Posted on - No Comments on If you had only one week to live, would you spend it — querying?

If you had only one week to live, would you spend it — querying?

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I’m just back from the opening weekend of the Victoria Film Festival — yes, even living a mere three hours from the border, I still had to take a ferry boat to see any significant amount of Canadian film, and I’m delighted to report that this particular festival’s offerings were well worth a few hours of traveling over wind-jostled water. Normally, it’s only the hand-held camera work that leaves one a bit seasick at an indie film festival, but in this instance, the voyager to and from the festival could enjoy the educational experience of comparing literal seasickness with the merely visually-induced variety.

A good time was had by all, in short.

I was thinking of you, readers, during the gala first screening of a potential crowd-pleaser entitled ONE WEEK, an often genuinely delightful romp about an unfortunate soul who learns that he has that rarest of diseases, asymptomatic Stage 4 cancer metastasized through all of his major organs. So what does he do? Naturally, he goes on a solo motorcycling spree across most of Canada, in order to learn Important Life Lessons (ILL), of course.

Because, you know, no filmgoer has ever seen a protagonist do that before. At least the Canadian Rockies part.

Some of you are already anticipating the point I’m about to make, aren’t you? “I’m onto you, Anne,” the second-sighted predict. “You’re going to draw a parallel between this basic film plot, which we’ve all seen many times before, and the premise repetition Millicent the agency screener sees constantly. I’m also sensing that you’re going to spout that old publishing biz truism, it all depends on the writing.”

Gotcha, oh anticipators: I was not going to say that at all. (But well caught, anyway.) No, I was going to say that I thought of you fine people all throughout this film because the protagonist is an aspiring writer.

Because, you know, there has never been a movie about one of those. Aspiring writers make marvelous progress-markers in films, apparently, because as soon as they learn whatever ILL the script dictates, all the plot has to do in order to create a happy ending is to show his (almost never her, I notice) book for sale in a store window.

You know, the way that the road to publication always works in real life. Authorial success or failure has nothing to do with the writer’s talent, storytelling ability, and/or whether s/he has anything interesting to say, evidently, but by true movie logic, is composed of equal parts wanting it more than anybody else and resolving one’s personal crises through ILL.

Add luck and stir. Presto: publication!

Seldom in a film does a writer do anything as pedestrian as, say, sit in front of a computer screen, typing away, or staring off into space, thinking, or sending out 150 query letters. Admittedly, the way writers actually spend their work time isn’t all that interesting to observe — “Look, honey, he just finished entering changes from the hard copy, crumpled up a piece of paper, and recycled it!” — which is why, in case you’ve been wondering, that biopics about writers tend either to ignore their writing entirely (in HENRY AND JUNE, for instance, the sole appearance any piece of Mssr. Miller’s writing makes is when his justifiably fed-up wife tosses a manuscript in the air like confetti) or to pretend that their lives were exactly like their books.

Because, naturally, no one ever writes anything that isn’t autobiographical. Unless, of course, it’s a memoir, in which case we should all assume that it’s a collection of monumental lies.

In ONE WEEK, for example, the protagonist has written the expected lightly fictionalized autobiographical novel. Thus, those of us cowering in the dark of the movie theatre know implicitly that he is a devotee of truth.

That’s lucky, because the audience has to take the protagonist’s writer cred on faith: in a moment that if it appeared on the page would cause any Millicent in the business to shout, “Show, don’t tell!” we are simply told that he was an aspiring writer — by a voice-over, no less. As in an inexplicably high percentage of films with characters-who-write, the audience was never actually treated to the sight of him DOING any of it.

Because, presumably, those of us who court the muse are invisible to film, in much the way that a vampire is invisible to a mirror.

And now, you will be delighted to hear, we are approaching the reason that I brought this film up at all: our hero was not only a writer-behind-the-scenes, but a discouraged, rejected one.

How do we know this? Well, the voice-over told us so, accompanied by a shot of the protagonist standing in front of what appeared to be a grand total of fifteen rejection letters thumb-tacked to a bulletin board. This small handful of rejections, the narrator tells us, so depressed our hero that he never tried to write anything again.

Well, that’s realistic enough, isn’t it? I don’t have anything clever or sarcastic to say about that. That’s just reality. I’m sure all of us know faint-hearted writers who, having made a breathless stab at catching the industry’s attention, curled up in a ball at the first rejection (or the 15th) and just gave up.

Sad? Of course. In real life, we all have sympathy for such tender souls who allow their dreams to be smothered by the jarring realization that the literary world was not, in fact, holding its breath, prepared to drop everything when this particular book came along

But would any talented novelist out there care to venture a guess as to why a reader might not find a fictional character suffering from the same slings and arrows of literary fortune all that sympathetic on the printed page? Or, if not all readers, at least professional ones like Millicent?

If you immediately shouted out, “Because Millicent the agency screener knows that it’s a heck of a lot easier to sell a novel or memoir with an active protagonist to an editor than one who simply observes his life going on around him!” give yourself a gold star for the day. If you elaborated to explain why — murmuring, for instance, “Generally speaking, readers prefer following protagonists whose actions and choices move the plot along, rather than being helpless, unresisting victims of a smothering fate — although that particular preference is stronger in U.S. readers, and thus in NYC-based Millicents, than in the other literary capitols of the world” — award yourself two gold stars and a big kiss on the cheek.

In response to the great gasp I just heard from the large majority of novelists and memoirists out there to whom that is news, never fear. In a couple of weeks, I’m going to delve into the ubiquitous problem of the passive protagonist, one of the most common reasons that novels and memoirs alike get rejected mid-manuscript.

For now, I just want to point out the additional reason that an agent, editor, contest judge, or other professional reader tend not to find writer-who-gives-up-at-first-rejection story at all sympathetic: not only is it an exceedingly common phenomenon, but they also know from first-hand experience those who are prepared to give up so easily seldom make it as authors, even if they do manage to get picked up with unusual speed. If the first rejection doesn’t wither these shy souls, the first bad review will.

Not very empathetic with what can be honest-to-goodness heart-rending pain? Definitely. But at a time in literary history when even the best manuscripts generally get rejected dozens and dozens of times before being picked up, such an attitude is at least understandable, isn’t it?

I’m sensing some uncomfortable shifting in chairs out there. “But Anne,” I hear those of you disturbed by that last paragraph demur, “isn’t knowing that likely to depress at least some of us into not sending out our work at all? So why even bring it up, since you just spent much of January urging us to take control of our submissions, polish them up, and send them on their merry way?”

Well observed, uncomfortable shifters. My goal here is twofold: to remind all of you who are in the throes of querying and submission that it’s only sensible to gird your proverbial loins for potential rejection, since pretty much every eventually successful author encounters quite a bit of it on the way to publication, and to reassure those of you who have been brave and virtuous enough to be sending out queries and submissions that no single rejection can possibly mean that it’s not worth sending out your work again.

And frankly, even the Millicent who rejected it would probably tell its author that. These days, the pros expect a good manuscript to have been rejected quite a bit before it finds a home. All a single rejection NECESSARILY means is that a particular person said no on a particular day.

You may have noticed that this particular reality runs contrary to popular belief amongst aspiring writers, but the fact is, no individual agent represents the entirety of the industry’s opinion. In other words, please don’t give up as quickly as the writer in ONE WEEK — in this market, it just doesn’t make sense.

Trust me on this one: virtually any book that you liked that came out within the last five years was rejected more than 15 times. And yes, now that you mention it, the fact that the protagonist gave up after what was quite a cursory submission history did make this particular audience member wonder if he had it in him to be a successful novelist at all.

So there I was, all set to suspend my disbelief and follow this ex-writer throughout his often-amusing story, when WHAMMO! that ubiquitous narrator spoiled the whole thing for me by informing the audience that if ONLY our hero had made one more submission, he would have discovered that HarperCollins had just hired an editor hungry for precisely the type of book he had written.

Wait a minute — those fifteen rejections were supposed to be from publishing houses, not agencies? Major ones like HarperCollins, the kind that as a matter of policy do not accept ANY submissions from unagented writers? And our hero is despondent because his novel has gotten rejected by them?

I was flabbergasted. All I wanted to do was grab the protagonist by his button-down shirt and shout into his face, “Honey, no one ever read that book. Those rejections that depressed you so much are form letters.”

Strange to say, no one else in the theatre seemed moved to similarly histrionic disbelief.

Yet from a writer’s point of view, this revelation could mean only one of two things: either the audience is supposed to think the protagonist is completely ignorant, too unprofessional to bother to learn how the publishing industry actually works before blithely sending off a manuscript, or that no one affiliated with the film bothered to do said homework — because, really, if all of those rejections had been from agents, rather than publishing houses, they would have been precisely as depressing, wouldn’t they?

I’ll leave it to future filmgoers to decide which is the more probable interpretation. Suffice it to say that at no point in the film does either the protagonist, anyone around him, or that self-satisfied narrator ever suggest that the proper thing to do would be to find an agent, since that is how fiction is sold.

I’m sensing more disgruntlement out there, amn’t I? “I’m confused, Anne. Why are you so positive that no one at a major publishing house ever read our hero’s book?”

Other than the fact that all of the major US publishing houses accept only agented submissions, you mean? If you don’t believe me, check out their websites — and you should, because any editor who works for them will expect a writer of promise to be aware of this fact. While some smaller and independent publishers still do accept submissions directly from writers, the big boys don’t.

Which means, in practical terms, that the inevitable result of our hero’s sending a manuscript to an editor at a great big publishing house would be the manuscript’s immediate return, if he included a SASE, along with a prefab rejection letter devoid of any content specific to that particular book. Or, if it were an electronic submission, either a form-letter e-mailed response or no reply at all.

So, as anyone with any experience with those publishers could have told him: never, ever submit an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher. It’s just a waste of your time and resources. Wait until you are asked to send that manuscript.

Actually, a wise aspiring writer extends this stern little axiom to small publishing houses and agencies, too, since both routinely reject unsolicited manuscripts unread. The rejection letter tucked into the SASE might not specifically say that — the whole point of a form-letter rejection, after all, is that it is not tailored to every contingency — but this is such a ubiquitous policy that it’s safe to assume that the sheer fact of the submitter’s having jumped the gun lead to summary rejection.

So how does one go about getting a manuscript solicited? As we have often discussed here, usually by the writer’s either querying or giving a verbal pitch to an agent or editor from a small press. If they like the query or pitch, they will ask to see pages — thus the term solicited.

Yes, yes, I know: most of you are already aware of this, but since either ONE WEEK’s protagonist or its screenwriter was evidently unaware of this important set of realities, I felt compelled to spell it out. I would hate for any good aspiring writer out there to give up after fifteen rejections that essentially meant nothing more than You don’t know how the publishing industry works, do you?

I’m hearing more huffing. “That seems like a pretty draconian way to treat a person’s dreams,” some of you sniff. “Not to mention self-defeating. How do they know that one of those unsolicited manuscripts ISN’T the next classic or the next major bestseller?”

A perfectly valid question, but the fact is, rejecters of unsolicited manuscripts receive so many properly-submitted manuscripts that they don’t really have to worry about the one that might have gotten away. That’s merely a practical response to the huge volume of manuscripts that are written every year.

Also, you know how I often mention that one of the reason agencies expect potential clients to jump through so many hoops is to weed out the writers who can’t or won’t follow directions? As hard as it may be to face, if the fine folks who run publishing houses have a choice — and I assure you that they do — between a good manuscript by an aspiring writer who has taken the time to learn the rules of submission and an equally good one by someone who has not, they’re not going to hesitate an instant before selecting the first.

And rejecting the second unread. Please don’t make the mistake of sending out unsolicited materials; it will only end in heartache.

Which is why, contrary to the impression I might have given above, I would advise aspiring writers to see ONE WEEK: perhaps unintentionally, it’s a cautionary tale about the perils of not doing your homework before submitting. For a manuscript, it honestly is a life-or-death issue.

And that brings me back to the question in the title, or at least a variation on it: if you found that you had only a limited time to live, much of it would you invest in trying to get the work you had already written published? Or would you instead write something new that you had already intended to write but never had the time? Polish off something already in progress?

Yes, these questions are a trifle morbid, but for those of us who have devoted ourselves to the life of the pen — and thus to a bid for immortality — they’re not insignificant. As we discussed in December, an awful lot of good writers put off until tomorrow what they could be writing today. Even more frequently, aspiring writers often delay the moment of composition until that oft-delayed ideal moment when they will ostensibly have scads of time with nothing else to do.

I’ll spare you the obvious conclusion to this thought. But isn’t it a pretty good argument for getting on the ball right away?

And you thought I was kidding about having thought about all of you throughout the screening of this film! More thoughts on form letter rejections follow tomorrow — keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XI: fending off those pesky resentful teenagers, over-articulate tots, and ever-chattering corpses

Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part XI: fending off those pesky resentful teenagers, over-articulate tots, and ever-chattering corpses

Last time, I went on a bit of a tear about how infrequently those of us who regularly give advice to writers — speakers at writers’ conferences, folks like me who blog on writing-related issues, writing teachers, and sometimes even members of critique groups — talk about the practical implications of four of the classic knee-jerk rejection reasons: old-fashioned style, style or storyline too similar to a past bestseller, redundancy, and just plain lack of interest. Since writers chat about these so little amongst ourselves, it’s no wonder that the vast majority of submitters apparently don’t know to self-edit for these.

I’m sure that the sharp-eyed among you spotted a significant omission from that list of potential feedback-givers: the agents, editors, and contest judges who determine the fate of manuscripts. I didn’t include them for the exceedingly simple reason that until a writer is signed, the two former will seldom comment on her work, and most literary contests don’t offer feedback to entrants. 99% of the time, a rejected writer will merely receive a form-letter rejection, regardless of both the actual reasons for rejection and whether the decision to reject was easy or hard.

Did I just hear some jaws hitting the floor out there? I suppose I should explain. For those of you who have not yet begun submitting, it’s extremely rare for a rejected writer to receive any substantive explanation at all from the pros who passed on his work, even if the agent or editor requested the entire manuscript. It’s even become rather common for agents not to respond at all if the answer is no. And that is very frustrating for submitting writers, because such terseness prevents them from learning from the rejection experience.

Which means, incidentally, that since form-letter rejections are practically universal, you shouldn’t regard them as the particularly emphatic negative that they used to be ten years ago. Back then, submissions that were near-misses usually sparked a personalized rejection letter. These days, though, even very polished manuscripts are frequently met with a generic response like this:

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to us, but it does not meet our needs at this time. The market for this kind of book is very tough right now, and I just did not fall in love with this enough to be confident that I can place it. Best of luck elsewhere.

All across the English-speaking world, rejected writers expend huge amounts of energy trying to read between the lines of missives like this in an attempt to extract some practical feedback from it, but the fact is, it means just what it says: the agency is passing on the manuscript in question because, for some reason that its staff doesn’t have the time or will to communicate, the book strikes them as difficult to market.

Which leaves the writer to guess precisely why they reached that conclusion.

After a writer has been submitting for a while — at least long enough to have figured out that the publishing industry has developed generic terms for justifying rejection — it’s only natural to start to chafe at this guessing game. It is likely to occur to one: yes, agency screeners read a lot of submissions in a day, but how hard would it be to scrawl a single sentence fragment in the margins at the point where they stopped reading, so the submitting writer would know why it was rejected? Or even just make a mark on the page, so the writer would know where the screener stopped reading?

Heck, since manuscript problems repeat themselves across submissions, they could just place the appropriate sticker on each page, or invest in a few rubber stamps: Show, don’t tell, or Where’s the conflict? At least then, aspiring writers would know what the red flag was, so they could take steps to improve their pages before submitting them again.

From the rejecter’s point of view, the reasons for being terse in rejecting a manuscript are rather obvious, not to mention identical to why they utilize form-letter rejections for queries: a desire to minimize the amount of time they invest in a manuscript that is not going to make them money (because they will not be marketing it) and not wanting to provoke further argument.

Writers hear much more about the former than the latter on the conference circuit, of course: we’ve all been told over and over again that the sheer volume of submissions requires swift decisions merely in order to plow through them all within a reasonable period of time. Thus the all-too-frequent page 1 rejection — since agencies (reputable ones, anyway) are not actually paid to screen manuscripts, their staffs are encouraged to sift through the tens of thousands of pages they receive with all possible dispatch.

Which means, if we’re going to be blunt about it, that although Millicent the agency screener actually will have a specific reason for rejecting any given manuscript, she really doesn’t have time to communicate it. And honestly, if she’s read only the first page or a fraction of it, it’s not too reasonable to expect a fully fleshed-out analysis of the submission as a whole.

Not wanting to provoke further argument is less discussed on the conference circuit, I suspect, because the very concept is likely to raise ire in the average aspiring writer. By not assigning a specific reason for rejection, an agent reduces the probability that the rejected writer will write or call to demand, “What do you mean, my physical descriptions are heavy-handed? Explain to me precisely why you think so.”

Or, even more likely, to offer eagerly, “You said my protagonist isn’t very likable — but I’ve fixed that now. May I resubmit?”

From an aspiring writer’s point of view, these responses would make abundant sense: by giving specific feedback, Millicent would be opening a conversation about the book, right? Or, better yet, a negotiation. Essentially, by giving editorial advice, she would be implying, if not actually saying, “Revise and resubmit.”

Not entirely coincidentally, back in the days of personalized rejection letters, agencies did often request that writers of promise would revise their work and resubmit it, but that’s become exceedingly rare. Today, well-respected agents receive so many technically perfect manuscripts by talented writers that they can afford to let a fish that needs to grow a bit more get away.

I know, I know: not a very appealing way to think of one’s own work, but you must admit, it’s tremendous incentive to take a fine-toothed comb to your submission, isn’t it?

On that note of brave desperation, let’s return to the Idol list of rejection reasons. (If you do not know what I am talking about, please see the first post in this series.) Today, I want to concentrate on the rejection reasons that would make the most sense for agency screeners to rubber-stamp upon submissions if they were in the habit of doing so: these are the common technical problems that are relatively easy for the writer to fix.

If he knows about them, that is.

My favorite easy-fix on the list is #50, an adult book that has a teenage protagonist in the opening scene is often mistakenly assumed to be YA. This is funny, of course, because even a cursory walk though the fiction section of any major bookstore would reveal that a hefty percentage of adult fiction IS about teenage protagonists.

So why is this perception a problem at the submission stage? Well, in an agency that does not represent YA, the book is likely to be shunted quickly to the reject pile; there is no quicker rejection than the one reserved for types of books an agency does not handle. (That’s one reason that they prefer query letters to contain the book category in the first paragraph, FYI: it enables agency screeners to reject queries about types of books they do not represent without reading the rest of the letter.) And in an agency that routinely represents both YA and adult fiction, the submission might easily be read with a different target market in mind, and thus judged by the wrong rules.

“Wait just a cotton-picking minute!” I here some of you out there murmuring. “This one isn’t my fault; it’s the screener’s. All anyone at an agency would have to do to tell the difference is to take a look at the synopsis they asked me to include, and…”

Stop right there, oh murmurers, because you’re about to go down a logical wrong path. If you heed nothing else from today’s lesson, my friends, hark ye to this: NO ONE AT AN AGENCY OR PUBLISHING HOUSE IS LIKELY TO READ THE SYNOPSIS PRIOR TO READING THE SUBMISSION, at least not at the same sitting. So it is NEVER safe to assume that the screener deciding whether your first page works or not is already familiar with your premise.

Why is this the case? Well, for the same reason that many aspects of the submission process work against the writer: limited time.

Getting pretty tired of that excuse, aren’t you? So is Millicent, in all probability: she needs to figure out whether the submission in front of her is a compelling story, true, but she also needs to be able to determine whether the writing is good AND the style appropriate to the subject matter. An adult style and vocabulary in a book pitched at 13-year-olds, obviously, would send up some red flags in her mind.

So, given that she has 77 submissions in front of her, and she needs to get through them all before lunch, is she more likely to (a) devote two minutes to reading the enclosed synopsis before she turns her attention to the writing itself, or (b) only read the synopses for the submissions she reads to the end?

If you didn’t pick (b), I would really urge you to sign up for a good, practical writing class or attend a market-minded conference as soon as humanly possible; a crash course in just how competitive the writing game is would probably be exceedingly helpful to your writing career. From the point of view of a screener at a major agency, two minutes is a mighty long time to devote to a brand-new author.

I know; it’s sickening. But knowing the conditions under which your baby is likely to be read is crucial to understanding how to make it as rejection-proof as possible.

So for those of you who write about teenagers for the adult market, I have a bold suggestion: make sure that your title and style in the opening reflect a sensibility that is unquestionably aimed at adult readers, so your work is judged by the right rules.

This can be genuinely difficult to pull off if your narrator is a teenager — which brings me to #49 on the Idol list, narration in a kid’s voice that does not come across as age-appropriate. (For the record, both an agent who represents solely adult fiction and one who represents primarily YA noted this as a problem.)

This issue crops up ALL the time in books aimed at adults that are about children; as a general rule of thumb, if your protagonist is a pre-Civil War teenaged farmhand, he should not speak as if he graduated from Dartmouth in 1992. Nor should a narrator who is a 6-year-old girl sport the vocabulary of an English Literature professor.

Usually, though, the problem is subtler. Often, teenage protagonists are portrayed from an adult’s, or even a parent’s, point of view, creating narrators who are hyper-aware that hormones are causing their mood swings or character behavior that is apparently motivated (from the reader’s point of view, anyway) solely by age. But teenagers, by and large, do not tend to think of themselves as moody, impossible, or even resentful; most of them, when asked, will report that they are just trying to get along in situations where they have responsibilities but few rights and little say over what they do with their time and energy.

And yet screeners are constantly seeing openings where teenage girls practice bulimia simply because they want to fit in, where teenage boys act like James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, where teenage characters flounce off to their rooms to sulk.

Yes, many teenagers do these things, undoubtedly, but in novels, these things have been reported so often that they come across as clichés. And teenage characters and narrators who diagnose these behaviors as an adult would are accordingly rife.

Also, NYC-based agency screeners and editorial assistants tend to be quite young: they weren’t teenagers all that long ago. Sometimes, they are still young enough to resent having been pigeonholed, and if your manuscript is sitting in front of them, what better opportunity to express that resentment than rejecting it is likely to present itself?

So do be careful, and make sure you are showing the screener something she won’t have seen before. Not to give away the candy store, but the best opening with a teenage protagonist I ever saw specifically had the girl snap out of an agony of self-doubt (which could easily have degenerated into cliché) into responsible behavior in the face of a crisis on page 1.

To submission-wearied professional eyes, reading a manuscript where the teenaged protagonist had that kind of emotional range was like jumping into a swimming pool on a hot day: most refreshing.

One of the most common ways to set up a teenage scene in the past involves rejection reason #63, the opening includes quotes from song lyrics. Yes, this can be an effective way to establish a timeframe without coming out and saying, “It’s 1982,” but it is also very, very overused. I blame this tactic’s all-too-pervasive use in movies and TV: in the old days, soundtracks used to contain emotionally evocative incidental music, but in recent years, the soundtrack for any movie set in the 20th-century past is a virtual replica of the K-Tel greatest hits of (fill in timeframe), as if no one in any historical period ever listed to anything but top 40.

I’m fairly confident, for instance, that there was no period in American history where dance bands played only the Charleston, where every radio played nothing but AMERICAN PIE, or every television was tuned to THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW. Yes, even when Elvis or the Beatles appeared on it.

We’re creative people — can’t we mix it up a bit more?

Other than ubiquity, there are other reasons that agents and their screeners tend to frown upon the inclusion of song lyrics in the opening pages of a book. Unless the song is within the public domain — and the last time I checked, HAPPY BIRTHDAY still wasn’t, so we are talking about a long lead time here — the publisher will need to get permission from whoever owns the rights to the song in order to reproduce it. So song lyrics on page one automatically mean more work for the editor.

Also, one of the benefits of setting a sentiment to music is that it is easier to sound profound in song than on the printed page. No disrespect to song stylists, but if you or I penned some of those lines, we would be laughed out of our writers’ groups. For this reason, song lyrics taken out of context and plopped onto the page often fall utterly flat — especially if the screener is too young to have any personal associations with that song.

#45, it is unclear whether the narrator is alive or dead, started cropping up on a lot of agents’ pet peeve lists immediately after, you guessed it, THE LOVELY BONES came out. It’s hardly a new literary phenomenon, though — ghostly narrators began wandering into agencies with a frequency unseen since the old TWILIGHT ZONE series was influencing how fantasy was written in North America on a weekly basis. And wouldn’t you know it, the twist in many of these submissions turns out to be that the reader doesn’t learn that the narrator is an unusually chatty corpse until late in the book, or at any rate after the first paragraph of the first page.

Remember what I was saying the other day about agents not liking to feel tricked by a book? Well…

I need to sign off for today — I’m off to have dinner with a sulky teenager who prattles on about peer pressure, a child who speaks as though she is about to start collecting Social Security any day now, and a fellow who may or may not have kicked the bucket half a decade ago; someday soon, I hope I’ll know for sure. Honestly, if agents and editors would only recognize that we writers are merely holding, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, all of our lives would be so much easier, wouldn’t it?

More analysis of common rejection reasons follows next time. Keep up the good work!

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Seeing submissions from the other side of the desk, part III: would you mind holding this massive grain of salt for me?

Yes, Virginia, that is indeed exactly what it says on the box: a massive grain of salt. You’re going to want to have it on hand for today’s installment in our series on reasons so many submitted manuscripts get rejected on page 1.

