read it — take a deep breath now, so you can say it along with me — in its ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and ALOUD), it’s worth your while to take the time for a final polish.

You want your book to be pretty for its big date, right?

While you’re doing that, I’m going to be running over how to pull together a submission packet that just bellows, “This writer has done her homework! How refreshing!” So do keep checking in throughout the next week or so.

In the meantime, you are relaxing about getting those requested materials out the door, I tell you…relaxing…

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

Happy Bastille Day, everyone!

Somehow, it seems appropriate that at the end of a series about building the pitch, brick by brick, we should be celebrating the anniversary of a whole lot of very fed-up people’s having torn down, brick by brick, that famous prison at 232 Rue Saint-Antoine. And that it should be the same day that I discovered, when a reader’s question caused me to take a gander at the offerings at the Conference-That-Shall-Remain-Nameless, a bit of advice to writers to limit their pitches to a single sentence.

Quoth our own Thomas Jefferson (himself a lifelong fan of liberté, égalité, et fraternité AND writers), “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Yesterday, I tackled a reader’s question about pitching a novel that features multiple protagonists. Since I had a lot to say on the subject, I didn’t quite finish — but conveniently enough, the part I left for today dovetails nicely with a few other readers’ concerns about what should and shouldn’t make its way into the formal 2-minute pitch.

Last time, I went over a few reasons that it’s a better idea to pitch the overall story of a multiple perspective book, rather than try to replicate the various protagonists’ personal story arcs. It tends to be substantially less confusing for the hearer this way, but there’s another very good reason not to overload the pitch with too much in-depth discussion of HOW the story is told, rather than what the story IS.

Writers very, very frequently forget this, but the author is not the only one who is going to have to pitch any given book.

Think about it. A writer has chosen the multiple POV narrative style because it fits the story she is telling, presumably, not the other way around, right? That’s the writer’s job, figuring out the most effective means of telling the tale. That doesn’t change the fact that in order for an agent to sell the book to an editor, or the editor to take the book to committee, he’s going to have to be able to summarize the story.

That’s right — precisely the task all of you would-be pitchers out there have been resenting for a month now.

If the story comes across as too complex to be able to boil down into terms that the agent or editor will be able to use to convince others that this book is great, your pitch may raise some red flags.
So it really does behoove you not to include every twist and turn of the storyline — or every point of view.

If you really get stuck about how to tell the overarching story, you could conceivably pick one or two of the protagonists and present his/her/their story/ies as the book, purely for pitching purposes.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you upright souls cry, “isn’t that misleading?”

Not really. Remember, the point of the pitch is NOT to distill the essence of the book: it is to convince the agent or editor to ask to READ it.

No one on the other side of the pitching table seriously expects to learn everything about a book in a 2-minute speech. If they could, how much of a storyline could there possibly be? Why, in fact, would it take a whole book to tell it?

“But Anne,” the upright whimper, “I don’t want to lie. Won’t I get in trouble for implying that my book has only two protagonists when it in fact has twelve?”

Trust me, this strategy is not going to come back and bite you later, at least not enough to fret over, because frankly, it would require the memory banks of IBM’s Big Blue for a pitch-hearer to recall everything he heard over the average conference period. After an agent or editor has heard a hundred pitches at a conference this weekend, and two hundred the weekend after that, he’s not going to say when he receives your submission, “Hey! This has 4 more characters than the author told me it did!”

I know, I know: we all want to believe that our pitches are the exception to this — naturally, the agent of our dreams will remember every adjective choice and intake of breath from OUR pitches, as opposed to everyone else’s. But that, my dears, is writerly ego talking, the same ego that tries to insist that we MUST get our requested submissions out the door practically the instant the agent or editor’s request for them has entered our ears.

In practice, it just isn’t so.

And shouldn’t be, actually, in a business that rewards writing talent. Given the choice, it’s much, much better for you if the agent of your dreams remembers what you said in your submission than what you said in your 10-minute meeting.

As to the question of being misleading…well, I’ll get back to the desirability of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth a little later in this post. For now, let’s move on to the next reader question.

Insightful long-term reader Janet wrote in some time ago to ask how to handle the rather common dilemma of the writer whose local conference happens whilst she’s in mid-revision: “What do you do when you realize that you might have to change the structure of the novel? Pitch the old way?”

I hear this question all the time during conference season, Janet, and the answer really goes back to the pervasive writerly belief I touched upon briefly above, the notion that an agent or editor is going to remember any given pitch in enough detail a month or two down the road to catch discrepancies between the pitch and the book.

Chant it with me now, experienced pitchers: they’re going to be too tired to recall every detail by the time they get on the plane to return to New York, much less a month or two from now, when they get around to reading your submission.

Stop deflating, ego — this isn’t about you. It’s about them.

Remember last week, when I was talking about pitch fatigue? At a conference, the average agent or editor might be hearing as many as hundred pitches a day. Multiply that by the number of days of the conference — multiply THAT by the number of conferences a particular agent or editor attends in a season, not to mention the queries and submissions she sees on a daily basis, and then you can begin to understand just how difficult it would be to retain them all.

I hate to bruise anyone’s ego, but now that you’ve done the math, how likely is it that she’s going to retain the specifics of, say, pitch #472?

But you shouldn’t fret about that, because — pull out your hymnals, long-term readers — the purpose of ANY book pitch is to get the agent or editor to ask to read it, not to buy the book sight unseen. Since that request generally comes within a few minutes of the writer’s uttering the pitch, if it’s going to come at all, what you need to do is wow ‘em in the moment.

Although it IS nice if yours is the pitch that causes an agent to scrawl in her notes, “Great imagery!”

The upside: you don’t really need to worry if your story changes between the time you pitch or query it and when you submit the manuscript pages. That’s par for the course. Writers rewrite and restructure their books all the time; it’s not considered particularly sinister.

That being said, your best bet in the case of a book in the throes of change is to tell the story that you feel is the most compelling. If you haven’t yet begun restructuring, it will probably be the old one, as it’s the one with which you are presumably most familiar, but if you can make a good yarn out of the changes you envision, it’s perfectly legitimate to pitch that instead.

It really is up to you. As long as the story is a grabber.

The final questions du jour, which the various askers have requested be presented anonymously, concern the ethics of not mentioning those aspects of the book one is afraid might negatively influence a pitch-hearer’s view of the book. I refer, of course, to the book’s length and whether it is actually finished on the day of your pitching appointment.

Let me take the second one first, as it’s easier to answer. There is a tacit expectation, occasionally seen in print in conference guides, that a writer will not market a novel until it is complete, because it would not be possible for an agent to market a partial first novel.

So it would most definitely be frowned-upon to pitch a half-finished book that might take a year or two to polish off — unless, of course, the book in question is nonfiction, in which case you’d be marketing it as a book proposal, not as an entire manuscript, anyway. (Yes, even if it’s a memoir; although some agents do prefer to see a full draft from a previously unpublished writer, the vast majority of memoirs are still sold in proposal form.)

Like so many of the orders barked at conference attendees, however, the expectation of market-readiness has mutated a bit in translation. You’re most likely to hear it as the prevailing wisdom that maintains you should have a full draft before you pitch BECAUSE an agent or editor who is interested will ask you for the entire thing on the spot.

As in they will fly into an insensate fury if you’re not carrying it with you at the pitch meeting.

But as I have mentioned earlier in this series, that doesn’t happen all that often anymore (and the insensate fury part never happened in the first place). 99.9% of the time, even an agent who is extremely excited about a project will prefer that you mail it — or e-mail it.

I’ll bring this up again when I go over submission packets next week — so PLEASE, if you’re pitching this weekend, hold off on sending anything until we’ve had a chance to go over the most frequent submission mistakes — but I always advise my clients and students not to overnight anything to an agency or publishing house unless the receiving party is paying the postage.

Yes, even if an agent or editor asks you to overnight it.

I heard that horrified gasp out there, but the fact is, it’s a myth that overnighted manuscripts get read faster — yes, even if the agent asked you to send it instantly. FedEx and other overnight packaging is just too common to attract any special notice in a crowded mailroom these days.

If you’re worried about speed, Priority Mail (which gets from one location to another within the US in 2-3 days) is far cheaper — and if you write REQUESTED MATERIALS in great big letters on the outside of the package, might actually get opened sooner than that spiffy-looking overnight mail packet.

Besides, even if you did go to the trouble and expense to get your manuscript onto the requester’s desk within hours of the request, it can often be months before an agent reads a manuscript, as those of you who have submitted before already know. Which means, in practical terms, that you need not send it right away.

And that, potentially, means that a savvy writer could buy a little time that could conceivably be used for revision. Or even writing.

Catching my drift here? After all, if you’re going to mail it anyway…and pretty much everyone in the industry is gone on vacation between the second week of August and Labor Day…and if you could really get away with sending requested materials anytime between now and Christmas…and if they’ve asked for the first three chapters only…

Or, to put it in querying terms: if the agencies are going to take a month to respond to my letter…and then ask for the first 50 pages…and that has to get by a couple of screeners before they can possibly ask for the rest?

Starting to get the picture? Naturally, I would never advise anyone to pitch a book that isn’t essentially done, but the fact is, it may well be months before the person sitting across the table from you in a pitch meeting asks to see the entire manuscript.

And you know what? You’re under no obligation to send it out instantly, even then.

Although I would not encourage any of you to join the 40% of writers who are asked to submit requested materials but never do, anyone who has ever written a novel can tell you that where writing is concerned, there is finished — as in when you’ve made it all the way through the story and typed the words THE END on the last page — and then there is done — as in when you stop tinkering with it.

Then there’s REALLY done, the point at which you have revised it so often that you have calculated the exact trajectory of the pen you will need to lob toward Manhattan to knock your agent or editor in the head hard enough to get him to stop asking for additional changes.

And then there’s REALLY, REALLY done, when your editor has changed your title for the last time and has stopped lobbying for you to transform the liberal lesbian sister into a neo-conservative professional squash player who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan in his spare time.

But frankly, from the point of view of the industry, no manuscript is truly finished until it is sitting on a shelf in Barnes & Noble. Until the cover is attached to the book, it is an inherently malleable thing.

The fact that everyone concerned is aware of this, I think, renders a bit of sophistry on the writer’s part over the question of whether a manuscript is completed somewhat pardonable.

This does NOT mean, however, that it is in your best interests to waltz into a pitch meeting and ANNOUNCE that the book isn’t finished yet — and because agents and editors are, as a group, perfectly aware that writers are prone to levels of tinkering that would make Dante’s inferno appear uncomplex, it’s actually not a question that gets asked much.

If you are asked? Sophistry, my dears, sophistry: “I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m very close.”

You are close to finishing it, aren’t you?

I’m sensing that the hands that shot into the air a dozen paragraphs ago are waving frantically by now. “Um, Anne?” the observant owners of those hands cry. “What do you mean, pretty much everyone in the industry is gone on vacation between the second week of August and Labor Day? I’m going to a conference two weeks from now — surely, despite what you said above about not needing to overnight my submission, I have to send out requested materials immediately?”

No, actually — it means that it might behoove you to tinker with them (see distinctions amongst types of doneness above) until after the mass exodus from Manhattan is over. Because, really, do you WANT your submission to be the last one Millicent needs to read before she can head out the door to someplace cooler than sweltering New York?

Naturally, there are exceptions to the closed-until-after-Labor-Day norm; many agencies arrange to have one agent remain on-site, in case of emergencies. But since editorial offices tend to clear out then, too, it would be a kind of quixotic time to be pitching a book: even if an editor loved it, it would be well-nigh impossible to gather enough bodies for the necessary editorial meeting to acquire it.

(If all that sounded like Greek to you, and you’re not particularly conversant with the tongue of ancient heroes, you might want to take a gander at the AFTER YOU LAND AN AGENT category on the list at right, as well as the WHEN ARE THE BEST AND WORST TIME TO QUERY? sections.)

The question of length is a bit more tortured, as it tends to generate a stronger knee-jerk response in pitches and query letters than the question of submission timing. Or so I surmise, from the response to the inevitable moment at every writers’ conference I have ever attended when some stalwart soul stands up and asks how long a book is too long.

And without fail, half the room gasps at the response.

I hesitate to give limits, for fear of triggering precisely the type of literalist angst I deplored a couple of days ago, but here are a few ballpark estimates. Currently, first novels tend to run in the 65,000 – 100,000 word range — or, to put it another way, roughly 250 – 400 pages. (That’s estimated word count, by the way, 250 x # of pages in Times New Roman, standard format. For the hows and whys of estimation vs. actual word count, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

So if your book runs much over that, be prepared for some unconscious flinching when you mention the length. Standards do vary a bit by genre, though — check the recent offerings in your area to get a general sense.

And remember, these are general guidelines, not absolute prohibitions. Few agency screeners will toss out a book if it contains a page 401. Do be aware, though, that after a book inches over the 125,000 word mark (500 pages, more or less), it does become substantially more expensive to bind and print. (For more on this point, please see the rather extensive exchange in the comment section of a recent post.)

If at all possible, then, you will want to stay under that benchmark.

And not just for marketing reasons, or at any rate not just to preclude the possibility of an instinctive response to a book’s length. If a manuscript is too long (or too short, but that is rarer since the advent of the computer), folks in the industry often have the same response as they do to a manuscript that’s not in standard format: they assume that the writer isn’t familiar with the prevailing norms.

And that, unfortunately, usually translates into the submission’s being taken less seriously — and often, the pitch or query as well.

If your book IS over or under the expected estimated length for your genre, you will probably be happier if you do not volunteer length information in either your pitch or your query. This is not dishonest — neither a pitcher nor a querier is under any actual obligation to state the length of the manuscript up front.

I’m not recommending that you actually lie in response to a direct question, of course — but if the question is not asked, it will not behoove you to offer the information. Remember, part of the art of the pitch involves knowing when to shut your trap. You will not, after all, be hooked up to a lie detector throughout the course of your pitch.

Although that would be an interesting intimidation strategy, one I have not yet seen tried on the conference circuit. Given the current level of paranoia aimed at memoirists, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it come into fashion.

Yes, I know, many experts will tell you that you MUST include word count in your query, but as far as I know, no major agency actually rejects queries where it’s not mentioned. Some agents will say they like to see it, for the simple reason that it makes it easier to weed out the longest and the shortest manuscripts — but if your book would fall into either of those categories, is it really in your interest to promote a knee-jerk rejection?

Whew! We covered a lot of ground today, didn’t we? Well, the path to glory has never been an easy one, right?

Marchons! Marchons! Or, to put it in more familiar terms, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Building blocks of the pitch: but what if I’m pitching a book with multiple protagonists? Huh? Huh?

Building blocks of the pitch: but what if I’m pitching a book with multiple protagonists? Huh? Huh?

Yesterday’s post about hyper-literalism lifted a weight off my weary shoulders, campers: at this point in my long and checkered career, I feel like the kid who pointed out that the emperor was slightly under-dressed. It does become rather a strain, conference after conference, year after year, not to stand in the back of the room and bellow, “But don’t knock yourself out following that advice to the letter!”

I guess it’s a corollary of what I find myself saying here every few months: it’s honestly not a good idea to take anyone’s word as Gospel, even if the speaker purports to be an expert.

Perhaps especially if.

Logically, this sterling advice must apply to yours truly, right, and what I say here? In that spirit, I’m going to tackle a couple of excellent questions about the pitch proper sent in by readers over the years. (Keep ’em coming, folks!)

Sharp-eyed reader Colleen, for instance, wrote in to ask how one adapts the 2-minute pitch format to stories with multiple protagonists — by definition, it would be pretty hard to pitch it as just one of the characters’ being an interesting person in an interesting situation; in theory, a GOOD multiple-protagonist novel is the story of LOTS of interesting people in LOTS of interesting situations.

So what’s the writer to do? Tell the story of the book in your pitch, not the various stories of the characters.

