Posted on - 3 Comments on Some thoughts on naming characters, part III: wait, haven’t we met somewhere? You were the one in the hat, right?

Some thoughts on naming characters, part III: wait, haven’t we met somewhere? You were the one in the hat, right?

crowd-scene

Sorry I missed posting yesterday, everyone — I have a whale of a head cold. If there’s one principle I have tried to cling to like the proverbial leech, it’s stay offline when you have a fever. (I’m positive that we all know people we wish had clung to that appealing little axiom.)

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

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

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

Won’t you? (Lie to me, if not. I’m still feeling under the weather.)

If, on the other hand, you tend to emphasize your protagonist’s loneliness by having other characters engage in banter around him, seeing that pattern manifest on a list may lead you to question whether it needs to happen quite so often in the book to make your point — or with quite so many different people. Or cause you to question whether a reader might conclude that your protagonist is either an unemployed mime or not an actor in his own story.

It can, in short, alert you to both point overkill and the dreaded Passive Protagonist Syndrome. (Of which more follows in the weeks to come, rest assured.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself, amn’t I? So far, in discussing how to keep your characters from blurring together in the minds of swiftly-scanning agents and editors, I’ve concentrated on the scene and paragraph levels. Today, I would like to raise the discussion to the book level.

Let’s assume for the moment that you’ve refined your opening scene (and chapter) so that characters are introduced in discrete, memorable groupings, as I have advised in the my last post. Let’s also say for the sake of argument that you’ve minimized the possibility of name confusion by christening your characters as differently as possible — no Selma and Thelma for you. All that being done, you may now sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that each of your characters is distinctly memorable, right?

Not necessarily. You might still have too many named characters in the book.

Why might this be problematic? Well, if you have a cast of thousands, it’s going to be much, much harder for any reader – let alone a professional one like our friend Millicent, the agency screener – to care about individual characters. When attention is spread thin, affection starts to waver. Still worse, when a reader has to keep track of 77 different names, it can become a trifle difficult for him to tell which characters he’s supposed to be following.

And to reiterate from last time: no, as far as I am aware, there is no strict standard for how many is too many. What works best varies from book to book.

The only widely-used criterion I know is whether the reader starts to have trouble telling them apart — but, as I pointed out last time, characters whose names sound similar or begin with the same letter are prime candidates for blurrage. (Yes, I know – it isn’t a word. But it should be.) So, on a practical level, if your novel features more than 26 named characters, you MIGHT be risking their merging.

No, but seriously, since most writers do not keep running tallies of the characters in their books, it’s not all that hard to end up with 50 or 100 named characters without realizing it. Especially if they are introduced many at a time, without much character development for any given one, it isn’t precisely reasonable to expect the reader to keep track of them all, is it?

A great test of whether your novel is overstaffed is to hand a hard copy of it to a reader who does not know you very well (and thus has no incentive to lie to keep you happy), and ask him to stop reading when the number of characters becomes bewildering. Have him mark where he threw in the towel by folding that page in half.

Ideally, you will get the manuscript back with every page pristine, naturally, but if that folded page falls within your first fifty pages — i.e., in the part of the book that an agent would be likely to ask to see first — you should consider making some major cast cuts. (If the folded page falls within the first chapter, I would suggest going back and reading my last few posts, because in all likelihood, there are too many characters up front.)

You can do a version of this test on your own, by sitting down with your manuscript and a highlighting pen and marking every proper name, but if you are worried enough by the feedback you’ve been getting, you might want to go for broke and make an actual list of characters.

Yes, I know PRECISELY how time-consuming this would be; thanks for asking.

Lest you think I don’t practice what I preach, let me say up front: I do this quite a bit for my clients. When I’m editing a novel that seems to have quite a few characters wandering around, I routinely keeping track of how often and where a particular character appears. By name, so I can tell when a character who appeared once on page 15 carrying a load of firewood turns up again on page 310 entering the diner.

So far, the all-time record amongst my clients is 284 individual characters in a 400-page manuscript, but let me tell you, that tally has faced some stiff competition over the years. I tend to work with writers who envision rather fully-staffed worlds.

The easiest way to generate such a list is by using the FIND function in your word processing program and noting each page number. I like to keep the results in a spreadsheet, so I can sort it by character name, chapter, page number, and what the character is doing at the time.

Yes, that US an insanely meticulous thing to do, but then, I’m an editor by trade: my clients pay me good money to read their work with a magnifying glass. So there.

Why keep track of the extra data? To make it clearer which groups of minor characters could be consolidated into just one or two. If, for instance, my spreadsheet tells me that five different characters shoe horses throughout the book, and if the story does not involve a trip on horseback of several thousand miles between smithies, I would be tempted to make all five the same character.

Noting where each character appears — in addition to making it SUBSTANTIALLY simpler to go back and find those four extraneous blacksmiths and put them to death, literarily speaking — also makes it apparent which named characters appear in only a single scene. In my experience, character-heavy books tend to feature a LOT of one-off cameos; generating a list will help you go through all of the one-timers to check who is actually necessary to keep.

And if the idea of doing away with these folks makes you sad, remember: if you become a career novelist, this is not the only book you will ever write. Characters are notoriously recyclable. You may well find that Blacksmith Bob of today can be very happily recast as Soda Jerk Bob tomorrow.

I sense some of you shifting uncomfortably in your chairs out there. “But Anne,” some of you protest, glancing at your watches, “I realize that what you’re suggesting is something I could be doing while I am sitting down and reading my manuscript IN HARD COPY, IN ITS ENTIRETY, and OUT LOUD before I even consider submitting it, and in an ideal world, I would follow your advice to the letter. But frankly, I can barely find time to write, query, and/or submit as it is. You wouldn’t happen to know any short cuts for ferreting out extraneous characters, would you?”

As a matter of fact, I do, but I’m hesitant to roll ‘em out. I can’t even begin to tote up how many writers, aspiring and established both, I’ve heard wail, “Oh, if only I’d caught that simple, easily-corrected error before I sent out my manuscript! Now that terrific agent/dreamy editor/stern contest judge will think I’m a bonehead!” But hey, my head cold has apparently made me a softer touch than usual: if you will all PROMISE not to use the tricks as a substitute for reading your IN HARD COPY, IN ITS ENTIRETY, and OUT LOUD before sealing that submission envelope, I’ll go ahead and talk about them now.

The best technique is one that comes more or less automatically to professional readers at about the 10,000th scene mark: becoming aware what kinds of scenes tend to invite minor character lurkage en masse.

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

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

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

2. Any scene that takes place where strangers tend to gather.
Ditto with coffee shops, bars, class reunions, Ellis Island, airplanes/-ports, and party scenes in general. All of these venues seem to attract single-appearance characters as surely as a red carpet attracts celebrity gawkers.

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

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

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

Or the memoir, or the historical account, as the case may be. Which brings me to:

3. Any group scene depicting an actual event — or based upon one.
Of course, this is not always a fair conclusion, but there is some basis for it: when writers lift scenes from real life into their novels, they do tend to include direct one-to-one correlations between the actual people and the fictional ones.

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

And while this practice tends to delight the kith and kin mentioned (and create grudges in those not mentioned — another good reason to eschew the temptation), it’s not harmless. Both professional and casual readers alike are likely to find it problematic.

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

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

Not necessarily, no — and not just because my nose is so stuffed that I now find it hard to believe that air has ever passed through it.

Even if the characters in a crowd scene do appear elsewhere in the book, it can still be pretty tedious for the reader if the narrative engages in a full roll-call. Or even a partial one. Come closer, and I shall divulge a cherished secret of the trade to you: lists tend not to make for very interesting reading.

And yes, you do have my permission to attribute that line to me the next time your boss insists that you sit through yet another PowerPoint presentation.

Mentioning characters just to mention them is seldom very interesting to the reader, at least when the characters in question are not integral to the action of a crowd scene. Bystanders are not, by and large, memorable to the average reader, but as I mentioned last time, all too frequently, it’s not clear which of the cast of thousands in a scene is the one (or dozen) that the reader is supposed to remember.

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

I know, I know: you’re not going to be able to convince anyone who participated in the real-life events that s/he was not integral to the action. But just as not every detail within a physical space is either necessary to mention in order for a reader to be able to picture a place or interesting if you do, not every character in a real-world situation belongs in the written account of it.

And writers, as any editor can tell you, tend to forget that — not just that everyone who appears in our mental image of a crowd scene (or in our recollections or photographs of it, if we’re writing memoir) is going to be integral to the action, in storytelling terms, but that every new character name is something else for the reader to remember. That saps energy that would be better utilized getting involved in the story itself.

Or, to put it another way, every time a reader, professional or otherwise, mutters, “Wait — who’s Gerald?” s/he has been pulled out of the story. A top-flight storyteller — which all of us want to be, right? — tries to eliminate such jarring moments entirely from her readers’ experience.

One way to minimize such exclamations is to bear in mind that just-mentioned-in-passing characters are rarely memorable from a reader’s perspective. Every editor in the biz has at one time or another been confronted by an author angrily waving a manuscript in her face and shouting, “What do you mean, where did this character come from? Alice was a guest at Ben’s wedding in Chapter Two, for heaven’s sake!”

Invariably, the irate author is factually correct on points like these: the character will indeed have been mentioned by name in passing, as in:

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

200 pages later, out of those three never-again-mentioned bridesmaids, the author expects the reader to remember Alice. At the risk of seeming impertinent, why should he?

Unless he happens to be blessed with an unusually retentive memory, he won’t — and even Millicents who do have such memories tend to resent being expected to use them to keep 157 characters straight. At the submission stage, then, unless a character is central enough to what’s going on in a scene to warrant development, you might want to consider whisking her out of Millicent’s sight, at least for the time being.

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

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

Remember, no manuscript is set in stone until it’s actually in print between covers; expect to be asked for revisions. Especially these days, when it’s not at all uncommon at the large U.S. publishing houses for the editor who acquires a book not still to be on the job — or at any rate, in the same job — by the time that book comes up in the print queue. I don’t want to horrify anyone, but within the last couple of months, I’ve talked to authors who are on their fourth and fifth editors.

Think each of those editors has shared exactly the same vision of the book, or wants the same changes?

My point is, now more than ever, it behooves writers to keep their options open. The better-organized you are, the happier you will be at last-minute revision time. Go ahead and keep copies of EVERY major revision of your manuscript, so you can revisit the Alice issue again down the road. Hang on to that character list, too; someday, possibly between revisions 6 and 7 after you’ve signed with the agent of your dreams, it may come in awfully handy.

Now that I’ve frightened all of you into hysterics, I’m off to drink some hot tea, if there’s still any left in North America after my copious indulgence of the last couple of days. More name-related tips follow anon.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Getting good feedback, part VII: clarifying those expectations, or, has my watch stopped again?

Getting good feedback, part VII: clarifying those expectations, or, has my watch stopped again?

stop-the-deconstruction

Is it me, or are people who take even the slightest, most veiled criticism of their work as either deep personal insults or as proof positive that they should scrap the entire thing and start again rather, well, annoying?

Perhaps they are not to the general populace, but I’m sufficiently annoyed today to let you in on a little trade secret that we professional feedback-givers seldom admit in mixed company: for subtle critiquers, both forms of over-reaction are kind of insulting. Why bother to formulate a nuanced analysis of a work if its creator is simply going to blow up or be plunged into the depths of despair? With someone unskilled in the fine art of accepting feedback, the critiquer is in a no-win situation.

While I’m telling tales out of school, let me add that professional feedback-givers aren’t all that crazy about another species of feedback-taker: the one who doesn’t kick up a fuss upon getting critique, because he has no earthly intention of incorporating it. He either cherry-picks what he wants to hear from the feedback, blithely ignoring what doesn’t fit in with what he had already decided to do (or, even more often, not do), or simply doesn’t listen. In this case, too, the feedback-giver is left feeling that she might as well have saved her breath.

Especially when she’s staring at the next version and notices that none of the problems she pointed out last time have been fixed.

What feedback-giving crisis prompted this extended lament, you ask? Let’s just say that the World’s Worst Landscaper™ has really been getting on my nerves for the past few days. The photo above shows the current state of a wall and steps that are now in the process of being torn down and reconstructed for what I believe is the seventh time since last April. That pile of rocks you see is atop what was through Valentine’s Day a bed filled with burgeoning bulbs and other mildly decorative plant life, now demised. And when I happened to glance up from an editing project yesterday, I noticed someone tearing down yet another wall that no one had ever mentioned touching again. I had to dash outside to keep my favorite rosebush and the cat buried under it from being dug up and summarily discarded.

Talk about deconstruction.

But that’s not what you thought I was talking about at the opening of this post, was it? I would bet a wheelbarrow full of the abundant rock lying all over my yard that some of you, at least, just assumed that I was complaining about writers defensive about their work.

Well, I must say, I can’t blame you for leaping to that conclusion: writers in general (and aspiring writers in particular) are legendarily touchy — at least according to agents, editors, and any first reader who has tried to pass along a couple of suggestions to an ostensible feedback-seeker who secretly only wanted to be told that his work was the best collection of sentences ever produced in the English language; the rest of the scribblers worldwide might as well turn in their printer ribbons now.

I’ve got bad news for writers harboring this yen: from a professional point of view, there is no such thing as a manuscript that’s beyond critique.

Actually, this mythical beast doesn’t really exist for most good readers, either — have YOU ever met a published book that you didn’t think could use an alteration or two? — but professional readers are far more likely than other people to see the same manuscript twice. Given that reality, those of us who are devoted to trying to give useful feedback to writers are often left wondering: where does that astonishingly common aspiring writer’s daydream where the first reader hands back the manuscript the day after receiving it, exclaiming something along the lines of, “I stayed up all night reading this; I just couldn’t put it down. Don’t change a word!” come from?

You’re familiar with that daydream, right? It’s the first cousin of the one about the brilliant book written in secret, without the author’s revealing so much as a syllable of it to any eyes other than the faithful raven perched on the bust of Pallas above the chamber door (and if that last line didn’t make you either smile or groan, I’ve got a bone to pick with your high school English teacher), wowing the first human being to clap eyes on it — usually an agent or editor, in this fantasy — so much that it is snapped up and published without so much as the odd gerund altered. Not only does no one ever dare ask the author for revisions, even minor ones, but all of the normal rules of publishing dissolve into a mist before this august volume. Everything else in the publisher’s print run is shunted aside so that the book can come out within the month. Listing on the New York Times’ bestseller list and genteel protests that the writer never dreamed that her book would ever be so popular (“I wrote it because this was a story I just had to tell, Oprah!”) follow a week after that, and the writer is a household name by Christmas. When platoons of literary-minded interviewers trample down the overnight sensation’s shrubbery to ask neighbors how it feels to live next door to a national treasure, the local gossip is so flabbergasted that he sounds like the person whose block watch captain was just arrested as a serial killer: “Well, I just had no idea. She seemed so normal.”

You do realize that it doesn’t work that way, right?

Don’t be embarrassed if you didn’t — or if you thought, as so many aspiring writers do, that if a book is any good, it will inevitably get snatched up right away; therefore, if yours didn’t, it must not be very good. These are extremely pervasive misperceptions, harmful not only because they encourage writers to harbor unreasonable hopes that will be dashed even if they end up landing an excellent agent and selling their books to the best conceivable publisher, but because they place an amazingly heavy burden on the writer to produce perfect prose on the first draft.

Just doesn’t happen.

If you ever happen to meet an author who actually does produce perfect first drafts, will you be kind enough to introduce me? Because, frankly, I’ve never met one. And even if I did stumble on this to-be-envied freak of nature, I would still expect to hear her grumble about her agent and/or editor’s revision requests — because, I assure you, even Ms. Perfect Composer is going to receive them.

Okay, the volume of disbelieving guffaws has grown so tumultuous over the last couple of paragraphs that I can no longer ignore it. “But Anne,” some of you huffers cry, “that’s ridiculous. If an agent or editor didn’t already like a manuscript, why would she sign its writer? And if she does like it, why would she want it changed?”

Those are clear, direct questions, oh guffawers, and they certainly deserve a clear, direct answer. How I wish that I had one to give you, but at the risk of repeating myself, it just doesn’t work that way.

The fact is, a well-written book is not necessarily a book that an agent can sell to her already-existing contacts in the current market, nor a book that an editor can successfully push through an editorial committee and acquire. It’s not necessarily a tome that booksellers will instantly recognize as appealing to their customers, or one that browsers in bookstores will knock one another over to stand in line to buy. And even if the book in question is simultaneously all of those things — which it has to be, for the publishing world to consider it a success — every single individual who helps the writer bring it to publication will have — and express — his personal reading preferences about it. Unless that writer self-publishes, she’s going to need to take all of that feedback into account.

Since I may already have depressed some of you into a stupor, I shan’t even bring up what the marketing department might want a writer to do to the manuscript prior to publication. Suffice it to say that the book is almost certainly going to read differently in its published form than it did when the writer first approached her agent.

I can feel some of you clinging to that almost in the last sentence, can’t I? “But Anne,” a hopeful few point out, “it’s possible that my book will be the exception, isn’t it?”

Well, yes, it is possible, in theory. It’s also theoretically possible that you will win the lottery, give birth to sextuplets, and get struck by lightning, all on the same day. It is, however, extremely unlikely.

How unlikely, you ask? Well, let me put it this way: if I had a quarter for every writer who believed himself to be the exception to this particular rule, I wouldn’t have to win the lottery; I would be the richest nit-picker on the planet. Queen Elizabeth II would be hitting me up for loans. If I had a dollar for every superb writer whose agent or editor told her, “I love this book — now change it radically,” I would buy a small island in the South Pacific and establish the world’s first combination writers’ retreat/tap-dancing school for dolphins. And if I had five dollars for every writer who has ever heard, “I love your writing — could you give me less of it? How about cutting about a hundred pages from your perfectly delightful book?” I would…well, I don’t know what I would do after I commissioned fine Persian rugs for every drafty kitchen in Canada, but I’m sure that I’d think of something.

Yet hope is a stranger to the strictures of probability, isn’t it? One or two of you are still thinking that your manuscript is that 1 in 100,000,000 that will astonish us all. “Okay, so maybe the odds are a trifle long,” those dreamers concede. “But if clinging to that rather remote hope helps me keep moving forward with writing and submission, what’s the harm in my stubbornly refusing to apply my math skills to this particular situation?”

Apart from causing your future agent to go bald from pulling her hair out in frustration, you mean? Well, let’s me see…one common type of harm involves getting one’s hopes dashed, taking the small handful of rejections (or even just the first) that prove one’s manuscript isn’t the exception one thought it was as proof positive that one should just abandon any further attempts at submission. Another type leaves the writer so unprepared for critique of any kind that the slightest hint for improvement causes him to deconstruct his manuscript down to its very foundations and begin again. A third prompts the feedback-receiver to stomp away from the feedback-giver in a huff, or causes him to stuff his fingers into his ears, merrily whistling until the critiquer gets tired of fighting to be heard and just goes away.

Any of these behaviors sound familiar? They should: they’re precisely the behaviors I pointed out above, the ones that drive good feedback-givers nuts, because they imply that it never occurred to the writer that in producing a book, he would need to please anybody but himself.

Hadn’t thought of it that way before, had you, oh guffawers?

But once you accept the proposition — as every writer who intends to make a living at it must — that it’s part of a writer’s job to accept and incorporate feedback, then you can start to regard good critique as what it actually is in the professional reader’s world: a compliment to a writer’s talent. Because, really, would it be worth a feedback-giver’s time and energy to convey suggestions to a writer who wasn’t gifted and professional enough to use them to improve the book?

In order to work well with first readers — be they agents, editors, contest judges, or that constantly-reading coworker who has expressed interest in seeing your manuscript — that you are indeed worth the effort who ever walked the planet, though, you’re going to need to do more than write a good book. Even if you happen to be both beloved of the Muses and the best natural handler of constructive criticism ever born, you’re going to need to learn how to ask for useful feedback — and mean it.

Up until now in this series, we’ve been concentrating on the problems poorly-selected non-professional first readers — i.e., critiquers of your work who are neither freelance editors, agents, editors at publishing houses, or paid writing teachers — might have in giving feedback. Now, let’s take a gander at some of the more common frustrations feedback-seeking writers encounter, with an eye to figuring out how the writer’s way of making the request for critique might have influenced the outcome.

Of course it doesn’t sound like fun. Eliciting good feedback is hard work.

If you’ve already tried to drum up some useful critique, you’ve probably already encountered the enthusiastic friend who begs to read your manuscript…and then never mentions it again. Practically every serious writer has run into this one at some point. Or the second most common, the person who takes 6 months to read it, then hands it back with no more complex commentary than, “Oh, I liked it.” Or the reader who concentrates so hard on the minutiae (rending his garments and exclaiming, “The way you use commas is INFURIATING!” for instance) that he has nothing to report on the big picture.

“Forest?” he says, gaping at you as though you were insane. “All I saw was a single tree.”

You don’t need the chagrin of any of these outcomes, frankly, but the frustration is not the only reason such interactions hold little value for the writer. Even when such first readers do produce useable feedback, the manner of delivery often renders it either too soft-pedaled, too vague, or too harsh, or simply too late to be of any practical value.

Yet to be fair, most of the time, it isn’t precisely the first-time critiquer’s fault: these outcomes are usually the result of the writer’s not having selected readers carefully and/or not having set firm desiderata for feedback. You owe it to yourself — and the good first readers you will be asking to have faith in you — to invest the time in doing both.

Time is the operative word here, isn’t it? Even gearing up to submit your work to another human being is stressful for most writers, much less waiting to hear back. It’s nigh-impossible to explain to non-writers, but the period preparing to send work out to agents and editors can leave a writer as raw and sensitive as the time while she is waiting for a reply on a submission.

Which is another good reason to select your first readers with care, rather than just handing your baby to the first person that asks. Even when a spate of rejections may well have left you simply dying for someone — anyone, please! — to show an interest in reading your writing, it’s not a good idea to give in to that impulse without first giving the matter some extended thought.

What I am about to suggest may come across as downright prosaic, but I assure you, adding this one step to the feedback-solicitation profess can save a writer weeks or even months of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending whilst awaiting feedback:

Make sure your potential reader has time already available in his schedule to read your manuscript BEFORE you hand it off.

This is not a rude question; actually, it’s rather considerate to ask before you start handing over pages. If the reader cannot estimate a reasonable return date, thank him and move on to another choice.

I know, I know, we all wants to believe that every human being is going to be overjoyed to read our work. But the fact is, a critique-providing first read is not the same experience as reading a book for pleasure — yet far, far too many of us pretend that it is when handing our books to someone who has never given a writer feedback before.

Come on, admit it: even writers read differently for pleasure and for analysis; it’s the nature of the beast.

Reading to spot problems is considerably more time-consuming than other kinds of perusal, not to mention more stressful for the reader — and that will be the case even if the reader does not also have to worry about couching his feedback in ways that will preserve the intimate relationship between you. (For lively reader debate on this last point, I would highly recommend reading the comments on an earlier post on this topic.)

Remember, your first readers are doing you a favor, donating their time to the good cause of furthering your writing career. Even if you are giving them an advance peek at the next DA VINCI CODE so they can say they knew you back when, agreeing to give you feedback is a significant responsibility. Treat their time with respect.

It may seem counterintuitive, but setting some boundaries in advance is one of the better ways to pull that off. As in:

Ask your feedback-giver BEFORE you hand over the manuscript if you can schedule a date for her to return it to you, one that will work within her already-existing rubric of commitments.

Yes, I know: setting even a loose deadline makes it seem like an assignment, rather than a favor, but let’s not kid ourselves here: from the writer’s perspective, it is an assignment, as well as a favor. You honestly do want to hear back within a reasonable period of time, don’t you?

Being wishy-washy about the fact that you honestly do want feedback enough to stay up at night, nibbling your fingernails down to the quick because you’re terrified what your first reader might say, is not the kind of information you’re going to want to spring upon your kind friend as a surprise after the fact.

If you’re unsure why, please go back and re-read the litany of resentments at the top of this post.

Pick an actual date, rather than just saying, “Okay, I’ll expect that back in three weeks.” It’s far more difficult to follow up on a vague understanding than a specific commitment. If your potential first reader hesitates at all, ask him to suggest a date that seems reasonable, then add a week to it.

Obtain timing information even if — and perhaps even especially if — someone has expressed an interest in reading your manuscript simply out of friendship, family feeling, or curiosity. In my experience, such people, while kind and encouraging, frequently do not realize just how much time it takes to read a manuscript carefully – or even that the task is going to be any different from reading any book at the library. Often, these folks end up not finishing it at all or giving inadequate feedback, just because they did not budget sufficient time to read well.

Also, if you ask for this information courteously up front, you will have given yourself permission to take advantage of my next tip:

A week or so before the agreed-upon return date, send a polite reminder e-mail or drop a friendly note to your first reader, asking if he will find it convenient to finish the book in time for your meeting. If he says no, chuckle understandingly and set up a new date.

No, this isn’t nagging; it’s demonstrating your awareness that not everyone may consider reading a book a higher priority than eating, sleeping, and making a living. Crises do come up, and it’s only courteous for a feedback-seeker to give a first reader the option of extending the deadline.

But that’s not the real reason you’re going to want to ask. Creative civilians (or, to put it less colorfully, people who don’t write) almost never understand that writers are serious about deadlines — an opinion that many agents and editors seem to share, incidentally.) How could we be, they think, when we spend years at a time working on a single book?

Forgive them, readers: they know not what they think.

Given the pervasive belief that writers don’t own calendars, a pre-deadline reminder can go a long way toward making sure that the reading actually gets done. Just a quick heads-up, perhaps inviting the reader to coffee or lunch just after the deadline to discuss it, will help keep you from seething three weeks after the stated deadline passed, wondering if you should call now or wait another three days.

Since you will be asking for a time commitment before you hand over the manuscript, it’s a good idea to tell your first reader WHY you want her, of all people, to give you feedback. To put it bluntly, buttering ‘em up will often yield swifter results. Which leads me to my next tip:

NEVER leave a non-professional first reader guessing why you selected her to ask for feedback. If possible, couch your request for feedback in a compliment.

Ideally, you would like your potential first readers to be flattered that you asked, and thus hyper-motivated to sit down and read. There’s no need to make up extravagant praise — just be very clear about why you are asking THIS particular person for feedback, as opposed to anyone else who can read and has some time on his hands. The more specific you can be, the more likely your first reader is to regard the request as an honor, an indication that you respect his opinion enough to want to know what he thinks of your book.

So before you approach a potential reader, ask yourself: why is this person THE person to read THIS book? What special insight or experience do you believe will render this person’s perspective especially useful for this particular story? And, based upon these reasons, what type of feedback would you like from this person?

If you can’t come up with good answers to all of these question (or if the answers run along the lines of, “Um, because she asked to read it, and she’s less of an idiot than everyone else who works at my office. And I know absolutely nothing about either her reading habits or her life prior to two years ago, when she set up shop in the next cubicle.”), are you really sure that this is a good first reader for your book?

When it comes time to make the request, honesty is the best policy, just as your mother spent your youth suggesting. Try phrasing it like this:

“I trust your eye implicitly, so I am relying upon you primarily for proofreading.”

“I’ve always admired your sense of humor — would you mind flagging the jokes that you think don’t work?”

“You always know what’s about to happen in a slasher flick – may I ask you to take a quick run through my manuscript, flagging anytime you feel the suspense starts to droop a little?”

The complimentary approach kills the proverbial two birds with one stone: you will be preemptively thanking your first reader for the effort (good manners), and you will be setting some limits on the kind of feedback you would like (good strategy). Also, by setting these goals in advance, you will be better able to avoid the super-common pitfalls of either your first reader or you mistakenly believing that the manuscript-sharing process is about stoking your ego.

Or bringing you and the reader closer together as friends or lovers. Or even to reveal yourself more fully to another human being you happen to love. No, that’s what your kith and kin’s buying your published books are for: that’s support.

At the risk of sounding like a broken…broken…broken… (Allow me to pause a moment for readjustment.)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you’re going to be professional about your writing, the sole purpose of ANY pre-publication manuscript-sharing should be to help prepare the book for submission and eventual publication. As the author, you are the book’s best friend, and thus have an obligation to do what is best for it.

Writers new to the game often forget that. Heck, even writers who have been published for years forget that.

Keep that foremost in your mind, and I promise you, you are far less likely to hand your beloved baby over to the first careless coworker who says, “Gee, I’d love to read some of your work sometime.” The writer may be flattered by such attention, but the manuscript deserves not to be sent on blind dates.

Nor do your first readers; it’s not fair to expect them to read your mind in order to figure out how soon you expect them to read your book, or why on earth you picked them for that honor in the first place. Believe me, even if your carefully-picked critiquer turns out not to have much to say about your book (hey, it happens), you’ll both be far happier with the experience if you made the effort to set out your expectations clearly.

More on these crucial issues follows next time, of course, most likely accompanied by — heaven help me! — more updates from the WWL front. Please keep visualizing me cavorting amid walls that go up and stay up, and as always, keep up the good work!

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Getting good feedback, part VIc: gee, maybe we shouldn’t be rushing into this…

slow-sign

Last time, I went on a tear about the desirability of doing a bit of homework about anyone with whom you choose to share your unpublished manuscripts, especially electronically — and why this inspiring precept is a good idea to put into practice even when you’re planning to submit your work to an agent, editor, or literary contest. As much as we would all like to believe that every offer out there is legit, not all are, unfortunately, and it’s awfully hard to tell a scammer’s website from a legit agency’s.

We writers tend not to talk about this much amongst ourselves, but if you think about it for a moment, we spend our lives sending our most intimate productions to total strangers: agents, editors, contest judges, not to mention Millicent the agency screener and post office employees from here to Madison Square Garden. We all know that querying and submitting our work requires great personal courage — take a moment to pat yourself on the back for that, please — but it also requires quite a bit of trust, whether you are sending your work to a soi-disant agent, possibly credible publisher, contest organizer — or that nice person you met last week on a perfectly respectable writers’ forum.

Yes, I do realize what I’ve just implied. Thanks for asking.

To reiterate my main points from yesterday, it is most emphatically not paranoid to take the time to check track records before you pop your manuscript into the mail, hit the SEND key, or — heaven forbid! — write a check for a service for which reputable agencies do not charge — it is merely prudent. After all, any self-styled organization can post call for contest entries; since there is no special license required to become an agent (or an oath to serve the greater good of literature, for that matter), anyone can hang out a shingle.

To be blunt about it, scammers that prey on unsuspecting writers desperate to find agents are the only ones who benefit when writers don’t do their homework.

And while I hate to be the harbinger of doom, scams that prey on attention-hungry writers tend to enjoy greater success during periods when the publishing industry is tightening its belt. So if I seem to be uttering woe like the most Internet-fearing Cassandra of Luddites, it’s only because I worry about my readers falling prey to any of these dastardly schemes, particularly those involving so-called agencies who make their living by demanding payments from potential clients, rather then by selling their already-signed clients’ books.

All too often, agent-seeking writers presume that once an agent requests a manuscript, their role in protecting their manuscripts is over; it’s the agent’s responsibility from there on out, right? Wrong. You need to be in charge of who has your manuscript until an agent or editor takes it off your hands by signing a formal contract.

Why have I stopped my series on finding good non-professional feedback for your work in order to hammer home this point, you ask? Well, as is so often the case, readers have raised the issue when I have discussed manuscript-swapping in the past. Take, for instance, the comment insightful long-term reader Chris posted last year:

Anne, that raises an excellent point that I think a lot of unpublished writers are really worried about — people stealing their work/ideas and publishing them…I know that ideas can’t be copyrighted, only their execution can, but the issue of proving ownership of an unpublished manuscript is interesting. Have you ever seen this happen before? Presumably if the actual writer had many in-progress digital copies of the work, plus a number of marked-up printed versions (for revisions), it would be easy to convince a publisher (or the courts, I guess) that the person with the single photocopied version was a thief.

But what a hassle! And yet at the same time, it seems like some unpublished writers are worried over this issue to the point of extreme paranoia, which seems more than a bit out of perspective.

Yes, I have seen it happen, Chris, but actually, my sense is that it happened rather more often before the advent of the copy machine and home computer. Back in the old days, aspiring writers often produced only a single copy of a manuscript — and unwisely mailed off that sole record of their authorship to the first agent or editor who asked for it. Manuscripts did occasionally disappear, some because they simply got lost within institutions that handled a whole lot of paper (which still happens, by the way, and more often than writers care to think) and some because some unscrupulous soul swapped the title page, whited out the author’s name in the slug line, and submitted it as his own work.

Nowadays, of course, few writers would send out the only copy of their work (which, in case I was too subtle above, is VERY BAD IDEA), for precisely the reason Chris points out: because the original is the soft copy residing on their hard disks. A submission version is thus inherently a copy.

Does that mean that writers no longer need to worry about being able to prove that they were in fact the authors of their own books, unless they happen to enjoy the many and varied sensations that accompany advanced paranoia? No — in fact, the extreme ease of electronic transmission raises some of its own problems.

What kind of problems, you ask with fear and trembling? The first one that pops to mind: literally every time a writer e-mails all or part of her manuscript, she loses control of where it might be forwarded. Which means — are you sitting down? — that even if the person to whom she originally sent it is 100% honest, the writer needs to worry about the honesty about anyone to whom recipient #1 might choose to forward it.

Remember what I said earlier in this post about it’s being the writer’s responsibility to maintain control of who has her manuscript? Think that’s applicable here? You bet your boots — or, more accurately, your great prose.

Let’s look at a few prudent self-protective steps fans of manuscript-forwarding can take. (After the usual caveats, of course: this is intended as general advice to help writers avoid problems, not the last word on the subject. I’m not a lawyer; if you are seriously concerned about your copyright getting violated, or think that it has been I urge you to consult an attorney who specializes in publishing law.)

(1) Make frequent, well-labeled back-ups of every draft of your manuscript and keep them in a safe place.

Proving who wrote what when is substantially easier in the age of the computer than it was in either the bygone era of the typewriter or the long-lingering epoch of the bare hand. While word processing programs do keep track of when particular files are created and modified, so chances are that you already have a historical record of when you began writing your opus, as well as your practice of updating it.

Unless, of course, your computer happened to melt down, get stolen, perish in a monsoon, or fall prey to some other mishap since you started writing. Yet another good reason to make back-ups frequently, eh?

(Oh, come on — did you honestly think I wouldn’t follow up after yesterday’s plea to save your materials early and often?)

Even with computer in perfect health and a closet full of back-up disks, however, you’re still going to want to exercise some care in how you bandy your manuscript around. From a writer’s point of view, it’s a far, far better thing NOT to be placed in the position of having to prove when you wrote a piece.

