Daniel, author of Wider Than the Sea
Austin, author of Genius
I’m most excited about today’s group of winners in theAuthor! Author! Rings True literary competition — and not just because they write in a category near to my heart, literary fiction. Daniel Light and Austin Gary’s entries are a far cry from the literary fiction stereotype of being about nothing but the writing: their pages and synopses present strong storylines, interesting premises, and interesting writing, told in unique authorial voices. Well done, both!
Adding to the excitement: I shall be discussing these intriguing entries with the ever-fabulous Heidi Durrow, author of the blockbuster literary fiction debut, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. (Now available in paperback!) Since Heidi writes literary fiction and I edit it, we both waxed poetic in discussing it.
I’m also rather tickled by how many of this contest’s array of winners (and entrants in general) come from far-flung corners of the earth. Daniel wins the long-distance entrant prize — he lives in Jerusalem — while Austin inhabits lovely British Columbia. John Turley and Fiona Maddock, of Rings True freestyle category fame hail from Colorado and the United Kingdom, respectively; memoir winners Kathryn Cureton and Margie Borchers are from Missouri and Washington state. For a blog that started out five and a half years ago as the voice of a regional writers’ association, the diversity of entries is most gratifying.
This contest’s winners are really interesting people, too; I’m so glad that I asked for author bios this time around. Fair warning: I’m going to make this a regular feature for Author! Author! contests, so now would be a great time to start thinking about your own bio, as well as what you would use as an author photo if the agent of your dreams asked for either or both tomorrow. (For tips on pulling your own together, take a peek at the aptly-named HOW TO WRITE AN AUTHOR BIO category on the archive list at right.)
A moral that I hope everybody will take from these winners’ posts: an author bio need not be crammed to the gills with publication credentials in order to make the writer sound interesting. Austin and Daniel’s bios are very different, but they both would make Millicent the agency screener want to chat with these writers over a steaming-hot latte. First, check out Austin’s more traditional bio:
Austin Gary is a BMI award-winning songwriter (as Gary Heyde), with recordings by artists such as Tammy Wynette, John Berry & Jeff Carson. He’s been an editor of a weekly newspaper; an actor/director; copywriter; director of radio and TV broadcast; a jingle writer; owner of a music production company; and a teacher of English, speech, drama and film. Austin’s been seriously writing since 2007. In 2008, he was a fiction finalist in the PNWA lit contest (“Ask Me No Secrets:); 2009 semi-finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom fiction competition (“Miss Madeira”); and 2010 a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom novel-in-progress (“Genius”). He recently moved from Des Moines, WA to Port Moody, B.C., where he’s writing full-time.
Makes him sound pretty formidable, does it not? Now take a gander at Daniel’s less standard, but equally interesting bio:
Daniel Light is an ordained rabbi who has taught Talmud and Bible part-time in several schools in Israel and has run a listserv dedicated to essays that harmonize between Judaism and popular culture. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University and a Bachelor of Law from Hebrew University and, following a year-long internship in corporate law, is currently living in Jerusalem and studying for the Israeli Bar exam. WIDER THAN THE SEA is his first novel and the fruit of his experiences in, and knowledge of, law, medicine, religion, psychology, morality, and life.
Not as many publishing credentials, admittedly — but if you were inviting luminaries to a literary luncheon, you would want both Austin and Daniel on your guest list, wouldn’t you? So would Millicent. Except as someone who habitually thinks in terms of book marketing, she would also make a mental note that either of these writers would probably give a great interview and be genuinely interesting public speakers.
If you think those are not a selling points for a writer, I can only assume that you do not attend many book readings. Unfortunately, new authors (and even established ones) who spend entire hours-long promotional events with their noses three inches from their own books, assiduously avoiding eye contact, are the norm, not the exception. It’s not even all that uncommon to see authors who evidently experience difficulty reading out loud.
Yet another reason to get into the habit of reading your manuscripts IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD, should you need another. If your critique group doesn’t set aside time for members to read to one another, you have my permission to tell yours that I said it was excellent training for future author readings. (And while we’re on the subject, would any of you regular readers be interested in my running a series of public reading dos and don’ts?)
As interesting as the bios are, however, for literary fiction, what matters most is on the manuscript page: more than in any other book category, literary fiction readers pay attention to sentence structure, vocabulary, and imagery. As folks in the industry like to say, it all depends on the writing.
Specifically, how literary the writing is. Lest we forget, in publishing terms, there is no such thing as universally good writing: what constitutes good writing on the literary fiction page is quite different from stylistic excellence in a mystery and vice-versa. And while agents have been known to say, “It’s a {fill in book category here}, but in a literary voice,” they don’t mean that the author of the book in question has jettisoned the conventions and expected vocabulary of the category; they merely mean that the narrative contains unusually pretty writing.