Does that sound like an oxymoron? Allow me to explain.

For a novel with multiple protagonists to work, it must have an underlying unitary story — it has to be, unless the chapters and sections are a collection of unrelated short stories. (Which would make it a short story collection, not a novel, and it should be pitched as such.) Even if it is told from the point of view of many, many people, there is pretty much always some point of commonality.

That commonality should be the focus of your pitch, not how many characters’ perspectives it takes to tell it. Strip the story to its basic elements, and pitch that.

Why? Well, there’s a practical reason — and then there’s a different kind of practical reason.

Let’s take the most straightforward one first: from a pitch-hearer’s point of view, once more than a couple of characters have been introduced within those first couple of sentences, new names tend to blur together like extras in a movie, unless the pitcher makes it absolutely clear how they are all tied together.

Typically, therefore, they will assume that the first mentioned by name is the protagonist.

So if you started to pitch a multiple protagonist novel on pure plot — “Melissa is dealing with trying to run a one-room schoolhouse in Morocco, while Harold is coping with the perils of window-washing in Manhattan, and Yvonne is braving the Artic tundra…” — even the most open-minded agent or editor is likely to zone out. There’s just too much to remember.

And if remembering three names in two minutes doesn’t strike you as a heavy intellectual burden, please see my earlier post on pitch fatigue.

But it’s easy to forget that yours is almost certainly not the only pitch that agent or editor has heard within the last 24 hours, isn’t it, even if you’re NOT trying to explain a book that has several protagonists? Often, pitchers of multiple-protagonist novels will make an even more serious mistake than overloading their elevator speeches with names — they will frequently begin by saying, “Okay, so there are 18 protagonists…”

Whoa there, Sparky. Did anyone in the pitching session ASK about your perspective choices? So why present them as the most important fact about your novel?

Actually, from the writer’s point of view, there’s an excellent reason: the different perspectives are an integral part of the story being told. Thus, the reader’s experience of the story is going to be inextricably tied up with how it is written.

But that doesn’t mean that this information is going to be helpful to your pitch.

I mean, you could conceivably pitch Barbara Kingsolver’s multiple-narrator THE POISONWOOD BIBLE as, “Well, a missionary takes his five daughters and one wife to the middle of Africa. Once they manage to carve out a make-do existence in a culture that none of them really understand, what little security the daughters know is ripped from them, first by their father’s decreasing connection with reality, then by revolution.”

That isn’t a bad summary of the plot, but it doesn’t really give much of a feel for the book, does it? The story is told from the perspectives of the various daughters, mostly, who really could not agree on less and who have very different means of expressing themselves.

And that, really, is the charm of the book. But if you’ll take a gander at Ms. Kingsolver’s website, you’ll see that even she (or, more likely, her publicist) doesn’t mention the number of narrators until she’s already set up the premise.

Any guesses why?

Okay, let me ask the question in a manner more relevant to the task at hand: would it be a better idea to walk into a pitch meeting and tell the story in precisely the order it is laid out in the book, spending perhaps a minute on one narrator, then moving on to the next, and so on?

In a word, no. Because — you guessed it — it’s too likely to confuse the hearer.

Hey, do you think that same logic might apply to ANY complicated-plotted book? Care to estimate the probability that a pitch-fatigued listener will lose track of a grimly literal chronological account of the plot midway through the second sentence?

If you just went pale, would-be pitchers, your answer was probably correct. Let’s get back to Barbara Kingsolver.

Even though the elevator speech above for THE POISONWOOD BIBLE does not do it justice, if I were pitching the book (and thank goodness I’m not; it would be difficult), I would probably use the speech above, then add AT THE END, “The reader sees the story from the very different points of view of the five daughters, one of whom has a mental condition that lifts her perceptions into a completely different realm.”

Not ideal, perhaps, but it gets the point across.

But most pitchers of multiple POV novels are not nearly so restrained, alas. They charge into pitch meetings and tell the story as written in the book, concentrating on each perspective in turn as the agent or editor stares back at them dully, like a bird hypnotized by a snake.

And ten minutes later, when the meeting is over, the writers have only gotten to the end of Chapter 5. Out of 27.

I can’t even begin to estimate how often I experienced this phenomenon in my pitching classes, when I was running the late lamented Pitch Practicing Palace at the Conference-That-Shall-Remain-Nameless, and even when I just happen to be passing by the pitch appointment waiting area at your average conference. All too often, first-time pitchers have never talked about their books out loud before — a BAD idea, by the way — and think that the proper response to the innocent question, “So, what’s your book about?” is to reel off the entire plot.

And I do mean ENTIRE. By the end of it, an attentive listener would know not only precisely what happened to the protagonist and the antagonist, but the neighbors, the city council, and the chickens at the local petting zoo until the day that all of them died.

Poor strategy, that. If you go on too long, they may well draw some unflattering conclusions about the pacing of your storytelling preferences, if you catch my drift.

This outcome is at least 27 times more likely if the book being pitched happens to be a memoir, incidentally: because most memoir submissions are episodic, rather than featuring a strong, unitary story arc, a rambling pitching style is likely to send off all kinds of warning flares in a pitch-hearer’s mind.

Word to the wise: keep it snappy, and emphasize the storyline.

Which brings me to the second reason that it’s better to tell the story of the book, rather than the story of each of the major characters: POV choices are a WRITING issue, not a storyline issue per se. And while you will want to talk about some non-story issues in your pitch — the target audience, the selling points, etc. — most of the meat of the pitch is about the story (or, in the case of nonfiction, the argument) itself.

In other words, the agent or editor will learn HOW you tell the story from reading your manuscript; during the pitching phase, all they need to hear is the story.

Which is why, in case you are curious, so many agents seem to zone out when a writer begins a pitch (and believe me, many do) with, “Well, I have these three protagonists…”

It’s an understandable thing to say, of course, because from the writer’s perspective, the structural choices are monumentally important. But from the marketing POV, they’re substantially less so.

Don’t believe me? When’s the last time you walked into a bookstore, buttonholed a clerk, and asked, “Where can I find a good book told from many points of view? I don’t care what it’s about; I just woke up this morning yearning for multiplicity of perspective.”

I thought not. Although if you want to generate a fairly spectacular reaction in a bored clerk on a slow day, you could hardly ask a better question.

I have a bit more to say on this subject, but if I don’t post this soon, it will be tomorrow’s blog, not today’s. (Speaking of being over-literal…and over-tired) Get a good night’s rest, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Preserving that freshness seal, or, you’re not going out wearing that, are you?

Preserving that freshness seal, or, you’re not going out wearing that, are you?

I’m winding down this series on craft for the nonce, because I do want to take a quick barefoot run through pitching (and what to do if an agent or editor says yes after you’ve pitched, other than jump up and down like a six-year-old jumping rope) before conference season gets too much older. Too few aspiring writers prepare adequately for face-to-face pitches — and since pitching a learned skill that really doesn’t have a tremendous amount to do with learning to write well, that lack of preparation results every year in a whole lot of good writers’ disappointment.

We’re going to be doing something about that over the next few weeks.

Not to worry, though, craft-mongers: I’m going to be hurrying back to craft as soon as possible thereafter. I have not yet begun to explain all the ways that interesting books scuttle themselves with unfortunate openings, for instance. Not to mention the fact that it’s been almost six months since I last went through the hows and whys of standard format for manuscripts.

Stop groaning, long-time readers. You should know almost as well as I do by now that a professionally-formatted submission tends to be treated with a great deal more respect in agencies and publishing houses.

And if you DON’T know that almost as well as I do, run, don’t walk to the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS and STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories on the list at right. Seriously, these can be life-or-death issues for your submission, and too few writers know the rules.

In case anyone out there is reading this blog for the first time: yes, Virginia, tiny problems CAN and WILL knock a manuscript out of consideration at most agencies, publishing houses, and contests. Remember, the first reader in each of these venues is usually given explicit criteria for weeding out submissions, so the screener is often not looking to like the book in front of her.

Today, I want to talk about not the nit-picking little concerns that agents and editors so love to jump upon as evidence of a manuscript’s not being ready for print, but a larger issue that traditionally causes editorial eyes to roll and Millicent the screener to mutter, “Oh, God, not another one.”

The time has come, my friends, to speak about freshness, the industry term for projects that are exciting because no one has written something like it before — or hasn’t made a success with something like it recently — yet isn’t so out there that those whose ideas of normalcy are predicated upon the current literary market will reject it as weird.

Confused yet? Don’t worry; you will be.

Freshness is one of those concepts that people in the publishing industry talk about a lot without ever defining with any precision. It is not synonymous with cutting-edge — although cutting-edge concepts are indeed often marketed as fresh.

And it doesn’t, contrary to popular opinion amongst late middle-aged writers complaining to one another at conferences, mean something aimed at the youth market. Nor does it mean original, because originality, in the eyes of the industry, often translates into the kind of strange topics that don’t make sense within either a Manhattan or LA context: cow tipping, for instance, or rural tractor-racing.

Although, of course, in some cases, all of these things are true of fresh manuscripts.

Okay, are you confused now? You’re not alone. But that’s not much of a consolation, is it?

As a basic rule of thumb, a fresh story is either one that has never been told before, never been told from that particular point of view before, or contains elements that make the reader say, “Wow — I didn’t expect THAT.”

Assuming, of course, that the reader in question scans as many manuscripts in a given week as Millicent.

Yet, as I pointed out above, original stories are not automatically fresh ones. In the eyes of the industry, a fresh story that makes it is generally not an absolutely unique one, but a new twist on an old theme.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, for instance, was certainly not the first tragedy ever written about socially frowned-upon love, or even the first one involving either cowboys or two men. It was the combination of all of these elements — and, I suspect, the fact that it was written by a woman, not a man, which rendered it a bit less socially threatening at the time it came out — that made for a fresh story.

Had it been more explicitly sexual, or overtly political, or had a happy ending, or even been written by an author less well-established than Annie Proulx, I suspect that publishing types would have dismissed it as weird.

Weird, incidentally, is defined even more nebulously than fresh in the industry lexicon: it is anything too original, off-the-wall, or seldom written-about to appeal to the agent or editor’s conception of who buys books in the already-established publishing categories.

Graphic novels, for instance, were considered until about 15 years ago not to have broad enough market appeal to be comfortably sold in mainstream bookstores, and thus were weird. Practically overnight, though, a few successful graphic novels (Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning MAUS or THE DARK KNIGHT, anyone?) sold really well, and BOOM! Editors started searching eagerly for fresh concepts in the graphic format.

THE DARK KNIGHT is a useful example, I think, of how a creative author can turn a well-worn story into a fresh concept, and since we’re about to be inundated with so much promotion for the movie version that soon it will no longer seem fresh, I should probably talk about it now. For those of you not familiar with it, THE DARK KNIGHT was a retelling of the story of Batman — who, before the graphic novel was published, had a sort of friendly, light-hearted reputation from both decades of comic books and a tongue-in-cheek TV show. Batty was, by the 1980s, considered pretty old hat (or old mask-with-pointed-ears, if you prefer.)

But in THE DARK KNIGHT, the focus switched from Batty’s do-gooding to his many, many deep-seated psychological problems — after all, the guy gets his jollies by hanging out in a damp cave encased in latex, right? That can’t be healthy. He is not saving Gotham time and time again because he happens to like prancing around in tights; it serves to ease his pain, and he very frequently resents it.

And that, my friends, was a fresh take on a well-traveled old bat.

It is endlessly fascinating to me that when people in the industry talk about literary freshness, they almost invariably resort to other art forms for examples. WEST SIDE STORY was a fresh take on ROMEO AND JULIET; RENT was a fresh retelling of LA BOHÈME, which was in itself a retelling of an earlier book, Henri Murger’s Scènes del la Vie de Bohème; almost any episode of any sitcom originally aired in December is a fresh take on A CHRISTMAS CAROL. (Or maybe not so fresh.) And can we even count how many Horatio Alger-type stories are made into movies — like, say, ERIN BROCKOVICH?

Hey, just because a story is true doesn’t mean its contours do not conform to standing rules of drama.

Like it or not, folks in the publishing industry just love the incorporation of contemporary elements into classic stories. There is just no other way to explain the industry now-embarrassing enthusiasm for BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY (well, okay, the sales might have had something to do with it), which reproduced the plot of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE so completely that many of the characters’ names remained the same. (Trust me, Darcy has never been all that common a first name for Englishmen.)

In the mid-1980s, publishing professionals regularly described THE COLOR PURPLE as “THE UGLY DUCKLING with racial issues” — a description dismissive of the great artistry of the writing, I have always thought, and the fact that THE UGLY DUCKLING in its original Hans Christian Anderson form is absolutely about race.

That sad little signet was on the receiving end of a whole lot of nasty ethnic stereotyping, if you ask me.

Do I hear the unmistakable sounds of disgruntlement out there? “Gee, Anne,” some of you seem to be muttering, “this would be very helpful indeed if I were starting a book from scratch. But at the moment, I am packaging an already-existing manuscript for submission to an agent or editor — in fact, I’m about to pitch it at a conference. How does the freshness issue affect ME?”

A fine question, and one that richly deserves an answer. Actually, it is almost more important to consider your story’s freshness at the point that you are about to send it out the door than when you first start the process — because once the manuscript is complete, it is far easier to see where the storyline (or argument; the freshness test applies to NF, too) falls into too-familiar grooves.

Because absolutely the last thing you want an agent to think when reading your submission is, “Oh, I’ve seen this before,” right?

Since a big selling point of a fresh manuscript is its surprise, you will want to play up — both in your marketing materials and your editing — how your manuscript is unique. And quickly, as in within the first few pages of the book.

Think about it: if you begin it like just another Batman story, the reader is going to have a hard time catching on where your work is fresh and different from what is already on the market.

Yes, Virginia (who seems to be asking an unusually high volume of questions today), you DO need to make the freshness apparent from page 1.

I hate to be the one to tell you this — and yet I seem to be the one who breaks the news very frequently, don’t I? — but people who work in the publishing industry tend to have knee-jerk reactions, deciding whether they like a writer’s voice or story within a very few pages. It’s not a good idea, generally speaking, to make them wait 50 pages, or even 5, to find out why your submission is special — and so very, very marketable.

Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’ve made the average agency screener sound a bit shallow, a trifle ill-tempered, a smidge impatient. Oh, I WOULD hate it if you got that impression.

Read over your manuscript, and ask yourself a few questions — or, better yet, have a reader you trust peruse it, and then start grilling:

How is this book unlike anything else currently in print within its genre?

Is that difference readily apparent within the first chapter? Within the first couple of pages? In the first paragraph?

Are the unusual elements carried consistently throughout the book, or does it relapse into conventional devices for this kind of story?

Would, in short, a well-read reader be tempted to say, “Oh, I’ve seen this a dozen times this month,” or “Wow, I’ve never seen this before!” upon glancing over your submission?

If the story is a familiar one, is it being told in a new voice?

If the story is surprising and new, are there enough familiar stylistic elements that the reader feels grounded and trusts that the plot will unfold in a dramatically satisfying manner? (And yes, you should be able to answer this last question in the affirmative, even if your book takes place on Planet Targ.)

It’s better to ask these questions BEFORE you send out your work, of course, than after, because as that tired old aphorism goes, you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. Make sure those early pages cry out, “I’m so fresh you could eat me!”

Yes, I know: I sound like your mother before you went out on your first date. You’re not going to wear THAT, are you?

I also know that getting hooked up with an agent with whom you plan to have a lifetime relationship via a level of scrutiny that seems suspiciously like speed-dating (oh, come on: that analogy has never occurred to you when you were pitching at a conference?) may strike you as a bad idea…well, I have to say I agree. All of our work deserves more careful reading than the average agency gives it. We are all, after all, human beings, timorous souls who are putting the fruits of our stolen hours on the line for scrutiny. Our work should be treated with respect.