(2) Always keep BOTH hard and soft copies of every syllable of your own work — and NEVER send your only copy of anything to anyone, ever.

Yes, even if your intended recipient is your twin sibling who rescued you from a burning building at risk to his own life. For obvious reasons, that used to be the FIRST piece of advice the pros gave to new writers back in the days of typewriters.

That, and to keep a pad of paper and a writing implement with you at all hours of the day or night, just in case inspiration strikes. You already do that, don’t you?

Why night as well, you ask? Because as experienced writers know, no matter how certain you are that you will remember that great idea that woke you up at 3:42 AM, if you don’t write it down, chances are very high that it will disappear into the ether like the mythical final stanzas of KUBLA KHAN.

(3) Maintain an up-to-date list of EVERYONE who has a copy of your manuscript at any given time — and don’t keep the only copy of that list on your hard drive.

I’m always surprised at how infrequently aspiring writers do this, even for the agents to whom they submit, but until sign a publication contract, you absolutely must know who has your manuscript. Make sure that you have full contact information for every single soul on that list — not just an e-mail address, a phone number, and/or a first name — so you can track down any of your writing that goes missing.

Get a physical address for the recipient even if you are communicating solely online — any reputable agency or publishing house should post a mailing address on its website. If you choose to post excerpts of it online for critique, keep a record of precisely what you posted, where, and why.

If you’re wondering why I’m suggesting that you should not keep your only copy of this list on your computer, I can only suggest that you re-read yesterday’s post. Hard drives are not immortal, you know.

(4) If you send your work via regular mail, keep records of where and when you sent it — and track delivery.

Literally every piece of your writing that you ever mail to anyone in the publishing industry with whom you do not already share an established relationship of trust should be sent via tracked regular mail, so you may prove that your manuscript actually arrived at its destination, should you ever need to do so. Within North America, manuscript tracking is quite inexpensive these days — the cost of USPS’ electronic Delivery Confirmation varies by how far it is going, but domestically, it’s less than a dollar at the moment — so there is really no excuse for not taking this reasonable precaution.

If you want to make super-sure that you can prove delivery, you can cough up the $2.70 for Certified Mail, so someone will actually have to sign for package. This is an especially good idea if the recipient is someone with whom you’ve never dealt before. That way, should it ever be necessary (pray that it won’t), you will be able to prove that you did indeed send it — and precisely when he received it, the rogue.

Why is being able to prove when he received it as important as if? Because, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, if a question ever arises about who wrote the book, you will be very, very happy that you can produce objective evidence of the first time your would-be plagiarist clapped covetous eyes (and grimy hands) upon your precious pages.

(5) Minimize how often you send any finished manuscript via e-mail to anyone with whom you do not already have a signed representation or publication agreement.

Yes, I am saying that I believe it’s in a writer’s interest to submit in hard copy, rather than electronically. As long-term readers of this blog already know, I frown upon sending original material via e-mail, anyway, for a variety of practical reasons that have nothing to do with the possibility of a manuscript’s going astray. (For a full banquet of my many tirades on the subject, I refer you to the E-MAILED SUBMISSIONS category at right.) For our purposes today, however, I’m just going to treat you to a brief recap of the highlights, by way of review.

First, many, many NYC-based agencies and publishing houses are working on computers with outdated operating systems and not the most up-to-date versions of Word — and virtually all of them are working on PCs. So the chances that they will be able to open your attachment at all, especially if you are a Mac user, are somewhere in the 50-50 range.

If you submit in hard copy, you simply don’t need to worry about this. I just mention.

Second, it’s significantly harder to read on a computer screen than on a printed page — and, unfortunately for acceptance rates, it’s also far quicker to delete a file than to stuff a manuscript into the nearest SASE. (I leave you to speculate the probable effects of these undeniable facts upon speed with which the average e-mailed submission is rejected.)

Third — and if you’ve been paying attention throughout this post, you should be murmuring this in your sleep by now — you can never really be sure where an e-mailed document will end up. It can be forwarded at the recipient’s discretion, and at the discretion of anyone to whom he forwards it, indefinitely.

Quite apart from the threat of outright theft (which, as I mentioned earlier in this series, is exceedingly rare), too-free forwarding could conceivably make it harder to enforce your claim to copyright, should you ever need to establish it: since part of the argument you would need to make if someone else claims to have written your book is that you made a reasonable effort to maintain control over how and where it could be read. Forwarding it as an attachment to anyone who asks does not, alas, convey the impression that you as the author are particularly insistent upon protecting your rights to the work.

For all of these reasons, if I had my way, aspiring writers everywhere would actively avoid sending ANY of their original material by e-mail, at least to people they don’t know awfully well. Now that some agents have started requesting electronic submissions — heck, some even ask writers to copy-and-paste the first few pages of their manuscripts into e-mailed queries — this is not always practicable, of course, but this is still largely a paper-based industry.

Feel free to use that argument when your prospective manuscript exchange partner claims that it would be SO much easier if you would just e-mail your manuscript to her; I don’t mind. If that doesn’t work, tell her that a professional editor told you that it’s infinitely harder to catch manuscript problems on a computer screen than in hard copy — true, incidentally — so you would vastly prefer that she read your work in paper form.

Do I feel some waves of panic wafting in my general direction? “But Anne,” I hear some of you inveterate e-mailers protest, “what if an agent ASKS me to e-mail all or part of my manuscript? I can hardly say no, can I?”

Well, actually, you can, if you want: in my experience, nothing brings an e-mailed submission-loving agent or editor more quickly to a recognition of the joys of the printed page than a writer’s saying, “Gee, I would love to shoot that right off to you, but I think my computer has a virus. I wouldn’t want to pass it along to you. Just this time, I’m going to have to send you a paper copy, if that’s okay.”

Care to guess just how often a reputable agent or editor will say no after hearing THAT sterling little piece of argumentation? You’re the white knight here; you’re trying to protect the world from computer viruses. You’re not uncooperative — you should be up for membership in the Justice League, along with Wonder Woman and Superman.

Ah, I can hear that some of you still aren’t satisfied by promotion to superhero(ine). “But what if the agent insists?” you demand. “Or just has a really, really strong preference?”

Well, since you asked so nicely, and since truth compels me to admit that my own agent has been known to exhibit this preference from time to time, I’ll tell you.

(6) If you choose to send your writing electronically, verify IN ADVANCE that the recipient is who you think he is.

This is a bit of a repeat from yesterday, but If you absolutely MUST send a submission via e-mail, again, double-check that the agency and/or publishing house toward which you are flinging it trustingly has a track record of being on the up-and-up. Verifying that the agent has a track record of selling books like yours or that the publishing house has in fact published them in the past will both let you sleep easier during the submission period and avoid scams. (It will also help you target your queries better, if you do this research well in advance.)

A contest should list past award winners on its website, and most do: if their winners end up getting published, they tend to like to claim credit. If a contest’s site does not provide that information, think twice before sending your entry. (Yes, I know that this stance discriminates against contest-throwing organizations that are just starting out, but my interest here is protecting you, not them.)

Double-checking is harder to pull off with an individual than a business or contest, of course, especially if you happened to meet him online; few sites require that posters prove they are who they say they are. Get to know your potential first reader as much as you can before blithely sending off your work.

And NEVER send your manuscript to anyone for whom you have only an e-mail address. Really.

(7) Whenever you send your writing electronically, e-mail or a copy to yourself — and to someone else you trust.

If an agency, small publishing house, or contest positively insists upon electronic submission, e-mail a copy of everything you’ve sent them to yourself at the same time. This will provide at least an electronic record of what you sent when.

Or print up a copy, seal it in an envelope, sign across the seal (to make it obvious if it gets opened), and mail it to yourself. Once it arrives back on your doorstep, don’t open it; just hide it away in case you need it on some dark future day.

That way, you can prove, if necessary, that as of a particular date, you were the writer in the position to send the material.

If you choose to e-mail, too, it’s also not a bad idea to send blind copies to a couple of friends whom you trust not to forward it along. Ask them to save it until you send them an all-clear signal or until your name appears prominently on the New York Times Bestseller List, whichever comes first.

(8) Maintain communication with those to whom you have submitted your work, particularly if you have done it electronically. If you don’t hear back, follow up — and keep a record of your attempts at further contact.

Admittedly, since so many agents have embraced the rather rude recent practice of not responding to submitters if the answer is no, this one can be a bit difficult to pull off, but unless an agency has actually posted this policy, a submitter can and should follow up if he has not heard back after two or three months. If the manuscript has gotten lost (which, again, does happen more often than writers tend to think it does), a reputable agent will want to know about it.

If the recipient was NOT someone within the publishing industry, you should follow up even sooner, for the most practical of reasons: the longer your work been circulating around, the harder it would be to try to rein it in again.

Think about it: if your piece has been floating around the computers of Outer Mongolia for the last six months, how are you going to prove that you held control over who did and did not read your work? (Although, again, I’m not a lawyer, so if you find yourself in this unenviable position, hie ye hence and find an attorney who specializes in this branch of the law.)

(9) Bite the bullet and register the copyright.

If you are a U.S.-based writer, you might want to just go ahead and register the copyright for your work before you begin sharing it. For the vast majority of submitters, this step isn’t really necessary, but if you are in the habit of circulating your work very widely (or are not very sure where that manuscript you sent out a month ago to a mysterious stranger you met online might have ended up), you may sleep better at night if you take the step to alert the government to the fact that you wrote your book.

Stop groaning. It’s a lot less onerous — and significantly less expensive — than most aspiring writers tend to assume. Go ahead, take a wild guess about how much time it will actually take away from your writing to gain this protection and how spendy it is.

Well, the last time I did it, it took only the time required to print up a copy of my manuscript and fill out a one-page form. And the expense was unbelievable: a $45 registration fee and the expense of having my corner copy shop spiral-bind the thing. If you register it online — through exactly the type of electronic submission I discouraged above, as it happens — it’s only $35.

And yes, nonfiction writers, you CAN register a book proposal. Jointly, even, if you have a collaborator.

What it will NOT help you to do – and what many novice writers give themselves away by doing — is place in the header or footer of every page, © 2009 Author’s Name. Yes, copyright can be established by proving intent to publish, but intent to publish is also established by submitting work to an agent or editor. Contrary to what you may have heard, the copyright bug will not protect you, should push come to shove.

It will, however, give rise to substantial mirth amongst its first readers at most agencies and publishing houses. “Look,” they will say, pointing, “here’s another rookie.”

This unseemly mirth tends to cover an undercurrent of hostility: writers who so pointedly indicate distrust of the people to whom they send their work, the logic goes, are in fact conveying a subtle insult. You are not to be trusted, such marks say, loud and clear, affronting those who would never steal so much as a modifier from an author and not scaring those who would steal entire books outright. Best to leave it out.

The beauty of the registering the copyright to a manuscript, of course, is that it can be done entirely without the knowledge of your recipients. Ditto with the blind e-mail copies. There’s no need to advertise that you are protecting yourself.

But for heaven’s sake, especially if you are dealing with someone that you do not know well enough to trust, take these few quiet steps to let yourself sleep better at night. Chances are, you will never need their help, but remember that old-fashioned sampler: better safe than sorry.

Call me zany, but I would prefer to see you get credit for your writing than the friend of the friend of the friend to whom you happened to forward it.

Whew! That was a long one, wasn’t it? Next time (which may not be for a couple of days, given how much this post took out of me), I shall delve back into the ins and outs of finding good sources of feedback. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Getting good feedback, part IV: more importantly, what do YOU think happened?

Ellery Queen cover

I must admit, whenever I revisit one of the big issues such as feedback (or querying, or submission, or pitching, or…), I experience a qualm or two. Intellectually, I know that it’s vital to keep coming back to the essential problems writers face, because let’s face it, readers who habitually go archive-diving are the exception, not the rule. For the folks who read only the new posts, it actually doesn’t matter if I wrote the definitive piece on, say, how to write an author bio six months ago: to help readers new and old keep improving their writerly skill sets, I’ve come to accept that I need to keep the major issues in constant rotation.

Still, whenever I unearth a topic from a year ago, I always think for at least a fleeting moment: oh, I don’t need to go over this again. Surely my readers know by now not to do X.

As in, for instance, not simply assuming that any acquaintance who asks to see some of one’s writing is volunteering to provide feedback. Realistically, I know perfectly well that even very experienced writers often fall into this trap, but yesterday, I couldn’t help but feel that my bringing it up again was, if not actually nagging, at least its next-door neighbor.

And then I realized this morning that I had fallen into that very logical fallacy within the last few weeks. Clearly, even I had forgotten my advice for a few minutes.

It all started innocently enough, as over-stepping situations often do. I’m currently polishing off (and up) my next novel, a comic romp set at Harvard in the mid-1980s. Considering how well-known the big H is, surprisingly little has been written about undergraduate life there — and virtually none of what’s out there was written by anyone who actually went there for more than a tour of the Yard, if you catch my drift. Since writers are notoriously shameless at trolling for material, I’ve been ruthlessly bugging a broad array of my former classmates to troll their memories for the book’s benefit.

Telling details help make a manuscript come alive, after all.

I was having a friendly e-mail exchange with someone who had been unusually patient about my desire to sit through her memory reels again and again, one of my dearest friends from college, when she mentioned that she was really looking forward to reading the book. Instantly, I snapped into writer-seeking-feedback mode, considerately (I thought) explaining to her that while I would be overjoyed to hear her critique of the manuscript, agreeing to give a writer feedback is a heavy responsibility. Since she is not a writer, I explained to her about nervous those of us who are get when our manuscripts are in the hands of others; if her feedback was going to be useful in revising the manuscript, I pointed out, I would need it within a certain specified period of time. I then went on to rejoice over precisely how and why her feedback would fill a necessary niche not yet occupied by any of my other first readers, thanking her sincerely for making her excellent counsel available to me and my book.

I terrified her, in short — and in such a typically writerly manner that it took me a while to realize what I had done.

Any guesses? After all, I had followed most of the suggestions I have made so far in this series. Given that I was both polite and clear about my expectations, what went awry in this exchange? Was it:

(a) that I told her what level of feedback I expected and how quickly I would want it, rather than asking her what kind of critique and turn-around time would be comfortable for her?

(b) that I explained my expectations in generalities first, rather than narrowing it down to a very specific area upon which I wanted her to concentrate?

(c) that I didn’t make her repeat her offer after I explained what giving feedback to a professional writer actually meant?

(d) that I didn’t decline with thanks, since she might have only said it in order to be polite (or to get me to stop asking to plumb her recollections of long ago), or

(e) that I told her that I expected feedback at all, rather than just letting her read the manuscript and hoping that she would intuit what I wanted?

I wish I could set a giant stopwatch in motion, as they did on the old Ellery Queen series, to give all of you time to ponder which is the real culprit. The problem of eliciting useful feedback is a serious one; eventually, every professional writer will need to face it, so I would love to play some thinking-time music whilst you muse. But short of just signing off for today and picking this quiz up again tomorrow — which would be pointless and confusing for those happy few who will be reading this in days and years to come in the archives — my hands are tied. As, indeed, the victims in Ellery Queen’s mysteries often were.

Okay, that’s enough distraction. Which did you pick?

If you selected (a), you’re a kind and considerate soul: you’re quite right that a solicitation for feedback should be a request, not a demand. However, I’m not ready to hand out pages to first readers yet, so this one is moot. (Like the excellent Ellery Queen, I sometimes hide information from my reader in order to produce the outcome I wish.)

If you chose (b), you’re a close reader, or at any rate a retentive one: this is the option that conforms to the advice I’ve given so far in this series. Again, though, this was my initial response to an offer to read, not the moments before I gave her the manuscript, so this critique is also a bit premature. (See my earlier comment about adopting the E. Queen strategy for creating false suspense by withholding necessary information.)

If you picked (c), well, you might be a just a trifle passive-aggressive. Or insecure, the type of writer who sends a follow-up query letter to an agent to whom he’s already pitched to see if the agent REALLY was serious about that request to send materials. Generally speaking, it’s not a very good idea to make people who want to do favors for you beg for the privilege of doing them.

If you opted for (d), well, at least you have no illusions for me to dispel.

If you jumped at (e), you might want to go back to the very beginning of this series and start again.

Are those impatient sighs I’m hearing an indicator that I’ve carried this quiz show a bit too far? “Oh, come on, Anne,” I hear some of you muttering. “Even Dashiell Hammett would have relieved the suspense by now.”

Okay, okay; you’ve worked hard enough. My mistake was that like virtually every writer who seeks feedback from non-writers, I leapt to the assumption that a request to read my manuscript was identical to an offer to give feedback.

It probably wasn’t. How do I know that? Because, from the point of view of someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time around working writers, a request to act as literary critic might actually seem rather presumptuous, not to say judgmental.

Hard as it may be for those of us who live to share our thoughts in writing to believe, people who don’t read for a living tend to do it for pleasure or to learn something, not to be of service to writers. Since the average reader may never have seen a manuscript before, s/he is unlikely to understand it as a work-in-progress; s/he generally expects something more or less identical to what s/he might find in any bookstore. So in asking to take a gander at a writer friend’s opus, s/he is expecting to receive, rather than to give.

And that’s a perfectly reasonable expectation, of course. However, it is an attitude substantially more likely to produce a vague, “Oh, I liked it,” than the reams of useful feedback for which a sensible writer longs.

What we have here, in other words, is a failure to communicate. And to ask the right questions going in about who is assuming what.

So far in this series, I have concentrated on finding the right people to read your manuscript, and for good reason: selecting the wrong first readers can bring tremendous chagrin into a writer’s life, in the form of everything from hyper-harping on insignificant punctuation issues to keeping it for a year without reading it to handing it back to you with no feedback at all to causing strain in a marriage. I suggested that most of these standard first reader problems could usually be avoided by simply not asking people who are not qualified to critique your book to read your manuscript.

Perhaps qualified is putting it a trifle strongly, but let’s face it, what we’re talking about here is tracking down the best non-professional feedback available for your work.

If you’re looking for professional feedback — as in from people who read for a living, such as agents, editors, freelance editors, and/or teachers — you usually either have to pay for it (I’ve gone over how to find a good pro under the HOW DO I FIND A FREELANCE EDITOR? category at right) or wait until a pro has signed you. Agents and editors at publishing houses seldom have time to give significant feedback to people to whose books they haven’t already committed, and both classes and freelance editing can cost serious money. So most aspiring writers, at least the ones professional-minded enough to be open to feedback, turn to the far less costly and more easily available readers at hand.

Which is to say: ones who are free.

Which means, inevitably, that the etiquette is a bit delicate. When one is asking a favor — as soliciting concrete critique from a first reader gratis definitely is; don’t kid yourself about that — one may not feel justified in saying, “Um, do you mind if I grill you a bit about your background before I hand this manuscript to you?”

Yet you should. There is, after all, a good deal more to providing useful feedback on a manuscript than simply saying what one did and did not like.

That comes as a surprise to many people — including many writers, many of whom automatically assume that being able to write well means being able to edit well. Far from it. The best feedback is both practical, suggesting how and why to make necessary changes, and market-savvy, taking into account both the reader’s personal opinion and the tastes of the target audience.

Do I hear some of you out there harrumphing? “Yeah, right,” go the almost-audible grumbles, “she’s a professional writer and editor with a Ph.D. and masses of writer friends. She probably doesn’t think ANYONE is qualified to read a book.”

Actually, depending on your genre or field, a highly-educated person can be the WORST first reader imaginable: most attorneys, for instance, are trained specifically to regard anything but brevity as undesirable, and academics to insist that every assertion be backed up with footnotes full of evidence. Neither predisposition would be particularly desirable for, say, a mystery.

Nor would a scientist necessarily be the best first reader for a science fiction piece; she might raise all kinds of practical objections to how things work on your imaginary world. (You know, the one where both time and gravity run backwards occasionally.)

And the last person able to give objective feedback on a memoir is someone who lived through the events described in it. That person might, like my college buddy, have an uncanny ability to point out factual errors and forgotten details, but by definition, every participant in a real-life event will have her own interpretation of it.

Just ask the relatives of any successful memoirist.

Ultimately, the best qualification for knowing whether a book will appeal to an audience is being either a member of that particular audience or very familiar with what that audience likes to read. If you were writing for fifth graders, your ideal first readers would be a classroom full of kids, not a symposium of philosophy professors. Or even, necessarily, a conference room full of child psychologists.

If you’re looking to sell a book to a fish, in short, you might want to learn a bit about what life looks like from inside a fishbowl — and solicit feedback accordingly. As Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, the answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

However, astoundingly few aspiring writers actively seek members of their target audiences as first readers for their manuscripts. Heck, I’m constantly meeting disgruntled members of writing groups to whom even the question, “Well, if you’re not getting useful feedback from your critique group, have you given any thought to whether you would expect those readers to BUY your book, if they didn’t know you?” comes as a surprise.

Which I’m guessing it did for some of you. So allow me to ask the next question I invariably pose to unhappy feedback-seekers: if you’re not looking for first readers amongst your target audience, why not?

In my informal polling on the subject, the most common answer is that it’s just easier to ask people the writer already knows — and it turns out that writers aren’t always any more aware of what their friends do or do not read than anyone else. Not that there’s usually outright deception involved; sometimes, it’s just a matter of a friend’s trying to seem more literate to a literate-minded buddy.

Hey, people don’t always give pollsters straight answers, either: they often say what they think will make them sound better. Back in the early Neolithic period, when the Nielsen ratings statistics were compiled by families’ keeping a written record of which television shows they watched, PBS got suspiciously high ratings compared to, say, Network Battle of the Ts and As. (If you don’t know what T and A stand for, thank your lucky stars that you weren’t watching American television in the 1970s.)

When the honor system was replaced by electronic monitoring, Masterpiece Theatre turned out to be significantly less popular than previously reported.

I assure you, that shift wasn’t because the level of intellectual debate on Network Battle of the Ts and As became any more scintillating. But I digress.

When I ask writers how they pick their first readers, the second most common answer — brace yourselves — is the sheepish (and often astonished, because the responder hadn’t previously realized it himself) admission that the writer has simply been handing the book to anyone who said, “Gee, I’d love to read it.”

In other words, most of the writers I ask seem not to be using any selection criteria at all.

No wonder so many writers have negative experiences with feedback: they’re essentially leaving selection of those vital first readers as much up to chance as if they cut up their local telephone directories, tossed the shards into a hat (a big one, like Abraham Lincoln wore), pulled out a slip of paper randomly, and shouted: “You! You’re my first reader!”

You’ll pardon me if I collapse briefly on the nearest chaise longue: as a professional reader, the very idea makes me feel a bit woozy.

Why? Well, let me put it this way: if you wanted to find the best escargot in town as an anniversary surprise for your spouse, you wouldn’t simply open the Yellow Pages randomly at the restaurants section and allow the fickle finger of fate to decide, hoping that the restaurant blindly chosen won’t turn out to serve Icelandic or Korean food instead of French, would you?

Sacre bleu, non! You would ask someone you are sure knows a thing or two about garlicky snails before investing in a potentially expensive evening at an unknown restaurant. I can’t think of a single reason to treat your manuscript with less respect, can you?

Intriguing question, isn’t it? Your time to consider it starts…NOW!

Next time, I shall go through a few more tips on selecting productive first readers, and begin to discuss how to frame your request for feedback in ways that will encourage useful commentary. In the meantime, I’m going to go and apologize to my friend for overwhelming her with my unwarranted assumptions.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Getting good feedback, part III: unrealistic expectations, artistic tantrums, and other things to avoid if you want to get good feedback on your manuscript

Getting good feedback, part III: unrealistic expectations, artistic tantrums, and other things to avoid if you want to get good feedback on your manuscript

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Do you believe in omens? Or at least the historically very tenacious notion that certain people seem to walk around with clouds of doom hanging over their heads?

Normally, I’m not very superstitious, but like all good editors, I am a pattern-noticer. It’s come to my attention that all winter, whenever the fellow who is supposed to be landscaping our yard has deigned to show his frowning mug on our property, or even calls and hints that he might be considering a state visit, the heavens crack open within a few hours of when he’s supposed to show up and dump snow all over us.

Snow. In Seattle. Where it snowed a grand total of twice in the first decade I lived here.

Long-standing readers of this blog will recall our old friend, the World’s Worst Landscaper, from early last April. when he and his motley and ever-shifting band of rogues first began ripping up our yard. We’ve had five different-shaped back patios since June, ornamental cherry trees and blooming rose bushes backed over by backhoes, and the total disappearance of about 200 flower bulbs, varied of course by the weeks at a time when the crew just disappears. And don’t even get me started on the demise of the deck that used to have the hot tub in it.

RIP, hot tub. And adjacent tree.

There have been compensations, of course. The Montana ledge stone walls holding up my few remaining flower beds are genuinely pretty, if one manages to remember not to walk, kneel, or plant anywhere near them, lest they tumble over and send one flying into the dwarf witch hazel. For a few dimly-remembered months, we boasted a lovely New England-style stone wall in front of our house, at least until the landscaper fired the very talented stonemason who appeared to be descended from a long line of gnomes and decided to fix the one rock that was awry all by himself, with results easily anticipatable by anyone who ever played Pick-Up Stix. (I’m sure the pile of rubble will eventually be reformed into something that remotely resembles a wall.) He installed, rather over our objections, a faux old-growth cedar grove by importing a series of stumps that can only be described as either Freudian or biologically-correct, enthusiastically erecting one particularly exuberant log with a salmonberry bush growing frothily from its tip (which was, naturally, shaped precisely the way you are picturing it, but as I want teenagers to be able to join us on this site, I shall not describe it further) in the precise center of the grove. When we demurred over…how shall I put this for the family hour…the visual similarities between the resulting landscape and certain models we remembered from 9th-grade health class, the WWL informed us huffily that he is an artist, and we had our nerve questioning his vision.

We had him remove it, anyway. Children live in our neighborhood.

If ever a human being gave off a disaster-attracting miasma, it’s the WWL. He merely has to glance at an irrigation hose for it to break, tie itself into a knot that would defy even Alexander the Great’s ingenuity to untangle, or burst because the water inside it has spontaneously decided it wants to form an open-air ice sculpture.

Still, I didn’t really worry until early this morning, when I peeked out into yet another work-delaying snowfall to discover the art installation shown above, a scarlet A the WWL had left on his dust-and-snow-gathering materials.

Even though I find it unlikely that the WWL has been reading Hawthorne in his apparently abundant free time, I have to wonder what artistic vision he was pursuing here. Did he intend the A as an homage to the only A-named person in the household (sweet, in a twisted way), as a reference to Hester Prynne (considerably less flattering), or as a means of grading his own work? Or perhaps none of the above? As with so much modern art, it’s a trifle difficult to tell whether it’s just a carelessly tossed-aside pile of rubble or a Statement.

I’m inclined to the latter, as the WWL apparently employed ruler and protractor to place it in the exact center of our back patio.

Why am I bringing this up, other than to illustrate my ambivalence toward the recent snowfall that probably means that the art installation will be on display in my back yard for at least another three weeks? (When the WWL is discouraged by poor weather, he tends to remain discouraged for quite some time, predictably.) To remind all of you feedback-seekers out that while those of us who consider ourselves artists often do believe ourselves to be beholden to a different set of standards than other mortals, artists trying to make a living at it are not magically exempt from the obligation to present their work to others in a professional manner. Many an extremely talented writer has fallen flat in the publishing world because he refused to meet the demands of the business side of the business.

And agents tend not to have too much sympathy for that because, lest we forget, there are plenty of self-proclaimed artists like the WWL out there, using their alleged callings as an excuse for irresponsibility. Any agent who has been at it a while has already met more than her share of writers who predictably don’t meet deadlines, conform to the expectations of the industry, or take feedback well. So has any editor. If you buy them a drink in that bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to regale you with horror stories about bad clients.

Unfortunately for writers’ collective reputation, they encounter far more writers who believe talent is the universal solvent of rules than those who do not. So perversely, if you want to stand out as the exception, not complaining at length about how market force artists to compromise is the better strategy.

Why? Well, a couple of reasons. In the first place, anyone who makes a living representing or selling art is already well aware that the market doesn’t always reward good art lavishly; that’s hardly news. Since agents and editors have experience with how books are marketed, they have first-hand knowledge of how the writers with whom they work have had to compromise their visions in various ways.

They don’t need reminders; if you want to be an agent’s dream client, save the cries of “But it’s my ART!” for the battles that really count.

Because, as the agent of your dreams would be the first to tell you, if you gain any success at all as a writer, the day will come when you’re going to be asked to make a change you don’t want to make in your book. If a writer has already established a reputation as a tantrum-thrower (yes, that’s how they think of it), an editor may well balk at acquiring a book he believes needs revision.

Which leads me to the other reason — and the one more pertinent to the subject of this series — is that while all us are familiar with the cultural stereotype of the artist who, like the WWL, rants and raves over the slightest, most veiled criticism of his work, in the real world, many, many people will have the right and even the obligation to give feedback on a book between the time an agent signs the writer and the happy day when the book lands on bookstore shelves. Not merely the agent and the editor handling the book, but the publisher, marketing department, and for nonfiction, sometimes the legal department will all have their say.

Taking feedback well is, in fact, an essential skill for a professional writer. So essential that it’s a pretty good idea for an aspiring writer to get some practice at it before signing with an agent or selling a book to a publisher.

Convenient that we’ve already been discussing how to go about finding non-professional feedback-givers, isn’t it?

For those of you joining this series already in progress, we spent all last week about feedback — when an writer is and isn’t likely to get professional critique during the query and submission stages, where outside the publishing world that same writer is likely to turn in order to find it. While the vast majority of aspiring writers choose to self-edit (at least until they sign with agents, many of whom habitually request revisions in their clients’ work), often not exposing their manuscripts to any human eyes other than their own prior to mailing off that requested submission to an agency or posting those first few pages on an agency website along with a query, omitting what most professional writers consider the necessary step of eliciting reader feedback can leave a manuscript vulnerable to rejection.

Many, many writing problems are extremely difficult for a self-editor to catch: pacing, for instance, or ways in which a protagonist may be trying the objective reader’s patience. To be blunt about it, you may think giving your protagonist the catchphrase, “You’re telling me!” is endearingly hilarious, especially on the fiftieth repetition, but the reader may not. Unless you’ve run the manuscript past a few unbiased sets of eyes, you can’t really be sure, can you?

Most first-time submitters are positively stunned to learn that such information is only very rarely included in rejection letters, but then, those new to querying are often astonished when their SASEs come back without any indication of why an agent chose to pass. As I mentioned earlier in the week, unless an aspiring writer actually pays for professional feedback — from a freelance editor, for example, or by taking manuscript revision class — s/he is highly unlikely to gain substantive critique through the querying or submission processes.

Sorry to be the one to have to break that to some of you, but better that you hear it from me than get your heart broken by the agent of your dreams, right? Try not to take minimal response personally; it happens to virtually everyone who queries or submits.

I hear some impatient sighing from those who followed last week’s discussion closely. “I get it, Anne,” some of you are telling me. “I shouldn’t expect to receive any substantive feedback from agents at the querying and submission stage; that will come later, after one picks up my work. So where should an aspiring writer turn for feedback prior to signing with the pros?”

Good question, impatient sighers. Ideally, you would run your submission materials past your writing group, or a freelance editor familiar with your genre, or a published writer who writes books similar to yours.

Allow me to reiterate the desirability of finding first readers conversant with the current market IN YOUR BOOK CATEGORY, not merely with books in general or what was being sold ten years ago. As I may have mentioned a couple of thousand times before, the conventions and styles prevailing in one genre are not necessarily those that reign supreme in another, nor are the standards of 7 years ago those of today. And no matter how good a poet is, her advice on your nonfiction tome on house-building is unlikely to be very market-savvy, unless she happens to read a lot of house-building books.

However — and this is not an insignificant however — not all of us have the kind of connections or resources to command that kind of readership. Professional editing, after all, isn’t particularly cheap, nor are the writing conferences where you are likely to meet writers in your field.

And even then, it’s considered pretty darned rude for an aspiring writer to walk up to a total stranger, however famous, and hand him a manuscript for critique. As in any relationship, there are social niceties to be observed first. (If you’re in any doubt whatsoever about where the lines are drawn, I would strenuously advise a quick read through the INDUSTRY ETTIQUETE category at right BEFORE you even think of approaching your first industry insider.)

So where does that leave the isolated writer seeking feedback? Usually, soliciting commentary from pretty much anyone who murmurs, “Oh, you write? I’d love to see something of yours sometime.”

That hasn’t been working out too well for most of you who have tried it, I’m guessing. “I give my manuscript to first readers,” I hear some of you brave souls grumbling, “and they NEVER give me feedback. Or they hold onto the manuscript for so long that I’ve already made revisions, so I can’t really use their critique. I’ve gotten SAT scores back faster. Or they so flood me with minute nit-picking that I have no idea whether they even LIKED the manuscript or not. I really feel burned.”

If you’ve had this experience, you are certainly not alone: trust me, every freelance editor has heard these complaints hundreds of times from new clients. In fact, freelance editors ought to be downright grateful for those poor feedback-givers, as they tend to drive writers either to despair or into the office of a pro.

At the risk of thinning the ranks of potential editing clients, I have a few suggestions about how to minimize frustrations in the first reader process when handing your work to non-professional readers — i.e., someone who is not a professional writer, editor, agent, or teacher.

First, never, but NEVER, simply hand a manuscript to a non-professional reader without specifying what KIND of feedback you want. (Actually, this isn’t a bad precept when working with more seasoned readers, either.)

Remember that intimidation factor I mentioned yesterday? Well, the first-time manuscript reader often becomes so cowed at the prospect of providing first-class advice that she simply gives no feedback at all — or just keeps putting off reading the manuscript.

Sound familiar?

Other first readers will begin with enthusiasm, but once they come up with genuine critique, they will fear to mention it, instead preferring to murmur something vague about how much they liked it. Why sugar-coat what might be useful feedback? Because they, like everyone else, are familiar with would-be artists like the WWL. They don’t want to risk your flying off the handle at them.

Still others, conditioned to expect that every syllable in your manuscript will exactly resemble a published book, will run in the other direction, treating every typo as though it were evidence that you should never write another word as long as you live. Both of these outcomes will make you unhappy, and might not produce the type of feedback you need.

Second, in case anyone has missed the subtle hints I’ve been dropping over the last couple of posts, RELATIVES, LOVERS, AND CLOSE FRIENDS ARE POOR CHOICES FOR FEEDBACK.

