A moment of silence, please: John Updike is dead.
Since nothing elevates the short-term literary stature of an established author as much as his death, I’m sure that there will be no shortage of superlatives being bruited about out there for Mr. Updike, so I shall not attempt to add to them here, nor shall I reproduce his oft-quoted comments about the decline of literary fiction as a mainstream art form. Suffice it to say that he was a writer who alternately impressed and infuriated me — not a bad goal in and of itself for a literary novelist — and leave it at that.
When I heard the news — one of the mixed blessings of being widely known as a writer and descendent of a long line of writers is that people very considerately call to break the news to me whenever any well-established author kicks the bucket, as if everyone who has ever set pen to paper were a distant cousin of mine whose death I should not be forced to learn from the standard media sources — I naturally went straight to my bookshelf and glanced through some of his work. In light of our ongoing series on opening pages and the fact that his first novel, THE POORHOUSE FAIR, came out in 1959, I expected his initial pages would, to put it politely, have a tough time making in past Millicent the agency screener today, thus proving his frequently-made point about how literary fiction has been all but brought to earth over the last 40 years.
I was pleased to find that quite the opposite was true: his first pages were grabbers. Take that, eulogists of literary fiction, including Mr. Updike!
More to the point of the latter part of this series, his hooks largely operated not through garish action, but interesting character development. Take a gander, for instance, at the first two paragraphs of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1984):
“And oh yes,” Jane Smart said in her hasty yet purposeful way; each s seemed the black tip of a just-extinguished match held in playful hurt, as children do, against the skin. “Sukie said a man has bought the Lenox mansion.”
“A man?” Alexandra Spofford asked, feeling off-center, her peaceful aura that morning splayed by the assertive word.Now, we could speculate all day about the probable insecurities of a male author who felt compelled not only to have a female character repeat the word man here, as though the very concept of the Y chromosome were inherently troubling to heterosexual women, but also to inform the reader that the word is assertive AND use splayed, a word commonly associated with the things models do in the centerfolds of men’s magazines, to describe a mental state. It might also not be too much of a stretch to assume based upon this opening that Mr. Updike wasn’t picturing much of a female readership for this book when he wrote it — intriguing, since in 1984 as now, women were far and away the most common purchasers of literary fiction.
But none of that concerns us at the moment. Look, I ask you, at how beautifully he has used visceral details to establish both a mood and character.
Some ears just perked up out there, didn’t they? “Visceral details?” those who had dozed off a bit, anticipating a eulogy, now exclaim. “Why, we were talking about those only yesterday. Weren’t those the kind of tidbits Millicent and her ilk liked to see, the tangible specifics that make vague generalities fade to gray by comparison?”
Those are they, indeed. Arresting, aren’t they, in this museum piece?
In fact, it’s a heck of an opening in general. Let’s take a moment to ponder why: instead of easing the reader into the story by an extensive description of the physical space in which we discover these characters, or the even more common physical description of the characters themselves, Updike introduces these women by providing specific insight into their mental processes and motivations. Instead of just telling us that Jane is mean and Alexandra shy, he shows us through an analogy and word choices that we might not expect.
Yes, what you just thought is absolutely right: this opening would grab Millicent because it’s not only well-written, but surprising.
Seeing all the elements in action helps to clarify what we’ve been talking about, doesn’t it? But while we’re at it, let’s be thorough about this. Quick, without rushing back and checking our initial list of red flags that often lead Millicent to reject a submission on page 1, what might strike her as problematic if she saw this opening in a submission by a brand-new writer today?
If you pointed out the typo in the very first sentence, give yourself a great big gold star for the day. (Technically, there should be a comma between oh and yes; as Mr. Updike was a graduate of my alma mater, I’m relatively certain that he should have been aware of this.) While some Millicents might be kind enough to read past a first sentence grammatical or spelling error, it’s not a foregone conclusion.
Proofread.
While we’re giving out prizes for observation, take a red ribbon out of petty cash if you flagged the repetitive dialogue. As we’ve discussed earlier in this series, repetitive dialogue tends to annoy agents and editors, since they’ve been trained since they were pups to excise redundancy. Besides, characters who simply echo what has already been said tend to come across as less intelligent than those who actually add something new to the conversations in which they participate — always a tad risky in a protagonist.