And oh, how I wish I could assure you that it always will be. But don’t you think it is prudent to prepare it for the dates where it won’t be? Button up that top button, and axe the nail polish.

Above all, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Raising the stakes for your protagonist: wait, wasn’t the baby supposed to STAY in that bath water?

Raising the stakes for your protagonist: wait, wasn’t the baby supposed to STAY in that bath water?

Remember how I was telling you last time that I get a lot of great ideas for posts from readers’ comments and questions? A week or so ago, intrepid commenter Kathy wrote in response to something I’d said in response to an earlier comment, describing a:

“protagonist whose problems are — well, trivial is such a harsh word… shall we say not of life-bending importance?”

This seems to be the problem I’m having with my WIP. While my readers like it, they’re not thrilled by it. Which makes me wonder if I will ever see it published.

Today, it seems you can’t write about an ordinary person and her troubles, but have to throw earth-shattering obstacles at her. As if life isn’t hard enough already.

I hope you’ll discuss this situation and offer some pearls of wisdom to remedy it, without throwing everything out and starting over. Yikes!

Funnily enough, I was discussing this very problem with a literary agent at a book launch the other day. Except when he identified the problem, he explained it from the other side of the submission envelope: “I keep getting manuscripts with good characters and good writing, but there’s just not enough at stake.”

Did that collective harrumph I just heard indicate some disbelief that Kathy and the agent were talking about the same phenomenon? Trust me: I’m fluent in both writer- and industry-speak, and they were.

They were referring, you see, to a very common manuscript megaproblem, a little something I like to call the Cinema Verité Dilemma: how does one write truthfully and movingly about ordinary life — which is, at least most of the time, stubbornly resistant to the basic rules of drama — without producing a text that’s too ordinary to excite reader interest?

Would it surprise you to hear that the agent probably wouldn’t agree with Kathy’s suggested solution of throwing earth-shattering problems into the protagonist’s path in order to make the piece more marketable? Nor would I, as it happens.

Most of the time, it’s just not necessary. More than that, it’s not always plausible.

But I’m overjoyed that Kathy brought up the possibility, because many revisers do go a bit overboard in response to the suggestion that they raise the stakes of their protagonists’ conflicts a little, give them a more complex array of problems, and generally make the journey from Plot Point A to Plot Point Z a bit more circuitous.

How far overboard, you ask? Well, let’s just say that giving the protagonist’s best friend/husband/child a fatal disease, lingering addiction, or propensity to wander out into traffic is all too frequently the FIRST step.

From there, the changes can get truly dramatic.

Finding ways to make the ride more interesting is a more useful way to think of adding conflict, perhaps, than throwing more obstacles into your protagonist’s way. In the first place, most writers are pretty fond of their protagonists — so the notion of making that nice character’s life HARDER can be pretty distasteful.

Especially if, as is often the case with a first novel (and pretty much always the case with a memoir), the protagonist’s original situation was based all or in part upon some aspect of the writer’s life. “Make her life MORE difficult?” these writers exclaim. “But millions of people struggle with the problems she had in my first draft every day! Surely, that’s important enough to carry a whole book, isn’t it?”

Well, as that agent would have been likely to tell you, it all depends upon the writing. But the fact is, ordinary life tends not to be all that interesting, dramatically speaking.

So who’s job is it to make it so on the page? That’s right: the writer’s.

I suspect that pretty much all of us who write about the real are already aware of this on some level. I mean, the fact that we writers tend to describe such stories as ORDINARY is kind of a tip-off, isn’t it? If the characters are just surviving, rather than engaged in an active story arc, it’s hard for the reader to feel pulled along with the story.

Let’s face it: the Fates, while unquestionably gifted at producing real-life irony, are not always the best at dramatic timing. So, again, whose job do you think it is to correct for that on the page?

This is equally true of fiction and nonfiction, by the way. Even memoir is seldom just the straightforward reproduction of life as it is actually lived — or, to be more precise, memoirs that SELL are seldom just that. In order to make readable stories, memoirists tell their stories through their own individual lenses, selectively, and in a manner that makes a particular point.

Which, if we’re honest about it, is more than whatever deity is in charge of the running order of quotidian life tends to do.

In fiction, simply reproducing one’s diary (or real-life scenes verbatim) doesn’t very often work on the page, either — and, as I mentioned a few days ago, I suspect the fact that most of us were first taught to write short stories, not novels, tends to disguise that marketing reality.

Possibly because good slice-of-life short pieces of the type that most of us were weaned upon in Comp class are usually DESIGNED to disguise that marketing reality.

I’m not joking about that: the essence of slice-of-life literature is conveying the illusion that it is ripped from real life and displayed more or less as is, in much the way that found art is. But actually, considerable craft is required to produce that effect.

What, did you think that David Sedaris just stood in his childhood living room with a tape recorder, writing down transcripts of his family’s hilarity? (Can you BELIEVE the ridiculousness of that recent so-called exposé of Sedaris’ writing, by the way? Some humorlessly anal-retentive researcher went over his books with a fine-toothed comb to try to figure out how much of it was literally true. Apparently, no one involved had noticed that Mr. Sedaris is a COMEDY WRITER — or had heard of poetic license. But I digress.)

I’m sensing some disgruntlement out there — and not with the writer of that exposé. “But Anne,” I hear some of you slice-of-lifers protest, “hasn’t there been a lot of great literature that reveals truths about everyday life through closely-examined, beautifully elucidated moments of life as it is actually lived?”

Of course there has been — and still is, amongst each year’s crop of literary fiction, memoir, and fiction in every genre. No need to fear that such writing isn’t getting published anymore, because it undoubtedly is.

However — and this is one whopper of a however — the reception such a book tends to receive depends almost entirely upon the quality of the writing. (Wait — where have I heard that before?)

I’m not going to lie to you: a book that aspires to consist of nothing but such moments and ISN’T billed as literary fiction or memoir would probably experience some resistance from Millicent. And before any of you dismiss her taste as philistine-ish, remember that it’s her job to sift through her boss’ submissions, looking for work that has market potential, not just what’s well-written.

(Just a quick comprehension check before I move on: everyone out there IS already aware that literary fiction and good writing are not synonyms, right? The former is a marketing category; the latter is a descriptor of work in every book category. If you’re unclear on how to define the former, well, you’re in good company: ask any two agents who represent it for a definition, and you’ll probably get at least two different responses. For more on the ongoing debate, please see the LITERARY FICTION category on the list at right.)

I’ve been over this particular argument enough (and recently enough) that I don’t want to depress everyone by rehashing it again here. Suffice it to say that few agencies are charitable organizations; they exist to sell their clients’ writing, not just to serve the interests of High Art.

Which brings me back to my little chat with that agent at the book launch: what he was saying, I think, is not that he would like to see writers of books about ordinary people toss them aside in favor of writing something completely different, but rather that he would like to see those ordinary people be a bit more interesting on the page.

As, indeed, Kathy asked me to explain how to do. So I suppose I’d better get around to it.

Unfortunately, like so many good questions about craft, there isn’t a simple answer, or even any single technique to apply. Most of the techniques we’ve discussed in the Passive Protagonist Syndrome series would help, to tell you the truth.

But as I am apparently incapable of walking away from a half-answered question (I really do need to work developing that skill, if only so I can get a bit more sleep), here are a few other tricks o’ the trade for pepping up the reality-based — as well as narratives that aspire to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature. (Fair warning, Kathy: you’re not going to like the first one.)

(1) Give your protagonist a few more problems. Frankly, most novels and memoirs feature characters that are a little too straightforward — and so are their problems. In real life, most people are dealing with a whole rash of issues simultaneously. So why should a novel’s protagonist be luckier?

They don’t need to be big problems to be effective, either. You needn’t cut off her leg, for instance, but how would it complicate the plot to have her sprain her ankle at a crucial juncture? Would it give more scope for character development?

(2) Make solving those problems — and smaller problems along the way — more urgent for your protagonist. Or, to rephrase this in industry-speak, if the protagonist isn’t vitally interested in the outcome, why should the reader be?

A lack of urgency is an UNBELIEVABLY common problem in slice-of-life submissions. Even if the conflict at hand is quite small, the protagonist’s (and other characters’) involvement in it can make it seem immensely important to the reader.

Again, it’s the writer’s job to make sure that alchemy occurs, not the reader’s job to remain interested in whatever happens to be going on.

(3) Make your protagonist a bit more off-beat. Often, self-described ordinary characters are relatively devoid of quirks — which, again, is not particularly realistic, as anyone who has lived in an ordinary small town can tell you. Almost everybody has at least one or two genuine character oddities; why not let ‘em out for some air?

A very tangible fringe benefit: quirky protagonists tend to be a bit more likeable than salt-of-the-earth nice ones. The former are less predictable. Which brings me to…

(4) Allow your protagonist to act out of character every once in a while. Most aspiring novelists think that keeping a character absolutely true to type 100% of the time is a mark of narrative sophistication — but to tell you the truth, consistency is overrated. (Except, of course, consistent plausibility.)

Why, you ask? If a character isn’t very complex to begin with (see tips 1 and 2), the result can be utter predictability. Especially in a piece that aspires to feel very true-to-life, too much character consistency can sap considerable tension from even a very exciting storyline.

In a flatter story arc, it can take it away entirely.

Think about it: if the reader already has a pretty good idea of how the protagonist is going to react to any given stimulus, and if the storyline self-consciously avoids major twists and turns, what precisely is going to keep that reader turning pages?

(5) Add occasional humor. This is surprisingly often missing from slice-of-life stories — and astonishingly seldom plays a major role in memoirs.

(6) Allow the external environment to reflect the protagonist’s state of mind. This is an old literary fiction trick: from time to time, instead of showing the protagonist’s mental state through the on-the-nose method of typing her thoughts, why not have a nearby dog growl when she’s angry? Or a sunny day seem made for her alone?

(7) Play to your narrative strengths. Normally, I’m reluctant to give this particular bit of advice, as most writers have particular phrases, sentence structures, types of images, etc., that they would just LOVE to add 400 more times to their current manuscripts. But for quiet books, it honestly is a good idea to figure out what makes the best scenes so good — and to try to replicate that magic in a couple of other instances throughout the book.

A COUPLE, mind you. If any of you 400-times-per-manuscipt types claim down the road, “Well, Anne Mini said it was okay to play to my strengths,” I shall deny it vociferously.

(8) Accentuate contrasts. Even in the most prosaic storyline, there are ups and downs, right? Try heightening the joys and deepening the despair.

At first, this may seem as though you’ve made your protagonist bipolar, but a too-even keel tends to reduce a reader’s sense of the importance of that’s going on in a scene. Which leads me to..
.
(9) Raise the stakes of the conflict that’s already there. This need not mean making every conflict a matter of life or death — but if a conflict seems vitally important to the protagonist, it generally will to the reader as well.

It’s harder to make the day-to-day seem vitally important (see comment above about highs and lows), but that’s just another challenge for a talented writer, isn’t it?

Finally — and this is general advice that it would do most aspiring writers good to embrace — try to avoid the temptation to blame the publishing industry’s market-oriented tastes for what is very often a narrative problem. Once a writer’s gone there, it’s just a short step to the slippery slopes that lead to deciding that it’s not worth querying (“Agents only want books with non-stop action.”) — or revising (“They’re not publishing books like mine anymore, so I might as well trash this manuscript and start on a potboiler.”).

A warning flare that one might be getting close to that slippery slope: catching yourself speaking about the process in superlative terms. Watch out for words such as never, always, only, and impossible.

Or — and today’s questioner is certainly not the first commenter to bring up this possibility on this blog, even within the last week; most of the comments I get are actually on archived posts at this point — thinking that maybe it would be easier just to throw out the current manuscript and start fresh with a new story. Admittedly, sometimes that actually is a good idea — but as writers are rather more likely to produce this sentiment at the beginning of the revision process, rather than at the middle or the end, I tend to regard it as a more reliable symptom of a lack of confidence than a lack of potential in the book.

And when the thought is attached to a manuscript that has yet to be submitted, it sounds as though the author is trying to talk himself out of sending it out at all. I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again: yes, the current literary market is exceptionally tough, but the only book that will certainly never get published is the one upon which the writer has given up.

Or, to translate it so everyone on both sides of the industry can understand: no one really knows for sure whether a book is marketable until its author has tried to market it extensively.

So there.

Best of luck revising, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 5 Comments on The plague of passivity V: Help! I’m tied to a train track!

The plague of passivity V: Help! I’m tied to a train track!

I always like hearing my readers’ reactions to my posts, particularly on craft; those of us who have been in the game for a while tend to think so differently about what’s on the page than those brand-new to the craft that it’s sometimes hard for editors like me to see beyond what is to us old habit. For example, the last time I ran a series on protagonist passivity, reader Ashleigh wrote in to inquire:

You encouraged us to go through our manuscripts and mark places where the protagonist is not the primary actor and where she is merely observing. What about those instances when a character is reacting to an external stimulus? Does that make her the secondary actor rather than the primary actor? Can a protagonist be passive because they are too reactive and not proactive enough?

Doesn’t that get right to the core of the matter? Before I realized it, I had written four pages (standard format) in response. Then I thought: hey, shouldn’t I be sharing this with the rest of the class? Shouldn’t I, in fact, extend it into an entire post?

That’s often true of my responses to reader questions, I notice. In the interests of conserving time and energy expenditure, I really should answer more often with a post. But when I’m in a middle of a series…So until I mend my ways, it’s often worth going back and checking the comments on recent and archived posts; there’s quite a bit of useful material lurking there.

A first baby step toward responding less there and more here: the topic for today is how active is active enough, when the perspective is focused upon a particular character?

In any story that doesn’t involve the protagonist’s floating perpetually in an isolation chamber (a premise I wouldn’t recommend), she is going to be acted upon by external sources. That’s unavoidable — but there are active ways to react to ambient conditions and inactive ones, right?

Right?

Let’s get down to brass tacks: certain matters are beyond the control of even the most active protagonist. A tree falling upon her house, for instance, or a boss’ annoying whims. Her boyfriend’s suddenly announcing that he’s gay — or her girlfriend’s abruptly declaring that she isn’t. Civil rioting. Not winning the quilting prize at the county fair. Contracting the mumps. Death, either as a result of the mumps or otherwise.

That sort of thing.

In each of these cases, it would be unreasonable to expect the protagonist to be the generator (or generatrix, in this case) of the action of the scene. Gravity made that tree fall, after all, coupled perhaps with a little root rot.

Obviously, the protagonist is going to react to these external stimuli (unless, as I mentioned, she happens to be residing in an isolation tank).

A passive protagonist will respond primarily, from the reader’s point of view, with descriptive information about the effects of the catastrophe du jour. As in: “Why did that tree have to fall on Aunt Eugenia’s tea service! God obviously hates my entire family as far as it can be traced!”
Often, this takes the form of self-recrimination (“Why oh why did I not listen to that handsome arborist?”), resentment against the cause of the problem (“Daddy never got around to retrofitting the house. Mama always told him the roof would cave in someday!”), and/or analysis (“Why THAT tree, and why now? I’d best go to graduate school to learn something about Dutch elm disease, pronto.)

Quick: which of those responses is most likely to lead to protagonist activity? Got it in one: the thought that is forward-looking, rather than backward-looking.

How so, you ask? Well, as informative and entertaining as the first two responses might be on the page, they don’t actually change the situation at hand, do they?

I might even go so far as to posit that as a grand rule of thumb when deciding whether a protagonist’s response to external stimulus is too passive: is anything within the situation DIFFERENT as a result of the protagonist’s response to it?

If not immediately, how about five pages hence? Ten? Half the book later?

Let’s look at this in action, shall we? If protagonist Angela is living through an earthquake in a scene, she is obviously not what is making the ground shake: unless she possesses some godlike powers, she is being acted upon by the ground. So far, so good.