And furthermore, it’s not particularly fair to them to be expected to provide it, unless they already have experience giving it. It’s a Catch-22 for both parties: if they like the book and say so, the writer may think they’re lying to be nice; if they report they hated it, the writer is left wondering whether that wince-worthy critique was really about the book, or if the loved one is still secretly livid about that disastrous trip to Grandma’s house sixteen years ago.

So think very, very carefully before you place anyone you love in that particularly hard spot. I shan’t break any confidences by revealing just how many of my editing clients’ SOs have privately thanked me for letting them off the critiquing hook, but suffice it to say, I’m no longer particularly surprised when it’s the first thing they say when they eventually meet me.

If you DO have loved ones read it, make a positive statement when you give them the manuscript, limiting what you expect in response.

By telling them up front that you do not expect them to do the work of a professional editor (which at heart, many first-time manuscript readers fear with an intensity usually reserved for cobras and other venomous snakes), you will make the process more pleasant for them and heighten the probability that you will get some useful feedback.

Couching the request in terms of feeling reactions rather than textual analysis is a great way to make both writer and reader comfortable: “I have other readers who will deal with issues of grammar and style,” you can tell your kin, for example. “Don’t worry about sentence structure. I want to know if the story moved you.”

Better still, you can couch the request in a compliment. “You know the world of the pool hall so well, my darling,” you can suggest to your lover, “that I want you to concentrate on whether the characters feel real to you. Don’t give even 38 seconds’ consecutive thought to the writing itself; I’ve got someone else reading for that.”

Notice how I keep bringing up other readers? Again, may I suggest that this strategy is substantially more effective if you already have a few well-qualified first readers waiting in the wings?

If you do (sigh…) decide to use your kith and kin as first readers, it can been VERY helpful to cite the existence of other readers, even if they’re imaginary. Why? Knowing that others are available to give the hard-to-say feedback can lighten the intimidated reader’s sense of responsibility considerably, rendering it much, much more likely that s/he will enjoy reading your book, rather than coming to regard it as a burdensome obligation.

“Burdensome?” I hear some tremulous souls cry. “My delightful literary romp?”

To an ordinary reader, perhaps — but did you seriously believe that handing your baby to your cousin at Thanksgiving, knowing full well that you were scheduled to meet again at Christmas, wasn’t imposing an obligation to read it, and pronto? Or that giving in to your coworker’s repeated requests to read something you’ve written, even though that meant her having to meet your reproachful, why-haven’t-you-read-it-yet eyes every week at the staff meeting, didn’t involve establishing a tacit deadline?

To appreciate the literature-dulling potential of deadline-imposition fully, you need only cast your mind back to high school: which did you enjoy more, the book you were assigned to read, the one that was going to be on the final exam, or the one you read in your own good time?

You don’t have to answer that; I spent enough years teaching to guess.

Still unsympathetic to first readers who hang onto manuscripts forever and a day? Would it help to consider that most people don’t understand that writers want to submit their work to agents, editors, and contests almost immediately upon completion? And that it would never occur to most non-professional readers that you might be waiting to hear their reactions before you submit again.

I feel you reaching for your hair to tear it out. Don’t do it. Take a deep breath instead and consider where you might find readers less hesitant to give you the feedback your book needs — and more likely to understand without your having to bully them the concept of turning around the manuscript in a timely manner.

Your best first reader choice (other than a professional reader, such as an editor, agent, or experienced contest judge) is a fellow writer in your own genre, preferably an already-agented or recently published one. Ideally, you want someone very up on the current market in your type of book — and writing for it. Trading manuscripts for critique can be very fruitful.

Second best would be a good writer in another genre, someone who is already familiar with the basic demands of the market (and how a manuscript differs from a published book, something that tends to flummox less experienced first readers a bit) and the value of specific feedback. Good critique groups are often made up of writers working in different book categories; if you are setting up a group from scratch, just make sure that you all discuss the ways in which your genres vary before anyone starts trading chapters.

Third is an excellent reader who isn’t a writer, one who has read widely and deeply and is familiar with the conventions of your book category.

In a pinch, if you feel that all your manuscript needs is a rigorous proofreading, you could always pick the most voracious reader you know or the person so proud of her English skills that she regularly corrects people in conversation. My litmus test is whether the potential reader knows the difference between farther and further — yes, they mean different things, technically — and uses momentarily in its proper form, which is almost never heard in spoken English anymore.

(Poor momentarily has been so abused that some benighted dictionary editors now define it both as for a moment — its time-honored meaning — AND in a moment, as we so often hear on airplanes: “We will be airborne momentarily…” Trust me, you wouldn’t want to be in a plane that was only momentarily airborne…unless you have a serious death wish.)

Which brings me to another suggestion: stick to readers familiar with your genre. Someone who primarily reads nonfiction is not the best first reader for a novel; an inveterate reader of mysteries is not the best first reader of literary fiction or a how-to book. Readers tend to impose the standards of the books they like best onto anything they read, with results that can sometimes puzzle writers and readers of other genres.

For instance, my fiancé, an SF/fantasy reader since his elementary school days, shocked me on one of our first dates by confessing, in the middle of my rhapsody in praise of John Irving, that he had not been able to make it all the way through THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, one of my favorite novels of all time. “I found it boring,” he admitted. “Not much happened.”

“A character gets castrated in mid-car crash,” I pointed out, stunned. “How much more action do you want?”

From the perspective of my SO’s reading background, though, he was right: it’s rare that more than a page goes by in a good SF novel without overt action; mainstream novels tend to be lamentably devoid of, say, time travel. John Irving would be wise, then, to avoid my sweetie as a first reader.

As would I — oh, here’s a great opportunity for a pop quiz. Why don’t I use my SF-loving SO as a first reader?

If your first impulse was to cry out, “He’s double-disqualified! He’s more or less kith and kin, AND he doesn’t read either adult fiction or memoirs on a regular basis! What’s that he’s reading on the chaise right now, yet another Orson Scott Card paperback?” you get an A.

Above all, remember that it’s the requesting writer’s job to make the expectations clear, not the potential feedback-giver’s. Most of those who offer to be first readers are simply curious, or being polite, or trying to show support; they may honestly have no idea whatsoever what you hope to gain from having them read your book in manuscript form, rather than waiting to buy it when it’s available in bookstores everywhere.

Heck, they may not even be aware that asking to read it conveys any expectation that they will give feedback at all — or when — unless the writer tells them so. And doesn’t THAT make you think slightly differently about those well-meaning folks who begged to see your work but never said anything?

That makes a certain amount of sense, if you’ve been trying to use non-writers as first readers: unlike what would-be artists like the WWL seem to think, a working writer learns to welcome helpful, honest feedback on her work. Good writing is all about communicating the author’s artistic vision to the reader, not making the reader guess what that vision is.

Just a little something to think about. More on the care and feeding of first readers follows in the days to come. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XX: and now for the good part — oh, and RIP, Mr. Updike

Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XX: and now for the good part — oh, and RIP, Mr. Updike

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A moment of silence, please: John Updike is dead.

Since nothing elevates the short-term literary stature of an established author as much as his death, I’m sure that there will be no shortage of superlatives being bruited about out there for Mr. Updike, so I shall not attempt to add to them here, nor shall I reproduce his oft-quoted comments about the decline of literary fiction as a mainstream art form. Suffice it to say that he was a writer who alternately impressed and infuriated me — not a bad goal in and of itself for a literary novelist — and leave it at that.

When I heard the news — one of the mixed blessings of being widely known as a writer and descendent of a long line of writers is that people very considerately call to break the news to me whenever any well-established author kicks the bucket, as if everyone who has ever set pen to paper were a distant cousin of mine whose death I should not be forced to learn from the standard media sources — I naturally went straight to my bookshelf and glanced through some of his work. In light of our ongoing series on opening pages and the fact that his first novel, THE POORHOUSE FAIR, came out in 1959, I expected his initial pages would, to put it politely, have a tough time making in past Millicent the agency screener today, thus proving his frequently-made point about how literary fiction has been all but brought to earth over the last 40 years.

I was pleased to find that quite the opposite was true: his first pages were grabbers. Take that, eulogists of literary fiction, including Mr. Updike!

More to the point of the latter part of this series, his hooks largely operated not through garish action, but interesting character development. Take a gander, for instance, at the first two paragraphs of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1984):

“And oh yes,” Jane Smart said in her hasty yet purposeful way; each s seemed the black tip of a just-extinguished match held in playful hurt, as children do, against the skin. “Sukie said a man has bought the Lenox mansion.”
“A man?” Alexandra Spofford asked, feeling off-center, her peaceful aura that morning splayed by the assertive word.

Now, we could speculate all day about the probable insecurities of a male author who felt compelled not only to have a female character repeat the word man here, as though the very concept of the Y chromosome were inherently troubling to heterosexual women, but also to inform the reader that the word is assertive AND use splayed, a word commonly associated with the things models do in the centerfolds of men’s magazines, to describe a mental state. It might also not be too much of a stretch to assume based upon this opening that Mr. Updike wasn’t picturing much of a female readership for this book when he wrote it — intriguing, since in 1984 as now, women were far and away the most common purchasers of literary fiction.

But none of that concerns us at the moment. Look, I ask you, at how beautifully he has used visceral details to establish both a mood and character.

Some ears just perked up out there, didn’t they? “Visceral details?” those who had dozed off a bit, anticipating a eulogy, now exclaim. “Why, we were talking about those only yesterday. Weren’t those the kind of tidbits Millicent and her ilk liked to see, the tangible specifics that make vague generalities fade to gray by comparison?”

Those are they, indeed. Arresting, aren’t they, in this museum piece?

In fact, it’s a heck of an opening in general. Let’s take a moment to ponder why: instead of easing the reader into the story by an extensive description of the physical space in which we discover these characters, or the even more common physical description of the characters themselves, Updike introduces these women by providing specific insight into their mental processes and motivations. Instead of just telling us that Jane is mean and Alexandra shy, he shows us through an analogy and word choices that we might not expect.

Yes, what you just thought is absolutely right: this opening would grab Millicent because it’s not only well-written, but surprising.

Seeing all the elements in action helps to clarify what we’ve been talking about, doesn’t it? But while we’re at it, let’s be thorough about this. Quick, without rushing back and checking our initial list of red flags that often lead Millicent to reject a submission on page 1, what might strike her as problematic if she saw this opening in a submission by a brand-new writer today?

If you pointed out the typo in the very first sentence, give yourself a great big gold star for the day. (Technically, there should be a comma between oh and yes; as Mr. Updike was a graduate of my alma mater, I’m relatively certain that he should have been aware of this.) While some Millicents might be kind enough to read past a first sentence grammatical or spelling error, it’s not a foregone conclusion.

Proofread.

While we’re giving out prizes for observation, take a red ribbon out of petty cash if you flagged the repetitive dialogue. As we’ve discussed earlier in this series, repetitive dialogue tends to annoy agents and editors, since they’ve been trained since they were pups to excise redundancy. Besides, characters who simply echo what has already been said tend to come across as less intelligent than those who actually add something new to the conversations in which they participate — always a tad risky in a protagonist.

Anything else? What about the unnecessary tag lines (Jane Smart said, Alexandra Spofford asked), now out of fashion? Since Mr. Updike had already been established in the first rank of North American authors by the time the use of tag lines fell out of fashion, this might seem like an unwarranted quibble, but remember, we’re judging this by the standards that would apply to a writer trying to break into the biz now.

Long-time readers, pull out your hymnals and sing along with me now: an established author can often get away with things that someone new could not.

Did any of you red-flag the semicolon? If Mr. Updike were submitting this to Millicent labeled as anything but literary fiction, you’d be right to consider cutting it. Generally speaking, in fiction that isn’t aimed at a college-educated audience — as literary fiction is, ostensibly — semicolons are considered a bit highbrow.

The fact that Millicent regularly sees manuscripts whose vocabulary barely scrapes the 10th grade positively peppered with semicolons might have something to do with this, admittedly. No one but writers really like semicolons, and not even all of us use them correctly (which, John Harvard would no doubt be delighted to note, Mr. Updike has done properly above), but my, don’t we like to shoehorn them into a manuscript!

Unless you’re submitting your work as literary fiction to an agent with a successful track record of representing a whole lot of it AND her client list fairly bristles with semicolon-wielding authors, you might want to minimize their use.

All of which, as fate would have it, is a perfect lead-in to my wrap-up of the Idol rejection reasons because, really, it’s important to recognize that while, in the past, agents tended to be open to working with their clients in order to work out the technical kinks prior to submission to publishing houses, now most of them expect writers to submit manuscripts so clean and camera-ready that the agency screener could confidently walk them directly from the agency’s mail room to the desk of even the pickiest editor. Thus these last few weeks of weeding out the most common submission problems, at least on page 1: we’ve been going over these points exhaustively so that you can meet standards far higher than when the late, great Mr. Updike faced when he was first trying to break into the biz.

Today, however, we get to see the reward: the kind of manuscript that makes agents weak in the knees.

Surprisingly, agents and editors tend not to talk too much about what they love about books at conferences — they tend to stick to describing what is marketable, because that is, after all, their bread and butter. Remember, agents (most of them, anyway) don’t hold submissions to such high standards in order to be mean — they want to take on books that they know they can sell within today’s extremely tight market. It’s not enough for an agent to love your work; she needs to be able to place it at a publishing house for you.

But as those of you who have been querying strong, marketable projects for a while already know, agents often reject submissions for perfectly marketable books, a fact that is very confusing to those who have been taught (sometimes by agents at conferences) to believe that every agent is looking for the same thing, or to those who believe that a single rejection from a single agent means that everyone in the industry will hate a book.

Or that there exists writing so beautifully literary that every agent currently drawing breath will instantly exclaim, “Oh, of course — I’ll represent that!”

Especially for first fiction, it’s not enough for an agent to recognize that a writer has talent and a book has market potential: they like to fall in love. If you’re a good pitcher, you already know the reaction I’m talking about: the eyes becoming moist with desire, the mouth appearing to go dry with lust. When an agent wants a project, the symptoms strongly resemble infatuation, and as the Idol series has taught us, it’s often a case of love at first sight.

As with any other type of love, every agent has his own particular type that is likely to make his heart beat harder, his own individual quirks and kinks. Just as an agent will train his screeners to rule out submissions containing his pet peeves, he will usually set some standards for the kind of project he would like to see forwarded to his desk.

So, in a way, our old pal the underpaid, latte-quaffing, late-for-her-lunch-date screener is her boss’ dating service.

Here’s the list of what the Idol panelists said would light their fires sufficiently to ask for a second date — in other words, what would lead them to want to read beyond page 1 of a submission:

1. A non-average character in a situation you wouldn’t expect.

2. An action scene that felt like it was happening in real time.

3. The author made the point, then moved on.

4. The scene was emotionally engaging.

5. The narrative voice is strong and easy to relate to.

6. The suspense seemed inherent to the story, not just how it was told.

7. “Good opening line.”

8. ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.”

Notice anything about this list? Like, say, that the opening of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK knocks every single one of these criteria out of the proverbial ballpark?

“Hey,” I hear some of you out there saying, “isn’t there something missing from this list? Shouldn’t ‘This is a marvelous writer,’ or ‘That’s the best metaphor I’ve ever seen for a love affair gone wrong,’ or “Wow, great hook” have made the list? Shouldn’t, in fact, more of these have been about the craft of writing, rather than about the premise?”

Excellent questions, both. Would you like the cynical answer, or the one designed to be encouraging to submitters?

Let me get the cynicism out of the way first: they are looking for a book that can sell quickly, not a writer whose talent they want to develop over a lifetime, and that means paying closer attention to an exciting plot than to writerly skill. In essence, they are looking to fall in love with a premise, rather than a book.

The less cynical, and probably more often true, reason is that this is not the JV team you are auditioning to join: this is the big league, where it is simply assumed that a writer is going to be talented AND technically proficient.

Unless an agent specifically represents literary fiction — not just good writing, mind you, which can be produced in any book category, but that specific 3-4% of the fiction market which is devoted to novels where the beauty of the writing is the primary point of the book — the first question she is going to ask her screener is probably not going to be, “Is it well-written?”

Why not? Well, presumably, if any submission weren’t fairly well-written and free of technical errors, it would not make it past the screener. As we have seen before, the question is much more likely to be, “What is this book about?”

Before you sniff at this, think about it for a minute: the last time you recommended a book to someone, did you just say, “Oh, this is a beautifully-written book,” or did you give some description of either the protagonist or the plot in your recommendation? Even the most literary of literary fiction is, after all, about SOMETHING.

Ideally, any good novel will be about an interesting character in an interesting situation.

Why does the protagonist need to be interesting? So the reader will want to follow her throughout the story to come, feeling emotionally engaged in the outcome. Why does the situation need to be interesting? So the reader will not figure out the entire book’s plotline on page 1.

If you have both of these elements in your premise, and you present them in a way that avoids the 74 rejection reasons I’ve been discussing throughout this series, most of the rest of the criteria on this love-it list will follow naturally. Not necessarily, but usually. If the reader cares about the protagonist, the stakes are high enough, and the pacing is tight, the scene is much more likely to be emotionally engaging than if any of these things are not true. If you eschew heavy-handed description and move straight to (and through) the action, conflict is more likely to seem as though it is happening in real time, no one can complain that you are belaboring a point, and the suspense will develop naturally.

So really, all of this critique has been leading directly to the characteristics of an infatuation-worthy book.

Of course, all of this IS about the quality of the writing, inherently: in order to pull this off successfully, the writer has to use a well-rehearsed bag of tricks awfully well. Selecting the right narrative voice for a story, too, is indicative of writerly acumen, as is a stunning opening line. Each of these elements are only enhanced by a beautiful writing style.

However, most agents will tell you that lovely writing is not enough in the current market: the other elements need to be there as well. As well as a certain je ne sais quoi that the pros call an individual voice.

All of which is to say: submission is not the time to be bringing anything but your A game; there really is no such thing as just good enough in the current market. (Unless you’re already established like John Updike, of course, or a celebrity, or you happen to have written the story that the agent always wanted to write himself, or…) Playing in the big leagues requires more than merely telling a story well — that’s the absolute minimum for getting a serious read within the industry.

Which brings me to #8, ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.” Submission mail bags positively burgeon with clear accounts of straightforward stories, as well as with manuscripts where every nuance of the plot is instantly accessible to the reader as soon as it is mentioned. Books that work on a number of different levels simultaneously, that give the reader occasion to think about the world to which the book is introducing her, are rare.

That the Idol agents would be looking actively for such a book might at first blush seem astonishing. How much subtlety could a screener possibly pick up in a 30-second read of the first page of a manuscript?

Well, let me ask you: the last time you fell in love, how much did you feel you learned in the first thirty seconds of realizing it?

Pat yourselves on the back for making it all the way through this extremely sobering list, everybody: this was good, hard, professional work, the kind that adds serious skills to your writer’s tool bag. Be pleased about that — and keep up the good work!

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Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XVIII: sins of excess, purplish prose, and the effect of all of that caffeine on Millicent’s reading sensibilities

cups-of-coffee

Does that large-scale collective whimpering I’ve been hearing over the last week, a sort of humanoid version of a slightly rusted machine cranking gears in stasis back into unaccustomed action, mean that many of you have leapt back into action and are laboring feverishly to send out queries and pop those long-requested materials into the mail? Hurrah, if so, because the infamous New Year’s resolution should just about have petered out by now. (If you’re joining us late, half the aspiring writers in North America send out queries and manuscripts within the first three weeks of any given calendar year — and, like other New Year’s resolutions, the impetus to virtue tends to fade before February rolls around.) This is a grand time to be getting those marketing materials out the door.

Since some of you are probably laboring toward that laudable goal this very weekend, this seems like an apt time to remind everyone of something I haven’t mentioned in a while: if you’re planning to query or submit electronically, either via e-mail or through an agency or small publisher’s website, don’t do it between Friday afternoon and Monday at noon.

Stop laughing; I’m quite serious about this. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that rejection rates are higher for queries and submissions sent over the weekend.

I’m not talking merely about this particular weekend, mind you, but any weekend, especially those that contain a national holiday on either end. Trust me, you don’t want your e-query or e-submission lost in the weekend’s backlog.

Why avoid weekend submissions, when it’s usually the most convenient time for the writer? For precisely that reason: because weekends are far and away the most popular time for contacting agents, their inboxes are almost invariably stuffed to the gills on Monday morning. If you wait to send off your missive until after lunchtime in New York, you will probably be dealing with a less surly and thus easier to please agent.

Or, more likely, a less overwhelmed screener, a Millicent who has had time to let her scalding-hot latte cool — or possibly be on her second or third — before reading what you sent. That increase in caffeine and concomitant decrease in grumpiness gives your query or submission a slight competitive edge over those that she finds stacked up in her inbox first thing Monday morning, when all she wants to do is weed through them as quickly as humanly possible.

Admittedly, this is often her goal, especially with queries, which routinely arrive at any well-established agency by the truckload. But as the Carpenters so often whined back in the 1970s, rainy days and Mondays always get her down.

That being said, shall we get on with the many, many reasons she is likely to reject a submission on page 1, so you can start prepping to send out that electronic submission come Tuesday? I’m going to keep this short today, so those of you using checking here at Author! Author! as a break in your marketing-prep endeavors may get right back to work.

As the saying goes (or should, at any rate), no rest for the weary, the wicked, and the agent-seeker.

As you may have noticed over the course of this series, most of the professional readers’ pet peeves we’ve been discussing are at the larger level — paragraph, conception, pacing, choosing to include a protagonist with long, flowing red hair, etc. — but today’s subsection of the list falls squarely at the sentence level:

55. Took too many words to tell us what happened.

56. The writing lacks pizzazz.

57. The writing is dull.

58. The writing is awkward.

59. The writing uses too many exclamation points.

60. The writing falls back on common shorthand descriptions.

61. Too many analogies per paragraph.

Most of these are fairly self-explanatory, but I want to zero in on a couple of them before I talk about sentence-level red flags in general. Objection #55, took too many words to say what happened, is to a great extent the offspring of our old friend, the thirty-second read, but to professional eyes, text that takes a while to get to the point is not problematic merely because Millicent has to wait too long to see the action in action. To an agent or editor, it is a warning signal: this is probably a book that will need to be edited sharply for length.

Translation: this manuscript will need work.

As we have learned over the course of this series, your garden-variety NYC-based agent would much, much rather that any necessary manuscript reconstruction occur prior to their seeing the book at all, so spotting even a quite beautifully-written submission that takes a while to warm up is a major red flag for them. In fact, it is likely to send them screaming in another direction.

Which is a pity, especially for the large contingent of writers enamored of either most books written before 1920 or quite a lot of the literary fiction still being published in the British Isles, which often take pages and pages to jump into the story proper. Many’s the time that I’ve picked up a volume that’s the talk of London, only to think, “This is lovely, but Millicent would have ben tapping her fingers, toes, and anything else that was handy four pages ago, muttering under her breath, ‘Will you please get on with it?’”

This should sound at least a trifle familiar from last time, yes? US-based agents tend to prefer books that start with action, not character development for its own sake, even in literary fiction. And I’m not necessarily talking about CGI-worthy fireworks, either: for the purposes of literature, conflict is action.

Which means, in practice, that even an unquestionably gorgeous 4-page introduction that deftly situates the protagonist with respect time, space, social status, costume, dialect, educational level, marital status, voting record, and judgment about whether ice dancing is too harshly judged in the Olympics is less likely to be read in its entirety than a substantially less stylistically sound scene that opens mid-argument.

I know; it’s limiting. But being aware of this fact prior to submission enables the talented writer with the 4-page opening to move it later in the book, at least in the draft she’s marketing, and open with an equally beautiful conflict, right? As I’ve said many, many times before: a manuscript is not set in stone until it’s set in print, and not always even then.

Translation: you can always change it back after the agent of your dreams signs you, but that can’t happen unless you get your book past Millicent first.

To be fair, her get on with it, already! attitude doesn’t emerge from nowhere, or even the huge amounts of coffee, tea, and Red Bull our Millicent consumes to keep up with her hectic schedule. Just as most amateur theatrical auditions tend to be on the slow side compared to professional performances, so do most submissions drag a bit compared to their published counterparts.

Sorry to be the one to break that to you, but the tendency to move slowly is considerably more common in manuscript submissions than an impulse too move too fast. As in about 200 to 1. Millicent often genuinely needs that coffee.

Also, because so few submissions to agencies come equipped with a professional title page, most screeners will also automatically take the next logical (?) step and assume that a prose-heavy first page equals an overly long book. (Interestingly, they seldom draw the opposite conclusion from a very terse first page.) See why it’s a good idea to include a standard title page — if you are not already aware of the other good reasons to do this, please see the TITLE PAGE category at right — that contains an estimated word count?

In short, it is hard to over-estimate the size of the red flag that pops out of an especially wordy first page.

And in answer to the question that half of you mentally howled at me in the middle of the last paragraph about how long is too long, it obviously varies by book category and genre, but for years, the standard agents’ advice to aspiring writers has been to keep a first novel under 100,000 words, if at all possible.

That’s 400 pages in standard format, Times New Roman.

Before any of you start rushing toward the COMMENTS function below to tell me that you asked an agent at a recent conference about your slightly longer work, and she said rather evasively that it was fine, 60,000 – 110,000 words is fairly universally considered a fine range for a novel. (This is estimated word count, of course, not actual; if you do not know why the pros figure it this way, or how to estimate the way they do, please see WORD COUNT at right.)

Shorter than 60,000, and it’s really a novella, which would usually be packaged with another work (unless the author is already very well-established); longer than 110,000, and it starts becoming substantially more expensive to print and bind (and yes, they really do think about that as soon as they lay eyes on a novel). Do check, though, about the standards in your particular genre and sub-genre: chick lit, for instance, tends to be under 90,000 words, and a quick romp through any well-stocked bookstore will demonstrate that many romances, mysteries, and humor books weigh in at a scant 40,000 – 60,000.

If your manuscript falls much outside that range, don’t despair. Or at least don’t despair until you’ve worked your way step by step through this checklist:

(1) Double-check that it is indeed in standard format (if you’re not positive, please see the MANUSCRIPT FORMATING 101 and STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories on the archive list at right). If the margins are too wide or the font too big (Times New Roman is one of the most space-efficient), those choices can apparently add specious length to a manuscript.

(2) Make sure that you are estimating correctly — actual word count is typically quite a bit higher than estimated. (Again, if you’re unsure, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.) If actual and estimated are wildly different, use the one that’s closest to the target range.

(3) If your word count is well out of range, don’t include the word count in your query letter.

I heard that great big gasp out there; I know that I’m one of the rare online writing advice-givers that recommends this. But frankly, since agents routinely have their clients leave the word count off too-length manuscripts, I don’t see an ethical problem with an omission that will help your work get past the querying stage so it can be judged on the merits of the writing.)

(4) Consider editing for length. If it’s too long to render that feasible, consider chopping the storyline into a pair of books or a trilogy, for marketing purposes. (What was that I said earlier about the possibility of changing it back later?)

(5) If 1-4 fail to solve the problem, you have my permission to panic.

Well, that took us rather far afield from sentence-level red flags, didn’t it? Let’s get back to those proverbial brass tacks.

#59, too many exclamation points and #61, too many analogies are also sins of excess, but the conclusions screeners tend to draw from them are more about their perpetrators than about the books in question.

To a professional reader, a manuscript sprinkled too liberally with exclamation points just looks amateurish: it’s seen as an artificial attempt to make prose exciting through punctuation, rather than through skillful sentences. Since this particular prejudice is shared by most of the writing teachers in North America, agents and editors will automatically assume that such a manuscript was produced by someone who has never taken a writing class.

Not a good one, anyway. And while that is not necessarily a bad thing (they often complain that they see too much over-workshopped writing), they tend, as a group, to eschew writers whom they perceive to still be learning their craft.

Yes, yes: of course, we’re all still learning our craft as long as we live, but to be on the safe side, save the exclamation points for dialogue.

#61, too many analogies, on the other hand, is often the result of having been exposed to too much writing advice. Most of us, I think, had similes and metaphors held up to us as examples of good writing at some point in our formative years, and I, for one, would be the last to decry the value of a really good analogy.

But too many in a row can make for some pretty tiresome reading.

Why, you ask? Well, descriptive flights of fancy are by definition deviations from what’s going on in the moment, right? As such, they can slow down a nice, dramatic opening considerably. Take a gander at this lightly lavender-tinted passage, for instance:

Like a rat in a maze, Jacqueline swerved her panther of a sports car through the Habitrail™ of streets that is South London as if she were being pursued by pack of wolves howling for her blood. Her eyes were flint as she stared through the rain-flecked windshield, as reflective as a cat’s eye at night. She had left her heart behind at Roger’s flat, bloodied and torn; she felt as though she had put her internal organs through a particularly rusty meat grinder, but still, she drove like a woman possessed.”

Now, that’s not a bad piece of writing, even if I do say so myself. The prose isn’t precisely purple, but still, the analogies are laid on with a trowel, not a tweezers.

Taken individually, of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with any of the clauses above, but all in a row, such writing starts to sound a bit evasive. It reads as though the author is actively avoiding describing the car, the streets, or Jacqueline’s feelings per se. To a screener who is, after all, in a hurry to find out what is going on in the book, all of those things that are like other things could provide distraction from what the story is ABOUT.

#60, writing that falls back on common shorthand, could be interpreted as a subsection of the discussion of clichés earlier in this series, but actually, you would have to read an awful lot of manuscripts before you started identifying these as tropes.

Still, tropes they are, radically overused in submissions as a whole. The Idol agents specifically singled out the use of phrases such as, She did not trust herself to speak, She didn’t want to look, and a character thinking, This can’t be happening — all of which are, from a writer’s POV, are simple descriptions of what is going on.

But then, so is the opening, It was a dark and stormy night, right? Many a night has been devoid of significant light, and a significant proportion of them see storms. That doesn’t mean It was a dark and stormy night isn’t the champagne of clichéd first lines.

Or that Millicent doesn’t see pointlessly resentful teenagers, sighing as the sole indicator of protagonist disgruntlement, children growing up too fast, women pressuring men to get married, and men wanting more physical contact than their partners (possibly with those half their partners’ ages) dropped into every third manuscript she sees. To a professional reader, such overused phrases and hackneyed concepts represent wasted writing opportunities.

Yes, they convey what is going on concisely and clearly, but not in a way that hasn’t been done before. Remember, you want an agent to fall in love with YOUR unique voice and worldview, so using the phrases of others, even when apt, is not the best way to brand your work as your own.

Ultimately, though, you should tread lightly around all of today’s objections for strategic reasons, because they imply something to a professional reader that you might not want to convey: because virtually any good first reader would have called the writer’s attention to these problems (well, okay, perhaps not #60), they make it appear as though the screener is the first human being to read the submission. (Other than the author’s mother, spouse, lover, best friend, or anyone else who has substantial incentive not to give impartial feedback, that is, but of that, more next week) To the pros, these mistakes make a submission read like a work-in-progress, not like one that is ready to market.

Uh-oh. Did that red flag just mean that this submission needs further work?

Remember, virtually every agent and editor in the industry perceives him/herself to be the busiest human being on the planet. (Try not to dwell on the extremely low probability of this being true; it will only confuse the issue.) Your chances of impressing them favorably rise dramatically if your work cries out, “I will not make unwarranted inroads onto your time! You can sell me as is!”

Please, I implore you, do not make an agency screener the first impartial reader for your work. Frankly, they just are not going to give you the feedback you need in order to learn how to bring your book to publication. They don’t have — or believe they don’t have– the time.

Acknowledging that you need feedback to bring your work to a high polish does not make you a bad writer; it makes you a professional one who recognizes that there is more going on in a submission that your expressing yourself. It makes you a savvy one who knows that a book is a product to be sold, in addition to being a piece of art.

It also makes you, if I may be blunt about it, a better self-marketer than 98% of the aspiring writers who enthusiastically fulfill their New Year’s resolutions by licking stamps for SASEs on January first, or who will be blithely hitting the SEND button on their electronic queries and e-mails this weekend.

Don’t worry, weary first page-revisers: we’re very close to being done with the rejection reason list. Hang in there, and keep up the good work!

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Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XV: but it really happened that way!

pearlfishers

I went to see THE PEARLFISHERS at the Seattle Opera again last night; since the tenor had been practically inaudible with the cast we saw the first time, we went back and saw the other, in which the baritone was practically inaudible. Oh, well, you can’t have everything — where would you put it? (As comic Stephen Wright has been asking plaintively for years. One should never borrow a good joke without attributing it.)

During opera mach II, I was thinking about you fine people and the list of common reasons submissions get rejected on page 1 we’ve been discussing, admittedly a bit one-sidedly, for the last couple of weeks. During the protracted opening scene with the acres of milling supernumeraries and ten minutes of heavily Balanchine-influenced prancing around (don’t even get me started on the five minutes of dance in Act III that’s apparently lifted directly from THE PRODIGAL SON), I kept murmuring to myself, “Um, haven’t we heard this dialogue already? And is it really necessary to tell the audience fifteen times that you’re dancing when the choreographer has placed ocular evidence at the front of the stage?”

I suppose that my response could be regarded as a sort of SCARED STRAIGHT for would-be editors — this is where hardcore manuscript screening leads, kids — but seriously, the opera’s first ten minutes ran afoul of a hefty percentage of our cringe list for openings:

3. The opening is about setting, not about story.
6. Took too long for anything to happen.
7. Not enough happens in the opening.
24. Opening spent too much time on environment, and not enough on character.
32. Where’s the conflict?
38. Repetition (all of that explanation that they’re dancing in Sri Lanka)
39. Too many generalities.
51. Hollywood narration

It just goes to show you: judging one art form by the standards of another isn’t all that productive — so any of you who are planning to defend repetitious or Hollywood narration-based dialogue to your future agents and editors as something done in movies, plays, or on opera stages all the time might want to think twice.

I just mention. Back to not entirely unrelated business.

I’m writing today’s post between appointments, balanced on the rather unstable table of a coffee-purveying chain that shall remain nameless. While I’ve been sitting here, I’ve been doing the dialogue experiment I suggested to you a couple of days ago, and I freely admit it: was mistaken in telling you that 99.9% of overheard conversations would not work in print.

Based on today’s sample, I radically overestimated how much would be bearable as written dialogue.

It may be that the patrons’ caffeine purchases haven’t hit their bloodstreams yet, but if they were on the page, our old pal Millicent the agency screener would be reaching for the Xeroxed rejection letters within seconds. You wouldn’t believe how similar the things one customer says to a barista are to the things the next customer says, and the next.

