Posted on - 3 Comments on Repetition — and repetition. And did I mention repetition?

Repetition — and repetition. And did I mention repetition?

Can you stand another few posts on self-editing? I hope so, because after a very refreshing day off yesterday (translation: I edited, and then I had a nice, long, my-fiancé-wondered-if-I’d-been-eaten-by-wolves length writing session. Woo hoo!), I’m raring to go.

Oh, no: I’ve inadvertently used the evil phrase, the one involved in my first A CLOCKWORK ORANGE-like aversion therapy for repetitive phrase use. I was six years old, standing in line for the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland, back in the days when the quality and popularity of the ride was easily discernable by the level of ticket required to board it. E was the best; I believe this particular ride was somewhere in the B range.

So there I was, all eyes and braids, holding my mother’s hand while my father watched my older brother go on D and E ticket rides, waiting in a queue of inexplicable length to cruise around an ersatz London with Peter, Wendy, and the gang. As each ship-shaped (literally) car took a new crew of tourists into the ride itself, Peter’s voice cried out, “Come on, everybody, raring to go-o-o-o!”

After about five minutes of listening to that annoying voice while inching toward the front of line, I started counting the repetitions. By the time it was our turn to step into the flying ship, Peter had barked that inane phrase at me 103 times. It’s all I remember about the ride.

And that, my friends, is how one grows up to be an editor.

Actually, it’s probably fortunate that I was aurally assaulted by a cartoon character chez Mouse in my early youth — it’s helped make me very, very aware of just how much repetition is constantly flung at all of us, all the time. Not just in everyday conversations, as I mentioned last week — although it’s there, too: if you doubt this, go find a community that’s experiencing a heat wave, sit in a popular café, and count the variations on, “Hot enough for ya?”  you hear within a 15-minute period — but in TV and movies as well.

Most of us become inured through years of, well, repetition to the film habit of repeating facts and lines that the screenwriter wants to make sure the viewer remembers, information integral to either the plot (“Remember, Gladys — cut the RED cord hanging from that bomb, not the yellow one!”), character development (“Just because you’re a particle physicist, George, doesn’t mean you’re always right!”), or both (“You may be the best antiques appraiser in the British Isles, Mr. Lovejoy, but you are a cad!”)

The great recent example of this, of course, is the cult TV series Strangers With Candy, a parody of those 1970s Afterschool Special that let young folks like me into esoteric truths like Divorce is Hard on Everyone in the Family, Outsiders are Teased, and Drugs are Bad. (See, I even remembered the morals, doubtless due to repetition.) In SWC, the heroine, Jerri Blank, often telegraphs upcoming plot twists by saying things like, “I would just like to reiterate, Shelly, that I would just die if anything happened to you.” Moments later, of course, Shelly is toast.

It’s funny in the series, but it’s less funny to encounter in a manuscript, particularly if your eyes are attuned to catching repetition, as many professional readers’ are. Characters honestly do say things like, “But Emily, have you forgotten that I learned how to tie sailors’ knots when I was kidnapped by pirates three years ago?”

All the time. Even when the first 200 pages of the manuscript dealt with that very pirate kidnapping.

At base, this is another trust issue, isn’t it? The writer worries that the reader will not remember a salient fact crucial to the scene at hand, just as the screenwriter worries that the audience member might have gone off to the concession stand at the precise moment when the murderer first revealed that he had a lousy childhood.

Who could have predicted THAT?

Television and movies have most assuredly affected the way writers tell stories. One of the surest signs that a catch phrase or particular type of plot twist has passed into the cultural lexicon is the frequency with which it turns up in manuscript submissions. And one of the best ways to assure a submission’s rejection is for it to read just like half the submissions that came through the door that day.

Come closer, and I’ll tell you a secret: repetition is boring. REALLY boring. And here’s another secret: people who read manuscripts for a living are more likely to notice repetition than other readers, not less. (Perhaps Peter Pan traumatized them in their younger days, too.) Not only repetition within your manuscript, but repetition ACROSS manuscripts as well.

We all know how agents and editors feel about manuscripts that bore them, right? In a word: next!

It may not be a problem to which your manuscript falls prey — and if so, hurrah for you; it’s hard to strip a manuscript of them entirely, because they are so pervasive. But just to be on the safe side, here’s a project for a rainy day: sit down with your first 50 pages and highlight every line of dialogue in there that you’ve ever heard a TV or movie character say verbatim. Ever.

Was that giant slurping noise I just heard the sound of the blood rushing out of everyone’s faces at the realization of just how much dialogue that might potentially cover?

No? What if I also ask you to highlight similar phrases in the narration? First-person narration is notorious for echoing the currently popular TV shows.

Often, it’s unconscious on the writer’s part: it’s brainwashing from all of that repetition. It would be surprising if common dialogue HADN’T made its way into all of our psyches, actually: according to CASSELL’S MOVIE QUOTATIONS, the line, “Let’s get outta here!” is heard in 81% of films released in the US between 1938 and 1985.

Care to take a wild guess at just how often some permutation of that line turns up in submissions to agencies? No? Well, care to take a wild guess at how many agents and editors notice a particular phrase the second time it turns up in a text? Or the second time it’s turned up in a submission this week?

“Come on, everybody, raring to go-o-o-o!”

Unfortunately, just because a writer doesn’t realize that he’s doing lifting lines doesn’t mean that an agency screener won’t notice and be annoyed by it. Particularly if three of the manuscripts she’s seen today have used the same line.

It happens. Or, to put it in Afterschool Special terms, Checking for Both Types of Repetition is Good.

I know, I know, it’s tempting to assume that you haven’t used any of the standard catchphrases or plot twists, but believe me, even the most innovative writers do it from time to time. And for good reason: the rest of the population is subjected to the same repetitive teleplays and screenplays as writers are.

Over time, people do tend to start to speak the way they would if they were playing themselves onscreen. (A writer of very good hardboiled mysteries told me that he is constantly meeting private detectives who sound like Sam Spade, for instance.) But remember, just because people do or say something in real life doesn’t mean it will necessarily be interesting translated to the printed page.

Check. Weed out both repetition within your manuscript AND material unconsciously borrowed from TV and movies. Or, better yet, have a good reader you trust check for you. (And if you’re not sure whether a particular twist or line is common enough to count, film critic Roger Ebert maintains a database of them.)

Often, it’s surprising how small a textual change will turn an incipient cliché into a genuinely original moment. But a writer cannot perform that magic trick without first identifying where it should be applied.

It’s time for me to go-o-o (curse you, Pan!) for today. Keep up the good work!

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These foolish things… remind me of you…

Yesterday, while discussing ways to increase the tension of your submission pages, I brought up those gem-like tiny touches so beloved of editors everywhere, the telling little details that illuminate character and moment in an indirect manner. The frequency with which telling little details appear in a manuscript is — for me, at least — one of the primary factors in determining whether to keep reading.

Why? Well, more than almost any other device, they give the reader insight into the author’s worldview. A good writer sees the world around her with unique eyes, and — ideally, at least — powers of observation heightened to an extent that many non-writers would actually find painful. This requires pretty sensitive nervous tissue, as H.G. Wells pointed out: he liked to call writers Aeolian harps (that’s a fancy way of saying wind chime, in case you were wondering), responding to our perceptions of the world through our art and, he hoped, making it better in the process.

Wells is now best-known for his science fiction, of course, but in his lifetime, many of his most popular novels were about social interactions. His Mr. Britling Sees It Through, for instance, was considered at the time THE definitive work on the British home front during the First World War. My favorite of his social novels is The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, a comedy about marriage and the establishment of decent, affordable apartment buildings for young working women. (Okay, so his political beliefs were not hidden here.) If anyone wants to see sterling examples of what I was discussing yesterday, the distinction between polite dialogue that drags and polite dialogue that sings, this novel is a great place to do it — it contains masses of both.

You’d thought I was just digressing on a favorite author and had wandered off-topic, didn’t you? I confess, I’m a bit tired, with all the furor of the last week, but I’m not THAT tired.

The tiny little details that our sensitive nervous tissue lead us to notice — the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, as the song says — are a large part of what makes great writing seem almost miraculous to readers. Not everyone notices the worn-down heel of the left shoe of the man in his interview suit, after all, or the way the eyes of the president of the local charitable organization occasionally glaze with hatred while her mouth is loading the members with drippingly complimentary gushings.

Feeling special yet? You should: being aware of these telling little details is a gift, I tell you, and most writers don’t rely upon it heavily enough in constructing their narratives.

And to someone whose job it is to read manuscripts all day, every day, seeing that gift wasted can start to get pretty annoying. “Where are those delightfully unexpected little insights?” they think, running their fingertips impatiently down page 1. “Where is the evidence that this writer sees the world in a way that will change the way I see it myself?”

A tall order, yes, but — wait, do I hear some cries of distress out there? “Did you just say,” a strangled voice asks, “page ONE? As in my manuscript should produce evidence of my unique worldview and uncanny eye for telling little details THAT soon?”

Great question, strangled voice. The answer is yes, if you want to make absolutely certain that an agency screener will read PAST the first page. (If you doubt this, please take a gander at last November’s series on reasons that agents report for not reading past page 1. It’s a pretty sobering group of posts.)

Some of you may find the necessity for cajoling reading more than a few paragraphs from people who, after all, asked you to send a chapter or 50 pages or your entire book. If you’re a novelist, it can be especially galling: presumably, if your forté as a writer were brilliant single-page stories, you would be entering short-short competitions, not writing 400-page books, right?

Believe me, I’m sympathetic to this view — if I ran the universe, agents and editors would be granted an entire extra day per week, so they could read at least 10 pages into every submission they request. Writers would get an extra day, too, and lots of paid vacation time, so we could polish our work to our entire satisfaction before we sent it out. And the Easter Bunny would live in my back yard for all of April, instead of just tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, I believe I have mentioned before, I do not run the universe. If we writers want to be successful, it behooves us to recognize that submissions are often read very, very quickly, and adapt our first few pages to that reality.

Sorry to be the one to tell you that. But before you condemn the rigors of the industry too vigorously, take a moment to consider the conditions that might lead to someone at an agency or publishing house to conclude that it would be desirable, or even necessary, to give a requested manuscript only a page to establish the author’s brilliance.

Those of you who were reading this blog last fall probably remember that old writers’ nemesis, the unpaid (or poorly-paid) agency screener. (She’s been with us long enough that I think she should have a name, don’t you? How about Millicent?) If you will recall, Millicent is the world’s most impatient reader, the one to whom you pray your manuscript will not be assigned: while some screeners and agents are looking to be wowed, Millicent is in a rush to get out the door; she’s put off her lunch date three times already this week, because she had to work through lunch, and she’s not going to miss it again.

It is now 12:10, she’s just noticed a run in her tights, and your manuscript is the next in the pile. How easy do you think it is going to be for it to impress her into reading past page 1?

I bring up Millicent not to scare you, or even to say this kind of reading situation is the norm for submissions — but since a writer has absolutely no control over the mood of the person deciding whether to accept or reject his manuscript, it is worth preparing your submission so that it would impress EVEN Millicent at her most frustrated. That’s just good submission strategy.

Actually, I have a quite a bit of sympathy for the Millicents of the agenting world, as well as Monroe, the editorial assistant who is her equivalent in publishing houses. They are expected to read reams and reams of paper very, very fast — and for this Herculean effort, they are not necessarily always paid. Often, this work is assigned to interns. If it’s the summertime, Millicent is probably on break from a good Northeastern college, someplace like Barnard, and since her parents can afford to support her while she takes an unpaid but résumé-building job, she’s probably from an upper-middle class background.

If it’s the rest of the year, or she has already graduated, she is probably paid — poorly — and lives in an apartment the size of a postage stamp with four other girls with similar jobs. Millie would not have gone into this line of work had she not liked reading — in fact, she may have writing aspirations herself, or she may want to become an agent or editor, so taking a job screening queries and submissions seemed like dandy on-the-job training at the time.

But now, after weeks on end of seeing hundreds upon hundreds of rather similar storylines, her capacity for appreciating literature has markedly dimmed. Sometimes, when she is especially cranky, a single line of awkward dialogue or two lines free of conflict can make her feel downright oppressed.