Do I spot some raised hands out there? “But Anne,” the many, many aspiring writers who have been assuming that their work was literary fiction protest, “isn’t pretty writing half the definition of literary fiction? And isn’t the other half a story driven by character, rather than by the needs of the plot?”
Well, yes and no on both counts, literary assumers. Yes, nice writing and a character-driven story are standard elements of literary fiction. No, that doesn’t mean a book without a plot that features impeccably-crafted sentences. Nor — and this may come as more of a surprise to some of you — does it mean that any well-written character development is literary fiction.
Don’t feel bad if you thought this — if that giant gulping sound we just heard out there in the ether is any indication, you were certainly not alone in conflating good writing with literary writing. Aspiring writers presume that literary fiction is merely a euphemism for good writing; if their writing is stylistically strong, they reason, and if it is fiction, it must therefore be literary fiction.
Which renders it rather confusing when the pros state categorically that there is good writing in every book category, doesn’t it?
But book categories are not subjective judgments about authorial voice and style; they are marketing containers for books that share certain expectations about plot, character development, subject matter, and audience. Literary fiction is its own distinct book category — consisting of narratives more prone to dwell on character, true, but also written in a vocabulary and sentence style aimed to please a college-educated readership. In the U.S. market, that readership is between 90-95% female, depending upon whom you ask and whether the respondent considers John Irving’s work literary or mainstream fiction.
Oh, you may laugh, but for many years, debate raged over how to categorize THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. (If you don’t believe me, check out The New York Times’ extremely uncomfortable original review.) Until fairly recently, one of the best ways to find out how a literarily-aware person felt about the desirability of high literature’s being accessible to a mainstream readership was to bring up the inimitable Mssr. Irving and ask whether the aforementioned reader regarded him as a writer of literary fiction or not.
Bearing this ongoing debate in mind, let’s step gingerly into Millicent’s moccasins and peruse Daniel’s page 1. (As always, if you are having trouble making out the details, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.) Is it literary fiction, or is it just good writing?
Have you made up your mind? Good. Now take a gander at Daniel’s synopsis, and see if your opinion about the book category changes.
Have you come to a conclusion? Or, after our discussion last time about the differences between fiction and nonfiction synopses, did the analytical statement the novel reaches a climax distract you too much to be able to form a firm opinion? If it’s the latter, you’re thinking like Millicent: in a synopsis for a novel, regardless of book category, she expects to see the story told directly, not to see the plot talked about indirectly, in academic terms.
That’s another common misconception amongst aspiring writers: the notion that using technical terms like climax, protagonist, antagonist, central conflict, etc. will make their queries and synopses sound professional. In practice, however, while people in the publishing industry do occasionally use these terms, an agent pitching fiction to an editor or an editor pitching it to an editorial committee would rarely describe it this way.
Instead, they would tell the story — as should the writer. As beautifully as possible. After all, part of what’s being sold here is the writing style, and (feel free to chant it with me now, long-term readers) every sentence a writer submits to an agency, publishing house, or contest is a writing sample.
Again, those assessments are not going to be based solely upon whether the writing is strong in a general sense; every book category has slightly different standards for what constitutes good writing. As you may see for yourself, even two habitual readers of literary fiction may disagree on whether an opening page is or not. (Please forgive the giant BOOM! in the background; we know not whence it came.)
The question of where to begin this exciting-sounding plot is crucial to fitting this first page into a book category. Daniel does a marvelous job of tossing the reader directly into the midst of Simon’s personal angst; the speculation about what would have happened if a very minor accident had been a major one is a clever means of demonstrating how stressed-out Simon is.
However, what the character actually says (“Huh”) is not all that character- or situation-revealing — which alone might raise some doubt in Millicent’s mind over whether this is literary fiction. Yes, a person in this situation might actually say it, but the point of dialogue in a novel is not merely to provide a transcript of how people speak: it’s to use that speech selectively to develop character and move a plot around.
Here’s an excellent test for whether a line adds to a scene: try taking it out. If the scene reads as well without it, it probably did not add much.
Let’s apply that test here. While I’m at it, I’m going to change two small things that would have bugged Millicent, but an ordinary reader probably would not have noticed. See if you can catch them.
The cut text doesn’t detract from either the scene or the reader’s sense of who Simon is, does it? All taking it out does is speed up the pacing — which, in a scene as breathless as this, is a plus whether the book is literary fiction, mainstream fiction, or a thriller.
Did you catch the other changes? The most noteworthy: breaking the paragraph between lines 9 and 10, in order to make more palpable the mental change between Simon’s worry and the onset of his feeling of claustrophobia. It also helps offset the line of dialogue, a trifle odd to find in the middle of a narrative paragraph.