Which brings me to #31 on our list of common reasons submissions get rejected before the list, real-life incidents are not always believable on paper. If I may be so bold as to elaborate upon this excellent observation, permit me to add: and neither is real-life dialogue, necessarily.

This is a point I harp upon this particular point with fair regularity (and if you doubt that, please see the BUT IT REALLY HAPPENED THAT WAY! category on the archive list at right), I’m not going to dwell too long upon why any writer who includes a true incident within a fictional story needs to make ABSOLUTELY certain that the importation is integrated seamlessly into the novel. Suffice it to say that real-life events are so frequently shoved into otherwise fictional accounts wholesale so often that any Millicent worth her weight in lattes soon learns to spot ‘em a mile away.

Already, I sense some readerly disgruntlement out there. “But Anne,” some writers of the real point out querulously, “one of the virtues of fiction is the insight it gives the reader into life as it is actually lived. So how precisely is it a remotely negative thing if Millicent the agency screener thinks, ‘Oh, that bit seems real’?”

Counterintuitive from the writer’s perspective, isn’t it? It’s a storytelling problem, at base: while there’s nothing inherently wrong with incorporating real events into a fictional narrative, it’s undoubtedly jarring for the reader trundling along merrily within a fictional reality to suddenly be confronted with a scene or incident that is, as the LAW AND ORDER folks like to say, ripped from the headlines. Anything that pulls the reader out of the story by breaking the smoothness of the narrative’s worldview is bound to be distracting.

Which is a nice way of hinting obliquely that aspiring writers very frequently just drop in real elements — and real dialogue — into a story as if their very veracity were sufficient excuse to include them. From the reader’s point of view, that’s just not true; to get and remain involved, the story in from of him must appear to be one unbroken piece.

“But Anne,” the disgruntled pipe up again, “I can understand where that might be problematic in mid-book, after the story has gotten up and running, but on page 1, there isn’t an already-established narrative line to break, is there? It seems to me that if I should be dropping real elements into my writing wholesale — which I fully understand that you’re advising me not to do — page 1 would be absolutely the safest place to do it.”

Actually, no: strategically, you’re going to want page 1 to exhibit not only your best writing — the better to entrance Millicent, my dears — but to be representative of the writing throughout the rest of the book. If, as is often the case in dialogue, the real is not as compelling as the fictional, it’s not going to be as effective an introduction to the rest of the book as a writer might like.

One of the things we’ve learned in this series is that in order to be grabbed by a manuscript, Millicent needs to be sufficiently charmed by the narrative voice and storyline from the very first sentence, so it is imperative for the writing to establish the author’s unique voice and worldview right away. If that first sentence — or anything on the first page, really — is at odds with the rest of the narrative, the transition is going to feel rocky whenever it comes. And if that displacement rocks the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief on page one, it’s going to be pretty difficult for the reader to sink into the story.

Particularly if that reader is as jaded to the practice as Millicent.

But I said I wasn’t going to lecture you on the inherent perils of dropping the unpolished real into your manuscripts, didn’t I? Honestly, all I intend to do is nudge you gently about making sure that the narrative in including such incidents is not biased to the point that it will tip the reader off that this IS a real-life event. I’m not even going to remind you that, generally speaking, for such importations to work, the author needs to do quite a bit of character development for the real characters — which most real-character importers neglect to do, because they, after all, know precisely who they mean.

No, today, I’m going to concentrate on the other side of including the real, the way in which the Idol panelists used it: the phenomenon of including references to current events, pop culture references, etc. in a novel.

The editorial advice against utilizing such elements dates your work is older than the typewriter: Louisa May Alcott was warned to be wary about having characters go off to the Civil War, in fact, on the theory that it would be hard for readers born after it to relate to her characters. (And if you doubt that, try explaining to a 14-year-old why anyone was shocked when Rosa Parks declined to proceed to the rear of a certain bus.)

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

This part of the process can be lengthy, even for a book that ultimately sells very well inded. Even after an editor falls in love with a book, pushes it through the requisite editorial meetings, and makes an offer, it is extraordinarily rare for a book to hit the shelves less than a year after the contract is signed.

Often, it is longer — so a reference that seemed fresh as paint (where that cliché come from, do you suppose?) when it fell off the writer’s fingertips onto the keyboard will almost certainly be AT LEAST two and a half years old before it reaches readers of the published book.

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

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

The second strike was a superabundance of references to the TV shows of the year 2001. In an effort to be hip, its author had chosen to use characters on the then-popular HBO show SEX & THE CITY to illustrate certain points. “In five years,” I pointed out, “this will make your book obsolete. You want readers to keep finding your book relevant, don’t you? Could you possibly come up with less time-bound examples?”

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

She stuck to her guns so thoroughly that I eventually declined to edit the book; I referred her elsewhere. About a year and a half later, she contacted me to gloat: she had managed to land an agent, who did manage, within the course of another year, to sell the book to a small publisher.

The book came out at almost exactly the time as SEX & THE CITY went off the air. It did not see a second printing.

My point is, be careful about incorporating current events, especially political ones into your manuscripts — and seriously consider excising them entirely from your first few pages. The chances that Millicent will immediately exclaim, “Well, that’s an interesting example/analogy/temporal marker, but it’s going to read as dated by next week,” are just too hight.

Yes, I know: you can’t walk into a bookstore without seeing scads and scads of NF books on current events, even ones recent enough that they could not have possibly gone through the lengthy pre-publication process I’ve just described. The next time you’re in that bookstore, take a gander at the author bios of these books: overwhelmingly, current events books are written by journalists and the professors whom they interview. It is extraordinarily difficult to find a publisher for such a book unless the writer has a significant platform.

Being President of Pakistan, for instance, or reporting on Hurricane Katrina for CNN — and at this point, even the latter might well strike an agent or editor as a dated credential. Mainstream culture marches on FAST.

One last point about pop or political culture references: if you do decide to disregard my advice entirely and include them, double-check to make sure that you’ve spelled all of the names you cite correctly. Not only people’s names, but brand names as well.

Stop laughing; this is a mistake I see constantly as a contest judge, and it’s usually enough to knock an entry out of finalist consideration, believe it or not. Seriously. I once saw a quite-good memoir dunned for referring to a rap band as Run-DMV.

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

Make sure, too, that the sources you consult for verification are reliable; remember, it’s not as though everything currently posted on the Internet is spelled correctly. If you’re in serious perplexity about where to turn to double-check, call your local public library and ask where to start looking. But whatever you do, don’t just run them through a spell-checker — because the more up-to-the-minute those names are, the less likely your spell-checking program is to be aware of them — or check with kith and kin, who may also have been laboring under your misconception that it’s FDR that delivers flowers, rather than FTD.

Not that I wouldn’t pay good money to see President Roosevelt show up on my doorstep bearing a bouquet, mind you. I’m just saying that Millicent up on her presidential history might be a trifle startled to see him bounding out of his wheelchair today.

There’s an important lesson to take from this, over and above the perennial proofreading imperative to get technical matters right before submitting pages containing them: the written word is for the ages, not the moment. That can be easy to forget in catering to agents focused on what’s selling to publishing houses right now, but it’s nevertheless true. Nothing ages as quickly (or as badly) as last year’s pop culture reference.

Or, to get back to my initial nag, as last year’s cool catchphrase. If you’re devoted to reproducing actual conversation, you might want to bear that in mind, because, as anyone sentenced to listen to ambient chatter in a café could tell you, everyday conversation is loaded with catchphrases and references that would make the reader of ten years from now mutter, “Huh?” under her breath.

And the well-trained Millicent to shake her head over them right now. Choose your references carefully, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XII: scrutinizing those fundamental authorial choices, or, why so tense?

Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XII: scrutinizing those fundamental authorial choices, or, why so tense?

You know, the more I plow through the list of Idol first-page rejection reasons (if the very concept is news to you, please see the first post in this series.), the more obvious it is to me why it took me more than two years — an eternity in blogging time — to revisit it: these criteria genuinely come as a total surprise to the vast majority of aspiring writers. Perhaps not all of them, but pretty much everyone seems to get caught off-guard by at least a few.

Intellectually and ethically, I’m fully aware that I’m not personally responsible the deer-in-the-headlights response so many aspiring writers have to this information. I’m just the bearer of the bad tidings, not the instigator of them. But still, delving into them makes me feel just a touch guilty, because frankly, as an editor and not-infrequent contest judge, I kind of agree with most of the items on this list.

There, I said it. And I feel better for it. Please don’t throw things at me.

The fact is, most of the reasons on the rejection list are pretty sound, both literarily and in terms of book marketing. Admittedly, I would probably read more than a page before writing off a manuscript based on any one of these criteria alone, but in practice, these first page problems are seldom seen alone. Like spelling in grammatical errors, they tend to travel in packs.

Which means — are you sitting down? — that even manuscripts rejected on page 1 often contain more than one red flag.

Startling, but true. Millicent the agency screener actually does have a pretty good excuse for abiding by these criteria, just as she may be excused for taking a submission that deviates obviously from standard format less seriously: although the first page of a book may not be a representative sample of the writing — often, it isn’t, because writers tend to summarize more when providing backstory, and first pages are notoriously common hang-outs for backstory — a submission exhibiting several of these problems on page 1 probably does have similar problems later in the book as well.

So as firmly as I am on the writers’ side of this particular fence emotionally, I do think that submissions without this particular set of problems tend to be better — or at any rate more polished — than those that do not. My objection is that aspiring writers are very seldom made aware of where their submissions run afoul of industry expectation.

All of which is to say: I have a lot of ground to cover today. Because this is the day, my friends, that we begin launching into the real nitty-gritty, the technical authorial choices. First up on the roster: tense.

So fasten your seatbelts, campers; it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Given how often aspiring writers get wind of super-broad generalizations about tense — the most popular at the moment being that it’s impossible to land an agent for a present-tense narrative, particularly in the first person — were you surprised to see how few of the Idol rejection reasons concerned authorial tense choices? There were only two:

#53, the writing switching tenses for no apparent reason.

#71, “Why is this written in the present tense?”

Editorially, the first is more likely a consistency problem than a conscious authorial choice — although the sheer frequency with which it turns up in the early pages of manuscripts might suggest otherwise. As any agency screener will tell you, tense-shifting is surprisingly common in submissions, for reasons unfathomable to them.

I have a pretty good guess, however, so let me take a crack at it.

Many, many books begin their sojourns on this terrestrial sphere written in the present tense, only to be changed to the past tense later on, when the author realizes some of the practical difficulties of perpetually speaking in the present. And visa versa. Sometimes, writers just do not remember to go back and change every single verb after they’ve made the decision to change to the past tense.

Thus, unintentionally, quite a lot of submissions appear to be written in two tenses, when their writers probably only intended the narrative to be in one.

Which means, in practice, that unexplained tense switches are very frequently not deliberate choices, but proofreading problems — and ones that your word processor’s spelling and grammar checker is unlikely to catch, since these tools concentrate at the word and sentence level. They often will fail to point out tense consistency problems even — and I tremble to tell you this, but I see it constantly — if two of the tenses fall within a single sentence.

“Wait!” I hear a bevy of suddenly pale souls out there crying. “What do you mean, my grammar checker won’t catch tense problems? Isn’t that what it’s there to do?”

Counterintuitive, isn’t it? But long experience has led me to conclude that on the whole, the Microsoft Corporation either believes very deeply in an individual’s right to choose to switch tenses as often as he pleases — or just does not care very much about whether the first and fourteenth sentences of your novel are consistently tensed, or even the first and the second.

Yet another reason, in case you needed still more, that computerized spell- and grammar-checkers alone are not adequate replacements for good old human proofreaders. I just mention.

Don’t believe me? Okay, I’m writing this in the latest version of Word; let’s see what happens when I start to write a story with severe tense problems. I have to say, I’m not sanguine about this experiment, since my grammar checker routinely begs me to use the wrong form of there, their, and they’re and frowns upon every single use of a semicolon, apparently on general principle, but hey, I’m open to being mistaken about this. Here goes:

Jane threw up on her date, Stan, who backs away in horror. It was a cold, clear, moonlit night, ideal for dating. Yet Jane is sad, not because she is drinking so much, per se, but because Stan soon will be so plying her with alcohol that she will no longer have been able to tell the difference between the past, present, and future. The realization made her weep all the harder. Stan weeps as well. 

 

Okay, now I’m running this paragon of purple prose through my very up-to-date Word grammar checker…which, you will no doubt be thrilled to hear, did not raise a single objection to the preceding paragraph. It did, however, raise all kinds of red flags about my technically correct use of the word “which” in my last sentence.

I rest my case. Proofread VERY carefully for unintentional tense switches, particularly if you are writing in the present tense.

Tense lapses are especially very difficult to catch when proofreading on a small computer screen, too, or indeed, any computer screen at all, since backlit screens tend to make all of us skim. Long-term visitors to this site, shout along with me now: there is just no substitute for reading your work IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD before you send it out. Yes, it is a touch wasteful of paper (you can always use the back side to print future drafts, right?), but no other method is as likely to catch rhythmic, continuity, and yes, tense problems.

Do I hear a bit of disgruntled murmuring out there at the idea that first-page tense switches could happen only inadvertently? Come on, speak up. No? Too shy after the Idol barrage?

Okay, then, I’ll suggest another logical possibility: the narrative could be switching between the present and the past deliberately, perhaps because the protagonist is having a flashback, or because she is not very well grounded in present reality for reasons that do not bode well for her future mental health. Maybe she is sitting in a time machine, hopping around between the era of the dinosaurs and the reign of Charles I. Or perhaps — and this is one I have seen quite often — the book concerns a traumatic event, recalled in the present tense (and usually the first person as well), so the reader will get a brief flash of it before launching into the past-tense narrative…

All right, I can feel in my bones that there are dozens of you jumping up and down at this point, hands in the air, begging to explain at great length why any of these tactics is likely to get a writer in trouble on the first page of a submission. Go ahead, shout out the answer.

Yes, you’re right, enthusiastic hand-raisers: they all COULD be construed as tricking the reader, a practice we established a few days back as something the average agent admires about as much as the bubonic plague. So while this is a technique that we’ve all seen used, and used well, by successfully published authors, using it within the first couple of pages of your submission is inherently risky.

Not that it isn’t a legitimate authorial choice, mind you. It’s just a whole lot easier for an already-established author to get past an agent or editor. And frankly, I would strongly advise against running it under the eyes of a contest judge at all, unless you happen to be entering a contest that routinely rewards this type of writing experiment with big blue ribbons.

Have I captured your attention now, deliberate tense-shifters? Good.

Because this is such a common authorial choice for page one, allow me emphasize just how many of the Idol rules such an opening would break, so you will get a clear sense of HOW big a risk it is. To be precise, it would run directly afoul of rejection reasons #27 (the book opened with a flashback, rather than what was going on now) and #54 (the action is told out of temporal order). Often, such openings also stumble over #10 (the opening contained the phrase or implication, “This can’t be happening.”) and #11 (the opening contained the phrase or implication, “And then I woke up.”) as well. Then, too, unexplained switching back and forth could be construed as #20 (non-organic suspense, created by some salient fact being kept from the reader for a long time), or dismissed quickly as #34 (confusing).

And since, as I mentioned above, narrative problems tend to travel in packs, it’s entirely possible that Millicent — or her cousin Maury the editorial assistant, or their Aunt Mehitabel, inveterate volunteer contest judge — will assume that several tense-switches on page 1 is indicative of all of these problems.

Hey, I wasn’t kidding about how risky a choice it was.

Let’s face it — it’s definitely risky anytime an aspiring writer elects to include a style element that might be misconstrued as a proofreading mistake, and in the case of multiple tenses in a submission, the oft-heard justification, “Oh, it will make sense after you’ve read Chapter 2,” will do a writer precisely no good. In a literary environment where a writer trying to break into the biz honestly does have to demonstrate her writing chops from the first line of page 1, assuming that a professional reader will automatically assume that what he’s seeing is an interesting experiment in language rather than an unpolished manuscript can be very dangerous indeed.

Especially when — and I hate to point this out, but it is something those of you who like to tense-surf genuinely need to know in order to make an informed decision — this particular experiment is one that Millicent sees fail with great frequency. There’s just no getting around the fact that it’s exceptionally hard to handle frequent tense shifts with clarity.

Which does not mean that it’s impossible.

Again, I’m not suggesting a blanket prohibition on the use of multiple tenses — or on any authorial tense choice, for that matter. You are certainly well within your literary rights to write in more than one tense, if you are up for attempting a stylistic high-wire act, but the chances of tumbling are awfully high. On the plus side, if you can pull off a standing triple back flip from 30 feet in the air, it is going to be a heck of a lot more impressive than doing it while both your feet begin and end on solid ground, isn’t it?

Which is one reason, in case you were wondering, tense-switching narratives do turn up in the literary fiction sections of bookstores with some fair frequency. Almost always, these volumes have the name of an already-established author on the cover, suggesting that, having repressed their desire to play with the possibilities of tense-switching in their earlier books — you know, the ones that they had to get past Millicent in order to land an agent in the first place — they are using their earned greater leeway with their agents and editors to have a little fun this time around.

Some of you lovers of present-tense narratives have been feeling increasingly tense throughout the preceding explanation, haven’t you? The length of this post prompts me to sign off for the day, but as I hate to send any of you into a long weekend full of potential writing and revision time worried about your narrative choices, I’m going to throw caution to the winds and tackle the use of the present tense right now.

Since any habitual bookstore-trawler will inevitably stumble upon quite a few present-tense narratives, #71, “Why is this written in the present tense?”, tends to come as a surprise to an awful lot of writers. “But the present tense makes the action more immediate!” they protest, and with some justification. “It makes emotion pop off the page in the now! The reader gets to experience what is happening right along with the protagonist!”

Actually, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that readers DO necessarily find a well-written present-tense scene any more immediate than a well-written one in the past tense. Habitual readers are, after all, quite used to getting involved in past-tense narratives.

Honestly — ask anyone in the industry; it’s the quality and tension of the writing that keeps a reader involved, they will assure you, not the tense. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there are plenty of industry readers who believe, rightly or wrongly, that use of the present tense is a sneaky writerly subterfuge intended to cover up pacing and plotting problems in the text.

Now, obviously, this is not particularly fair; as we all know, many writers select the present tense for perfectly valid stylistic reasons, not the least important of which is that they just think their prose sounds better that way. However, occasionally, the agents and editors who dislike the present tense have a point: writing in the present tense is inherently prone to some rather perplexing timing problems, especially if flashbacks are also told in the present tense. It can be genuinely confusing for the reader to keep track of what is happening when.

While I’m bursting bubbles, it’s not all that uncommon for a story to be told in the past tense, with the flashbacks in the present, to emphasize them as thought. Three guesses how well any of the agents on the Idol panel would have liked THAT particular authorial choice.

There’s no denying that working in the present tense offers its own set of technical difficulties. How do you deal with memory, for instance, or sensations in the present that remind the protagonist or narrator of something in the past? How do you differentiate between what happened five minutes ago and what happened five years ago? And what about ongoing feelings — true yesterday, true today, and probably true tomorrow, but subject to fluctuations throughout — a condition for which French, say, has a perfectly useable tense, but in English requires a bit more finagling?

Human beings are complex creatures, I think; in a sense, we think of ourselves in the past, present, and future fairly continuously. In practical terms, this means that conditionals, quite frankly, can become a nightmare of verbiage in the present tense, even when the same sentiment is fairly straightforward when expressed in the past.

For example, in the past, it is easy enough to say that Lauren might have done X, had not event Y occurred while ongoing condition Z was going on. Nothing too convoluted about that, right? But look how much harder it is to explain poor Lauren’s state of mind in the present: right now, Lauren is inclined to do X. However, between the time she initially felt that way (which is, technically, already the past by this point, right?) and when she could actually put thought into action to do X, event Y occurred, making her think twice about doing thing X. It was not just Y occurring, though, that influenced her in that split second: it was also the fact that condition Z was in play at the same time, having presumably started prior to either the moment when Lauren thought X was a good idea AND the moment when Y’s intrusion convinced her that it was not, and continued into the future after both Y’s occurrence and Lauren’s response to it.

Kind of exhausting, isn’t it?

After you’ve read a few thousand manuscripts, you might well start anticipating running into these types of problems as soon as you read a first sentence in the present tense. You might, in fact, fall into the unfair habit of automatically regarding present-tense manuscripts as inherently requiring more editing on the way to publication, or even that since handling these kinds of difficulties with aplomb becomes easier with experience, a writer might want to cut her teeth on a less challenging narrative choice.

Like, say, by writing and submitting another book project before trying to interest an agent in this one.

And if you were the type of person who broke out in hives at the prospect of having even 32 consecutive seconds of your life taken up by an extra line or two in a query letter, you might, unfortunately, decide to save yourself some trouble by regarding being written in the present tense as an automatic strike against a book.

Again, this is not to say that you should not write in the present tense, if you feel it serves your story and your style best. Most emphatically not, even in a first book. It does, however, mean that to succeed in getting it past Millicent, you’re probably going to have to do it exceptionally well AND make sure that your presentation is impeccable, to make it absolutely clear to her that you are in fact up to the technical challenges you have set for yourself.

Yes, this is more important in a present-tense narrative because — and again, I hate to say it, but I don’t want any of you to walk into a tense decision unarmed with the facts — like multiple-tense narratives, Millicent sees far, far more unsuccessful and inconsistent present-tense narratives than she sees ones that wow her. You’d expect that, wouldn’t you, considering the difficulties of the choice?

And that, in case you’ve been wondering, is how those pervasive rumors that it’s impossible to sell a book written in any tense but the past get started: the rejection rate for such narratives does tend to be rather higher, and admittedly, there are agents and editors who just don’t like present-tense narratives. But does that mean that there’s no point in querying such a book at all until the holders of such preferences are shouted down by others?

Of course not. It just means that it would be well worth your while to avoid querying those particular agents — as with any other die-hard literary preference an agent might happen to hold, it’s probably not the best use of an aspiring writer’s energies and resources to insist that HIS book is the one that will change the agent’s mind once and for all about something she’s always hated. Do your homework; if you fear being rejected because of your narrative choices, select agents who have a proven recent track record for picking up and selling books with similar narratives.

That’s just common sense, right? For an agent who adores present-tense narratives, your manuscript may be precisely the book she’s instructed her Millicent to keep an eye out to find.

I’m hearing quite a few resigned sighs out there. “Okay, Anne,” some present tense lovers say with fear and trembling, “I get what you’re saying: I’ve chosen to do a hard thing, and it’s up to me to prove to Millicent that I have done it better than both any stereotype she might hold about present-tense narratives would lead her to expect and than 99% of the manuscripts she’s ever seen attempt something similar. That makes sense when we’re talking about the entire book, but what does this mean for the first page of my submission, you ask?

Well, at minimum, it would be prudent to quadruple-check that the first few pages of a present tense submission are ultra-clean, ultra-logical. Even when you submit to those with a demonstrated love who love your pet authorial choices, exercise extraordinary care to present your work as impeccably as possible — which means that if you are not already intimately familiar with the rules of standard format for manuscripts, or perhaps were not aware that there was an industry standard, this would be a great time to check out the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT and STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories on the list at the right of this post.

But that’s not enough: ideally, your first page should demonstrate some very tangible payoff for the work’s being written in the present tense, rather than the past. A payoff, ideally, that will make even a long prejudiced anti-present-tenser sit up straight and cry, “Why, have I been wrong for all these years? Here is a perfectly marvelous outcome of using the present tense!”

Remember what I said earlier about high wire acts? If they’re going to work, they need to wow the audience not just with their audacity, but with their successful audacity.

So if you favor writing in the present tense, it might be a good idea to read your opening over and ask yourself: “Okay, absent reasons of immediacy, is it clear here what purpose is being served by this tense choice, just in case my submission falls under the eyes of a present tense-hater?”

Remember, that answer to why this tense choice for this story? should be pretty apparent on page 1, if it is going to help your work get past the screener. You will not, after all, be standing next to Millicent when she reads it. No matter how finely argued your off-page justification is, it will not help if your submission gets rejected before you get a chance to talk with the agent about your work, right?

Fair warning about indulging in this particular stripe of introspection: don’t discount the very real possibility that the answer to this question may lead you to rethink how you want to tell the story in other ways, resulting in some rather time-consuming revisions. In my experience, once a writer gets into the excellent habit of asking about ANY any major authorial choice, how does this choice serve the narrative in a way that another option would not?, all kinds of complications are likely to occur.

Including a lot of delicious ones. Lovers of literature everywhere should be very, very happy about that.

Surprisingly often, embracers of daring narrative choices don’t seem to have thought very intensely about why they are exposing their stories to the inherent risks — or so I surmise from the fact that when asked, aspiring writers who choose the present tense almost without exception hesitate, then say that they just like it better as a narrative style. When pressed to elaborate, they will immediately mention favorite books written in a similar style, but won’t necessarily express a clear opinion on why that particular authorial choice worked better than any other for that particular story. It just sounds better to them, they tend to report.

As much as a taste-based response may make sense from a writerly perspective — a writer has a mental image of what his finished book will look like, and the manuscript reflects that vision — from a professional reader’s point of view, it’s not a very satisfying explanation. (Which is a nice way of warning you that if you say anything close to this to your future editor, s/he will turn bright purple with frustration.) Presumably, they think, you want an agent or editor to fall in love with your writing style, not that of your favorite authors — so why is what you like to read important to what you like to write?

You just laughed at the absurdity of that last question, didn’t you? I wasn’t kidding about the pros’ take on these choices being utterly different from the writer’s perspective.

From the business side of the industry’s point of view, a successful writer is equally likely to make an interesting authorial choice for marketing reasons as to satisfy personal taste. And from a marketing perspective, it’s far, far better have Millicent read your first page and think, “Wow, the tense choice here really compliments the story!” than “Wow, this reminds me of Established Author X’s third book, the one that came out eight years ago,” because, frankly, the market already has an Established Author X.

So it really does behoove you to set aside some serious time to ask yourself: what is it about the story I’m telling that makes it so clear to me that I need to tell it in the present tense? How could I tweak my first few pages to bring out the benefits of that choice?

Do give it some thought, please. At minimum, coming up with a clear justification of your choice to cast a narrative in the present tense — or multiple tenses, for that matter — will give you a great retort the next time you hear someone pass along a conference rumor that it’s impossible to sell a book that isn’t in the past tense right now.

Not to mention providing you with the basis of some great interview material years from now, when your third book is the one that inspires emulation in aspiring writers everywhere.

I had hoped to get to dialogue today, but I seem to have gotten carried away by the tense issue. I’ll tackle the talk next time, but since today’s such a long post, I’m going to be offline for the next couple of days, taking advantage of some of that lovely writing time I mentioned in long weekend coming up. (For the benefit of those of you who live outside the US, Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day; his birthday was actually Thursday the 15th, but we here in the States are prone to moving around our birthday celebrations for the no longer living. Just ask George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.)

Enjoy the long weekend, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part X: Millicent’s frequent sense of déjà vu, or, the benefits of venturing off the beaten path

Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part X: Millicent’s frequent sense of déjà vu, or, the benefits of venturing off the beaten path

Revisiting my posts from a couple of years ago on reasons agents give for rejecting submissions on page 1, I notice that I have been feeling compelled to add quite a bit of commentary, so much so that they are essentially new posts (which is why I’ve stopped doing the boldfaced introductions, in case anyone has been wondering). I’m not entirely sure whether this is due to how much the literary market has changed since I originally ran this list in the autumn of 2006, and how much is that, having edited, commented upon, and judged for contests scads of manuscripts in the intervening time, I have developed more pet peeves of my own.

I suspect it’s a combination of both. But I’m not the reader we’re discussing in this series, am I?

Here, we’ve been talking about the pet peeves of agents, editors, and the screeners they employ to accept or, more commonly, reject manuscripts. For the last couple of days, I’ve been going over something that is seldom discussed at writers’ conferences, in craft seminars, or even socially amongst aspiring writers, the possibility of submission’s getting rejected because it just doesn’t strike Millicent the agency screener as particularly exciting.

Funny, isn’t it, that although pretty much every writing teacher will underscore the importance of opening with a hook — an arresting conflict or strong image that draws the reader into the story from line 1, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, not to be confused with a Hollywood hook, a 1-line pitch for a book — very few seem to bring up the opposite possibility, inducing a yawn? Yet to understand what makes a hook effective, shouldn’t we writers give some thought to what might bore a reader in an opening?

More to the point of this series, shouldn’t submitters be casting a critical eye over their first pages before mailing them off, asking, “If I were Millicent the agency screener and this was my 25th first page before lunch, would I be turned off by anything in this opening?”

Yes, yes, I know — it’s painful to contemplate the possibility of even a line’s worth one’s own writing being less than scintillating, but it’s actually a much, much more useful exercise than the one usually conducted at the few writers’ conferences that devote seminar time specifically to opening pages. Some of you have probably been to these, right? They tend to be panel discussions where the published and their agents and/or editors discourse about what does and doesn’t grab them in an opening, using examples from books that have been out for years.

Can anyone see a problem with culling from that particular set of examples in order to help writers who are trying to land agents and publishing houses today?

If you said that what sold ten or fifteen years ago would not necessarily wow an agent or editor today, give yourself three gold stars and a pat on the back. When aspiring writers complain — admittedly with justification — that their favorite authors breakthough books probably couldn’t land an agent these days, the pros tend to shrug and say, “Why would anyone be surprised by that? The market is constantly changing.”

But you’d never know that to walk into most conference panels on craft, let alone on opening pages, where the examples tend to be rather long in the tooth. For instance, at a seminar on hook creation I attended not long ago, 5 of the 6 panelists selected as their favorite example of a stellar opening the first lines of Gabriel García Márquez’ A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

A stunning specimen of an opening for a book, certainly, but it was first published in 1991. Would it really work today, or would Millicent mutter, “Oh, great, another knock-off of A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.” (Millicents tend to be rather well-read.) Or — and this is the most probable reaction — would she roll her eyes and say, “Make up your mind which timeframe this book will be in, already! Next!”

More proof, in case you needed it, that the times they are a-changin’.

Speaking of which, a writer friend of mine forwarded an interesting article in the New York Times that actually contained some good news about reading rates in this country, something of a novelty these days. Apparently, for the first time since 1982, the percentage of adults who say that they’ve read at least one novel, short story, poem, or play in the previous 12 months actually rose in 2008.

I suspect that I would be happier about this news if consuming a short story or poem didn’t require a rather different level of commitment to reading than polishing off an entire book, or if the markets for the various types of writing weren’t wildly different. We’re just supposed to rejoice over increased readership in general, I guess.

No word on whether these wordhounds bought the works in question or checked ‘em out of the library, though, or whether those newer to habitual reading were more likely to do one or the other. From the point of view of those of us who write for a living — or want to — this is a rather important follow-up question, but I gather that this particular census did not make specific inquires in this direction.

As a professional reader, I’m all about asking the follow-up questions. I look at a poll like this and immediately wonder, “Gee, are these new readers snapping up the latest that’s on the market, or are their friends who have been reading voraciously for years passing along their dog-eared paperback copies of A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE?”

Oh, you thought that’s all there was to that conference anecdote? Not by a long shot — if you’d attended that panel I mentioned above, the first sentence of A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE would instantly start rattling around in your cranium the instant anyone mentioned analyzing the dos and don’ts of book openings for the rest of your natural life.

Why was that particular example so memorable? Well, in addition to the panelists’ devoting a full 15 minutes of the half-hour seminar to enthusing about that opening and no other without once even raising the possibility that what agents and editors seek in a submission might have changed just a trifle since 1991, they also missed something else about this opening that rendered it a less-than-perfect example of what they were trying to show.

That something was so obvious to me that I actually started timing how long it would take for anyone to mention it. Five minutes before the end of the seminar, when the moderator finally recognized my impatiently raised hand, I asked, as politely as I could, “I love A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE’s opening, too, but could you give a couple of examples of great book openings that were written in English?”

5 of the 6 panelists looked at me blankly. Apparently, it was news to them that they had been reading GGM’s work in translation for years.

Why bring this up within the context of this series? Even in translation, A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE was a magnificently influential book for English-language writers; for years afterwards, Millicents across the English-speaking world were seeing many, many manuscripts that opened similarly.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (which I doubt, personally, but that’s neither here nor there, I suppose), Márquez should have been blushing for a decade, based upon those submissions. So how effective do you suppose Millicent found such openings in, say, year 8 of seeing them?

Exactly: what began as brilliant had through sheer repetition begun to seem banal and derivative.

Another novel that apparently affected masses and masses of novelists was Alice Sebold’s THE LOVELY BONES. How do I know? Well, take a gander at the opening:

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.

A grabber? Definitely. But look how many agents’ pet peeves it spawned on the Idol list of rejection reasons, just a couple of years after it came out:

9. The opening contained the phrases, “my name is X” and/or “my age is Y.”

44. There is too much violence to children and/or pets.

45. It is unclear whether the narrator is alive or dead.

In answer to what half of you just wondered: yes, when asked, all three of the agents who generated this list did spontaneously mention that they’d been rejecting many, many more submissions on these bases since THE LOVELY BONES had come out. Which just goes to show you why so many great books from the past would have a hard time getting the Millicent stamp of approval today: they would seem derivative of themselves.

Fame for originality can create its own type of predictability. Kind of an interesting paradox to contemplate, isn’t it?

While you’re busy pondering it, let’s revisit that subset of the list of rejection reasons dealing with the many ways submissions disqualify themselves by not grabbing Millicent the agency screener within the first page:

35. The story is not exciting.

36. The story is boring.

38. Repetition on pg. 1

55. Took too many words to tell us what happened.

57. The writing is dull.

Last time, I took issue with the difference between not exciting and boring, as well as the many, many reasons that a writer might be temped to repeat words, phrases, dialogue, or even action on page 1 without necessarily thinking of it as redundancy. This time around, I’m going to finish out this list with the style-oriented items on this list, the ones that involve a reader’s judgment about how the sentences in question are actually written.

Yes, I realize what I just said; I’m going to let the implications of that last statement sink in for a bit. In the meantime, let’s look into some more ways to avoid boring Millicent, shall we?