And your manuscript will have to get past Millie, and often also a senior assistant who has been screening manuscripts for even longer and has an even shorter boredom fuse, before it lands on the agent’s desk.

It had better not bore her. Especially if, as occasionally happens, your manuscript is the next on her list to read immediately after she has broken up with her loutish boyfriend, she twisted her ankle clambering up from the subway, or she’s wondering how she’s going to pay the rent. And if poor Millie has just burned her lip on her non-fat double-shot tall latte… well, let’s just say that the first few pages of your manuscript had best be tight.

And feature at least a few delightful little details that will make Millicent sit up, forgetting her bright magenta lip, and cry, “Eureka! This writer showed me something I’ve never seen before, presented in magnificent, clear prose! Forget my lunch date — I have something to READ!”

The miracle of talent, as Mme. de Staël tells us, is the ability to knock the reader out of his own egoism. Let your first pages be living proof of that.

I think you have it in you; that gift of insight is what made you want to write in the first place, isn’t it? Don’t let the difficulties of the submission process dim that mission. Millicent, and readers everywhere, will be the better for the originality of your insight.

Keep up the good work!

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Is that line really necessary?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep up the good work!

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Being chatty — in the right way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Submission faux pas, continued: it’s all about ME

I love my readers: eagle-eyed Serenissima wrote in to point out that in my eagerness to tell you yesterday that our exemplar Daphne should have followed Digory’s instructions, I forgot to add HOW she should have followed them. (I’d fill those of you who missed yesterday’s post in on what I’m talking about, but that would make it too easy, wouldn’t it?) Yes, since agent Digory asked for 50 pages, Daphne should have sent exactly 50 pages – no more, no less, even if that meant cutting off the story mid-sentence.

But should she try not to have page 50 end mid-sentence? Should she try to arrange her plot so there is a section break there? Or, even more strategic, so there is a cliffhanger there?

Agents are quite, quite used to their requested page limits’ causing odd breaks, so do not worry about leaving ‘em hanging. (The ones who are truly married to closure will ask for entire chapters, not specific numbers of pages.) For this reason, it can appear a bit contrived if page 50 just happens to be the end of a chapter or section – although arranging the end of a section to fall on the last page is often a good idea for a contest entry, where it would be impossible for the judge to request more pages.

Never forget: the primary goal of those first 50 pages — or whatever part of the manuscript the agent has requested – is not to satisfy the agent’s sense of dramatic closure, but to get him to request the rest of the manuscript. Tying up ends too neatly might actually work against your aims here.

It’s nice if the agent finishes page 50 wondering what happens next – but as it’s not necessary to induce him to lie awake nights wondering what happens on page 51, rearranging your writing so a cliffhanger falls on page 50 (or whatever the last page of the submission may be) should not keep YOU awake nights. Leaving him wondering what happens in the rest of the book is sufficient – which, if you’ve established a sense of tension and conflict in the first 49 pages, he should already be doing.

In other words: you don’t need a murder to occur on page 50, necessarily, and it may well come across as heavy-handed if the last line on that page reads, “’I’ve been poisoned!’ Angelica cried. “And the culprit is”

Got it? Good. All right, on to the meat of today’s post.

Over the past few months, I have noticed an ailment cropping up with astonishing frequency amongst writers of my acquaintance. It’s a syndrome that, in its mild form, can drive writers to lose confidence in their work after only a few queries, and in its most virulent form, can alienate agents and editors before they’ve even read a word that the writer has penned.

And, to make it harder to head off at the pass, or to diagnose before symptoms develop, this syndrome leads to behavior that a professional writer, one who was actually making a living at it, would never even consider doing. So, naturally, it had never occurred to me that writers I know, good ones with probably quite bright futures, were engaging in it – and it might be hurting their publication prospects. So today I’m going to flag it, so none of my dear readers get caught in this quite common trap.

I refer, of course, to the notion that ANY book by a first-time author – be it absolutely the latest word in literary fiction, the mystery that even Perry Mason couldn’t solve before page 355, or the next DA VINCI CODE – would be so exciting to agents and editors that they would drop everything else to pay attention to it.

Or, potentially even more damaging, that they SHOULD, and that the writer has a right to expect instantaneous responses. Or even very quick ones.

Now, I have mentioned the most common corollary to this belief many times before: the insidious idea that if a book is really good (or, more usually, if its writer is truly talented), that the first query, the first pitch, the first submission will instantly traject it into a cozy lifetime relationship with the perfect agent or editor.

Oh, you laugh, but deep down, most of us would love to believe that our work is so redolent with talent that it will be the exception to the long turn-around time norm. The fantasy is a compelling one: place a stamp on a query on Monday, receive a request for the full manuscript by the end of the week, sign before a fortnight has elapsed, sell to a prominent publisher by Arbor Day. For those who query via e-mail, the expected timeline runs even faster: query tonight, request tomorrow, sign by next Wednesday, sale by April Fool’s Day.

I wish I could tell you it could happen, but as long-time readers of this blog already know, the industry just doesn’t work that way. Occasionally, people strike lucky, but a good writer should EXPECT to have to try many agents before being signed, and to have to wait weeks or even months to hear back from agents and editors.

So, in case any of you have missed the other 147 times I’ve said it in the last few months: it just doesn’t make sense to query or submit to agents one at a time. No matter how much you like a particular agent. Giving in to the notion that good work gets picked up immediately may cause a writer to take years to cover the requisite array of agents to find the right one, or even to stop querying in frustration after only a few tries.

Strategically, either is a bad idea. Competition over who is going to represent you, like competition over who is going to publish your book, can only help you, and unless an agent asks you point-blank for an exclusive look (which you are under no obligation to grant), these days, most agents ASSUME that a writer is sending out simultaneous submissions.

But the larger assumption, the one that dictates an expectation that ANY book is a drop-my-other-hundred-projects occasion for an agent or editor, is even more dangerous, because it can lead to behavior that is not only unlikely to convince industry types of a writer’s professionalism, but might even alienate them permanently. It can – sacre bleu! – lead to a writer’s being pushy.

Why is this a problem? Because as anyone in the industry can tell you, there is no book for which every agent is holding his breath. Naturally, everyone would like to snap up the next bestseller, of course, but since no one really knows what that will be, and they spend their lives surrounded by so much paper that the average agency could use it for insulation, it would simply be too exhausting to leap upon each new submission as though it contained the philosopher’s stone.

Even if that book turns out to be HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE. They need time to read, and no matter how much you would like yours to be the only submission on your dream agent’s desk at any given moment, yours is probably going to be one of fifty.

So there can be no legitimate reason, in their minds, for a writer to act as if HER book is THE one. Even if it is.

But try telling that to some writers. As in the most common manifestation of all:

Writer-centered scenario 1: Marcel has been working on his novel for a decade. Finally, after showing it timorously to his lover and a couple of roués claiming to be artistes he met at the corner café, he decides it is ready to submit. Being a careful sort of person, he researches agencies, and finally settles on the one that represents his favorite writer.

He submits his work, fully expecting to hear back within the week. By the end of a month, he is both flabbergasted and furious: why hasn’t that agent gotten back to him? As the sixth week ticks by, he decides that there is no point in hoping anymore. When his SASE and manuscript finally arrive back on his doorstep at the beginning of week 9, he doesn’t even bother to open the packet. He pitches them straight into the recycling bin.

He never submits again. Instead, he hangs out in absinthe bars with his amis, bemoaning the fact that the publishing world has refused to see his genius.

Okay, what did Marcel do wrong? (Other than drinking absinthe, which I’m told is pretty lethal.)

Oh, let me count the ways. Give yourself an A if you said he assumed that a single agent’s reaction was identical to that of everyone’s in the publishing world, as if rejection once means rejection eternally. What does Marcel think, that every agent in the country gets together every night under the cover of dark to share the day’s submissions, so every agent can provide a uniform response?

(Actually, there is a pervasive rumor like this that surfaces on the conference circuit every year or two about a national database where agents log in the names and book titles of every rejection, so that once a manuscript has been seen by a couple of agents, the others will know to avoid it. Piffle.)

Like it or not, the belief that one agent equaled the industry actually stems not from insecurity, but from an extreme case of egoism on Marcel’s part. Rather than considering himself one of the literal millions submitting manuscripts each year, or pondering the notion that he might need to learn a bit more about the industry before he can submit successfully, he prefers to conclude that his IDEAS are too out there for the cowardly market.

At least, he concludes that aloud: in his heart, he may actually believe that no one is interested in what he has to say. In this, he would be far from alone: there are plenty of Marcels out there who never send their books out even once.

Was that great collective “OH!” I just heard indicative of realizing that you know a writer like Marcel? Most of us do. The Marcels of the world are the ones who are all talk, and no query.

It takes real guts to pick yourself up after a rejection and send your work out again. It’s mighty tempting to give up, isn’t it? So give yourself an A+ if you pointed out by giving up so easily, Marcel never has to risk his ego’s being demolished by rejection again.

Extra credit with a cherry on top if you noticed that Marcel sought feedback only from his lover and friends, who could not possibly give him unbiased critique.

But you’re too clever to follow Marcel’s route in any of those three respects, aren’t you, readers? You know that a single rejection cannot logically mean that the book is unmarketable, that your writing is no good, or that you should give up writing altogether. Even a dozen rejections do not necessarily mean that: what an individual rejection means is that the agency in question didn’t like something about the submission.

Try to improve your submissions, by all means, but keep trying. Having to send out your work again and again is not – I repeat, is NOT – necessarily a reflection upon the quality of your writing, although it often is a reflection of how it is presented on the page. (Thus my continual yammering on the joys of standard format.)

Keep your chins up, campers. And keep up the good work.

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Submission faux pas: did they ASK you to think for yourself?

Yesterday, I cleverly (if I do say so myself) combined my ongoing series on industry etiquette with the short intermission series on submissions. The result, if not precisely magical, enabled me to begin to make a crucial point about submission: in the VAST majority of instances, 99% of an agent’s decision to sign a writer is based upon what is in the submission envelope.

This is even true if the initial contact between the agent and the writer occurred at a conference: no successful agent accepts a client simply because she happens to like him.

Remember that, the next time you are chatting with an agent at a conference. If the agent has not yet read your work, there is no tacit promise of representation here. Just, if you’ve pitched well, a request that you send pages so the agent can find out for herself whether you can write or not.

Long-time readers, chant along with me: agents read submissions looking for reasons to reject them, not reasons to accept them. Yet given the hundreds of queries and dozens of submissions agents read every week, the average agent could fill her client roster 80 times over with writers who write competently.

So place yourself in that agent’s shoes for a moment: if you were considering two clients, one who had demonstrated an understanding of the boundaries of industry etiquette, and one who stepped outside those norms one or more times during your brief interaction, which would you be more likely to sign?

That’s the pesky other 1% of the decision, in case you were wondering. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it really is possible to blow your big chance with an agent through something that has nothing to do with your writing. And that comes as a surprise to many, if not most, aspiring writers, who often violate the unwritten rules simply out of simple enthusiasm.

So that’s why I’m running through the usual suspects, to keep my readers from making these same mistakes. Of course, not all of the scenarios I’m introducing here are necessarily deal-breakers; all, however, are either considered rude by agency insiders or are harmful to the writer in some other way. Enjoy!

Submission scenario 3: After sending out a round of queries on his novel, Caleb is delighted to receive replies from two agents. One asks him to send the first chapter of his manuscript (in his case, the first 19 pages) and a 5-page synopsis. The other asked for the first 50, a 1-page outline, and bio.

Out of his mind with glee, Caleb pops two packets containing the first 50 pages, a 5-page synopsis, and his bio into the mail, and waits feverishly by the phone for The Call. In a month, he receives two form-letter rejections, with no indication why his submissions were rejected.

What did Caleb do wrong?

He violated one of the golden rules of submission: he did not send PRECISELY what the agent asked to see, no more, no less. Instead, he assumed that the agents must want the same thing.

Now, it would undoubtedly be infinitely easier on writers if every agent DID want the same thing, just as it would be simpler if every contest had the same submission requirements. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, for instance, if the term “synopsis” always referred to a document of predictable length, as opposed to the 1, 3, 4, and 5 pages to which the term might refer? Wouldn’t it be marvelous if everyone agreed on whether a hook is absolutely necessary in a first paragraph, or if dialogue is acceptable in a first line? And wouldn’t it be downright miraculous if individual agents and editors did not speak as though their own personal preferences on these points were industry standard?