How many is so many, you ask? Well, the actual percentage from agency to agency, publishing trend to publishing trend, and even screener to screener, but the last time I conducted informal polling on the subject, the most popular answer amongst US-based agents was, “the vast majority of them.”

Which brings be back one of my perennial caveats to the literal-minded: this is not the definitive list of rejection reasons, so please do not treat it as such. It does, however, include quite a few extremely common rejection triggers that I’ve seldom seen discussed amongst aspiring writers. Do keep your ears perked at conferences for others — trends do change over time and from country to country, and naturally, every agent, like ever other professional reader currently scurrying across the face of the planet, has personal preferences.

All of which is to say: submissions get rejected for a million different reasons, some legitimate, some not. An aspiring writer can’t second-guess every possibility, of course, but it is possible to screen one’s own work for the more common red flags.

Remember, though, that while this list is a pretty good place to start a rigorous look at the first page of your submission, it is just that, a beginning, not a set of absolute standards. Because individuals make rejection decisions, not pre-programmed machines, there’s no such thing as a foolproof, universally-applicable advance test for whether a first page will make it past a screener’s hyper-critical eyes.

Sorry to be the one to tell you that. If breaking into the publishing biz were easy…well, I suspect most of us would be a whole lot happier, but the fact remains, it isn’t.

Which is why, in case you’ve been wondering, the widely-embraced strategy of having an agent who has asked to see pages be the first human being to see a manuscript — or at least the first who is not the author’s relative, bedmate, best friend, or similarly non-objective party — tends not to be a recipe for success. It’s hard to self-edit, and loved ones tend to have an even harder time giving critical feedback. As I shall argue in the series to follow this one, impartial feedback can be immensely helpful in weeding out the problems one might not see in one’s own work.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, amn’t I?

For today, let me limit myself to this: all any aspiring writer can do to prepare for the broad array of preferences amongst agents is to select those who are most likely to be receptive to her work, take extraordinary care to make her manuscript the best it can possibly be (which includes SPELL-CHECKING, people!), and try to weed out the most common red flags.

All fired up to get at ‘em? Good. Happy reading!

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

A cougar isn’t all that likely to give the individual he’s mauling a good explanation for why he’s doing it, either, I’m told.

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

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

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

The first thing to realize about this list of agents’ pet peeves is that some of them are, in fact, personal pet peeves, not necessarily industry-wide red flags. The trick is recognizing which ones. Right off the bat, a cursory glance at the list, combined with a few decades of experience, lead me to identify the following as probably individual preferences, rather than endemic rejection triggers:

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

What makes me these are not widely-shared rejection criteria? Well, observation of what kinds of manuscripts have and haven’t been getting picked up by agents in recent years, but also, critical analysis. Allow me to explain.

Before I start dissecting them, however, one reservation: just because these particular pet peeves are agent-specific does not mean that you should simply disregard them. As with any conference-gleaned wisdom, if you are planning to submit to any of the agents on that particular panel, it would behoove you to take them very seriously indeed: one of the reasons that savvy writers go to conferences, after all, is to pick up information about the specific likes and dislikes of particular agents, right?

Use this information strategically, to help target your queries and submissions to the agents most likely to enjoy your work. But do not, I implore you, fall into the oh-so-common trap of regarding a single individual agent’s expression of a personal preference as a permanent bellwether for the entire industry.

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

I know: it’s subtle.

Also — and this actually happened on the panel that inspired this series of posts — sometimes an agent will express an opinion, and the other agents will guffaw at him, fall over backwards in surprise, choke on their Diet Cokes, slap him across the face and tell him he’s an idiot, etc.

Again, all of these are pretty good indicators that we’re not talking about a widely-recognized agency norm here. Keep your eyes peeled for such understated clues, conference-goers.

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

Starting to get the hang of this?

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

Learn what you can from the experience, then move on.

Just moving on can be very, very tough for writers who have just spent a small fortune on a conference, pitched to five agents, and had requested materials rejected. Yet at even the best conference, no group of agents small enough to fit in the same room, much less on the same panel, are a representative sample of how the entire industry will react to your work.

I’ve said it before, and I shall no doubt say it again: I know it’s discouraging, but it just doesn’t make statistical sense to throw up one’s hands after a single round of rejections.

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

As my last agent was fond of saying in times of strife and slammed editorial doors, you can’t gain a true sense of what the market value of a book is until a whole lot of editors have seen it.

The same goes for agents. Make your submissions as professional as possible, of course, but keep trying.

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

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

Ding ding ding!

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

However, this is not how the rejection reason was phrased, was it? No, it was cast as this is something a normal person would never do. Unless we’re talking about psychopathic behavior, a statement like this is almost certainly based upon personal experience. Like everyone’s opinion of beauty, everyone’s opinion of normal is different.

Yes, I did just say that normal is in the eye of the beholder. Got a problem with that?

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

Getting the hang of this yet?

The same logic test can be applied, with the same result, to #33 (agent can’t identify with the conflict shown, which is obviously based upon personal taste) and #37 (the story is corny, which must be based upon the observer’s background and worldview). Note the preference, and move on to the next agent. If you get the same response from a few different agents, it might be worth a second look at your opening pages for plausibility.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea in general, since, unfortunately, the vast majority of rejection letters contain no reference whatsoever to the actual reason the agent decided to pass. If your opening contains a real jaw-dropper, it’s possible that you’d never hear about it directly, even in the course of years of submission and rejection.

Yet another reason that getting objective feedback on your work BEFORE you submit it to professional scrutiny is a really, really good idea, right?

Plausibility problems can be particularly tough for a self-editor to catch, as presumably, if a writer includes an incident in a manuscript — like, say, the protagonist’s shaking her head to clear a thought — he personally finds it entirely plausible. For the sake of your revision, though, it is probably worth bearing in mind that an awfully high percentage of NYC-based agents and editors are from upper-middle clad backgrounds, and thus graduated from rather similar English departments at rather similar liberal arts colleges, mostly in the northeastern part of the country. Their brothers (and sisters) dated one another’s sisters (and brothers); their former roommates are mostly from similar backgrounds and hold similar jobs. One may reasonably expect, then, their notions of plausibility to run along similar lines.

If you can’t imagine reading your submission from such a point of view, it might behoove you to find a first reader with a background that permits subjecting your manuscript to what I like to call the Minor Ivy Plausibility Meter: would a 25-year-old who had never lived more than ten miles from the agency where she works — not at all out of the question for denizens of New York-based agencies — find this believable, or would she huff, “Oh, come on…” into her latte?

If you do not be a 25-year-old New Yorker born and bred — and, more to the point, if your protagonist is neither — or if your story takes place in any other part of the world, I would strenuously advise applying this test to at least the first few pages of your submission. Speaking as a writer who has spent hours explaining to New Yorkers what a logging truck is, something any Pacific Northwest 6-year-old could pick out of a police lineup (“That’s it, officer. That’s the truck with the logs!“), you will be happier in the long run if you identify and clarify references that they might not get.

The personal preference test, believe it or not, can also be applied to reasons associated with voice choice. Yes, I know: since it’s a technical matter, it seems as though rules should govern whether it’s acceptable, right?

Not really. There are plenty of agents and editors who don’t like the first person voice much, and, as we saw on the list, other voices may raise hackles: 46. The story is written in the second person; 47. The story is written in the first person plural. What could such statements be OTHER than personal preferences?

#48 (the narrator speaks directly to the reader, making the story hyper-aware of itself qua story) is also a personal preference about narrative voice, albeit a more subtle one: for some readers, including the agent who cited this rejection reason, a first-person narration that breaks the third wall is jarring, a distraction from the story. However, there are plenty examples of published books that have used this device to great comic or dramatic effect.

Despite that fact, I would not send the agent that expressed this preference THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, for instance.

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

Just choose your querying targets accordingly. May I suggest applying first to those who have represented novels with similar voice choices?

I should wrap up for today, but before I do, I want to take a quick run at another group of reasons, #42 (the opening scene is too violent), #43 (the opening scene is too gross), and #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets). The first two are obviously in the eye of the beholder: a quick look at any bookstore will tell you that there is no shortage of violent material.

So none of these could possibly be industry-wide peeves, right?

Actually, all three are quite common ones, for the excellent reason that such a high percentage of novel submissions (and often memoir as well) open with scenes of violence. That’s not accidental, of course: if you’ve taken a writing class or attended a literary conference within the last 15 years, you have been exposed to the admonition to grab the reader with action right off the bat. Not a bad idea, but unfortunately, like so much good advice, some of its adherents take it too literally and too far.

And because 99% of the writers out there have had this advice beaten into their brains, too, agents see a LOT of shocking things on first pages. A whole lot of violent death gets strewn across the opening paragraphs that cross Millicent’s desk.

Translation: a super-violent opening scene, then, will not necessarily make your submission unique.

Professional readers’ individual tolerance for violence varies quite a bit, however, so if you are lucky enough to hear one speak (or see one’s blog) about it, pay close attention where that agent draws a line. There’s quite a prominent agent (who has asked that I not report here the things he’s been going around saying at conferences for years, at least not with his name attached) who stands up at every conference he attends and announces that he doesn’t want to see any book that contains scenes with violence to children. While this decree almost invariably produces some scattered groans from his audience (he’s not very tactful), he’s actually doing the people who write violent pieces a favor by being up front about it: he’s trying to prevent them from wasting their time and his in querying him.

The vast majority of agents are not, alas, as up front about their preferences on the subject — which is why I slipped in #44 (there is too much violence to children and/or pets).

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

My overall point has, I hope, become clear. Go ahead and yell it out, class.

And the masses cry, “Never kill off the detective’s pet kitty!”

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

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

Posted on - 4 Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VII: a few last words about what professional feedback will actually entail, or, what if a manuscript isn’t practically perfect in every way?

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part VII: a few last words about what professional feedback will actually entail, or, what if a manuscript isn’t practically perfect in every way?

For the last couple of posts, I have been talking about yet another present the legendary Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver might want to consider for the aspiring writers on his list: a few hours’ worth (or a few hundred pages’ worth) of professional editing. As I demonstrated last time, not all freelance editors will be equally good fits for every project, so you will probably want to do a bit of comparison shopping, rather than simply looking for the most feedback for the least money. Because the levels of professional editing are quite different, both in content and in price, it will also behoove you to make sure in advance PRECISELY what services you are buying.

Before you give your FNDGG a subtle hint that your manuscript might appreciate a bit of a post-holiday tune-up, however, and definitely before either of you invest what can be quite a bit of money in the editing process, I would definitely advise pausing to give some thought to not only what services you want to buy, but why you want to buy them.

Or, to put it another way, as a writer, what precisely do you you want to get out of the experience? Other than to be picked up by an agent and/or sell the book to a publisher immediately after taking the freelancer’s advice, of course.

Actually, you should be wary if a freelancer promises that — or anything that implies such a promise. Reputable editors are very, very careful in describing how a manuscript might benefit from their assistance. Since freelance editors stand outside the agency and publishing house, none of us can legitimately make promises that any specific advice we give will unquestionably result in landing an agent or eventual publication.

And if you encounter anyone who tells you otherwise, run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit. As on the Internet, if an offer sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Let the buyer beware.

While I’m waving the warning flag, you should also be wary if an agency demands that writers shell out for professional editing reports as a condition of considering the manuscript, or charges for in-house editing, or if an agent responds to a submission by telling a writer not only that the manuscripts needs professional editing, but only from a specific editing company. All of these can be signs that the agency makes its money not by selling its clients’ books, but through payments from aspiring writers, not a good sign. (For more on how to tell a fee-charging agency from a non-fee-charging one, please see the FEE-CHARGING AGENCIES category on the list at right.)

Back to the business at hand: what, you’re probably wondering at this point, can a freelance editor legitimately offer you?

Well, among other things, perhaps answers about why a submission boasting a really good premise and good writing has been getting rejected. Remember, most manuscripts are rejected within the first page or two, for reasons that might not be apparent to the lay reader. A professional reader well versed in the writing norms of a particular book category or genre can often give substantial insight into how to tweak a manuscript to avoid pitfalls.

Call me zany, but I suspect that there are many, many aspiring writers out there who would like to be told if a fixable problem is triggering all of those form-letter rejections that don’t specify what went wrong.

(Are you listening, Furtive NDGG? You’ve already checked that list twice; leave it alone and pay attention.)

To bolster the egos I felt sagging during the last few paragraphs: not having some magical internal sensor that tells one just what the problem is most emphatically not a reflection upon one’s writing talent. Spotting a manuscript’s weaknesses is usually a matter of experience, pure and simple.

Here, a professional reader has a jump on the average writer. Agents and editors don’t read like everyone else, and neither do good freelance editors. Our eyes are trained to jump on problems like…well, insert any predator-prey analogy you like here.

The point is, we’re fast, and our aim is deadly.

Since manuscripts are now expected to be completely publication-ready by the time they reach an agent’s desk — although they are frequently revised afterward — getting professional feedback can be exceptionally helpful in whipping your work into publishable shape. Contrary to widespread belief amongst the aspiring, there is more to being publishable than merely being a good story well-written.

Which is why, as I mentioned yesterday, you’re going to want to find an editor with experience working with books in your category, if you are going to invest in editing more complex than proofreading. An editor familiar with the tropes, structures, and market trends in your book’s category is going to be able to help you better than one who does not.

You want to be able to trust the feedback you get, don’t you?

While I’m on the subject of trust, and since today is apparently my day of dire-sounding warnings, I should put the Furtive NDGGs out there on the qui vive: like editors at publishing houses, agents, and other professional readers, good freelance editors have to be quite explicit about what is wrong with a manuscript in order to do their jobs well. Writers new to having their work edited are often astounded, and even hurt, by just HOW straightforward professional feedback can be.

Think about that very, very carefully before you give this particular present.

Really, any writer contemplating hiring a professional editor should give some thought to just how much honesty s/he actually wants. Like an agent or editor at a publishing house, a good freelance editor is not going to pull any punches — amongst those who work with manuscripts for a living, it’s considered downright silly to beat around the bush. The manner of conveying the information may be kind, but if any of them believe that a particular writing issue is going to harm your book’s market prospects, they are going to tell you so point-blank.

That is, after all, what they are being paid to do.

That may seem self-evident, but in practice, seeing one’s own manuscript carved up by a pro can be pretty nerve-wracking. Obviously, if a writer is going to be given necessary critique, it’s quite a bit less traumatic to hear it from an editor whose job it is to help improve it than from an agent who is rejecting the book, but if one is not prepared to be told that a book has problems, it’s bound to be upsetting no matter who says it.

This response is, of course, completely understandable. Serious manuscript feedback generally isn’t fun even when it’s free and/or eagerly solicited. While the brain may understand that critique is a good idea, the emotions often hold the opposite opinion. Even authors with years of experience in accepting professional feedback have been known to become a trifle upset when told to alter their manuscripts.

Going into the editing process aware that the point of it is to ferret out manuscript problems, and as such is bound to be upsetting, then, tends to make it easier on the writer. Conversely, someone who approaches the process primarily seeking ego reassurance from someone in the biz that his work is fine as it stands is almost invariably going to be disappointed — and probably rather angry as well.

Did I sense some guffawing out there? “Oh, come on, Anne,” some self-confident sorts scoff. “We’re talking about writers who are willing to pay a professional editor to give them feedback. Isn’t it safe to assume that anyone likely to do that actually wants honest, well-informed critique? You make it sound as though there are aspiring writers who go to all of the trouble and expense of hiring a freelancer purely because they want to be told that their manuscripts are, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, oh guffawing scoffers, but isn’t that precisely what pretty much every writer currently wandering the earth’s crust wants to hear about his or her own work, subconsciously, at least? After all, most of us write in the hope and expectation that someone will pay US to read our work, not that we will need to pay someone to read it.

The result: pretty much every freelance editor who has been at it a while will have at least one story about the writer who showed up swearing that he wanted no-holds-barred, professional-level feedback — and then freaked out the instant he got it, because he hadn’t expected to be told to change his manuscript.

Oh, you may laugh, but actually, taking the fruits of the editorial process personally — whether the feedback comes from a freelance editor, an agent or publishing house, the essential pattern’s tends to be same — is a notoriously common writerly response to a first brush with professional feedback. Before anyone rushes to judge those who react this way, the hurt usually stems not from rampant egomania or even (as folks in the industry not infrequently diagnose it) from a frantic possessiveness over one’s precious arrangement of words.

No, in my experience, it usually stems from something far more easily fixed: a confluence of unrealistic expectations about how authors are typically treated and not understanding that the industry views criticism as an impersonal means of improving the marketability of a manuscript.

I am reminded of M.F.K. Fisher’s story about being solicited to write a preface for a charity cookbook — you know, one of those collections of recipes that were so popular as fundraisers in the 1970s, in which well-to-do local matron share the secrets behind their potluck-famous pineapple upside-down cakes and tuna surprise. The cookbook’s editors, both volunteers, came to visit Fisher, a neighbor of theirs, in the hope that having a big-name food writer attached to their compilation of local recipes would make the book sell better. It was, they told her, for a good cause, so she donated her expertise.

Well (the story goes), Fisher very kindly took the draft book from them and had a good, professional look through it. Without missing a beat, she instantly began barking out everything that was wrong with the book: poor editing, meandering writing, abundant redundancies.

All of the things, in short, that professional writers and editors automatically flag in a manuscript.

When she paused for breath, she noticed that the amateur editors were not gratefully taking notes. Instead, they were dissolved in tears. From their non-professional standpoint, Fisher had been hugely, gratuitously, deliberately mean, whereas from a professional point of view, she had been paying them the huge (and possibly undeserved) compliment of taking their project seriously.

Yes, yes, I know: by this logic, the person eaten by a lion should be flattered by the lion’s impression that he tastes good. But as I have mentioned before, I don’t make the rules; I just tell you about ‘em.

The fact is, from a professional perspective, whitewashing an editorial opinion about a manuscript is a waste of everyone’s time. In a freelance editor’s feedback, it would border on unethical.

For those of you who think that this mindset sounds like a pretty fine reason to steer clear of anyone who might be tempted or empowered to pay this particular stripe of compliment, let me hasten to add: the ability to take criticism well is a highly valuable professional skill for writers; in the long run, you will be much, much happier if develop it as part of your tool kit.

Your dream agent, I assure you, will just assume that you have already have it up your sleeve. This is precisely why your dream agent should not be the first human being to set eyes on your work.

If you do not have experience rolling with harsh-but-true feedback, it is well worth your while to join a very critical writing group, or take a writing class from a real dragon, or (why didn’t I think of this before?) show some of your work to a freelance editor, before you send your work to an agent.

Trust me, it is much, much easier to accept suggestions on how to revise your work gracefully when your critiquer is NOT the person who is going to decide whether to take you on as a client or acquire your book. The stakes are lower, so it’s less stressful by far.

Getting used to the feedback experience alone is a pretty good reason to run at least part of your manuscript — say, the first 50 pages — across a freelance editor’s desk; that way, you can learn just how touchy you are at base, and work on developing the vital-for-authors skill of responding constructively, rather than with anger. Since, again, the stakes are lower, even if the critique makes you see red for a month, you can afford to take the time to blow your stack privately without running afoul of an agent- or editor-induced deadline.

Hey, that’s how published authors usually handle it.

Which brings me to my final piece of advice on the subject: if you are brand-new to textual feedback, or if the potential cost of having all 542 pages of your baby edited makes your head spin, there’s no earthly reason that you need to jump into professional-level feedback with both feet right off the bat. (I’m sure I could have mixed a few more metaphors there, but you catch my drift, I’m sure.)

Consider starting with the first chapter, or the first few chapters, and working up from there. Or even just your query letter, synopsis, or any other material an agent may have asked you to submit.

This may sound as though I’m advising you to feed yourself to a school of piranha one toe at a time, but hear me out. One of the toughest lessons that every successful writer has to learn is that, regardless of how much we may wish it otherwise, agents don’t pick up books simply because someone wrote them. Nor do publishing houses offer contracts to books primarily because their authors really, really feel strongly about them.

These are the first steps to becoming a professional author, but they are not the only ones. The pros learn not only to write, but to rewrite — and yes, to take some pretty stark criticism in stride in the process. Not because having one’s words dissected is fun on a personal level, but because that is what the business side of this business expects from the creative side.

Seeing your book in print is worth learning to live with that, isn’t it? The alternative, pretending that a manuscript that keeps getting rejected is already practically perfect in every way, may be appealing in the short run, but in the long run can prove a formidable stumbling-block on the already quite bumpy road to publication.

Next time, I shall try to wrap up my series on gifts for writers. After that, perhaps, I shall indulge in some discussion about gifts writers can give to themselves. Speaking of which, lest the less well-heeled out there have been gnawing on their nails throughout the last few posts, wishing that professional feedback were within their reach right now, don’t despair: I shall soon be talking about ways in which writers can scare up some genuinely useful feedback gratis. It requires investing more time and effort than simply paying a good freelance editor, of course, but it is definitely doable.

Whichever route you choose, stay warm, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 3 Comments on Synopsis-writing 101, part IV: the technicalities, or, what, you think I’m MADE of mushrooms?

Synopsis-writing 101, part IV: the technicalities, or, what, you think I’m MADE of mushrooms?

Okay, so the joke in the title would have been funnier if I had in fact been posting on consecutive days, as I had originally planned. But as the illustrious comic Stephen Wright is fond of pointing out — you can’t have everything; where would you put it?

For the last couple of posts, I’ve been showing you examples of good and not-so-good 1-page synopses, so we could talk about (read: so I could conduct a monologue about) the overarching strategies that rendered them more or less effective. Since I haven’t exactly been overwhelmed with howls of protest on the subject — really? The prospect of constructing a 1-page synopsis for a 400-page novel of a complexity that would make Tolstoy weep annoys nobody? — I’m going to assume that we’re all pretty comfortable with the strategic part.

Before I move on to the ins and outs of writing the longer synopsis, I feel I should respond to some of the whimpers of confusion from the more structurally-minded of my readers. “But Anne,” I have heard some of you pointing out, “you’ve shown us a couple of visual examples of properly-formatted synopses — a sort of SYNOPSES ILLUSTRATED, if you will. Any chance that you might go over the various rather odd-looking formatting choices you’ve used in them before, say, we need to send out our own?”

Oh, certainly. Let’s take another example at the good 1-page synopsis for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE:

For veterans of any of my extended forays into the joys and terrors of standard format for manuscripts, nothing here should be too surprising. By and large, standard format for a synopsis is the same as for a page of manuscript: double-spaced, 1-inch margins all around, indented paragraphs, Times, Times New Roman, or Courier, the works. (If you’re unfamiliar with the rules of standard format, you will find them conveniently summarized in the HOW TO FORMAT A MANUSCRIPT and STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories on the list at right.

Please notice that, as with the first page of a manuscript, the author’s contact information does not appear on the first page of the synopsis. Unlike the first page of a manuscript, however, the title of the book should appear on the first page of a synopsis, along with the information that it IS a synopsis.

Why the latter? Because the synopsis and the manuscript it accompanies — to say nothing of the synopsis and query that often arrive in the same envelope — often become separated during the reading and evaluation process. It never pays to assume, then, that the reader of one will automatically know things about the other.

The title, for instance.

A second (or third, or fifth; extrapolate) page should also look very similar to any other page of standard-formatted manuscript, with one vital exception: the slug line for a synopsis should, as I mentioned in the previous sentence, SAY that the page it decorates is from a synopsis, not a manuscript, in addition to displaying the author’s last name, the title of the book, and the page number. (If you don’t know what a slug line is, why anyone would use it, or, indeed, why anyone would name something on a pretty page of text after a slimy creature, please see the SLUG LINE category on the list at right.)

Why include a slug line here? Because pages do occasionally go astray, and because synopses, like manuscripts, should never be bound in any way — unless a contest’s rules specifically state otherwise, of course.

Do I hear some nervous shifting in chairs out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you cry out, “aren’t you ignoring the elephant in the room — or, in this case, on the page? You seem to have given some of the character names in all capital letters. Why?”

I’m glad you asked. It’s not absolutely necessary, technically speaking, but most professional fiction synopses CAPITALIZE THE ENTIRE NAME of each major character the first time it appears. Not every time, mind you; just the first.

Why only the first? To alert a skimming agent or editor to the fact that — wait for it — a new character has just walked into the story.

Because Millicent might, you know, miss ’em otherwise.

It is also considered pretty darned nifty (and word-count thrifty) to include the character’s age in parentheses immediately after the first time the name appears, resulting in synopses that look something like this:

ST. THERESA OF AVILA (26) has a problem. Ever since she started dating multi-millionaire GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER (82), all of her friends have unaccountably decided that she is mercenary and hates Native Americans. Apart from JEANNE D’ARC (30), her wacky landlady-cum-bowling-partner, who uses every opportunity to pump Theresa for man-landing tips, none of the residents of Theresa’s swanky Upper East Side co-op are even speaking to her — at least until they start desperately vying for invitations to her exclusive wedding extravaganza, a lavish event to be held onstage at the Oscars, with THE REVEREND DOCTOR OWEN WILSON (44 if he’s a day, I would guess; Author! Author! hopes he feels better soon) officiating. How will Theresa find a maid of honor — and if she does, what will her jealous old boyfriend GOD (∞) do?

Should any of you out there think you’re up to rounding out the plot above into some measure of coherence and submitting it, please, be my guest. Really. I’d love to read it.

For the rest of you, please note what I have done here: in preparing a synopsis for a comedy, I have produced a — wait for it! — humorous treatment of the material.