#55, took too many words to tell us what happened, is admittedly the most subjective reason on the how-to-bore Millicent list, as perceptions of wordiness are as personal to the reader as perceptions of beauty. For some writers, overwriting takes the form of sounding as though the word processor swallowed a dictionary and is coughing up every obscure three-syllable word in its technological stomach, but for most, it’s a matter of trying to cram too much information into any given sentence. In its simplest form, it tends to look a little something like this:

 

Bewildered yet not overcome, the lovely Clarissa pushed her long, red hair back from her fair-yet-freckled forehead so she could think better, a process with which she was not overly familiar, not having been brought up to the practice in her twenty-six years as Bermuda’s most celebrated debutante. Since the horrid pestilential fever that had so nearly claimed her life and had taken her handsome brother, harp-playing mother, flamenco master third cousin, and verbally abusive pet parakeet, she was ever-careful about over-heating herself through the the exercise of rigorous, excessive, or prolonged mental effort of any sort. Not for her the perplexing parliamentary papers of her grandfather, the stern advocate for planters’ rights yet friend of the downtrodden slaves who never failed to come near his petite lamb chop, as he had so loved to call her while he was still alive, without his august pockets crammed with sweets, pretty trinkets from far-off lands that he had picked up for a song at the local bazaar, and, always, a miniature of Clarissa and her mysteriously vanished yet equally beautiful twin sister, snatched at babyhood by brigands unknown.

Tremulously yet bravely, she sank gracefully against the gold-flocked wallpaper, gay with fleurs-du-lys, as tears of abject confusion clouded her usually sky-blue eyes and she felt for the comforting sofa beneath her, a gift from her now-dead but exceedingly generous whilst living mother back in their days of familial plenty, not to say opulence, before cruel Papa had been forced to auction off her favorite pony, Red Demon, who had merely mauled those silly Miller girls from across the river on that terrible day when Clarissa’s one true love, Roberto, had been swept away by piranha. If only she had listened to her beloved dog, Lassie, who kept barking vociferously at her as though trying to say, “Lady, your boyfriend’s fallen into the river!”

Seating herself with her delicate hands resting upon the still-sumptuous red velvet of her dress, a hand-me-down from Grandmamma, whose prowess at swordfighting was still the stuff of island legend…

 

Okay, what’s the problem here?

If you can’t see a number of reasons that this opening might make Millicent take umbrage, I can only suggest that you go back to the beginning of this series and read it all the way through again. But for our purpose of the moment, I ask you to consider only one question: what has actually happened in the course of this barrage of prose?

In the timeframe in which the story appears to be set, all that has actually occurred is that Clarissa pushed her hair off her forehead and sat down to think, right? Yes, yes, the author happened to stuff quite a bit of background information into this opening, too, but at the expense of moving the plot forward.

Or, as Millicent might put it rather less charitably, “I’m two-thirds of the way down page 1, and all the protagonist has managed to do is sit down and feel sorry for herself? Next!”

Overwriting tends to be forgiven a bit more readily in publishing circles than underwriting — partially because it’s a bit rarer than just-the-facts writing, partially because published authors’ first drafts tend more toward the prolix than the spare — but still, it’s not unusual for Millicent to get annoyed if a submission takes three paragraphs to say that the sky is blue and the protagonist is frightened.

Like redundancy, excessive overwriting is hard to sell to editors. Publishing houses issue those people blue pencils for a reason, and they aren’t afraid to use them. If you’re not sure whether you’re overburdening your opening pages, run them past a few first readers.

The last reason on our not-exciting sublist, #57, dull writing , also responds well, in my experience, to input from a good first reader, writing group, or freelance editor. Unfortunately, I am far, far too talented to be able to produce a practical specimen of dull writing my own construction — not to mention far too modest to mention my brilliance and good looks — and I’m far, far too ethical to use any of the examples I have seen in my editorial practice.

But I’m betting that although writers often don’t know when they have produced it, pretty much everyone recognizes it when they see it in other writers’ work.

Dull writing usually runs to the opposite end of the terseness spectrum from overwriting: in many instances, it’s lean to the point of emaciation, with one verb doing the office of fifteen, adjectives reined in severely, and adverbs banished altogether. Its point is to tell the story — or, as commonly, a portion of the story that the writer doesn’t want to show in much detail or first-hand — as quickly and in as few words as possible.

This approach can work well for some book categories, but by and large, professional readers tend to regard the point of narrative prose not as an exercise in coughing up a purely bare-bones story, but as an art form in which the artist renders the story fascinating through how he chooses to tell it, the charming embellishments and insightful character development that render the reader’s journey from Plot Point A to Plot Point B enjoyable.

To understand why Millicent might feel this way, an aspiring writer need go no farther than your garden-variety cocktail party. We’ve all been cornered by someone who insists on telling us dull anecdote after dull anecdote, aren’t we? While successful anecdote-tellers are apt to please their listeners with building dramatic tension, amusing vocal mimicry, or even the choice of unexpected words that elicit a chuckle through sheer surprise, the dull anecdotalist makes the fatal mistake of assuming that the story itself is so inherently interesting that it doesn’t matter how he tells it.

And tell it he does, remorselessly ploughing forward despite his listeners’ glazed-over eyes, desperate glances toward other bunches of party-goers obviously having a better time, and repeated declarations that they must be getting home to check on kids they don’t actually have.

To Millicent, a run of dull writing is like being trapped in a closet with an anecdote-teller of this kidney for hours on end. All she wants is to get away — and the simplest expedient for doing that is to reject the submission as quickly as humanly possible.

The sad thing is, since the rise of the heroic journey story structure as novel blueprint, many novels open with material that even the writer considers the least interesting of any in the book — the normal, everyday world soon to be left behind. Since it is only the jumping-off point, many aspiring writers seem to think, why invest a great deal of narrative space and/or writing style to it? Or to the background information so many new writers are eager to stuff into the first page or two? There’s much better stuff in a page or two — or a chapter or two.

I can give one very, very good reason to open with your best writing, early-page style minimizers: because if Millicent isn’t wowed by that first page, she’s not going to keep reading. She’s going to assume, and with some reason, that what she sees on page 1 is a representative sample of the writing in the rest of the book.

Changes the way you think of a submission to know that, doesn’t it?

The best way to determine whether your first page has any of these problems is — and you should all know the tune by now, so please feel free to sing along — to read your submission IN HARD COPY, OUT LOUD. If the page’s vocabulary isn’t broad enough, or if it contains sentences of Dickensian length, believe me, it will be far more evident out loud than on the printed page. Or on your computer screen.

Trust me on this one. But now, back to the pondering already in progress.

Were you struck when I mentioned above that only the last couple of items on the how-to-bore-Millicent list were style-based? That’s reflective of a trend observable on the Idol list of rejection reasons as a whole: had you noticed how many more of them were about content and storytelling than about writing style per se?

I don’t think that’s accidental — or insignificant, especially given that this particular list of rejection reason concerned only the first page of any given submission, a point at which most manuscripts are far more concerned with providing background information than telling the story of the book.

Which leads me back to a boredom-defeating strategy I mentioned in passing yesterday, and clever and insightful reader Adam was kind enough to elaborate upon in the comments: while scanning the early pages of your manuscript for rejection red flags, you might want to consider the possibility that your book should start somewhere rather later than your current page 1.

I’m quite, quite serious about this. I can’t tell you how many great first lines for books I’ve found on page 4, or how many backstory-laden first scenes could have been cut altogether. Background, contrary to popular writerly opinion, does not necessarily have to come first in a book.

Or even — brace yourself — in the first chapter.

Just as explaining why a joke is funny right after telling it tends to kill its humor, overloading the first few pages of a book with backstory is often a major storytelling mistake. We’ve all see it work sometimes, of course, but in practice, an opening scene tends to grab a reader (especially an impatient one like Millie) a bit faster simply to introduce an intriguing protagonist already embroiled in an exciting situation, and fill in the backstory gradually or later on.

I’m not advising that you simply throw out your first scene on general principle — it pays to be wary of one-size-fits-all editing advice. But I would advise conducting this diagnostic test: save your current first chapter in one document, and open a new document. Write a fresh opening scene that presents something surprising about your protagonist; make that scene as active as possible. Then hand both your current opening scene and the experimental draft to a first reader you trust. Ask her to read both, wait half an hour, then have her tell you what happened in each. While you’re at it, find out which version of the protagonist struck her as more likable.

If her recall of the fresh scene is substantially better, you might want to consider changing the opening of your manuscript — not necessarily by substituting the experimental scene, but by lightening its explanatory load.

What makes me think that the scene with more explanation is not going to be as memorable? Simple: action in the moment is almost always more memorable to a reader than summarized backstory — and backstory in a first scene is almost always summary. It happens offstage, as it were.

Yes, I know: you’ve seen authors front-load opening scenes with backstory; it used to be considered perfectly acceptable. And at one time, the first lines of both A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and THE LOVELY BONES would have struck Millicent as absolutely unique and fresh.

The times they have a-changed. Being cognizant of that may help save you from falling into one of the most frequently-seen rejection-trigger traps of all: “I’ve seen this a thousand times before.”

Next time, to what I suspect will be everyone’s grateful relief, I shall be moving past the boredom-related rejection reasons and on to juicier ones. Keep those opening pages spicy and original, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on Creating time and space to write: nothing up my sleeve…

Creating time and space to write: nothing up my sleeve…

I’m feeling a bit down today — I’ve just received word that an old acquaintance of mine committed suicide. The news comes courtesy of my alma mater. Ever-intent upon creating a far greater sense of community amongst its graduates than it ever was at promoting it amongst its undergraduates (at least while I was one of them), its staff tirelessly ferret out information about all of us and promulgate it ruthlessly, both on a bimonthly basis and in a peculiarly vicious form of sadism known as the reunion book, where poor, quivering souls are expected to account for the last five years of their terrestrial existence. Altogether, the university manages to give us all the impression that we’re all of such abiding eternal interest that we must all want to be kept updated on marriages, promotions, publications, and deaths in perpetuity.

Which means, in practice, that one seems always to be opening one’s junk mail and exclaiming, “Oh, I didn’t know he had died. I liked him.” The fine folks at the alumni office cheerfully informed me when they hit me up to give a eulogy earlier this year that the older one gets, the more often one should expect that to happen.

Good to know, I suppose.

Apart from the usual any man’s death diminishes me me malaise about someone I frankly hadn’t thought about in quite a number of years, Alex’s death had got me thinking about my membership in that other group that tends to exhibit an elevated suicide rate: artists in general and writers in particular. He, too, was a writer, and a good one. The sensitive nervous tissue I mentioned a few days ago, that stuff that allows us to perceive lovely ephemeral moments in life and capture them for all time, seems to have a harder time dealing with all of those slings and arrows outrageous fortune sees fit to fling at us all.

Or maybe we’re just better at composing last words than other people. In any case, one of the side effects of a lifetime spent interacting with the kind of fascinating, mercurial, observant souls who devote themselves to coughing up their visions of the world, often at great personal cost, for the delectation of others seems to be finding oneself saying on a fairly regular basis, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that! S/he was talented,” even without the intervention of a shared alumni publication.

It’s one of the costs of leading an interesting life. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

There are even those who argue, and cogently, that the urge to produce art is in itself is essentially a self-defensive response to an unjust world. “To devote life to a constantly disappointed hope of happiness,” Mme. de Staël wrote, is to make it even sadder. It is better to direct one’s efforts to going down the road from youth to death with some degree of nobility, and with reputation.”

Amazing that someone who never had to query agents was able to come up with that, isn’t it?

Should you ever find yourself wondering why I put so much time and energy into this blog — over and above, of course, having a general fondness for advising people what to do that’s no doubt buried deep in my little Mediterranean lady genes, along with a pathological propensity for feeding bystanders until they burst — you need look no farther than my fellow writers who have fallen by the wayside. I’m not just talking about fine, creative souls like Alex, whose negative was so very final, but to all of the hundreds and thousands of genuinely talented people who have given up writing because the road to recognition is so very, very difficult.

It is thus with a sense of solemnity and a full appreciation of the irony of what I’m about to do that I return to our topic du jour: carving time and space out of a busy life for writing on a regular basis.

I’ve been dancing around this particular topic all autumn, ever since I took my October writing retreat. Back then, I asked you to start pondering a very serious question: what do you actually need in order to write happily and well?

Over the last couple of weeks, I have periodically reminded you of this request, urging you to give the matter a bit more strenuous thought. So if you weren’t expecting a pop quiz to turn up on the horizon, well, you obviously have never taken one of my classes.

Actually, it’s less of a pop quiz than the assignment of additional homework. Last time, if you will recall, I posed a number of questions that any writer serious about making a career of it is going to need to tackle sooner or later, preferably sooner. To recap for the benefit of those of you who missed them:

(1) What conditions would you actually need in order to write productively for a significant, unbroken chunk of time? What are your necessary minimum conditions — not just generic ones, but yours — for retreating to write, even just for a day?

(2) What specific factors — ambient noise conditions, lighting, seating, height of monitor, being able to lock a door, whatever — are of tangible assistance in your creative process, and what is merely nice?

(3) Is there anything that you currently use that you could do without? If you could snap your fingers and replace a neutral factor with a useful one, what would it be?

(4) Conversely, what conditions render the actual act of writing more difficult for you? Be as specific as you can, please: cold drafts blowing across your keyboard, telemarketers calling every fifteen minutes, a bookshelf that threatens to dump its contents onto your head as you attempt to type next to it, fear of rejection? Write ‘em all down.

(5) If you believe taking a writing retreat of any length to be impossible or well-nigh impossible for you, why? Again, the more specific you can make your reply, the better.

(6) What feels like support for your writing? What are others in your life already doing that’s helpful to your writing progress, and what seems like a stumbling-block?

Yes, these are indeed unusual questions to spring upon people at holiday time, when light, fluffy queries like Where can I find the best deal on cashmere socks?, If I add five pounds to the amount of weight I’m planning to lose after New Year’s, is it okay to eat this seventh cookie?, and, of course, Will Rudolph be able to save Santa’s delivery schedule? are ostensibly supposed to be occupying our minds.

However, as anyone who has been reading this blog for more than twelve months could undoubtedly tell you, I believe that the pervasive practice of writers torturing themselves through New Year’s resolutions demanding such unreasonable feats as finishing that long-delayed novel within the next month or landing an agent before Mardi Gras causes a whole lot of unnecessary misery, ultimately rendering the path to publication emotionally harder than it needs to be.

So there.

Call me zany, but in my experience, slow and steady tends to be a better long-term strategy for those seeing fame and fortune through writing than the occasional — or annual — two-week burst of effort, followed by a month of disappointment when those efforts do not yield results akin to Jack’s having planted those magical beans and awakened the next morning to find a beanstalk. Not to mention the months of disappointment with oneself for not having pulled a rabbit out of a hat yet again this year.

Allow me to suggest a much more sensible New Year’s resolution: this year, don’t make any New Year’s resolutions related to your writing at all.

Instead, why not figure out just a few small changes that would help you write more regularly? Or to rearrange your life in a small-but-significant respect to garner more emotional support for sending out a new query every time you find a rejection letter in your mailbox? Or to commit to removing a distraction that regularly comes between you and your genuine passion to write. Oh, if only you had a list handy of what does and doesn’t help you write…

Wait — what’s that you have clutched in your hot little hands, those of you who obediently donned your thinking caps when I requested it? And you thought you couldn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Presto!

Because everyone’s list is bound to be different, I’m not going to presume to tell you how to prioritize the items on yours. At least not today. I’m going to leave you to ruminate on it a bit more, while we devote ourselves to applying the knowledge gleaned from that list to the long-delayed question of how to set up your own private writing retreat.

Yes, I am trying to clear out my to-write list before the end of the year! How did you guess? Since that’s such a big topic, I’m going to tackle the personal retreat next time.

I do have a little something up my sleeve, however, of a practical nature, to round out our time together today: remember in my last post, when I suggested asking your kith, kin, coworkers, canary, neighbors, and any stray children you may have happened to have taken in recently to cooperate with you in setting aside chunks of time sanctified for writing, agreeing not to bug you with anything less than an earthquake during these regularly-scheduled periods? Let’s give some thought today to how one might go about presenting that request in a manner that elicits neither thigh-slapping and guffaws, blank incredulity, nor doe-eyed moppets moaning, “Don’t you love me anymore, Mommy?”

For starters, I wouldn’t recommend just charging up to your nearest and dearest and accusing them, albeit nicely, of sabotaging your writing progress with their continual demands upon your time and attention. I can tell you from long experience observing and advising writers at various stages of their careers that however dramatically satisfying standing up at dinnertime and declaiming, “Support my writing or I’m leaving, Reginald!” may be in fantasy, it seldom yields positive results in practice.

Why, you ask? For the exceedingly simple reason that in all likelihood, Reginald probably no idea that he hasn’t been particularly supportive of your writing. He leaves you alone while he watches football in either the American or the international sense of the term, doesn’t he? Granted, you may not feel that bellowing at the television in the next room is particularly helpful to your artistic endeavors, nor is wandering into your writing space periodically to demand where his favorite pair of socks are, and sure, these orgies of spectatorship often take place during parts of the weekend when the kids want to be driven from activity — but for heaven’s sake, he’s trying, isn’t he?

Then, too, you may be so myopic that you can’t see that your mother’s nagging you to use your long-planned writing day to visit Grandma more often (because she’s not getting any younger, as opposed to the rest of us, but please don’t feel guilty) is her way of showing that she loves you, you sensitive so-and-so. Or that when you tell your best friend that you have rearranged your schedule so that you can spend Saturday mornings writing for several hours, that what she actually hears you say is, “I have some free time — let’s go to brunch!”

If you haven’t forced your nearest and dearest into a comfortable seated position recently and held them in place until you have explained that you regard such time as one of the greatest blessings of life, consider doing so, pronto. They may genuinely not understand why your writing time needs to be sacrosanct.

And why should they, really, unless they happen to be creative artists themselves? The fact is, dearly beloved, that to most non-writers, the idea of spending hours at a time sitting in front of a keyboard, composing a story from scratch where the grammar and spelling actually count, is not a particularly appetizing prospect. In interrupting your writing time, they may actually be trying to save you from what they perceive to be a grisly fate.

Don’t expect them to read your mind — or wait until you have been interrupted so many times that the only option left for expressing your desires on the subject is in a piercing scream. If you explain calmly and kindly why time and space are important to you, as well as how you would like them to act with respect to it, well-meaning souls will surprisingly often exclaim, “Oh, I had no idea! Of course I’ll leave you alone on Thursday afternoons from 4:45 to 6:15!”

Even better, they may actually do it. Naturally, like most New Year’s resolutions, their commitment to keeping out of your hair may falter over the course of a few weeks or months, but if you presented your case reasonably in the first place, you have laid the groundwork for a gentle reminder, haven’t you?

In order to encourage these sweet souls to make good on their promises, give ‘em a little practical help. Don’t answer the phone during your dedicated writing time, unless you are actually awaiting a heart transplant — and if you are, or if you’re not comfortable making yourself unavailable while your kids are in the house/out of the house/not yet old enough to vote, invest in caller ID or establish special ring tones so you know which calls are actually emergent and which merely Reginald eager to find out where you’ve hidden his favorite sweater after you washed it.

I’m quite serious about this. I know several successful authors who have gone so far as to get pagers and give the numbers only to their children, their elderly parents, and their agents.

Also, avoid the all-too-common trap of keeping your e-mail program or IM open while you are trying to write. They’re just too distracting — and as much as it may annoy your bored friends if you do not respond right away to visitors to your Facebook page, have you EVER received such a message that couldn’t actually have waited an hour or two for your response?

Speaking of distraction, some of you are still thinking about my crack about Reginald’s seeming inability to put away his own laundry, aren’t you? Your antennae are not steering you wrong, my friends: I am about to suggest that you sit down with the other members of your household to chat about how the domestic duties might be reapportioned to give you more writing time.

To put it another way, are the chores you do habitually are actually of such a nature that they can be done by your good self, or have you been doing them because, good heavens, if you don’t, who will? Or — brace yourself, neatniks — because you were brought up to believe that if laundry sits in a hamper longer than three days, it will transform into Godzilla and go rampaging through your house?

If you are the household doer-of-chores, expect some resistance to the suggestion that you are not equipped with an extra pair of hands specially designed for the purpose. As I mentioned last time, engrained habits are hard to dislodge.

Which is why I would not suggest walking into such a discussion unarmed: your argument will be more convincing if you are toting some proof that such chores are eating up quite a bit of your time. A great way to establish this is to take an average week and keep track of everything you spend more than ten consecutive minutes doing. Make your record as detailed as possible, then at the end of the week, tote up how much time you spent on each task.

If you’re like many conscientious chore-doers, you may be astonished at the totals. And if you’re like most time-fritterers, seeing how you’re spending your time may be equally enlightening.

Regardless of whether you will be confronting anyone but your pet cat or goldfish with the results (“I invested three hours playing with you last week, Fluffy! Your tyranny over my time must cease!”), keeping a meticulous record of how you spend your time for a week or two is a good idea. Be completely honest about it, so you may discern patterns.you can always destroy the document afterwards.

Yes, even if you’re embarrassed about some of the time-eaters you’ll need to list. After all, it won’t help you to pretend you spent six hours re-reading Marcel Proust’s À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU when you actually spent it watching reruns of Project Runway, will it? I offer no judgments — as a matter of fact, I’m rather fond of Project Runway — but presumably, if you felt you were already devoting enough time to writing, you wouldn’t be trying to find more.

Think of it as a time budget. If you know how and where are you currently spending your time, you will have an easier time figuring out what time expenses, so to speak, can be dropped. Or, to put it another way, would you prefer to invest your time elsewhere?

After you have a reasonably detailed account in your hands, try breaking your normal routine for a week or ten days, to get a clearer idea of what is and is not immutable in your usual schedule. This may require a bit of advance thought, but the results can be fabulously educational.

Switch around chores with your spouse; if you pick up the kids after school, try rearranging your carpool so you drive them there in the morning instead; it may well be that this will leave you fresher for evening writing. If you always do the dishes or laundry in the morning, do it late at night; maybe it will turn out that early morning is your prime writing time, and if so, do you really want to fill up that time with housework?

In short, just how much of that cast-in-stone schedule is actually cast in stone? What could go, at least in the short run, in order to free up more writing time

At the end of your week or ten days of messing with your schedule, after your routines are good and disrupted, look back over your account of how you spent your time. What worked and what didn’t? Where could you fit in chunks of solid writing time on a regular basis?

Could you use this information to rearrange your life so you could get more writing done? It may require some genuine bravery and ingenuity, but most of the time, the answer is a resounding YES.

Yes, it’s a lot of work, but changes implemented in this manner are far, far more likely to still be around six or even three months from now than if you pursue the infinitely more popular route of simply demanding more work from yourself while altering nothing else in your life.

Hey, there’s a reason that the average New Year’s resolution lasts only three weeks.

To minimize the resentment of the rest of your household, as well as to gain a more accurate sense of how you would use your untrammeled time, I advise going on a media fast for that week or ten days when you begin the new Schedule of Joy. It won’t hurt your worldview to turn off the TV and radio for that long, nor to skip the daily newspaper.

Not only will this allow you to assess just how much time every day you are currently spending being entertained and/or informed, to see if you could purloin some of that time for writing, but it will also help you get back into the habit of listening to your own thoughts without distraction.

I go on one of these fasts every year, and it honestly is amazing how much it calms the thoughts. It also arouses the pity and wonder of my household, and reminds my kith and kin just how important it is to me to have inviolate writing time. It reminds them that they, too, are contributing to my success, if only by remembering not to telephone during my writing time. It reminds them that they can actually LOOK for a stamp when they need it, rather than asking me.

Not to mention schooling the cats in who is actually in charge of when that furry mouse gets thrown for fetching purposes.

It also reminds everyone concerned why I am so strict throughout the rest of the year about not wanting to hear what is happening on the currently hot sitcom. For me, getting sucked into an ongoing plot line is a big dispensable time waster. I have seen a grand total of one episode of FRIENDS, two SEX AND THE CITYs, and no Seinfeld at all, but I have written several pretty good books.

I’m aware that the list above is woefully out of date, thanks, and I’m not sure that I could pick Jennifer Aniston out of a lineup. (She was on the first show I mentioned, right?)

Have I made my point?

Is getting a book project finished worth being temporarily out of touch with pop culture? Only you can answer that, but frankly, I doubt that even the most devoted television watchers will be clutching their throats like Vincent Price on their deathbeds, moaning ruefully, “Oh, if only I had kept up with my sitcoms better! If only I had followed reality television more faithfully, I would have no regrets departing this terrestrial sphere!”

And yes, in answer to what three-quarters of you just thought, I don’t believe that anyone Alex left behind wishes that he had spent more time watching television, either.

Which is why, in case you were wondering, that I’m not going to tell you how much time per day, week, month, or year is the idea amount for you to invest in your writing. How you choose to spend your time on earth — your leisure time, anyway — is up to you. If you want to set aside time to express yourself, be my guest; if you’d rather only work on your book sporadically, you have my blessing, too. Ditto with sending out your queries with the clockwork regularity necessary to land an agent vs. stuffing your manuscript pages into the bottom drawer, never to see the light of day. Whatever makes you happy, you should do.

All I’m asking — and I realize that it’s a big, big request, so feel free to say no — is that you make those choices consciously, rather than allowing yourself to be pushed around by the fact that a new year is going to begin in a few days or other people have not to date spontaneously offered to lighten your burdens so you may devote more time to writing. Creating a stellar piece of writing does not happen by accident; 99.9999% of the time, a glorious book is the result of quite a bit of advance planning and sacrifice.

Please do give some thought, in short, to the tender, loving care of your talent and all of that nervous tissue. To help you do so, I can do no better than to show you that Mme. de Staël quote in its entirety:

 

So let us rise up under the weight of existence. Let us not give our unjust enemies and ungrateful friends the triumph of having beaten down our intellectual faculties. They reduce people who would have been satisfied with affection to seeking glory; well, then, we have to achieve glory. These ambitious attempts may not remedy the sorrows of the soul, but they will bring honor to life. To devote life to a constantly disappointed hope of happiness is to make it even sadder. It is better to direct one’s efforts to going down the road from youth to death with some degree of nobility, and with reputation.

 

 

As John Irving urged us in THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, keep passing those open windows, everyone. And as I have been known to advise a time or two here, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part X: where you stand depends on where you sit, sometimes literally

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part X: where you stand depends on where you sit, sometimes literally

In my last post, I lingered on the desirability of making physical space in your home — or somewhere else, if you can afford separate office space — specifically dedicated to writing. Like playing the same music every time you sit down to write, lighting your desk area more brightly than the rest of the house in midwinter, or painting your kneecaps bright green as a pre-writing ritual, setting aside a space where you do nothing but write can be very helpful in fending off writer’s block, seasonally-induced or otherwise.

Why, you ask? Well, like the other sensual cues mentioned last time, walking into a dedicated writing environment makes the transition from mundane (non-writing) time to creative time clear to not only your daytimer, but to your body. Just as nice, clean towels coming out of the dryer tell my cats that it’s time to curl up and have a nap, walking into my writing space tells me that it’s time to get to work.

You can TELL your body that it’s time to write until you’re blue in the face, but let’s face it, we’re animals at base, and creatures of habit to boot. That pancreas of yours will need a non-verbal hint or two, and when’s the last time your T2 vertebra listened to reason?

You’ve probably already noticed the stimulus-bodily reaction phenomenon manifesting in less positive ways. The body’s no fool. When you have a job you hate, merely walking into the building raises your stress levels markedly, doesn’t it? The smell of baking bread or cookies cheers most people up, regardless of what else is going on, and incessant holiday music following one from store to store so stuns the nervous system after a while that one begins to buy frantically in self-defense, just to get out of there.

(No one can tell me that last effect isn’t calculated. I was in a children’s choir for many years, doomed to wander puckishly from rest home to shopping mall to stage to insane asylum all throughout the holiday season, piping carols at the top of our childish voices. The sounds we were yelping were generally considered high-quality, but let me tell you, spectators’ eyes glaze over like Santa’s swimming pool before the end of the second verse of even the most beautifully-rendered carol. They’ve been hypnotized by sheer repetition.)

Having a dedicated space usually helps with that other common writerly tendency, jumping up after only a minute or two to do something else. The less comfortable your writing area, the more likely that urge is to overwhelm you.

(Confidential to the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver who might still be snuffling around for meaningful means to mark a Hanukkah evening: have you considered giving an office chair with really good back support? Not a generic office chair, but one that fits the writer’s body specifically? Or a copy of THE NOW HABIT, psychologist Neil Fiore’s excellent and accessible book on breaking procrastination patterns?)

A solid fit between computer user and furniture can help avoid all kinds of writing-delaying problems, as many of us now know to our cost. Business offices are notorious for trying to force every body type into identical chairs, as are colleges. When I was an undergraduate, my college saw fit to equip each and every dorm room with large, square wooden desk chairs like the one above, emblazoned with the school’s insignia — so, you know, if we forgot the school’s motto, we could just turn around and read it. My friends who happened to be 6’2” hockey players claimed that the chairs were most comfortable.

Everyone else ended up with sore backs and overworked arms. And in my day, whippersnappers, those chairs did not come equipped with that festive pillow, so after an hour or two of studying, what I shall delicately call the end of the spine began to complain as well.

Perhaps because there is no such thing as a good, supportive one-size-fits-all desk chair, one can surprisingly often find quite decent barely-used ones at thrift stores, I’ve noticed. You may need to canvas your entire city to find one that suits you and take a carpet-cleaner to it before you use it, but the eye-popping discounts are often worth it.

To return to my previous point: once you have established a space, song, lighting condition, specific chair, etc. as THE signal to begin serious writing, your body will soon come to understand that it’s time to stop distracting you with minor matters like the desire to eat, sleep, or have meaningful human contact and get down to work. Perhaps equally important, having a dedicated space — particularly one with a door that closes firmly on loved ones’ noses — tells everyone else in your household that you are not to be disturbed.

So it’s not only your habits that we’re hoping to recondition here. When intensive writing schedules work, EVERYONE in the household is cooperating to make that happen, starting in babyhood.

Oh, you laugh, but having grown up in a family of writers, I can tell you with absolute confidence: a career writer’s kid learns to go to sleep by the sound of typing (and speaking of conditioned reflexes, the sound of a manual typewriter still makes me distinctly sleepy). To this day, I seldom raise my voice above quiet conversational level, lest there be someone writing in the next room.

It’s habit, like everything else.

It’s also absolutely necessary, incidentally, for the household of a writer working on a deadline — and lest your kith and kin be harboring any fond illusions on the subject, the more successful you are as a author, the more deadlines you are going to have and the tighter they are going to be. It’s just a fact that at some point, no matter how nice a successful writer is, s/he is going to have to say to loved ones, “My writing needs to be my #1 priority right now. Which, by definition, places your needs slightly lower on the list.”

And mean it. So why not avoid the proverbial Christmas rush and start getting your kith and kin in the habit of hearing it now?

Did the last few paragraphs make you a trifle uncomfortable? If so, you’re certainly not alone: many writers are too sweet-tempered or too responsible or too habit-bound or just to gosh darned nice to expect their family members to change ANYTHING about THEIR schedules in order to make room for Mama or Papa or Sissy’s writing. Mama or Papa or Sissy simply give up sleep or recreation or dating in order to finish that book in spare moments when nobody else is making demands upon their time; Mama, more often than not, trains herself to drop her train of thought in mid-sentence the nanosecond anything remotely resembling a request for assistance or care falls upon her distracted ear.

Since this is the season of giving, may I suggest that this would be an excellent time to reexamine that attitude just a little?

Of course, I’m not suggesting that writers’ children should be taught to stifle their cries over their bleeding, severed limbs (although admittedly, writers’ kids of my generation often did). I’m merely throwing out the notion that everyone in the household might make supporting the writing project a top priority on an ongoing basis, rather than leaving the poor writer to struggle with trying to carve out time and space alone.

Why, yes, you may pause in your perusal of this post at this point to read that last bit out loud to your significant other, children, upstairs neighbor, or dog. I’m perfectly happy to wait. Tell ‘em it’s my idea, not yours.

While I’m being subversive — and to wrap up my series on gifts that the average writer would love to receive — FNDGG, why not give the writer in your life the gift of TIME TO WRITE on a regular basis?

After all, a few hours a week is a gift that even fairly small children could give to an overworked writer-parent. Maybe Santa could be induced to whisper some suggestions during that usually one-way communication on his lap; I know many, many writers to whom a pack of hand-made gift certificates, each good for an hour of uninterrupted time, would be the best stocking-stuffer EVER.

Monetarily, it would be hard to find a less expensive present — or New Year’s resolution, for that matter. In most aspiring writers’ households, though, it would require some fairly significant reshuffling of priorities to institute.

Which brings me to another very, very good reason that you might want to speak up about desiring dedicated time and space now, rather than holding your tongue until the happy day that you land an agent, sign a book contract, or see your nom de plume jauntily topping the New York Times’ bestseller list. Remember how I mentioned at Thanksgiving time that the vast majority of North Americans have absolutely no idea how books come to be published or how long it typically takes? Until they see the bound volume for sale at Borders or Chapters, even the most habitually kind and considerate of these well-meaning souls is prone — nay, likely — to express puzzlement and even disappointment at the most exciting tidings falling from their writer friends’ lips.

It’s usually expressed through hoping they’ve misunderstood you. “You signed with an agent?” they will say, uncomprehending smiles playing about their faces. “Great — when is the book coming out?”

They don’t do it to hurt you, honestly: they just don’t understand how many stages (or how much work) is involved in shepherding a book from first bright idea to successful publication. Or even unsuccessful publication. From the outside, a writer who isn’t being paid to sit and tap at a keyboard can look an awful lot like an unusually obsessed hobbyist nursing repetitive strain injuries.

Why? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: because practically everyone in the English-speaking world, or at any rate English-reading one, mistakenly believes that when a genuinely gifted writer adds the last bon mot to any book worth reading, agents, editors, and scouts for the Oprah Winfrey show magically and spontaneously appear on his or her (usually his, in this fantasy) doorstep, clamoring to bring the magical book out tomorrow.

In the face of that preconceived notion, anything less than instant, massive literary recognition for the writer one actually knows personally is bound to seem like a bit of a letdown.

To be fair, plenty of aspiring writers buy into this fantasy, too — at least until they learn how the publishing industry actually works. In reality, even the writer of a book destined to be a classic a hundred years from now will often spend years querying, pitching, submitting, and revising before being picked up by an agent. Even after that legitimately thrilling achievement, there’s no guarantee that the agent will be able to sell the book to a publisher, or if s/he can, how soon it will be.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but I’ve met literally hundreds of authors who didn’t attain any serious recognition of their writing until their third or fourth books, not third or fourth month marketing them to agents.

I’m bringing this up not to depress you (although I could see where it might conceivably have that effect) but so that you will not talk yourself out of considering asking for more time, space, and support for your work just because you’ve been looking for an agent for a while — or talking yoursel into making one of those lamentably common New Year’s resolutions that demand landing an agent or a publishing contract by the end of the year.