Yup. I would also like a clown at my birthday party, and a pony with a great big bow on his halter. I have been waiting for these since I turned 8, however, and, like industry-wide standardization of what is expected of writers, experience has taught me that I probably should not expect to see any of these things in my lifetime.

Every agent is different, just as every agency is different. And just as there is no single writing style that will please every agent in North America, there is no single array of items to include in a submission packet. This is why they invariably tell you specifically what they want to see.

How touchy are they, you ask? Let’s take a look at a related scenario.

Submission scenario 4: After sending out a raft of query letters, Daphne is delighted to receive several requests for submissions. Because she is in a writers’ group with Caleb, she knows to check carefully for what each agent has asked her to send. Dorian, agent #1, has asked her to send the first chapter + synopsis; Darlene, agent #2, has asked for the first two chapters, bio, and synopsis; Digory, agent #3, asked for the first 50.

Daphne has been preparing for years for this moment, so she has well-polished pages, a solid synopsis, and an interesting-sounding bio all ready to go. Yet after she has printed up her submissions to Dorian and Darlene on bright white paper, she hesitates: Chapter 3 ends on page 54. Digory would not want to stop reading mid-line, would he? She prints through page 54, seals the envelope, and sends them off.

The result: both Dorian and Darlene ask to see the rest of the book; the pages she sent to Digory are sent back without comment.

I would ask what Daphne did wrong, but I would hope that by now, all of you would have seen her mistake coming a mile away, and started screaming, “No, Daphne, NO!” just as you would at a slasher-movie heroine about to explore that dank basement alone wearing only a tube top and shorts.

Yes, even a few extra pages might make a difference. Again, do NOT second-guess what the agent wants: follow directions.

This used to be one of the FIRST things writers learned on the conference circuit, but it seems to have fallen out of fashion as something writers tell one another. Because violations of this rule genuinely make agents angry, practically universally.

How angry? Well, let me put it this way: you know how the agents and editors hang out together in that bar that’s never more than 100 yards away from the epicenter of any given conference in North America? After they’ve gotten a few drinks into ‘em, try asking one if they mind receiving more pages than they asked to see.

The trick here is getting only ONE to answer. Practically everyone has a horror story about the time some eager author sent a live kitten along with his manuscript on pet care. And even the agents who don’t will say, “What, the writer thinks we won’t notice? Or that we’re asking every writer for a different number of pages?”

There are two reasons this bugs agents so much. First, every agent has established how many pages he is willing to read before deciding whether he is interested enough in a book to read the whole thing. It can be as little as 1, as few as 5, or as many as 100. Trust me, the agent who requests your materials knows PRECISELY how long it will take him to read that many pages. Sending more translates in his mind to an expectation that he will devote more time to your submission than he had planned.

I don’t think I need to remind you how folks in the industry feel about those who waste their time, do I?

The second reason is a bit more reasonable. To professional eyes, Daphne’s sending the extra pages demonstrates from the get-go that she is going to be a difficult client to handle, one who will have to be told more than once what to do. As long-time readers of this blog already know, the publishing industry has only two speeds: delay and I-need-it-today! A client with poor direction-following skills is going to have a hard time with both.

And think about it: would you want to be the agent who had to tell an editor at a major house, “I know Daphne didn’t give you the revisions you wanted on her book. Give her a second chance – this time, I’ll go through and explain to him what you wanted.”

This is not to say that by any reasonable human standard of behavior, Digory was not overly-touchy to draw the conclusion from a few extra pages that Daphne was unreliable: he was, or more likely, his screener was. However, as neither Digory nor his screener know Daphne personally, they worked with the limited information they had. As do we all.

Keep up the good work!

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As Gandhi famously said, there is more to life than increasing its speed

Yesterday, I was discussing the actual submission packet, and I realized that I left out the rather important issue of how to pack it. The post office does in fact sell boxes the right size for manuscripts – if your local PO doesn’t, ask them to order ‘em – as do many office supply stores.

But let the buyer beware: sometimes, the ostensibly manuscript-sized boxes do not comfortably fit a stack of 8 1/2” x 11” paper. The old USPS Priority Mail boxes, provided for free, used to fit two manuscripts beautifully side-by-side, for instance, and they no longer do. Take a sheet of scratch paper with you, and double-check that it will fit in the bottom without wrinkling before you buy.

Whatever you do, though, don’t try to recycle the box your Christmas presents came in for the purpose. Present boxes tend to be too flimsy for cross-country travel. And don’t use a shipping box that a company sent you with the company logo crossed out, as that is considered rather tacky. The ones from Amazon tend to be a perfect footprint for manuscripts, I notice, but don’t yield to the temptation.

“But wait!” I hear the box-savvy cry, “those Amazon boxes are about 4 inches high, and my manuscript is about 2 inches high. Wouldn’t a box that size be too big?”

In a word, no. In general, it’s better to get a box that is a little too big than one that’s a little too small. To keep the manuscript from sliding around and getting crumpled, insert wads of bubble wrap around it. (This technique will also make a larger-sized Priority Mail box work.)

If you’ve been asked to send more than one copy of a manuscript – not all that uncommon after you’ve been picked up by an agent – insert a piece of brightly-colored paper between each copy. Just make sure it’s not construction paper, or the color will rub off on your lovely manuscripts.

I have a few more tips, but since I’m on a faux pas roll anyway, let me present the single most common mistake submitters make as one of my case studies:

Intermezzo scenario 1: After querying for months, Anita receives an e-mail from the agent of her dreams, asking to see the whole manuscript. Alternately overjoyed and petrified (a very common twin state for writers at this juncture, incidentally, although we hear only about the joy), Anita prints up her manuscript that very day. When she plunks down the hefty box and asks to overnight it, she turns pale at the price, but does pays it anyway. An anxious month of waiting later, the manuscript is returned to her, rejected.

What did Anita do wrong? Hint: what she did wrong here probably didn’t have any impact whatsoever on whether the manuscript got rejected or not.

Anita’s error was to overnight the manuscript. It was hugely expensive – and completely unnecessary. It would have gotten exactly the same read had she sent it via the much cheaper Priority Mail, or even regular mail. (Book rate is very, very slow, so I wouldn’t recommend it.)

The more interesting question here is why would Anita, or any other aspiring writer, spend money unnecessarily on postage? One of two reasons, typically. First, many writers assume – wrongly – that an overnighted package is taken more seriously in an agency’s mailroom. In their minds, the mail sorter says, “My God! This must be urgent!” and runs it directly into the agent’s office, where it is ripped open immediately and perused that very day.

Just doesn’t happen. At this point, writers have done this too often for an overnighted package to generate any enthusiasm at all at the average agency. 20 years ago, perhaps, when FedEx was the hot new thing, it might have made a difference, but now, overnight packaging is just another box.

Save yourself some dosh.

The other common reason for overnighting a manuscript is eagerness. Once the request for submission is made, the writer naturally wants everything to happen in a minute: reading, acceptance, book sale, chatting on Oprah. You know, the average trajectory for any blockbuster.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but speed on the writer’s end will not make one iota of difference in how quickly a manuscript is read, or even the probability of its moldering on an agent’s desk for months. Certainly, the differential between the agent’s receiving the manuscript the next day or receiving it in the 2-3 days offered by the more reasonably priced Priority Mail will make no appreciable difference.

This is true, incidentally, even when the agent has ASKED a writer to overnight a project. Consider the plight of poor Bartholomew:

Intermezzo scenario 2: Bartholomew has just won a major category in a writing contest. During the very full pitching day that followed his win, six agents ask him to send submissions. Seeing that he was garnering a lot of interest, Brenda, the most enthusiastic of the agents, requests that Bartholomew overnight the manuscript to her, so she can respond to it right away. Being a savvy submitter, Bartholomew says yes, but submits simultaneously to all six. Within three weeks, he’s heard back from all of them; puzzlingly, Brenda is among the last to respond.

What did Bartholomew do wrong?

He said yes to an unreasonable request. Why was it unreasonable? Because in essence, the situation was no different than if Brenda had asked Bartholomew to leave the conference, jump in his car, drive three hours home to print up a copy of his manuscript for her, drive three hours back, and hand it to her. In both cases, the agent would have been asking the writer to go to unnecessary effort and expense for no reason other than her convenience. As Brenda’s subsequent behavior showed, she had no more intention of reading Bartholomew’s manuscript within the next couple of days than she did of reading it on the airplane home.

Pop quiz: why did she ask him to overnight it at all?

Give yourself full marks if you said it was to get a jump on other interested agents. Remember last week, when I mentioned that agents tend to be competitive people who value book projects in direct proportion to how many other agents are interested in them? This is one way it manifests.

Pause and consider the ramifications of this attitude for a moment. Let them ripple across your mind, like the concentric circles moving gently outward after you throw a stone into a limpid pool, rolling outward until…OH, MY GOD, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE AVERAGE QUERY-GENERATED SUBMISSION?

Uh-huh. Explains quite a bit about why the agent who requested your first 50 pages doesn’t get back to you for two months, doesn’t it? Even though the average agent expects that the writer querying her will be simultaneously querying elsewhere, she will assume, unless you tell her otherwise, that the packet you send her is the only submission currently under any agent’s eyes.

So what’s the rush? It’s only your baby that’s sitting on the edge of her desk for weeks on end.

This is why it is ALWAYS a good idea to mention in your submission cover letter that other agents are reading it, if they are. (I would have to scold you if you lied about this, just to speed up the agent’s sense of urgency.) No need to name names: just say that other agents have requested it, and are reading it even as she holds your pages in her hot little hand.

In the scenario above, Brenda already knows that other agents are interested in Bartholomew’s work; she is hoping to snap him up first. So why didn’t she read it right away?

Give up? Well, Brenda’s goal was to get the manuscript before the other agents made offers to Bartholomew, not necessarily to make an offer before they did.

Is that a vast cloud of confusion I feel wafting from my readers’ general direction? Was that loud, guttural sound a collective “Wha–?”

Relax – it honestly does make sense, when you consider the competition amongst agents. Brenda is aware that she has not sufficiently charmed Bartholomew to induce him to submit to her exclusively; since he won the contest, she also has a pretty good reason to believe he can write. So she definitely wants to read his pages, but she will not know whether she wants to sign him until she reads his writing.

Essentially, Brenda is setting up a situation where Bartholomew will tell her if any of the OTHER agents makes an offer. By asking him to go to the extraordinary effort and expense of overnighting the manuscript to her, she has, she hoped, conveyed her enthusiasm about the book sufficiently that Bartholomew will regard her as a top prospect. Even if he gets an offer from another agent, he’s probably going to call or e-mail her to see if she’s still interested before he signs with anyone else.

If she gets such a call, Brenda’s path will be clear: if she hasn’t yet read his pages, she will ask for a few days to do so before he commits to the other agent. If she doesn’t, she will assume that there hasn’t been another offer. She can take her time and read the pages when she gets around to it.

Again, what’s the rush?

From the agent’s POV, asking a writer to overnight a manuscript is a compliment, not a directive: it’s the agent’s way of saying she’s really, really interested, not that she is going to clear her schedule tomorrow night in order to read it. And even if so, the tantalization will only be greater if she has to live through another couple of days before cloistering herself to read it.

So what should Bartholomew have done instead? The polite way to handle such a request is to say, “Wow, I’m flattered, but I’m booked up for the next few days. I can get it to you by the end of the week, though.” And then he should have Priority Mailed it.

Sound daring? Well, let me let you in on a little secret: in the industry, the party who wants a manuscript overnighted is generally the one who pays for it. After a publisher acquires your book, the house will be paying for you to ship your pages overnight if they need them that quickly, not you. So by asking the writer to pay the costs, the agent is actually stepping outside the norms.

More submission tips, and faux pas avoidance strategies, follow tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

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Submission packet dos and don’ts

I’m interrupting my amusing (to me, anyway) series on industry faux pas because I’ve received several questions recently about submissions. Not content questions, the kind we spent November wrestling with, the kind that get manuscripts rejected, but the technicalities of what actually goes into a submission packet.

I tend to gloss over this, because agents are usually very specific about what they want when they ask for a manuscript. Give them what they want. Never, ever send what you THINK they want to see instead: you may offer in your cover letter to send more, but that is all.