Anything else? What about the unnecessary tag lines (Jane Smart said, Alexandra Spofford asked), now out of fashion? Since Mr. Updike had already been established in the first rank of North American authors by the time the use of tag lines fell out of fashion, this might seem like an unwarranted quibble, but remember, we’re judging this by the standards that would apply to a writer trying to break into the biz now.
Long-time readers, pull out your hymnals and sing along with me now: an established author can often get away with things that someone new could not.
Did any of you red-flag the semicolon? If Mr. Updike were submitting this to Millicent labeled as anything but literary fiction, you’d be right to consider cutting it. Generally speaking, in fiction that isn’t aimed at a college-educated audience — as literary fiction is, ostensibly — semicolons are considered a bit highbrow.
The fact that Millicent regularly sees manuscripts whose vocabulary barely scrapes the 10th grade positively peppered with semicolons might have something to do with this, admittedly. No one but writers really like semicolons, and not even all of us use them correctly (which, John Harvard would no doubt be delighted to note, Mr. Updike has done properly above), but my, don’t we like to shoehorn them into a manuscript!
Unless you’re submitting your work as literary fiction to an agent with a successful track record of representing a whole lot of it AND her client list fairly bristles with semicolon-wielding authors, you might want to minimize their use.
All of which, as fate would have it, is a perfect lead-in to my wrap-up of the Idol rejection reasons because, really, it’s important to recognize that while, in the past, agents tended to be open to working with their clients in order to work out the technical kinks prior to submission to publishing houses, now most of them expect writers to submit manuscripts so clean and camera-ready that the agency screener could confidently walk them directly from the agency’s mail room to the desk of even the pickiest editor. Thus these last few weeks of weeding out the most common submission problems, at least on page 1: we’ve been going over these points exhaustively so that you can meet standards far higher than when the late, great Mr. Updike faced when he was first trying to break into the biz.
Today, however, we get to see the reward: the kind of manuscript that makes agents weak in the knees.
Surprisingly, agents and editors tend not to talk too much about what they love about books at conferences — they tend to stick to describing what is marketable, because that is, after all, their bread and butter. Remember, agents (most of them, anyway) don’t hold submissions to such high standards in order to be mean — they want to take on books that they know they can sell within today’s extremely tight market. It’s not enough for an agent to love your work; she needs to be able to place it at a publishing house for you.
But as those of you who have been querying strong, marketable projects for a while already know, agents often reject submissions for perfectly marketable books, a fact that is very confusing to those who have been taught (sometimes by agents at conferences) to believe that every agent is looking for the same thing, or to those who believe that a single rejection from a single agent means that everyone in the industry will hate a book.
Or that there exists writing so beautifully literary that every agent currently drawing breath will instantly exclaim, “Oh, of course — I’ll represent that!”
Especially for first fiction, it’s not enough for an agent to recognize that a writer has talent and a book has market potential: they like to fall in love. If you’re a good pitcher, you already know the reaction I’m talking about: the eyes becoming moist with desire, the mouth appearing to go dry with lust. When an agent wants a project, the symptoms strongly resemble infatuation, and as the Idol series has taught us, it’s often a case of love at first sight.
As with any other type of love, every agent has his own particular type that is likely to make his heart beat harder, his own individual quirks and kinks. Just as an agent will train his screeners to rule out submissions containing his pet peeves, he will usually set some standards for the kind of project he would like to see forwarded to his desk.
So, in a way, our old pal the underpaid, latte-quaffing, late-for-her-lunch-date screener is her boss’ dating service.
Here’s the list of what the Idol panelists said would light their fires sufficiently to ask for a second date — in other words, what would lead them to want to read beyond page 1 of a submission:
1. A non-average character in a situation you wouldn’t expect.
2. An action scene that felt like it was happening in real time.
3. The author made the point, then moved on.
4. The scene was emotionally engaging.
5. The narrative voice is strong and easy to relate to.
6. The suspense seemed inherent to the story, not just how it was told.
7. “Good opening line.”
8. ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.”
Notice anything about this list? Like, say, that the opening of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK knocks every single one of these criteria out of the proverbial ballpark?
“Hey,” I hear some of you out there saying, “isn’t there something missing from this list? Shouldn’t ‘This is a marvelous writer,’ or ‘That’s the best metaphor I’ve ever seen for a love affair gone wrong,’ or “Wow, great hook” have made the list? Shouldn’t, in fact, more of these have been about the craft of writing, rather than about the premise?”
Excellent questions, both. Would you like the cynical answer, or the one designed to be encouraging to submitters?
Let me get the cynicism out of the way first: they are looking for a book that can sell quickly, not a writer whose talent they want to develop over a lifetime, and that means paying closer attention to an exciting plot than to writerly skill. In essence, they are looking to fall in love with a premise, rather than a book.
The less cynical, and probably more often true, reason is that this is not the JV team you are auditioning to join: this is the big league, where it is simply assumed that a writer is going to be talented AND technically proficient.
Unless an agent specifically represents literary fiction — not just good writing, mind you, which can be produced in any book category, but that specific 3-4% of the fiction market which is devoted to novels where the beauty of the writing is the primary point of the book — the first question she is going to ask her screener is probably not going to be, “Is it well-written?”
Why not? Well, presumably, if any submission weren’t fairly well-written and free of technical errors, it would not make it past the screener. As we have seen before, the question is much more likely to be, “What is this book about?”
Before you sniff at this, think about it for a minute: the last time you recommended a book to someone, did you just say, “Oh, this is a beautifully-written book,” or did you give some description of either the protagonist or the plot in your recommendation? Even the most literary of literary fiction is, after all, about SOMETHING.
Ideally, any good novel will be about an interesting character in an interesting situation.
Why does the protagonist need to be interesting? So the reader will want to follow her throughout the story to come, feeling emotionally engaged in the outcome. Why does the situation need to be interesting? So the reader will not figure out the entire book’s plotline on page 1.
If you have both of these elements in your premise, and you present them in a way that avoids the 74 rejection reasons I’ve been discussing throughout this series, most of the rest of the criteria on this love-it list will follow naturally. Not necessarily, but usually. If the reader cares about the protagonist, the stakes are high enough, and the pacing is tight, the scene is much more likely to be emotionally engaging than if any of these things are not true. If you eschew heavy-handed description and move straight to (and through) the action, conflict is more likely to seem as though it is happening in real time, no one can complain that you are belaboring a point, and the suspense will develop naturally.
So really, all of this critique has been leading directly to the characteristics of an infatuation-worthy book.
Of course, all of this IS about the quality of the writing, inherently: in order to pull this off successfully, the writer has to use a well-rehearsed bag of tricks awfully well. Selecting the right narrative voice for a story, too, is indicative of writerly acumen, as is a stunning opening line. Each of these elements are only enhanced by a beautiful writing style.
However, most agents will tell you that lovely writing is not enough in the current market: the other elements need to be there as well. As well as a certain je ne sais quoi that the pros call an individual voice.
All of which is to say: submission is not the time to be bringing anything but your A game; there really is no such thing as just good enough in the current market. (Unless you’re already established like John Updike, of course, or a celebrity, or you happen to have written the story that the agent always wanted to write himself, or…) Playing in the big leagues requires more than merely telling a story well — that’s the absolute minimum for getting a serious read within the industry.
Which brings me to #8, ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.” Submission mail bags positively burgeon with clear accounts of straightforward stories, as well as with manuscripts where every nuance of the plot is instantly accessible to the reader as soon as it is mentioned. Books that work on a number of different levels simultaneously, that give the reader occasion to think about the world to which the book is introducing her, are rare.
That the Idol agents would be looking actively for such a book might at first blush seem astonishing. How much subtlety could a screener possibly pick up in a 30-second read of the first page of a manuscript?
Well, let me ask you: the last time you fell in love, how much did you feel you learned in the first thirty seconds of realizing it?