You’ll be happier in the long run — and, dare I say it, less likely to fall prey to writer’s block — if your view of what a good writer can hope to achieve in the short run is realistic.

These days, even the IRS recognizes that ultimately very successful authors often expend years of effort without making a profit at their craft before hitting the big time. (It’s true; look it up.) If the government can accept the unappetizing fact that they’re going to have to wait to tax your book sales, is it really too much to expect those who love you to do the same?

Astonishingly often, it seems to be, but again, try not to blame your kith and kin too much. When everyone one knows seems to believe that an unpublished book must be by definition inherently flawed — because if it weren’t, it would already be published and featured on Oprah, right? — one is likely to look a trifle askance at a dream that takes a long time to come true. Or which appears to be coming true in small increments whose importance the observer doesn’t really understand.

All of which is to say: if you were planning to wait until your writing caught a break before politely requesting that your kith and kin

(a) stop nagging you to get published and go on Oprah,

(b) arguing that other activities are inherently more important than preserving your writing time and/or space,

(c) installing fitness equipment in the only logical space in the house for your desk,

(d) interrupting your scheduled writing time with the crisis du jour,

(e) interrupting your scheduled writing time for phone calls, and/or

(f) interrupting your scheduled writing time because someone just said something funny in a sitcom (improbable, but within the realm of possibility, certainly),

it might not be worth the wait. What is to a writer a major event — the realistic possibility of completing a novel within the next three months, for instance, or an agent’s request for materials, or finally selling that book proposal to a small publisher — may not be to them the unanswerable argument for support you’ve been expecting it to be. They may not respond as you would like, because after all, if your book were REALLY destined for greatness…

Well, you know the tune by now, don’t you?

And that, to slip into the vernacular for a moment, is going to suck, because at that point, you’re going to want to drop everything and devote yourself to your art. Trust me, because I speak from long, long experience and observation: at that ostensibly-joyous-yet-practically-stressful juncture, even the most sweet-tempered author is bound to feel bubbles of ulcer-inducing resentment welling up against her solar plexus.

Consider, then, the alternative. There are many advantages to gathering one’s significant other, paramour(s), children, parents, grandparents, friends, coworkers, pets, and anyone else who might be at all likely to disturb your writing time and announcing, “Now hear this! Starting this very minute and until this project is complete, I’m going to need all of your help. Raise your right hands and repeat after me: ‘Unless the house is actually on fire, I shall not interrupt my beloved writer while s/he is working…”

I’m feeling waves of panic floating from the timid at the very notion of saying such a thing. “But Anne,” I hear some of you kindly souls squeak fearfully, “isn’t that a little, you know, drastic? After all, they do leave me alone to write sometimes; I don’t want them to think I’m not grateful for that. I’ve got a much, much better idea: what if I don’t say anything at all, and just hope that they’ll take the hint?”

I understand your reluctance, oh gentle souls, but I have one question to ask in response: how has that strategy worked out for you so far?

As lovely as it would be if one’s families, roommates, and friends would spontaneously cry, “You know, honey, I’ve been thinking, and you would have two and a half hours of clear extra time per week to work on your book if I did the grocery shopping for the next six months. Please let me do this for you!” in my experience, it doesn’t happen all that often. Habit is habit, unlikely to change without somebody laying out some awfully good reasons that it should.

(Although for the benefit of any Significant Others, paramours, cats, etc. who may be reading this: anyone who DID murmur such words under the mistletoe — and actually followed through on them — would be exceedingly likely to find by spring that every writer of his/her sweetie’s acquaintance is bright green with envy. I just mention.)

Call me a cynic, but I believe that one is far, far more likely to get what one wants if one asks for it, rather than waiting for those in a position to give it to read one’s mind. Especially when, as so many aspiring writers do, you’ve probably been juggling your writing and the rest of your life well enough that from the outside, it might not look like the strain it undoubtedly is.

So instead of relying upon your loved ones to realize that you could use a bit of extra time, why not come out and request it? Or — don’t faint on me here — decree establishing time and space to write as your holiday present to yourself?

Your writing is important to you. You are NOT being selfish to ask for time and a place to do it.

Before any of you tell me that you are far, far too busy for this to be practicable — I can tell which ones intend to make this objection by the loud guffaws of disbelief and tears of mirth running down your faces — let me hasten to add that I’m thinking about some fairly small increments of undisturbed tranquility. What if, say, you were no longer the one doing the laundry? Or your teenager cooked dinner twice per week? Or you stopped playing canasta with those neighbors you never really liked in the first place? Or — and I suspect this one might resonate with some of you at this particular season — you opted out of hosting your thirty-person family’s holiday dinner next year?

How much time would that free for your writing? And, more crucially, just what message would such a step send to your kith and kin about precisely how important your writing actually is to you?

Because, if you don’t mind my asking, if you’ve never asked them to sacrifice anything for it, even momentary pleasure, are you positive that they honestly understand that you consider it your real life’s work, your genuine passion, regardless of whether your writing ever actually gets published?

Assuming, of course, that you feel this way. Most of the dedicated writers I know do.

Yes, working up the nerve to convey this to non-writers is hard, but anyone who ever told you that being a writer is easy was — well, let’s say inadequately informed. I’m going to talk more next time about how one might go about expressing this to one’s kith and kin, as well as some practical means of figuring out what can and cannot be altered in order to make more time and space for writing in your life. Before you groan, believe me, the rewards of self-expression are massive and ongoing. It is well worth reassessing the demands upon your time and space to make room for you to try.

At least think about it, please: even writers with great support and lovely, comfortable, well-lit writing spaces can usually figure out where there’s room for improvement. As Emily Dickenson wrote so charmingly, “We never know how high we are/till we are called to rise.”

She was talking about something completely different, of course, but it brings me back to a question I asked you to start considering way back in October: what do you actually need in order to write happily and well?

You didn’t honestly think that I was going to content myself with a mere pep talk today, did you?

To render subsequent discussions of October’s burning question and today’s modest proposal both more useful and more interesting, let’s expand that general question into a number of more focused ones:

(1) What conditions would you actually need in order to write productively for a significant, unbroken chunk of time? What are your necessary minimum conditions — not just generic ones, but yours — for retreating to write, even just for a day?

(2) What specific factors — ambient noise conditions, lighting, seating, height of monitor, being able to lock a door, whatever — are of tangible assistance in your creative process, and what is merely nice?

(3) Is there anything that you currently use that you could do without? If you could snap your fingers and replace a neutral factor with a useful one, what would it be?

(4) Conversely, what conditions render the actual act of writing more difficult for you? Be as specific as you can, please: cold drafts blowing across your keyboard, telemarketers calling every fifteen minutes, a bookshelf that threatens to dump its contents onto your head as you attempt to type next to it, fear of rejection? Write ‘em all down.

(5) If you believe taking a writing retreat of any length to be impossible or well-nigh impossible for you, why? Again, the more specific you can make your reply, the better.

(6) What feels like support for your writing? What are others in your life already doing that’s helpful to your writing progress, and what seems like a stumbling-block?

Yes, yes, I know: these are some pretty weighty questions, downright fundamental to who you are and how you write. That’s why I’ve given you a couple of months — and the upcoming weekend — to ponder them. They are questions that every successful professional writer has to face sooner or later, not as daydreams, but as practical realities that can be changed as necessary.

Usually, the answers become apparent about three days before a major deadline, but I think we can do better than that, don’t you? Give ‘em some thought — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VIII: have you considered giving learning experiences?

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VIII: have you considered giving learning experiences?

For the last few posts in this series on gifts a generous, sensitive, and smart Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver (did I mention attractive?) might want to bestow upon a writer, I have been concentrating upon engaging the services of a professional editor. Since that can be a pretty expensive endeavor, I’m going to spend today talking about less costly learning experiences that writers might appreciate — and, still better, ones that might help move their work toward successful publication.

Good writers, and I don’t care who hears me say it, usually tend to be more open to learning experiences than your average bear. Why? Well, it probably has something to do with having a brain that’s wired to notice telling details more than other people’s. To paraphrase HG Wells’ THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN, a writer is an Aolian harp upon whom the winds of society blow, causing us to sing. We have, as Wells said, unusually sensitive nervous tissue.

Aolian harp, in case you don’t happen to have a good mythological dictionary handy, is a fancy term for wind chime.

I love this analogy, because it pinpoints something that the kind folks who attempt to live with us who write must come to understand and accept: we often react more intensely to external stimuli than other people. We’re born extrapolators. You may find this hard to believe, but apparently, non-writers can sit in a restaurant without eavesdropping on nearby tables and creating elaborate life histories about the speakers based upon an excerpted sentence or two.

Or so I’m told. Anthropologically fascinating to hear how other tribes think, isn’t it?

Since we writers work overtime developing our listening skills, taking advantage of them through taking classes makes perfect sense — a common enough view that writing classes tend to be a terrific place not only to learn something new, but to meet other writers at all stages of their careers. Call it a two-for-one deal.

So here’s an idea for writers up for making suggestions about what they’d like to receive as presents: why not seek out a good writing class, either at a local teaching facility or online, and ask your FNDGG to spring for it?

If you immediately thought, “Oh, I don’t have time to take a class — I barely have time to write as it is!”, well, you’re certainly not alone. It makes perfect sense to give some advance thought to the level of time commitment you could realistically devote to a class without eating into your writing time. Allow me, however, to suggest that the less time you have to write, the more benefit you might derive from clearing some time in your schedule to take a class.

How so, you murmur? Well, at the risk of sounding pedantic, it can be beneficial in addressing a broad spectrum of writerly problems. Most literally, a class can give a writer the specific skill-polishing s/he needs to help write better, faster, stronger, etc. There are also plenty of good classes out there — and in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I teach some of them — that will assist a writer in constructing a query, synopsis, or book proposal.

Slightly more nebulously, classes also exist that will help writers revise their work to render it more marketable — agent Don Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel class pops to mind — conform more closely to the parameters of a particular genre, and yes, just write better sentences.

Price tags vary as much as offerings do. As with any other professional advice, however, the buyer should beware: not every class actually delivers what it promises. Marketing help to writers is big business these days, as anyone who has taken a gander at the many, many books offering writing advice of late can tell you, but it’s not as though there is a writer’s guardian angel out there making sure that only those with a proven track record assisting writers improve their work are allowed to advertise.

So it’s in your interest to assess claims carefully, rather than blithely sending off a check to the first class that sounds appetizing. Find out precisely what your potential teacher’s background is and how it relates to what s/he is offering to teach you.

There’s a third reason that I like to recommend that the super-busy and the writing-blocked (two groups with quite a bit of member overlap, I’ve noticed) carve out some time in their schedules to invest in a class: to get into the habit of finding time in their schedules to devote to writing.

Some of you just guffawed, didn’t you? “Um, Anne?” I hear a few cynics point out. “Aren’t you suggesting that people solve a problem by solving it? Just a touch tautological, no?”

Hear me out on this one, oh guffawers. Those who diagnose themselves as too busy to write on a regular schedule and writers experiencing certain types of writer’s block usually share the problem of finding themselves unwilling or unable, for any number of perfectly legitimate and not-so-legitimate reasons, to sit down and write on a regular basis. The hyper-occupied will rush off to do all of the other, higher-priority things they have to do before they can devote time to writing; the blocked will frequently come up with other things to do to avoid the pain of staring at a blank computer screen.

As a result, members of both groups tend not to budget a whole lot of time purely for writing, at least not on a regular basis: all too often, they will put it off until some hypothetical day when they are either not busy with something else or spontaneously inspired. Over time, that mythical day’s planned agenda can become downright terrifying: from merely a day (or week or month) to devote to writing, it devolves into feeling like THE day (or week or month) in which one has to complete the ENTIRE project. The bigger the task looming in the mind, the more tempting to put it off.

Then these well-meaning souls wake up three months later and realize that they haven’t made much progress on their writing projects. At that point, they have every incentive to blame this results on being too busy or galloping writer’s block — and once again to put off sitting down with the project. And so the vicious cycle continues.

Now admittedly, there are a million causes for writer’s block, and many millions of obligations that might conceivably render budgeting time to writedifficult. But from a working author’s point of view, the underlying problem above is that the writers have not made time to write and stuck to a schedule. This may or may not be attributable to factors within the individual’s control, but whatever the specific reasons, sitting down and writing somehow isn’t near enough to the top of the writer’s priorities to make it happen on the regular basis necessary to complete a book project.

With me so far? Excellent.

Due no doubt to early childhood training, most of us are better at maintaining a formal commitment (such as showing up for a class) than an informal one (such as a promise to oneself to sit down every day and write a few thousand words). We tend to perceive sticking to something we do with other people (or something we are paying to do) as involving less willpower than keeping a private vow.

In actuality, that’s often not true, but there’s no reason not to put the impression that it is true to good use.

Here’s a proposition to consider: a writer who can figure out how to attend a weekly two-hour class is very likely to discover at the end of it that s/he has two hours per week no longer budgeted for something other than writing; by adhering to an already-established schedule, then, that writer has gained a couple of hours per week to devote to writing. Similarly, once a writer has managed to clear a weekend to invest in a seminar, or a few days to attend a conference, s/he can probably repeat that achievement in order to devote that time to writing.

Will those couple of hours or few days be enough to write an entire book? Almost certainly not. But if repeated frequently, could the fruits of regular writing time add up? Absolutely.

And don’t throw up your hands, please, if you felt uncomfortable in classrooms growing up — writing classes turn up in a lot of forms, from traditional composition classes to paid critique groups run by established authors or editors to weekend seminars on plot complexity to once-a-week online give-and-take. The more specific you can be about what you would like to learn, the easier it will be for you — or your FNDGG — to find a class you’ll enjoy.

One reliably fruitful source of course offerings for writers lies on the conference circuit. Good writers’ conferences tend to be crammed with classes on craft, querying, submission, marketing, you name it. They’re also often wonderful places to meet other writers to swap tips and share sympathy. You might even make a friend or two with whom you’ll feel moved to exchange manuscripts for critique, or to form the nucleus of a writers’ support group.

Not to mention the fact that many conferences offer the opportunity to meet agents and editors and hear about what they like to see in a submission. At some conferences, you can even pitch your book to them, neatly sidestepping the querying stage.

Which brings me to another gift suggestion: why not ask your FNDGG to subsidize a trip to a well-constructed conference? If not to underwrite the whole thing, at least to chip in?

If you choose your conference carefully, you may also derive another fringe benefit from attendance: manuscript feedback. As clever and intrepid reader Susan wrote in yesterday to remind us, some conferences offer manuscript critique sessions relatively inexpensively — relative, that is, to employing the services of a professional editor.

Conference-based critique comes in a number of different flavors; there is no such thing as a generic conference critique, so do make sure before you register which is being offered. Here is a field guide to a few of the more common.

The public examination. At this type of event, feedback is offered during short classes within the conference itself in a manner reminiscent of American Idol: both presentation and expert feedback take place in a public forum. Attendees are invited to show up with a very short excerpt — usually a page or two, either from the text or in some cases, a query letter — dissection and discuss.

The few shy souls out there who just exclaimed, “I’d rather stick my hand into a meat grinder!” need despair: because critique is a time-consuming business, these classes usually attract far more feedback-seekers than time to take a magnifying glass to their work. Most of the time, those who sit by quietly and take copious notes on what the pros say about other people’s pages are more than welcome.

The small-group intensive. Here, critique sessions are couched in multi-hour or even multi-day group classes, often lead by an established writer or editor. An intensive class is generally offered either just before or just after the regular conference offerings, and usually entail an extra charge over and above the regular conference registration fee, so do double-check before you register.

Intensive sessions usually concentrate on a short excerpt — the first chapter is a common choice — or require participants to write fresh material in class. Again, if feedback on material already in hand is your goal, check.

The professional assessment. Sometimes these are group endeavors where a dozen people will sit and confer with an agent, editor, or established author, but they are more commonly one-on-one. Almost invariably, though, these sessions are touted as a big selling point for a conference.

Attendees are invited to submit a short manuscript excerpt — usually the first 5-20 pages, although some conferences will allow an entire chapter — which the agent, editor, etc. will undertake to read prior to the meeting. The feedback is usually quite a bit less intensive than what a freelance editor would provide (you’re unlikely, for instance, to receive commentary on particular lines of text), but if you’re looking for an uninterrupted five-minute conversation about how a professional reader like Millicent might respond to your opening pages, this can be a terrific place to start.

The pitch meeting. Pitch meetings rarely involve anyone reading manuscript pages and giving feedback on them, but I thought I should include them on this list, as conference brochures sometimes give the (often false) impression that a professional assessment is a pitch opportunity, and vice versa.

At a pitch meeting, a writer gives a verbal presentation to an agent or editor, a sort of verbal query letter, in the hope that the pro will be so taken with the pitch that s/he will request the writer to submit pages for later consideration. Face-to-face pitching is a learned skill, so if you are considering attending a conference where writers have the opportunity to pitch, please take a gander at the PITCHING BASICS category on the list at right.

As you may see, these types of conference-based feedback opportunities differ widely. The trick to benefiting from these sessions is to do your homework before you get there — which is important to know before you start looking for events to attend, since this is homework that generally needs to be done not only before the conference, but before one even signs up to attend it.

Why so far in advance? Well, several reasons. First, as I mentioned above, conferences usually require writers to submit pages for critique well in advance, generally at the time of registration. Sometimes, the deadline for submission is months before the conference, so do try to send in pages that are not likely to change radically in the interim, if the rules allow it. (Most don’t: the first chapter or 10-20 pages plus a synopsis is a fairly standard requirement, as those pages require less set up to follow, by definition.)

Also, since virtually every critique-offering conference fills personalized feedback slots on a first-come, first-served basis, you may have to be speedy to take advantage of this perq. At a conference that offer many critique opportunities, you may be able pull off registering in the month or two immediately prior to the conference, but for the vast majority of such conferences, the number of slots available is in the low double digits. They tend to go fast, so once you’ve picked your conference, register early.

One caveat to bear in mind while you’re conference-searching: as with feedback from critique-offering contests and every other source, the quality of the feedback varies by the experience level of the critiquer — and more specifically, the critiquer’s familiarity with the submitted manuscript’s book category. Even if the scheduled feedback giver has been editing romance at Harlequin for a decade, s/he may not be able to give you insight into why agents have been rejecting your thriller.

As with finding a freelance editor — or an agent, for that matter — fit between the feedback-giver and the manuscript is important. Some conferences randomly assign writers to feedback-givers, but most of the larger conferences will allow registrants to express preferences. Do a bit of background checking before you commit; you’re far, far more likely to walk away from a critique session with feedback you can use if your critiquer has a solid track record in handling your type of book.

Another factor that radically influences the quality of conference-based feedback is how much time the critiquer has actually invested in reading the pieces before commenting upon them. I don’t mean to frighten you, but do be aware that advice clearly based upon barely-skimmed submissions or, even more hurtful, only the first paragraph or two of a chapter-length submission is a perennial complaint voiced by writers attending such feedback sessions, especially those conducted by agents and editors: the habit of simply ceasing to read as soon as they’ve made up their minds about a submission can be pretty firmly ingrained.

Before anyone out there takes umbrage at the notion of paying a conference for this level of feedback — which doesn’t necessarily entail a more solid reading than Millicent might give a first chapter; the difference lies in hearing specifics about why the screener stopped reading — lack of familiarity with the materials to be reviewed is not always the critiquer’s fault. It’s not at all uncommon for critiquers to be culled from the speakers, agents, and editors invited to the conference, some of whom may not receive the pages for critique until they actually arrive at the conference.

Or — brace yourselves — on the day of the meeting.

And yes, this frequently occurs even at conferences that require writers to submit their pages months in advance. Why? Beats me; organizational acumen seems to be wildly unevenly distributed across conference-giving groups. When I’ve inquired about it — say, at a conference where I had been engaged to give such feedback, but did not actually see a syllable of the writing involved until a couple of hours before I was supposed to meet with the people who wrote them — I’ve heard every explanation from shifting schedules to lost paperwork to an elaborately polite insistence that giving me the pages early enough to spend some real time with them would have inconvenienced me.

They didn’t want to impose, they said.

I’ve been on both sides of this particular phenomenon, actually: some years ago, I was in residence at a New England artists’ colony that shall remain nameless. as well-established sculptors and painters dropped by to give emerging artists feedback on their works-in-progress, the colony had taken the trouble to import a famous author or two every couple of weeks to impart wisdom to those treading the earlier steps of the path to greatness.

Or, slightly more cynically, the colony helped supplement the established’s income by offering informal teaching gigs. The first of these authors spent a week on-site and was quite charming, at least to those of us whose work she liked. She read excerpts, gave constructive feedback, helped writers over manuscript difficulties, and even gave a couple of impromptu lectures on craft.

A couple of weeks later, the feedback environment altered considerably. The Living Legend scheduled to shed her effulgence on the residents sent word that she would be arriving a trifle late, but she was reading the excerpts we had submitted to her industriously. One forgives such things in National Book Award winners, naturally. When she arrived late on day 3 of her week-long residence, she announced that she could stay for only a couple of days — the absolute minimum, the cynical speculated, to collect her honorarium for meeting with us — so she wanted to meet with each of us right away.

Practically the moment I walked into my scheduled meeting, she launched into a vigorous diatribe about the inherent weakness of a particular scene. The only trouble was, I hadn’t written the scene that had so upset her sensibilities; the writer with the appointment after mine had. As nearly as I could tell from her tirade, she had decided that I must have written the short story in question — although I do not write short stories — because the character in the story looked a bit like me.

As do hundreds of thousands of adult women of Mediterranean extraction, I might add. But I digress.

It took me several minutes to convince the Grande Dame of Literature that I was telling the truth about who I was and what I had written — and for both of us to realize that she had not yet read my piece at all. Embarrassed for her, I offered to reschedule our appointment on the following day, but she was adamant that she was only prepared to give me (her phrase) an hour of her time. As about 35 minutes of that time had already elapsed, I proposed that we should devote it to chatting about the writing life in general; again, no.

After an intensive five minutes of rooting about in her briefcase, she finally managed to dig up my pages. With a sigh of irritated relief, she plumped herself down to read them in front of me. I sat uncomfortably, marveling at her speed-reading prowess. Fortunately for my ego — or unfortunately; I’ve never been able to decide — she evidently did not find any error glaring enough to point out. I suspect it would have been a relief to her if she had.

After she finished, she glanced up at me warily. “It’s good,” she conceded, clearly cudgeling her well-laureled brains for something constructive to advise.

Having been well brought-up, I waited politely for her to continue — and I must say, I’m still waiting. To fill up the remaining five minutes of our meeting, we chatted about the writing life in general.

I wish I could state positively that La Belle’s behavior was exceptional, but the sad fact is that one hears similar stories about write-your-way-in conferences and artists’ retreats that offer on-site professional feedback from well-established authors as an incentive for writers to apply for residencies. It just goes to show you: not all feedback from professionals is professional feedback, nor will all of it be helpful. But I’m relatively certain that had I not already sought out and received scads of genuinely thoughtful, well-informed critique of my work before I watched the Famous Gentlewoman unsuccessfully trying to critique my work on the fly, I would have been crushed by her lack of professionalism.

The moral: just because someone famous reads your work doesn’t necessarily mean that their feedback is going to be useful; just because a conference brochure touts a critique opportunity doesn’t mean it will be a good fit for your manuscript. Do your homework, invest your conference-going dollars carefully — and accept that sometimes, you’re going to encounter a dud. That’s the nature of one-size-fits-all critiquing.

Oh, dear, I meant to spend today’s post recommending conference attendance, not repeatedly hissing, “Caveat emptor,” let the buyer beware. Well, I suppose that’s not a complete surprise in a blog that so frequently cautions caveat lector, let the reader beware.

On that dubious note, I shall sign off for today. More gift-giving tips and general chat about the writing life follow anon. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VII: a few last words about what professional feedback will actually entail, or, what if a manuscript isn’t practically perfect in every way?

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VII: a few last words about what professional feedback will actually entail, or, what if a manuscript isn’t practically perfect in every way?

For the last couple of posts, I have been talking about yet another present the legendary Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver might want to consider for the aspiring writers on his list: a few hours’ worth (or a few hundred pages’ worth) of professional editing. As I demonstrated last time, not all freelance editors will be equally good fits for every project, so you will probably want to do a bit of comparison shopping, rather than simply looking for the most feedback for the least money. Because the levels of professional editing are quite different, both in content and in price, it will also behoove you to make sure in advance PRECISELY what services you are buying.

Before you give your FNDGG a subtle hint that your manuscript might appreciate a bit of a post-holiday tune-up, however, and definitely before either of you invest what can be quite a bit of money in the editing process, I would definitely advise pausing to give some thought to not only what services you want to buy, but why you want to buy them.

Or, to put it another way, as a writer, what precisely do you you want to get out of the experience? Other than to be picked up by an agent and/or sell the book to a publisher immediately after taking the freelancer’s advice, of course.

Actually, you should be wary if a freelancer promises that — or anything that implies such a promise. Reputable editors are very, very careful in describing how a manuscript might benefit from their assistance. Since freelance editors stand outside the agency and publishing house, none of us can legitimately make promises that any specific advice we give will unquestionably result in landing an agent or eventual publication.

And if you encounter anyone who tells you otherwise, run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit. As on the Internet, if an offer sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Let the buyer beware.

While I’m waving the warning flag, you should also be wary if an agency demands that writers shell out for professional editing reports as a condition of considering the manuscript, or charges for in-house editing, or if an agent responds to a submission by telling a writer not only that the manuscripts needs professional editing, but only from a specific editing company. All of these can be signs that the agency makes its money not by selling its clients’ books, but through payments from aspiring writers, not a good sign. (For more on how to tell a fee-charging agency from a non-fee-charging one, please see the FEE-CHARGING AGENCIES category on the list at right.)

Back to the business at hand: what, you’re probably wondering at this point, can a freelance editor legitimately offer you?

Well, among other things, perhaps answers about why a submission boasting a really good premise and good writing has been getting rejected. Remember, most manuscripts are rejected within the first page or two, for reasons that might not be apparent to the lay reader. A professional reader well versed in the writing norms of a particular book category or genre can often give substantial insight into how to tweak a manuscript to avoid pitfalls.

Call me zany, but I suspect that there are many, many aspiring writers out there who would like to be told if a fixable problem is triggering all of those form-letter rejections that don’t specify what went wrong.

(Are you listening, Furtive NDGG? You’ve already checked that list twice; leave it alone and pay attention.)

To bolster the egos I felt sagging during the last few paragraphs: not having some magical internal sensor that tells one just what the problem is most emphatically not a reflection upon one’s writing talent. Spotting a manuscript’s weaknesses is usually a matter of experience, pure and simple.

Here, a professional reader has a jump on the average writer. Agents and editors don’t read like everyone else, and neither do good freelance editors. Our eyes are trained to jump on problems like…well, insert any predator-prey analogy you like here.

The point is, we’re fast, and our aim is deadly.

Since manuscripts are now expected to be completely publication-ready by the time they reach an agent’s desk — although they are frequently revised afterward — getting professional feedback can be exceptionally helpful in whipping your work into publishable shape. Contrary to widespread belief amongst the aspiring, there is more to being publishable than merely being a good story well-written.

Which is why, as I mentioned yesterday, you’re going to want to find an editor with experience working with books in your category, if you are going to invest in editing more complex than proofreading. An editor familiar with the tropes, structures, and market trends in your book’s category is going to be able to help you better than one who does not.

You want to be able to trust the feedback you get, don’t you?

While I’m on the subject of trust, and since today is apparently my day of dire-sounding warnings, I should put the Furtive NDGGs out there on the qui vive: like editors at publishing houses, agents, and other professional readers, good freelance editors have to be quite explicit about what is wrong with a manuscript in order to do their jobs well. Writers new to having their work edited are often astounded, and even hurt, by just HOW straightforward professional feedback can be.

Think about that very, very carefully before you give this particular present.

Really, any writer contemplating hiring a professional editor should give some thought to just how much honesty s/he actually wants. Like an agent or editor at a publishing house, a good freelance editor is not going to pull any punches — amongst those who work with manuscripts for a living, it’s considered downright silly to beat around the bush. The manner of conveying the information may be kind, but if any of them believe that a particular writing issue is going to harm your book’s market prospects, they are going to tell you so point-blank.

That is, after all, what they are being paid to do.

That may seem self-evident, but in practice, seeing one’s own manuscript carved up by a pro can be pretty nerve-wracking. Obviously, if a writer is going to be given necessary critique, it’s quite a bit less traumatic to hear it from an editor whose job it is to help improve it than from an agent who is rejecting the book, but if one is not prepared to be told that a book has problems, it’s bound to be upsetting no matter who says it.

This response is, of course, completely understandable. Serious manuscript feedback generally isn’t fun even when it’s free and/or eagerly solicited. While the brain may understand that critique is a good idea, the emotions often hold the opposite opinion. Even authors with years of experience in accepting professional feedback have been known to become a trifle upset when told to alter their manuscripts.

Going into the editing process aware that the point of it is to ferret out manuscript problems, and as such is bound to be upsetting, then, tends to make it easier on the writer. Conversely, someone who approaches the process primarily seeking ego reassurance from someone in the biz that his work is fine as it stands is almost invariably going to be disappointed — and probably rather angry as well.

Did I sense some guffawing out there? “Oh, come on, Anne,” some self-confident sorts scoff. “We’re talking about writers who are willing to pay a professional editor to give them feedback. Isn’t it safe to assume that anyone likely to do that actually wants honest, well-informed critique? You make it sound as though there are aspiring writers who go to all of the trouble and expense of hiring a freelancer purely because they want to be told that their manuscripts are, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, oh guffawing scoffers, but isn’t that precisely what pretty much every writer currently wandering the earth’s crust wants to hear about his or her own work, subconsciously, at least? After all, most of us write in the hope and expectation that someone will pay US to read our work, not that we will need to pay someone to read it.

The result: pretty much every freelance editor who has been at it a while will have at least one story about the writer who showed up swearing that he wanted no-holds-barred, professional-level feedback — and then freaked out the instant he got it, because he hadn’t expected to be told to change his manuscript.

Oh, you may laugh, but actually, taking the fruits of the editorial process personally — whether the feedback comes from a freelance editor, an agent or publishing house, the essential pattern’s tends to be same — is a notoriously common writerly response to a first brush with professional feedback. Before anyone rushes to judge those who react this way, the hurt usually stems not from rampant egomania or even (as folks in the industry not infrequently diagnose it) from a frantic possessiveness over one’s precious arrangement of words.

No, in my experience, it usually stems from something far more easily fixed: a confluence of unrealistic expectations about how authors are typically treated and not understanding that the industry views criticism as an impersonal means of improving the marketability of a manuscript.

I am reminded of M.F.K. Fisher’s story about being solicited to write a preface for a charity cookbook — you know, one of those collections of recipes that were so popular as fundraisers in the 1970s, in which well-to-do local matron share the secrets behind their potluck-famous pineapple upside-down cakes and tuna surprise. The cookbook’s editors, both volunteers, came to visit Fisher, a neighbor of theirs, in the hope that having a big-name food writer attached to their compilation of local recipes would make the book sell better. It was, they told her, for a good cause, so she donated her expertise.

Well (the story goes), Fisher very kindly took the draft book from them and had a good, professional look through it. Without missing a beat, she instantly began barking out everything that was wrong with the book: poor editing, meandering writing, abundant redundancies.

All of the things, in short, that professional writers and editors automatically flag in a manuscript.

When she paused for breath, she noticed that the amateur editors were not gratefully taking notes. Instead, they were dissolved in tears. From their non-professional standpoint, Fisher had been hugely, gratuitously, deliberately mean, whereas from a professional point of view, she had been paying them the huge (and possibly undeserved) compliment of taking their project seriously.

Yes, yes, I know: by this logic, the person eaten by a lion should be flattered by the lion’s impression that he tastes good. But as I have mentioned before, I don’t make the rules; I just tell you about ‘em.

The fact is, from a professional perspective, whitewashing an editorial opinion about a manuscript is a waste of everyone’s time. In a freelance editor’s feedback, it would border on unethical.

For those of you who think that this mindset sounds like a pretty fine reason to steer clear of anyone who might be tempted or empowered to pay this particular stripe of compliment, let me hasten to add: the ability to take criticism well is a highly valuable professional skill for writers; in the long run, you will be much, much happier if develop it as part of your tool kit.

Your dream agent, I assure you, will just assume that you have already have it up your sleeve. This is precisely why your dream agent should not be the first human being to set eyes on your work.

If you do not have experience rolling with harsh-but-true feedback, it is well worth your while to join a very critical writing group, or take a writing class from a real dragon, or (why didn’t I think of this before?) show some of your work to a freelance editor, before you send your work to an agent.

Trust me, it is much, much easier to accept suggestions on how to revise your work gracefully when your critiquer is NOT the person who is going to decide whether to take you on as a client or acquire your book. The stakes are lower, so it’s less stressful by far.

Getting used to the feedback experience alone is a pretty good reason to run at least part of your manuscript — say, the first 50 pages — across a freelance editor’s desk; that way, you can learn just how touchy you are at base, and work on developing the vital-for-authors skill of responding constructively, rather than with anger. Since, again, the stakes are lower, even if the critique makes you see red for a month, you can afford to take the time to blow your stack privately without running afoul of an agent- or editor-induced deadline.

Hey, that’s how published authors usually handle it.

Which brings me to my final piece of advice on the subject: if you are brand-new to textual feedback, or if the potential cost of having all 542 pages of your baby edited makes your head spin, there’s no earthly reason that you need to jump into professional-level feedback with both feet right off the bat. (I’m sure I could have mixed a few more metaphors there, but you catch my drift, I’m sure.)

Consider starting with the first chapter, or the first few chapters, and working up from there. Or even just your query letter, synopsis, or any other material an agent may have asked you to submit.

This may sound as though I’m advising you to feed yourself to a school of piranha one toe at a time, but hear me out. One of the toughest lessons that every successful writer has to learn is that, regardless of how much we may wish it otherwise, agents don’t pick up books simply because someone wrote them. Nor do publishing houses offer contracts to books primarily because their authors really, really feel strongly about them.

These are the first steps to becoming a professional author, but they are not the only ones. The pros learn not only to write, but to rewrite — and yes, to take some pretty stark criticism in stride in the process. Not because having one’s words dissected is fun on a personal level, but because that is what the business side of this business expects from the creative side.