And if I were creating a synopsis for a steamy romance novel with the same premise (although I tremble to think what a sex romp with that particular cast of characters would entail), you can bet your last wooden nickel [that] I would take some writerly steps to make my reader’s mouth go dry and his breath become short while perusing it.

Would I do this because I’m wacky? No, because — those of you who have been following this series, chant it with me now — the synopsis, like the first 50 pages, is a writing sample.

Oh, had I mentioned that before? Well, it cannot be said too often, in my opinion. The sensible writer’s primary goal in producing it is to demonstrate not only that it is a good (or at least marketable) story, an attention-grabbing yarn peopled with fascinating characters, but that the writer is a terrific storyteller.

Don’t worry — in the days to come, I shall be talking about ways in which you can tweak your synopsis in order to convey that lovely impression.

For the nonce, let’s take a quick field trip back to yesterday’s examples of a not-so-hot 1-page synopsis. Do you notice any formatting problems here?

If you immediately leapt to your feet, screaming, “It doesn’t have a slug line! It doesn’t have a slug line!” give yourself a gold star for the day. Further points if you bellowed that it doesn’t say anywhere on the page that it is a synopsis.

Extra credit if you noticed that the pages are not numbered — a major no-no in any submission, ever, yet one of the more common ones. And yes, you should number it, even for a one-page synopsis — and no, you should not number it consecutively with the manuscript, unless a contest rule’s SPECIFICALLY tell you to do so. The first page of a synopsis is always page 1.

Top yourself with a halo if you also discovered that Aunt Jane made the rookie mistake of adding her name to the synopsis anywhere but in the slug line. For book-length works, the first page of text — regardless of whether it is in the manuscript, the synopsis, or any other requested materials — is not a title page.

Don’t treat it as if it were one; it looks unprofessional to the pros.

Everyone happy with his or her score on that quiz? Let’s take on the other negative example:

Where do we even begin? Millicent the screener would almost certainly not even read this one — in fact, she might burst into laughter from several paces away.

Let’s go over why. It stars too far down on the page, for one thing, falling into the same title-page error as the previous example. It’s the over-the-top typeface, though, and the fact that the page uses more than one of them, that would set Millicent giggling and showing it to her coworkers.

Oh, and it doesn’t contain a slug line or numbering. But I doubt Millicent would even notice that over her guffaws.

It makes one other error for a fiction synopsis, a subtler one — any guesses what?

This one may surprise some of you: it mentions the title of the book IN the text of the synopsis. Why is this a problem? Well, it’s considered stylistically weak, a sign that the synopsis is talking ABOUT the book instead of getting the reader involved in the story. Or, to put it another way, and a bit more bluntly: a fiction synopsis is supposed to tell the story of the book; one that pulls the reader out of the story by talking about it at a distance tends not to do that well.

And anyway, the title is already both at the top of the page (and SHOULD be in the slug line): why, Millicent wonders impatiently, cradling her too-hot latte until it cools — she’s learning, she’s learning — would the writer WANT to waste the space and her time by repeating the information?

“Wait just a minute, Anne,” I hear some of my former questioners call from the rear of the auditorium. “You’re talking about the cosmetic aspects of the synopsis as though it were going to be judged as pitilessly as the manuscript I submit. Surely, that’s not the case? The synopsis is just a technical requirement, right?”

Um, no — as I said, it’s considered a WRITING SAMPLE. So yes, it does tend to be judged — and dismissed — just as readily as problematic text anywhere else in the submission packet.

Sorry to be the one to break that to you. But isn’t it better that you hear it from me than surmise it from a form-letter rejection? Or, as is more often the case, NOT surmise if from a form-letter rejection and keep submitting problematic synopses?

Something worth mulling over, I think.

Next time, we’ll leave technicalities behind and delve into the wonderful world of storytelling on the fly. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The submission packet, part III: making yours the Easter egg that everyone wants to find, or, the race is not always to the swiftest

The submission packet, part III: making yours the Easter egg that everyone wants to find, or, the race is not always to the swiftest

The age of miracles has not yet vanished, my friends. Remember that yard renovation we started way back in, oh, March? Or was it in April, or 2003, or the era of the Visigoths? Today, after what felt like an entire Bronze Age of delays, the landscapers showed up (in itself something of a miracle), cleared away the debris that they had left artistically dotting our neighborhood, waved their hands over the heaping piles of sod that have housed a mole-and-squirrel theme park for months now — and violà, we abruptly have a very lush lawn.

I’m not talking just healthy, mind you — this is downright bourgeois. I haven’t seen greenery this decadent since I was a student at Harvard, when the grand old school would banish the students from the trampled lawns a few weeks before graduation and roll out new ones, so the Yard would look nice for the soon-to-be-visiting alumni.

Oh, as if Harvard’s the only university that does it.

Our new, croquet-worthy lawn seems like an apt metaphor for today, when I shall be wrapping up this week’s micro-series on SASEs and other things an aspiring writer might conceivably ship to an agent or editor. You could always go the Rolls Royce route, overnighting every scrap of requested paper or even having a bike messenger deliver it, but why shell out the dosh?

In the end, whether the yard boasts a pelt-thick lawn or the most modest rock garden, you will want to impress the recipient with the house, if you catch my drift.

On the off chance that anyone out there didn’t, allow me to make it plainer: too many aspiring writers waste scads of money speeding up the delivery time between their houses and a requesting agency. Overnighting a submission is utterly unnecessary; it won’t win you any Brownie points whatsoever with Millicent the agency screener, and it most assuredly will not get her boss to read your manuscript any faster.

Save your money for something else — nice paper upon which to print the submission, for instance.

With an eye to helping submitting writers figure out what is and isn’t a necessary expense, I have spent the last couple of posts talking (in part) about ways to save money when shipping requested materials to an agent or editor. We writers don’t talk about this very much amongst ourselves, but the fact is, the process of finding an agent can be pretty expensive.

Did a few of you new to the process just choke on your cornflakes? “Wait just a minute, Anne,” a sputtering few still working up to the marketing stage cry. “Surely, you’re talking about the entire agent-finding process being expensive, right, not just the shipping-off part? I mean, really, I’ve just shelled out hundreds of dollars to attend a writers’ conference so I could meet agents to query — I hadn’t thought at all about the the next step, mailing off requested materials, taxing my piggie bank.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it might.

At minimum, the costs of producing a professional-looking submission packet include shipping (both there and back), boxes, paper, ink cartridges, wear and tear on your computer, and a ton of your time that could be used for, well, anything else. While individually these may not seem as potentially scarifying to your checking account as the even greater optional costs of attending conferences, entering contests, and hiring freelance editors like me to help pull your submission into tip-top shape, it all adds up.

So much so that if you’re a US citizen and marketing a book, it’s worth looking into the possibility of filing a Schedule C for your writing as a business, so you can deduct these expenses. Talk to a tax professional about it (I am not a tax professional, so I cannot legally give you advice on the subject), but do try to find one who is familiar with artists’ returns: ones who are not will almost invariably say that a writer must sell work in a given year to claim associated expenses, but that’s not necessarily true.

Yesterday, as part of my ongoing quest to save you a few sous, I brought up the case of Antoinette, the writer who rushed out and overnighted her manuscript, then waited seemingly endlessly by the phone for the agent of her dreams to respond. I went into her possible reasons for doing this — rather than sending the book regular mail or the more affordable 2-3 day Priority Mail rate.

Today, I want to talk a bit about the other two primary motivators for jumping the proverbial gun: fear and eagerness.

To let one of the most poorly-hidden cats out of one of the most hole-ridden bags in the business, new souls walking the planet are in a greater hurry than a writer who has just received a request for materials. Especially if that request comes at the end of a long period of querying or after a particularly intense conference, it’s far from uncommon for the lucky writer to decide, wrongly, that the only possible response is to drop everything else in her life — calling in sick to work, if necessary — to throw together the requested materials and get them out the door as close to instantly as possible.

One of two rationales typically underlies this approach. In the first, the writer says, “Oh, my God, this request to see all or part of my manuscript must be a fluke. I’d better get these materials under the agent or editor’s nose within the next few hours, before either (a) s/he changes her/his mind, (b) the malignant forces that rule the universe cause the wall of indifference to art to rise again, this temporary fissure mended, or (c) both.

Whichever thunderbolt the hostile gods of publishing are planning to send his way, the fearful writer wants to make absolutely sure that his submission is out of his hands well before it strikes.

Who cares that he hasn’t had time to double-check his submission for easily-overlooked gaffes, or that overnighting that package will cost four times as much as sending it via regular mail? He’s trying to submit before the agent of his dreams comes to his/her senses.

In reality, of course, it just doesn’t work like that: a request to submit materials will be every bit as good two weeks from the day it was made as it was in the moment. Or two months.

Also, as I MAY have hinted gently above, the writer’s speed in getting the submission to the agent will not make one scintilla of difference in how quickly a manuscript is read — or even the probability of its moldering on an agent’s desk for months. Certainly, whether the agent’s receiving the manuscript the next day or in the 2-3 days offered by the more reasonably priced Priority Mail will make no appreciable difference to response time.

Especially during summer conference season, since most of the industry goes on vacation from early August through Labor Day. Or around Christmastime, when the biz more or less shuts down.

The other, more common rationale for too-swift submission is eagerness. “Whew!” the writer who has just received a request to submit says. “The hard part is over now: my premise has been recognized as a good one by an agent who handles this sort of material. From this point on, naturally, everything is going to happen in a minute: reading, acceptance, book sale, chatting on Oprah.”

You know, the average trajectory for any garden-variety blockbuster. Who wouldn’t want to cut a week, or even a few days, out of tackling that bright future?

I sincerely hope that yours is the one in eight million submissions that experiences this second trajectory — and that’s the probability in a good year for publishing — but writerly hopes to the contrary, a request for submission is the beginning of the game, not the end. The fact is, as small a percentage of queries receive a positive response (and it’s unusually under 5%), even fewer submissions pass the initial read test.

Or, to put it the terms we typically use on this blog, it takes even less provocation to cause Millicent shout “Next!” over the first page of a manuscript than over a query.

There’s a reason that I grill you on the details, you know: I want yours to be in that top few percentiles. Which is why I would rather see your resources and energy going toward perfecting the submission itself, rather than getting it there with a rapidity that would make Superman do a double-take.

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

Submission scenario 2: Gilberto has just won a major category in a writing contest with his thriller, DON’T PAY ANY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN; HE’S NOT REALLY CARRYING AN AXE. During the very full pitching day that follows his win, five agents ask him to send submissions. Seeing that he was garnering a lot of interest, Maxine, the most enthusiastic of the agents, requests that he overnight the manuscript to her, so she can respond to it right away.

Gilberto says yes. He actually does overnight the packet.

However, being a savvy submitter, he submits simultaneously to the other five via regular mail right away. He does not tell Maxine — or any of the others — that he is letting many agents read his manuscript at the same time. He writes REQUESTED MATERIALS — FIRST PLACE, CONTEST NAME on the outside of every submission and mentions the request in the first line of his cover letter, to minimize the possibility of his work being lost in amongst the many submissions these agencies receive.

Within three weeks, he’s heard back from all but one of them; puzzlingly, Maxine is the last to respond. And when she finally does, six weeks after he overnighted her the manuscript, it’s with form letter. This most enthusiastic of agents has rejected him without even telling him why.

What did Gilberto do wrong? Not much, really, except for saying yes to an unreasonable request — and not telling the agents that they were competing over his work. That not made his submission process more expensive than it needed to be, but also more or less eliminated any benefit he might have derived from the contest-generated buzz about his book.

Let’s take his missteps one at a time. Why was Maxine’s request that he overnight the manuscript unreasonable?

In essence, the situation was no different than if Maxine had asked him 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.

Yet as Maxine’s subsequent behavior showed, she had no more intention of reading Gilberto’s manuscript within the next couple of days than she did of reading it on the airplane home.

Okay, here is a pop quiz to see how much those of you who followed this summer’s series on conference pitching have learned: 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. As I mentioned in the pitching series, agents tend to be competitive people — to many of them, a book project’s value will increase in direct proportion to how many other agents are interested in it.

The give-me-first-peek request is one way it manifests — yet another reason that it is ALWAYS in a writer’s best interest to make simultaneous submissions and queries, rather than approaching them one at a time.

Not clear why? For the same reason not telling all of the agents concerned that they were in potential competition over his work was a mistake: because they would probably have been a bit more interested had they known that.

What makes me suspect that not using his manuscript’s being in demand as a selling point harmed Gilberto’s chances of landing an agent. Okay, let’s think about it for a minute: why didn’t Maxine get back to him sooner?

In practice, of course, she could have had a lot of reasons — a death in the family, a problem with an existing client’s relationship with her editor, a particularly exciting negotiation, rehab…the list goes on and on. But any other possible factors aside, Maxine knew that if any of those other agents at the conference had made an offer, Gilberto would have contacted her — and when he didn’t, she could treat his might-have-been-hot property just like any other submitted manuscript.

In other words, jumping in and asking for a first peek cost Maxine nothing — it obviously affected her subsequent treatment of Gilberto’s work not at all — but guaranteed that she would be first to know about how his other submissions fared. And once she could safely assume that he had not been picked up by anyone else, the shiny gleam of being sought-after faded from his manuscript.

Now pause and consider the ramifications of Maxine’s attitude toward other agents’ interest levels for a moment. Picture them spread thickly across the industry. Let the possible effects 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. Not high on the average Maxine’s to-do list.

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? While an agent expects that the writer querying her will be simultaneously querying elsewhere, the converse is also true: she will assume, unless you tell her otherwise, that the packet you send her is the only submission currently under any agent’s eyes.

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. 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.

I heard that thought go through some of your minds: I would have to scold you if you lied about this, just to speed up the agent’s sense of urgency. Ooh, that would be too strategic, clever, and unscrupulous. Sneaky writer; no cookie.

Okay, here’s the extra credit question: in the scenario above, Maxine already knows that other agents are interested in Gilberto’s work; she is hoping to snap him up first. So why didn’t she read it right away?

Give up? Well, Maxine’s goal was to get the manuscript before the other agents made offers to Gilberto, 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–?”

It honestly does make sense, when you consider the competition amongst agents. Maxine is aware that she has not sufficiently charmed Gilberto 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 up a storm. So she definitely wants to read his pages, but she will not know whether she wants to sign him until she reads his writing.

Because, as agents like to say, it all depends upon the writing.

Maxine’s met enough writers to be aware that it is distinctly possible that Gilberto’s response to his big win will be to spend the next eight months going over his manuscript with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, perfecting it before showing it to anyone at all. She would like to see it before he does that, if at all possible.

To beat the Christmas rush, as it were.

Even if she doesn’t get an advance peek, Maxine is setting up a situation where Gilberto will automatically tell her if any other agent makes an offer: he’s probably going to call or e-mail her to see if she’s still interested before he signs with anyone else. 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 he will regard her as a top prospect.

If she gets such a call, Maxine’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.

What’s the rush, from her perspective?

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 Gilberto 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, and several other agents have already asked to see it. I can get a copy to you by the end of the week, though, when I send out the others.”

And then he should have sat down, read it IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD to catch any glaring mistakes, and Priority Mailed it a few days later, accompanied by a cover letter reiterating that other agents are also reading it.

Tick, tick.

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 generally 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 of the biz.

You need some time to wrap your brain around that last point, don’t you? Fine; I shall sign off for the day to go and run barefoot across that decadent lawn. Whee!

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The submission packet, part II: “So many manuscripts, so little time.” — Millicent

The submission packet, part II: “So many manuscripts, so little time.” — Millicent

Well, when I digress, no one can say that I don’t do it thoroughly: having begun thinking about the problems that typically assail a first-time submitter, I realized that I have at least a few days’ worth of ostensibly wise, potentially helpful, and possibly witty things to say on the subject. As is true of so many of the hills dotting the long and curvy road to publication, knowing what the way ahead holds can help the aspiring writer avoid taking any of the multitude of wrong turns.

Since I doubt I can milk that metaphor any further, let’s move on to pastures new — or at any rate nearby.

To put it another way: isn’t it amazing just how much there is to know about the ostensibly straightforward task of printing out requested materials, placing them in an appropriate mailing container, and sending them off to an agent or editor?

Underscore presents itself: you all know NEVER to submit unrequested pages, right?

Why? Because almost universally, unsolicited manuscripts are rejected unread. Even at the rare agency or publishing house that accepts unrequested manuscripts, it’s going to end up in what’s known as the slush pile, the stack of submissions that stretches, Dr. Seuss-style, skyward, awaiting the day when someone will have the time to review them.

It can take a LONG time just to go through the manuscripts they asked to see. Care to guess how tempting that fact renders tossing aside those they didn’t request?

Long-time readers, pull out your hymnals and sing along: because agencies and publishing houses get so many submissions that their PRIMARY goal is to weed out the one they are reading at the moment. The faster they can do that, the better for them.

Yet despite the ubiquity of the reject-the-unsolicited-on-sight policy, amazingly few of the writers rejected for doing so are even aware that jumping the gun caused it. Like aspiring writers who submit without a SASE, with too much material, or without following the strictures of standard format, gun-jumpers usually receive exactly the same form-letter rejection as writers whose work was rejected for writing-related reasons.

So they keep submitting incorrectly time after time, never understanding that a few relatively simple changes could get the pros to take their manuscripts more seriously. It saddens me.

Do I see a raised hand or two out here? “Um, Anne?” I hear a few quick-reasoning readers pipe up. “Since submitting via e-mail would obviate the lack-of-SASE problem entirely, and since if I send my materials as an attachment to an e-mail, Millicent the screener won’t know how many pages I’ve submitted unless she reads through them all, wouldn’t I pretty much always be better off submitting my work electronically?”

Well, you could make a good argument for that, computer-huggers. While an unsolicited e-submission will, admittedly, tend to meet the same fate as an unsolicited paper submission — a quick and quiet rejection — e-submission does undoubtedly have many perqs. It’s substantially cheaper than printing up and mailing a submission, for one thing, especially so for writers submitting to US agents from outside the country, not to mention less wasteful of paper. Agencies often respond to e-queries more rapidly than paper queries, and an electronic submission may easily be e-mailed around the office.

So if I were in the market for an agent (which, thank the gods, I’m not), would I be querying and submitting electronically? No, I can’t say I would.

Why are paper submissions are worth all the effort and expense? Well, for starters, they are typically read more closely then e-mailed submissions, for the extremely simple reason that people read faster on a screen. Electronic rejection is as easy as Millicent’s hitting a button a nanosecond after a sentence displeases her — far, far less energy- and time-consuming than having to dig out the SASE, reach for the form rejection letter to stuff inside it, insert the rejected manuscript, and eventually carry the whole shebang to the mail room.

Yes, you read that correctly: Millicent;s begrudging, mercurial attention to your first printed page is the BETTER option. The world is a strange place.

Also, a writer can control more factors in hard copy. As much as a pain as pulling a physical submission packet together may be, at least you know that the formatting will show up on the other end as you want it.

“Wha–?” I hear the more computer-reliant of you out there exclaiming.

I hate to be the one to break it to you (although that’s never stopped me yet, I notice), but if you e-mail a submission, you have absolutely no way of knowing that all of your precious formatting arrived intact. Copying and pasting a writing sample into the body of an e-mail (or one of those little comment boxes on agencies’ websites) will, naturally, eliminate most of the formatting, but even if you have included the pages as a Word attachment, different operating systems and versions of Word can play havoc with the cosmetic attributes of a page.

Given the choice, I would advise opting for paper submission.

While I’m on the subject of stuffing your submission into a box, let me bring up a rather important piece of advice I forgot to mention yesterday: as desirable as it might be for your pocketbook, your schedule, and the planet, do NOT send your manuscript in a box that has already been used for another purpose.

You know what I mean, don’t you? We’ve all received (or sent) that box that began life as an mail-order shipping container, but now is covered with thick black ink, crossing out the original emporium’s name. My mother takes this process even farther, turning the obfuscating lines into little drawings of small creatures cavorting on a cardboard landscape.

As dandy as this recycling is for birthday presents and the like, it’s considered a bit tacky in shipping a submission. Which is unfortunate, as the ones from Amazon tend to be a perfect footprint for manuscripts. Don’t yield to the temptation, though.

“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 can feel some of you getting restive under the onslaught of so many dos and don’ts, so instead of throwing any more at you today, I’m going to give you the opportunity to put some of what we’ve learned into practice.

That’s right; it’s example time again. Hold your applause, please, until we’re done.

Submission scenario 1: After months on end querying her short story collection, WHAT I DID FOR LOVE AND OTHER DRY-CLEANING ANECDOTES, Antoinette receives an e-mail from Clara, the agent of her dreams, asking to see the whole manuscript. Alternately overjoyed and petrified (a very common twin mental state at this juncture, incidentally, although even amongst ourselves, we writers tend to talk only about the joy), she prints up her manuscript that very day and rushes it into the nearest cardboard container.

She makes it to the post office five minutes before it closes. When she plunks down the hefty box and asks to overnight it, she turns pale at the price, but pays it anyway. Exhausted but happy, she rushes home to plan what she’s going to wear for her appearance on Oprah.

Afraid to miss Clara’s response — which, naturally, she begins to expect within a day of learning that Clara has received it through the magic of delivery confirmation — Antoinette cancels her gym membership, turns down Eugene’s seven requests to have dinner with him, and gives up reading my blog in order to pursue the more rewarding activities of staring at her e-mail inbox and repeatedly checking to see that her phone is working.

Clearly, madness has taken hold of her.

A couple of weeks later, another agent asks to see the first 50 pages. Before Clara’s request, this prospect would have thrilled Antoinette beyond words, but now, she does not even respond. “I’ve already committed to Clara,” she tells kith, kin, and the neighbor who comes over to complain about Antoinette’s having turned her phone’s ringer up to glass-shattering levels, so she won’t miss calls when she’s in the shower. Or a coma.

An anxious three months pass before Clara returns the manuscript to her, its rejection explained only by a boilerplate: we regret that your manuscript does not meet our needs at this time.

Okay, what did Antoinette do wrong here? (Hint: what she did wrong here probably didn’t have any impact whatsoever on whether the manuscript got rejected or not. But it was still a faux pas.)

Antoinette’s first 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.)

Also, one suspects, in her rush to get it out the door and into an agent’s hands, she neglected to sit down and give it a final once-over, reading it IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD. It’s also not a bad idea to flip through the manuscript as it prints out to make sure that no pages are smudged or missing.

Since we are talking about Antoinette here, I’ll spare you the story about the time I forgot to check, and page 47 of my master’s thesis was nowhere to be found. My defense turned a mite ugly as a result.

The more interesting question here is why would Antoinette, 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 takes one look at that FedEx package and cries, “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 anymore, although it may have 20 years ago, at the dawn of overnight cross-country shipping. At this point in human history, though, writers have done this too often for an overnighted package to generate any enthusiasm at all at the average agency. Now, overnight packaging is just another box.

Save yourself some dosh.

Antoinette’s other mistake was to put the rest of her submissions on hold, effectively granting the agent of her dreams an unrequested and totally unnecessary exclusive look at the manuscript.

Oh, you can see her reasoning easily enough: if her top pick offered representation, she wouldn’t need to query or submit anymore. But since Clara didn’t — and took her own sweet time saying so — Antoinette just took 8 weeks of potential submission (and querying) time and threw it out the window.

Sometime later in her writing career, she may wish she had that time back. The most probable first expression of that wish: about 35 seconds after she reads Clara’s form-letter rejection.

I can think of couple of reasons — and good ones — to keep submitting and querying right up to the moment an agent makes you an offer. First, finding and landing the right agent for your work can take some serious time — if your book is genuinely ready to send out, why wait a month (or more) to hear back from each?

Second, few agents assume that a good writer will be submitting to only one agency at a time; if there isn’t competition over you, they tend to conclude that no one else is interested.

Long-time readers, chant it with me now: unless an agency SPECIFICALLY says that it will accept only exclusive submissions, it does not expect them. The writers’ conference rumors that say otherwise are just not true.

Third — and I’m sorry to have to say this, Antoinette, but it’s true — for the sake of your long-term happiness, it’s never a good idea to hang all of your hopes on a single submission. This is a tough business; being realistic about that can help take some of the sting out of rejection. Keep plowing forward.

Signing off for today, but a few more submission tips follow tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Query letter troubleshooting, part II: more toiling in the literary vineyard

Query letter troubleshooting, part II: more toiling in the literary vineyard

Happy Labor Day, all! I was tickled to find this image from the Book of Hours to gladden our hearts today, because it is such an accurate depiction of how so many aspiring writers view the work of querying these days: a long, toilsome effort aimed toward impressing the powerful folks in the white castle on the hill — who may or may not be paying attention — under a sky that (we hope) conceals at least a few minor deities rooting for the underdog’s eventual success.

Oh, right — I was the only writer who felt that way while I was trying to find the right agent. Thanks for clearing up that little misconception.

But on the off chance that I wasn’t the lone writer who ever shivered in the face of seemingly unalterable industry coldness, I feel an obligation to point out from the other side of the Rubicon that even those newest to querying are not as entirely helpless in the face of it as we writers tend to tell ourselves we are. Although much of a writer’s progress along the road to publication is dependent upon factors outside her control — fads in style, fashions in content, and what kind of memoir has garnered the most scandals recently, to name but three — how she presents her work to the industry is in fact entirely under her own control.

Which is a really, really nice way of saying that from a professional reader’s point of view, scads of query letters traject themselves like lemmings straight from the envelope into the rejection pile with scarcely a pause in between. Sadly, the vast majority are rejected for reasons that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the potential personality fit between the author and agent, the agent’s ability to sell the book in question, or even the quality of the writing.