Pat yourselves on the back for making it all the way through this extremely sobering list, everybody: this was good, hard, professional work, the kind that adds serious skills to your writer’s tool bag. Be pleased about that — and keep up the good work!
Anne,
In 2002, Dr. James Plath, an English professor, friend of the late writer, and specialist in John Updike’s work said, “While other people were writing about characters in the extreme, John Updike spoke and wrote about people who lived middling lives in the middle of the United States which is the anchor of this country.”
Especially with the higher standard unpublished writers must reach, middling Midwesterners, on the surface, have an extra challenge in getting past criteria #1 on panelists’ dream-date list. Yet, like the character development shown in your excerpt, isn’t it how we expose our characters that pushes them past the bell curve (or not)?
I should admit my Midwestern protagonist is feeling a bit ordinary today.
I’m not sure that I would agree with your professor’s assessment — Updike was hardly the ONLY portrayer of Middle America in the post-war era — but you’re right that the portrayal of a so-called ordinary character can elevate that character above a dull normal. In order to pull that off, however, the writer has to imagine a fully-rounded protagonist who is more complicated than what a casual observer would consider typical of his job, class, sex, race, political affiliations, sexual preferences, and so forth, because unless the writer conceives him as an individual, he’s likely to come across as a mere representative of a group, trend, or background.
Updike was very good at this, at least for male characters. His men are not just stand-ins for their position in society or backgrounds, but fully-realized individuals operating within the rubric of what Wallace Stevens called the time and space in which we breathe.
Often, the author’s perception of the protagonist’s ordinariness is more problematic than the locale: in the vast majority of submissions that deal with so-called ordinary people, their lives and characters are depicted as dull, as composite or representative of an entire group of people rather than as we encounter people in real life, as individuals with personal quirks. That would be problematic for any protagonist, anywhere, anytime — and frankly, with most readers, not just the professional ones.
They just see more dull normal characters than the average reader, for the simple reason that they read many more books, at least in part. From their point of view, reading about an ordinary character from a generic background — even a background that a great many potential readers share — is rather like listening to an actor doing a generalized foreign accent, rather than one tailored specifically to the background of the character she’s portraying. (If you doubt this, try listening to some of the faux Irish brogues that turn up on US stages — they tend to be better on Canadian ones — that wander from County Cork to Dublin and back again with a winsome disregard for geographic probability, or ersatz American accents on British stages, evident hangovers from WWII GIs, with adjectives evidently from Brooklyn, nouns from Houston, and verbs from the movie lots of LA.) Genuine accents are always individuated, to a certain extent; a close listener to a speech of mine might discover, for instance, that my vocabulary changes when I’m talking about politics (the result of years of graduate school), my hometown boasts a specific cadence unshared by people who live 15 miles away that pops up when I talk about my childhood, and when I’m embarrassed, some of my English grandmother’s vowels come tripping out of my mouth.
And don’t even get me stared on the kid I knew in college who was from New Jersey, but tried to speak like a Cambridge graduate in tribute to his deep and abiding love of Monty Python. My point is, real accents are a seething mass of influences and choices, so when we hear an actor produce a voice seemingly representative, it can sound rather fake.
So, too, with characterization. No one is absolutely the product of a monolithic background, any more than anyone remains in character 100% of the time. It’s the deviations and moments of departure that render us interesting.
As I’ve argued before on this subject (earlier in this series, in fact), it’s far from impossible to portray an ordinary person in an ordinary situation in a manner that will be interesting to a reader; it does, however, require thinking about the character and scene differently than most writers were taught in English classes. Most beginning writing classes fall into the write-what-you-know school, tending to encourage neophyte writers to concentrate upon building their craft through acutely observed everyday life; a good place to start, certainly, but not one that necessarily takes the reader’s point of view into account as much as Millicent might like to see. From the industry’s point of view, it’s the writer’s job to render the protagonist and the situation fascinating, not the reader’s job to say, “Oh, this is supposed to be an everyday character; I guess I don’t mind his being predictable.”