But the writer can choose to have her just crouch under a table, riding it out (a mighty fine plan in real life, should you ever find yourself in this situation, incidentally). Or the writer could choose to show her doing something active in response — saving a puppy from falling glass, perhaps.

In neither instance is Angela the cause of the primary event of the scene, but the first case, she is passive; in the second, she is not.

That was an easy instance; it becomes more complicated when other, more action-generating people are involved. This time, let’s have Angela be acted-upon by another human being: she’s waiting in line at the bank when a robber walks in and threatens everybody.

Again, in real life, Angela would probably be best served by being passive — sensible lady that she is, she might well choose to down on the floor as requested, waiting all a-tremble for the robber to get the money and go.

On the other hand, she would be most active if she jumped up, wrestled the gunman to the floor, and once again snatched a puppy from the jaws of imminent harm.

But realistically, Angela could still be active in her response, even without canine-related heroics. She could, for instance, surreptitiously work her coat over that puppy while she is lying on the floor, ostensibly following the robber’s directions, or whisper encouragement to the hysterical old man lying next to her who might be shot if he keeps whimpering.

In both these cases, although an outside observer might consider Angela passive, the reader knows better: she is struggling against an externally-imposed fate in small, believable ways. And that makes her the primary actor in the scene, if the narrative perspective remains focused upon her.

Starting to be clearer now? Let’s take another, less dramatic example — the one in which I happen to find myself at the moment, so I suppose that makes this memoir:

I am writing this on an airplane that is either experiencing epic turbulence or is rolling over Godzilla’s back. The dear lady sitting in front of me has just reclined her seat so far that my laptop, carefully balanced on the tray table before me, keeps snapping shut onto Our Heroine’s typing hands. The Recumbent One seems to be suffering from some sort of seizure, as she keeps bashing herself against the back of her bedlike seat, as though to encourage it to flatten onto my lap still farther. All the while, the gentleman behind me snores resonantly.

By no stretch of the imagination did I cause any this, other then getting on the plane in the first place and wanting to work on my blog, right?

I ask because I tend to feel responsible no matter what happens — I felt guilty when the Soviet Union fell, for instance, because I was worried about the locals getting heating fuel in the cold winter to come — but it’s apparent even to me that I am neither the demented deity shaking the plane like some demented child with a rattle, nor the ever-dissatisfied recliner, nor the producer of those rather ghastly noises best confined to one’s private bedchamber, rather than shared public space. I am, in fact, the victim here.

As much as we might not like or even notice it, our actions affect other people, and they us. Especially, as in this case, when some people I could name are so territorial that they obviously automatically recline their chairs as far as the darned things can go JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN.

But let me ask you something about what I’ve just written: am I an active protagonist in this account, or a passive one?

Actually, it depends a bit on the genre in which I was writing it: in a thriller, my quiet resentment would have come across as pretty passive. But in a memoir — hey, I called it — the reader would probably perceive my response as active, because I put so much vim into describing my resentment of it all.

But really, in real life, what made me an active responder was my muttering under my breath after the last jerk backwards, “Lady, it doesn’t recline anymore, obviously.”

And how do we know for sure that made me a more active protagonist in my own tale? Because I evidently said it loudly enough that the seizure-haver has calmed herself. Situation changed!

Now if I could only do something about all of that turbulence…and if only I hadn’t designed these seats so only a Munchkin could fit into them comfortably….

Which is, I suppose, a long-winded way of saying that Ashleigh’s last question went right to the heart of the matter. The protagonist does not need to cause the action in a given scene to be an actor in it, for our passivity-analysis purposes — she merely has to ACT.

Necessarily, she’s not always going to be the primary actor, but she can always do or say something, however tiny, in response to what is going on, to keep herself in the game.

I’m not saying it’s always going to be easy to discover how to demonstrate this on the page, particularly for shy characters. The greater the external stimulus, the more difficult it is to find that spark of autonomy: when people feel helpless, “How can I alter this situation in an indirect manner?” is not usually the first question that leaps to their minds.

But the attempt to change the situation — not necessarily the success of that attempt — honestly does make a great difference from the reader’s perspective. On the page, whether a murder victim scratches her attacker or freezes in fear — both completely understandable reactions, right? — can be the line between an active protagonist and a passive one.

Although I applaud any author brave enough to write from the perspective of someone on the bottom end of that extreme a power differential, victims in fiction are all too commonly, well, victims. Personally, I think it is far sadder when a vibrant, complex individual character’s life is destroyed than a passive one’s; to paraphrase EF Benson, I like to see characters who are terribly interested in life until the moment they go phut.

Even if this means going away somewhere else in thought, because there is no other course of action available. (As, for instance, Our Heroine might concentrate even more intensely upon her blog, now that the seizure-haver is readjusting herself to watch the in-flight movie.)

Let’s say that Angela is now tied up on a railroad track, poor girl, à la The Perils of Pauline. Clearly, there’s not a lot of physical action she can take in this instance, or even verbal action: trains make a lot of noise, after all.

So whatever can she do? She could just lie there and scream, waiting for someone to rescue her, of course, while the villain twirls his moustache in glee: passive.

Or she could, in the face of imminent death, project herself into a fantasy of ascending the peak of Mt. Everest, seeking cool mental breezes while the locomotive’s hot breath is bearing down upon her: active.

Tell me, which would you rather read?

When your protagonist is acted-upon, concentrate upon finding that instant of autonomy, rather than trying to force the protagonist to take control of a scene that would realistically be beyond her control. Figure out where a miniscule change is possible, or where an attempt to fight back would be plausible.

Do I hear some snickering out there? “Right,” I hear some of you gigglers say. “Tell me, Anne, how is that protagonist going to find autonomy against the reality of that falling tree?”

A whole bunch of ways, O snickerers. She could get out of its way, for instance (good choice), or snatch that ubiquitous puppy away from its far-reaching branches just in the nick of time. She could drag everyone within dragging distance into the wine cellar, anticipating the end of the world.

Or she could try to run into the house to save Aunt Eugenia’s tea service — even if she’s stopped by that handsome arborist or a concerned neighbor, her attempt to do SOMETHING to save the situation is going to give her power in the scene.

So there.

If you can find the time, a great exercise for developing a sense of active response is to write a scene where your protagonist is listening to a non-stop talker, a situation where it would require actual rudeness to get in a word edgewise. How can the protagonist control or alter the interaction, if only for a second at a time?

Okay, how can she do it without picturing herself on the peak of Mt. Everest?

There are no easy answers here, my friends, only meaty challenges to your creativity. I know you’re up to it. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The plague of passivity IV: processing…processing…

The plague of passivity IV: processing…processing…

Last time, I began telling you the story of Passive Paul, inert protagonist extraordinaire. Doubtless a charming fellow in real life, Paul is problematic as the center of a book’s interest because his devotion to constant courtesy, never taking even the slightest risk, however trivial, avoiding confrontation of every sort, and extensive internal monologuing render his entrance into virtually any scene of his own book a signal to the reader to start yawning now.

Or, to put it a touch more generously, a reader — particularly a professional one like Millicent the agency screener — might like him to DO a bit more and ponder a bit less.

What tends to end up on the page, in short, is a great deal of what we here on the West Coast call processing: lengthy examination of self, loved ones, and/or a situation in order to wring every last drop of psychological import from Paul’s life.

So I repeat my question from last time: why does Paul deserve to have an entire book devoted to him?

This question is infinitely harder to answer in the case of a passive protagonist than an active one. After all, the Pauls of this world almost never cause the central problems of a plot — far from it. He’s usually the guy who tries to get everyone to calm down. Passive Paul 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 (often in pages upon pages of unsaid response to what’s going on around him), but deep down, he’s a voyeur — a very specific kind of voyeur who likes to watch the world through a magnifying glass at a safe distance.

Even when the plot thickens enough to make his life exciting, 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.

Yes, plenty of people feel that way in real life. We all have our moments of adolescent yearning when we long to have the entire universe rearrange itself around us, in order to get us what we want. But as appealing and universal as that fantasy may be, it is very hard to turn into an exciting plot.

But oh, do aspiring writers ever try! Thus the perennial popularity of Ordinary Joes who are unwittingly drawn into Conspiracies Beyond their Ken as protagonists.

Let’s return to our hero, to get some sense of what this tendency might look like on at the plot level.

Paul encounters a thorny problem, one that would require him to

(a) make a decision,
(b) take some action that will disrupt the status quo of his life, and frequently
(c) learn an important lesson about himself/love/commitment/life with a capital L in the process.

So he dons his proverbial thinking cap…

(Insert Muzak or other appropriate hold music here. Writers LOVE working through logical possibilities in their heads, so their protagonists seldom lack for mulling material.)

…and two pages later, he’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 within the context of the plot. Instead, they tend to be summarized in a few lines, told, rather than shown, but analyzed to the last drop.

Did that set off warning bells for anyone but me? On about 45 levels?

Protagonists who feel sorry for themselves are particularly prone to thought-ridden passivity: life happens to Paul, and he reacts to it.

Oh, how lucidly he resents the forces that act upon him, as he sits around and waits for those forces to strike at him again! How little does the external pressure affect his basic niceness as he mulls over the problems of his life! How redolent of feeling do the juices in which he is stewing become!

This is fine for a scene or two, but 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.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that Paul could not be written about well, or even that a novel or memoir in which he was the protagonist would necessarily be unmarketable, even in the current super-tight, oh-my-God-is-this-a-recession? literary market.

What I AM saying is that Paul’s creator would have to work awfully hard to make his story exciting. A pure observer’s storyline tends to be, among other things, predictable.

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 (or memoirists, for that matter) who habitually had their leads agonize for a hundred pages or so before doing anything whatsoever, ask yourself this: how many books of this ilk can you name that were published within the last five years?

Come up with many? Okay, how many of the ones you have in mind were written by first-time novelists or memoirists?

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? Paul’s creator has a book that might interest ‘em.

You see, 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 about inert characters more than you might think. Especially if they represent literary fiction or memoir.

Why? Well, unfortunately, there seems to be a sizable and actively writing portion of the writing community that proceeds on the assumption that literary fiction SHOULDN’T be about anything in particular. Or if it is, it should be about the kinds of moments that work so well in short stories: exquisitely rendered instants fraught with significance.

You know, the type of hyper-examined scene that is really, really hard to sustain for longer than 20 pages or so. Partially — and see if this sounds at all familiar — because all of that observation and reaction tends to keep the narrative, if not mostly within the protagonist’s head, then at least within his body, for most of the piece.

Also, literary fiction refers to the writing style, not the plotline: Cormac McCarthy’s hyper-literary recent hit THE ROAD is a reworking of a premise long familiar to any SF/fantasy reader, after all; it’s the writing that makes it literary fiction.

So yes, Virginia, literary fiction CAN have a plot. It can even move the reader through that plot swiftly.

Memoir submissions often suffer from a similar reluctance to step outside the protagonist’s head into a full and complex world. But while literary fiction submissions tend to hold the magnifying glass up to nature (mostly the nature inside the protagonist’s head, admittedly, but still, nature), memoir manuscripts are frequently collections of loosely-drawn anecdotes.

Why is this problematic, you ask? Well, by definition, most anecdotes are told, rather than shown. Many, many memoir submissions rely so heavily upon the anecdotal style (which seems chattier than a more robust narrative) that they don’t include any fully-realized scenes or fleshed-out characters other than the protagonist.

Which can present a considerable storytelling problem.

In fact, the protagonist’s thoughts tend to be so central to the author’s conception of a memoir that memoirists often act rather puzzled when someone asks them the perfectly reasonable question, “So, what’s your book about?”

“It’s about ME,” they’ll say, astonished that anyone would feel the need to verify anything so obvious.

In a way, they’re right, but in another way, they’re wrong: a memoir is ALWAYS about something other than the narrator’s life, at least in part. People don’t grow up in a vacuum, typically, and even anecdotally, most of us will tell the story of our own lives within a context.

Which means, in practice, that the memoir can either present the narrator as a mover and shaker within that context, or as a passive (but likeable!) observer of it. Guess which most memoir submitters pick?

“But wait!” I hear some of you shouting. “Now I’m so paranoid about Passive Paul and his lethargic brethren and sistern that I’m terrified that my book will be rejected every time my protagonist pauses for breath! I’m no longer sure what’s being nice and what’s being passive!”

Never fear, my friends. When you are in doubt about a scene, ask yourself the following series of questions about it, to reveal whether your protagonist is taking an active enough role in, well, his own life. (These questions work equally well, incidentally, whether the manuscript in question is a novel or a memoir. You’re welcome.)

If you can honestly answer yes to all of them, chances are good that you don’t have a passivity problem on your hands. If you find yourself answering no to one or more…well, we’ll talk.

(1) Is it clear why the events being described here are happening to my protagonist, rather than to someone else? (Hint: “Because the book’s ABOUT Paul!” 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? If it doesn’t, could it? Would having Paul act a little OUT of character here make the scene more revealing?

(3) Is there conflict on every page of this scene? If yes, is my protagonist causing some of the conflict? (A golden oldie from previous self-editing question lists, admittedly, but always worth asking.)

(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) Does this scene change the protagonist’s situation with respect to the plot? Is either the plot or an important interrelationship between the characters somehow different after the scene than before it? If not, is this scene absolutely necessary?

(6) Is my protagonist doing or saying something to try to affect the outcome or change the relationships here? Is the protagonist integrally involved in that change, or merely an observer of it? (Another oldie but goodie.)

(7) If the scene contains dialogue, is my protagonist an active conversational partner? (Hint: if Paul’s linguistic contributions consist of “What?” “What do you mean?” “How is that possible?” and/or “Really?” you should consider tossing out his lines and writing him some new ones.)

(8) If my protagonist is not saying much (or anything), does he honestly 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?

#8 may seem like a harsh assessment, but make no mistake about it, to the eye of 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 of the industry: 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, a rude and pushy Paul can start to seem rather refreshing.

Yes, these are a lot of questions to ask yourself about every questionable scene in the book — but if you don’t plan to implement them right away, there are always those sweltering, sleepless summer nights ahead.

It’s a great alternative to counting sheep, after all: Passive Paul would never consider using his pondering time to such useful effect.

Keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that’s conflict, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did I just hear some jaws hitting the floor again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 6 Comments on The plague of passivity II: the many, many different translations of aloha

The plague of passivity II: the many, many different translations of aloha

On Monday, I gave you what I hope was a dandy scare about the passive protagonist problem: when the action of a book occurs around the main character, rather than her participating actively in it — or (dare I say it?) CAUSING it. As I intimated yesterday (and the week before, and a year ago, and…), passive protagonists tend to annoy professional readers.

Wondering why I’ve been hitting this particular manuscript megaproblem with such vim? While naturally not every single agent, editor, contest judge, or screener in the biz will instantly stop reading the moment the leading character in a novel stops to contemplate the world around him, at any given moment, thousands and thousands of submissions sitting on professional readers’ desks feature protagonists who do just that.

Often for pages and chapters at a time. It would start to annoy you eventually, too.

So perhaps it’s understandable that the average screener’s reaction to encountering inert characters tends to be a trifle reflexive. One doesn’t need to pull all that many pans out of hot ovens without using mitts to start snatching one’s hands away from blister-inducing surfaces, after all.

“But if the pros dislike character passivity so much,” I hear some of you asking, “why don’t they just TELL writers so? How hard would it be to post on their websites or include in their agency guide listings, ‘No passive protagonists, please?”

As is the case with so many basic facts of publishing, they DO tell aspiring writers about it — but usually in terms that you’d have to read 50 manuscripts a week to translate accurately. “I couldn’t identify with the character,” is a fairly common euphemism for Passive Protagonist Syndrome.

Was that giant thump I just heard a thousand jaws hitting the floor? Let me guess: you thought you were the only submitter who had ever heard this, right?