An argument could be made against inserting the paragraph break here, of course: beginning a new paragraph with a description as vague as something in the air might not be the best way to capture Millicent’s attention in a literary fiction submission. It would work for a thriller — undefined unease is part of the genre’s stock in trade — but in literary or mainstream fiction, I would advise against forcing the reader to guess what internal or external force (as Heidi mentioned, it’s not entirely clear which) is pressing upon our hero. The reader simply doesn’t know him well enough yet to know what might generate this response.
Then, too, aspiring writers as a group just love statements like something made him turn, somehow, she just knew, and somewhere in the distance, a sound emerged. To a professional reader, such descriptions come across not as mysterious so much as undescriptive.
“What made him turn?” Millicent wonders. “How did she know? From whence did that sound emerge, and while we’re at it, what did it sound like? And why is it my job to fill in the specifics here, rather than the writer’s?”
Good questions, all, if a trifle on the literal side. And while we are discussing literal trifles, did you catch the alteration I made to the header?
I’d be rather surprised if you did: I changed the font from 11 to 12 point, because the slug line should be in the same font as the rest of the manuscript. I also made it black instead of gray.
Hey, I haven’t been kidding about how even the smallest details might affect how Millicent perceives a submission. There’s a bigger issue, however, that might lead her to conclude that Daniel’s first page was not literary fiction.
I can sense some of you literary fiction writers muttering under your breath. “So how I tell my story should be dictated by marketing concerns? That seems horrifyingly anti-artistic. My muse is liable to throw a hissy fit if I devote so much as an instant of my writing time to such prosaic concerns.”
You need not risk offending your muse at the composition stage, oh mutterers, but it would behoove you to invest a bit of thought into what part of your vision of the story is first going to greet Millicent’s eyes. Agents and editors are used to being able to tell by the bottom of page 1 what kind of manuscript is in front of them — and since any reader is likely to project the opening scene or image onto the rest of the book, that’s a legitimate artistic concern.
How so? Well, the art of writing isn’t merely about reproducing the author’s vision on the page: it’s also concerned with conveying that vision to the reader.
Let’s apply that principle to this page 1. It’s vital that the reader’s first impression of Simon matches Daniel’s mental image of him, right? So even the most artistically-minded reviser might want to interrogate the text: is there an external stimulus causing Simon’s claustrophobia, or is all of this pressure internal?
A fringe benefit: the answer to that question is going to tell Millicent quite a lot about the book category. If the sense of being persecuted is entirely the result of clashing pressures in his mind, it’s probably literary fiction. If it’s a combination of internal and external stimuli, it’s probably mainstream fiction — and our Millie will want to have some indication of what the outside force is by the bottom of page 1. If supernatural forces caused his oppression, it’s a paranormal.
And so forth. Since the single easiest excuse Millicent can have for rejecting a submission is if the manuscript appears not to fit into a book category her boss represents, it honestly is in the writer’s best interest to make the opening pages read like opening pages tend to read in his chosen book category.
While you are turning that rather far-ranging self-editing advice around in your mind, let’s move on to Austin’s page 1 and synopsis. As you may see, his approach to literary fiction is quite different from Daniel’s, but Millicent would approach it with the same question in mind: is this literary fiction, or is it another type of book? Or are there other issues here that might distract Millie from that central issue?
Let’s consider these pages at the micro level, then move up to the macro. Unless a manuscript includes footnotes — unusual in fiction, but not unheard-of — every word in it should be in the same font. So if you found the gigantic chapter designation distracting on page 1, you’re certainly not alone — many Millicents would simply reject this page without reading beyond, believing (in this case, wrongly) that a writer who had not learned the requirements of standard format for manuscripts is unlikely to produce polished prose.
Even if Millie was broad-minded enough to overlook the non-standard heading, she would have her opinion confirmed by the use of emdashes, also improper in manuscript submissions. (For those of you new to standard format, dashes should be doubled, with a space between the dashes and the words that come just before and just after it.) And if she makes it to the bottom of the page, there’s the rather odd repetition of the book’s title in the footer. While it’s fairly apparent in soft copy that this was a matter of a misplaced page break, Millicent can only respond to what’s actually on the page.
In short, the formatting here is likely to prevent the writing on this page from getting an impartial reading. That’s a genuine pity, but it’s quite understandable, right? As we have been discussing in recent weeks, a manuscript that’s not in line with professional standards tends to set off warning bells in agencies, because a client who needs to be shown the ropes is inherently more time-consuming to represent than one already familiar with the rules.
Hey, there’s a reason I keep devoting weeks of every year to going over the strictures of standard format. A properly-formatted submission is much more likely to get taken seriously at an agency, publishing house, or contest. Indeed, many literary contests simply disqualify improperly-formatted entries.