That’s right, I said cover letter – which no agent is ever going to ask you to include. The cover letter is for YOUR benefit, to help keep your requested submission out of the automatic rejection pile where the unrequested submissions go. It is also a polite way to respond to a business opportunity – in a business where politeness definitely counts.

What should your cover letter contain, and how is it different from a query letter? Primarily, the cover letter is a reminder that the agent DID request the manuscript. This information should be in the first paragraph, as in, “Thank you for asking to see the first fifty pages of my memoir, DEATH BY INCHES.”

Do I hear some murmuring out there? “But the agent is really excited about my manuscript,” comes a disgruntled voice. “Of course, he’ll remember it.”

Not necessarily – and that’s not necessarily bad for your book. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: contrary to what virtually every writer in the world believes, agents do NOT sit on the edges of their chairs, waiting for that manuscript they requested a week ago. They see literally hundreds of queries every week; it would be downright surprising if they remembered them all.

Don’t expect it – and don’t risk your submission being placed in the discard pile. Mention the request in your cover letter, and write on the outside of the envelope REQUESTED MATERIALS in letters so large that they can be seen from space.

If you met the agent at a conference, the cover letter is even more important. At conferences, agents often meet hundreds of people over the course of a day or two, and there are weeks at a time during the summer and autumn months where there are conferences every weekend. All of those pitches start to blur together after a while, even with the best intentions. (And no, making Frances’ mistake will NOT necessarily render yours more memorable.)

So it’s always an excellent idea to begin your cover letter with “Thank you for requesting the first 50 pages of my novel, FIVE HUNDRED BLANK PAGES. I so enjoyed meeting you at Conference X, and I hope you will enjoy reading it.”

And THEN take the biggest marking pen known to man and write REQUESTED MATERIALS – CONFERENCE X on the outside of the envelope.

Your cover letter need not contain much more than this. In fact, this would be a dandy cover letter for a requested submission:

Agent’s name
Agency address

Dear Ms. Smith:

Thank you so much for requesting the full manuscript of my novel, AND THEY ALL BURNED IN HELL. Please find it enclosed, along with a SASE and the author bio you requested.

I appreciate your taking the time to read this, and am thrilled at the prospect of working with your agency. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Writerly B. McAuthor
Address
Phone number
e-mail address

That’s it. Make sure ALL of your contact information is on the letter, though, either in the header (letterhead-style) or under your signature, and do be absolutely certain that the letter includes the title of your book, just in case the letter and the manuscript end up on different desks.

Like any other communication you send to anyone in the industry, use correspondence format, not business format: indent your paragraphs. Do not address the agent by first name only (“Dear Isabelle…”) unless the agent’s missive to you addressed you by YOUR first name only. (And “Dear Binky” is right out.) And it’s professional norm to use the same typeface and font in the cover letter as in the manuscript, so 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier are your choices here.

Like a contest entry, the nicer the paper (within reason), the better: at a large agency, a submission will often go through at least two screeners’ grubby paws before it lands on the agent’s desk, and low-quality paper wilts after a read or two. Use 20-lb paper or better (I use 24-lb) in bright white. Cream or ecru paper, be it ever so beautiful, will come across as unprofessional. Bright white paper provides the best background for crisp printing.

Which means that you should NOT print your submission while your printer cartridge is on its last legs.

Okay, beyond this, what should your submission packet include, and in what order?

In part, this is a trick question, because otherwise, the packet should include precisely what the agent asked you to include. However, any agent is going to assume that a writer of your caliber is already aware that certain requests imply certain inclusions. Here they are, in the order in which they are generally expected to appear in the packet:

1. Cover letter

2. Title page (ALWAYS include this, if ANY manuscript pages have been requested – yes, even if you have already sent the first 50 pages, and are now sending the rest of the book. If you have never formatted a professional manuscript before, please see the YOUR TITLE PAGE category at right.)

3. Requested pages in standard format. (Including a slug line in the top left margin of EVERY page, no matter what the PNWA contest guidelines told you: AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/#. The page number should appear ONLY in the slug line, nowhere else on the page. If you are unfamiliar with the slug line standards and other provisions of standard format – or didn’t know that there WAS a standard format – please check out the FORMATTING MANUSCRIPTS category at right.)

4. Synopsis, if one was requested, clearly labeled AS a synopsis. (With fiction, when an outline is requested, they usually mean a synopsis, not an annotated table of contents. For nonfiction, an outline means an annotated table of contents.)

5. Author bio, if one was requested. (If you don’t know how to write one of these, please consult the AUTHOR BIO category at right. I really have been trying to cover as many of your needs as possible here.)

6. SASE – that’s self-addressed, stamped envelope, for those of you new to the game — big enough to fit the entire manuscript; if you sent it in a box, it is acceptable to send a mailing label and postage. (Always use stamps, not metered postage. If you want to send a second, business-size envelope SASE as well, to make it easy for them to request the rest of the manuscript, place it at the end and mention it in your cover letter.)

It’s also a good idea to include a self-addressed, stamped postcard for the agency to mail to you to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript. Don’t worry about this causing trouble; it doesn’t, and you will have proof that they received it. This is important, because manuscripts do go astray from time to time.

That’s it. Don’t forget that EVERYTHING you send to an agency is a writing sample: impeccable grammar, punctuation, and printing please. No smudges or bent corners, either. Make it all pretty.

A bit more on this topic follows tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

PS: For those of you who are in the process of sending out packets: if you have follow-up questions on the subject, PLEASE post them here as comments, rather than e-mailing me with them. That way, everyone can benefit from the responses, and I can use my time more efficiently. I thank you; my agent thanks you; my publisher thanks you.

Posted on - 2 Comments on Getting the feedback you need, Part II: not over the eggnog

Getting the feedback you need, Part II: not over the eggnog

I wrote last time (as, indeed, I have written frequently over the last year plus that I have been posting a blog) about the advisability of getting some trustworthy soul to read your work IN ITS ENTIRETY before you send it out to an agent or editor at a small press.

Trustworthy, in this case, means objective, and far too few aspiring writers get honestly objective feedback on their work before they send it out. Instead, they give it to relatives or friends, almost none of whom have any experience giving the kind of feedback good writers need. Nothing against them — I’m sure they’re all lovely people to a man — but what you need is well-informed, practical advice based upon a thorough understanding of your target market.

Translation: it shouldn’t come from people who already love you. Or hate you, for that matter. No matter how supportive, kind, literate, critical, eagle-eyed, or brutally honest your parents may be — and I’m sure that they’re sterling souls — their history with you renders them not the best sources of feedback. One of the miracles of love is that it can blind the eye of the beholder. So the same principle applies to your siblings, your children, your best friend since you were three, and anyone who has ever shared your bed.

ESPECIALLY anyone who has ever shared your bed. Even on a very casual basis. Being horizontal can have the same effect on truthfulness as tears on mascara: things get murky.

Far be it from me to suggest that anyone who cares about you might be sweet and generous enough to lie to spare your feelings, but frankly, it happens. Be grateful that you have such supportive folks in your life. Cherish them; appreciate them; cling to them with the tenacity of an unusually insecure leech. But get other first readers for your manuscripts, because a first reader who will not tell you the truth reliably is simply not useful for a writer.

I’m bringing this up now, since many of us have been known to spend holidays with relatives or friends who say things like, “I’d love to read your novel sometime.” Trust me, it will be better for both your book and your relationships with your loved ones if you thank them profusely — and say no.

I can feel that some of you still aren’t convinced. Perhaps you have kith and kin who just adore giving their unvarnished opinions to you, ostensibly for your own good. “Is it really worth worrying,” I hear voices out there saying, “that the cousin who told me I looked stupid in my prom dress will be afraid to tell me that Chapter Three doesn’t work? Since Grams has no problem telling me that she hates my husband, why should she hesitate to rip my novel to shredsm, if it needs it?”

This is the other primary reason not to ask your loved ones for feedback, even if they are noted for their blithe indifference to any pain their truth-telling might cause to others: if you care about the advice-giver, it’s hard not to be emotionally involved in the response. If your favorite brother critiques your book, rightly or wrongly, it’s probably going to hurt more than if a member of your writing group gives precisely the same advice. And by the same token, the emotional baggage of the relationship, even if it is neatly packed and generally non-obtrusive, may make it harder to hear the advice qua advice.

Also — and I hesitate to bring this up, because, again, I’m sure your kith and kin are marvelous human beings — but critique by loved ones often runs in the other direction, particularly if you happen to be loved by the type the psychologists used to call passive-aggressive. I have had many, many editing clients come to me in tears because their significant others have pounced on the first typo of the manuscript as evidence that the writer should never have put pen to paper at all. Long-repressed sibling rivalries often jump for joy when they see a nice, juicy manuscript to sink their teeth into, and are you quite sure that your best friend ever forgave you for the time that your 4th-grade soccer team beat hers? What you need is feedback on your BOOK, not on your relationships.

Or, at least, that’s what you need in order to improve your book. (The state of your relationships is, of course, up to you.)

Often, too, when you’re dealing with people unused to giving feedback, being overly-judgmental is not even a reflection of their opinions of your book: in many cases, being vicious is what people think giving feedback means. (And if you doubt this, take a gander at the first efforts of most movie reviewers — or, heck, if you happen to live in the Seattle metro region, at the majority of film reviews in the local free paper THE STRANGER, where most of the contributing writers evidently believe that the title “critic” means that they should never, under any circumstances, say anything positive about a movie that might, say, induce a reader to go and see it. Given their editorial philosophy, I’m surprised to see any starred reviews at all in that paper.)

I’m not saying not to show your work to your kith and kin — if it makes you happy, do. But even if your Aunt Mary won a Pulitzer in criticism last year, you probably should not rely solely upon her critique of your manuscript. I speak not just from professional experience, but from familial as well: my mother is one of the best line editors I’ve ever seen. She’s been doing it since the late 1940s, for some pretty top-notch writers. I do show my work to her — as my mother. But for the brutal truth, I rely on my trusty band of tried-and-true first readers.

Yes, I know: finding good first readers is a whole lot of work, especially if you live in a small town. But, at the risk of wearing out the record, if you are going to be called on a mistake, it is FAR better to be a little embarrassed by a good first reader than rejected by a hyper-critical agent, editor, or contest judge. That way, you can fix the mistakes when the stakes are low — and, frankly, you’re far more likely to get usable feedback. If you are one of the many too shy or too busy to show your work to others, yet are willing to send it out to be evaluated by grumpy literary assistants hyped up on seven lattes before lunch, consider carefully whether you really want your first reader to be someone who does not have either the time or the inclination to give you tangible feedback.

Because, really, will “We’re sorry, but your manuscript does not meet our needs at this time?” tell you whether that orgy scene in Chapter 8 is the problem, or if it’s your constant use of the phrase, “Wha–?” You need readers who will tell you just that.

If you belong to a writers’ group, you already have a built-in problem-catching system in place — or you do if you belong to a GOOD writers’ group. If you have been hanging with other writers too kind to tell you about logical holes in your text, grammatical problems, or the fact that your protagonist’s sister was names Myrna for the first hundred pages and Myra thereafter, it really would behoove you to have a few more critical eyes look over your work before you send it out.

Do I hear some of you out there gnashing your teeth? “I HAVE been giving my work to first readers,” I hear you 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 do, you are 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 professional. 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.

First, never, but NEVER, simply hand a manuscript to a non-professional reader (i.e., someone who is not a professional writer, editor, agent, or teacher) without specifying what KIND of feedback you want.

Why not? Well, all too often, the amateur reader gets so intimidated 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?) Alternatively, other readers 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. All of these outcomes will make you unhappy, and might not produce the type of feedback you need.

Second, as I have indicated above, avoid asking relatives and close friends for feedback. If you do have them read it, make a positive statement when you give them the manuscript, limiting what you expect in response:  “I have other readers who will deal with issues of grammar and style,” you can tell your kin, for example. “I want to know if the story moved you.” 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), you will make the process more pleasant for them and heighten the probability that you will get some useful feedback.

Ideally, your best first reader choice (other than a professional reader, such as an editor, agent, or teacher) is a fellow writer in your own genre, preferably a published one. Second best is a good writer in another genre. Third is an excellent reader, one who has read widely and deeply and is familiar with the conventions of your genre.