Seeing your book in print is worth learning to live with that, isn’t it? The alternative, pretending that a manuscript that keeps getting rejected is already practically perfect in every way, may be appealing in the short run, but in the long run can prove a formidable stumbling-block on the already quite bumpy road to publication.

Next time, I shall try to wrap up my series on gifts for writers. After that, perhaps, I shall indulge in some discussion about gifts writers can give to themselves. Speaking of which, lest the less well-heeled out there have been gnawing on their nails throughout the last few posts, wishing that professional feedback were within their reach right now, don’t despair: I shall soon be talking about ways in which writers can scare up some genuinely useful feedback gratis. It requires investing more time and effort than simply paying a good freelance editor, of course, but it is definitely doable.

Whichever route you choose, stay warm, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VI: what to find out before you shell out the dosh

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VI: what to find out before you shell out the dosh

It’s a mite stormy here in Seattle, the most snow, the old-timers and local talking heads say, since the 1970s. My lights keep flickering, and most of my neighbors seem to be either sledding or sloshing their way back from trips on foot to stock up on cat food and peanut butter. (My new office set up has a spectacular view of the environs.) Is it me, or did some great cruise director in the sky suddenly decree that ’tis not the season for shopping for non-necessities?

Myself, I’ve been running only frivolous errands, on general principle. In the face of semi-hysterical admonitions from state Department of Transportation officials, begging everyone who possibly can to stay far, far away from anything that remotely resembles a road, my SO and I have felt downright brave to have been out and about to meet friends for brunch. The restaurant was so empty that the hostess practically burst into tears when we walked in, and the manager declared that happy hour had been extended to the entire day.

I’m as pleased as anyone to be regaled with half-price crab-and-artichoke dip, but I couldn’t help but wonder what these days on end of Seattlites staying home meant for the local economy. Was everyone who intended to purchase last-minute presents wrapped up in blankets at home, huddled over computer terminals and praying that somewhere out there was a company that would deliver through the proverbial sleet, snow, and dark of night? Or were folks just throwing up their hands and returning the wrapping paper to storage until next year?

Let me tell you, it made me feel pretty smug for having spent yesterday’s post on a present that not only can consist of a handwritten card saying that the giver intends to pay for X amount of freelance editing for the recipient, but probably should, because this is the type of present a writer will want to pick out for herself.

For those of you scratching your heads, wondering what on earth I’m talking about, last time, I suggested to the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver — and anyone else who might be biting his or her nails, wondering what to give loved ones that would not involve braving half a foot of snow to purchase — that some freelance editing might make an unusual-but-useful gift for the writer in one’s life. (To forestall suspicions of self-interest here: my client list is already full for 2009. The book doctor is, therefore, out.)

But not just any editorial service from any editor will do: a savvy writer will want to pick one with an extensive background working with a specific type of book.

Why? Well, since writing norms vary quite a bit amongst book categories, and what is and isn’t considered a cliché can vary even more, good developmental editors usually overtly specialize in certain types of books, far more than line editors or proofreaders do. But the fact is, even if they do not advertise themselves that way, almost any editor with experience will have developed at least a genre preference over time.

As I mentioned yesterday, while any good editor can make a manuscript conform to the overarching rules of English grammar, substantive or developmental editing — or even heavy copyediting — writing advice from someone with a truly firm grounding in the SPECIFIC expectations for YOUR type of book is going to be of more practical use to you.

So it’s a good idea to check in advance whether the freelancer you’re considering has experience with your type of manuscript, regardless of the level of editing needed. Or, for that matter, any philosophies of editing or reading habits that may conflict with your notion of what the book should be.

And that, my friends, is going to entail asking a few pointed questions.

A word to the wise: determining this is going to require some conversation with potential freelancers, either by phone or via e-mail (a better idea, as you will have a written record of the terms discussed), and I assure you, you will be much, much, MUCH happier during that conversation if you have already given some serious thought to what you want to get out of the editor-author relationship.

While most freelancers will be thrilled with the novelty of a potential client whose opening line is more complex than, “Um, I need an editor; what do you charge?” the conversation will go more smoothly if you (or Santa, if this is a gift, although I recommend leaving the final choice of editor up to the writer) have a few specific pieces of information already at your fingertips. Heck, you might even want to include them in the initial e-mail:

1. What’s the book’s category?
Yes, I am talking about the same information you would include in a query letter, pitch, or on your title page. As in a query letter or pitch, subsequent conversation with a freelance editor tends to be more productive if you stick to the established book categories, rather than a seven-page synopsis. (If you’re unfamiliar with the hows and whys of selecting a book category, please see the BOOK CATEGORIES section on the list at right.)

Why use the professional designation, and why should you mention it first? To save yourself time, mostly : if a reputable freelance editor is approached to work on a type of book he’s never edited before, or with which he has scant experience, or which he doesn’t even like to read in his spare time, he will say so up front.

2. What level of editing are you seeking?
Professional editing services range from simple proofreading (to catch spelling and grammatical errors, period) to line editing (for formatting, consistency, sense, and to avoid repetition) to developmental editing (in-depth diagnosis the manuscript’s problems, taking into account current market trends). I went over the different levels yesterday; for further pondering directions, my editors’ guild has an excellent page of tips on how to find the right level of editing for you.

Sometimes, aspiring writers will want an editor to read the entire manuscript and write the equivalent of an editorial memo at a publishing house, giving very general advice about what needs to be changed. While there are editors who do this, experienced ones tend not to offer this service, for the simple reason that it’s a pretty time-consuming enterprise: to make a profit at it without rendering a read-through prohibitively expensive, a pro would have to skim — not the best level of reading for catching serious problems.

3. How many pages is the manuscript?
We’re talking about pages in standard format, of course — and in case anyone’s forgotten, that’s double-spaced, single-sided pages in 12-point font with 1-inch margins AND two spaces after each period. Most good editors will not consider working with single-spaced manuscripts.

The reason any editor will want to know the length immediately is to make quick mental calculations about how long it will take to edit. (PS: with pretty much any level of editing, your adhering closely to the rules of standard format in the manuscript will make it less time-consuming — and thus less expensive, typically — to edit.)

3a. How much of the manuscript would you like edited?
While most seekers of professional feedback prefer to have an editor take a gander at an entire work, that’s not the only option. It’s not a bad idea to start with only the first few chapters, to get a feel for the experience — or, if funds are tight, only the first chapter.

4. When you would like the editing to be completed?
If your first instinct is to answer, “Why, right away, of course,” do be aware that an experienced editor with a good reputation will often be booked up months in advance. Some freelancers will build flexibility into their schedules to accommodate rush projects, but a 20%-30% rush fee is fairly standard for this piece of convenience.

Why? Well, unscheduled projects with ultra-quick turnarounds often require editors to inconvenience other clients and/or work double shifts.

It is worth your while to plan in advance. So if you wanted your FNDGG to give you editing assistance on a contest entry that is due, say, in mid-February and wanted to avoid a rush fee, you should be approaching editors now, not in early February.

4a. Is there currently an externally-imposed deadline hanging over this project, in addition to your desired turn-around time?
You’d be AMAZED at how often editing clients neglect to mention that their agents are expecting a revised draft by the end of the month, or that they intend to enter the first chapter of the manuscript in a contest three weeks from now. Being up front with this information will render it easier for the editor to help you meet your deadlines.

5. How would you prefer to receive feedback?
Unless you are seeking only the most basic proofreading, a reputable freelance editor will not make her suggested corrections directly in your soft copy; since most editorial feedback results in considerable revision, doing so could raise ethical problems or even questions about who actually wrote any given sentence. Thus, a freelance editor will want to give you feedback so that you may make the suggested revisions.

Specify whether you would prefer feedback on hard copy (usually a little cheaper, if the editor charges by the hour) or as parenthetical comments on a computer document. Do be prepared for the editor to insist upon the former, since it is so easy to transfer computer viruses through attachments.

If the editor works in hard copy, expect to print it out yourself, rather than e-mailing it and having the editor print it for you.

5a. If you plan to submit in soft copy, what kind of word processing program do you use, with what operating system?
This is important to include, for the sake of attachments. The industry standard is MS Word, so you should definitely tell a potential editor up front if you use anything else.

It’s NEVER a good idea to assume that anyone who deals in manuscripts for a living — and this includes agents and editors at publishing houses — is using the same operating system you are. To minimize the probability of translation problems, save Word documents in Rich Text Format before sending them. (It’s one of the format choices under the SAVE AS… menu.)

6. What is the manuscript’s submission history?
Has it been seen by many agents? Publishing houses? A particularly vicious writers’ group? No one but your dear old white-headed mother?

Having this information up front will assist the editor in assessing what your manuscript needs and answering your questions, as well as giving you a common language to discuss the project in question. (Not to mention making the freelancer think spontaneously, “Oh, thank goodness: this one isn’t vague. What a welcome change!”)

7. Do you have any specific goals in mind for your next revision?
If you feel you need to chop 200 pages from your 600-page manuscript, this is the time to mention it. Ditto if you seek to make your manuscript fit more comfortably to your chosen book category, are trying to render it more marketable to agents, or have had agents tell you your premise is implausible.

8. Will you also want the editor to help you polish your query letter and/or synopsis, or to suggest agents who might be interested in this particular book?
Not all freelancers will do any of the above, but it’s worth asking if it’s a possibility.

Seems like a lot to think about before approaching a pro, doesn’t it? Well, it is — but if I have one principle in life, it’s not to waste the time of people who charge by the hour.

During your preliminary interactions, you’re going to want to ask questions, too. Your goal here should be to elicit enough information to make substantive (and not merely cost-based) distinctions between the editors you’re interviewing, so get specific with the questions. Some good ones to get you started:

1. Does the freelancer have a genre specialty?

2. How much experience does s/he have with your book category?

3. What does s/he read for fun?

4. What is her average turn-around time for a book-length project?

5. Does s/he write in the margins, or prefer giving feedback electronically, in the text itself?

6. Does s/he provide a write-up about the book instead or in addition to marginalia?

7. Does s/he charge extra for follow-up questions? (Most pros do.)

8. Does s/he require a deposit to reserve time in advance, and what is his or her policy on refunds if a pre-scheduled project is canceled? Will there be any additional charge if you need to push back your scheduled manuscript delivery date?

Ask, too, about her availability. Don’t be surprised if she’s booked a few months in advance; although there are sometimes last-minute cancellations, the more experience an editor has, generally speaking, the less likely a brand-new client is to be able to book her time within the next month.

Rest assured, none of this is pushy; it’s is perfectly acceptable to ask a potential editor about her background, methodology, and policies. If she’s brand-new to editing, these questions may surprise her, but most of this information is standard first-meeting stuff.

Don’t be surprised if the editor who sounds like a great fit suddenly turns a bit cagey on the subject of references. It may not be by choice: it’s not uncommon for published authors and even merely the agented to be rather secretive about using the services of a freelance editor.

I’m quite serious about this: my work is hardly sub rosa, given how much I write about it here, but some of my clients’ agents and publishers would be fairly astonished to learn of my existence. Some published authors don’t even thank their personal editors in their acknowledgments.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to find out how experienced any editor you approach actually is, particularly in the current slow economy: published authors with no editorial experience whatsoever do occasionally out their shingles as book doctors. Sometimes, these folks are talented feedback-givers, but do be aware that the mere fact of having a book or story in print doesn’t necessarily guarantee that.

Why? Well, think about it: since the published generally have agents and editors looking over their manuscripts, telling them what to change, they may not have much experience editing even their own work. And as any professional editor, freelance or otherwise, would me more than happy to tell you in confidence, plenty of books come to publication only after a whole lot of in-house editorial assistance.

Instead of requesting references, consider asking if she would edit 5 or 10 pages as a work sample before you commit to a longer project. Most freelancers will do this happily, given sufficient advance notice, but do expect to pay full price for their time. (For a glimpse at average rates nationally, click here.)

An editing sample will give you considerably more information about how the editor works — and, after all, fit between editor and client is EXTREMELY important. An editor — freelance or otherwise — not familiar with the norms of your book category can actually harm your end product, and since everyone gives feedback slightly differently, it will save you both time and money in the long run if you do some comparison shopping to find someone who can give you professional-level feedback in the manner that will be easiest for you to incorporate it into your book.

It’s also a rather straightforward way for the shy to gain a sense of precisely how any given editor likes to approach a manuscript, what services he provides, and how much each part of it will cost. It’s worth your time to make some rate comparisons, if only to find what the local prevailing rates are.

Do be prepared, though, to pay the local market rates for what you expect to get, not only because it is fair, but also because many experienced freelancers will walk away from a negotiation if they feel that a potential client is trying to haggle down to the very last second. (Since post-service haggling is not unheard-of, most freelance editors require clients to sign a contract.)

If you encounter a freelancer who seems to be charging too little, be wary. An inexperienced editor might well not be aware yet how long giving feedback can take, and thus under-price himself — but a low price may also be an indication of an experienced editor who habitually gives minimal feedback, relying on volume to make a living. At both ends of the spectrum, then, it makes a great deal of sense to ask for a very specific indication of what to expect from the feedback.

If you’re genuinely not sure what the kind of editing you would like to receive should cost, consider posting your project on a freelance editors’ association’s job board and asking for bids. (The Northwest Independent Editors’ Guild has a dandy job board, very easy to use.) Be sure to include the full list of preliminary information above (okay, you can save the bit about how much you’ve shopped the book around until a later communication), and don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions of those who respond.

Do I hear some put-upon sighs out there? “But Anne,” some harried souls cry, “isn’t the point of this to make my life EASIER? Tracking down a good freelance editor sounds like almost as much work as pulling together a list of agents to query!”

Well, not quite, but admittedly, finding the right editor for you may take a bit of searching beyond just checking who charges what, or even what credentials various candidates have. It involves taking the time to find an editor who loves your kind of book and who has the skills to make your manuscript the best it can possibly be.

Ultimately, though, a good fit is worth the effort. When it comes right down to it, your work is too important to go into ANY critique relationship blindly. Just as you don’t want any random agent to represent you, regardless of sales record, trust me, you don’t want just ANY freelance editor to advise you about your book. (Or just any writers’ group, for that matter.)

Tomorrow, I’ll talk a bit about why enlisting a pro’s help might be a good idea, along with some indication of what you should and shouldn’t expect. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part IV: research and other tools you can use to narrow (and, ideally, shorten) your agent search

For the past couple of days, I’ve been talking about the strategic desirability of keeping abreast of what’s being published lately in the book category in which one has chosen to write — in particular, what first-time authors in your area are managing to get into print these days. While what hit the shelves at Barnes & Noble last week isn’t necessarily an infallible indicator of what agents and editors want to see right now — it’s often a year or two between a manuscript’s sale to a publisher and when it comes out, and often a year or several before that when that manuscript got picked up by an agent, so what’s new at B&N is reflective of what these discerning folks wanted then — reading the current releases can give you a strong general sense of what these folks consider good writing in your genre.

Besides, how else are you going to figure out how your book is different and better than what’s already out there, an essential set of information for pulling together a stellar query, pitch, or book proposal, if you aren’t familiar with what iS already out there?

Gaining familiarity with, say, the last five years’ worth of first releases in your category will also enable you to glean a working impression of what’s old hat and what’s hot, what might be considered fresh and what just weird in a new submission. Agents see a LOT of queries and submissions that seem derivative of the latest bestseller in a book category — or, even more commonly, a bestseller from two, five, or even ten years ago. And the sad thing is, in many of these cases, the submitting writer didn’t even borrow on purpose; they just knew so little about the current market for that category that they thought the bestseller was the category.

Don’t laugh — plenty of writers stumble into seeming derivative by accident. Independently writing a book that’s very, very similar to something that’s hit the market and failing to mention its uncanny resemblance to that book is a mistake that’s scuttled many a good query.

Or, to put it as uncharitably as critics as long ago as Samuel Johnson (who probably didn’t actually say this; it’s been attributed to a whole lot of editors over the years) have: “Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that’s good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

Ouch.

Frankly, it used to be easier for fledgling writers to follow their respective markets than it is now. We hear about the potential bestsellers, of course, but smaller books garner less attention than in days of yore. Publishing houses have been cutting down on promotion in recent years, particularly of first books, and many newspapers have been cutting way back or even eliminating their book review sections.

Why, I read only the other day that even National Public Radio is planning on cutting one of its fine book-discussion shows. When even NPR and PBS start to doubt the future of the book, the barbarians are not only at the writer’s gate; they’ve pulled up chairs and are sharing our dinner.

Now, I happen to believe in the future of the book — yes, even the book that isn’t a bestseller. Mid-list books, the ones that sold not spectacularly but consistently, used to be considered the backbone of the industry, after all. I just think — and admittedly, this is a lulu of a just — that the combination of a slow economy and the rise of the Internet means that the traditional means of selling books aren’t working as well as they have in the past.

But that doesn’t mean that the book is dead; it’s perfectly obvious that people haven’t simply stopped reading, any more than folks like us have stopped writing. The rise of the blogosphere alone proves that. Publishers are going to need to figure out new ways to convince readers to buy their products — or to change how readers pay for it. (There have been some exciting experiments lately in sponsorship for serialized e-books, for instance.)

While they’re figuring that out, I’ve a modest proposal: the English-speaking world is rife with aspiring writers, and the vast majority of us are inveterate readers. Millions of us. We may not be able to change profitability trends by ourselves or overnight, but if all of us bumped up our book-buying habits just a little and kept at it, the cumulative effect could be considerable.

Or, to put it bluntly: if you want to live in a world where it’s profitable to sell books, buy some. And if you want to live in a world where publishers, and thus agents, are willing to take chances on first-time authors of books like yours, buy books like yours by first-time authors.

Admittedly, however, this practice can add up into some serious dosh pretty fast — which is why, in case you were wondering, so many professional writers regard buying recent releases in their own books’ categories as market research, a legitimate business expense, and claim it as such on their Schedule Cs. (Word of warning: I am not a qualified tax advisor and I don’t know your particular situation, so do have a nice chat with someone who is and does — ideally, someone with experience in artists’ taxes — before you start deducting anything.)

So why not, as I have been suggesting for some days now, place the relevant volumes on your wish list so that those who are just aching to buy you presents (like, say, our old pal, the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver) can help float those authors’ boats, too? Everybody wins — including you, because it’s just about the least costly means of getting your mittens on the books you really should be reading in order to market your writing effectively.

But enough of the more depressing reasons that investing in books in your category is a good idea. Let’s move hastily on to another, more immediately practical reason to get in touch with one’s submarket and remain so, one much dearer to the hearts of most agent-seekers than any I mentioned yesterday.

It’s a great way to identify agents to query. Better than that, it’s also a great way to find out what warms a particular agent’s heart.

Because while, as I spent the late summer and early fall arguing in this very forum that there’s no such thing as a query or submission that will please every single agent on the planet, there is substantial empirical evidence that every agent on the planet is at least a little bit flattered by queries that begin,

Since you so successfully represented Unknown Author’s recent novel, FIRST BOOK, I hope you will be interested in my novel, PROJECT I’VE BEEN WORKING ON FOR A DECADE…

Obviously, to pull of this particular bit of strategic flattery, it helps to be familiar with Unknown Author’s work. If only there were a way to do that…oh, wait; I’ve just spent the last couple of days discussing that very issue.

Fortuitous, eh?

Note that I’m suggesting mentioning a less-known or first-time author upon whom the agent took a chance, rather than merely finding out who an agent’s best-selling client is and praising her to the skies. They are far likely to be buttered up, I’ve found, by mentions of novels them may have struggled to sell than by similar references to their better-established clients.

It’s not very difficult to use this pervasive quirk to your advantage in a query letter. Perhaps because, as Edith Sitwell tells us: “The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.”

(Had I mentioned that I still have a backlog of apt quotes to use up?)

To slather on the butter with an even more lavish hand, go ahead and say something nice about the book in your query letter to its agent. According to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, “We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.”

Naturally, the buttering-up process is going to be a whole lot easier to pull of if you have actually read the book in question. Although truth does compel me to say that if you are in a hurry, you can’t go far wrong with something along the lines of, “As the agent who so ably represented Keanu Reeves’ BRAIN SURGERY FOR EVERYBODY, I believe you will be interested in my book…” even if your sole contact with this impressive volume was seeing it on a list of Mssr. Reeves’ agent’s clients.

That being said, on conscientious grounds, I really should reiterate that you ought to read, if not actually buy (or urge your FNDGG to buy for you), all of the books you are using as launching pads for query letters to agents. Don’t even think of formulating a substantive praise for an unread book, even if you lift that praise directly from The New York Times Review of Books. Too many would be butterers-up have found themselves being asked, “So, what did you like about that book?” by an agent who devoted years of her life to promoting it.

Trust me, she’ll be able to tell if you’re faking an opinion.

If you can at all afford it, do try to buy these books, though. Indirectly, it’s in your self-interest: after all, the sales of an agent’s current clients subsidize hiring Millicent to screen submissions from new writers, right? And while agents’ literary tastes do vary widely, they do inexplicably all share a taste for readers actually purchasing their clients’ work.

Must be the effect of close proximity on the collective mind, much like that strange phenomenon often noted by conference-attending writers where the mere fact of sitting on a dais with other agents and editors will apparently cause them all to tell an expectant audience of the would-be published exactly the same things about querying and submission, rather than emphasizing how their tastes differ, which would actually be far more useful to attendees trying to figure out which of the throng to approach for pitching purposes.

Perhaps famous salonnaire Marguerite-Louise-Virginie Chardon Ancelot was presciently thinking of the collective opinions of those who promote books when she wrote, “It can be said of the society of salons that not one person exactly resembles another. Nevertheless, there is so little difference, it being like the leaves of a tree that are not exactly the same, yet seem all alike.”

Another reason to buy books written by the agent of your dreams’ more obscure clients is the good karma factor. As I MAY have pointed out earlier in this very post, the world would be a substantially better place for writers if we supported one another by purchasing books by first-time authors early and often.

Who can forget Glückel of Hamelyn’s 1719 pronouncement, “Stinginess does not enrich; charity does not impoverish”?

However, good old Glückel aside, I know that some of you will need to rely upon the library for your pre-buttering-up research. That can be pretty time-consuming — and not always sufficient, because although the print-on-demand market is becoming increasingly important, both for self-publishers and small presses, many libraries still refuse to purchase POD books at all, as a matter of policy.

So here are a few tips on how to expand your reading list without buying out Borders or hiding from its staff while you carefully read books for sale without bending their pages. As Zora Neale Hurston liked to put it, “research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prodding with a purpose.”

First, you don’t need to until a book is actually published before complimenting it agent on the achievement of selling it. Given predictable lag times between book contract and actual publication, you may be able to spot a relevant sale as much as two years before it turns up in a bookstore near you.

So in a sense, even a very hip bookstore is a graveyard of passé contracts. (As Mary Webb informed us in PRECIOUS BANE, “We are tomorrow’s past.”) As I mentioned at the top of this post, what you are seeing in bookstores today, then, is not necessarily what is selling NOW.

And, as I sense dimly that I may not be the first to point out, the early bird catches the worm. By querying the agent BEFORE the book comes out, you will beat the crowd of writers who inevitably swamp the agent of any commercially big book. (Sorry, no quote for that one. This is harder than it looks, people.)

Also, your promptness will tell the agent indirectly that you are a savvy writer familiar with market trends — and you will become one, if you become a regular reader of book sales. It is surprisingly addictive, if a bit depressing at the moment, and you will quickly learn a great deal about what is and is not being sold to publishing houses right now.

How does one pull this off, you ask? Start reading the trade journals, such as Publishers’ Weekly, or subscribe to Publishers Marketplace, which lists pretty much every sale to a North American publishing house, by title, author, agent, and often a one-line description of the book as well.

Neither subscription is very cheap — but hey, isn’t that what hints to one’s FNDGG are for?

A fringe benefit to reading either source habitually: many times, these sources will give a general indication of the advance offered, too, so you can start getting some idea of what your writing is potentially worth in the happy event that you do sell a book in the current market. (Spoiler alert: pretty much every aspiring writer believes that the average advance is exponentially larger than it actually is. Especially these days.)

To quote my former agent, “We don’t really have any idea of a book’s market value until we start to shop it around.” (Come on — you expected me to have a famously relevant quote ready for that one?)

If you are a novelist, pay particular attention to the debut novels, which are often broken off into their own section in industry listings. Again, there is no better way to tell which agents are willing to take on new writers than to find out who is putting that inspiring level of openness into action.

If any or all of this seems anti-artistically practical to you, consider what George Eliot told us in ADAM BEDE, “It you could make a pudding wi’thinking o’ the batter, it ‘ud be easy getting dinner.”

Hard to argue with that.

Keeping abreast of who is selling what will also allow you to target your queries more effectively as agents’ (and agencies’) tastes change over time — a phenomenon which, I am sad to report, is not always reflected promptly in the standard agency guide listings (which often remain un-updated for years on end) or even on agency websites (which tend to be updated seldom). Acquiring the laudable habit of comparing what these sources say particular agents are looking to represent with the same preferences as the agents themselves are currently describing them at writers’ conferences and their blurbs in conference guides will also help you keep on top of who to send what when.

The more current the information you can dig up, the better.

Since a pre-publication query is a situation where you could not possibly have read the book before querying (unless you happen to be a member of the author’s critique group), you need not worry about complimenting the book; by noticing the sale, you will be complimenting the AGENT, which is even better.

In fact, you should make sure NOT to compliment the book, since anything you say is bound to come across as insincere. Has not Pearl S. Buck taught us that “Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame”?

A good all-purpose opening, to steer clear of the slightest hint of misdirected flattery:

Congratulations on your successful sale of BOOK X! Since you so skillfully represent (BOOK X’s type of book), I hope you will be interested in my book…

Yes, learning to be this talented an agent-butterer does take time, as well as quite a bit of work. But unlike so many of the mundane tasks aspiring writers need to perform to attract an agent’s attention in a tight market, forming the twin habits of reading what’s newly in your area and keeping abreast of what editors are acquiring right now for your future reading pleasure will not merely be helpful in blandishing the agent of your dreams into taking a gander at your work. These are habits that will help you in later years be a more marketable — and perhaps even better — author, well versed in all of the pretty things writers in your category can do to enchant their readers.

“Unhappiness,” Bernadin de Saint-Pierre wrote in THE INDIAN HUT, “is like the black mountain of Bember, at the edge of the blazing kingdom of Lahor. As long as you are climbing it, you see nothing but sterile rocks; but once you are at the peak, heaven is at your head, and at your feet is the kingdom of Cashmere.”

Try to think of all this self-assigned reading as continuing education for your dream profession. Asking for these books might not have been your first impulse when you sat on Santa’s lap this year, but it would be a good, strategic second thought.

Speaking of gift lists, I shall be moving on to a new section of mine next time — and you’ll be happy to hear that I’m all quoted out for now. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 6 Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part III: the graveyard of book contracts past, or, a few more good reasons to buy books by first-time authors, and still more evidence that a little contact with a book of quotations goes a long way

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part III: the graveyard of book contracts past, or, a few more good reasons to buy books by first-time authors, and still more evidence that a little contact with a book of quotations goes a long way

Looks like the aftermath of a major flood in Mouseville, doesn’t it? When I first caught sight of the scene, I instinctively glanced about to check if Anderson Cooper were reporting nearby, wet to the knees and disapproving.

Apparently, I am the mayor of poor, flooded Mouseville, because I took this picture about a foot and a half from where I am now sitting, inside my house. I came by the position honestly, I assure you: after my tirade the other day about the vital importance of good lighting in a midwinter writing space, the proverbial bee seems to have remained in my bonnet, buzzily nagging — nay, demanding — that I move my studio to the brightest room in the house in genteel protest of the notorious darkness of a Seattle winter and the news in the last few issues of Publishers Weekly.

As the far and away the brightest room in our house is also the biggest, the living room/library (so designated to differentiate it from the bedroom/library, kitchen/library, laundry room/library, etc.; see yesterday’s comment about serious writers always owning more books than shelves to house them), I was anticipating having to lobby my SO for the rest of the year to pull this off — by which time, of course, the darkest part of the year would be beginning to recede. However, in an odd twist that would be absolutely implausible in a novel, the very seasonal darkness of which I had been complaining abruptly made my case for me: my SO saw some doubtless light-craving soul jump off one of our region’s less lovely bridges the other day.

He’s been busily rearranging furniture in the ex-living room/library ever since. Heck, he even made an unprompted trip to Ikea for another bookshelf.

Fortunately, unlike most bits of real-life melodrama that don’t seem real on the page, the story of the jumper has ending rather an ancient Greek tragedy, complete with deus ex machina: at the particular moment the hapless jumper chose to end it all on that distinctly unpretty bridge (as opposed to the far more popular choice of suicidal aesthetes on the other side of town), an unoccupied ambulance happened to be trying to merge into the traffic jam on the bridge. If he had jumped directly into the ambulance, rather than off the bridge first, he probably would have been happier in the long run, but still, I hope that he will someday be grateful that King County evidently had the foresight to hire at least one psychic ambulance driver.

Just another service brought to you by the local New Age ordinances, presumably; we must have them. My proof: in yet another development that would make any hardened novel or memoir-reader snort with derision, I saw in the newspaper the other day that many Seattle City Council meetings open with a poetry reading.

If you have seen the poetry local government sees fit to post on buses, you are probably already trembling for democracy. Still, it’s kind of great to live in a town so stuffed to the gills with poets that there is actual competition over who gets appointed to be this month’s official City Poetry Curator.

In anticipation of a shiny new bookcase and the dislocation of my desk, my SO and I were gruntingly shifting the God-awful 1950s dresser his sainted grandmother had seen fit to bequeath to us. Until now, sentimental recollections had gilded the sublime hideousness of its multicolored veneer: Granny used to store her beloved Bible and handgun side-by-side in it.

A fact I discovered inadvertently years ago while helping her move, in case you’re curious. I had thought the revolver was a toy, the property of one of the grandchildren playing in the next room, until I picked it up — and realized that it was both real and loaded. Evidently, the phrase gun safe had never sullied Granny’s ears until I uttered them that day. If the words Communist plot featured prominently in her reply, well, far be it from me to speak ill of the dead.

Suffice it to say that before this enlightening discussion had unfolded far, I got the kids out of there, pronto.

For a variety of reasons, then, this particular dresser had slumbered for years under an embroidered tablecloth a globe-trotting friend had been kind enough to send me from Bangladesh shortly after Granny’s death, never moved and seldom even having its drawers opened. The discovery that our cats had been using it as a sarcophagus for the much-chewed remains of their furry toys thus seemed eerily appropriate.

For hours after we unearthed this mousy Valley of the Kings, the kitties prowled around protectively, snarling at us when we tried to discard the most decomposed of them. Clearly, that dresser had a preoccupation with death, and who can blame it, after the life it’s led?

I’m happy to say that it is no longer in the house — and that I have both a sunnier place to work and slightly more storage space for my books.

Speaking of which, last time, I was touting the virtues of getting into the habit of reading every (or as close to every as possible) first book published in your book category this year…and next year, and the year after that. Not only will adherence to this sterling practice give an aspiring writer a very solid sense of how editors and agents conceive of the category — thus rendering it easier to tell whether one’s work genuinely falls within it, a question that plagues many genre-crossers — but it will help develop a sense of one’s target readership as well.

Perhaps the lingering billows of dust from all that furniture moving have temporarily clogged my psychic antennae, but somehow, I felt that this sterling argument left some of you unconvinced yesterday. So I’m going to spend today elaborating.

Sometimes the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver requires more cajoling than others.

Reading the entire literary output of new authors in a particular subsection of the market may seem like a gargantuan task to some of you, but most of you have no serious reason for trepidation: the majority of book categories actually sport relatively few first-time authors in any year’s harvest of publications.

Yes, Virginia, even in the fairly large categories.

Let me share a deep, dark secret from my past: back in my thankfully long ago agent-seeking days, I made a practice of reading every first literary or mainstream novel written by an American woman under 40 published by a major US publishing house each year. Care to guess how long that took?

I wish I could report that it was a full-time job, but in truth, it wasn’t all that time-consuming. There were few years where more then 25 books answered that description; one year, there were only 7, counting new Canadian female authors. And those 7 were represented by only 3 agencies, I discovered.

Guess whom I queried the instant I uncovered THAT unsavory little fact?

The realization could have made me despair — but instead, it convinced me to sit down and take a good, hard look at the novel I was shopping around, to see if there was any way that I could legitimately make it appeal to readers of more book categories, because that opened up so many more querying possibilities. And sure enough, after I had taken most of the semicolons out of the text and readjusted the thought/action ratio a little, I found that my novel was about equally welcome to agents who represented adult fiction, women’s fiction, and literary fiction — which makes some sense, as there is considerable overlap amongst the readers of all three.

Heck, literary fiction aimed at women is considered downright redundant in some circles of the industry, since college-educated women form about 90% of literary fiction buyers.

And yet the burly writings of Phillip Roth continue to sell well. Yet another cosmic mystery. As that marketing genius Jacqueline Susann once said, “I think Phillip Roth is a great writer. But I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.” (Had I mentioned that I dug up far, far more quotes yesterday than I could ever hope to work into a single post?)

Unless a writer became awfully darned familiar with the book market, how is s/he to know that a book category filled with so many prominent male authors boasts such a largely female readership? Or that literary fiction by women featuring female protagonists is often marketed not as literary fiction, a comparatively tiny market, but as what agents like to call women’s fiction with a literary voice because the women’s fiction market is so huge?

Quoth Queen Marie Leckzinska, wife of Louis XV: “To live in peace with socieity, you must open your eyes to the qualities that are pleasing and close them to to the ludicrous and eccentric that are offensive.”

Hey, she said it; I didn’t.

Following the ever-changing boundaries of one’s chosen book category is only one of the many benefits of reading all of the first-time authors within it, of course. It’s substantially easier to produce something fresh if you know what agents and editors who represent your kind of book have been reading over the past couple of years. How about learning the current conventions of one’s genre, what’s now considered de rigeur and what’s now passé?

While you’re out snooping, why not do some research on what kind of voice have been selling of late, and which eschewed as old-fashioned? Are the Point-of-View Nazis enjoying a resurgence in your selected category, or have they fallen out of fashion? How long are first books in that category these days?

I hesitate to mention length, because it tends to be a sore spot with many aspiring writers. Don’t believe me? Okay, the next time you find yourself at an agents’ or editors’ forum at a conference, stand up and ask how many pages is too long for a submission. Even if the pros are very kind in expressing the answer, the subsequent depression amongst half the audience will be palpable — and most of the time, the writer grumbling in the row behind you will not be muttering that the limits are too high.