There’s also a style-related formatting issue here: the italicized sentence opening the last paragraph is likely to give her pause. On its face — that is, without reading the rest of the paragraph on the next page — this statement doesn’t seem nearly important enough to justify the emphasis.
Again, there’s a very simple test for this: remove the italics. If the text does not lose any meaning by the change, the emphasis did not add to the reader’s understanding of the argument.
Fortunately, all of these formatting problems are quite easy to fix. Take a gander at what a mere 45 seconds of revision achieved — and that included the time to remove the quotation marks around the phrase that isn’t quoting anyone specific and the equivocation about time:
Makes a surprisingly great difference, doesn’t it? To a screener or contest judge in a hurry, it might make all the difference.
There’s another potential red flag here, a style choice that would be more difficult to get past literary fiction-reading Millicent than habitual screeners of other types of writing: all of the this is… statements. While they definitely work dramatically, the use of the passive voice is always a risk in a submission, for the exceedingly simple reason that the overwhelming majority of US-based Millicents have been trained to regard it as a stylistically weak fiction writing. (The passive voice is considered more acceptable outside the United States and in nonfiction.)
How widespread is this opinion? Let me put it this way: the overwhelming majority of freelance editors and most writing teachers routinely advise writers to avoid using the passive voice altogether in narration. As in throughout an entire manuscript.
Personally, I believe that sometimes the passive voice is the best way to convey certain facts (“That’s he, officer!”). However, because this is such a common Millicents’ pet peeve, I would strenuously advise against using the passive voice within the first chapter of a manuscript — or, in this case, the prologue. (A brave choice to submit the prologue in a contest, though, Austin — I would have sent page 1 of Chapter 1.) I would jump up and down shouting to prevent an aspiring writer with talent from indulging in it on page 1 of a submission.
Since — chant it with me now, campers — every sentence in a submission packet is a writing sample, I would also recommend eschewing the passive voice in a synopsis. That’s harder, of course, especially in a story like this, where forces larger than the actors are at play.
Think of it as a writing challenge. And do bear in mind that synopses, like manuscripts, should be in standard format.
More Millicent-friendly, is it not? Because I’m very taken with Austin’s story — that’s not getting lost in all of this detailed critique, is it? — I’d also like to see a few other changes in the synopsis. In fact, I’ve made a couple of them above.
For starters, I attributed the long quote right away: a Millicent in a hurry might not be willing to wait until the following paragraph to find out who is speaking. Generally speaking, however, quoting other writers in one’s marketing materials is not the best strategy for impressing a professional reader: our Millie is trying to find out what kind of writer Austin is, not whether Mark Twain has an engaging style. Instead, I would have preferred to see the synopsis devote that page space to a description of what the Paige Compositor actually was.
Did you notice the other major revision? Actually, there were two: I edited out the commanding tone of the last paragraph (Millicent doesn’t like to be ordered to encounter anyone or anything; she’s an independent soul) and removed the reference to point of view. As we discussed with respect to Daniel’s synopsis, a novel synopsis should concern itself the story of the book, not talk about it in analytical terms.
Or, to put it as Millicent might: the manuscript itself will show her the point of view. In the synopsis, tell the story. And to put it as I invariably do: this is a great opportunity to demonstrate to a professional reader that not only that you can plot an entire book, but that you are a fantastic storyteller.
Does that mean dancing around the passive voice? For literary fiction, definitely. And it’s not a bad idea for synopses for any other type of fiction, either.
All that being said, let me ask you: you still want to read this book, don’t you? That’s the alchemy of a strong, assured narrative voice and a genuinely intriguing premise.
That, my friends, is why making sure the small details are correct is so very important. While it is possible to see that this is potentially a great book in these two pages, the reader needs to concentrate in order not to be distracted by the technical problems we’ve been discussing. That’s the point of standard format: to remove as many distractions as possible, so professional readers may concentrate upon the writing.
And, of course, the nifty premise, which Heidi and I both loved. Being me, I also wanted to talk about tinkering with the book category.
There’s a reason that revision is also known as polishing: as we have seen demonstrated so delightfully in Austin and Daniel’s first pages, even a manuscript that’s awfully darned good can often be improved by a bit of buffing. Twenty or thirty years ago, most agents were willing to take on pre-buffed manuscripts from first-time authors, under the assumption that the acquiring editor was not only going to be willing to help in the burnishing process, but would be eager to help a promising writer develop his voice. Today, unfortunately, editors seldom have that luxury.
It is most assuredly in a talented writer’s best interest, then, to put in the extra hours to put a high shine on his prose — or, in these extremely promising writers’ cases, to put an even higher shine on them. Isn’t your good writing worth it?
I have confidence that it is. Best of luck with these intriguing books, Austin and Daniel, and once again, many thanks to the wonderful Heidi Durrow for lending us her expertise. And, as always, everybody, keep up the good work!