Which brings me to my third 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. “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 his reading background, though, he was right: it’s rare that more than a page goes by in a good SF novel without overt action, and mainstream novels tend to be devoid of, say, time travel. John Irving would be wise, then, to avoid him as a first reader.

As would I — and here’s where I see if you’ve been paying attention: why SHOULDN’T I use my SF-loving boyfriend 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 memoirs on a regular basis!” you get an A.

Tomorrow, holiday and revision conditions permitting, I shall share a few more hints on how to minimize first reader disappointments. In the meantime, enjoy the holidays, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Getting the feedback you need — and deserve

Getting the feedback you need — and deserve

Given that from now until after the last New Year’s hangover has receded into memory is a publishing world dead zone, a time of internal reassessment when query letters are seldom read, to be followed by the annual avalanche of New Year’s resolution query letters in January, now is a lovely time to take a break from querying. It’s a great time to be revising your own work with an eye to sending it out afresh to agents, editors, and conferences, to clear it of those little gaffes that make you smack yourself in the head when you catch them AFTER the submission’s in the mail.

It’s revision time, boys and girls.

This, I know, will make some of my long-term readers giggle. When, you may well be wondering, does Anne think it ISN’T a good time to revise a manuscript? Or, at the very least, to scan it for common mistakes and deviations from standard format?

Yes, yes, I am the high priestess of manuscript perfection, but as I find it a trifle difficult to believe that anyone who has been reading this blog for a while isn’t aware by now WHY I preach that particular gospel, I shan’t explain again. But I shall reiterate: it is absolutely vital to clear your manuscript (and query letter, and synopsis) of spelling and grammatical errors, pronto.

In this effort, DO NOT rely upon your word processing program’s spelling and grammar checker. As any professional editor will tell you, they tend to be rife with technical errors — mine, for instance, regularly tells me to use the wrong form of there, their, and they’re — and it’s far too easy for a slip of the mouse to convince your dictionary to accept “caseless” when you mean “ceaseless.”

Spell check, by all means, but I implore you, do not let that be your only means of proofreading. There is no substitute for the good ol’ human eye running down a printed page of text for catching errors.

Why not proof on your computer monitor? Because, as any editor will happily tell you, the screen is not the best place to proofread, even if you read every syllable aloud (which I recommend, particularly for novels that contain quite a bit of dialogue). It’s just too easy for the eyes and the brain to blur momentarily in the editing process, making you skip an error.

Yes, even if you have a simply massive computer screen — this is an instance where size truly doesn’t matter. Since I edit professionally, I have a monitor that could easily balance a small litter of puppies on it. But I ALWAYS use hard copy for a final edit, both for my work and for my clients’. As my downstairs neighbor would, I’m sure, be overjoyed to tell you, if a deadline is close, I’m going to be sitting in my library, reading the relevant manuscript in its entirety, in hard copy, out loud.

I’m funny that way.

After you have proofed and poked the slower movements of your text, I STRONGLY urge you to have at least one third party reader take a gander at the text. It is NOT the best idea in the world to be the only eyes who see your work before it lands on an agent’s or editor’s desk. Gaining some outside perspective, via a trustworthy first reader, has many benefits — most notably, good pre-submission feedback can enable you to weed out the rookie mistakes that tend to result in automatic turndowns from professionals. Like misspelling your own name or address on the title page — which happens more than you might think.

Hey, people are in a hurry.

Other than the simple fact that other eyes are more likely to catch mistakes than you are the 147th time you read a text, there is another reason that you should run your work by another human being before you submit them. I tremble to report this, but it is very, very common for writers to send off the first chapter or three of their novels WITHOUT EVER HAVING ANYONE ELSE READ THEM. The result: for many writers, the agent’s feedback is the first time many writers EVER get an outside opinion of their work.

And, as those of you who followed me through the November list of rejection reasons know, that feedback is usually either minimal or non-existent. Not, in any case, feedback that’s likely to help a writer improve his work before the next round of submissions.

Select wisely your first reader wisely, preferably another writer, rather than a friend, lover, or — sacre bleu! — a family member. Long-term readers, chant it along with me now: the input of your best friend, your mother, your siblings, and/or your lover (s), however charming it may be, is unlikely to yield the kind of concrete, tangible feedback every writer needs.

No offense to your kith and kin, but it’s true. Ties of affection do not necessarily good readers make.

Since holiday time is notorious for prompting one’s relatives to ask, “So, dear, how’s your writing coming? Published anything yet?” I thought this might be a good moment to remind you of this unfortunate fact. The closer the tie, the lower the objectivity — and no, smart people are not exempt from this rule. Even if your mother runs a major publishing house for a living, your brother is a high-flying agent, and your lover reviews major novelists regularly for THE WASHINGTON POST, they are unlikely to have the perspective necessary to give you objective feedback.

Nor should they have to, really. It’s their job to make you feel better about yourself — or to make you feel worse about yourself, depending upon your taste in relationships and familial patterns.

So when your Aunt Gladys says she’d just LOVE your manuscript (and trust me, at some point, she will; everyone likes the idea of getting a free advance peek at the next big bestseller), I give you my full permission to use me as your excuse for saying no. Do it politely, of course: “I’m sorry, but I’ve been advised by a professional editor that until I find an agent, I need to limit myself to objective readers,” or “I’d love to, Aunt Gladys, but I have a writing group for feedback — what I need you for is support!” tends to go over MUCH better than, “What, are you just trying to get out of buying a copy of the book?”

And for those of you who already have agents: break yourself of the habit NOW of promising free copies of your future books to your kith and kin. Since authors now receive so few copies — and are often expected to use those for promotion — it’s really, really common for the writer to end up having to BUY those promised freebies to distribute.

Get Aunt Gladys used to the idea that supporting you means being willing to shell out hard cash for your book. Promise to sign it for her instead.

But I digress. If you haven’t shown your writing to another trustworthy soul — be it through sharing it with a writers’ group, workshopping it, having it edited professionally, or asking a great reader whom you know will tell you the absolute truth — you haven’t gotten an adequate level of objective feedback. I know it seems as though I’m harping on this point, but I regularly meet aspiring writers who have sent out what they thought was beautifully-polished work to an agent without having run it by anyone else — only to be devastated to realize that the manuscript contained some very basic mistake that objective eyes would have caught easily.

Trust me, wailing, “But my husband/wife/second cousin just loved it!” will not help you at that juncture.

And emotionally, what are you doing when you send out virgin material to a stranger who, after all, has the institutional ability to change your life by bringing your book to publication? It’s the equivalent of bypassing everyone you know in getting an opinion on your fancy new hairdo and going straight to the head of a modeling agency. Professionals have no reason to pull their punches; if a publishing professional does take the time to critique your work, the criticism comes absolutely unvarnished. Even when rejection is tactful, naturally, with the stakes so high for the author, any negative criticism feels like being whacked on the head with a great big rock.

I’m trying to save you some headaches here.

But even as I write this, I know there are some ultra-shy or ultra-independent Emily Dickinson types out there who prefer to write in absolute solitude — then cast their work upon the world, to make its way as best it can on its own merits. No matter what I say, I know you hardy souls would rather be drawn and quartered than to join a writers’ group, wouldn’t you? You are going to persist in deciding that you, and only you, are the best judge of when your work is finished.

And maybe you are right.

I am not saying that a writer can’t be a good judge of her own work — she can, if she has a good eye, and sufficient time to gain perspective on it. I would be the last person to trot out that tired old axiom about killing your darlings; hands up, everyone who has attended a writers’ workshop and seen a promising piece that needed work darling-chopped into a piece of consistent mediocrity. CONSIDERING killing your pet phrases is often good advice, but for a writer with talent, the writer’s pet phrases are often genuinely the best part of the work.

However, until you get an objective opinion, you cannot know for sure how good your own eye is — and isn’t it just a trifle masochistic to use your big shot at catching an agent’s attention as your litmus test for whether you are right about your own editing skills? Even if you find only one person whom you can trust to tell you the absolute truth, your writing will benefit from your bravery if you ask for honestly locally first.

Ideally, you would run your submission materials past your writing group, or a freelance editor familiar with your genre, or a published writer IN YOUR GENRE. (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, not all of us have those kinds of connections or resources. 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.)

In a pinch, you can 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 actually 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.)

In tomorrow’s post, I shall talk about strategies for getting the kind of good, solid feedback you need without treating your first readers like mere service-providers. (If you want to do this without engendering social obligations, you really should be working with a paid professional freelancer, rather than your friends.) Until then, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Details, details, Part II: avoiding a fulsome fate

Details, details, Part II: avoiding a fulsome fate

“God is in the details,” architect Mies van der Rohe allegedly wrote.

I’m not a big fan of his buildings, to tell you the truth, but I do think that this aphorism applies to writing in spades. It’s quite clear to us as readers, usually — walk into any crowd of writers, and you’re sure to find at least one on-going discussion of So-and-So’s stylistic choices. There are writers whose use of semicolons makes me swoon, thank you very much, and as brilliant Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has pointed out, for most of us writers, there are fictional characters who have affected us more than most flesh-and-blood human beings.

But for the vast majority of aspiring writers who write in isolation, without significant contact with other people who speak the creative language, keeping sight of the huge weight small touches carry in their own work is harder. And this is a pity, because the little, unique details are often what catches an agent’s eye — and the misbegotten details definitely catch agency screeners’.

It pays to pay attention to the little things, therefore. Yet time and again, I hear submitting writers speak of the submission process as though the little things — spelling all of the words correctly, for instance, or formatting pages in accordance with standard format — don’t matter. It’s the overall writing, these fine folks argue, that will make or break one’s chances with an agent or editor.

Well, yes and no. If the writing is absolutely beautiful, but the formatting is all akimbo and the spelling is lousy, there’s an outside chance that someone at an agency might be in a saintly enough mood to overlook the problems and take a chance on the writer. However, virtually all of the time, an agent, editor, contest judge, or screener’s first reaction to such a manuscript is the same as to one that is dull but technically perfect: rejection. And with few exceptions, the rejectors will not even take the time to scrawl, “Take a formatting class!” or “Next time, spell-check!” on the returned manuscript.

Why can they afford to be so caviler? Long-time readers, chant along with me now: because they receive enough technically perfect AND well-written manuscripts that they don’t need to worry about the rest. If a writer is truly talented, they figure, she’ll mend her ways and try again.

All that being said, let’s return to yesterday’s list of standard formatting restrictions, shall we?

(9) The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page.
That’s twelve single-spaced lines, incidentally. The chapter name (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the first line of the first page, but then nothing else should appear until a third of the way down.

This means that the title of the book, “by Author’s Name,” and/or your contact information do NOT belong on this page — all variations of a classic rookie mistake. Including any of this information on this page (other than in the slug line) will simply make the submission appear unprofessional.

But of that, see the next entry.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.
Yes, you should ALWAYS include a title page with ANY submission of ANY length, including contest entries and the chapters you send after the agent has fallen in love with your first 50 pages. Even when a contest does not specify that you should (and no, it doesn’t count toward page count; the first page of the first chapter is page 1).

Literally every manuscript that any agent in North America sends to any editor will include a title page, yet around 92%) seem to be unaware that including it is industry standard. On the bright side, this means that if you are industry-savvy enough to include a professionally-formatted title page with your work, your submission automatically looks like a top percentile ranker to professional eyes from the moment it’s pulled out of the envelope.

It’s never too early to make a good first impression.

If you do not know how to format a proper title page (and yes, Virginia, there IS a special format for manuscripts), please see the Your Title Page category at right.

(11) The beginning of each paragraph should be indented five spaces — no exceptions — and nothing you send to anyone in the industry should EVER be in block-style business format.

To publishing types, any document with no indentations, skipping a line between paragraphs, and the whole shebang left-justified carries the stigma of (ugh) business correspondence, which is to say that they regard it as a symptom of creeping illiteracy.

Just don’t do it.

Yes, yes, I know: published books — particularly mysteries, I notice — often begin chapters and sections without indentation. Trust me, that lack of indentation was the editor’s choice, not the author’s, and copying the style here might get your work knocked out of consideration. At minimum, you won’t get any points for style.