In answer to that inquisitive whimper I just heard out in the ether and the giant unshouted question that I suspect underlies it, the long answer is that I’ve written at length on this subject under the BOOK LENGTH category on the list on the right-hand side of this page.

The short answer: in general, 65,000 – 100,000 words — estimated, not actual — or 260 – 400 pages in standard format, is considered roughly normal for a first book. (If you don’t know how or why to estimate a word count, please see the WORD COUNT category on the list at right. If you’re unfamiliar with the restrictions of standard format for manuscripts, please see MANUSCRIPT FORMATTING 101 or STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED.)

To forestall any imminent heart problems out there, let me hasten to add that length expectations do vary quite a bit by category, genre, and even subgenre. Checking how long first books like yours are lately can save you a whole lot of uncertainty at revision time.

Am I hearing some long-suffering sighs out there? I know; that was a lot of heavy information to toss at you in a single post at the height of holiday season. I have more to say on this subject, but I’m going to sign off for today, to give you some time to digest all of this — or, for those of you whom I have already convinced of the value of stocking up on new works by first-time authors in your area, to scurry off to make a wish list for your FNDGG.

To lighten your hearts a bit before I go, let me just take a second to add: as Francis Bacon wrote so long ago, knowledge is power. In few areas of life is this as true as often as during the querying and submission stages of a writer’s career — because as painful as it may be to accept, scads of queries are rejected on sight because the book is miscategorized or sent to an agent who doesn’t represent that type of book; literally tons of manuscripts are rejected every year because they seem dated or repeat something that’s been done before or are just too long or short by current standards.

How can knowing all that make you more powerful in a situation that often seems arbitrary to aspiring writers? By spurring you to learn about the category in which you are writing, so you may market your work and revise it more effectively. That’s knowledge that can genuinely help you reduce your manuscript’s chances of rejection.

A bit depressing? Perhaps. Time-consuming? Definitely. It’s not for nothing that Lawrence Kasden said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

But isn’t your writing’s success worth it?

More thoughts on this subject follow tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part II: shelves and the things that go on them

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part II: shelves and the things that go on them

Last time, I began suggesting some ways in which the holiday habits of that seasonally-ubiquitous jolly fellow, the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver, might be turned via gentle hints toward the consideration of items and services of genuine long-term use to the committed writer. Admittedly, I began by shooting high: what’s wrong, I asked innocently, with giving a writer time and space to write? Happy the writer whose kith and kin understand her well enough to gather behind her back whilst she’s baking cookies to say, “You know what Gertrude would REALLY like this year? A week without any obligations, so she could finally finish her novel/memoir/definitive history of drainage in 17th-century Ireland!”

I suspect that I don’t have to elaborate for any working writer about precisely how and why Gertrude would be cryingly grateful for such a present. After all, “(l)ife together,” as George Sand wrote, “is the ideal of happiness for those who love each other; but each thinking soul also needs time for solitude and contemplation.”

So true, George, so true — but I’d be willing to bet this handful of change in my pocket that 95% of the writers reading this have never even discussed the possibility of a retreat with even their nearest and dearest. There’s good reason for that, of course, at least amongst those of us who were not raised by wolves. Let’s face it, it’s just not considered polite to answer the perennial (and rather uncreative, I’ve always thought) question, “What do you want for Christmas?” with a heartfelt howl of, “Are you kidding? Leave me alone so I may get some writing done!”

Even if that is, in fact, what you would like to receive for Christmas. Or any other time, really.

Next week, as promised, I’m going to talk a bit more about how to clear time and space for one’s writing. (Just in time for New Year’s resolution-making, you point out? Why, what a remarkable coincidence!) For today, I’m going to content myself with brainstorming about a few less pricey ways writers’ FNDGGs may bring joy and practical assistance to them throughout the year.

I’m tempted to go all prosaic here and suggest asking for bookshelves — because, honestly, have you ever known a serious writer who didn’t possess more volumes than shelves to house them? As Jean-Paul Sartre was known to observe, “In reality, people read because they want to write. Anyway, reading is a sort of rewriting.”

At least for the many submitters who continue to work on their manuscripts after they’ve already sent them off to an agent or editor, J-P. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of times I’ve heard agents complain over the years about clients who keep sending them a revised page 147 or 236 every few weeks to insert into an already-circulating manuscript. (In case you’re curious about how to pass along subsequent revisions to your agent after you sign, the accepted method is — brace yourselves — to send a whole new copy of the manuscript.)

To return to my larger point, we tend to be hard-core readers, bless our collective heart, which is in and of itself something to consider during present-buying binges. If you’ve been paying attention to even a fraction of the news coming out of the publishing industry lately, you’ll have heard that major publishers across the English-speaking world have been announcing that they’re laying off staff.

“The profession of book-writing,” John Steinbeck once wrote, “makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business.” Can’t imagine why that little snippet should come to mind right now.

Unless anyone out there reading this happens to be a billionaire with a weakness for literature, literally the only thing most of us who write can do to help ameliorate this appalling situation is to get out there and buy some books. Ideally, books by still-living authors who write in our respective book categories.

Why? Well, if you want to live in a world where publishers are eager to buy books like yours, it only makes sense to convey that preference through buying them yourself, right? Perhaps I am intolerant because I come from a family of writers, but I have no patience with aspiring writers who don’t support the market for the kinds of books they write themselves. If aspiring writers won’t buy books in the genres in which they hope eventually to publish, who will?

Well, possibly their FNDGGs, if those writers sit them down and explain clearly and carefully that the only means of convincing bigwigs at publishing houses that it’s profitable to publish a particular type of book is for lots and lots of people to buy that type of book. Not to mention the obvious benefits to the aspiring if buyers go out of their way to purchase books by first-time authors in that category.

Seriously, wouldn’t you be more pleased to receive a good book in your category by a new author than one of those ubiquitous gift books containing quotations about writing that FNDGGs always seem to be stuffing into aspiring writers’ stockings? Because, as Groucho Marx once observed, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

(In the unlikely event that you hadn’t already noticed, on the off chance that anyone reading this one of those perennially epigraph-hunters who can’t get enough of that kind of collection, I’ve been cramming as many inspiring quotes into this post as humanly possible. No charge.)

There are many other excellent reasons to buy recently-released books in the category in which you have chosen to write, of course. Learning who your competition will be, for one, and what they are offering your target audience. Finding out what the agents and editors who habitually work with authors in that category think is good writing, as well as building up a list of who those agents and editors are.

And last but certainly not least, keeping up with what is being published right now, as opposed to five or ten years ago. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard agents and editors complain about aspiring writers’ not being familiar with the current market, as opposed to what was hot ten years ago. Contrary to popular belief, the species or even quality of writing that may have caused your all-time favorite author to ricochet to fame and fortune fifteen or twenty years ago will not necessarily turn heads at agencies and publishing houses today if it did not have an already-established author’s name attached to it.

And the tighter the book market gets, the more likely that is to be true, because an established author already has name recognition with the target market for her next book.

Because the market is ever-changing (and will probably be mutating even more rapidly than usual over the next year or two), it’s vital to keep refreshing one’s understanding of what is in fact current. What attracts an agent or editor today will not necessarily garner praise a year from now — again, unless an author with a proven track record happens to have produced it.

Which is precisely why it’s in your interest to keep abreast of what kind of writing, storyline, structure, etc. has been helping first-time authors in your selected category break into the biz over the last couple of years, not just what the big names have been producing. It’s just too easy for an aspiring writer who doesn’t keep up with his genre’s internal trends to forget whilst hiking the querying-and-submission trail that it honestly does take more courage on the part of an agent to sign a previously unpublished writer than a published one, just as it requires more bravery for an editor to take a chance on a brand-new writer than upon the 17th work by a well-recognized name.

Why? Because “courage,” as playwright Ruth Gordon informed us all, “is like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.”

This is why, in case you were wondering, those of us who have been in the biz for a while cringe when we hear an aspiring writer say, “Well, my book is at least as good as the rest of the junk out there.” The standard against which a new writer’s work is held is not that of the current market for established writers, but considerably above it.

Don’t believe me? Try this little experiment: read five books by first-time authors in your chosen book category that have come out within the last year. (Better yet, buy them, or get your FNDGG to buy them for you.) Then go and take a gander at what the time-honored leaders of the genre have put out lately.

Ask yourself: do they honestly seem to be edited, let alone written, to the same standard?

Another reason to keep an eye on publications by authors new to your chosen category is to gather information for approaching their agents. The logic is a trifle convoluted, but stick with me here.

As I’m sure you’re already aware (I’m fairly certain that I’ve mentioned it within the last few months), the vast majority of books sold to publishers each year in this country are written by the already-published. Why? Well, they have a verifiable history of selling books.

Before you take offense at that, be honest: in the last five years, how often have you bought a book by first-time authors? Not only in your chosen book category, but at all?

Okay, what about ones you don’t know personally, or who haven’t won major awards?

Readers tend to gravitate toward names they know — and bookstores encourage the practice. Unless the author is a celebrity in another medium or a politician, books by new authors are substantially less likely to be placed in a prominent position in a chain bookstore. Certainly, they are less likely to be place face-out on the bookshelf, a placement which increases that probability of being browsed considerably).

Naturally, this results in sales statistics that show very plainly that overall, established authors sell far, far better than new ones.

So — don’t worry; the payoff is coming — your chances of getting picked up by an agent are higher if you already know that particular agent has been successful selling a first-timer like yourself. You know, at any rate, that the agent has been exceptionally brave at least once.

As Helen Keller was apparently wont to say, “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” Are you listening, agents?

Because the agent who compulsively sells first novels is something of a rarity, let me once again urge you to draw a firm distinction in your mind between agents whose listings in the standard agents’ guides SAY they are open to queries from previously unpublished writers, and those who have a successful RECENT HISTORY of selling first books. In this market, that takes not only courage, but commitment and talent.

As Abigail Adams seems to have written to her troublemaking husband in 1774, “We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.” Amen, Abby!

To be fair, agents — the successful ones, anyway — only take on what they’re pretty sure they can sell. As anyone in the industry will tell you at great length after he’s had a few drinks (oh, like it’s accidental that writers’ conferences almost always take place in hotels with bars in them…As Agnes Repplier was prone to say, and even wrote in 1891’s POINTS OF VIEW, “If a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariable credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.”), a first book, unless it is written by a celebrity, is quite a bit harder for an agent to pitch to an editor than a second or third. On average, less than 4% of the fiction published in any given year is by first-time authors.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you. But as the already-quoted George Sand apparently wrote to some friend of hers in 1863, “Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.’” Or, if you prefer Thomas Jefferson, “We must not be afraid to follow the truth, wherever it may lead.”

I’m sure I could find a dozen more quotes on the subject if I really took a spade to the Bartlett’s, but I’m sure you catch my drift.

Speaking of which, I seem to have drifted away from the subject of great gifts for writers, haven’t I ? Here’s one that might help add impetus to your writing career: wouldn’t it be nice if your FNDGG sprung for some really nice (say, 20-pound or heavier) paper for your next spate of submissions?

High-quality paper is worth the investment: pages that don’t wilt as it gets passed from Millicent to Millicent tends to get taken more seriously, believe it or not; it’s not even unheard-of for agents to resubmit manuscripts that they’ve already circulated to other editors.

Or what about a lovely box of those Manilla envelopes we writers are always using to send out short stories and partial manuscripts, not to mention tucking into other Manilla envelopes as SASEs? They’re not very expensive, but I know a lot of writers who would feel that such a gift was awfully darned supportive. Especially if it happened to arrive wrapped up with a roll of stamps.

Oh, you expected me to come up with a quote appropriate for that? Okay, try this one on for size: as Gertrude Stein wrote, “Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is frightening.”

I think that’s a terrific motto for anyone who has anything to do with the current literary market — aspiring writers, established writers, agents, Millicents, editors, marketers, you name it. Trying to sell a book at any level is absurdly difficult for everyone concerned these days, but hasn’t that always been true, to a certain extent? After all, the vast majority of writers who have landed agents and publishing contracts have had their work rejected dozens upon dozens — if not hundreds upon hundreds — of times over their professional lifetimes. Including yours truly and, in all likelihood, that well-established bigwig who broke into the market twenty years ago. We kept ploughing ahead until the NYC publishing types started to take us seriously.

Maya Angelou wrote, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” And Tallulah Bankhead claimed, “If I had to live my life again, I’d make all the same mistakes — only sooner.”

What on earth do I mean to demonstrate by throwing those two quite unrelated quotes into close proximity? Either that (a) all of the work required to get recognized as a writer is genuinely soul-trying for pretty much everyone who makes it, but you can learn a lot along the way, (b) practically without exception, everyone who already has an agent is deeply, deeply grateful not to have to go through THAT ongoing trauma again, and/or (c) tearing a whole lot of quotes out of context and presenting them to the hapless reader may not be all that useful an exercise, but it doesn’t seem to stop anybody else from doing it, so why should I forbear?

More importantly, what do any of those possibilities have to do with what you might want your FNDGG to give you? Well, for most ultimately commercially successful writers, the road to recognition is long. If that gift-giver wants to find a means to show that s/he believes that you are talented enough that you definitely should keep ploughing ahead, wrapping up some practical aids for you to use along the way is a marvelous mean to express that.

I just mention, FNDGG.

Keep moving forward — and keep up the good work!

PS: any FNDGG intrigued by the Cave Shelf above may find it here.

Posted on - No Comments on How long is too long?

How long is too long?

Before I begin today, time for a little self-promotion: if you are at all interested in guest blogging — anywhere, ever — virtual tours, or just plain not annoying people online whom you would like to promote your book for you someday, I’ve written a guest post on the subject for MJ Rose’s most excellent blog on book promotion, Buzz, Balls & Hype. For those of you not yet familiar with MJ’s good work there, suffice it to say that whenever I have a question about promotion, she is my very first stop.

As in I may not actually draw a second breath before checking to see what she has to say on the subject. She really, really knows her stuff.

Speaking of questions, long-time reader Mark approached me with an interesting one around Halloween (yes, I am clearing out my blog-about list these days, thank you for asking):

My question has to do with agent contacts. At {the Conference-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named} 2006, I met Maura M. McLiterate {note from Anne: not her real name},
pitched her, and she asked me to contact her when
I had a finished manuscript…So finally, after finishing
the manuscript this summer, I sent her a {cover letter reminding her of our conversation} with the stuff she asked for.

That was September 4 {2008}. Haven’t heard anything back. Given that she
requested the followup, does the 4-6 weeks “wait time” still make sense? I
have a handful of other agents and editors who asked to be contacted, trying
to figure out how to manage this. Advice welcome.

Mark raises several intriguing issues here, all relating to the burning question of how long is too long in the publishing biz:

*How long after a successful pitch may one take up an agent’s offer to submit materials and still continue them requested? (For an explanation of the vital difference between requested and unrequested materials, see yesterday’s post.)

*How long is a normal turn-around time at an agency for requested materials?

*Does a long gap between pitch or query and submission necessarily extend that turn-around time?

*Does a submission based upon a face-to-face pitch typically receive swifter attention from agents than one based upon an impersonal query letter?

The short answers to these questions are, in the order asked: it depends, it depends, it depends, and it depends.

I imagine, clever writers that you are, that you would like to know upon what it depends in each instance, but that’s not really a question that may be answered accurately on a theoretical basis — because (wait for it) it all depends.

I know that sounds like a flippant response to a serious question (or, more accurately, to four serious questions), but honestly, I don’t mean it to be. How long an agent is going to be willing to wait to see requested materials depends upon a lot of factors, potentially ranging from how the book market has changed in the interim to whether the agent is still representing that type of book to what authors an agent may have lost lately (agented writers move around more than one might think, sometimes from project to project) to whether the agent has just had a baby.

If that seems like too many unknown factors for a rational person to take into strategic consideration, you’re absolutely right: second-guessing is frequently impossible. Given that realization, would it frighten you too terribly to learn that the list of factors above represents just a tiny fraction of the possible influences over how long an agent may take to respond to a submission?

So my initial answer was quite accurate: in all of these cases, the answer depends on a lot of factors, virtually none of which a writer on the other side of the country (or other side of the world) may anticipate.

Each individual submission is thus to a certain extent the plaything of outside forces. Before that notion depresses anyone too much, let’s return to Mark’s specific case, to see if it sheds any light upon what an aspiring writer can and cannot control in a submission situation.

First, to place this in as empowering a light as possible, Mark did something very, very right in his submission to Maura. Actually, he did something else pretty smart, too. Anyone care to guess what these bright moves were?

If you said that he sent a cover letter along with his submission, reminding her where they had met, what he had pitched to her, and that she had asked him to send the enclosed materials, give yourself a gold star for the day. And make it three gold star and a firecracker if you immediately added that he was right to tell her when he pitched that he had not yet completed the manuscript, so she would not expect it to arrive right away.

Your mother was right, you know — honesty, contrary to popular opinion, often genuinely is the best policy.

Why was reminding Maura how much time had elapsed strategically smart? It prevented her from thinking, “Who?” when she saw the submission marked REQUESTED MATERIALS. More importantly, it minimized the possibility of her thinking, “I don’t remember telling this guy to send anything.”

All of which begs the question: was over two years too long for Mark to wait before submitting the materials Maura requested?

You all know the refrain by now, don’t you? Chant it with me: it all depends.

Normally, I would advise trying to get requested materials out the door within six months, if it is humanly possible. Longer than that, and an aspiring writer runs the risk not only of his query or pitch not being remembered (which is probably going to happen far sooner than that, but hey, agents keep records of this sort of thing) but also of the agent’s individual tastes and market trends changing. At minimum, a much longer delay will send a pretty unequivocal message to the agent in question to the effect that the submitter is slow at responding to requests, always a bit frustrating to someone in the business of mediating between authors and publishing houses.

Of course, you could always take your chances and send a much-delayed submission anyway; technically, requests for material don’t expire. But after a year has passed, the risk of any or all of the conditions above’s having changed becomes so high that I would advise sending a follow-up letter, confirming that the request is still operative.

Mark, however, was savvy enough to protect himself against the liabilities of a long delay between request and submission: he told Maura up front that he was not yet finished with the manuscript. This gave her the clear option of saying either, “Well, then you should wait and query me when it is finished,” (a popular choice, particularly for novels) or what she actually did say, “That sounds interesting — when you’re finished, send me this and this and this.”

For insight into why this worked, see my earlier comment about honesty.

Assuming that Mark need not worry about Maura’s having lost interest in his book while he was finishing writing it — again, a fairly hefty assumption, but certainly worth his testing practically — is he right to worry that he did not hear back from her right away?

I’m exceedingly glad that he brought this up, because in the weeks and months following the annual onslaught of writers’ conferences, a LOT of aspiring writers wonder about this. Naturally, everyone wants to hear back right away, but how likely is that desire to be fulfilled?

Or, to put in terms common to fantasy, is it possible to pitch to an agent on Saturday, overnight the requested materials on Monday, and be signed by Friday — and then for one’s new agent to sell one’s book by the following Thursday for publication three weeks from the next Tuesday, so the author may appear triumphantly beaming on Oprah by the end of the month?

The short answer is no. The long answer, as the Vicar of Dibley used to delight in saying, is NOOOOOOOOOOO.

Just doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid. These days, it’s not at all uncommon for submitting writer not to hear back from an agent for months or — you should make sure that you’re sitting down for this, because it’s a lulu — even not at all.

Don’t let that depress you into a stupor just yet — I’ll talk a bit more about the logic behind extensive turn-around times times next time. For the purposes of today’s discussion, my point is that no, a few weeks’ worth of silence after sending off requested materials isn’t at all unusual.

Let’s get back to the specifics of Mark’s situation, though, to see what else we can learn, because the long lapse between pitch and submission honestly do render his position unique — or do they? Let’s see: he pitched to Maura in 2006, then submitted (as per her request) in late September, 2008, either by e-mail or by regular mail. Since so much time had passed between the request and the submission, she couldn’t possibly have anticipated when he would send her the materials, and thus could not have budgeted time to read them.

Which begs the question: why did Mark expect her to respond with unusual quickness after she had received them?

Honestly, just a few weeks would have been positively lightning speed according to current norms. So what about this particular submission would have called for Maura to move it to the top of her reading pile — or, more probably, to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa that is the desk of Millicent, her agency’s in-house manuscript screener?

My guess is that from Maura’s perspective, there wasn’t any reason — but that from Mark’s point of view, there undoubtedly was.

This particular differential in urgency perception between agents and the writers who submit to them is such a common one that one might almost call it classic: what probably happened here is that Mark had been thinking of Maura’s request to submit whenever he happened to complete the manuscript he had pitched as inherently unusual — or at any rate as something different than the kind of request to submit materials that an agent might have made to an aspiring writer who had been pitching a completed manuscript.

As such, Mark did indeed, at least implicitly, expected it to be moved up in the submission pile when it arrived, as a special situation. In his version of events, Maura would not have been patient enough to wait until he completed the book before seeing it if she hadn’t been genuinely interested, so why wouldn’t she jump on it immediately?

But from Maura’s point of view, asking him to contact her with pages after he finished writing them was not a special request — it was precisely the same request as she would have made in response to other intriguing pitches she heard at that conference. The only difference is that she didn’t expect to receive it within a month or two of the request.

As such, it would have been reasonable to expect that when Mark did submit it, his submission would be treated precisely like every other packet of requested materials the agency received in early September. Translation: Maura’s not having gotten back to Mark within 4-6 weeks probably had far more to do with how many manuscripts were stacked up at her agency than with how long Mark took to pop those requested materials into the mail.

In a way, aspiring writers should find this encouraging, or at the very least democratic: queue-jumping is actually pretty hard to do during the pitching/querying and submission process. Even if writers everywhere aren’t particularly grateful for this, I suspect that those who had submitted requested materials to Maura in July or August might find it comforting to know that she — or her Millicent — didn’t just drop whatever manuscript they happened to be reading when a new envelope arrived in the office.

Pop quiz for those who followed my marketing series this last summer: can you think of any other reason that Maura’s office might have been slow to respond to a submission received during the first week of September? Say, just after Labor Day?

Rack up another gold star for yourself if your first response was to shout that just after Labor Day is always an especially busy time for agents, as the publishing houses tend to be shut down from the middle of August through Labor Day.

My guess would be that Mark’s materials are caught up in the residual summer backlog and post-conference season submission wave. As I told Mark at the time (you didn’t think that I waited two months to get back to him directly, did you?), a LOT of aspiring writers tend to be in his situation in any year’s autumn.

So how should Mark have handled it? Should he, as his question implied, assume that his previous face time with Maura meant that he should follow up with her earlier than any other submitter? And what about all of those other submitters whose work has been sliding around on Millicent’s desk for weeks and months on end — what should they do?

In the first place, take a nice, deep breath. Delays are a completely normal part of the submission process, so it doesn’t make sense to read too much into them. If Mark hasn’t heard back, it’s probably because no one at the agency has read his submission yet.

I know: disappointingly prosaic, compared to the much more common dead-of-night submitter’s fantasy that the agent is reading and re-reading the submission in frantic indecision about whether to represent it or not. But my version is much, much more likely to be true.

In the second place, Mark — and all of those other anxious submitters I mentioned a few paragraphs ago — should check Maura’s agency’s website, listing in the standard agency guides, and/or any written materials she might have sent (like, say, a letter requesting materials), to see if the agency had the foresight to post average turn-around times.

Try looking under the submission guidelines; they will often contain some mention of how long they typically take to get back to writers about requested materials. Not to toot my own team’s horn, but my agency has a simply dandy page on its website that explains not only what turn-around times submitters to expect, but the logic behind it and what a submitter who has been twiddling his thumbs for months on end should do.

Getting back to Mark’s situation: before I gave him any advice whatsoever, I spent a couple of minutes checking out Maura’s website. Turns out that her agency lists an 8-week response time; not unusually long. So at minimum, Mark should wait two months before sending Maura a follow-up e-mail, letter, or second copy of his materials.

I would advise holding off for a couple of weeks after that, just in case Maura and Millicent are totally swamped and touchy about it, but not for too much longer after that. If the agency has lost the manuscript — yes, it does happen occasionally, one of the many reasons that I disapprove of the increasingly pervasive practice of agents’ simply not responding at all to submitters if the answer is no — they’re going to want to know about it.

Or, to recast that from a writerly perspective, after 2 1/2 or three months, Mark has every right to give Maura a gentle nudge, to double-check that his book is languishing in a stack on the northeast corner of Millicent’s desk, rather than having vanished into that mysterious other dimension where lost socks, extinct animals, and the child stars of yesteryear dwell. But it’s probably not going to be in his interest to contact her before that.

Why? Long-time readers, open your hymnals and sing it with me now: it often doesn’t take much pushiness for a writer to get labeled as difficult.

So what should Mark be doing in the meantime? Submitting to everyone else who requested materials, of course — and continuing to query up a storm to generate new requests for materials.

Did I just hear yet another chorus of, “Why?” Well, unless you have actually promised an agent an exclusive look at your work, it’s poor submission strategy to submit one at a time. (For an extensive explanation of the logic behind this, you might want to check out the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category on the list at right.) Your time is too valuable, and at this point in publishing history, agents simply don’t expect exclusivity unless they ask for it.

And if you doubt that, perhaps you should scroll back up to that earlier bit about how some agents now don’t bother to get back to writers whose submissions they have rejected.

I’m constantly meeting submitting writers who believe that the agent of their dreams will be hugely insulted if they don’t grant him an unrequested exclusive, but think about it in practical terms for a moment: if Maura’s agency habitually takes two months to get back to the Marks of this world and her agency is not unusually slow, Mark could find himself waiting two, three, or even six months (it happens, alas) to hear back from every agent to whom he submits. If he does not engage in multiple submissions, he is limiting himself to just a few submissions a year.

Does that seem fair or reasonable to you? Believe me, when agents genuinely want exclusives or if their agencies require them, they’ll let you know about it.

The other thing that Mark might want to do while he’s waiting is to do a bit of research on what to expect after a submission. We discuss it quite often here at Author! Author! (for those of you who are new to the blog, the WHY HAVEN’T I HEARD BACK YET? category might be a good place to start), but frankly, this is a perennial topic of discussion on almost every good writers’ discussion board.

Why invest valuable time in finding out what is happening to your fellow submitters? Well, on a purely selfish level, it would probably reduce your submission-period stress levels. Since writers are so isolated, it’s very easy to start to think that what is happening to oneself is exceptional, whereas usually, it’s just a matter of business as usual in an industry that receives literally millions of pages of submissions every year.

Comparing notes can be very empowering. Honest. So can starting to work on one’s next book.

What a submitter gnawing his nails, anticipating a response from the agent of his dreams, should most emphatically NOT do is allow the delays inherent to the submission process to bring his life to a screeching halt while he waits to hear back. Yes, it’s stressful to know that someone with the power to help you sell your work has her hands all over your work, but obsessing over what might be happening won’t help.

Trust me on this one. Like so many novelists, I’m a born obsesser, so I know whereat I speak.

Speaking of that novel, I’m going to sign off for today so I may get back to work on my next. Since this is a topic that affects so many aspiring writers, I suspect that I shall have more to say on the subject next time.

In the meantime, keep taking those nice, deep breaths, submitters, and everybody, keep up the good work!

PS: No Marks were harmed in the research and writing of this blog post. And to set the minds of those of you who have spoken with me privately about your fears and hopes at ease, he gave his permission for me to use his story as an example. Keep taking those deep breaths, I tell you.

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The Glamour of the Book Tour, Part II, by Michael Schein, author of Just Deceits

Hello, campers –

Welcome back to Part II of your treat for having made it all the way through the Manuscript Formatting 101 series: a first-hand account from a FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) of a book tour by a recently-published author. Bookmark these posts, because someday you’ll need them.

Don’t quibble about when someday will come. Whenever it does come, you’ll want to be ready, won’t you?

Yesterday, FAAB Michael Schein, author of the recently-released JUST DECEITS gave us a humorous peek into the hectic world of being one’s own publicist, as well as some very valuable tips on how to set up book readings. (In response to that great gasp I just heard from those of you who missed yesterday’s post, no, Virginia, one’s publisher doesn’t always set those up for one. Increasingly, it’s up to the authors of books released by major publishing houses, just as it’s always been to self-published authors, to schedule public readings.)

Today, Michael is being kind enough to share his experience of what happens after an author gets to such a reading, as well as insights on how to cajole attendees into actually shelling out the dosh for a copy.

Speaking of which, I would be remiss to my duty to a fellow author if I did not add: if you happen to have a mystery lover or two on your holiday shopping list, here is a brief description of JUST DECEITS to whet your gift-giving (and reading) appetite:

In 1793, the most powerful family in Virginia found itself embroiled in scandal: Richard Randolph and his sister-in-law, the beautiful and impetuous Nancy Randolph, were charged with adultery and infanticide. Based on actual events, Just Deceits tells the story of the Trial of the Century – the 18th Century – as the remarkable defense team of wily Patrick Henry and ambitious John Marshall battled each other, their clients, family intrigue, the prosecution, and the truth itself, trying to save their clients from the gallows. In its ribald portrayal of a young legal system already driven more by spectacle than evidence, Just Deceits calls into question the feasibility — and even the desirability — of uncovering “the whole truth.” Ultimately, in the secrets revealed and the relationships celebrated, Just Deceits is as much a story of a trial of love as the trial in the courtroom.

You may buy JUST DECEITS directly from Michael’s website, from his publisher, if you’re in the mood to spread the Christmas spirit to an independent press, or on Amazon. If you’d like to buy it from him in person, here’s a link to his tour schedule.

Why do I so often list several venues for buying my guest bloggers’ work? Knowing how publishing works, mostly: in case you weren’t already aware of it, these days, the author’s royalty rate varies by where a book is sold. Typically, that rate is highest through the author’s or publisher’s website and lowest at discount clearinghouses like overstock.com. (Yes, you read that correctly: much of the discount offered by discount venues comes out of the author’s pocket.)

Once again, please join me in welcoming Michael Schein. Pay close attention, think good thoughts about your own future book tours, and keep up the good work!

How to sell a book, one at a time. OK – it’s the day of the book signing! I just had the first one of my tour today (11/18). It was my fifth overall. I sold 13 books today on a quiet Tuesday evening (in three hours), and the Barnes & Noble manager said that as signings go, that’s a success.

I certainly think so – I feel quite good about it. I’m being read by people from various parts of the country, including (aside from Washington State, where I live) Virginia, Missouri, Minnesota, Texas, West Virginia, Alabama and New Jersey. If they like it, they’ll probably tell their friends and family – because I asked them to.

Making contact with your future readers. If you aren’t John Grisham, the first and most important thing about a book signing is to get your butt up out of the chair.

The only time to sit in the lovely chair the bookstore will provide (it’s a leather throne at Seattle Mystery Bookshop) is while actually signing the book you just sold. Then get up and shake your new reader’s hand as you return the book to him/her. That won’t make up for a crappy book, but it will make your new reader want to like your book, which doesn’t hurt.

Second, don’t wait for people to approach you – they won’t. Don’t stalk them, but greet them as they walk by, and ask, “May I tell you about my new novel?” or something to that effect.

It takes a hard heart or a big hurry to answer “no” to that one.

Your pitch – the same one that sold the book – comes next. Every time you say it, say it like it is the first time (but without the stuttering). In other words, this is conversation, not telemarketing.

Show the customer the back cover – the one with the great blurbs. Hand it to them. Put the product in their hands.

Yes, it’s a “product.”

Ask a question: “Are you interested in history?” (for historical fiction) “Where are you from?” “Have you ever dreamed of traveling to Africa?” (for a book involving Africa).

You’ll get used to it – again, this is simply conversation. Don’t do all the talking. Listen.

Once you’ve engaged a person in conversation, you’ve probably got a sale. But you still need to close the deal.

The correct way to close a book deal is not, “Would you please buy my book?” It is “May I sign that for you?” “Shall I personalize it?”

Once signed and personalized, it is sold.

Pretty scary, huh? Look, we can be artists on our own time. When we are in the bookstore, our job is to sell books. If you need motivation beyond the royalties, remember this – that new masterpiece taking shape in your hard drive is unlikely to see the light of day if your current book flops.

Nov. 19. More pitfalls on the road. All the above sounds rational, right? Forget rational. The world is not what it seems. Or, worse yet, maybe it is.

On Nov. 19th I found that the Richmond stop I’d sweated blood over was a small house off the main road on the edge of a small shopping district where there’s no foot traffic. True, the owner was kind and interesting, the shop was crammed to bursting with an eclectic assortment of books, and it had been in business somehow for 28 years, but still, it was dead. It had never been my first choice, but writers can’t be choosers: it was an independent non-Christian bookstore and therefore something special in post-apocalyptic America.

Despite marketing through their email list and by postcards to local lawyers, the only two people who showed up were my brother-in-law, and the woman who owns the B&B where I’m staying. I could have sold to them directly, and made more on each sale.

No one else even entered the shop from 7 pm to 8:20 pm, when I gave up. Then I did what you cannot do if you are to make a profit – I bought an expensive book. It is hard to sit in a bookstore for over an hour with nothing to do, and not buy a book or two.

This is so glamorous!

What do you mean, the books aren’t here yet? My publisher was supposed to ship two cases of books, and I needed them for my 11/20 appearance at the John Marshall House, since they hadn’t ordered books directly. I’d made arrangements with Anna, the B&B proprietor, to ship books to her, so I was disappointed to find when I arrived the night of 11/18 the books were not yet here. Nor did they arrive on Nov. 19.

Finally, I got the tracking numbers from my publisher – and sure enough, they had arrived on Nov. 17th, and been signed for by Anna! It was too late to ask her again, but I sent an urgent email, and then didn’t sleep well all night, thinking they’d been stolen.

The story emerged the next day. Anna (an otherwise very capable woman) had hosted another writer the previous weekend (see, I told you last time that we’re thick as flies), and had arranged with his publisher to take a shipment. She’d forgotten about the same arrangement with me, so when the books arrived, she assumed they were his, and had his sponsor pick them up for shipment to his next stop – New Hampshire!

My books were on their way to a general store in the Granite State and my signing in Richmond was in three hours.

Frantic calls, texts, and imprecations to the ghost of Jack Randolph, who I’d insulted the previous day during my visit to Hollywood Cemetery, resulted in a rescue worthy of Lassie, as my books were snatched off the loading dock with all the shipping labels affixed, and somehow returned to me.

I sold twenty (count ‘em – twenty!) books today (11/20). I almost had none to sell.

And so, to end this tale of woe and wonder, this life of ours is never boring as soon as we step off the edge, and call ourselves writers.

Happy touring, fellow fools!