Why, you cry? Because agents and their screeners read hundreds of the darned things per week: even if only 20 of them share the same basic mistake — and trust me, more of them will — the 21rst query that carries even a shade of similarity is likely to trigger a knee-jerk reaction so strong that even Dr. Pavlov would shake his head and say, “No kidding? Just because the letter was addressed to Dear Agent, instead of an individual?”

Oh, yes, Dr. Pavlov, there are few epistolary errors that engender a stronger — or quicker — negative response than a Dear Agent letter. But that’s merely the best-known of the notorious query-reader pet peeves…and I’m getting ahead of myself.

Call me zany, but if a query elicits a rejection for any reason other than that the storyline or argument in the proposed book didn’t grab Millicent or her boss, my first question is not, “Oh, how could the screener have made such a mistake?” but “May I have a look at that letter, so see how the writer may improve it?”

Why do I tend to leap straight to that conclusion, you ask? Experience, mostly. If there is a single rule of thumb that may be applied at every stage of any successful author’s career, it’s that it ALWAYS behooves us to look critically at our own writing before assuming that the only possible explanation for frowned-upon writing lies in the eye of the predisposition of the reader to frown.

My, that was a convoluted sentence, wasn’t it? Let me put it more simply: Millicent may indeed be a bit rejection-happy at times, but any writer can learn how to avoid provoking her. As with a manuscript, the writer of a query will virtually always be better off taking steps to improve what she can control than blaming the rejection upon other factors.

It is possible, in other words, to learn from one’s own mistakes, even in the current agency environment, where the vast majority of queriers are never told precisely what made Millicent slide their letters directly into their SASEs with a copy of the agency’s prefab one-size-fits-all rejection note.

In the spirit of trying to avoid that dismal fate, I began running through a checklist of some of the most common query letter mistakes yesterday. Let’s recap, shall we?

(1) Is my query letter longer than a single page in standard correspondence format?

(2) If my query letter just refuses to be shorter, am I trying to do too much here?

(3) If my query letter is too long, am I spending too many lines of text describing the plot?

(4) Is my query letter polite?

(5) Is it clear from the first paragraph on what precisely I am asking the agent to represent?

(6) Does my letter sound as though I am excited about this book, or as if I have little confidence in the work? Or does it read as though I’m apologizing for querying at all?

(7) Does my book come across as genuinely marketable, or does the letter read as though I’m boasting?

Please do take the time to re-read your query before you answer these questions or the ones to come. Yes, even if some of these points sound a trifle redundant to those of you who have been reading my blog for a while: you would be well within your rights to think, honestly, don’t all of us know by now to avoid sounding bitter in a query letter? Or to be polite while doing it?

Well, probably so — but humor me here, because queriers often do not change anything but the first paragraph, address, and salutation between each time they sent out their letters, more or less insuring that a mistake made once will be replicated a dozen times. It’s quite easy to fall into the habit of pumping out those queries without really pondering their content — or whether this particular letter is the best means of marketing to that particular agent.

In short, it’s worth reviewing what’s going out every once in a while. Which, coincidentally, brings me to the next question on the checklist:

(8) Have I addressed this letter to a specific person, rather than an entire agency or any agent currently walking the face of the earth? Does it read like a form letter?

Many aspiring writers approach quite a few agents simultaneously — and with good reason. At this point in publishing history, when many agencies don’t even respond to e-mailed queries if the answer is no, waiting to hear back from one agent before approaching the next is poor strategy. One-by-one queries can add years to the agent-finding process.

Do I hear some restless murmuring out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you conference veterans protest, “I heard that some agents will become furious if they find out that a writer is sending out many queries simultaneously. I don’t want to scare them away from my book by breaking their rules right off the bat!”

I’m not sure why this rumor remains so pervasive, because exclusivity requests almost invariably refer to submissions, not queries — and without exception, agencies that prefer to have exclusive looks at either make that fact PERFECTLY OBVIOUS in their listings in the standard agency guides, on their websites, and at conferences. So if you have checked to ascertain that the agent of your dreams — or at least the next on your list — does not have an exclusivity policy, you should assume that s/he doesn’t.

Trust me, if an agent who does prefer an exclusive peek doesn’t want other agents seeing it, s/he will let you know. Until then, it’s a waste of your valuable time to grant a de facto exclusive to someone who hasn’t asked for it. (For some tips on dealing with an actual request for an exclusive, if and when it comes up, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category on the list at right.)

I suspect that the astonishing persistence of the rumor that most agents secretly crave exclusives (and thus penalize queriers who don’t read their minds and act accordingly) is a direct result of agents’ standing up at writers’ conferences and saying, “For heaven’s sake, don’t send out mass queries — if I see a query that’s clearly been sent to every agent in the book, I send straight it into the rejection pile.”

Since everyone in the room will nod sagely in response, the agent will not unnaturally assume that the entire audience knows that s/he is referring not to the practice of querying several agents simultaneously, but to the astonishing common feat of sending (often via e-mail) an IDENTICAL query letter to, say, a hundred agents all at once. (And if you don’t know why that’s a bad idea, you might want to check out this archived post before you launch a flotilla of your own.)

As we have discussed, a letter designed to please all is unlikely to be geared to the specific quirks and literary tastes of any particular agent — one of the many reasons that this shotgun approach seldom works. The other, believe it or not, is that mass submitters often render the fact that they don’t know one agent on their lists from another by sending out what is known in the biz as a Dear Agent letter. As in one that begins:

Dear Agent,

I haven’t the vaguest idea who you are or what you represent, but since the big publishing houses don’t accept submissions from unagented authors, I come to you, hat in hand, to beg you to represent my fiction novel…

Why, when there is so much to resent in this (probably quite honest) little missive, would the salutation alone be enough to get this query rejected without reading farther? Well, to folks who work in agencies, such an opening means only one thing: the writer who sent it is sending an identical letter to every agent listed on the Internet or in one of the standard agency guides.

Willy-nilly, with no regard to who represents what and consequently who is likely to be interested in the book at hand.

Which means, they reason, that it is unlikely to the point of laughability that the book being proposed is going to fit the specific requirements and tastes of any of the agents currently domiciled at the agency. And, most will additionally conclude, the writer hasn’t bothered to learn much about how the publishing industry works.

Since virtually any Millicent will simply pitch a Dear Agent letter into the reject pile, if not actually the trash (Dear Agent letter-writers seldom know to include SASEs), it’s in your best interest to make it quite, quite obvious to whom you are addressing your missive. In fact, the query most likely to succeed is one that is specialized not only in the salutation, but in the first paragraph as well.

How, you ask? Good question.

(9) Do I make it clear in the first paragraph of the letter SPECIFICALLY why I am writing to THIS particular agent — or does it read as though I could be addressing any agent in North America?

This is a corollary of the last, of course — to put it another way, writers aren’t the the only ones screaming at the heavens, “Why me? Why me?” Agents scream it, too, albeit with a slightly different meaning.

No, but seriously, agents (and their screeners) wonder about this. Given half a chance and a martini or two, many agents will complain vociferously about queries that read as though the writer simply used a mail merge to address letters to every agent listed on a particular website or in a given guide.

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while may find this question SLIGHTLY familiar, and for good reason: this is a NOTORIOUS agents’ pet peeve.

So it’s worth taking a look at your query letter and asking yourself if it answers the question: there are hundreds and hundreds of literary agents in the United States alone — why did you choose this one, out of all others, to query? What specifically about this agent’s track record, literary tastes, and/or bio led you to say, By gum, I would like this person to represent my work?

And no, in this context, because she is an agent and I desperately want to sell my book, is not a reason likely to impress Millicent. She hears it too often.

Remember, agents — like most other people — tend to be proud of their best work: if you want to get on their good side, showing a little appreciation for what they have done in the past is just good strategy. Especially if you can honestly compliment them on a project they really loved, or one that was unusually difficult to sell.

See why I kept urging you earlier this summer to ask those panels of agents at conferences some pointed questions about their favorite projects? I was just looking to help you glean some useful information.

I picked this little trick up not at writers’ conferences, but in academia. When a professor is applying for a job, she is subjected to a form of medieval torture known as a job talk. Not only is she expected to give a lecture in front of the entire faculty that is thinking of hiring here, all of whom are instructed in advance to jump on everything she says with abandon, but she is also expected to have brief private meetings with everyone on the faculty first.

It’s every bit as horrible as it sounds, like going through a series of 20 or 30 interviews with authors who think simply everyone in the universe has read their work. (Everyone smart, anyway.) If you’re the job candidate, you’d better have at least one pithy comment prepared about each and every faculty member’s most recent article, or you’re toast.

Gee, I can’t imagine why I didn’t want to remain in academia. But it did teach me something very valuable indeed: pretty much every human being affiliated with every book ever published likes to be recognized for the fact.

And it’s so very easy to work a compliment into a query letter without sounding cheesy or obsequious! If the agent you are querying has represented something similar to your work in the past, you have a natural beginning: “Since you so ably represented X’s book, I believe you may be interested in my novel…”

I had lunch a while back with a writer who used this method in a pitch with triumphant success. The agent was blown away that the writer had taken the time to find out whom she represented and do a little advance reading.

There are many ways to find out what an agent has represented. Check the acknowledgments of books you like (authors often thank their agents), or check the agency’s website to see whom the agent represents. If all else fails, call the book’s publisher, ask for the publicity department, and ask who the agent of record was; legally, it’s a matter of public record, so they have to tell you.

Actually, with small publishers, this isn’t a bad method for finding out what they are looking to publish. I once had a charming conversation with an editor at a small Midwestern press, who confided to me that when she had acquired the book about which I was inquiring, the author did not yet have an agent. Sensing an opportunity, I promptly pitched my book to her — and she asked me to send her the first fifty pages right away.

Moral: sometimes opportunities are hiding in some unexpected places. As, for instance…

(10) If I met this agent or editor at a conference, or am querying because I heard him/her speak at one, or picked him/her because s/he represents a particular author, do I make that obvious immediately?

I am surprised at how often writers seem reluctant to mention this, but since such a low percentage of the aspiring writers out there attend conferences (under 4%, according to the last estimate I saw), attending a good one that the agent you’re querying also attended is in fact a minor selling point for your book: the prevailing wisdom goes that writers who make the investment in learning how to market their work professionally tend to have more professional work to present.

A kind of old-fashioned notion, true, but if you’re a conference-goer, one you should be riding for all it is worth.

If you have heard the agent speak at a conference, read an article she has written in a writer’s magazine or online, or even just noticed that your favorite author thanked her in the acknowledgments of a book you liked, mention that in the first line of your query letter. If you have no such personal reason, be polite enough to invent a general one: “Since you represent literary fiction, I hope you will be interested in my novel…”

I would suggest being even more upfront than this, if the conference in question was a reputable one and you did in fact attend it. Why not write the name of the conference on the outside of the envelope, in approximately the same place where you would have written REQUESTED MATERIALS had you pitched to the agent successfully there? And if you are an e-querying type, why not mention it in the subject line of the e-mail?

Oh, and lest I forget to mention it later in this series:

(11) Am I sending this query in the form that the recipient prefers to receive it? If I intend to send it via e-mail, have I double-checked that the agency accepts e-mailed queries?

Stop laughing, hard-core web fiends. The publishing world runs on paper — it’s far from unusual for a prestigious agency not to accept e-submissions at all. Even agencies with websites (which not all of them maintain, even today) that accept submissions directly through the website often employ agents who prefer paper queries, even from writers residing in foreign countries for whom getting the right stamps for the SASE is problematic. (Don’t worry, those of you reading this abroad: I’m going to be talking next week about how to deal with the stamp problem.)

Double-check the agency’s policy before you e-query. This information will be in any of the standard agency guides, and usually on the website as well.

If you’re in any doubt, query via regular mail — strategically, it’s a better idea, anyway.

Yes, you read that correctly. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of querying via e-mail, for the exceedingly simple reason that it’s far, far less work to reject someone by the press of a single button than by stuffing a response into a SASE. A truly swift-fingered Millicent can reject 50 writers online in the time that it would take her to reject 10 on paper.

Not to mention the fact that the average reader scans words on a screen 70% faster than the same words on paper. (Or at least she did the last time I checked the statistics.) I can’t conceive of any writer who has thought about it actively longing to have Millicent spend less time reading his letter than she already does, can you?

The relative speed of scanning e-queries is why, in case you’re wondering, quite a few of the agencies that actively solicit online queries tend to respond more quickly than those that don’t. Or not at all — which means that it’s also worth your while to check an agency’s policy on responding to e-queries before you approach them; many have policies that preclude responding to a querier if the answer is no.

I sense an unspoken question hanging in the air right now. Go ahead; ask.

“But Anne,” I hear many of you shout, “what happens if I accidentally send an e-query to an agent who doesn’t like them, or a paper query to one who prefers to be approached electronically? That won’t result in an automatic rejection, will it?”

Not necessarily, no. But let me ask you this: who would you prefer to read your letter, an agent calmly going through a stack (or list) of queries, or an agent whose first thought upon seeing your epistle is, “Oh, God, not another one! Can’t any of these writers READ? I’ve said in the last ten years’ worth of Herman’s Guides that I don’t want to be queried via e-mail!”

I don’t know about you, but given my druthers, I would select the former.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that just as it’s polite to address a person the way he prefers to be addressed, rather than by a hated nickname, a courteous writer should approach an agent in the manner she prefers to be approached. Those with strong preferences either way seldom make a secret of it; double-check before you send.

And before anyone out there asks: yes, most agents will assume that a writer worth having as a client will have gone to the trouble of learning something about their personal preferences. If they have expressed a pet peeve in one of the standard agency guides, they will assume that you are aware of it.

While we’re on the subject of double-checking, allow me to sneak in one more quick question before I sign off for the evening:

(12) Am I absolutely positive that I have spelled the agent’s name correctly, as well as the agency’s? Am I positive that the letter I have addressed to Dear Mr. Smith shouldn’t actually read Dear Ms. Smith? Heck, am I even sure that I’m placing the right letter in the right envelope?

I hear some titters out there, but you wouldn’t BELIEVE how common all of these gaffes are. The last is usually just the result of a writer’s being in a hurry to get the next set of queries in the mail, and tend to be treated accordingly, but the first two constitute major breaches of etiquette.

And yes, an agent with a first name that leaves gender a tad ambiguous is every bit as likely to resent an incorrect salutation as a Rebecca or Stephen would. Often more, because a Cricket, Chris, or Leslie would constantly be receiving queries apparently addressed to someone of the opposite sex.

If you’re in serious doubt, call the agency and ask point-blank whether the agent is a Mr. or Ms. (Quick note for those querying US agents from other parts of the world: currently, Mr. or Ms. are the only two options; unless a woman makes a point of identifying herself as a Miss or Mrs., Ms. is the proper salutation.)

I know, I know: you’ve heard 4500 times that a writer should NEVER call an agency until after he has a signed representation contract in hand or the agent has left a message asking him to call back, whichever comes first. While it is quite true that allowing the agent to set the level of familiarity in the early stages of exchange is good strategy, most offices are set up to allow a caller to ask a quick, anonymous question, if he’s polite about it. As long as you don’t ask to speak to the agent personally and/or use the occasion to pitch your book, you should be fine.

Have you noticed how many of these tips boil down to some flavor of be clear, do your homework, and be courteous? That’s not entirely accidental: as odd as it may seem in an industry that rejects so many so brusquely, manners honestly do count in this business.

As my grandmother was fond of saying, manners cost nothing. But as I am prone to tell my clients and students, not exhibiting courtesy can cost an aspiring writer quite a lot.

So sit up straight, brush your teeth, and help little old ladies across the street; it will be great practice for working with an agent or editor.

More of the checklist follows tomorrow, of course. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 1 Comment on What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part II: the inevitable effects of competition at the feeding bowl

What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part II: the inevitable effects of competition at the feeding bowl

As you may see, this summer’s litter of wee raccoonlets (I’d call them cubs, but the term fails to convey the relevant cuteness) have found our outdoor cat’s food bowl. In broad daylight, no less, with the kitty in question regarding them with singular disfavor from a few scant feet away. Since we fed the babies’ mother when she was a cub, and her parents when they were, I suppose I would be unreasonable to expect them to be shy. They scratch on my door when they’re hungry.

I don’t have a whole lot of leisure to watch them, unfortunately, because I’m still on relative hiatus (read: I’m writing this propped up on a couch, nearly buried in blankets, cats, and Kleenex, not the healthy person’s choice for stylish summer apparel), but by gum, I’m on the job. The task at hand: helping those of you new to constructing query letters learn to build a good one — and giving those of you who have been at it for a while some tips on making yours better.

To that end, my last couple of posts have been re-runs (yes, a bit lazy of me, but you try moving the cat who likes sleeping on top of my mousing arm) on what a query letter is and isn’t. For the rest of this week, I’m going to continue this trend — mostly, like today, combining some material from different past posts into fresh ones, then folding in some visuals. After we’re all good and clear on the basic concepts, I’ll move on to how to spot trouble spots in existing query letters. Sounds like fun, eh?

Well, okay, maybe not fun, but doesn’t it at least sound bearable?

At minimum, it should be exceedingly useful. Honest. Think of it as taking your query letter to the gym.

Now would be a great time to work on its muscle tone: for those of you who don’t know, most of the NYC-based publishing world goes on vacation from mid-August until after Labor Day. Throughout that sleepy, humid period, mail rooms back up and desks disappear under as-yet-to-be-read query letters and manuscripts, threatening to bury the lone, pale intern left behind to answer e-mails and phones (or, alternatively, the agent who likes to work uninterrupted, and thus took his vacation at some other time of year).

It’s not the best time to query or submit. Nor is immediately after Labor Day, when Millicent and her cronies return, groaning, to sort through that pile — if you picture the look on her face when she reappears in the office after the winter holidays, wincing at the sight of the thousands of envelopes sent by well-meaning keepers of New Year’s resolutions, you’re feeling the mood correctly.

Take a couple of weeks to polish your query or submission. Trust me, Millie will be in a better mood after the 10th or so.

Why — what a remarkable coincidence! I have a couple of weeks of query-burnishing posts planned. Why so many? Well, plenty of aspiring writers find the querying process quite intimidating.

And who can blame them, considering how short a query letter is supposed to be? “My God,” the little voice in the back of my head which I choose to attribute to you is saying, “how is all of that possible within the context of a single-page missive? How can I cram all I need to say to grab their attention in that little space?”

Um, are you sitting down? You don’t actually have the entire page to catch their attention; on average, you have about five lines.

Yes, you read that correctly.

While you already have the heart medication and/or asthma inhaler at the ready, it seems like a good time to add: most query letters are not even read to their ends by screeners.

Why? Because the vast majority of query letters disqualify themselves from serious consideration before the end of the opening paragraph.

Hey, I told you to sit down first.

Unfortunately, Americans are so heavily exposed to hard-sell techniques that many aspiring writers make the mistake of using their query letters to batter the agent with predictions of future greatness so over-inflated (and, from the agent’s point of view, so apparently groundless, coming from a previously unpublished writer) that they may be dismissed out of hand. Some popular favorites:

“This is the next (fill in name of bestseller here)!”
“You’ll be sorry if you let this one pass by!”
“Everyone in the country will want to read this book!”
“It’s a natural for Oprah!”
“This book is like nothing else on the market!”

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but to professional eyes, these are all absurd statements to find in a query letter. Yes, even if the book in question IS the next DA VINCI CODE.

Why? Because these aren’t descriptions of the book; they’re back-jacket blurbs, marketing copy, equally applicable to (and equally likely to be true about) any manuscript that crosses their desks. Even in the extremely rare instances that these statements aren’t just empty boasts based upon wishful thinking, consider: whose literary opinion would YOU be more likely to believe in Millicent’s shoes, the author’s vague claim of excellence about his own book or another reader’s recommendation?

Hitting too close to home? Okay, let me put it this way: if someone you’d never met before came up to you on the street and said, “Hey, I bake the world’s best mincemeat pies, the kind that can change your life in a single bite,” would you believe him? Would you trustingly place that total stranger’s good-looking (or not) slice of God-knows-what into your mouth? Or would you want some assurances that, say, this hard-selling Yahoo knows something about cooking, had produced the pie in a vermin-free kitchen, and/or hadn’t constructed the mincemeat out of ground-up domestic pets?

Oh, you may laugh, thinking that this isn’t really an apt parallel, but what is agents and editors’ desire to hear about a new writer’s past publication history — or educational background, or even platform — about, if NOT to try to figure out if that pie is made of reasonable materials and in a manner up to professional standards of production?

That’s why, in case you’ve been wondering, a good query letter includes what I like to call ECQLC, Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy. Not because agencies are determined to seem exclusionary toward previously unpublished writers (okay, not merely to seem exclusionary), but because specific references to specific past literary achievements are signals to a quick-scanning screener that this is a query letter to take seriously.

As will an opening paragraph that states clearly and concisely why the writer decided to query this agent, as opposed to any other; a well-crafted single-paragraph elevator speech for the book; some indication of the target market, and a polite, respectful tone — the same basic elements, in short, as an effective verbal pitch.

Did some light bulbs just flicker on over some heads out there? That’s right, campers — the difference between a vague boast and solid information about your book and why THIS agent is the best fit for it is actually a show, don’t tell problem, at base. Your goal in the query letter is to demonstrate through your professional presentation of your project that this is a great book by an exciting new author, not just to say it.

As in, “My friends say this is the greatest novel since THE GRAPES OF WRATH. It’s also a natural for Oprah.”

“But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “my book really is a natural for Oprah! I’m going on her show next week!”

Well, congratulations — go ahead and open your query letter with the date of your appearance on the show, and the best of luck to you. For the vast majority of you who have not already heard from her production staff, I wouldn’t suggest mentioning your book’s Oprah potential at all, either in the query letter or, if you write nonfiction, in the book proposal.

Why? Because, conservatively speaking, at least 40% of book proposals will mention the possibility of appearing on Oprah. As will most marketing plans, a hefty percentage of verbal pitches, and a higher percentage of query letters than I even like to say.

What’s the result of all of that repetition? Usually, Millicent will simply stop reading if a query letter opens with an empty boast, because to her, including such statements is like a writer’s scrawling on the query in great big red letters, “I have absolutely no idea how the industry works.”

Which, while an interesting tactic, is unlikely to get an agent or her screener to invest an additional ten seconds in reading on to your next paragraph.

That’s right, I said ten seconds: as much as writers like to picture agents and their screeners agonizing over their missives, trying to decide if such a book is marketable or not, the average query remains under a decision-maker’s eyes for less than 30 seconds.

That’s not a lot of time to make up one’s mind, is it?

Even the best-meaning Millicent might conceivably, after as short a time as a few weeks of screening queries, might start relying pretty heavily upon her first impressions. Consider, for instance, the English major’s assumption that business format is in fact not proper formatting for either query letters or manuscripts.

Again, think about it: it’s true, for one thing, and let’s face it, improper formatting is the single quickest flaw to spot. Let’s take another gander at what Millicent expects to see, a letter formatted observing standard English rules of paragraph-formation:

Now let’s take a look at exactly the same letter in business format:

Interesting how different it is, isn’t it, considering that the words are identical? In an e-mailed query, of course, the latter format would be acceptable, but on paper, it’s not the best strategic choice.

Which may, I gather, come as a surprise to some of you out there. Unfortunately, a lot of aspiring writers seem not to be aware that business format tends to be regarded in the industry as less-than-literate, regardless of whether it appears in a query letter, a marketing plan, or — heaven forfend! — a submitted manuscript. (If you don’t know why I felt the need to invoke various deities to prevent you from using business format your manuscripts, please run, don’t walk to the STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED category at right.)

In fact, I am always meeting writers at conferences and in classes who insist, sometimes angrily, that a query letter is a business letter, and thus should be formatted as such. They tell me that standards have changed, that e-mail has eliminated the need for observing traditional paragraph standards, that it’s the writing that counts, not the formatting.

I understand the logic, of course, but it just doesn’t apply here: not all businesses work in the same way. As anyone who works in an agency or publishing house would no doubt be delighted to tell you, there are many, many ways in which publishing doesn’t work like any other kind of business. One does not, for instance, require an agent in order to become a success at selling shoes.

If you’re looking for evidence of the biz’ exceptionalism, all you have to do is walk into a bookstore with a good literary fiction section. Find a book by a great up-and-coming author that’s sold only 500 copies since it came out last year, and ask yourself, “Would another kind of business have taken a chance like this, or would it concentrate on producing only what sells well? Would it continue to produce products like this year after year, decade after decade, out of a sense of devotion to the betterment of the human race?”

Okay, so some businesses would, but it’s certainly not the norm.

Yet almost invariably, when I try to tell them that publishing is an old-fashioned industry fond of its traditions, and that agents and their screeners tend to be people with great affection for the English language and its rules, I receive the same huffy reply from writers who dislike indenting: some version of, “Well, I heard/read/was told that a query/marketing plan had to be businesslike.”

I’m always glad when they bring this up — because I strongly suspect that this particular notion is at the root of the surprisingly pervasive rumor that agents actually prefer business format. I can easily envision agents stating point-blank at conferences that they want to receive businesslike query letters.

But businesslike and business format are not the same thing. Businesslike means professional, market-savvy, not overly-familiar — in short, the kind of query letter we have been talking about for the last couple of posts.

Business format, on the other hand, doesn’t dictate any kind of content at all; it’s purely about how the page is put together. There’s absolutely nothing about this style, after all, that precludes opening a query with the threat, “You’ll regret it for the rest of your natural life if you let this book pass you by!”