Pop quiz: which do you think is going to strike format-minded industry professionals as more literate, a query letter in business format or one in correspondence format (indented paragraphs, date and signature halfway across the page)?

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

(12) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.
This one is for all of you bloggers and business letter-writers out there. The whole darned manuscript should be double-spaced, and paragraphs are all indented, so there is no need to skip a line to indicate a paragraph break.

The ONLY exception is that you may skip an extra line to indicate a section break in the text.

(13) Words in foreign languages should be italicized.
The logic here is very straightforward: don’t want the agent of your dreams to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

You may also use italics for emphasis, book titles, song titles, etc. — and just so you know, anyone who follows AP style will tell you to underline these. DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE TEMPTERS: AP style is for journalism, not book publishing. They are different fields, and have different standards.

In a submission for the book publishing industry, NOTHING should be underlined. Why? The reason is actually very practical: underlining uses more ink than italics in the book production process. Thus, italics are cheaper.

(14) All numbers (except for dates) under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.

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

Here is how charmingly archaic the industry is: this formatting rule was originally for the benefit of the manual typesetters. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

Again, be warned, those of you who have been taught by teachers schooled in the AP style: they will tell you to write out only numbers under 10. Yes, this is true for newspaper articles, where space is at a premium, but it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG in a manuscript.

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

(15) Dashes should be doubled — rather than using an emdash, with a space at either end. Hyphens are single and are not given extra spaces, as in self-congratulatory.
Yes, I know: my blogging software will not allow me to insert a doubled dash here, and any Microsoft product will automatically change a doubled dash to the longer emdash.

Change it back. Seriously, any agent would make you do this before agreeing to submit your manuscript to an editor, so you might as well get into this salutary habit as soon as possible.

Microsoft may actually have a point here: I fully admit that doubling the dashes is a monumental pain, and the practice is archaic. Books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy; many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. An AP-trained teacher will tell you to use the longer emdash, as will the Chicago Manual of Style.

In this, however, they are wrong. Standard format for manuscripts is invariable upon this point.

And heck, MS Word’s grammar checker has more than once told me to replace the correct form of there, their, or they’re with an incorrect one. Who are you gonna believe, me or Bill Gates?

(16) The use of ANY brand name should be accompanied by the trademark symbol, as in Kleenex™.
If you catch an agent under the age of 30, or one who doesn’t have a graduate degree, you may get away without including the trademark symbol, but legally, you are not allowed to use a trademarked name without it. Writers — yes, and publishing houses, too — have actually been sued over this within the last few years, so be careful about it.

There you have it: the rules. Literally every page of text you submit to an agent, editor, or literary contest (yes, including the synopsis) should be in standard format. Oh, and it’s a good idea to make sure everything is spelled correctly, too.

Yes, these are all small details, but this is an industry that thrives on details. There’s a reason, after all, that the term “nit-picker” is more or less synonymous with “editor.” Not only should you read your ENTIRE submission IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD before you even think of popping it in the mail — you should give serious thought to allowing some trusty soul to proofread it for you.

Why is another pair of eyes a good idea? Because not all manuscript errors are typos. Here’s an illustrative anecdote, to show you why.

When I was in grad school, I was a teaching assistant for a professor who longed beyond all things to be an inspiration to her students. You know, the kind who spur their students to the kind of DEAD POETS SOCIETY minor free thinking that’s not particularly dangerous to the status quo/

And how did she choose to inform her students of this fact? Frequently, during undergraduate lectures, she would soften her habitual chiding of a narrow-minded student by throwing her arms wide and exclaiming, “Be as intellectually wide-ranging as possible! I want all of you to lead fulsome lives!”

Every time she did it, we teaching assistants arrayed at the back of the room would have a terrible time keeping straight faces. Because, you see, the professor had made a very common mistake: she believed fulsome was a synonym for full. She had, she said, heard many people use it this way. But just because a usage is common doesn’t mean it is correct.

Fulsome means noxious, noisome, loathsome. So, inadvertently, she was urging all of her students to have perfectly hideous lives.

God is in the details; sometimes all of us need an extra pair of eyes to remind us of that.  Keep up the good work.

Posted on - 2 Comments on Is that dialogue I see before me?

Is that dialogue I see before me?

I was called in as a last-minute replacement contest judge — yes, it happens; regularly-scheduled judges drop out all the time – at a time I shall simply designate as recently, so it will not be apparent which contest it is. (But it was really, really recent.) I highly recommend stepping up to judge a contest from time to time; there’s nothing like spending a long weekend with a small mountain of entries to get a very tangible sense of what agency screeners face each and every day.

I refer, of course, to the constant joy of revelation. Oh, and so much repetition that spontaneous combustion starts to seem marginally attractive, just to have some diversion.

I was in a fiction category this time, not my usual donnybrook. Most of the time, I step up for NF categories, because, generally speaking, it’s far harder to find experienced judges for NF. But this time, it was a couple of dozen 15-page (max) novel excerpts. After such a lengthy short chapter orgy, I felt I could not exist another instant on this terrestrial sphere without passing along the following piece of gleaned wisdom:

It is a whole lot easier than one might suspect to bore someone who has just read twenty manuscripts. All your really have to do, should you aspire to it, is to write like everyone else. The easiest way to do this, apparently, is to construct dialogue.

Remember a month or two ago, when I went on a rampage about the drawbacks of the ever-popular dialogue-only scene? (Okay, I could be referring to several different posts here: this is a pet peeve of mine as an editor and as a blogger.) I suggested gently, if memory serves, that such scenes tend to be frowned upon by many professional readers: if you want to make your points entirely through dialogue, the industry wisdom runs, write a play.

Novels, on the other hand, have been known to include such decorative details as character development and environment description. Little things like that. Yet most of us were taught at some point in our writing development that GOOD dialogue should reveal so much about the characters from whose mouths it is ostensibly falling that description is, well, kinda superfluous.

As someone who spent quite a few years teaching, let me let you in on a wee teaching secret: exaggeration is often a very effective way to make a point. You might want to take tutorial truisms with a grain of salt, therefore. As in one that you might purchase at Costco, and a forklift would deliver it to your car.

To put it another way, if you had just finished reading your 1500th 10th-grade story where every character says things angrily, sadly, or scornfully, you might well feel that some extreme measures were called for to reduce the sheer number of adverbs your eyeballs might be forced to scan in future. You might conceivably say tell your students to avoid them like the proverbial plague.

Yes, I am saying what you think I’m saying here: many, many dialogue-only pushers are not motivated merely by a love of spareness, or even a hatred of intra-text description. Much of the time, they are trying to cut down on all of those adverbs – and the tag lines they grace. (You remember tag lines, right? They’re the he said and she exclaimed part of the dialogue. A surprisingly high percentage of the time, most professional readers will tell you, they’re not necessary.)

In running full-tilt from the Scylla of over-reliance upon adverb-laden tag lines, however, many writers run smack into the Charybdis of over-terseness in their dialogue. As in pages at a time where there is nothing but dialogue as far as the eye can see. No softening indications of tone or body language; no indications of the room where the dialogue might conceivably be taking place, or indeed that the conversation is taking place in a tangible location at all; not even a hint that every speaker might not be telling the truth 100% of the time.

Because, of course, in real life, everyone speaks in a monotone while holding perfectly still, standing in a featureless, all-white room while doing it, and says everything that crosses his mind with perfect candor. Can’t throw a cupcake at a single party in North America without hitting someone engaged in THAT type of conversation.

And heavens, does this make contest entries (and submissions) similar! I hate to break anyone’s bubble here, but I have it on pretty good authority that after the fifth or sixth such dialogue scene in a row, the underdeveloped characters in one might conceivably start to seem a heck of a lot like the underdeveloped characters in the next. In fact, it is not at all hard to imagine a situation where such characters might begin to blur together after a while.

I’m not saying that every judge or screener would read so quickly that this would happen, of course. Just the ones with, you know, lives. Think about it: what professional reader has time to take a 15-minute break between reading projects to clear her head?

Actually, I think play-like dialogue in novels has quite a few significant drawbacks, over and above how common it is. First, it encourages the kind of real-life exchanges that, while undoubtedly a reflection of how people speak in authentic situations, is deadly dull on the page. Unless you’re Samuel Beckett (who wrote PLAYS, people!), you’re going to have an uphill battle trying to get the average reader (let alone a professional one) to sit through sterling exchanges on the order of:

Sonia: Is the tea ready?
Simon: Yeah.
Sonia: I had to buy the tea myself today, you know. Didn’t you see the note on the refrigerator?
Simon: No. Isn’t there any sugar?
Sonia: No, there isn’t, because time, in case you haven’t noticed, is not infinitely flexible. I do not have the eight extra hours in the day you seem to think I have, nor do I have jet packs installed in my feet. You, on the other hand, work in a grocery store. Is it too much to ask for you to reach into Aisle 2 from time to time to grab a tin of tea?
Simon: Ah. Good tea.

Second, as I mentioned above, it pushes narrative character development out of dialogue-based scenes, which strikes me as something of a waste of a good scene. Third, such dialogue rests upon the logical fallacy that human beings just blurt out everything relevant about a situation in ordinary dialogue. (I would explain the problem with this, but in the interests of space conservation, I shall instead refer my readers to anyone who has ever had a conversation with an unpleasant boss, a coworker with B.O., a relative with political views different from oneself, or who has ever heard a eulogy or a toast at a wedding. Absolute truthfulness is simply not the norm for human interaction.)

The fourth reason is really a corollary of the third: as a matter of craft, dialogue-only scenes render depicting undercurrents between people, if not impossible, then at least far more difficult than it needs to be. As the Idol agents pointed out, scenes that have more than one thing going on in them are far more eye-catching (and interesting) than those that deal only in the obvious.

Dialogue-only scenes convey the impression that there is precisely nothing going on between the discussants but the subject of the conversation. The reader may well know different from earlier, non-dialogue parts of the book, but within the context of the discussion shown, the speakers have no bodies to speak of, apparently, no emotions worth mentioning, evidently, and no motivations, ulterior or otherwise, that they would not be more than happy to bellow at the nearest bystander.

Personally, I have never been in on such a conversation, but hey, they must exist: recently, I read fifteen of them in a row. I can’t imagine where. Or how recently.

Regardless of whether such conversations do actually occur in real life, or whether you (or your revered writing teachers) are fond of seeing them in print, consider this: is reproducing such an incredibly common writing technique really the best way to make your contest or submission stand out in the crowd?

I leave it up to you to decide. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The limitations of style, or, is there a way I can make my submission screener-proof?

The limitations of style, or, is there a way I can make my submission screener-proof?

Is everybody thawed out yet? Nothing like a good cold snap to inhibit driving and drive us all back to our writing studios, I always say. During the recent shivery period, I’ve been going back to questions readers have posted as comments that really deserve entire posts of their own. Today, I have a question that I know will interest all of you writers of literary fiction out there: how to prevent the pretty language experiments you like to unleash upon the world from being misinterpreted by the average agency screener. Take, for example, intelligent and insightful reader Mary’s dilemma:

“I am frantically working on a proposal to be submitted within the next week or two. As I am working on my sample chapters, I’ve realized that part of my writing style consists of sentences that are fragments.

“I have an excellent grasp of grammar and have no trouble writing in complete sentences. But the style I have developed over the years owes part of its rhythm to fragments. I like the emphasis they provide, and the way they “pace” the writing.

“I’m concerned, however, about putting fragments in my sample chapters. What if agents think I don’t know how to write in complete sentences? But without the fragments, my writing feels formal and a little bland.

What’s the scoop? Are fragments allowed in otherwise grammatically correct writing, or are they to be avoided like the mange in those critical sample chapters?”

Hoo boy, Mary, is this ever a complex question, and one that I have heard debated long into the night by many, many well-established writers of literary fiction, who have precisely this fear about boneheaded critics not understanding the interesting things they like to do with language from time to time. Basically, the underlying concern is that someone in some dark corner of the industry will not be able to tell the difference between the CHOICE to bend the rules of grammar a trifle and a simple ignorance of those rules.

As someone who reads a LOT of manuscripts, let me set your mind at least partially at ease: said difference is usually ABUNDANTLY clear to a professional reader. A writer unaware of the basic rules of grammar will make mistakes consistently, but an experienced writer will make them selectively. Also, if a good writer decides to use a stylistic quirk, such as sentence fragments, those quirks will affect only as small fraction of the sentences in the manuscript. In a submission by writer who does not understand the rules of sentence construction, on the other hand, this ignorance will show up in most of the sentences, and probably in all of the paragraphs.