Which is why I’ve been emphasizing the elements of surprise and freshness throughout this series: virtually any plot or character is capable of generating something that the reader will not have expected, and the essence of freshness as the industry defines it is placing a new narrative twist on the world we all share. The ability to surprise isn’t exclusive to any particular time zone, after all.
But that doesn’t mean that an agent, editor, or contest judge fond of good writing would seriously expect a writer portraying an average Joe or Janet to have them do something they would never do, either. The challenge in portraying any culture foreign to Millicent — and I think a good case could be made that quotidian life in the rest of the country is often rather foreign to NYC-based agents — is to present it to her in a manner that will both educate and intrigue her.
Ditto with a so-called ordinary protagonist. If a protagonist’s creator feels that a protagonist is a bit nondescript, readers will usually draw the same conclusion. Unlike readers, however, the writer has the opportunity to do something about it.
And there’s quite a bit that can be done, because most people are actually pretty interesting if you take the time to get to know them: not their daily habits, which may have been formed externally, but who they are inside, what memories they hold, how they reacted on the day that a giant redwood fell onto the local schoolhouse, etc. Try giving your protagonist a secret shame, a bizarre hobby, a long-ago childhood determination to become an astronaut — even if those elements never actually make it onto the stage, as it were, your knowing that they are in her background will probably make a difference in how ordinary you feel she is.
Not all black sheep carry their wool on the outside, if you catch my drift.
As we saw in today’s list, not everything that’s going on in a story should be right on the surface; giving your protagonist a more intricate past than a dismissive, “Oh, he’s an ordinary Midwesterner,” can inform his actions, even if you choose never to let the reader in on that past. (Besides, I can’t be the only writer out there who has met fascinating Midwesterners, can I? I’ve known many who were positively bristling with quirks.)
A good way to jump-start thinking about your protagonist as interesting is to invest some time in drafting a brief bio for him. Try going back a generation or two. I’m often surprised at how infrequently US writers discount the family backgrounds of characters whose kin have been in this country for more than a generation or two; go back far enough, and you’re bound to find a dandy Ellis Island or that’s-when-they-moved-us-off-the-reservation story that can be tied to the current generation’s worldview or habits in some surprising way.
Even a practically inert character with a swashbuckling great-grandmother is kind of intriguing. One of the thing I love about living in the west is that practically everybody whose family migrated prior to World War II has a genuinely quirky relative or two lurking about the family tree; there’s a middle school named after a forebear of mine who…well, I might want to use that in a book someday. Let’s just say that I’d be rather surprised if the school board had been aware of the rich variations within his character when they decided to put his picture up in the principal’s office.
Obviously, I have quite a bit to say on the subject, so I should probably table the rest of it until I have time to build this up into an entire blog post — which may have been your goal in bringing it up, you clever person you. For now, let me just advise this: if you’re feeling that your protagonist is ordinary, assume that your fine writer’s sense is telling you that it may be time to make him more complex.
Anne,
Many thanks for such a detailed reply!
Your answer to my question also soothed my concern about my choice of a Midwestern protagonist. I love your explanation of freshness and surprise from Millicent’s perspective. I get it. I think I have been holding out on my character — I’ll definitely have a visit with her so I can delve into her background and quirks more deeply.
I’m afraid I can’t reply intelligently about the Professor’s view of Updike. I was just struck as I listened to his quote, perhaps because the subject has been on my mind. I don’t believe in regrets, but I will say that learning more about what I love — English and writing — would have stuck with me much longer than the pragmatic course of study reflected on my college transcripts. Thanks for blogging the writing class(es) I never had.
Anne,
Many thanks for such a detailed reply!
Your answer to my question also soothed my concern about my choice of a Midwestern protagonist. I love your explanation of freshness and surprise from Millicent’s perspective. I get it. I think I have been holding out on my character — I’ll definitely have a visit with her so I can delve into her background and quirks more deeply.
I’m afraid I can’t reply intelligently about the Professor’s view of Updike. I was just struck as I listened to his quote, perhaps because the subject has been on my mind. I don’t believe in regrets, but I will say that learning more about what I love — English and writing — would have stuck with me much longer than the pragmatic course of study reflected on my college transcripts. Thanks for blogging the writing class(es) I never had.