All of these negative examples are lifted from real query letters, by the way.

All that being said, there’s another reason that I would strenuously advise against using business format in your query letters — and a comparative glance at the two letters above will show you why.

Take another look, then put yourself in Millicent’s shoes for a moment and ask yourself: based upon this particular writing sample, would you assume that Aspiring Q. Author was familiar with standard format? Would you expect Aspiring’s paragraphs to be indented, or for him/her (I have no idea which, I now realize) NOT to skip lines between paragraphs?

Okay, would your answer to those questions change if you had a hundred query letters to read before you could get out of the office for the day, and you’d just burned your lip on a too-hot latte? (Millicent never seems to learn, does she?)

No? Well, what if it also contained a typo within the first line or two, had odd margins, or began with, “This is the best book you’ll read this year!” or some similar piece of boasting? Wouldn’t you be at least a LITTLE tempted to draw some negative conclusions from the format?

Even if you wouldn’t, Millicent would — and perhaps even should. Why? Because although most aspiring writers seem not to be aware of it, every sentence a writer submits to an agency is a writing sample. Even if the writer doesn’t treat it as such, a screener will.

After all, when that stranger comes up to sell you a meat pie, you’re going to be looking for whatever clues you can to figure out if he’s on the up-and-up.

Quick rejections are not about being mean or hating writers — they’re about plowing through the mountains of submissions that arrive constantly. The average agency receives 800-1000 queries per week (that’s not counting the New Year’s Resolution Rush, folks), so agents and screeners have a very strong incentive to weed out as many of them as possible as rapidly as possible.

That’s why, in case you were wondering, that agents will happily tell you that any query that begins “Dear Agent” (rather than addressing a specific agent by name) automatically goes into the rejection pile. So does any query that addresses the agent by the wrong gender in the salutation. (If you’re unsure about a Chris or an Alex, call the agency and ask; no need to identify yourself as anything but a potential querier.)

So does any query that is pitching a book in a category the agent is not looking to represent. (Yes, even if the very latest agents’ guide AND the agency’s website says otherwise.)

And you know what? These automatic rejections will, in all probability, generate exactly the same form rejection letter as queries that were carefully considered, but ultimately passed upon. Again: how precisely is an aspiring writer to learn what does and doesn’t work in a query?

By finding out what agency screeners like Millicent are trained to spot — and learning what appeals to her. So go to conferences and ask questions of agents about what kind of queries they like to see. Attend book readings and ask authors about how they landed their agents. Take writers who have successfully landed agents out to lunch and ask them how they did it.

But do not, whatever you do, just assume that what works in other kinds of marketing will necessarily fly in approaching an agent. After all, almost universally, they specifically ask aspiring writers not to use the hard-sell techniques used in other types of business: writers seeking representation are expected not to telephone to pitch, send unrequested materials, or engage in extracurricular lobbying like sending cookies along with a query letter.

Instead, be businesslike, as befits a career writer: approach them in a manner that indicates that you are aware of the traditions of their industry. And, of course, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 5 Comments on What does standard format look like, anyway? Part VI: yet another great cosmic mystery explained, sort of

What does standard format look like, anyway? Part VI: yet another great cosmic mystery explained, sort of

Hello, campers –

Well, I’m feeling a little better today, you’ll be happy to hear (or at least I hope you will be), enough so to spend half an hour reading my local newspaper. And what should I see but that Arleen Williams, memoirist and long-time reader of this blog, is going to be reading at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, WA tonight at 7 pm!

What a treat. I think I’m going to try to make this my first evening out in weeks. I know that it’s short notice, but if you happen to be in the area, why not join me there?

For those of you who missed my gushing about The Thirty-Ninth Vicitim when it came out last spring, I can do no better than to quote my Amazon review (not a place I post reviews very often):

Oh, my, what a disturbing memoir this is. Not solely because of the murder of the author’s sister by the infamous Green River Killer — which would be plenty creepy enough for any true crime book, or even murder mystery — but because Arleen Williams presents us with an achingly honest look at absence, longing, and denial within a family waiting years for what the media dismissively calls closure.

What struck me most about this story is that, unlike so many books about particularly horrific crimes, the victim here comes alive on the page. Not as yet another in an almost unimaginably long list of murdered women (so long, in fact, that it sparked the nationwide Take Back the Night rallies) or as merely an object to be acted upon with violence, but as a vibrant light abruptly, inconceivably snuffed. And as part of a family so deeply attached to its own self-image as normal that not even a daughter’s disappearance is allowed to disrupt it.

Powerful stuff. Chilling. (And yes, for you fans of close-up crime recreations, there was one scene that I’m quite positive is going to give me nightmares for years to come.)

In light of my upcoming unwonted (lately, at least) energy expenditure, I’m going to conserve my resources and post today’s re-run as much as is as I can. Enjoy!

No, the statue is not a Christmas angel, but rather Nike, the winged goddess of victory, bringing a laurel wreath for reader ACD, who will be famed in song and story forevermore for the comment she posted on yesterday’s blog. Why? Because she, clever soul, wrote in with a method for using Word’s Find and Replace feature to change single spaces between sentences into double spaces within sentences. And if that’s not an achievement worthy of a laurel leaf or two, I should like to know what is.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the artist’s original intent with this particular statue (which comes to us courtesy of FreeFoto.com), but some celebration seemed appropriate, no?

And if THAT isn’t enough to meet whatever standard you may be cherishing for what constitutes a reason to initiate dancing in the streets, long-time reader, prolific commenter, and computer whiz Chris has once again gone far above and beyond the call of duty and written an entire blog post on the subject.

Thanks, Chris and ACD. Laurel leaves all around!

All week, I have been running through the strictures of standard manuscript format and some common deviations from it, to demonstrate just how clearly our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, discerns the differences. And let me tell you, at the end of a long day’s reading, they definitely jump out at her, and with good reason: once a professional reader gets used to seeing the similarities that pretty much all professional manuscripts share, submissions formatted in other ways might as well have UNPROFESSIONAL stamped on them in bright red ink.

And while Millicent may strive valiantly NOT to allow that impression to color her reading of the submission itself, it’s just not a good idea to assume that it won’t. She’s only human, after all.

It’s an even worse idea to assume a charitable reading for a contest entry, by the way. If anything, contest judges tend to be even more sensitive to the beauty of standard format than Millicent, for the simple reason that they’ve usually been reading a whole lot longer. The agency gig may well be Millie’s first job out of college, but the judge handed your entry may well have just retired from a long and fruitful career teaching English composition. Her fingers ache for the red pen of correction.

Then, too, most well-respected contests require some professional credentials from their judges, either as writers, editors, or teachers. Which means, in practice, that judges have often been writing in standard format themselves for years or bludgeoning other writers into compliance with its requirements.

To put it another way, other kinds of formatting won’t look right to them, either. By now, you’re probably having a similar reaction, aren’t you?

Don’t think so? Or don’t want to believe you could conceivably share any traits with Millicent? Let’s test the proposition by trying a little Aphra Behn on for size.

If you don’t know her work, you should, at least historically: as far as we know, she was the first woman paid for writing in English. (She’s also hilarious.) Here is a page from THE FAIR JILT (1688):

You could tell instantly that there was something wrong here, couldn’t you, and not just because Miranda’s trying to seduce her priest? (For convent, read monastery.) Set aside her practically Dickensian affection for semicolons for the moment — which would tend to turn off a modern Millicent pretty quickly — and try to tote up in your mind all of the deviations from standard format.

To refresh your memory and gladden your now-sharpened eyes, here’s what it should have looked like:

Got your list of problems in hand? Let’s take the problems on the first version from the top of the page: the incorrect version does not have a proper slug line. (For those of you joining us late, a slug line is AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/PAGE #, repeated on every page of the text.)

Seeing this lone page out of context, it’s quite obvious why a slug line is a dandy idea, isn’t it? Without a slug line, it would be virtually impossible to return this wandering page back into the manuscript from whence it came. “Who wrote this?” Millicent cries in ire, glaring around her cubicle at the 47 manuscripts lying there. “It could be from any of these!”

At least Ms. Behn thought to number the pages of Example #1 — but did you catch the problem with how she did it? The page number is in the bottom right-hand margin, not in the slug line, where it belongs.

Did you catch any other difficulties? What about the 10-point type, which will strain Millicent’s already overworked eyes? Or the Ariel typeface? There is nothing inherently wrong with either, but when she’s used to see practically every manuscript that heads out of the agency to publishing houses in 12-point Times New Roman, it (chant it with me here) just doesn’t look right.

Anything else? What about that right margins? Mighty straight, isn’t it? That look proper to you?

It’s called block-justification, and it’s another problem that can be laid squarely at the feet of those who insist that a manuscript and a published book should be identical. The text in many published books, and certainly in many magazines and newspapers, is spaced so that each line begins at exactly the same distance from the left-hand edge of the page and ends (unless it’s the last line of a paragraph) at exactly the same distance from the right-hand edge of the page.

Which, to let you in on why this type of neatness bugs professional readers, renders skimming quite a bit more difficult. Fewer landmarks, as it were; to the glancing eye, practically every line of narrative text resembles every other. To those of us used to the ragged right margins and even letter spacing of standard format, it’s actually kind of hard to read.

So there’s quite a bit in Example #1 that’s distracting, isn’t there? Doesn’t help sell the text, does it?

Okay, all of these rhetorical questions are beginning to make me dizzy, so I’m going to wind down for the day. But before I do, let’s take one more look at Example #2, the one Millicent and a contest judge would like:

Now, let’s take a gander at the same page in — ugh — business format:

Startlingly different, isn’t it, considering that I made only two formatting changes? (In case you missed one or the other, all I did was I eliminate the indentations at the beginning of each paragraph and skipped a line between paragraphs.) This, of course, is the norm for business correspondence, as well as for most of the text currently posted on the Internet.

Including this blog. As a professional writer and reader of manuscripts, it drives me NUTS that my blogging program won’t allow me to indent paragraphs.

Why? Because it just doesn’t look right. So much so that in a contest entry, business formatting is often grounds all by itself for knocking a manuscript out of finalist consideration.

Finding yourself asking why again? Well, to a professional reader, the differences between the last two examples would be more than visually jarring — they’d be downright confusing. In standard format, the only reason for a skipped line between paragraphs would be a section break, so Millicent would be expecting the second paragraph to be about something new.

Okay, so a misconception like that might distract her attention for only few consecutive seconds, but let’s not kid ourselves: Millicent is spending less than a minute on most of the submissions she rejects — it’s actually not all that uncommon for her not to make into the second or third paragraph before reaching for the SASE and a copy of that annoying form rejection letter.

Take a moment for the implications of that to sink in fully. Don’t worry; I’ll wait.

Time loss is not the only reason she might take umbrage at momentary confusion. Let me let you in on a little secret: professional readers, especially those who inhabit agencies and publishing houses, are not overly fond of having their mental image of the story they are reading at the moment jarred.

How do I know this? Well, for one thing, they commonly refer to it as being tricked. As in, “I hate being tricked by a first paragraph that is about someone other than the protagonist.”

There’s a practical basis to this dislike, of course, but it’s kind of complicated. I wrote a couple of fairly extensive posts on the subject last year (here’s a link to the first, and here’s a link to the second, in case you’re interested), but I’ll run over the thumbnail version now.

Comfortably seated?

To get through all of those manuscripts she’s assigned to screen each week, Millicent has to read quite quickly. If she decides to pass a manuscript on to the next level, she is going to need to be able to tell her boss what the book is about: who the protagonist is, what the conflict is, and why that conflict is important enough to the protagonist for the reader to be drawn into it.

Basically, she’s going to need to be able to pitch it to the higher-ups at the agency, just as the agent is going to have to do in order to sell the book to an editor, and an editor is going to have to do in order to convince HIS higher-ups that the publishing house should acquire the book. And, often, as first-round contest judges will need to do on an evaluation form in order to pass an entry onto the next round.

Okay, brace yourself, because explaining what comes next involves delving into one of the great cosmic mysteries. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Remember earlier in the week, when I mentioned that agents and editors don’t read like other people? Well, one of the primary differences is that from line one of page one, they’re already imagining how they’re going to pitch this book.

So if paragraph 2 or 3 (or page 2 or 3) suddenly informs them that their mental patter has been about the wrong character, they feel as if they’ve been backing the wrong horse.

And while there may have been any number of perfectly reasonable narrative reasons for the text to concentrate upon an alternate character for the opening, unless the writing AND the story have already really wowed Millicent, her resentment about being trickedwrong about the identity of the protagonist is often sufficient to make her reach for that SASE and form letter.

Feel free to go scream into a pillow over that last piece of logic; you don’t want to keep that kind of existential cri de coeur pent up inside. I’ll wait until it’s out of your system.

Feel better? Good.

Before you go rushing off to see if your opening paragraphs might possibly be open to an interpretation of trickery — because, for instance, you might have taken the bold authorial step of noticing that there is more than one human being in the world, and reported a piece of action accordingly — let’s return to the formatting issue that prompted my little segue into the psychology of resentment. Can we extrapolate any practical lesson about business format from it?

You bet your boots we can: it’s not a good idea to give the impression of a section break where there isn’t one.

There’s a lot more psychodrama than one might think involved with these formatting choices, isn’t there? I’ll wrap up this series next time, to spare us further emotional toll. Keep up the good work!

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

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

Hello again, campers –

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

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

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

So there.

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

By Millicent and her ilk, in any case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s “high school book report.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MINI/A FAMILY DARKLY/3

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

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

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

MINI/THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB/1

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

MONTENEGRO-COPPERFIELD/BUDDHA/1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny you should mention that, because…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - 7 Comments on Finding your voice, or, yet another post featuring a small, nagging bug

Finding your voice, or, yet another post featuring a small, nagging bug

I begin today with some terrific news about one of our own, FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) and fabulous writer Caleb Powell has just signed with agent Diane Nine of DC-based agency Nine Speakers, Inc.. Congratulations, Caleb!

Keep that good news rolling in, everybody — we all love hearing about it.

Despite being happy for Caleb, I’m feeling a bit stuffy-headed today, perhaps due to the fact that the great big crabapple tree in my backyard has suddenly burst into magnificent masses of pink blooms. Very beautiful, very pollen-laden.

It reminds me of the small town — a village, really, ensconced within an agricultural preserve — where I grew up, in the Napa Valley. (Note to those not from those parts: PLEASE don’t refer to the entire area as Napa; it makes the locals apoplectic. Napa is a well-developed city on the south end of the quite rural Napa Valley. If you’re thinking of vineyards, you actually mean the latter. Thank you.)

Tourists overrun the Napa Valley in the autumn, when the grapevines sport leaves ranging from bright green to mellow gold to sunburned red, but my favorite time there has always been the early spring, this time of year, when the vines are dormant and the vineyards are full of knee-high fluorescent yellow mustard flowers: acres and acres of neon brilliance.

The local truism runs that if you don’t suffer from pollen allergies during a Napa Valley spring, you never will. Because I am inherently contrary, I never suffered from pollen allergies while I was living there. Then, years later, I moved to Seattle, where the pollen apparently especially virulent.

A-choo.

I bring this up, not merely because my head is stuffy, but as an apt metaphor for today’s topic. Some weeks back, intrepid and curious reader Gordon wrote in to ask:

Anne – How do we tell if our voice is actually …our voice—? Is there an easy answer, or do we rely on our early reader to tell us? Or our editor?

Terrific question, Gordon, and one that is surprisingly rarely discussed at literary conferences or in writing classes. There’s a pretty good reason for this: while craft is general, voice is individual.

Which is, I must admit, why my first response to this question was, “God, no — by definition, the best arbiter for a truly original voice is its author.” Authorial voice can’t really be taught (although there are some writing teachers who would disagree with me on that point): typically, it arises organically, often after years of cultivation.

I already hear some disgruntled muttering out there. “Very pretty, Anne,” these mutterers say, “but we’re looking for practicality here, not philosophy. What precisely IS voice, and why should I worry about whether my work exhibits a unique one?”

For those of you who have heard it bruited about in literary circles but were afraid to ask for a definition, voice is that combination of tone, worldview, vocabulary, rhythm, and style that makes one author’s work differ from another’s, even if they are telling the same story.

It is, to put it as simply as possible, what makes YOUR work sound like YOU, and not like someone else.

In a book with a strong, well-developed voice, every paragraph — indeed, every sentence — will be in that voice, a phenomenon the pros call consistency. And that’s darned hard for a writer to pull off, particularly (as is often the case for those new to the craft) if the writer in question isn’t quite sure what his voice IS.

But think about it: as a reader, don’t you expect consistency of voice — and haven’t you ever read a book where the tone, vocabulary, and/or style abruptly altered so much that it jarred you out of the storyline?

Most readers dislike that feeling of being pulled out of the story, so industry pros tend to edit with an eye to removing it. The result: the authors we tend to love are those whose voices are so consistent that if we took a two-line excerpt from Chapter 2 and another from Chapter 8, we could tell that the same person wrote them.

“Golly,” say the former scoffers, “that sounds awfully important. Why doesn’t every writers’ conference devote huge amounts of time to helping aspiring writers seek out and develop theirs?”

Beats me — unless it’s because by definition, teaching a group means catering to commonalities; to help a writer develop his voice, an instructor would have to read enough of his work to figure out what he does better than any other writer on the planet, the literary acumen to weed out those elements that are borrowed from other authors’ styles (more common than you might think), and the time to encourage the writer, draft after draft, to cater to his own strengths.

Kind of a tough brief for a one-time two-hour seminar with twenty students, no?

To be fair to conference organizers, most submissions do fall under the weight of formatting, grammar, and clarity problems, not an inconsistency of voice, so it does make some sense to offer instruction on those issues first. And when a writer is still struggling to express herself clearly and in a way that will appeal to an established market, those are definitely the skills she should master first.

Or, to put it another way, if her manuscript is not in standard format, contains many grammatical errors, and is confusing to read, an agent or editor’s rending his garments and crying, “But the voice is not consistent!” is probably the least of her worries.

So, to reiterate Gordon’s question, how does a writer know when he’s found his voice? For starters, it’s extraordinarily rare that an author’s distinctive personal voice shows up in her first writing projects, except perhaps in flashes.

Why? Well, as much as we might like to think of ourselves as expressing ourselves as no one else does, doing so in writing is a rather difficult skill to master. Most writers begin by imitating the voices of authors they admire, so it’s not at all uncommon to see a manuscript scene that contains a patch that reads a bit of Annie Proulx, a terse dialogue reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, and a blistering line or two of Jay Mcinerney cynicism, all tied together by a few straightforward declarative sentences.

Tell me, out of all of those disparate elements, which part is the writer’s own voice?

Usually — and brace yourselves, because some of you may find this rather discouraging — a writer comes to recognize her own voice because over time, it becomes the most natural for her to use. Its consistency sits up and announces itself to be how she should be writing all the time.

Which means, Gordon, that I have quite an annoying answer to your excellent question: you may not know what your voice IS, but you will probably recognize it when you see it.

I know, I know; that sounds very woo-woo, but I swear that it’s true. For most good writers, one day, after seemingly endless writing, a personal voice abruptly emerges and takes over the narration, like all of those crabapple and mustard flowers bursting into bloom.

And the writer says, “Hey, I like that. I think I’m going to write like that all the time.”

To complicate matters, just as those early spring flowers make some people smile and others sneeze violently, a strong, original voice will not appeal to all readers, so not all published writing DOES exhibit an individual narrative voice. The more distinctive the voice, the greater the risk, in a way — it can irritate in a way that a merely clear, pleasant, generic voice may not.

And that, in case you were wondering, is one of the many reasons that journalists are trained to sound so much alike: they are urged to keep their individual voices out of the story, so as not to distract the reader.

The ambient mutters have been steadily growing to a near-roar. “Okay, now I’m REALLY confused,” I can hear some of you saying. “If I understand you correctly, it’s safer NOT to write in an individual voice, but if I want to be known for the beauty of my writing, I need not only to do just that, but to do it consistently throughout my manuscript.”

Nicely summarized, ghostly mutterers: it is a genuine paradox. It’s also a choice that every writer has to make for himself.

Feet continue to shuffle out there, and hips to shift uncomfortably on computer chairs. “What I’m really asking, I guess, is what separates a good voice from a bad voice. Or, to put it another way, how on earth can an agent, editor, or contest judge rate voice on anything but personal preference?”

Remember back in my Book Marketing 101 series, when I pointed out that, contrary to popular opinion amongst the aspiring, a writer shouldn’t want to sign with just ANY agent; she should aspire to signing with one who truly loves her work? This is precisely why — response to voice IS quite individual.

Is the common rejection line I just didn’t fall in love with it making a bit more sense now?

In order to represent you successfully, an agent needs not only to like your voice, but to be able to identify what is individual about it lucidly enough to be able to go to an editor and say truthfully, “Look, based on the books you have been buying lately, I think you are going to like this author’s voice, for these twelve reasons…”

Because a runny nose is apparently conducive to decoding cosmic mysteries, allow me to add: that’s why nonfiction is reputed to be easier to sell than fiction; fiction is inherently much more heavily reliant upon voice, right? Particularly literary fiction, where the freshness and strength of the voice is the book’s primary selling point.

And, let’s face it, no matter how strong a story is, few readers will finish a novel if they dislike the author’s voice. “I just couldn’t get into it,” they will say, setting it aside.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, is much more concerned with the interest of the subject matter, the slant of the approach, and — yes, I must say it — the credentials of the author. (Oh, stop your groaning — you didn’t honestly expect me to talk about selling NF {without} bringing up platform, did you?) While a strong voice may be an additional selling point, clarity is generally the main desiratum.

Unless, of course, it’s a memoir, where voice is nearly as important as in a novel.

Is your head spinning from all this? Not to worry; tomorrow, I shall discuss voice choices in greater detail.

For today’s purposes, it’s less important that you come away from this with a clear idea of the strategic uses of voice than to realize that you may well have more than one voice lurking inside you — and that before you can make it consistent throughout the narrative, you are going to want to give some thought to tailoring the one you choose to emphasize to the book project at hand.

“I’ve got just one more question,” the disgruntled mutterers who have been dogging me throughout this post are piping up to say. “Why did you decide to start talking about voice in what I sincerely hope is the middle, not the end, of a series on keeping our narratives moving?”

Because, my friends, there is more to revising a manuscript than deciding whether this sentence is necessary, that paragraph is clear, or a scene tells rather than shows. All of these are necessary, of course — but ideally, a revising writer should also be asking himself, “But does this part of the manuscript fit with the overall voice? Does it sound like ME?”

Just a small, noisy bug to stick in your ear while you’re reviewing your manuscript. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on The nuts and bolts of revision — and a long-time reader gets PUBLISHED!

The nuts and bolts of revision — and a long-time reader gets PUBLISHED!

Before we begin what I hope will be a rather lengthy and fruitful headlong dive into craft issues, may I have a drumroll, please? Long-time Author! Author! reader Arleen Williams’ memoir, The Thirty-Ninth Victim, has just been published by Blue Feather Press!

Congratulations, Arleen! Here’s the book’s official blurb:

The Green River murders were headline news throughout the 1980s. By the time the perpetrator was sentenced in 2003, at least 48 young women had met an untimely death at his hands. What started as as string of local killings in Seattle became a national nightmare before it was over. In homes all across America, television news programs and newspapers large and small carried feature stories about the ever-growing list of victims.

Now imagine that during this time, someone you love — your baby sister, a beautiful young woman of 19 –suddenly goes missing. The police are at best unhelpful, and at worst, seemingly uninterested in what’s happened to her. And then comes word you hoped you’d never receive: your youngest sister’s remains have been found. She is yet another victim of the Green River killer. With amazing candor, Arleen Williams tells the story of her family’s journey, before and after the Green River killer murdered her sister Maureen and left her body in a stretch of wilderness off the west side of Highway 18.

As insightful as it is heart-wrenching, The Thirty-Ninth Victim gives you a window into the family dynamics that contributed to this life-altering tragedy. This is a memoir unlike any other. The author set out to tell Maureen’s story, but in doing so, she tells bits and pieces of every family’s story. You cannot read this profoundly personal and cataclysmic tale and come away unchanged, nor will you ever view your own family in quite the same way. You will applaud Ms. Williams’s courage in sharing this recounting of her family’s trauma through one of the most atrocious streaks of serial killings in American history. And like the family, you will never forget The Thirty-Ninth Victim.

I’m always thrilled when one of our community makes the leap into print, but in this case, I’m particularly tickled. I read an early draft of Arleen’s memoir a couple of years ago — and even as recently as last week, driving past the lovely forested hills east of Seattle, where poor Maureen’s remains were discovered, I still got chills, remembering some of the scenes in this book about the intense fragility of human life and collective memory.

What struck me most about this memoir is that, unlike so many books about particularly horrific crimes, the victim here comes alive on the page. Not as yet another in an almost unimaginably long list of murdered women (so long, in fact, that it sparked the nationwide Take Back the Night rallies) or as merely an object to be acted upon with violence, but as a vibrant light suddenly snuffed. And as part of a family so deeply attached to its own self-image as normal that even a daughter’s disappearance is allowed to disrupt it.

Chilling stuff. And powerful.

So please join me in giving Arleen a great big round of applause for pushing an unusually brave piece of writing to publication. THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM is now available on Amazon or at a slightly lower price on Blue Feather’s website.

That was invigorating, wasn’t it? Makes you just long to chat about editing your own manuscript, eh?

No? Okay, let’s warm up first by talking about a controversial subject amongst manuscript editors: editing for style.