And yes, Virginia, the difference is generally apparent on the first page. If someone has genuine writing talent, a professional reader will often already be excited by the end of the first paragraph.

So the short answer, Mary, is that if the sentence fragments are integral to your style — which certainly seems to be the case, from what you describe — keep ‘em. Usually, if fragments are part of a well-developed rhythm, it will be pretty apparent to a good reader’s eye that their use is a well-thought-out choice.

That being said, there are agents and editors out there who hate fragments like the mange you mention. (Great analogy, by the way, for the way grammar-hounds tend to think of it.) They are certainly in the minority these days — I mean, come on, most published writers will use a sentence fragment from time to time for emphasis, and let’s not even talk about how Joan Didion has raised the acceptance of the once-verboten one-sentence paragraph — but there are indeed industry folks whose English teachers beat into them that only complete sentences will do.

These people, I imagine, lunch with the Point-of-View Nazis, bemoaning the decline of American letters and plotting how to subvert anyone who is even thinking about doing something interesting and original with language. And after they finish sipping their post-prandial cognac, they stiff the waiter and go out kicking those Santa Clauses who ring bells on city street corners for charity. Or so I surmise. Then they go back to work, screening manuscripts.

Seriously, they’re not too common, and for good reason: this taste would basically render it impossible for these people to work much with literary fiction or NF written by journalists (who are trained to use fragments for effect). So you can usually avoid them by sticking to agencies that, well, deal with writers who break the occasional grammatical rule. But again, if the rest of your writing is solid, it’s unlikely that a seasoned professional would mistake a legitimate stylistic choice for lack of grammatical acumen.

However, the folks in power are not the only ones you need to worry about. As I believe I have mentioned before, at an agency or publishing house of any size, the first reader of a requested manuscript will almost certainly not be the agent or the editor herself, but at least one level of screener or assistant. Even a medium-sized agency will often employ a screener or two.

This is why, in case you were wondering, that requests for the rest of the book are often so vague. Few agents are brave enough to say outright, “Well, Thing One and Thing Two, my faithful screeners, really liked your first 50 pages. I haven’t read it yet, but if they read the rest of your manuscript and tell me it is worthwhile, I’m definitely interested.”

Why should the employment of screeners worry the occasional bender of grammatical rules? Well, while most agencies will school their screeners in what they should use as rejection criteria, the usual assumption is that the screeners will already be familiar with the basic standards of good writing. Most of the time, screeners are simply told to weed out the submissions with grammatical problems, but not necessarily given a crash course in the difference between stylistic choice and error first.

Uh-oh.

As those of you who kept up with the recent Idol series are already aware, plenty of screeners have freshly tumbled out of English departments of varying degrees of credibility. If it’s very freshly, they tend to perpetuate their professors’ pet peeves until they have read enough submissions to develop pet peeves of their own. And this can sometimes be problematic for submitters, because while screeners do not have much power within their agencies, they definitely do have veto power over submissions. If some over-eager intern screener fresh from his first serious English class takes umbrage at your use of fragments, there’s not much you can do about it.

Whether your submission ends up screened by such a sterling character is, alas, largely a matter of chance. So yes, you are taking a bit of a risk in including them; with such people, you would in fact be better off without the fragments. However, if the fragments add considerably to your writing, in your opinion, I am inclined to think that you would be better off not associating with agents and editors — or screeners, or editorial assistants — who don’t understand what you’re trying to do.

After all, almost anyone in the industry will tell you that it’s a mistake to mess with a style that works. Fragments are not all that rare anymore — heck, Annie Proulx even won the Pulitzer for a work chock full of ‘em. If you love them, they should probably stay.

Especially if your book’s category is one where fragments have a track record for being used with success. In literary fiction, for example, their use is very much accepted — but before I say more about that, I am going to need to talk about what is and isn’t literary fiction, and that, my friends, is the topic of another day.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 6 Comments on Let’s talk about this: what would be useful rejection information?

Let’s talk about this: what would be useful rejection information?

Since I’ve been talking for the last month about rejection criteria that is news to most querying writers, and yesterday about how little actual information the average agency tends to send back with a rejected manuscript, it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) that there is an awfully large communication gap between aspiring writers and the agents to whom they submit their work. Having talked about the issue with people on both sides of it, I have come to the conclusion that this lapse is actually quite frustrating for both sides: agents report feeling that writers don’t seem to understand just how little time they can devote to each query and/or submission; writers report that they feel that their work is being treated with disrespect, and that it’s hard to improve without getting actual feedback on what they’re doing wrong.

One aspect of this conflict particularly caught my attention: most of the agents with whom I have discussed this seem to believe that it’s the FACT of rejection that annoys writers so, rather than the form it takes. Simply put, many of them seem to feel that there is no way that they could reject a manuscript without angering its writer, and that form letters are, in part, a recognition of that reality. But is this true?

So let me turn the question out to you, dear readers: what kind of information would you LIKE to see in a rejection letter? Feedback on how to improve your querying style? A simple statement about why your work in particular is not for that agency? A photocopied form listing common problems, with the appropriate ones checked off?

Alternatively, are you of the school of thought that would prefer to be told no as quickly as possible, without fanfare, so you may move on to the next agency on your list? Would you prefer form letters that did not attempt any explanation at all, and spared you the usual platitudes?

And, finally: is there anyone out there who actually prefers form letters to a personalized response?

Now is your time to vent, everybody – but please, eschew profanity (I already get enough spam comments from porn-site teasers trying to post here, thank you very much), and for your own protection, let’s avoid naming specific agents. It’s just not that big an industry, and I don’t want to encourage you to be burning any bridges that might be useful to you down the line.

But seriously, if you were in their shoes, how would you do it differently?

Posted on - 4 Comments on Form-letter rejections revisited

Form-letter rejections revisited

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

But not often.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - 2 Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XV: wrapping it all up and tying it with a nifty bow

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XV: wrapping it all up and tying it with a nifty bow

Some exciting news today, campers: remember how I spent the month of October locked in my studio, making revisions on my novel, as requested by an editor at a major publishing house? No? Well, remember that long period when I was extremely grumpy? It has evidently borne some fruit: I have been asked to make a second set of revisions. Which, believe it or not, is good news; it means the editor liked my first set of revisions. Hooray!

Was that gasp I just heard the sound of a quarter of my readers clutching their hearts, crying, “Wait – a publisher can make an author revise a book TWICE before making an offer?”

Well, to tell you the truth, the second go-round is a touch unusual, but it’s not at all uncommon anymore for an editor to ask for some fairly hefty one-time revisions before there is even any talk of filthy lucre changing hands. And yes, in the past, it was traditional for a publishing house to buy the book first, before the fine-tuning began. So the next time anyone tries to tell you that the publishing industry is anything like it was even ten years ago, you know what to reply: the fiction market, and indeed the book market in general, is a lot tighter than it used to be.

All of which seems like a perfect lead-in to my last post on the Idol rejection reasons (if you do not know what these are, please see my post for October 31), because, really, it’s important to recognize that 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; the agent needs to be able to place it at a publishing house for you.

And 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.

Today, however, we get the reward: the description of the kind of book that makes agents weak in the knees.

Surprisingly, agents 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. 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.

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.”

“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?” Presumably, if a 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. 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. All of these elements are only enhanced by a beautiful writing style, of course.

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, 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 be surprising. 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 series, 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!

P.S.: Hey, those of you interested in alternate realities: long-time reader and FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Brian Mercer will be talking about his book, MASTERING ASTRAL PROJECTION on the radio show, The Darkness on the Edge of Town. The radio show will air on Sunday at 10 PM Central Standard Time at 1470 AM (for those of you in the greater Minneapolis area) or streaming live via the show’s website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that, my friends, is something to celebrate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - No Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XIII: the writing itself

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XIII: the writing itself

No, I did not run off to Latin America with the documentary film crew: I’ve just been rushed off my feet since I got back to Seattle. I got a real burst of energy from the realization that no matter happens from here on out with my memoir — on which: still no word from my publisher — part of my story will be out there for the world to hear. (If this comment seems cryptic to you, please see the MY MEMOIR’S SAGA category at right. It’s been quite a ride.) It’s a small step toward getting the truth out there, but at least it’s a step.

It’s a pretty odd sensation, having to wonder every time I open my mouth or set fingers to keyboard to communicate about my life whether THIS statement will be the one that causes the situation to escalate again. Bizarre, isn’t it, that there is some serious question over whether I own the story of my own life?

But honestly, I know several other memoirists in similar binds. Granted, my book has been carrying the additional burden of a threatened $2 million lawsuit, but this is such a hostile publishing environment for memoirists in general — for A Million Little Reasons — that the already tight memoir market has become practically moribund for the second half of this year.

Hands up, every memoir-writer out there who has been told within the last six months that no one is buying memoirs anymore. (Or rather, to be precise, that publishing houses are no longer buying them. Readers, if the industry figures are correct, still are buying memoirs at roughly the same rate as ever.) Or that any memoir that contains dialogue is now considered automatically suspect. It’s tougher than it was even a year ago, isn’t it?

Speaking of which, I would like to wrap up the last of the Idol rejection reasons (if you do not know what these are, please see my post of October 31) as soon as possible, so you can get on with sending out your last barrage of queries of the year this weekend.

Why the last? Well, you could keep sending ‘em out, but since the publishing industry more or less closes down between Thanksgiving and Christmas (YOU try getting an editorial committee together during that month, with all of the various religious observances), agencies tend to slow their response rate then, too.

How slow? Well, let me put it this way: if you send out your queries right now, you might conceivably hear back this year. But not necessarily.

However, if you want to get your work under an agent’s eyes prior to say, February, you should send it toute suite, for reasons that not even the most reactionary industry die-hard could not manage to pin on James Frey (who has been blamed for every other industry ill of the year). Actually, the January phenomenon is one of the few industry conditions caused by collective action amongst writers: practically every unpublished writer in America makes a New Year’s resolution to get his work out the door.

So guess what happens at the average agency on January 2? That’s right: an avalanche of queries, accompanied by submissions from all of those writers who were asked for their materials over the last year, but spent the intervening months going over it again and again to make sure it was perfect. (SIOA!)

Thus, as simple mathematics will tell you, the competition is greater between New Year’s and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — the average New Year’s resolution lasts a grand total of three weeks — so it doesn’t make too much sense to query then. If our old pal, the underpaid (or unpaid intern) agency screener is grumpy on every other Monday of the year, just imagine how much grumpier she is likely to be with an extra mailbag’s worth of queries dumped on her desk every single day.

Why, there’s hardly room for her to set down her scalding-hot latte.

So let’s get on with the rejection reasons, shall we? As you may have noticed over the course of this series, most of these pet peeves are at the larger level – paragraph, conception, pacing, etc. – but today’s 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 them in general. Objection #55 (took too many words to say what happened) is, of course, the offspring of our old friend, the thirty-second read, but to professional eyes, overly prolix text is not problematic merely because it takes too long to get the action going. 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, agents would much rather that any necessary manuscript reconstruction occur prior to their seeing the book at all, so this is a major red flag for them. It is likely to send them screaming in another direction.

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 do not know the other good reasons to do this, please see the YOUR 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 howled at me in the middle of the last paragraph, for years, the standard agent advice to aspiring writers has been to keep a first novel under 100,000 words, if humanly possible.

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 there are many romances and mysteries that weigh in at a scant 40,000 – 60,000.

#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, 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. Take a gander at this, 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, but it’s awfully analogy-heavy, is it not? Taken individually, 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, it can be a bit distracting.

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

To a professional reader, such phrases 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, all of today’s objections 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.) 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 inroads onto your 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 makes you, if I may be blunt about it, smarter than 98% of the aspiring writers who will be enthusiastically fulfilling their New Year’s resolutions by licking stamps for SASEs on January first.

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.