Would you be surprised to learn that this is one of the single most common pieces of individualized rejection feedback writers receive? So I would imagine that quite a few of you — at least, the ones who have been querying diligently — have seen this little number in rejection letters.

Hands up, anyone who received such a response and instantly thought, “Oh, I’d better make my protagonist more active, by gum.” Anyone? Anyone?

Of course, there are other reasons a screener (who is usually the one weeding out submissions at a big agency, by the way, rather than the agent) might not have identified with a protagonist OTHER than passivity. But it is one of the more common.

Other rejection-speak that might translate as an appeal for more activity: “I didn’t like the main character enough to follow him through an entire book,” “There isn’t enough conflict here,” and the ever-popular, “I just didn’t fall in love with the protagonist enough to pick up the book.”

However, since this last euphemism has about as many meanings as aloha, it’s often difficult to translate exactly: I have seen it mean everything from, “The first paragraph bored me” to “I hate books about brunettes.”

You’d be amazed what a broad range of issues folks on the business side of the biz will lump under the general rubric of writing problem, too.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you slice-of-lifers fume, “this is grossly unfair! Surely, this is not a reaction that every reader would have to a slightly lackadaisical character — and in case you haven’t noticed, the world is stuffed to the gills with people who do not rush headlong into conflict at the slightest provocation. Haven’t you ever heard of REALISM?”

Oh, I think that this problem is ALL about realism — I suspect the underlying problem here is that writers tend to identify with passive protagonists far, far more than other readers do. (And just to give you a heads-up, imaginary protestors: professional readers generally HATE it when aspiring writers accuse them of having invented the marketing reality that certain books are harder to sell than others. Really.)

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, charming, interesting people.

The average fiction or memoir agent, to put it mildly, does not share this opinion. Nor does the average editor of same; even those who publish books by journalists — who are, after all, trained to be primarily observers — want the SUBJECTS of those stories to be active.

For one simple reason: because such stories are, by and large, infinitely easier to sell to readers.

It helps to remember that we writers are far from normal readers. We buy a disproportionate share of any year’s crop of literary fiction, for instance, as well as much of the short story collections and masses of poetry. We pore over books in our chosen genre, following our favorite authors’ careers with a loyalty and intensity that others reserve for sports stars.

We are, in fact, an extremely specific market niche, and it would be interesting to try to make the case that a particular piece of literary fiction could be marketed successfully to writers-who-read, specifically on the grounds that its protagonist DOES think like a writer, observing.

However, if you are writing in most of the established book categories, I can virtually guarantee that writers will not be your primary target audience.

And that’s something of a pity, because from a writer’ point of view, 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 — and one of the simplest ways to incorporate our shrewd observations on the human condition seamlessly into a text is to attribute them to a character.

Writers who read LOVE that.

Which is fine, until the protagonist becomes so busy observing — or feeling, or thinking — that it essentially becomes his full-time job in the book. Since in the two of the three most common fictional voices — omniscient narrator, first person, and tight third person, where the reader hears the thoughts of the protagonist — the observing character is generally the protagonist, this propensity sometimes results in a book centered on someone who is too busy observing others to have a life of his or her own.

Yes, you did just draw the correct conclusion there: on the page, being purely reactive seldom comes across as all that fascinating a life.

That sentiment just stirred up some reactions out there, didn’t it? “But Anne,” I hear some reactivity-lovers cry, “my protagonist has a rich and full emotional life in responding to stimuli around him. His mental activity is prodigious. If that was good enough for Mr. Henry James, why shouldn’t it be good enough for me?”

Well, for starters, have you taken a gander at some of Mr. James’ sentences lately? Some of them are two pages long; even Dickens would have blushed at that.

More to the point, from a reader’s point of view, a protagonist’s being upset, resentful, or even wrestling within himself trying to figure out the best course of action is NOT automatically dramatic. To compound that blasphemy, allow me to add: thought about interesting matters does not necessarily make interesting reading.

In the throes of eliciting solid human emotion or trenchant insight, writers can often lose sight of these salient facts.

Why aren’t internal dynamics inherently dramatic, you ask? Because whilst the mind is churning, the entirety of protagonist’s glorious energy expenditure typically is not changing the world around her one iota.

Don’t believe me? Here’s how the phenomenon generally plays out in otherwise solid, well-written manuscripts:

(1) The protagonist is confronted with a dilemma, so she worries about for pages at a time before doing anything about it (if, indeed, she does do anything about it at all).

(2) If it’s a serious problem, she may mull it over for entire chapters. Or volumes of a trilogy.

(3.) When the villain is mean to her, instead of speaking up, she will think appropriate responses.

(4) At some point, she will probably talk it all over with her best friend(s)/lover(s)/people who can give her information about the situation before selecting a course of action. (See parenthetical disclaimer in #1.)

(5) Even in the wake of discovering ostensibly life-changing (or -threatening) revelations, she takes the time to pay attention to the niceties of life; she is not the type to leave her date in the lurch just because she’s doomed to die in 24 hours.

(6) When she has assembled all the facts and/or figured out what she should do (often prompted by an outside event that makes her THINK), she takes action, and the conflict is resolved.

Is it me, or is this progression of events just a TAD passive-aggressive? Especially in plotlines that turn on misunderstandings, wouldn’t it make more sense if the protagonist spoke DIRECTLY to the person with whom she’s in conflict at some point?

Gee, one might almost be tempted to conclude that writers as a group are confrontation-avoiders. Nah…

Often, writers will have their protagonists keep their more trenchant barbs to themselves in order to make them more likable, especially if the protagonist happens to be female. But an inert character who is nice to all and sundry is generally LESS likable from the reader’s point of view than the occasionally viper-tongued character who pushes situations out of the realm of the ordinary and into the conflictual.

Because, as I MAY have mentioned before, conflict is entertaining. On the page, if not in real life.

Again, real-life situations do not necessarily translate well to the page. While pitting virtuous and forbearing protagonists against aggressive bad folks (who often bear suspicious resemblances to the writer’s “ex-friends, ex-lovers, and enemies,” as the bard Joe Jackson likes to call them) is probably a pretty healthy real-world response, emotionally speaking, it can be deadly on a page. Sitting around and resenting, no matter how well-justified that resentment may be, is awfully darned hard to convey well in print.

But that doesn’t stop us from trying, does it?

Let’s face it, one of our collectively favorite means of showing resentment, angst, or just plain helplessness is to have the protagonist THINK pithy comebacks, uncomfortable reactions, pointed rhetorical questions, and/or outraged cris de coeur against intractable forces.

Instead of, say, uttering these sentiments out loud, which might conceivably provoke a confrontation (and thus the conflict so dear to agents’ hearts), or doing something small and indirect to undermine the larger conditions the protagonist is unable to alter.

Yes, people mutter to themselves constantly in real life; few of us actually tell of the boss in the way s/he deserves. However, at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, just because something actually occurs does not necessarily mean that it will make good fiction.

What does make good fiction is conflict. Lots of it. On every page, if possible.

This is not to say, of course, that every protagonist should be a sword-wielding hero, smiting his enemies right and left — far from it. But even the mousiest character is capable of acting out from time to time.

And yes, I AM about to give you another assignment. How clever of you to see it coming.

Whip out those Post-It notes and highlighting pens and start running through your manuscript, seeking out silent blowings-off of emotional steam. Whenever you find them, check to see if there is conflict on the rest of the page — and if your protagonist is taking part in it actively, only in thought, or simply as an observer.

Depending upon what you find in each instance, here are some possible next steps. (Fair warning: some of these are going to sound a wee bit familiar from Monday’s assignment, as we’re talking about fixing the same phenomenon.)

(1) If there’s not conflict on the page, ask yourself: how could I add some? Or, if you’re trying to avoid adding length to the manuscript, are there elements slowing down the scene that you could cut? Does this interaction add enough to the plot or character development that it actually needs to be there?

(2) If your protagonist is active, pat yourself on the back. Then ask yourself anyway: is there something even more interesting s/he could do here? A way that her reaction could surprise the reader a little more, perhaps? Small twists go a long way toward keeping a reader involved.

(3) If your protagonist is merely thinking her response, go over the moments when she is silently emoting. Is there some small tweak you could give to her response that would make it change the situation at hand? Or — and it’s astonishing how infrequently this solution seems to occur to most aspiring writers — could she say some of the things she’s thinking OUT LOUD?

(4) If your protagonist is a pure observer in the scene, sit down and figure out what precisely the observed interaction adds to the book. Are there ways that you could achieve the same goals in scenes where your protagonist is a stronger player?

If you find yourself worrying that these textual tweaks may cumulatively transform your protagonist a charming, well-rounded lump of inactivity into a seething mass of interpersonal problem generation, consider this: many 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. Please bear in mind that before your work can speak to your target market of readers, it has to please another target market: agents and editors. Even if you have good reason to keep your protagonist from confronting his challenges directly — and you may well have dandy ones; look at Hamlet — he will still have to keep in motion enough to please this necessary first audience.

So while you’re editing, ask yourself: how can I coax my protagonist out of his head, and into his story? How can his actions or words alter this particular moment in the plotline, if only a little?

As individuals, we can’t always more mountains, my friends, but we can usually kick around a few pebbles. Give it some thought, and keep up the good work.

(PS: the original of the doctored photo above appears on FreeFoto.com.)

Posted on - 3 Comments on The plague of passivity

The plague of passivity

Have you spent the last few days mulling over what I said on Friday about how easily the average reader — to say nothing of the professional ones like agents, editors, contest judges, and our dear old friend, Millicent the agency screener — can turn off to passive characters, protagonists in particular? Not due to any anti-literary hatred of interior monologue, as aspiring writers fond of slow-moving plots tend to assume, but as a matter of pacing and plot momentum.

I heard what your mind just shouted: no, Virginia, that ISN’T just a publishing world euphemism for a reader’s getting bored at a speed to rival a four-year-old’s attention span. Or a gnat’s. This is a legitimate manuscript megaproblem.

Which places the responsibility for fixing it squarely upon the writer.

What, no cheering at the prospect of talking about a submission problem it’s entirely within your ability to solve? That should make a frustrated aspiring writer rejoice, shouldn’t it?

And even if it doesn’t, after the sentence-level self-editing focus of the past few weeks, the kind that had your eyeballs glued to your manuscripts, I thought it might be something of a relief to sit back for some conceptual editing. Today, I want to talk about editing to make your characters more active, both to improve your manuscript’s pacing and to make your protagonist more likeable.

That’s right: I said LIKEABLE, not just more marketable. If the tension starts to lag due to protoganist inactivity — or, heaven help us, extended periods of feeling sorry for himself — readers often begin to find the him less likeable than in periods of activity.

(Yes, even in literary fiction.)

We’ve all read books starring the passive protagonist, right? He’s the main character who is primarily an observer of the plot, rather than an active participant in it. Things happen to the passive protagonist as the plot put-puts along, rather than his internal drives moving the plot along.

Since you brought up marketability (hey, I was planning to focus purely on art today, but you had to go and start me thnking), let me share a secret: any screener, agent, editor, editorial assistant, and/or contest judge who has been at it more than a week automatically rolls his/her/its eyes when such a protagonist lumbers his way across the pages of yet another submission.

Because, you see, a similar malaise plagues the lead in, oh, 85% of the manuscripts they see. At least in a scene or two.

So tell me: how are they usually going to react to a submission whose first chapter features a passive protagonist? Or whose first five pages does?

Do I see some raised hands out there? “But Anne,” some frightened frequent submitters protest, “what if the manuscript in question is by a market-savvy writer, someone who realizes that most rejections occur, if not actually on page 1, then certainly within Chapter 1? If the opening 50 pages are quickly-paced and open with a good hook, I — I mean, the hypothetical writer in question — can rest easy, right?”

Not necessarily, alas. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but amongst submissions that have made it to the whole manuscript request stage in recent years, a storyline’s slowing down somewhere around page 50 is a rather well-known phenomenon — for precisely the reason you pointed out: many writers now know that for those first 50, every sentence has to pass strict scrutiny.

After that, revisers tend to relax. A whole heck of a lot.

Resulting, often, in a manuscript megaproblem known in the trade as sagging in the middle. (So called because many manuscripts pick up again in the last 50 pages. We writers do like our endings, don’t we?)

But wait, the news gets even worse: as those of you who have been slaving to perk up your openings already know, a protagonist does not need to be passive for very long to be diagnosed as such. Or even particularly passive.

Again, try not to think of this as the industry’s problem, or as the noxious result of Millicent’s notoriously low thresholds of boredom: that would be a passive response, to a genuine obstacle to the creation of a compelling narrative.

Instead, I find it’s more helpful for a reviser to think of it as an activity level problem: it’s hard for a reader to sympathize with someone who is purely acted-upon without pushing back, at least in some miniscule way.

It’s no accident that early screenwriter Elinor Glyn (she who discovered Rudolf Valentino, Clara Bow, and first identified the elusive quality of It) advised those who would create screenplays never to allow their heroes to feel sorry for themselves for more than a minute on film.

She meant a literal minute, by the way, not a figurative one, but her advice easily translates into a page for our purposes here.

If there’s an ongoing plot problem — and, as we’ve touched upon in our discussions of tension-building, the characters should face problems more or less constantly throughout a story, to keep the pacing tight — audience members and readers alike prefer to see the protagonist DOING something about it than SAYING or THINKING something about it.

Even, surprisingly, if that action is completely misguided.

Perhaps ESPECIALLY if it is completely misguided; poor life choices for a character are often great fun for the reader, right? One of the quickest ways to add complexity to a two-dimensional character is to have her act out of character at some point early in the book.

To be fair, the vast majority of protagonists are not uniformly passive (and for good reason: it’s a challenge to construct a storyline around a static character). In most manuscripts, the hero lapses only occasionally into total observation mode.

Unfortunately, they often do so during those interview scenes I was discussing a few days back. You know the ones:

Our guy Jerry is on the trail of a secret that could bring down City Hall while his brother, Arnold, is sitting on death row, accused of a murder he didn’t commit that was — mirabile dictu! — actually committed by someone at the bottom of THAT VERY SECRET. Jerry has been rushing all over town, dodging bullets, in order to seek out answers, yet anytime he bumps into someone who might be able to shed light on the matter, he just sits there while the source spills his proverbial guts.

Even, amazingly, when the source has just spent the last 50 years in excruciating emotional pain, keeping that particular portion of his guts inside. Go figure.

Frequently, Jerry doesn’t even have to ask a single question beyond, “What do you know about it, old timer?” to provoke this innard exposure. (Passive protagonists’ skin apparently secretes some sort of truth serum.)

As I’ve mentioned before, TV and movies have inured most of us to this kind of spontaneous truth-telling; it has seeped into our collective consciousness to the point that it seems almost normal.

Why, just the other night, I was tapping away on my computer while my SO Rick was watching the season finale of one of the five million LAW & ORDER franchises. By the time I had finished my post and sat down next to him, there were only ten minutes left. A harried-looking woman was on the witness stand, being grilled about a long-ago rape. Apparently, she’d kept the identity of her rapist a secret for the past 26 years.

I got up to fix myself a sandwich.

“How can you leave at such an exciting point?” Rick asked.

I yawned. “Because she’s about to blurt out that she was raped by her father. Are you hungry?”

THAT’s how common this kind of interview scene has become: the instant we in the audience learn that a character is hoarding a great big secret, we EXPECT the whole truth to pop out of her mouth within minutes. (And on the original LAW & ORDER, if a victim survives a rape and is female, she usually is an incest victim. Or invented the whole thing, despite the fact that in real life, the false report rate for rape is no higher than for any other crime. Annoying. And predictable. But I digress.)

The point is, passive interview scenes are now ubiquitous — which should set your marketing antennae wiggling automatically. Pop quiz: what do we know about how Millicent tends to respond to ANYTHING — be it a plot twist, formatting error, or cliché — that she’s seen 20 times already this week?