As a freelance editor, I can tell you: much of what an editor does is fairly straightforward; the average manuscript abounds in non-standard usage, grammar, and spelling that would not, to put it kindly, make the soul of Noah Webster sip his lemonade happily in literary heaven.

Any editor would make these kinds of changes in almost exactly the same way; these matters are relatively non-negotiable.

I’m talking about good editors, of course — not the ones who neither like prose nor know how to fix its problems. (Don’t even get me started about the ones who aren’t well enough read to be editing in the first place. Because I am a very tactful individual — no, really — I shall eschew mention of the not-very-experienced editor who, in handling a certain memoir at an imprint that shall remain nameless — even though it went out of business last year when its parent company was bought out by a larger concern — spied the name Aristotle in the text and scrawled “Who?” in the margin.)

Contrary to popular opinion, though, editing for style, in either someone else’s manuscript or one’s own, is significantly slipperier than the good-writing-is-good-writing aphorism-pushers would have you believe.

Why? Well, every editor — just like every writer, every agent, and every reader in North America — was taught something slightly different about what makes a paragraph well-written.

And not only do we all THINK we are right about our particular favorites — we all actually ARE right about it. Style is very much a matter of taste. Obviously, certain tastes prevail at any given time in any given genre, but that does not mean that every reader in the genre will like the same stylistic choice.

Do I hear some grumbling out there? “Wait just a gosh-darned minute,” I hear some of you cry, the ones who have taken a whole lot of writing classes, attended more than your share of writers’ conferences, or wrote your way through an MFA. “I’ve always been taught that good writing is good writing, period. My teacher/mentor/that guy who ostensibly had a background that justified his yammering at me for an hour at a literary conference told me that there’s actually not a whole lot of variation amongst different styles of good writing, just what each particular market will embrace. Good writing, I have always been given to understand, is good writing, across venues.”

Ah, that old bugbear — yes, grumbling readers, you are quite correct to point out that experts thither and yon are indeed prone to saying things like this. The mere ubiquity of a saying, however, is not necessarily proof of its truth.

If you doubt this, I sentence you to a couple of hours contemplating all of the disparate things, people, and concepts tagged with “That’s hot!” over the last couple of years.

This is one of those translation issues, yet another instance where industry truisms are subject to misinterpretation if one listens to the actual words being said. What publishing professionals actually mean when they say that good writing is good writing is twofold: every format demands CLEAR writing, and standard format is standard format across venues.

In that respect, yes, good writing is good writing: standard manuscript format demands specific structures, norms for spelling and grammar, preferred typefaces; clear writing that says what the writer wants it to say AND is easily comprehended by others on a first read.

Go back and read that last paragraph again, because it’s awfully important: these, dearly beloved, are the minimum standards for professional writing.

If a manuscript does not adhere to this standard, it will invariably have problems making its way through an agency, publishing house, literary contest, or good English program. Thus, mastering these basics is the necessary first condition to producing a marketable manuscript.

Period, unless you are a celebrity on some other basis. And even then, chances are good that your publishing house will assign you a ghost who is VERY proficient in the basics.

Why am I bringing up this distinction at the beginning of a series on self-editing your work, you ask? Because unless a manuscript is clearly-written, perfectly formatted, and free of technical problems, revising for style is not going to render it publishable.

Want some time to go back and read that last sentence again? Go ahead; I’ll wait.

As a professional book doctor, I would STRONGLY recommend that any aspiring writer contemplating large-scale revisions perform a basic-level clarity-and-grammar editorial sweep through the manuscript FIRST.

Yes, I’m fully aware that this level of revision will be no fun whatsoever. Do it anyway, not only because it needs to be done if you ever intend to sell the book in question, but also because cleaning up the non-negotiable points will clear the decks for higher level revisions.

THEN you can begin to think about style.

And promptly fall into a quagmire, at least if you happen to be a person who likes to follow the current trends of writing advice.

What constitutes good style is quite subjective. This is why, in case you were curious, you can walk virtually into any good writing program and hear at least a couple of people arguing over whether good writing can be taught.

Writers quibble a lot amongst themselves over this. I have always thought that this question was formulated incorrectly: it really should be whether style can be taught, or whether talent can be learned.

Certainly, the mechanics and forms of the base level of good writing can be taught, or at any rate learned: it is hard to imagine someone absolutely new to the craft spontaneously electing to set up a manuscript in accordance with standard format. Its strictures are rather counter-intuitive, aren’t they, to those of us who read published books from time to time? And any good listener willing to take critique can learn to be, if not a clear writer, at least a clearer writer.

Which brings us right back to the good old basics.

While the basic level of good writing may not seem particularly ambitious — not worth, say, the years of alternated stomach-churning submission stress and nail-biting waiting to bring to publication — it is a truism of the industry that the VAST majority of submissions agencies and publishing houses receive do not rise even to this level.

Again, you might want to take a second gander at that last sentence.

I cannot stress this enough: no amount of personal flair or innovative insight will permit a technically problematic manuscript to clear the minimum standards hurdle. Agency screening guidelines, contest judging rules, and editorial expectations are almost invariably set up to prevent it.

That massive moan you just heard, new readers, the sound so like all of the banshees of the world complaining about their respective stomach aches, was my long-time readership anticipating my dragging them yet again through the logic behind standard manuscript format.

Actually, I’m going to spare you that march through grimness for the time being (but if you have even the smallest doubt on the subject, please run, don’t walk, to the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS category in the list at right). For now, suffice it to say that I tend to harp on the basics because, frankly, the basics, not matters of style, are where most manuscripts meet their Waterloos.

This was not always true. In the not-so-distant past, when agents were not required equipment for fiction and editors were able to spend more of their time on editing and less on acquisition, it was not uncommon for the Writer With Promise’s first work to be taken on, with the intention that over time, the editor would work with the author to help that promise ripen into something beautiful.

These days, however, agents and editors both see enough technically perfect manuscripts in their submission piles that the decision to reject the technically imperfect ones is considered a no-brainer. Today’s Writer With Promise, then, needs to be producing impeccable basics before s/he can get a serious read for style.

Hmm, where have I heard that before?

I wish this were more widely known, or at any rate that if agents and editors MUST use form letters, they would have a version that reads, “Your style is promising, but unfortunately, this manuscript has too many technical errors for us to be able to consider it as is. Please consider getting a whole lot of good feedback or taking a professional formatting class, revising it, and sending it to us again.”

But that’s not writers are told, is it? No, we hear “this manuscript does not meet our needs at this time,” or “I just didn’t fall in love with it enough to take it on.”

Leaving many an aspiring writer to wonder: what do these generic phrases mean with respect to MY manuscript? Was it rejected because it had typos, due to running afoul of a common agency screeners’ pet peeve, or because Millicent the screener did not like the style?

Left with this kind of ambiguity, the average writer will almost invariably conclude that the problem was stylistic. Yet until she has done a basic clarity/format/grammar edit, how can she be sure?

More to the point, how can she possibly even begin to guess what she should change in order to make her work more marketable?

In practice, she typically can’t: most writers will just send out the same manuscript every time an agent or editor requests it. Or, if it gets rejected several times, they might tweak their submissions stylistically and send it out again, without correcting the technical problems that got them rejected in the first place.

Anyone but me sensing a vicious cycle here?

Here is my hope for all writers: if we are going to be rejected, let it be because an agent, editor, or browser in a bookshop legitimately doesn’t like our style. Not because the margins are the wrong size, or we’ve used a bizarre typeface, or we really didn’t understand how a NF book proposal should be put together, but because each of our voices is so strong that it comes down to whether the individual reader LIKES it or not.

Because at that point, my friends, we will all be marketing our work like professionals, building our individual stylistic choices upon a firm foundation of clarity, literacy, and a thorough understanding of how the industry works.

Don’t make me take that metaphor any further. I’m fully capable of constructing that metaphorical house right up to the rafters.

All of which was a lengthy preamble for this: starting tomorrow, I’m going to start talking about how to diagnose and make stylistic changes to your manuscript. Throughout, I shall be focusing mostly upon novels, but much of the techniques will be applicable to creative nonfiction and memoir as well.

But fair warning: I shall be operating on the assumption that the manuscript you are looking to revise is already crystal-clear, perfectly formatted, and free of technical errors — because if you want to make a living as a writer, you need to begin thinking of that level of polish as the BEGINNING of the revision process, not its end.

Yeah, I know: I have high standards for your work. Aren’t your ideas worth it? Believe me, on this point, I am cruel only to be kind; I would much, much rather be announcing the publication of your first book than consoling you after a rejection.

I’m funny that way.

Congratulations again, Arleen, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 12 Comments on Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: is that a dagger I see before me?

Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: is that a dagger I see before me?

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Welcome back to Part II of my series of tips on how to accept feedback with a minimum of angst, mutually hurt feelings, and/or swordplay. Since we have a lot to cover today, let’s rush right into reviewing our tools so far for dealing with written manuscript critique:

1. Don’t argue about the feedback with the feedback-giver.

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

5. Don’t use an industry professional as the first — or only — reader of your manuscript.

Oh, look — here’s a corollary to #5:

6. Don’t expect your readers to drop everything to read your manuscript. Especially if they happen to work in or with the publishing industry.

To put it another way, just because an agent, editor, or friend expresses an interest in reading your book does NOT imply either that (a) s/he has nothing else to do but sit around until you cough up the manuscript OR (b) s/he is planning to drop everything else s/he currently has on her plate in order to read it from beginning to end the nanosecond it arrives in the mail.

But try explaining that to an aspiring writer who has just received such a request from a pro for the first time.

Because this is such a common set of misconceptions, those of us in the biz see them manifest in quite a variety of ways. Let’s see if we can’t unearth another examplar or two to show how:

Written feedback meltdown #4: Tatiana’s agent, Ulrich, pitched her novel, PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOW! to editor Vivienne in last November — and now, at the end of March, Vivienne still hasn’t yet vouchsafed an opinion on it.

Tatiana is going nuts with anticipation. She wants to be a good client, yet she can’t resist sending Ulrich e-mails every few days, asking if there’s been any word yet.

No? How about now? Or…now?

He answers every third tersely: “What makes you think that I would keep that kind of news from you?”

She knows that he has a point, of course. She tries to restrain her anxiety, but she’s a novelist, after all — she’s an inveterate situation-dissector. Her brain is hard-wired to make up motivations.

So on Monday, she attributes the delay to Vivienne’s difficulties in gathering an editorial committee so close to Easter; on Wednesday, she is depressed into a stupor because she’s convinced that Vivienne has passed on the book, and Ulrich just doesn’t know how to break the news to her; by Saturday, she’s frantically re-editing the manuscript, absolutely certain that Vivienne has spent the last three months unable to make it past the first page.

Long-time readers, would you care to guess where that’s manuscript actually been for most of the intervening period?

That’s right: under three other manuscripts-to-be-read on Vivienne’s coffee table, competing for her time and attention with the editor’s significant other, work, meetings, her sister’s impending wedding (not another puce bridesmaid’s dress!), desire to make it to the gym occasionally, desire to sleep occasionally, the ambient noise of New York, and any TV show she might happen to watch on a regular basis.

None of which have anything whatsoever to do with Tatiana or her book, of course.But in the throes of worried speculation, the author simply cannot see that. Maybe if she tweaks that dodgy section in Chapter 10 one more time, something good will happen.

This is what we literary types like to call magical thinking.

Those of us who know and love Tatiana send our best wishes her way, along with sincere hopes that Vivienne will get around to reading that manuscript before the author starts sleepwalking, muttering that all the perfumes of Arabia won’t sweeten that little hand of hers.

That’s right: Lady Macbeth went nuts because she was an aspiring writer waiting for professional feedback.

(Think about it — it’s not as though the play gives a really convincing alternate explanation for why she cracks at that particular moment. And if you think turn-around times are slow today, what must they have been in the 11th century, when rejection letters would have been traveling on horseback — or, for an editor really in a hurry, via the local witch’s broomstick? )

Not seeing the moral? (Other than DON’T MURDER YOUR DINNER GUESTS, that is.) Let’s try another.

Written feedback meltdown #5: after many months of querying, Xerxes is elated to receive a request from agent Yarrow to submit the first 50 pages of his memoir, AND THEY SAID I WAS WASHED UP IN 480 BC: RECOLLECTIONS OF A COMEBACK KID.

Like so many frustrated aspiring writers, he interprets this request as an implied command to throw work, sleep, relations with loved ones, flogging the slaves, and personal hygiene to the winds until those pages are safely in the hands of the fine folks at FedEx.

Hey, those slaves aren’t gonna flog themselves.

Do I see some of this blog’s long-time readers with their hands raised, jumping up and down to capture my attention? “Wait just a Babylon-invading minute!” I hear these sharp-eyed protesters roar. “Did Yarrow ASK him to overnight his submission? If not, didn’t Xerxes just waste a fair amount of money?”

Well caught, readers: take a hoplite or two out of petty cash.

(Okay, I’ll admit that the jokes in this post are starting to get just a tad esoteric. Trust me, readers of Thucydides would have found that last one a real thigh-slapper.)

You’re quite right, in any case: there is absolutely no reason to shell out the dosh for overnight shipping for a submission. But hey, this was the guy who had his troops beat up the Hellespont when his bridge across it collapsed during a storm.

A bridge made of flax and papyrus; our pal Xerxes isn’t exactly the king of reasonable.

Having sent off his pages with the greatest possible swiftness, Xerxes naturally takes a week off work to rotate nervously between checking his e-mail every ten minutes, pacing outside to examine the contents of his mailbox every half-hour, and picking up his telephone receiver to make sure there’s still a dial tone every time the second hand clicks.

Yet amazingly, Yarrow does not get back to him before he runs out of vacation days. (Being king of Persia carries fewer fringe benefits these days than in ancient times. Back then, he would have had time to take a vacation long enough to discover the New World twice, if he’d wanted.)

By the time she asks to see the rest of the manuscript a month later, Xerxes has become a mere shadow of his former self: listless with chronic lack of sleep, he’s even too tired to rends the papyrus of his next book into 50,000 pieces and feed it to the palace dogs himself; he has the army do it.

But when an agent asks to see pages, pages be sent, right? So he gulps down a few handfuls of vitamin capsules, puts his entire scribe brigade on round-the-clock inking duty, and is able to send out the entire work in record time.

Once again, the wait is long, at least as far as Xerxes is concerned. “Criminy,” he grumbles. “Conquering Babylon took less time. How is she reading it, three words per day and six on Sundays?”

His patience pays off, Baal be thanked: Yarrow asks to represent him!

After the agency contract is signed, Yarrow tells her new client that she has a few pages’ worth of small tweaks that she would like him to make in his manuscript. “Nothing major,” she assures him on the phone. “Shouldn’t take you long at all.”

Exhausted by his extended vigil, yet eager to get his book into print, Xerxes rushes to his e-mail, rapping his fingertips nervously on his desk until Yarrow’s list of revisions arrives. He opens it — and ye gods, it must have a hundred points!

Overwhelmed, he begins to bash his head rhythmically upon his gold-encrusted desk, bringing his retainers running. How can he possibly do it all?

Catching my drift here? No? Okay, let’s try again:

Written feedback meltdown #6: Zelda has written what she modestly believes and hopes is the best novel in human history, MY HEART ON A PLATE. While not at all autobiographical, she assures every agent she queries, it is the story of a woman who went to her alma mater, holds her current day job, and was apparently married to her first husband.

The schmuck.

After much querying, leads to a handful of requests for pages and no offers of representation, she realizes that she is no closer to her goal of publication than she was at the beginning of her queryfest, for the simple reason that no one she has approached has actually told her anything about her book.

Other than, “We’re sorry, but it doesn’t meet our needs at this time.”

Perplexed, she begins reading every how-to book she can find on the writing life, only to find that most of their advice is of the pep talk variety; it’s not telling her why HER book isn’t getting published. But she does the suggested breathing exercises, makes a voodoo doll of herself and places it strategically within a carefully-arranged diarama depicting a packed book reading, and sacrifices a goat or two to the Muses.

As she’s been told many successful authors do.

She begins haunting writers’ conferences and surfing the net, looking for better answers. One day, she stumbles across a blog where a freelance editor was threatening to chain herself to a rock and expose herself to sea serpents unless all of her readers agreed to get some feedback on their manuscripts before shipping them off to agents and editors.

“Eureka!” Zelda cries, digging around in that nifty tote bag she got in return for her $500 literary contest registration fee. Surely, she jotted down contact information for a few of the nicer writers she met there.

She e-mails the one she liked best, Zippy (I don’t have the energy to go through the alphabet again, people; sorry), asking if he would like to exchange manuscripts.

Zippy responds that he would indeed like that very much, but he is about a month away from polishing off the latest draft of his novel, NOT AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY EITHER, REALLY, the tender story of an accountant striving to be a novelist.

“But I’ll have quite a bit more time on my hands after tax season,” he assures her.

Delighted, Zelda immediately e-mails her entire book to her new friend — and is nonplused when Zippy writes back a few days later to suggest that they exchange physical manuscripts, for ease of reading, rather than each expecting the other to print up 700 pages or so.

Shaking her head at his unreasonableness — he sounds just like her ex, Xerxes — Zelda digs up her last rejected copy and hands it over.

A month passes with no more word than a quick note from Zippy saying that his revision is taking a bit longer than he’d anticipated. “Turns out taxes are due in April,” he informs her cheerfully. “Who knew?”

No matter, Zelda thinks: a slow read means more thoughtful feedback, right?

Another month goes by, however, and Zippy is still not ready to exchange: last week’s horoscope told him that he was too stressed out, so he took a much-needed break from revision to take up curling. “But I am reading yours,” he writes apologetically between slides across the ice. “I’m enjoying it very much.”

Zippy has an unexpected crisis at work — his client Tatiana is being audited — pushing back his projected completion date still further. By this time, Zelda has gnawedher fingernails down to the quick: she really needs this feedback.

Still, she knows that he’s doing her a favor, one that he hasn’t yet made it possible for her to return, and tries to be patient. Is it possible, she wonders, that he isn’t aware that she can’t query again until she’s weeded out any problems with her work?

Yes, long-time readers, I saw your hands shooting into the air: Zelda SHOULD have kept querying all throughout this process. She also should have found more than one first reader, made sure that he had time to give her feedback, and made specific requests about how she would like to receive it and when.

But then, she hasn’t had the advantage of having read the posts in my GETTING GOOD FEEDBACK series (conveniently available in the category list at right, Zelda), and you have.

At three and a half months, she writes and asks Zippy to lunch the following Saturday. “Maybe,” she suggests brightly, “we could talk about my novel?”

“Don’t have time,” he writes back. “Sea monsters have just carried off my favorite writing blogger.”

Losing her temper completely, Zelda sends him a lengthy, tear-stained explanation about why she had sought out feedback in the first place. “If you hate it,” she concludes, “or if you never intend to finish reading it, just tell me so. It’s kinder than toying with my feelings. My God, it’s been like Acts II-IV of Macbeth — all I’ve been able to do is wait!”

Contrary to what some of you cynics out there may have concluded, Zippy actually HAS read her novel; he genuinely is extremely busy. (Sea monsters can’t be relied upon to hack off their own heads, obviously.) So he tosses together a few supportive-sounding paragraphs saying how much he liked the book and sends them to her.

Delighted to have critique in hand at last, Zelda opens it — only to find that he has not given her ANY specific suggestions about how to improve her manuscript, only some vague statements about liking this character, not liking that plot point, and so forth. Her howls make all the cats of the neighborhood rush for cover.

Clearer now? Yes, each of today’s exemplars stumbled in several ways (heaven forefend that I should ever provide an illustration of only a single point) in facing genuinely frustrating situations over which they had virtually no control.

But Tatiana, Xerxes, and Zelda greatly exacerbated their own suffering by walking in with unrealistic expectations about when others would read their work. (And, in Zelda’s case, not setting up sensible ground rules for exchange before anyone so much as thought about budging a manuscript.)

As I MAY have mentioned seventy or eighty times before, agents and editors are REALLY busy people. If you imagined most of them buried up to their delicate necks in paper, you wouldn’t be far off about how much they have to read.

Yet most writers expect to hear back more or less instantaneously — and if they don’t, come up with all kinds of explanations except for the single most likely one: the agent or editor hasn’t had time to read it yet.

Why do unrealistic timing expectations make incorporating feedback harder when it actually does come? Because the writer has already expended so much vital energy in fretting over the differential between how quickly she wanted to hear back and when she did, energy that would have been much better spent, say, drafting the first chapter of her next book.

You can’t fool me about why Lady Macbeth went mad, Bill Shakespeare: you didn’t give her anything to do after Act I but wait around for her husband to slaughter half of Scotland. A long wait is an open invitation for an imaginative mind to prey upon itself. No wonder she started strolling the battlements at midnight, moaning.

Of course, she shouldn’t have told her husband to kill the king, either, but hey, no one’s perfect.

Since you’ve all been so very good, we’re going to take a break from this series tomorrow for a post on something completely different — and trust me, it will be a treat. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: looking both ways before you cross the street

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Throughout this week, I have been talking about strategies to help a writer accept written feedback — you know, the kind that editors scrawl in margins after they have acquired your manuscript — with aplomb, professionalism, and a minimum of self-destructive blood-letting. Or at the very least to discourage writers from applying the leeches of self-torture to themselves with too liberal a hand.

Yes, I’m perfectly aware that’s a disturbing image. After one has spent years holding writers’ hands through crises of literary faith, one’s standards of disturbing rise considerably. And it’s not as though I posted a photo of a leech, right?

While having one’s baby subjected to ruthless examination in the name of improving it is undoubtedly a rather traumatic experience (many authors never really get used to it), developing good listening, consideration, and response skills can render the process substantially less painful.

Experience, of course, is how most professional writers become acclimated to dealing with the take-no-prisoners clarity of professional critique. However, as I’ve been arguing for the past couple of weeks, a writer’s usually better off not waiting until after selling that first book or even signing an agency contract before beginning the toughening-up process.

Today’s paradoxical truism-of-the-trade: the more sensitive a talented writer is to critique, the earlier in her writing life she should start to seek it out.

Before I launch into elaboration upon that rather cryptic statement, let’s revisit the strategies we’ve discussed so far:

1. Don’t argue about the feedback with the feedback-giver.

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Give a shout if any of those are still puzzling you, please. In the absence of anguished bellowing from my readership, I’m going to move on.

5. Don’t use an industry professional as the first reader of your manuscript. Get other feedback first.

Seems like a strange thing for a freelance editor to say, doesn’t it? Yet the more time I put in as a book doctor, the more I’m convinced that this is a good idea.

The vast majority of aspiring writers do not agree with me, however — or so I surmise from the astonishing high percentage of manuscripts that are apparently blithely sent off to agents and editors without any human eyes save those belonging to the writer having scanned them.

Heck, in submissions with many typos, a professional reader is sometimes tempted to wonder if even the {writer’s eyes} wandered over it between the moments of composition and submission.

It’s appealing on a fantasy level, isn’t it? A writer works in secret for years on end, polishing a manuscript to the nth degree of perfection whilst his obtuse coworkers, ungrateful friends, and/or monstrous family meander through their lives, unaware that they are under the merciless scrutiny of an author extraordinaire.

The writer sends off queries and submission in secret, mentioning his ambition to no one (because, naturally, NO ONE UNDERSTANDS HIM) until the happy day when he can burst into his workplace/favorite bar/dysfunctional home, book contract in hand, and announce, “Hey, bozos, you’ve underestimated me for all these years!”

Whereupon everyone who has ever been mean to him promptly shouts, “Touché, Frederick. Guess I’ve been wrong about you all along. Let me spend the rest of our collective lives making it up to you.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I’ve sold two books and published many shorter pieces without inducing any ex-friends, ex-lovers, and enemies (to lift a line from the great Joe Jackson) to tumble out of the woodwork and apologize for their general schmuckery.

Try as I might, I have never been able to negotiate that particular stipulation into my publishing contracts.

In practice, not showing one’s work to people one knows prior to submission to judgmental total strangers such as agents and editors generally results in bad news for the writer, even when the response is good, by professional standards: if the manuscript is rejected, the writer doesn’t have a context in which to understand why, and if it is accepted, the writer suddenly finds herself on the receiving end of a whole lot of quite blunt professional feedback.

Hard to wrap your brain around, isn’t it? In this biz, it’s the really good work that’s singled out for critique.

Elementary school certainly did nothing to prepare any of us for that eventuality.

To tell you the truth, I’ve always thought that the no-win situation faced by writers who eschew pre-submission feedback was a pretty disproportionate punishment for being shy — the most popular reason for not hitting up all and sundry for manuscript evaluation. After all, few, if any, agencies post advice on their websites about the desirability of seeking out non-threatening first readers. How on earth is the writer new to the biz supposed to find out?

In a word: experience.

Personally, I suspect a whole lot of human misery could be avoided if those of us farther along in the process sat aspiring writers down and leveled with them — on a blog, for instance. In that spirit, I’m going to share just a scant handful of the bushel of very, very good reasons NOT to make a pro your first reader:

a) It doesn’t give the writer a chance to learn about unspotted writing or formatting problems before an agent or editor sees it.

b) Since form-letter rejections are now the norm, submission only to agencies is unlikely to yield feedback that will enable the writer to improve subsequent drafts of the manuscript.

c) It encourages the writer to begin to regard professional acceptance as the single standard of quality, ignoring the fact that the literary market is notoriously mercurial, seeking out very different kinds of books at different times.

This is not a complete list, of course — I brought this up at greater length and in exhaustive detail a few months back, in my GETTING GOOD FEEDBACK series (see category at right, if you missed it). My goodness, though, those three are enough, aren’t they?