Tomorrow (yes, I intend to blog on Thanksgiving, because I skipped a couple of days earlier in the week; turkeys cook for a long time), I shall finish up the last of the Idol rejection reasons. Hooray! In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XII: reading from the other side of the envelope

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XII: reading from the other side of the envelope

I’m sitting in a Berkeley espresso place right now, surrounded by people who apparently stepped directly out of either my memoir (my parents were local beatniks) or the novel currently in editorial limbo (my protagonist’s parents were local hippies). Seriously, I could cast movies of either very comfortably without walking outside into the prevailing misty fog.

Why am I here? Well, I’m waiting to be interviewed for a documentary about Philip K. Dick. My mother is in front of the cameras right now, and since, as filmmakers and physicists agree, the process of being observed changes that which is being observed, I have taken myself off to blog. This is only the second time I’ve ever allowed myself to be interviewed about Philip (contrary to what the PKD estate claims on its fan forum), and the first on film, and I’m finding the process absolutely fascinating. Naturally, any procedure that encourages my mother to drive around Berkeley with a movie camera strapped to the hood of her truck gets my vote, but now I’m thinking that I should add a short chapter to the memoir about it, the observed observing the observers.

Okay, back to business, before I am called upon to reminisce again. I think taking on the Idol rejection reasons (see my post of October 31) one by one is being very fruitful, but heavens, there are a LOT of them, aren’t there? I’m moving through them as fast as I can. I’ve gotten a lot of great questions from readers while I have been going through them, matters about which I normally would have written a post right away, but I did not want to disrupt the Idol flow. I’m anxious to get back to them!

Today, I want to deal with the rejection reasons that did not fit comfortably into general categories — the odd ducks, as it were:

39. Too many generalities.
40. The character shown is too average.
41. The stakes are not high enough for the characters.
60. The details included were not telling.

Shaking your head over the practically infinite subjectivity of this set? There’s a good reason for that: just as one agent’s notion of fresh is another’s idea of weird, one agent’s Everyman is another’s Ho-Hum Harry.

And this is problematic, frankly, to most of us who have lived through Creative Writing 101. Weren’t we all told to strive for universality? (Which, until fairly recently, was code for appealing to straight, white men.) Weren’t we all ordered to write what we knew? (Which led to forty years’ worth of literary journals crammed to the gills with stories about upper middle class white teenagers.) Weren’t we implored to be acute observers of life, so we could document the everyday in slice-of-life pieces of practically museum-level detail? (Which left us all sitting in writing class, listening to aspiring writers read thinly-fictionalized excerpts from their diaries.)

I can’t be the only one who had this writing teacher, can I? A quick survey of my fellow espresso-drinkers here in Berkeley reveals that most of them received similar advice in their formative writing years.

Unfortunately, from an agent’s point of view, all of the good students following this advice has led to a positive waterfall of submissions in which, well, not a whole lot happens. (See #6, took too long for anything to happen, along with its corollary, the story’s taking time to warm up, as well as #7, not enough action on page 1.) These opening scenes may be beautifully-written, lyrical, human life observed to a T. But from a marketing professional’s perspective — and, despite the fact that agents are essentially the first-level arbiters of literary taste these days, they need to be marketers first and foremost, or they are of little use to those they represent — such an opening translates into
“hard to sell.”

And, to be perfectly frank, most of them simply do not have the time or the patience to read on to see what this story IS about. Remember that burnt-tongued unpaid intern whom I told you to channel last week? She might well be a few minutes late for her lunch date for the sake of a page of gorgeous prose, but if she doesn’t have an inkling of a plot by the end of it, she’s probably not going to ignore her stomach’s rumblings long enough to turn to page 2.

Sorry. As I believe I have mentioned before, this is not how it would work if I ran the universe. If I did, all good writers would be eligible for large, strings-free grants, photocopying would be free, and all of you would be able to share the particularly delicious pain au chocolat I am enjoying at this very moment. So gooey that the bereted gentleman (yes, really) at the wee round table next to me offered a couple of minutes ago to lick the chocolate off my fingers so I could readdress my keyboard in a sanitary manner.

The locals are very friendly, apparently. And very hygiene-minded.

This (the ordinariness of characters, that is, rather than licking chocolate off fingertips) is something that comes up again and again in agents’ discussions of what they are seeking in a manuscript. “An interesting character in an interesting situation” is in practically all of their personal ads on the subject, particularly if the protagonist is not the character one typically sees in such a situation. A female cadet at a prestigious military academy, for instance. A middle-aged stockbroker arrested for protesting the WTO. A veteran cop who is NOTA paired in his last month of duty with a raw rookie. That sort of thing.

So while a very average character may spell Everyman to a writing teacher, an average Joe or Joanna is typically a very hard sell to an agent. As are characters that conform too much to stereotype. (How about a cheerleader who isn’t a bimbo, for a change? Or a coach who isn’t a father figure? A mother who doesn’t sacrifice her happiness for her kids’?) An interesting character is surprising, at some level: could you work an element of surprise onto page 1, the best place to catch an agent’s eye?

One of the best ways of preventing your protagonist from coming across as too average is to raise the importance of what is going on in the opening for that character — which leads us nicely to critique #41, the stakes not being high enough. “Why should I care?” is an extremely common question for screeners to ask — and if the book opens with the protagonist in an emotionally-fraught or otherwise dangerous situation, that question is answered immediately.

Yet another reason, to revisit a topic from a few days ago, that too-typical teenage characters often fall flat for screeners: a character who is trying to be cool and detached from a conflict can often convey the impression that what is going on in the moment is not particularly important. But what’s more engaging than a protagonist who feels, rightly or wrongly, that what is going on before the reader’s eyes is the most important thing on earth right now? When the protagonist wants something desperately, that passion tends to captivate the reader.

It doesn’t always work to open with an honestly life-or-death situation, of course, but far too many novels actually don’t start until a few pages in. Seriously — it’s not at all uncommon to find a terrific opening line for a book on page 4 or page 10, or for scene #2 to be practically vibrating with passionate feeling, while scene #1 just sits there. (Again, I think this is a legacy of the heroic journey style of screenwriting, which dictates that the story open in the protagonist’s everyday reality, before the challenge comes.) Choosing to open with a high-stakes scene gives a jolt of energy to the reader, urging her to keep turning the pages.

Many, many writers want to keep something back, to play their best cards last, to surprise and delight the reader later on. But for very practical reasons, this is not the best strategy in a submission: if this Idol series has made anything clear, it is that you really do need to grab a professional reader’s attention on page 1.

#39, too many generalities, is a trap that tends to ensnare writers who are exceptionally gifted at constructing synopses. In a synopsis, it is very helpful to be able to compress a whole lot of action into just a few well-chosen words; it’s a format that lends itself to a certain amount of generalization. It is tempting, then, to introduce a story in general terms in the book itself, isn’t it?

So why do agents frown upon this practice? Well, it feels to them like the writer is warming up, rather than diving right into the story. The average fiction agent is looking for good, in-the-moment sensations on the first page, visceral details that will transport her quickly to the time and place your characters inhabit. The writer is the travel agent for that trip, and it’s your job to make the traveler feel she is actually THERE, rather than just looking at a movie or a photograph of the events described.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant with me now: too many writers rely too heavily on visuals. Sensual details sell. Or, to put it another way: doesn’t your protagonist have a NOSE?

Which segues very nicely into #60, the details included were not telling. The wonderful short-short story writer Amy Hempel once told me that she believes that the external world her characters inhabit is only relevant insofar as it illuminates the character’s mood or moves the plot along. I’m not sure I would put it quite so baldly, but I think there is a lot to this. If a protagonist is sad, I want to hear about the eucalyptus trees’ drooping leaves; if she is frenetic, my sense of her heartbeat will only be enhanced by the sound of cars rushing by her as she jogs. And, of course, if I’m going to be told about her shoes — which, I must confess, don’t interest me much as objects — they had better reveal something about her character.

Few good short story writers would think to take up space with unrevealing details, but even very good novelists frequently get bogged down in description for its own sake. (See the Idol list for abundant evidence that this is not the best strategy on page 1 of a book.) But if the description is peppered with revealing details, it is hard for it to feel extraneous to what is going on.

For instance, I could tell you that the café I currently inhabit is brightly-lit, with windows stretching from the height or my knee nearly up to the ceiling, small, round tables with red-varnished wooden chairs, and a pastry case full of goodies. A young and attractive barista is making the espresso machine emit a high-pitched squeal. I just held the door for a woman on crutches who was wearing a yellow rain slicker and a green scarf, and four of us here are working on laptops.

That description is accurate, certainly, but what did it tell you as a reader? I could be in virtually any café anywhere in the world; it is probably raining outside, but my reader does not know for sure; you don’t even know the sex of the barista.

But what if I told you that in order to work, I have had to turn my back to the glass doors that keep sending fog-chilled blasts past my skirt as patrons shed their coats in the doorway? That gives you both seasonal detail and information about me: I am concentrating; I am wearing a skirt despite the cold weather; I am not expecting to meet anyone I know here. Or that the barista’s three-day stubble reminds me of a Miami Vice-loving guy I dated in college? That both describes the guy in my peripheral vision and tells the reader my age, in rough terms. Or that I am bouncing my leg up and down at roughly the same rate as the fresh-faced girl in sweats across the room, scowling into a sociology text book? That conveys both caffeine consumption and the fact that I’m near a university.

Get the picture?

Now how much more do you feel you are here with me if I add that the air is redolent with the smell of baking cheese bread, the oxtail soup of the flat-shoed retiree at the table next to me, and the acrid bite of vinegar wafting from her companion’s I’m-on-a-diet salad? What if I mention that I have been moving my cell phone closer and closer to me for the past 15 minutes, lest the clanking of cups, nearby discussions of Nancy Pelosi and the war in Iraq, and vintage Velvet Underground drown out my call to flee this place? What about if I tell you that the pony-tailed busboy currently unburdening the overflowing wall of meticulously-labeled recycling bins — a receptacle for glass, one for plastic, one for newspaper, one for cardboard, one for compostable products — a dead ringer for Bud Cort, of Harold & Maude fame, put down his volume of Hegel to attend to his duties, and ran his beringed hand across the Don Johnson clone’s back as he passed?

All of these details help set a sense of place, and of me as a character (rather nervous, I notice from these details; must be the coffee) within it.

All right, I’ve outstayed the beret-wearing finger-lover, so I am going to venture out onto the street now. My call may come at any minute, and I probably should not drink any more coffee.

Keep up the good work!

PS to Matthew: I answered your (very good) question via that same June comment; I try to respond to questions actually on the site as much as possible, so folks later reading those posts may see the response, too. I’m going to try to write a blog on the subject next week, too, though — I suspect that you’re not the only one in that particular boat!

Posted on - No Comments on Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XI: More technicalities

Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XI: More technicalities

My flight has been delayed for an hour (due to leprechauns? Wing demons? The flight crew’s suddenly having been spirited off to Oz? No explanation appears to be forthcoming), so I am taking advantage of the unexpected time to write to you. Now that all of my liquid possessions are safely trapped in the now-mandatory clear plastic bags (since airline security is now apparently being handled by the Glad corporation), my feet are clad in seasonally-inappropriate shoes (because heaven forfend one should hold up the security line to deal with anything with laces), and having successfully wrestled with the question of whether to check the 50-year-old phone I needed to bring along for my interview (don’t ask) or carry it on, I am happy to use my remaining time in limbo to revisit more of the Idol rejection reasons (see my post of October 31).

By the way, I’ve been doing the dialogue experiment I suggested to you yesterday here in the airport, and I 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 useable.

Which brings me to #32 on the Idol list, real-life incidents are not always believable on paper. I’ve blogged about this fairly recently (see my post for September 6, for instance, and a series in the second week of October), so 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. Or do more than 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 advice that 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.

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. Typically, 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 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.

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 sends up a barrage of warning flares. (Yes, even references to September 11th.)

About five 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 shooting for 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 this book 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 said, “this will make your book obsolete. Could you use less time-bound examples?”

The author’s response can only be 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, and eventually, about a year and a half later, she 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.

The book did not see a second printing.

My point is, be careful about incorporating current events, especially political ones. Yes, I know: you can’t walk into a bookstore without seeing scads and scads of NF books on current events. 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.

One last point about pop or political culture references: if you do include them, double-check to make sure that you’ve spelled all of the names correctly. 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?

Okay, my plane has finally arrived, so I am going to sign off now. Happy trails, everyone, and keep up the good work!