That’s right: “Next!”

Again, this isn’t because Millicent is peevish: novels and memoirs (or, really, any book) featuring a passive protagonist is going to be harder for an agency to sell in the current market. 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. And in the opening scenes of a novel, often even less than that. (What are you complaining about? It’s longer than Glyn’s minute of screen time.)

You can see your assignment coming, can’t you? Don’t worry; it’s not going to be as bad as you think.

Go through your manuscript, scene by scene. No need to read for specifics; the general sense will do. If your protagonist is not the primary actor in any given scene, mark it, as well as any scene where she is observing action around her rather than participating in it.

Employ different kinds of markers for these two types of scenes; top and bottom folded page corners or Post-It™ flags will do. If you really want to be thorough, you can make a list of scenes as you go, marking them accordingly.

After you’ve rated the scenes, go back and revisit those where the protagonist is not the main mover and shaker. Could adding a line or two here or there beef up her presence in the scene? Could she ask some of the questions currently in the mouth of a third party, for instance, or take a more aggressive stand against a villain? Or against her mother?

Could you, in short, inject some conflict into every page of the scene? How about every half-page?

The conflict need not be earth-shattering: it can be something quite small. Many aspiring writers make the mistake when trying to increase conflict of being too literal about it, inserting actual arguments, assault, battery, etc. all over their texts, thinking this must be what the pros mean by conflict.

Yes, all of these things ARE conflict — but so is the protagonist’s saying something pleasant whilst thinking something evil in a first-person or close third-person narrative, potentially. Or the protagonist’s doing something insignificant to subvert his tryingly anal-retentive boss — moving the paper clips to the wrong side of the storage cupboard so they’re harder to find, for instance.

There are countless ways to introduce conflict, in short, if the author is willing to try. Ordinary life is stuffed to the gills with it.

Next, take a gander at scenes where everyone is being polite. Courtesy is predictable, and thus comparatively dull on the page: is there a way that you could make these exchanges less so?

Now turn to the scenes where the protagonist is watching what is going on. This one is going to sting a little: ask yourself honestly, without weighing in the balance how much you like the writing in this section, whether this scene is actually essential to the book.

If not, could you cut it?

I know, I know: some of my favorite scenes in published books are quiet, too. But it’s often apparent to an outside observer (like, say, an editor) that a protagonist is merely observing a scene because it’s not central to the plot or to her character’s development.

When a scene adds to neither, it’s a prime candidate for trimming. Because, really, in a submission, there’s no room for filler. (And don’t bother to start listing published books that are filler-fests; as I’ve said time and again, the standards for a manuscript breaking into the biz tend to be substantially higher than what an established writer can get published.)

Well, those two tasks ought to keep you busy for a while, I imagine. So when I return next month…

No, but seriously, I shan’t leave you hanging for that long. Next time — tomorrow, in all probability — I shall delve into the nitty-gritty of ferreting out protagonist passivity. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Keeping that plot chugging along

Keeping that plot chugging along

How many of you out there were English or Literature majors? Are you up on the subtle uses of symbolism?

Tell me, please, how this rates on the symbolism front: I’m scheduled to give a eulogy for a dead friend of mine in a couple of days — a writer of great promise, as the pros used to say — at a communal memorial service, and I’ve been under substantial pressure from various people to…how shall I put this?…clean up the narrative of my late friend’s life a little. Or at least tell a version that might not offend the folks who didn’t happen to know him.

No, that’s not the symbolic part; that’s all backstory. Here’s the symbolism: my throat has been sore all week.

I have to say, if I saw a parallel that obvious in a novel I was editing, I would probably advise cutting it. “No need to hit the reader over the head with it,” I’d say.

Now, if my life were a short story written for a high school English class, this voice loss might pass for legitimate symbolism — or even irony, in a pinch. A bit heavy-handed, true, but certainly situationally appropriate: outsiders move to silence protagonist’s voice through censorship = protagonist’s sore throat.

Both New Age the-body-is-telling-you-something types and postmodern the-body-is-a-text theorists would undoubtedly be pleased.

But the fact is, in a novel, this cause-and-effect dynamic would seem forced. As I believe I may have mentioned, oh, four or five hundred times before in this very forum, just because something happens in real life doesn’t necessarily mean that it will make convincing fiction.

My sore throat is precisely the type of symbolism that comes across as ham-handed in a novel. It’s too immediate, for one thing, too quid pro quo. Dramatically, the situation should have taken time to build — over the years since my friend’s death, perhaps — so the reader could have felt clever for figuring out why the throat problem happened.

Maybe even anticipated it.

How much better would it have been, fictionally, if I had dealt with all the different input with aplomb, not coming down with strep throat until scant minutes before I was to speak? That way, in fine melodramatic style, I would have to croak my way through my speech, while my doctor stood by anxiously with antibiotics.

The possibilities make the novelist’s heart swoon.

Just think how long it would extend a funeral scene if a eulogizer were unable to speak more than a few emotion-charged words before her voice disappeared with a mouse-like squeak. Imagine the deceased’s secret admirer creeping closer and closer, to catch the muttered words.

Actually, just think of the dramatic impact of any high-stakes interpersonal battle where one of the arguers cannot speak above a whisper. Or the comic value of the persecuted protagonist’s being able to infect her tormenters with strep, so they, too, are speechless by the end of the story.

Great stuff, eh? Much, much better than protagonist feels silenced, protagonist IS silenced. It’s just so…literal.

Then, too, readers like to see a complex array of factors as causes for an event, and an equally complex array of effects. Perhaps if I had been not spoken about my friend since he passed away (which, in a sense, is quite true: I was unable to make it across the country for his memorial service), then I would be fictionally justified in developing speech-inhibiting throat problems now.

Or if he and I had shared deep, dark secrets I had sworn never to reveal (no comment), how telling a slight sore throat might be on the eve of spilling the proverbial beans, eh?
But a single event’s sparking a severe head cold? Dramatically unsatisfying. Makes the protagonist seem like a wimp.

Because, frankly, readers, like moviegoers, like to see protagonists take a few hits and bounce up again. Even better is when the protagonist is beaten to a bloody pulp, but comes back to win anyway.

As I mentioned the other day, one of the great truisms of the American novel is don’t let your protagonist feel sorry for himself for too long — at least, not if his problems rise to the level of requiring action to fix. Simply put, most readers would rather see a protagonist at least make an attempt to solve his problems than spend 50 pages resenting them.

I can feel authors of novels and memoirs where characters sit around and think about their troubles for chapters on end blanching, can’t I?

Frankly, you should, at least if you intend to write for the U.S. fiction market. Domestic agents and editors these days expect first-time author’s plot to move along at a pretty good clip — and few characteristics slow a plot down like a protagonist’s tendency to mull.

Especially in a first-person narrative, where by definition, the reader must stay within the worldview of the narrator.

Some of you blanching souls have your hands raised, I see. “But Anne,” these pale folks exclaim, “you’ve been talking for a month now about the desirability of conflict on the page. Well, most of my protagonist’s conflict is internal — she can’t make up her mind where to turn. Surely,” the pallor deepens, “a professional reader wouldn’t dismiss this kind of thinking as whining, right?”

Um…that’s a good question, blanchers, and one that fully deserves an answer. The short one is that it all depends on how long the equivocation goes on, how repetitive the mulling ends up being — and whether the protagonist (or the plot, for that matter) is doing anything ELSE whilst the wheels in her brain churn.

The long answer, of course, is that in order to formulate a really good answer to that particular question, you would need to go out and read a hefty proportion of the tomes released in your book category within the last couple of years.

Not EVERY book, mind you: those by first-time authors, because the already-established have to impress fewer people to get a new book into print. In recent years, most fiction categories have moved pretty firmly toward the action end of the continuum.

As opposed to, say, virtually any novel written in English prior to 1900, most of which hugged the other, pages-of-mulling end of the continuum.

This preference isn’t limited to the literary realm, either — we often this philosophy in movies, too. Don’t believe me? Okay, think about any domestic film with where an accident confines the protagonist to a wheelchair.

Not springing to mind? Okay, how about if the protagonist is the victim of gratuitous discrimination, or even just simple bad luck?

I’m talking about serious drawbacks here, not just everyday annoyances, of course. For some reason, whining about trivial problems — “But I don’t have the right shoes to wear with a mauve bridesmaid’s dress!” — seems to be tolerated better by most readers, provided that the whine-producer doesn’t bring the plot to a screeching halt until she finds those shoes.

Got a film firmly in mind? Now tell me: doesn’t the film include one or more of the following scenes:

(a) some hale and hearty soul urging the mangled/unemployed/otherwise unhappy protagonist to stop feeling sorry for himself,

(b) a vibrantly healthy physical therapist (job counselor/friend) telling the protagonist that the REAL reason he can’t move as well as he once did is not the casts on his legs/total paralysis/missing chunks of torso/total lack of resources/loss of the love of his life, but his lousy ATTITUDE, and/or

(c) the protagonist’s lecturing someone else on his/her need to stop feeling sorry for himself and move on with his/her life?

In fact, don’t filmmakers — yes, and writers, too — routinely EXPECT their characters to become better people as the result of undergoing life-shattering trauma?

Now, we all know that this is seldom true in real life, right? Generally speaking, pain does not make people better human beings; it makes them small and scared and peevish. That sudden, crisis-evoked burst of adrenaline that enables 110-pound mothers to move Volkswagens off their trapped toddlers aside, few of us are valiantly heroic in the face of more than a minute or two of living with a heart attack or third-degree burns.

Heck, even the average head cold — with or without a concomitant voice loss — tends to make most of us pretty cranky.

Yet dramatically, we as readers accept that the little irritations of life might seem like a big deal at the time, even in fiction, because these seemingly trivial incidents may be Fraught with Significance.

Which often yields the odd result, in books and movies, of protagonists who bear the loss of a limb, spouse, or job with admirable stoicism, but fly into uncontrollable spasms of self-pity at the first missed bus connection or hot dog that comes without onions WHEN I ORDERED ONIONS.

Why oh why does God let things like this happen to good people?

One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon comes in that silly American remake of the charming Japanese film, SHALL WE DANCE? After someone spills a sauce-laden foodstuff on the Jennifer Lopez character’s suede jacket, she not only sulks for TWO FULL SCENES about it, but is seen to be crying so hard over the stain later that the protagonist feels constrained to offer her his handkerchief. Meanwhile, the death of her dancing career, the loss of her life partner, and a depression so debilitating that she barely lifts her head for the first half of the movie receive only a few seconds’ worth of exposition.

Why? Because dwelling on the ruin of her dreams would be wallowing; dwelling on minor annoyances is Symbolic of Deeper Feelings.

Edith Wharton remarked in her excellent autobiography (which details, among other things, how terribly embarrassed everybody her social circle was when she and Theodore Roosevelt achieved national recognition for their achievements, rather than for their respective standings in the NYC social register. How trying.) that the American public wants tragedies with happy endings. It still seems to be true.

I have heard many, many agents and editors complain in recent years about too-simple protagonists with too-easily-resolved problems. In conference presentation after conference presentation, they’ve been advising that writers should give their protagonists more quirks — it’s an excellent way to make your characters memorable. Give ‘em backstory, and if you want to make them sympathetic, a hard childhood, dead parent, or unsympathetic boss is a great tool for encouraging empathy.

Provided, of course, that none of these hardships actually prevent the protagonist from achieving his or her ultimate goal.

In other words, feel free to heap your protagonist (and love interest, and villain) with knotty, real-life problems; just make sure that the protagonist fights the good fight with as much vim and resources as someone who did NOT have those problems.

Again, this is not the way we typically notice people with severe problems acting in real life, but we’re talking fiction here. We’re talking drama.

We’re talking, to put it bluntly, about moving a protagonist through a story in a compelling way, and as such, as readers and viewers, we have been trained to regard the well-meaning soul who criticizes the recently-bereaved protagonist by saying, “Gee, Erica, I don’t think you’ve gotten over your father’s death yet,” as a caring, loving friend, rather than as a callous monster incapable of reading a calendar with sufficient accuracy to note that Erica buried her beloved father only a couple of weeks before.

While a sympathetic soul might reasonably ask, “Um, why SHOULD she have gotten over it already, if she’s not completely heartless?”, strategically, even the deepest mourning should not cause the plot to stop moving altogether.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that professional readers who resent characters who linger in their grief are inherently unsympathetic human beings; they just see far, far too much wallowing in submission.

Why is that a problem, you ask? Well, in a short story or novel or screenplay, people who feel sorry for themselves (or who even possess the rational skills to think at length over the practical ramifications of obstacles in their paths) tend to be passive, from the reader’s POV. They don’t do much, and while they’re not doing much, the plot grinds to a screaming halt. Yawn.

Or to express it in the parlance of agents and editors: next!

This is a very, very common manuscript megaproblem, one about which agents and editors complain loudly and often: the protagonist who stops the plot in order to think things over, rather than taking swift action.

Or — and this should sound familiar by now — stops to talk the problem over with another character, rehashing the background information that the reader already knows.

When you see these pondering scenes in your own work, even if the project in question is the most character-driven literary fiction imaginable, pause and consider: could the piece work without the pondering scene?

Often, it can, and brilliantly.

A more subtle form of this megaproblem is the protagonist who waits patiently for all of the pieces of the mystery to fall into to place before taking action. Why, the reader wonders, did the protagonist NEED to know the entire historical background of the problem before doing something about it?

Because the author thought the background was interesting, that’s why.

Longtime readers of this blog, chant with me now: “because the plot requires it” should NEVER be the only reason something happens in a story. Wouldn’t it be more interesting, and substantially more active, if the protagonist acted on PARTIAL information, and then learned from the results of what she had done that she needed to learn more?

In the midst of manuscripts where 2/3rds of the book is spent hunting down every last detail before the protagonist acts, I often find myself wondering: is it really such a good thing that HAMLET is so widely taught in high schools?

Yes, many of the speeches are mind-bogglingly lovely, but here is a protagonist who more or less sits around feeling sorry for himself and not acting until the final act of a very, very long play — is this really the best exemplar of how to construct a plot? Yes, it’s beautifully written, but honestly, by the middle of Act III, don’t you just want to leap onto the stage, shake Hamlet, and tell him to DO SOMETHING, already?

Oh, yeah, right, as if I’m the only one who’s had THAT impulse…

There endeth today’s attempt to derive something from my ambient reality that will help at least some of you in your writing efforts. Okay, so it wasn’t a particularly subtle connection — but hey, I still have a sore throat. Cut me some slack for a minor annoyance.

Don’t panic, please, if in the dead of night you suddenly find yourself thinking, “Hey, Anne raised a whole lot of troubling points today — but what about strategies for dealing with them?” You may sleep peacefully, knowing that next week is going to be devoted to precisely that.

Today was just to whet your appetite. Keep up the good work!

(P.S.: today’s lovely choo-choo appears courtesy of the fine folks at FreeFoto.com.)

Posted on - No Comments on I said YES. Wait, you want me to say no? Okay, then it’s no — and other less-than-stellar argumentative techniques of fictional characters.

I said YES. Wait, you want me to say no? Okay, then it’s no — and other less-than-stellar argumentative techniques of fictional characters.

I was thinking about you, dear readers, earlier today at an opera rehearsal — hey, I move in some pretty rarified circles. Specifically, I found myself musing about our recent discussions of plausibility in interview technique — as the singers belted their characters’ deepest and darkest toward the back wall of the auditorium. I must have been giggling under my breath, for in the middle of an aria, my SO leaned over to me and whispered, “They can’t have been reading your blog lately.”

Obviously, the composer hadn’t — not entirely surprising, as the music in question first hit the pop charts in the middle of the 17th century; I doubt its author blog-surfed much.