“But Anne,” I hear some of you call out, and not unreasonably, “why tell us this in the context of a discussion about taking written feedback well?”

Prompt jumping on that cue, faceless chimers-in; your check is in the mail. For yet another reason plucked from the aforementioned bushel:

(d) When the writer receives her first professional feedback, she’s too likely to treat every syllable of it as Gospel. Even if that feedback is merely a form-letter response to a query letter.

The most common result: the writer feels crushed.

That’s because she’s set herself up. Deciding in advance that any single sentient being — be it agent, editor, best friend, mother, or Creature from the Black Lagoon — is going to be the sole arbiter of whether her work is any good places far, far too much power in that person’s hands. It can elevate what is in fact a personal opinion (which any rejection is, ultimately) into a final referendum upon whether the submitter should be writing at all.

If the writer-designated deity du jour happens to be the editor handling the manuscript or the editor who acquires it, the results can be even more ego-devastating. Suddenly, the affirmation of talent implied in the agency or publication contract seems to fade in the face of the first critique the manuscript has ever faced.

In that moment, how prepared would you expect that author to be to listen critically to feedback? Or to evaluate its usefulness?

Uh-huh. And yet that author would never DREAM of crossing a busy street without first checking both ways to see if there are any vehicles about to barrel down upon her.

Don’t get caught in that trap, I implore you. Get enough pre-submission feedback to have some sense of your manuscript’s strengths and weaknesses before you submit it to the tender mercies of the pros.

Whew, that was a dense one, wasn’t it? Don’t worry; I’ll select tomorrow’s with an eye to making it easier to swallow. And if you’re very good indeed, on Sunday, I’ll give you a special reward for virtue in working through this difficult series.

No, no hints: it’s a surprise, I tell you, a lulu. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

(PS: the original of today’s image appears courtesy of the fine folks at FreeFoto.com.)

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Becoming a good acceptor of feedback: hello? Hel-lo?

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Sometimes, the universe just rushes to provide material for this blog. Who am I to stop the flow?

After yesterday’s impassioned (but unillustrated by examples) argument against giving in to the urge to argue with someone who has just given you a slew of written feedback on your manuscript, I received a telemarketing call from PRECISELY the type of knee-jerk disputer I’d been talking about, the sort who acts as though a kindly-put no is tantamount to a yes.

Or, at the very least, that it’s an indicator that the person saying no couldn’t possibly be qualified to express an opinion on the subject.

To add SOME enjoyment to what was actually rather an unpleasant exchange, I’ve spiced up the dialogue a little — because, as long-time readers of this blog know, dialogue lifted directly from real life tends to come across as deadly dull, vague, and prolix on the page. I’ve also changed various names, to protect the guilty. (They already know who they are, after all.)

(Phone rings upstage left. Seated at her desk deleting the day’s crop of 250 spam would-be comments on her blog, ANNE tries to ignore it. As it keeps ringing insistently, she trips over three cats, several stacks of unbound manuscripts waiting to be read, and a small mountain of as-yet-to-be-recycled junk mail to answer it.)

ANNE (breathlessly): Hello?

BOB (in the tone one typically uses for chats amongst intimate friends): Hi. Is George there?

ANNE: No, I’m afraid he’s at work. May I take a message?

BOB: You must be his wife.

ANNE (considering then discounting the possibility that this is an old friend of George’s who has somehow missed all news of him over the past 14 years): I mustn’t, actually.

BOB (talking over her): I’ve got a great deal on heating vents for the two of you. Why don’t I swing by and…

ANNE: Why are you talking in such a familiar tone, when it’s perfectly obvious this is a telemarketing call? Please take us off your…

BOB (feigning surprise marginally well): But you’re on my list.

ANNE: The only list we’re on is the National Do Not Call Registry.

BOB: That’s impossible.

ANNE: I can report your company for calling us.

BOB: We vet our lists against theirs. Your husband must have…

ANNE: Are you seriously suggesting that George snuck behind my back and removed our number from the National Do Not Call Registry?

BOB: He might have called us for information about heating vents.

ANNE: I can assure you that he’s not interested. Nor am I. Go away.

BOB: I’ll call back later; he might get mad if we take him off our list.

ANNE: Break up many relationships with that line?

BOB (evidently taking this as encouragement): If you’ll just let me send him some information…

PHONE: Click. Buzz.

(Curtain.)

Some of you recognize Bob in his writerly form from conferences, critique groups, and pretty much everywhere else writers gather, right? He’s easy to spot in the wild: his constant cry is, “Oh, they just don’t understand my work.” It’s invariably the same excuse, whether they refers to other group members, agents who have rejected him, or editors who spurn his agent’s advances.

Rather than, say, “Oh, maybe I should check my work for typos or continuity problems before showing it to other people” or “You know, my agent may have a point there.”

As I mentioned yesterday, unfortunately for the collective reputation of writers everywhere, the Bobs of the literary world are also the ones who respond to form rejection letters with phone calls and e-mails to agents, explaining PRECISELY why the agency was wrong to reject their work.

Which, in case you’re pondering adopting it as a means of winning friends, influencing people, and/or selling heating vents, has never, ever worked. Unless, of course, Bob’s true goal is to give the target of the argument yet another anecdote about someone who just wouldn’t take no for an answer.

In which case, I must say he’s succeeding brilliantly.

Yes, an aspiring writer DOES need to be persistent — but in a strategic manner, in ways that don’t result in slamming doors through which a writer might want to slip someday.

Remember, when a writer approaches an agent or editor, she’s not merely offering a book — she’s offering herself as the author of it. Since it’s practically unheard-of for a manuscript to undergo NO revisions between first submission to final publication, both agents and editors are going to expect an author — ANY author, even Bob — to be able to incorporate their feedback quickly, creatively, and with a minimum of drama.

In that spirit, let’s recap yesterday’s first couple of suggestions on how to respond to written feedback gracefully:

1. Don’t argue

2. Read, reread — and get a second opinion.

Got those firmly ensconced in your brain, because you are better, more talented, and smarter in every way than Bob? Good. Let’s move on.

3. Don’t decide right away how you’re going to handle the critique — or how you’re going to apply its suggestions to your work.

In a way, this is the first cousin to #2: as I argued yesterday, the first flush of shocked emotion is not particularly conducive to long-term planning. All too often, normally perfectly reasonable writers will overreact in the heat of the moment, lashing back at the critiquer. (Which, as we have seen throughout this series, can have some pretty unpleasant consequences for everyone concerned.)

Others will rush to embrace the opposite extreme, deciding in a flash that such a barrage of feedback must mean that the book is not salvageable. Into the trash it goes, if not actually out the window.

Neither course is likely to do either your writing career or the manuscript any good. In the cooler light of subsequent reflection, it’s a heck of a lot easier to see that.

I know, I know — when the adrenaline is flowing fast, every fiber of your being wants to spring into action right away. But revision is a painstaking process; you’re going to need a carefully thought-out plan. That’s going to take some time and mature reflection to produce.

Give yourself permission to stew for a while — privately, where no one even vaguely affiliated with the publication of your book can see or hear you. Get all of that resentment out of your system. Journal. Join a kickboxing class. Frighten the pigeons in the nearest park with your guttural roars.

THEN, when your blood pressure is once again low and your hopes high, go back to the project. You may be surprised at just how much more reasonable that page of critique has become in the interim.

4. Remember that you and the critiquer are on the same side.

Hoo boy, do a lot of writers seem to find this hard to remember immediately after receiving feedback! To hear ‘em talk about (or heaven help us, to) the folks who wrote up that editorial memo, agent’s critique, freelance editorial report, etc., you’d think that expressing opinions about how to improve a manuscript and/or render it more marketable was an act of outright aggression.

But think about it: these people aren’t the enemy; it just feels that way in the moment. In fact, in the vast majority of instances, they’re trying to HELP the writer.

Okay, to the Bobs of this world, it can feel like a sneak attack by an enemy pretty much all the time, as well as for the hypersensitive. To the fellow who won’t hear no, anything but an instantaneous and unqualified YES represents a barrier to be overcome through persistence; for those who have trouble differentiating between their egos and their manuscripts — a very, very common conflation — every rejection, however minor, feels like a referendum upon their very worth as human beings.

I want to talk to the vast majority of writers who fall into neither camp — or who at least pay only short visits to either extreme.

Listen: professional readers are trained not to mince words — as those of you who have queried or submitted may have noticed, rejection letters are TERSE, typically. So is most professional feedback — so much so, in fact, that agents and editors tend not to give any feedback at all unless they think the submission is pretty good.

So when a pro takes the time and trouble to give substantive feedback on a manuscript, as opposed to a form-letter rejection, it’s almost always in the hope of assisting its writer to improve it. That’s almost always the ostensible goal of critique groups as well, and even of those generous first readers who take the time to read your works-in-progress.

When a writer responds to such efforts as though any desire to change the book must stem from an unadmitted and nefarious source — jealousy of talent is a popular choice in such accusations, as is lack of familiarity with what makes literature readable and just plain shallowness — the kindly-motivated feedback-giver feels burned.

Unfortunately for us all, it typically doesn’t take all that many outraged reactions before a feedback-giver starts to feel that it’s not worth it. Why expend the energy, she thinks, to try to help someone who blames the messenger?

Multiply that burned feeling by tens of thousands, and you can start to understand why most agencies choose not to give individualized feedback in rejection letters.

I can hear the better-behaved among you getting restless. “But Anne,” these models of propriety cry, “I am nothing but restrained in my dealings with professional readers. I treat them with respect: I approach them as they wish to be approached, wait patiently for them to read my work, and don’t lash out at them when they reject me. So why treat ME as though I’m as volatile as folks you’ve described?”

Good point, angelic ones. One simple reason: time.

Yes, it would be dandy if they could respond to each and every query as if no angry writer had ever sent them a flame-mail response to a rejection letter. But — and I think it’s been a while since I’ve pointed this out — the average agency receives upwards of 800 queries a week. Plowing through them all is very time-consuming…and form rejection letters save valuable minutes in fresh composition.

Open SASE, slip in pre-prepared photocopy, and whoosh — the response is on its way back to the writer.

In a way, obviously pre-packaged form rejections are kinder to writers than the same boilerplate pasted into return e-mails — since rejections tend to be so short, it’s tempting for the writer to conclude that those words AREN’T what that particular agency sends to everyone. It almost always is — why, from an agency screener’s point of view, should they expend the time personalizing each? — but every agent in the biz has received flame-mail from outraged Bobs who want to know EXACTLY how that generic critique applies to THEIR queries or submissions.

Which brings me to to the reason OTHER than time-savings that agencies are so fond of form-letter rejections. As annoying as those blandly identical form letters are to their recipients, the very fact that they are generic means — or so the logic goes — that they are less likely to provoke an angry response than a letter geared more to actual problems in the query or submission.

Okay, they’re less likely to provoke an angry response that makes it all the way back to the agency. As most of us know from personal experience, they cause plenty of storms in writers’ living rooms across the world.

Which sets up something of a vicious circle, doesn’t it? A few hotheaded writers excoriate their rejecters, causing the denizens of agencies to fear writerly backlash — so they produce maddening generic rejections that, over time, have led many aspiring writers to conclude that the industry is hostile to new talent. Every so often, some frustrated soul just can’t take it anymore — and shoots off a missive that confirms every fear the agency workers had about writerly response to rejection.

Let’s agree here and now that we here at Author! Author! are going to do our part to try to stop that unproductive and soul-curdling cycle. Let’s commit to being the writers that agents dream about representing, the ones who can and do take feedback professionally, incorporate it well, and use critique to make our manuscripts into the best books they can possibly be.

A bit ambitious, true. But someone’s got to start the counter-movement.

Whew, that was a lot of advice to absorb in one sitting, wasn’t it? Rest assured, it’s not my final word on the subject — we’ve barely scratched the surface of techniques for handling feedback. If today’s array doesn’t work for you, relax: one of the subsequent suggestions probably will.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The guessing game resumes

The guessing game resumes

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Did you enjoy yesterday’s little guessing game? For those of you tuning in while this show is in progress, last time, I invited readers to consider an array of fairly common writerly dilemmas — well, okay, three of five; the rest will come today. Rather than concentrating upon each as its own problem, as is my wont with exemplars, I challenged you all to try to identify the underlying thread that connected all of them.

Why would I take up your valuable time with such an exercise, especially stretched over two days of posts? A couple of reasons, of the fine variety. First, as I mentioned last time, the phenomenon that runs through each of these scenarios is not only typically a stumbling block to revision, but also very, very common in general. I see it constantly posing problems for writers at every level of the biz.

By clearing it out of the way, so to speak, before I launch into my series on manuscript megaproblems and agents’ pet peeves, any necessary changes should be easier for you to implement.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, being a working artist means having to wrestle with issues like this on a daily basis. The better a diagnostician you are, the more easily you will be able to root out writerly conflicts at their cores, rather then writhing for years under their influence while treating only their symptoms.

Also, the examples are kind of amusing, aren’t they?

Let’s move on to #4. Remember, the name of the game here is guess what issue underlies all of these case studies — and bear in mind that in none of these cases is the basic problem the only issue.

Cryptic scenario 4: over the last two months, Harriet’s sent out six queries for her mainstream novel, THE MICHELANGELO QUOTE THAT CARRIES A FAIRLY OBVIOUS HIDDEN MEANING THAT NO ONE HAS PICKED UP UPON FOR THE LAST 500 YEARS, yet no agent seems interested — even though she lucidly points out in her query letter that the book is very much in the tradition of a recent megaseller, and should appeal to the same audience.

Clearly, she concludes, the market isn’t looking for anything good or original these days.

But Harriet’s a hearty soul, so she sends out three more queries. No nibbles — and that astonishes her, because her husband said it was the best book he’d ever read, her mother raved over it, and her best friend at work handed the manuscript back to her after only three short days, saying, “It was great. I couldn’t put it down.”

Demoralized, Harriet stops querying, instead channeling her energies into letting everyone around her know how frustrated she is. (Her therapist says that this is good for her.)

She’s so at it that at holiday time, Idabel, assigned by the fickle finger of fate to be her Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver in the office pool, takes the hint and buys her a subscription to a well-respected magazine for aspiring writers, PENNERS’ PROCESSING, as well as a copy of the most recent WRITERS’ MARKET and one of the standard agency guides. Idabel is an aspiring writer herself, you see; her gift even includes a box of Manila envelopes topped with a Post-It note reading, “Use them!”

Around the Fourth of July, Harriet gets around to reading one of these helpful publications. Ten pages in, one of the agents interviewed mentions that he likes it when queriers include the information that they are members of an established writers’ group. He regards it as a sign that the writer in question has done her homework about how the business works. “Of course,” he adds, “the writing has to speak for itself, and it has to be original. I mean, if I get one more query for one more carbon copy of THE DA VINCI CODE, I’ll…”

The proverbial light bulb suddenly appears over Harriet’s head. “No wonder they haven’t been asking to see my book,” she muses. “I didn’t have an important professional credential.”

Amazingly, though, the Yellow Pages doesn’t seem to have any listings for either writers’ group, critique group, or professional writers’ credentials. After a couple of weeks of searching, she has the bright idea of turning to a more experienced writer for guidance.

“My group’s full,” Idabel hedges after hearing a full account of Harriet’s efforts, “but why don’t you check with our local writers’ association?”

After tracking down several false leads, Harriet is thrilled to be asked to join a group that has just lost a member. Staggering into the first meeting pushing a wheelbarrow stuffed with bound, 1200-page manuscripts, she is surprised to learn that in this group, members exchange only individual chapters in advance, then meet to discuss them; she had always assumed that writers read their work out loud in every critique group on the planet.

Still, she has copies of her first chapter with her, if she doesn’t mind doing some ripping, so she hands them out to everybody. When the others e-mail her their chapters (along with synopses, since she has joined at a point where many of them are mid-book), she reads them diligently. She thinks hard about what she wants to say at the next meeting; since they’ll be praising hers, she doesn’t want to be caught with nothing nice to say.

But at the second meeting, Harriet is astonished at how many specific criticisms people are giving one another. By comparison, her murmurs of, “This character was really likeable, for a sociopath; I wanted him to win,” “I was really rooting for the couple to get together after their cars collided,” and “Did Tanya really have to die after being run over by that bulldozer? It makes it less of a feel-good book, doesn’t it?” don’t seem to be treated with the seriousness they deserve.

When the group gets to her manuscript, the river of critique seems to intensify into a flood. She tries to keep smiling and taking notes, because that’s what the earlier victims had done, but it feels as if these people are ripping the flesh from her very bones. Although most of them preface their comments with a few (forced?) bits of kindness — along the lines of, “Your albino character was so convincingly…pale,” and “It’s interesting to describe a protagonist as Tom Hanks-like” — it’s clear that they positively hated literally every sentence in her chapter.

Or so she surmises, from the fact that they keep harping at her about her margins and her 14-point typeface. If they’d actually understood her chapter, would they have been concentrating on such trivialities? Or — and here poor Harriet’s heart hits her shoes — was her writing really so bad that they can’t talk about her plot at all?

She manages to keep her dignity until after the meeting breaks up, but she slips out without saying goodbye to anyone. Once home, she throws her notes into the trash, along with the manuscripts to read for the next meeting. She never goes back to the group again.

Wow, that was a sad one, wasn’t it? Is the problem becoming clearer now? Here’s the next example:

Cryptic scenario 5: Johannes is an Internet junkie; both in spare moments at work and every evening, he’s always surfing, always learning something new. He’s been working on a daring novel, AYN RAND LIVING IN PLATO’S CAVE IN A MACHIAVELLIAN WORLD, written in the present tense, the second person plural, and with semicolons decorating every other sentence.

So naturally, he’s been hanging out on writers’ forums. Having heard (well, seen) so many aspiring writers talk about their submission experiences, he feels well prepared to start the process himself. He does a Google search under “New York agencies,” and after a few false leads that produce terse replies demanding a head shot, he manages to narrow his list down to 50 or so.

Yet once he starts e-mailing out copies of his manuscript to agents and publishers, they seem to disappear into the ether. Why isn’t he hearing back? Are these people just going to steal his book and market it as their own?

Fortunately, Johannes now has online friends to ask this type of question — or rather, he has places where he can vent to the extent that other aspiring writers might figure out what his problem was. Much to his astonishment, his longtime sparring partner, Flam R. Høthead informs him that he should not have been sending out unrequested materials — he’d gotten a bit confused, since some people on the forums seemed to be mailing entire manuscripts — but instead should have been sending out something called a query letter first.

Johannes is furious. Why the heck hadn’t anyone told him this before?

So he composes the best, brashest, most self-promoting query letter he can imagine. Dear Agent, he e-mails, brace yourself for the greatest literary experience since MOBY DICK! Do yourself a favor and take a look at my novel — you’ll regret it if you don’t. It’s the next bestseller, and you wouldn’t want to be left with egg all over your face at Pulitzer Prize time, would you?

Yet amazingly, it only generates responses that seem oddly impersonal. What the heck do they mean, the book doesn’t serve their needs at this time and the novel market is tight right now? Obviously, his novel is too out there for the agents to appreciate.

He posts accordingly.

Another forum member, Bitr G. Nyess, explains to him the concept of a form letter rejection. Johannes spends the next month railing on three forums about the gross unfairness of the practice, a rant in which many, many frustrated aspiring writers are more than happy to join him.

Soon, his thread on his favorite forum is as howl-filled as a production of King Lear, but this doesn’t really seem to be getting him published. He notices that certain online sources keep being recommended by other forum readers in other contexts, so he traipses off to see what these so-called experts are suggesting.

Criminy, what drivel he finds! Everywhere he turns, he finds himself blamed for how he’s been abused. One sourpuss keeps telling her readers how awful their query letters are; another keeps yammering about something called craft; a guy who works at an agency keeps telling readers that it’s his job to reject as many of them as possible, and there’s even some insane chick who claims that all manuscripts are supposed to LOOK alike. And amazingly, when Johannes posts comments on these websites, pointing out that

(a) they’re contracting one another, so how on earth is a writer supposed to find out what to do?
(b) what they’re suggesting would take WEEKS of work to follow, and
(c) would they be interested in taking a look at his manuscript and passing it along to their friends in the industry?

they don’t seem to regard these points as fatal flaws. Or even points requiring response.

Instead, other commenters on these forums give him even more of the same kind of advice. They seem to expect him to change his book! Haven’t they ever heard of integrity? Of artistic vision?

Back on his writers’ forums, though, he is able to find many people to seem to share his outrage, though, and his threads on various forums lengthen well-nigh into infinity.

After a while, it occurs to him that he’s expending so much energy venting that he’s not writing much at all anymore. He stops posting so much, tosses his manuscript into a drawer, and starts a new book, UNRECOGNIZED GENIUS. Maybe the literary world will have matured enough by the time he’s done to be ready for THIS one.

Okay, campers: I know that there’s a lot going on here, but what’s the shared problem common to all 5? (Hint: each of these writers did quite a few things right AND wrong.)

Still stymied? I’m going to give you one final example, showing the problem in its baldest form — and incidentally the one that agents, editors, and freelance editors like myself see most often.

Cryptic scenario 6: Kimberley has just spent several years completing a novel, YOUR EYES ARE LIKE LIMPID POOLS. Justifiably pleased with herself and knowledgeable about how submission works, she sends off a flotilla of queries. Because she writes well and has done her homework, several of her queries prompt requests to see the first 50 pages.

When all of these attempts result in rejection, Kimberley is hurt and flabbergasted. For weeks, she pores over her rejection letters: what on earth does I just didn’t fall in love with the characters mean? If her book doesn’t meet our needs at this time and this is a book I probably could have sold ten years ago, are they asking her to resubmit or go away? If the former, how soon?

No matter how much she obsesses over the various possibilities, however, she can’t figure out why the book was rejected. She looks into freelance editing, but the sample edit of her first five pages came back so full of nit-picks, esoteric editing-speak like run-on and prettily written, but which one of these is the protagonist?, and cryptic statements about appealing to a target market that she realizes that the editor isn’t at all in tune with what she’s trying to do.

Besides, freelance editing is expensive. Instead, Kimberly seeks out a writers’ group filled with intelligent, creative people apparently genuinely interested in helping one another refine their work for publication. They seem excited about her project and eager to read it. (Unlike that stupid editor, who obviously wouldn’t know great literature if it bit her.)

By now, you can see this coming, can’t you? Follow the bouncing ball and sing along, people.

At the first meeting, one of the members, Linda, points out that Kimberley’s book category as listed on the title page seems a bit over-broad: romance-thriller-horror for the mainstream women’s market is not, Linda intimates, a category generally recognized by the industry. Glibly, Kimberley explains at great length why this designation is absolutely necessary: her novel stretches the parameters of boring commercial fiction.

When Linda objects that each of the named categories has a rather different expectations about vocabulary, storytelling, and voice, Kimberley takes pity on her literary ignorance and goes over, point by point and in exhaustive detail, all the ways that her book resembles THE SHINING, SOPHIE’S CHOICE, RAISE THE TITANTIC, TITANIC (yes, dear, the movie), THE VAMPIRE LESTAT, and BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY. Clearly, then, her book has an audience out there — and what’s Linda’s agenda that she would suggest otherwise?

Since Linda and the rest of the group eventually stop registering objections, Kimberley figures that she’s convinced them. She continues sending out manuscripts featuring this hyphenate category on the title page.

At the next meeting, Linda does not appear, but Martha, another member, mentions that Kimberley’s opening is a bit slow — in fact, the narrative doesn’t really warm up until page 10 or so. “Given how quickly agency screeners tend to make up their minds,” Martha says, edging her chair away from Kimberley’s increasingly frightening visage, “is it possible that this might be placing your work at a disadvantage?”

Although Kimberley is furious at the implication, she takes the time to explain patiently to Martha and the absurd group members who seem to agree with her that anyone even remotely familiar with Joseph Campbell’s concept of a heroic journey — you know, the one that they used to put together the plots for STAR WARS? — should know that the first stage is to present normal life. Of course, that normal life isn’t going to be as exciting as the challenge of the plot itself, but how can the reader possibly appreciate the drama of Chapter 2′s escalation without the mundane for contrast?

“Besides,” she adds huffily, “haven’t you people ever heard of symbolism? Each of those five scoops of coffee I describe in detail as the barista — who never appears again in the book, so I don’t know why how you could possibly see this as a distraction, Martha — pours them one by one into the espresso machine represents — I can’t believe that I actually have to explain this to you — a different stage of a woman’s life. Trust me, it’ll all be clear by the end of Chapter 15.”

Kimberley makes her case well — so well, in fact, that within a scant ten minutes, Martha and everyone else in the group have gone completely silent. Satisfied that she has won her point, Kimberley doesn’t revisit Chapter 1.

In fact, in the meetings that follow, she defends her book so well that eventually, the other members evidently come to realize that it doesn’t need additional revision at all. Or so Kimberley concludes from the fact that they stop bringing up any but the most picayune, sentence-level quibbles. She soon puts those to rest.

These days, her manuscript still attracts requests from agents occasionally, but for some reason, it has not yet been picked up. Clearly, the industry is not ready for literature of this caliber.

Is the pattern clear now? Has Kimberley laid it all out for you, or do you need to spend a year in her writing group to catch on to the problem? I’ll bet you a nickel that the group has vacancies.

Like Alcibiades, Dahlia, Griffin, Harriet, and Johannes, Kimberley has never learned to take constructive criticism constructively — or to tell the vital difference between good and bad feedback, or even to differentiate between well-meant manuscript and career advice and personal attack. Not all of the feedback our exemplars received was genuinely useful, or even necessarily correct — but these writers’ responses to it virtually guaranteed that none of it would prove helpful.