The moment I got home, I rushed straight to my computer and started rifling through my archives — a practice I highly encourage; there’s quite a bit of information stacked in the back room of this blog, you know — because I had a distinct recollection of having written on this very topic sometime last year.

As it turned out, I was right: my last spring’s opera intake included sitting through a classic bad interview scene. Take a listen:

The brave knight Ruggiero, ensnared by the love spells of the evil sorceress Alcina (who had a nasty habit of turning her exes into trees; opera gives one a lot of room for imaginative touches), has deserted both his fighting obligations and his warrior girlfriend, Bradamante. So another sorceress, Melissa, turns herself into an image of Ruggiero’s father, Atlante, to try to free him. Dressed as Atlante (and turning from an alto into a baritone for the occasion, a nifty trick), Melissa berates Ruggiero for lying around in sensual bliss when there’s work to be done.

A single three-minute solo later, Ruggiero’s mind is changed, with no argument from the big guy himself: he is free from the spell, and goes on to bellow some extraordinarily nasty insults at Alcina while Punchinello dances around with a squid.

You had to be there, I guess. It was quite entertaining; the squid was played by a hand puppet. It was also not very good storytelling — and even worse character development.

This type of persuasion in an interview scene — where the protagonist’s mind is changed on an issue about which he is supposedly passionate simply because someone TELLS him he’s wrong, without engaging in convincing argument — occurs in novel submissions more often than you might think. Many a protagonist who is downright tigerish in defense of his ideals elsewhere in the book is positively lamblike when confronted by a boss, a lover, a child, etc. who points out his flaws.

And that, unfortunately, makes the conflict seem much less important than if the characters argue the pros and cons at least a little. Usually, the result is a more compelling scene — and better character development for the arguers.

Oh, heck, I’ll go out on a limb here: it’s almost always better storytelling.

Why? Everybody chant it together now: because conflict is more interesting in a scene than agreement. Unending harmony, as delightful (and rare) as it may be in real life, can be a real snooze-fest on the page.

Even the injection of just a little good, old-fashioned passive-aggression can ginger up a scene no end.

Nor does being easily persuaded, non-confrontational, or generally — brace yourself — nice necessarily render a protagonist (or any other character) more likeable to the reader. No, not even if the reader happens to enjoy the company of such sterling souls in real life.

Why, you cry? Because endlessly making nice tends to kill dramatic tension dead, dead, dead.

That seems to come as a surprise to many aspiring writers, judging by the number of first novels and memoirs where the protagonist bends over backwards never to offend anyone — especially common in manuscripts where the protagonist happens to be female, I notice. Butter wouldn’t melt in some of these ladies’ mouths, as the saying goes.

Which pretty much inevitably results in either a relatively conflict-free plot or a passive protagonist who stands on the sidelines while the less scrupulous (and more interesting) characters act.

To give you some time to digest that particularly bitter little pill — don’t worry; I shall be returning to the problems of the passive protagonist next week — allow me to turn my opera example to another use: to show yet another way in which a screener might read an opening scene differently than another reader.

This object lesson should be a bit easier to swallow. Take this little test: quick, without re-scanning the paragraphs where I glossed over the opera’s plot, try to name as many of its characters as you can.

How did you do?

I originally mentioned six, but don’t be hard on yourself if you only came up with one or two. Most readers would have experienced some difficulty keeping all of those sketchily-defined characters straight.

Heck, seeing them introduced en masse like that, I would have trouble remembering who was who, and I’ve seen the opera!

Introducing too many characters too fast for any of them to make a strong impression upon the reader is EXTREMELY common in the opening few pages of novel submissions. Indeed, sometimes there are so many people lurching around that the reader does not know for several paragraphs, or even several pages, which one is the protagonist.

Why might confusion on this point be problematic? In a word: Millicent.

Agency screeners read fast; if they aren’t sure what’s going on and who the book is about by the middle of page 1 (which is, unfortunately, how they would tend to diagnose the paragraphs above), they generally stop reading.

To use Millie’s favorite word: next!

So strategically, you might want to limit the number of characters introduced within the first couple of pages of your submission. If you’re in doubt about how many is too many — no, Virginia, there is no hard-and-fast rule — there are a couple of tests I like to use.

The first, and the simplest, is a modification of the one I used above: hand the first page to a non-writer. (NOT a relative, lover, or someone with whom you interact on a daily basis, please; these folks’ desire to see you happy may well skew the results of the test.) Ask her to read through it as quickly as possible. As soon as she’s finished, reclaim the manuscript. Then take her out to coffee and ask her to tell you who the main character is and what the book is about.

Why did I specify a non-writer, you ask? Because writers tend to be unusually good at absorbing character names; the average reader is not. Thus, the latter is a better barometer for submission purposes, at least for this particular issue.

Seem counter-intuitive? Think about it: your garden-variety agency screener scans far too rapidly, and reads far too many submissions in a given day, to retain the name of any character who has not either been the subject of extensive description — which, as we’ve been seeing over the past few days, can be problematic in itself — or a mover or shaker in the plot.

Oh, look: the question of protagonist passivity has popped its winsome little head out of its gopher hole again. Can’t imagine how that happened.

I sense some discomfort out there, don’t I? “But Anne,” some intrepid submitters protest, “weren’t you telling us just the other day that professional readers resent having things over-explained? Assuming that they’re smart enough to follow a complex plot, wouldn’t they be able to remember any character I’ve named? After all, even if Millicent forgot who Nicodemus was by the bottom of page 5, she’d merely have to flip back to page 1 to remind herself.”

Oh, I’m glad you asked this question, intrepid submitters. If you take nothing else from today’s post, cling to what I’m about to say next with the tenacity of an unusually stubborn leech:

In preparing ANY manuscript for professional submission, make it your mission to assure that a screener NEVER has to flip back to remind herself who was who or what just happened.

The simple fact is that very few professional readers will take the time to do it. Our old pal Millicent has a lot on her mind, you know — like that too-hot latte that just burned her full pink lip. (You’d think, after how long I have been writing about her, that she would have learned by now to let it cool, wouldn’t you? But that’s an agency screener for you: time is of the essence.)

No, but seriously, folks, most aspiring writers make the mistake of assuming that their submissions will be read slowly, with meticulous care. But Millicent might have 50 submissions to screen between now and the end of the day — you do the math.

The other test for a reasonable character-to-page ratio — and perhaps a better one, as it is also useful to see how well your storytelling skills are coming across: hand the entire first scene to that non-writer and ask her to read it as quickly as possible, to reproduce Millicent’s likely rate of scanning. Then take away the pages and talk with her about something else entirely for ten minutes.

In minute eleven, ask her to tell you the story of that first scene with as much specificity as possible. Note which names she can and cannot remember — if she’s like 99% of skimmers, she will probably remember only the two primary ones.

After thanking her profusely, sit down with your list of passed-over names and the manuscript: do all of these folks really HAVE to make an appearance in the opening scene? Could some of them be consolidated into a single character, to reduce the barrage of names the reader will have to remember?

Or could any of them be there, but not mentioned until later in the book, where the protagonist encounters that character again? (A simple statement along the lines of, “Hey, Clarence, weren’t you one of the thugs who beat me to a pulp last month?” is usually sufficient for later identification, I find.)

Alternatively, are some of the characters mentioned here for purely photographic reasons? In other words, is their being there integral to the ACTION of the scene, or are the extraneous many named or described simply because they are in the area, and an outside observer glancing at the center of action would have seen them lurking?

In a screenplay, you would have to mention their presence, of course — but in a crowd scene in a novel, describing the mob as monolithic can have a greater impact. For instance, which sounds scarier to you, Mr. Big threatening Our Hero while surrounded by his henchmen, Mannie, Moe, and Ambrose — or surrounded by an undifferentiated wall of well-armed baddies?

Personally, I would rather take my chances with Ambrose and Co. than with the faceless line of thugs, wouldn’t you? My imagination can conjure a much scarier array of henchmen than the named three.

I know, I know: when you create a novel, you create the world in which your characters live. And that world is peopled. But in the interest of grabbing an agency screener’s often mercurial attention, would a smaller cast of characters, at least at the outset, render your book more compelling?

Sometimes, less is more. Or at any rate, fewer. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 10 Comments on Like I said, yeah: more perils of lifting dialogue from real life

Like I said, yeah: more perils of lifting dialogue from real life

Are my eyes ever bloodshot today! With good reason, too: I’ve been reading up a storm for the past couple of days, in order to polish off some promised reviews. Everything I’ve been reading has been quite well written, thank goodness — although reading a bad review can sometimes be fun, writing one seldom is — but a certain type of repetition has been making me feel an unusually high level for Millicent.

What species of repetition am I complaining about now, you ask? Let me answer that with an appeal to you: as a reader, have you ever had one of those weeks where every piece of dialogue you scan seems to be a lightly-disguised monologue? Running, perhaps, a little something like this:

“I can’t believe how arrogant that car dealer was!” Sandy fumed. “You’d think he’d never met a woman who wanted to buy a car.”

“Yeah,” Jeff replied.

“I should have told him that I was going home to e-mail the National Organization of Women, to get them to issue a general boycott of his lot.” Angrily, she wrestled to undo the bungee cords that held the driver’s side door onto her 1978 Saab, provided that she never attempted to accelerate above thirty miles per hour. “Did you see how surprised he was that we left?”

“Um-hm.”

“You don’t suppose his telling me that women don’t know anything about cars is his standard sales technique, do you? Other women can’t actually have bought cars after a line like that.”

“No,” Jeff said, crawling into the passenger seat via the smashed back window. “I imagine not.”

Sandy dug under the visor to retrieve the seatbelt. “Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. It’s like those construction workers who yell disgusting things at women walking by their worksites: if it didn’t provoke a positive response at least once every 10,000 times, would they keep doing it? Or do you think that’s just blaming the victims?”

“Could be.”

“Anyway,” she concluded after she had successfully hot-wired the car, so she would not have to force the mangled key into the half-melted ignition, “I guess he won’t be offering five dollars on a trade-in again!”

“Absolutely,” Jeff said, clinging for dear life to what was left of the dashboard.

I ask you: what purpose is Jeff serving in this conversation, other than listener? And if he isn’t in the scene for any other reason, why doesn’t he just shut up and let Sandy blurt out her entire speech, instead of adding line after excisable line of entirely colorless dialogue?

Not to mention repetitious.

As you may have picked up from the subtle clues I’ve left lying around over the past week, dialogue has been on my mind for the past couple of days, because I recently enjoyed a long, gossipy conversation with a very old friend of mine with a very distinctive speech pattern: she says, “Like I said…” every other minute or so. In a long anecdote — to which she is quite addicted, as a world traveler with unusual tastes in traveling companions — she often uses this phrase ten or fifteen times.

Since we grew up together, you would think I would know where she had picked up this rare trope, but I don’t; it’s an adult acquisition. We have both wandered far from home, evidently. But still, you’d think I would have some inkling as to its origin: she and I were so closely allied in high school that at her wedding, her father spent 45 minutes grilling my boyfriend about his prospects and intentions toward me.

You might say that we come from a close-knit community.

Our hometown does in fact have a distinct speech pattern, a mixture of the lilt remaining when a small town in Switzerland (cow and wine country) picked up and became a small town in California (wine and cow country), certain Mexican-influenced words, a smattering of barrel-related French, and a linguistically inexplicable tendency to pronounce “mirror” as “meer.”

Being a farming community (the aforementioned wine), of course, certain agricultural tropes abound in season, such as, “How about this rain? Sure do need it,” “The grapes would have been in by now, 20 years ago” (untrue, incidentally), “Did you hear that bears have been at Farmer X’s grapes?” (true, incidentally; brown bears like expensive fruit), and “Damned drunken tourists have been at my vines again. They think every grape in sight is a free sample.”

But “like I said,” no.

Now, being a sharp-eyed writer with a strong sense of verisimilitude in dialogue, you may have noticed something about all of these phrases, real-life tropes that actual people say quite bloody often in my native neck of the woods. Chant it with me now: they would be DEADLY dull in written dialogue.

As would a character who constantly punctuated her personal stories with “like I said…” Or indeed, almost any of the small talk which acquaintances exchange when they bump into one another at the grocery store. Take this sterling piece of Americana, overheard in Sunshine Foods in my hometown not so long ago:

A: “See you got some sun today, Rosemary.”

B: “I was picking peaches. How did your dentist appointment go?”

A: (Laughs.) “The dentist won’t be buying his new boat on my dime. Was that the Mini girl who just dashed by?”

B: (Craning her head around the end of the aisle.) “Could be. She was supposed to be visiting her mother sometime soon. She’s not married yet, is she?”

A: (Shakes her head.) “Oh, hi, Annie. Visiting your mother?”

Me: (Seeking escape route.) “Yes. How’s your son? I haven’t seen him since high school.” (Murmurs to boyfriend, covered by Mrs. A’s lengthy description of the relative heights, ages, and weights of her grandchildren.) “Thank God.”

A: “And how’s your mother?”

Me: “Oh, fine, fine. I’d better be going. Nice to see you.”

B: “Give my regards to your mother.”

Me: (Wheeling cart away.) “I will. Remember me to Bobby.”

A: “Well?”

B: (Sighing.) “Still no wedding ring.”

Okay, what’s wrong with this scene as dialogue on the page, over and above its repetition? You can hardly fault this exchange for verisimilitude — it not only is a transcript of an actual conversation, but it sounds like one, literary traits that do not necessarily go hand-in-hand — but it’s missing something, right?

Any guesses, wild or otherwise?

Give yourself three gold stars if you yelled, “Well, it’s hardly character-revealing, is it? Who are these people as individuals, as opposed to representatives of a collective small-town mentality?”

See it now? This exchange might as well have been said by actors, rather than specific people with personal quirks. Granted, as is, it might tell you a little something about the spying capability of my home town’s feared and respected Little Old Lady Mafia, but it doesn’t tell you much about the speakers as human beings, or our relative positions within society.

And if there was a plot (other than to get me married off to someone with whom I might produce more little winemakers, a quest that is ongoing and perpetual), its intricacies are not particularly well revealed by this slice o’life.

Oh, how often writers forget that real-life dialogue generally does not reproduce well on the page! If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a writer say, “But s/he really said that!” or “But that’s what people really sound like!” I would buy my own Caribbean island and send the entire Little Old Lady Mafia on annual vacations there.

Do I see a raised hand or two out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “haven’t we already talked about this, and recently? Just as real-life events often don’t translate well into fiction, neither does most dialogue. Am I missing a nuance here?”

Perhaps one: aspiring writers also tend to forget that real-life dialogue is SELDOM character-revealing — and thus reproducing it in a manuscript will often not convey as much about a character as we sometimes expect.

Take, for instance, the oh-so-common writerly habit of placing the speeches of an annoying co-worker, relative, ex-lover, nasty dental receptionist, etc. into fictional mouth of a minor novel character as a passive-aggressive form of revenge. (Come on, every writer’s at least thought about it.) To a professional reader, the very plausibility of this type dialogue often labels it as lifted from real life:

“Oh, wait a minute, Sarah.” Pausing in mid-gossip, Theresa picked up the overturned plastic cup before anyone else could step on it, placing it neatly on the dining hall checker’s desk.

Dina the checker glared at it as if it was covered in baboon’s spit. “Don’t you dare leave your trash on my desk. Do you think I have nothing to do but clean up your messes?”

“It was on the floor,” Theresa stammered awkwardly.

“Don’t you give me your excuses.” Dina grew large in her seat, like a bullfrog about to emit a great big ribbet. “You walk that right over to the trash can. Now, missie.”

“I thought you had dropped it.”

“Go!”

“I’ll save you a seat,” Sarah offered, embarrassed.

Inwardly seething and repenting of her Good Samaritanism, Theresa obediently gave up her place in the block-long lunch line in order to take the walk of shame to the garbage receptacles on the far end of the dining hall. How quickly a good mood could evaporate.