And that’s a serious problem for all six, although the symptoms were different in each case. Professional critique pulls no punches; working authors are expected to be able to listen respectfully to constructive feedback, sift through it to determine what would be best for the book, and apply it sensibly to the manuscript in question.

The earlier in a writing career one can learn this valuable set of skills, the better — and the less likely one is to get hurt by the process. For the next week or so, we’re going to be talking about how to avoid the grisly fates of the Exemplar Six.

I don’t promise that it will be fun, but trust me, once you’re working with your dream agent and editor, you will bless the week that I brought this up. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on The ethics of exclusives, or, the pros and cons of early admission

The ethics of exclusives, or, the pros and cons of early admission

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Yes, yes, I know: the tulip encroaches upon the useful information running down the right-hand side of the page. For one day, I think we can all live with that, can’t we? Besides, its enormity is very much in line with my feeling at the moment — isn’t it about time that spring came? (The photograph, incidentally, was taken by the ever-fabulous Marjon Floris.)

Why the longing for sun, light, warmth, color, and other things we tend to take for granted for half the year? Well, as some of you may have suspected when I didn’t post for a couple of days (and weekdays, too), I’ve been a bit under the weather again — or, to be specific, I have been inside, looking out at the weather, feeling like a school kid whose bright plastic rain boots have sprung a leak.

If I’m stuck inside, it seems to me that the least my yard could do is fast-forward a month or two to provide me with colorful scenery. Is that so unreasonable?

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’m going through my list of often-asked questions, those excellent poke-in-the-ribs reminders that I should really write a blog post or two on certain murky issues. Today’s murk comes courtesy not of a question posted as a comment here, but rather as a culmination of something writer friends ask me privately a dozen or so times per year: what should a writer who already has submissions out to agents do if a newly-responding agent asks for an exclusive?

You didn’t think I had been procrastinating about the topics on the murk list because they were conducive to EASY answers, did you?

An exclusive, for those of you new to the term, is when a writer agrees to allow an agent a specific amount of time during which no other agent will be reviewing a manuscript. Generally speaking, agents will request exclusives for two reasons: either they fear that there will be significant competition over who will represent the project, or it is simply the agency’s policy not to compete with outside agencies.

Do I feel some of you out there getting tense, doing the math on just how many years (if not decades) it could take to make it through your list of dream agents if you had to submit to them one at a time? Relax, campers: requests for exclusives are actually fairly rare.

Why rare? Well, the first kind of exclusive request, the one Agent A might use to prevent Agents B-R from poaching your talents before A has had a chance to read your manuscript (hey, A’s desk is already chin-deep in paper), tends to be reserved for writers with more than just a good book to offer. Celebrity, for instance, or a major contest win.

Basically, the agent is hoping to snap up the hot new writer before anybody else does. Or before the HNW realizes that s/he might prefer to be able to choose amongst several offers of representation.

If you suddenly find yourself the winner of a well-respected literary contest or on the cover of People, remember this: just because an agent asks for an exclusive does not mean you are under any obligation to grant it. If your work is in demand, it’s not necessarily in your best interest to sign with the first agent who makes an offer — you will want the one with the best track record of selling books like yours, right?

Chant it with me now, long-time readers: you do not want to land just any agent; you want the best agent for YOUR work.

I mention this now, in advance of when at least some of you attain either celebrity or your first big literary prize, because when either of these things happen to a writer, it can be pretty disorienting.

Contest winners, after all, are often good writers who have spent years querying agents. (Partially because it’s considered a trifle gauche for the already-agented to enter contests for unpublished work.) The switch from frantically trying to catch an agent’s eye to multiple agents asking to see one’s winning entry, pronto, can often throw even the most level-headed writer for a loop.

Trust me, this is a problem you want to have: it’s a compliment to your work.

You will, however, want to think in advance about how you’re going to respond. Yes, I am speaking from experience here — and a big, well-deserved thank-you to all of my former contest-winner friends who had drilled me to say, no matter how shell-shocked I was after receiving the prize, “I’m sorry, but I’ve sworn that I won’t grant any exclusives. Would you like me to submit to you at the same time as I send out to the others?”

Granted, this glassy-eyed response did make a few agents grumble, but believe me, it was far, far better than my having to decide on the spot whether the first agent who asked to see my pages was so much more suited to my book than the other agents at the conference that I should not even let the rest take a peek at it.

Which is, incidentally, precisely what you are being asked to do with an exclusive. Think of it like applying for early admission to an Ivy League school: if the school of your dreams lets you in, you’re not going to want to apply to other universities, right? By applying early, you are saying that you will accept their offer of admission, and the school can add you to its roster of new students without having to worry that you’re going to go to another school instead.

It’s a win/win, in other words.

So if the best agent in the known universe for your type of writing asks for an exclusive, you might want to say yes. But if you have any doubt in your mind about whether Harvard really is a better school for your intended studies than Yale, Columbia, or Berkeley — to mix my metaphors again — you might want to apply to all of them at the same time, so you may decide between those that admit you.

My point is, if you are asked for an exclusive because your work is sought-after, it is up to you whether you would prefer to go steady right off the bat or date around a little. Got it? (If not, I can keep coming up with parallel cases all day, I assure you.)

With the other type of exclusive request, the one that emerges from an agency that only reviews manuscripts that no one else is, the writer is not offered that choice. Consequently, a request for an exclusive from these folks is not so much a compliment to one’s work (over and above the sheer desire to read some of it, that is) as a way of doing business.

In essence, these agencies are saying to writers, “Look, since you chose to query us, you must have already done your homework about what we represent — and believe us, we would not ask to see your manuscript if we didn’t represent that kind of writing. So we expect you to say yes right away if we make you an offer.”

Why might such a stance be advantageous for an agency to embrace? Well, it prevents them from ever having to experience the fear associated with the first type of exclusive request: if you send them pages, they may safely assume that you won’t be calling them in a week to say, “Um, Agent Q has just made me an offer, slowpoke. I still would like to consider your agency, so could you hurry up and finish reading my manuscript so you can give me an answer? As in by the end of the week?”

Okay, so you wouldn’t really be that rude. (PLEASE tell me you wouldn’t be that rude.) But let’s face it, agents who don’t require exclusive submissions do receive these types of calls a fair amount. And nobody, but nobody, reads faster than an agent who has just heard that the author of the manuscript that’s been propping up his wobbly coffee table is fielding multiple offers.

Agencies who demand exclusivity are, by definition, unlikely to find themselves in a similar Oh, my God, I have to read this 400-page novel by tomorrow! situation.

What does the writer get in return for agreeing not to submit to others for the time being? Not a heck of a lot, unless the agency in question is in fact the best place for his work.

But if one wants to submit to such an agency, one needs to follow its rules. Fortunately, agencies that maintain this requirement tend to be far from quiet about it. Their agents will trumpet the fact from the conference dais. Requires exclusive submissions or even will accept only exclusive queries will appear upon their websites, in their listings in standard agency guides, and on their form replies requesting your first 50 pages.

(Yes, Virginia, positive responses are often form-letters, too, even when they arrive in e-mail form. I sympathize with your shock.)

If they had company T-shirts, in short, there would probably be an asterisk after the agency’s name and a footnote on the back about not accepting simultaneous submissions. If they’re serious about the policy, they’re serious about it, and trying to shimmy around such a policy will only get a writer into trouble.

Do I feel some of you tensing up again? Relax — agencies with this requirement are not very common.

Why? Well, because they require their potential clients to bring their often protracted agent search to a screeching halt while the submission is under consideration, such agencies are, in the long run, more time-consuming for a writer to deal with than others. As a result, many ambitious aspiring writers, cautious about committing their time, will avoid querying agencies with this policy.

Which, again, is a matter of personal choice. Or it is if you happened to notice before you queried that the agency in question had this policy.

In my next post, I shall talk about what a writer who finds himself dealing with simultaneous requests from both exclusive-requesting and ordinary agents, but for today, let me leave you with something to ponder.

Requests for exclusives are, as I mentioned, rather rare. Writers who believe that ANY request for a submission is AUTOMATICALLY a request for an exclusive are not. As a result, would-be submitters sometimes delay sending out requested materials until they hear back from earlier requesters.

This is a serious strategic mistake. Unless an agent ASKS for an exclusive — and believe me, if an agency requires exclusivity, the member agent interested in your work will tell you so directly — it is NOT expected. In fact, now that the agent-finding market is so fierce, the vast majority of agents simply assume that good writers are querying and submitting widely.

Long-time readers, take out your hymnals: that apparently immortal conference-circuit rumor is simply not true — expectations of exclusivity are NOT the norm amongst agents. Nor is reticence about submission requirements.

A writer is under no obligation whatsoever to stop submitting or querying other agents while one is reading requested materials. So there.

Granting an unrequested exclusive is like applying to only one college per year: you might get in eventually, but it’s a far more efficient use of your time to apply to many simultaneously. Unless, of course, the school you’re absolutely sure that you want to attend offers you early admission.

Keep up the good work!

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Posted on - No Comments on A few words on feedback, part IX: this above all things, to thy own self be true, or, would it kill you to ask for what you want?

A few words on feedback, part IX: this above all things, to thy own self be true, or, would it kill you to ask for what you want?

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For those of you joining us late in this series, I’ve been talking recently how to get the most from non-professional feedback — which, let’s face it, is the vast majority of the substantive feedback aspiring writers get these days. While there are undoubtedly some agents and certainly many editors who give good editorial feedback to writers AFTER those contracts are signed, the agent or editor who gives concrete feedback to a rejected manuscript is rapidly growing as extinct as a bespectacled dodo speaking Latin and writing in cuneiform on the walls of a pyramid.

As, no doubt, those of you who have queried are already aware. The same practice often comes as a shock to those new to being asked to submit all or part of a manuscript, however.

Due to the sheer volume of submissions, it’s not even vaguely uncommon for a writer to receive the manuscript with no more indication of why than a polite Sorry, but I didn’t fall in love with this. Sad, but true, alas — and thus it’s not the most efficient use of your energies to resent an obviously form rejection when it is sent to you.

How do I know that some of you out there have been wasting your precious life force on trying to read deeper meaning into old chestnuts like It doesn’t meet our needs at this time or I don’t feel I can sell this in the current tight market?

Call me psychic. Or just experienced in the many ways that good writers can come up with to beat themselves up.

But how on earth is a writer to know what needs to be changed before a book looks yummy to the folks in the industry?

You could, of course, always pay a freelance editor to run through your work with a fine-toothed hacksaw, but most aspiring writers are reluctant to shell out the dosh for this service. After all, pretty much everyone who has had the self-discipline to write an entire book did so while living on the hope of other people paying to read it; to most writers, the prospect of paying a reader to struggle through their prose is pretty distasteful.

Come on, ‘fess up.

And even though I make a hefty chunk of my living being paid to do precisely that, I’m going to be honest with you here: most editors at major publishing houses, when asked at conferences if getting professional help is necessary, will get downright huffy at the notion. Good writers, they will tell you, need no such editorial help.

This sounds very noble, doesn’t it?

Until the 50th time you hear this exchange, when it dawns upon you that perhaps at least some of these editors hear the question not so much as a call to voice their opinions on the tenacity of talent as a critique of their ilk’s propensity to perform line editing. (A word to wise conference-goers: quite a few editors get cranky at the mention of the fact that they do a whole lot of things other than edit these days. Don’t bring it up.)

But think about it: in order for the contention that good writers do not need editorial assistance to be true, a good writer would have to be someone who never makes grammatical or spelling mistakes, is intimately familiar with the strictures of standard format, has a metronome implanted in her brain so that pacing is always absolutely even, has never written a bad sentence, plots like a horror film director…in short, such a writer would have to have an internal editor running around her psyche powerful enough to run Random House by telepathy.

That’s not a good writer; that’s a muse with her own editorial staff. For those of us who have not yet had Toni Morrison surgically implanted in our brains, blue pencil in microscopic hand, an extra pair of eyes can be very helpful.

However, if you are not getting feedback from someone who is being paid to do it (i.e., an agent, editor, writing teacher, or freelance editor), or members of a writing group with experience working on your type of book, or a writer in your chosen genre — which is to say, if you are like 99% of feedback-seekers in North America — then you are almost certainly going to be seeking feedback from first readers who have no previous experience in manuscript critique.

Which means that it’s not a particularly wise idea to make the first-time critiquer guess what kinds of problems to look for or how to point them out when he does. When the writer does not set out ground rules to guide inexperienced first readers, trouble often ensues.

All of which is a long-winded way of introducing the single best thing you can do to head off problems before they start: giving your first readers WRITTEN directions for how to give you feedback.

Ideally, these directions will include a list of specific questions you would like answered about the reading experience. Providing a brief list of written questions may seem a bit pushy at first, but believe me, if your reader finds herself floundering for something to say, she will be immensely grateful that you gave her some advance guidance.

And you, in turn, are far more likely to receive the kind of feedback most helpful to you than if you remain politely mum. Bringing your expectations into sync will substantially raise the probability of the exchange being positive for everyone concerned.

Coming up with specific questions will also force you to figure out what you in fact do want from your first readers. You may discover, for instance, that you actually do {not} want feedback; maybe you want support instead. Maybe you want recognition from your kith and kin that you have completed a project as major as a book.

Stop sniggering. This isn’t as uncommon as you might think; freelance editors see it all the time. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want.

As desires go, it’s a pretty harmless one — unless the writer is not up front about it. Why? Well, if the writer was seeking praise, and the reader thought he was looking for constructive criticism, both parties will end up unhappy.

If you feel this way, it is important to recognize it before you hear ANY feedback from your first readers. This will require you, of course, to be honest with yourself about what you really want and set realistic goals.

Hint: “I want for Daddy to say for the first time in my life that he’s proud of me” might not be the best reason to hand dear old Dad your manuscript. But “I want the experience of my work being read closely by someone I know is not going to say anything harsh afterward” is every bit as praiseworthy a goal as “I want someone to tell me how to make this book marketable.”

The trick lies in figuring out precisely what you want, finding a person who can deliver it, and asking directly to receive it.

And if that sounds like Miss Lonelyhearts advice to you, there’s an excellent reason: everyone is looking for something slightly different, so the more straightforwardly you can describe your desired outcome, the more likely you are to get what you really want.

There’s no need to produce a questionnaire the length of the unabridged Arabian Nights, of course, but do try to come up with at least three or four specific questions you would like answered. Ideally, they should not be yes-or-no questions; try to go for ones that might elicit an essay response that will provide you with clues about where to start the revision. Perhaps something along the lines of:

Did you find my main character sympathetic? Would you please note any point where you found yourself disliking or distrusting her/him/it?

Was there anyplace you found your attention wandering? If so, where?

Was it easy to keep the characters/chronology/list of who killed whose brother straight? Were any two characters too much alike?

Would you mind placing a Post-It™ note in the text every time you stopped reading for any reason, so I can recheck those sections for excitement level?

Would you mind keeping a list of plot twists that genuinely caught you by surprise? Would you also note any of plot twists that reminded you of another book or movie?

Remember, the feedback is for YOU, not for anyone else. Customize your request as much as possible. And if you are feeling insecure, it is completely okay to say:

Look, this is my baby, and I’m nervous about it. Yes, I would love it if you flagged all of the typos you saw, but what I think would help me most is if you told me what is GOOD about my book.

I cannot emphasize too much that it is PERFECTLY legitimate to decide that you actually do not want dead-honest critique, IF you tell your first readers that in advance. If upon mature reflection you realize that you want to show your work to your kith and kin in order to gain gentle feedback in a supportive environment (rather than in a cut-throat professional forum, where your feelings will not be spared at all), that’s a laudable goal — as long as neither you nor your first readers EXPECT you to derive specific, informative revision feedback from the experience.

“Don’t worry about proofreading, Sis,” you can say. “I have other readers who can give me technical feedback. Just enjoy.”

If you want to be a professional writer, however, you will eventually need to harden yourself to feedback; the rather commonly-held notion that really GOOD writing never gets criticized is a great big myth. Not only does professional writing routinely get ripped apart and sewn back together (ask anyone who has ever written a newspaper article), but even amongst excellent editors and publishing higher-ups, there will always be honest differences of opinion about how a book should unfold.

So the sooner you can get accustomed to taking critique in a constructive spirit, the better.

And the happier you will be on that dark day when an editor who has already purchased your manuscript says, “You know, I don’t like your villain. Take him out, and have the revision to me by the end of next week,” or “You know, I think your characters’ ethnicity is a distraction. Instead of Chinese-Americans from San Francisco, could they be Irish-Americans from Boston?” or “Oh, your protagonist’s lesbian sister? Change her to a Republican brother.”

You think these examples are jokes? Would you like me to introduce you to the writers who heard them first-hand? Would you like me to point out the published books where taking this type of advice apparently made the book more commercially successful?

“But Anne,” I hear some of you say, “didn’t you say earlier in this post that I can set up critique so I do not have to hear really draconian editorial advice? How will telling my first readers that I want them to reassure me first and foremost prepare me for dealing with professional-level feedback?”

Good question, anonymous voices: chances are, it won’t. But one doesn’t learn to ski by climbing the highest, most dangerous mountain within a three-state radius, strapping on skis for the first time, and flinging oneself downhill blindly, either.

Here’s a radical idea: use your first readers as a means of learning how you do and do not like to hear feedback, not merely as a device to elicit feedback applicable to the book in question.

In other words, try using it as an opportunity to get to know yourself better as a writer. Yes, a professional author does need to develop a pretty thick skin, but just as telling a first-time first reader, “You know, I would really prefer it if you left the pacing issues to me, and just concentrated on the plot for now,” will give you feedback in a form that’s easier for you to use, so will telling your future agent and editor, “You know, I’ve learned from experience that I work better with feedback if I hear the general points first, rather than being overwhelmed with specifics. Would you mind giving me your feedback that way?”

Self-knowledge is always a good thing, my friends. And why do we show our work to first readers if NOT to get to know ourselves better as writers?

Next time, I shall wrap up this little series on getting good feedback with a bit more discussion of how to ask for what you want. In the meantime, it’s a brand-new year: why not celebrate by backing up your writing onto a Greatest Hits of 2007 disk? Or at least back it up to your iPod?

Oh, and keep up the good work!

(PS: the photograph above — it’s an overloaded bookshelf, in case I got carried away in playing with it — appears courtesy of the fine folks at FreeFoto.com.)

Posted on - 4 Comments on A few words on feedback, or, a proposition to which you should NOT say yes on New Year’s Eve

A few words on feedback, or, a proposition to which you should NOT say yes on New Year’s Eve

I’m posting late today, I’m afraid — the news about Benazir Bhutto, while not exactly a surprise, left me very much saddened. I have been following her career since I was in college; we share an alma mater, and my work-study job involved maintaining files on the doings of alumnae. (Yes, in the 1980s, Harvard did not house the men’s and women’s files together, nor did male and female undergraduates receive the same diploma. You’ve come a long way, baby!) Her story was so interesting that I kept an eye out for her even after it was no longer my job to do so. The world is less fascinating without her in it.

Back to business. I may be jumping the gun on the parade of virtue that prevails in early January, that period when folks are still adhering to their New Year’s resolutions, but as many writers have a day or two of vacation right around now, I thought this might be a good time to start talking about the revision process — and its ever-helpful first cousin, useful feedback.

To clarify the timing: we DO all know better than to send off our queries and submissions during the first three weeks of any given new year, right? Half the writers in the English-speaking world bravely embrace SIOA (Send It Out, Already!) as their New Year’s resolution.

The result: Millicent and everyone at her agency is swimming in exponentially more paper at that time of year than at any other — and in the U.S., agencies are required to get tax statements about the previous year’s sales to their clients by the end of January. The combination of stressors tends to make ‘em a mite grumpy — and, believe it or not, even more eager than usual to reject.

So in case I’m being a bit too subtle here: if you can’t t get requested materials out the door this week, hold off until after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Trust me on this one. The average New Year’s resolution lasts a touch under three weeks (one of the many reasons that I deplore them), so the influx of paper calms down pretty quickly. You can afford to wait until it does.

And while we’re re waiting: it’s revision time! Hooray!

I heard that giant collective guffaw from my long-term readers. “When,” you are asking yourselves, “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?”

Okay, you’ve got me there. I have been preaching that particular gospel quite a bit this month, and with good reason: it is absolutely vital to clear your manuscript (and query letter, and synopsis) of spelling and grammatical errors, pronto.

Or at least before you send it out in a few weeks, after all of those resolvers have gotten it out of their systems. Because you, clever homework-doer that you are, know that there is more to landing an agent than making a single push: success comes to those who keep trying again and again.

And since agency screeners tend to stop reading after just a couple of spelling or grammatical errors, giving a book an honest shot at getting picked up means taking the time to create clean copy. This is not a business where good enough is in fact good enough; technical perfection is expected.

Sound like familiar advice? It should; both of the successfully self-published authors in my recent interview series said precisely the same thing — it’s worth your time to rework the manuscript until it fairly shines. Which just goes to show you that the standards of excellence prevailing in the world of traditional publishing may not be as far from those of the self-published world as one may have heard.

Either way, the author is generally held responsible for mistakes, so you’ll want to minimize them.

Because technical perfection is so important, I implore you, DO NOT rely upon your word processing program’s spelling and grammar checker as your only source of proofreading. 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 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 those editors to whom I referred above 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, sliding past an error unseen.

Yes, even if you have a simply immense computer screen — this is an instance where size truly doesn’t matter. (And the masses rejoice!)

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 it. At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, 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. (Or the press, if you are intending to self-publish.)

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 our old pal Millicent the screener’s choking on her coffee and reaching for the form rejection letter.

Like, for instance, 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, of course, is that the agent’s feedback is the first time many writers EVER get an outside opinion of their work.

And, as those of you who have submitted to an agency lately know first-hand, that feedback is usually either minimal or non-existent. Or so generic that it could apply to any manuscript Millicent saw — remember, just because a rejection letter or e-mail is personalized with your name doesn’t necessarily mean that it was written freshly in response to reading your book. Stock phrases like I just didn’t fall in love with it, this is a tough market for fiction, and it doesn’t meet our needs at this time have graced rejection letters for many years; they are not intended as meaningful feedback, but as a polite negative.

It does not, in short, tend to be feedback that’s likely to help a writer improve his work before the next round of submissions. Your writing deserves feedback with content you can use.

Now, there are a lot of places you can receive such feedback. You can ask a professional freelance editor, as I described a few weeks ago; you can join a critique group; you can exchange with another writer. No one method is right for everybody, so you may need to experiment a little before figuring out how you most like to receive feedback.

But remember just before Christmas, when I was preparing you for that inevitable moment when some well-meaning co-celebrant leans over to ask, “So, dear, how’s your writing coming? Published anything yet?” No matter how sincerely this person asks to read your work, no matter how flattering her request may be, no matter how much she swears that she would love nothing better than to read it and tell you what she thinks — if this person is a close friend, lover, would-be or ex lover, or — sacre bleu! — a family member,

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE THIS PERSON THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

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.

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 DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READERS OF YOUR BOOK.

Get other first readers for your manuscripts, because a first reader who does not have the objectivity — or, often, the reading experience in your genre — to tell you the truth about your manuscript is simply not useful for a writer.

The closer the tie, the lower the objectivity — and no, smart people who read a lot are not exempt from this rule. Even if your father runs a major publishing house for a living, your sister 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.

Why? Because they like you.

Don’t fault them for that. 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 Ermintrude says she would 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, as if you were acting upon medical orders. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been advised by Dr. Mini that until I find an agent, I need to limit myself to objective readers,” or “I would love to, Aunt Ermintrude, 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?”

No one likes getting called on that. And, let’s face it, when you do have a book coming out, you DO want your Aunt Ermintrude to buy it — and to talk all of her friends into buying it.

If you think that professional writers don’t cadge on their relatives this way, think again; most of the pros I know keep mailing lists of everyone who has ever cut their hair, cleaned their teeth, listened to their son’s book reports, etc., to send a postcard the instant a new book of theirs comes out.

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.

Yes, you read that correctly. Now picture everyone who has ever said to you, “Oh, you’ll have to send me a copy when it comes out.” It can be costly.

Promise to sign it for them instead. Get Aunt Ermintrude — and everyone else who loves you — used to the idea that supporting you means being willing to shell out hard cash for your book.

But DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

So on New Year’s Eve, should you find yourself wrapped in the arms of some charming, well-meaning soul who whispers those words that make the average aspiring writer melt like butter, I’d LOVE to read your book,” you will know what to say, right?

Right? Stop fantasizing about meeting a gorgeous stranger who wants to read your book and concentrate. Trust me, it will be better for both your book and your relationships with your loved ones if you thank him/her/them profusely — and say no.

Ditto with loved ones of every description. My mother is one of the best editors I’ve ever met, and naturally, she is eager to read my work, but we have both been in this business long enough to know that giving birth to a writer pretty much automatically disqualifies a reader from being particularly objective about that writer’s work.

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 shreds, 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.

Ponder that for a moment, and you’ll see that it is true. 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 all too often, 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.

Seriously, 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.)

Which is why (hold your ears, because I’m about to start shouting again) YOU SHOULD NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MAKE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THE FIRST READER OF YOUR BOOK.

Often, too, when you are 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 of 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.

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 are 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-?” in dialogue?

Trust me, you need first readers who will tell you PRECISELY that.

Next time, I shall talk about strategies for getting the kind of good, solid feedback you need without treating your first readers like mere service-providers. (Hey, 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!