Tell me: what about this scene would tip off Millicent that this really happened, and that Dina is a character from the author’s past? And why would her being able to tell this be a liability? Why, in fact, would Millicent be surprised if Dina ever showed later in the book any side other than the touchy one displayed here — or, indeed, if she ever appeared again?

Actually, that was a trick set of questions, because the answer to each part is the same: because the narrative doesn’t provide enough motivation for the intensity of Dina’s response — and fairly clearly, the writer doesn’t think that any such explanation is necessary. That’s usually an indication that the writer has a fully-formed mental image (negative, in this case) of the villain in question.

In other words, this is a rather subtle manifestation of the telling, rather than showing phenomenon: because the writer experienced this exchange as nasty because Dina was nasty, she has assumed that the reader will perceive it that way as well.

But without more character development for Dina — or indeed, some indication of whether this kind of insistence was typical for her — the reader isn’t really getting enough information to draw that conclusion…or any other. It’s just an anecdote.

Without reader feedback, the writer almost certainly wouldn’t notice this narrative lack — any guesses why?

If you said it was due to the fact that his memory of Dina the real person is so strong, run out and get yourself a chocolate sundae with jimmies on top. In his mind, her character is so well established that he can just write about her, rather than helping the reader get to know her.

The other tip-off that this was a real exchange, in case you were wondering, is that Theresa is presented as a completely innocent victim of an unprovoked attack. The pure villain vs. completely blameless protagonist is a dead giveaway that dear self is concerned.

And yes, I WAS darned annoyed when Dina — in real life, a very nice woman named Ellen who happened to be having a spectacularly bad day — misinterpreted my act of good citizenship. But if I crave well-deserved vindication from the total strangers who might conceivably read this story, I’m going to have to do quite a bit more character development.

Not to mention integrating the incident into the storyline well enough that it’s actually interesting to read.

Of course, we want to be true-to-life in our dialogue: as Virginia Woolf wrote, “fiction must stick to the facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction.” But let’s not forget that in order to maintain a reader’s interest, a book has to have entertainment value, too — and that however amusing a verbal tic might be in person, repetition is often annoying in a book.

This is especially true when a character is tired, angry, or in pain, I notice: all of a sudden, the dialogue sounds as though all of the characters are trapped in one of those interminable Samuel Beckett plays where the people are doomed to move immense piles of sand from one end of the stage to the other with teaspoons. See if this dialogue sounds familiar, theatre-goers:

A: “Oh. You’re home.”

B: (nursing the thumb the elephant trod upon in the last scene) “Yeah.”

A: “Have a nice day?”

B: “Um-hm.”

A: “I was cleaning out the attic today, and I came across that picnic blanket we used when we went out to Goat’s Rock Beach to scatter Father’s ashes. How it rained that day, and then the sun broke out as if Father and God had joined forces to drag the clouds aside to smile upon our picnic.”

B: “Yeah.”

A: “Ham sound good for dinner?”

B: “Yeah.”

As a general rule of thumb, I like to flag any piece of dialogue that contains more than one use of yeah, really, yes, no, uh-huh, um, or a linguistic trope such as our old pal “like I said…” Almost invariably, these are an indication that the dialogue could either be tightened considerably or needs to be pepped up.

“Like I said…” would be a particularly easy edit, because it would be a pretty sure indicator that the speaker is repeating herself (although interestingly enough, my old friend habitually uses this phrase when she ISN’T repeating herself, I notice). Yes, people do repeat themselves all the time in spoken English. Is it boring on the page? You bet.

Similarly, anyway and however in dialogue are pretty reliable flares, indicating that the speaker has gotten off-topic and is trying to regain his point — thus warning the manuscript reviser that perhaps this dialogue could be tightened so that it stays ON point.

My fictional characters tend to be chatty (dialogue is action, right?), and I was once taken to task for it by a fairly well-known writer of short stories. She had just managed to crank out her first novella — 48 pages typeset, so possibly 70 in standard manuscript format — so perhaps unsurprisingly, she found my style a trifle generous with words.

“Only show the dialogue that is absolutely necessary,” she advised me, “and is character-revealing.”

Now, since the dialogue in her published works has seldom, if ever, strayed beyond three lines, regardless of situation or character, I was not particularly inclined to heed this advice — have you noticed how often it’s true that established writers with little or no teaching background spout aphorisms that all boil down to “Write as I do”? — but I have to say, it has been useful in editing, both for others’ work and my own.

I can even derive an axiom of my own from it: if a person said it in real life, think twice before including it. Because, like I said, if it isn’t either interesting or character-revealing, does it really need to be there?

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on In which I lose my struggle to stop myself from condemning Hollywood Narration yet again

In which I lose my struggle to stop myself from condemning Hollywood Narration yet again

Before I justify that rather Dickensian title, allow me to a little something to those of you reading this outside the confines of the United States, its territories, and wherever its military happen to be traipsing about these days: today is Memorial Day, the national holiday originally established to honor the dead of our Civil War, but expanded in an effort to conserve holiday time after World War I to include perished servicepeople of all of our wars and police actions.

In a similar conservation push, the birthdays of Presidents Washington and Lincoln were collapsed into a single day in February. And nowhere is the birthday of the late Millard Fillmore celebrated at all, except perhaps in his hometown.

So why, you may be wondering — and who could blame you? — have I seen fit to commemorate the day with a close-up shot of Montana ledge stone?

Because, it may shock you to learn, people who don’t happen to be addicted to writing frequently use three-day weekends for home improvement projects. And mattress sales, apparently.

Anyway, it’s pretty, isn’t it? What more do you people want from me?

Last time, I introduced you to the Short Road Home’s glamorous first cousin, Hollywood Narration, the all-too-common phenomenon of one character’s telling another things they already both know, purely for the sake of filling in the reader. Hollywood Narration is when information is conveyed by dialogue between persons who both already know the information perfectly well — and thus have absolutely no legitimate reason to be having this conversation at all.

As in this little gem of human interaction:

“So, Tim, how was your work at the steel mill today?” Sally asked, drying her rough hands on the fraying dishtowel that served her as a makeshift apron. “Having worked there for fifteen years — one before we married, two more before the twins were born, and five years since our youngest girl, Sammy, fell off the handlebars of Tim Junior’s bike and sustained brain damage, forcing me to quit my beloved teaching job and stay home to help her re-learn basic life skills — I imagine you sometimes get sick of the daily grind. But you are my husband, my former high school sweetheart, so I try to be supportive of all you do, just like that time I went down to the police station in the middle of the night in my pink flannel nightgown to bail you and your lifetime best friend, Owen Filch, out after you two drank too much near-beer and stole us the biggest Sequoia in the local national park — renowned for its geysers — for our Christmas tree.”

Tim shook his graying head ruefully. “Ah, I remember; I had gotten you that nightgown for Valentine’s Day the year that little Betty, then aged six, played Anne Frank in the school play. As you know, Sally, I am committed to working hard to support you and the kids. But since our eldest daughter, the lovely and talented Selma, won that baton-twirling scholarship to State, I have felt that something was lacking in my life.”

“Why don’t you go downstairs to the workshop you built in the basement with the money from that car-crash settlement? You know how much you enjoy handcrafting animals of the African veldt in balsa wood.”

“What would I do without you, honey?” Tim put his arms around her ample form. “I’ve loved you since the moment I first saw you, clutching a test tube over a Bunsen burner in Mr. Jones’ chemistry class in the tenth grade. That was when the high school was housed in the old building, you recall, before they had to move us all out for retrofitting.”

“Oh, Tim, I’d had a crush on you for six months by then, even though I was going out with my next-door-neighbor, Biff Grimley, at the time! Isn’t it funny how he so suddenly moved back to town, after all those years working as an archeologist in the Sudan?” Tim did not respond; he was kissing her reddish neck. “But you always were an unobservant boy, as your mother Gladys, all sixty-four years of her, always points out when she drops by for her weekly cup of Sanka and leftover cookies from my Tuesday night Episcopalian Women’s Empowerment Group social.”

Okay, so this is a pretty extreme example — but honestly, anyone who has read manuscripts professionally for more than a few weeks has seen Hollywood Narration almost this bald. Make no mistake: this is telling, not showing in its baldest form.

The term Hollywood Narration is mine, of course; due to its widespread unpopularity, it is cursed under many names throughout the publishing world. My personal favorite is the SF/fantasy moniker, as you know, Bob… dialogue. Whatever you like to call it, as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the scourges of both the modern publishing industry AND the screenwriters’ guild.

For today, I had planned to leave my brief warning to this: when you are scanning your submission for this type of dialogue — and you most assuredly should; I’m not the only professional reader it drives completely nuts — try VERY hard, please, not to imagine those fine actors you’ve mentally cast in the movie version of your book (c’mon, every writer does that) reading these lines.

Why? Well, due to the unfortunate ubiquity of Hollywood Narration in movies, it might just sound logical to you.

I meant to leave it at that; truly, I did. But on Saturday night, I was dragged kicking and screaming to a midnight showing of a Korean horror film, Epitaph, in which a good 10 out of the first 20 minutes of the film consisted of characters telling one another things they already knew. Most of the other ten consisted of silent shots of sheets blowing symbolically in the wind — in a GHOST STORY; get it? — and characters standing frozen in front of doors and windows that they SHOULD NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

I pass along this hard-earned nugget of wisdom to those of you who may not have a chance to catch the flick: should you ever find yourself in a haunted hospital in Korea, don’t touch anything with a latch and/or a doorknob. Especially if you happen to be standing in front of the body storage wall in the morgue.

Trust me on this one.

Now, I would be the first to admit that horror is not really my mug of java — I spent fully a quarter of the film with my eyes closed and ears blocked, which I suppose is actually a rather high recommendation for those fond of the genre — so I did not see every syllable of the subtitles. But the fact is, my companions and I were not the only ones giggling audibly during the extensive backstory-by-dialogue marathons. An actual sample, as nearly as I can remember it:

Grown daughter: Dad, are you lonesome?

Doctor-who-interned-in-haunted-hospital: (chuckling ruefully) No, of course not.

Grown daughter: You’re too hard on yourself, Dad. Stepmother had a heart condition long before you married her.

Doctor-who-interned-in-haunted-hospital: But we were married for less than a year!

Grown daughter: You can’t blame yourself. Mother died in having me, and Stepmother had been sick for a long time. It’s not your fault. It’s nothing you did.

Doctor-who-interned-in-haunted-hospital: (weighed down by Ominous Guilt) Both marriages lasted less than a year.

I’m sure that you can see the narrative problem — can you imagine a more blatant telling, rather than showing, presentation? — but the laughter from the audience was a dead giveaway that this dialogue wasn’t realistic. Bad laughter is a sure sign that the audience has been pulled out of the story.

Too addled with a surfeit of Hollywood narration to sleep — and, frankly, not overly eager to dream about a maniacally-laughing, high C-singing dead mother standing by her small, terrified daughter’s hospital bed in a ward where there were NO OTHER PATIENTS — I ran home, buried myself under the covers, and reached for the nearest book to sooth my mind and distract my thoughts from the maniacally-laughing, high C-singing dead woman who was clearly lurking nearby.

As luck would have it, the volume in question was a set of Louisa May Alcott’s thrillers; I had used it as an example on this very blog not so long ago. Yet no sooner had I opened it when my eye fell upon this sterling opening to a story promisingly entitled, THE MYSTERIOUS KEY AND WHAT IT OPENED. Because I love you people, I have excised the scant narration and turgid poetry of the original, so you may see the dialogue shine forth in untrammeled splendor:

“This is the third time I’ve found you poring over that old rhyme. What is the charm, Richard? Not its poetry, I fancy.”

“My love, that book is a history of our family for centuries, and that old prophecy has never yet been fulfilled…I am the last Trevlyn, and as the time draws near when my child shall be born, I naturally think of the future, and hope he will enjoy his heritage in peace.”

“God grant it!” softly echoed Lady Trevlyn, adding, with a look askance at the old book, “I read that history once, and fancied it must be a romance, such dreadful things are recorded in it. Is it all true, Richard?”

“Yes, dead. I wish it was not. Ours has been a wild, unhappy race till the last generation or two. The stormy nature came in with the old Sir Ralph, the fierce Norman knight, who killed his only sun in a fit of wrath, by a glow with his steel gauntlet, because the boy’s strong will would not yield to his.”

“Yes, I remember, and his daughter Clotilde held the castle during a siege, and married her cousin, Count Hugo. ‘Tis a warlike race, and I like it in spite of the mad deeds.”

“Married her cousin! That has been the bane of our family in times past. Being too proud to mate elsewhere, we have kept to ourselves till idiots and lunatics began to appear. My father was the first who broke the law among us, and I followed his example: choosing the freshest, sturdiest flower I could find to transplant into our exhausted soil.

“I hope it will do you honor by blossoming bravely. I never forget that you took me from a very humble home, and have made me the happiest wife in England.”

“And I never forget that you, a girl of eighteen, consented to leave your hills and come to cheer the long-deserted house of an old man like me,” her husband returned fondly.

“Nay, don’t call yourself old, Richard; you are only forty-five, the boldest, handsomest man in Warwickshire. But lately you look worried; what is it? Tell me, and let me advise or comfort you.

“It is nothing, Alice, except my natural anxiety for you…”

By this point in the text, tangling with the maniacally-laughing, high C-singing dead harpy was beginning to look significantly better to me. Clearly, the universe was nudging me to set forth again like the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future to warn writers to alter their sinful ways before it was too late.

Just in case anyone out there didn’t spot the logic problem here: generally speaking, in real life, people do not recite their basic background information to kith and kin that they see on a daily basis. Unless someone is having serious memory problems, it is culturally accepted that when a person repeats his own anecdotes, people around him will stop him before he finishes.

Because, among other things, it’s BORING.

Yet time and again in print, writers depict characters wandering around, spouting their own résumés without any social repercussions. Not to mention listing one another’s physical and mental attributes, informing each other of their respective ages and marital histories, listing the articles of furniture in the room, placing themselves on a map of the world, and all of the other delights we saw above.

As we may see from Aunt Louisa’s example, authors have been using characters as mouthpieces for background for an awfully long time. Dickens was one of the all-time worst violators of the show, don’t tell rule, after all. Since the rise of television and movies — and going back even farther, radio plays — certain types of Hollywood Narration have abounded still more in manuscripts.

See dialogue above, lifted from the Korean horror movie. Or any of the films of Stephen Spielberg.

Oh, don’t get me started — but since you have, let me suggest something radical: readers tend to be pretty smart people. They are often, bless their respective hearts, quite capable of looking at an opening like this and remarking, “Hey, wait a minute: real people would have no reason to say these things to each other. Isn’t it just possible that the author is placing this dialogue into their mouths merely so I will know what’s going on?”

And you know something? They would be right. But that’s not all that’s going on here.

Like so many transgressions of the show, don’t tell rule, Hollywood Narration does provide some definite benefits to the writer who incorporates it. placing backstory and description in dialogue instead of narrative text is a shorthand technique, a means of allowing the author to skip showing entire scenes — or, even more commonly, to avoid figuring out how to reveal necessary information in a slower, more natural manner.

It is, in short, a trick — which is precisely how a professional reader who has seen it used 500 times this month tends to regard it. Millicent might not see it as necessarily the result of narrative laziness (although it can be that, too), but at least as evidence of a writer’s not being conversant with the many ways a text can convey information to a reader without just coming out and telling him outright.

Next time, I’m going to talk a bit more about this form of sleight-of hand and why so many aspiring writers seem to be so very fond of it. In the meantime, if you find yourself standing in front of a wall of drawers in a Korean morgue, keep your hands to yourself, okay? Maniacally-laughing, high C-singing spirits tend to be a trifle hard to shake once wakened.

Keep up the good work!