Let’s talk about this: the perils of chatting about one’s writing over the Thanksgiving turkey — and I’m not referring to missing the mashed potatoes as they pass by

In between bouts of frenetic cookery — we have 28 guests coming over for Thanksgiving dinner this year; my mother-in-law, who keeps inviting ‘em, has really been shaking the ol’ family tree to see what relatives will fall out — I’ve been thinking about you, dear readers, and the great grumpiness with which I have been covering standard format for manuscripts of late. Granted, there’s been a lot going on chez Anne lately, over and above the imminence of guests I’ve never seen before, not all of it entirely unrelated to my writing career. And frankly, the strain of NOT discussing the latter in this forum has been a bit, well, grump-inducing.

I really, truly, honestly hope that such portions of my mood that have been spilling over into the blog have not been off-putting to those of you walking through manuscript formatting with me for the first time. It’s hardly a subject designed to render anyone chipper, but it’s arguably the most important single topic I discuss here at Author! Author!

How important do I believe it to be, you ask? Well, my blogging program tells me that this is my 870th post over the last 3+ years. (I know: time flies, doesn’t it?) Of these, 73 have been on standard format, I notice, and I seem to have established 7 distinct categories for it on the archive list located on the lower right-hand side of this page. (Just in case anyone should, say, be wondering if I’ve ever written on a particular subject of interest before, this is the best place to start looking. There is also, for your perusing pleasure, a site search feature located in the upper right-hand corner of this page, for searching by keyword.)

THAT’s how vital I think learning proper formatting is to any aspiring writer’s success. In case you might have missed that over the last week or so.

Deviations from standard format are not the only hurdles submissions face, of course. Like many, if not most, freelance editors, when I begin reading a new manuscript, I anticipate finding certain problems, simply because they are so very common. Run-on sentences are ubiquitous, for instance; in dialogue, characters often use profanity as a substitute for expressing emotion; the actual action of a novel often does not start anywhere near page 1. That sort of thing.

Since there are a few dozen such mistakes that turn up in the vast majority of manuscripts, most professional eyes zero in on them immediately. I’m anticipating launching into lovely, long examinations of some of the most frequent offenders in the weeks and months to come, as a much-needed distraction break skill-building exercise during these panic-inducing tough economic times.

Just keep telling yourself: the Great Depression was actually a really good time for literature in the US.

With Thanksgiving practically upon us, however, I wanted to spend today prepping you to deal with that question aspiring writers so frequently face whenever they are reveling in the warm embrace of their nearest and dearest: “When will your book be coming out?”

As in, “Why is it taking so long for your book to get published? Aren’t you, you know, working hard enough? Isn’t the book any good? Don’t you have enough talent? Shouldn’t you have given up this ridiculous quest long ago?”

Okay, so that’s NOT usually what they say verbatim — but it’s often what we hear, isn’t it, when we’re asked about an unpublished book’s progress? Even the most innocuous inquiry, if it comes at the wrong time, can sound like a challenge for us to produce instantly a full and complete explanation of exactly why this book DOES deserve to be picked up, and pronto.

And then, before we realize what’s happened, we’ve been talking about the horrors of searching for an agent, or revising a manuscript, or finishing that last chapter, for 20 minutes as our original questioner looks at us with deer-the-headlights eyes and the gravy gets cold.

Such inquirers know not what they’re getting into, obviously.

Amazingly enough, non-writers often do not have the vaguest conception that implications that the process is taking too long can be to writers fighting words, akin to calling someone’s mother…well, I wasn’t brought up to call people’s mothers that sort of thing. It’s not nice.

In fact — and I tremble to be the one to tell you this, but better that I inoculate you before your Great-Aunt Rhoda’s new husband mentions it while passing you a second helping of turkey — one’s kith and kin frequently seem to be laboring under the to-writers-bizarre delusion that you will be HURT if they do not ask you how the book is going.

They don’t want to be remiss or insensitive about your little hobby, after all.

So they fling their arms around you practically the instant you cross the threshold into their homes, bearing platters of cookies that you took time out of your writing schedule to bake, bellowing at the top of their lungs, “Darling? Have you finished that novel yet?”

Or, “Sweetheart, what a lovely color on you. When will I be able to pick up your book on Amazon?”

Or, “I won’t even ask if you’ve managed to sell that book of yours yet, so spare me the speech about how hard it is to catch an agent’s eye. And is it safe to assume that you burned the pies again this year?” (Some relatives are more supportive than others.)

In North America, at least, it is not considered permissible, or even legal, for a writer to respond to such ripostes by taking a swing at such people in response, or poisoning their holiday punch, or even making fun of that completely unattractive pumpkin-orange sweater with the dancing turkey on it that they’re wearing.

No, we’re expected to smile, hug back, and say, “Oh, it’s coming along.” Rather than, say, telling them anything that remotely resembles the truth, especially if the truth entails something along the lines of three or four years of extremely stressful querying book #1 while trying to write book #2, or a year and a half of revising a manuscript seven times before one’s agent is willing to send it out to editors, or eight months of nail-biting anxiety while s/he does send it out to editors.

Because, let’s face it, unless your relatives happen to be writers themselves, they’re probably not going to understand that clapping you on the back and telling you to visualize your book’s selling magnificently is going to make you want to scream, if not throw cranberries at somebody.

Take a nice, deep breath if this impulse begins to overwhelm you: most non-writers have absolutely no idea of the difficulties that writers face getting into print. Heck, even for writers, discovering just how challenging it is to land an agent and/or sell a book often comes as a big, ugly surprise.

Come on — you probably remember precisely where you were and what you were wearing when you first realized that there was more to winning this game than talent, don’t you? Or that even the most brilliant authors don’t produce Pulitzer-worthy material in first drafts, but revise until their fingers are sore?

Catching your mother playing Tooth Fairy probably didn’t even come close in the disillusionment department.

Fortunately for human happiness as a whole, most members of the general public are spared more or less permanently the disorienting shock of learning that not all good books necessarily get published, that agents don’t just pick up every piece of good writing that they read, or that speed of composition usually isn’t a particularly good indicator of writing quality.

So when George, your next-door neighbor, waltzes into your kitchen and booms, “When are you going to be finished with that damned book of yours, Harriet?” he probably doesn’t mean to be nasty. Or even passive-aggressive.

No, George just isn’t that kind of guy.

He almost certainly believes, bless his heart, that by remembering to tease you light-heartedly about the book you have been SLAVING over for the past fifteen years, he is offering non-judgmental support. Because in his world, if you HAD finished the book in question, you would already be burbling with excitement about its imminent release — if not planning what to wear on Oprah.

Try not to judge him too harshly; you believed in the Easter Bunny once, too.

Bizarrely enough, these unintentionally pointed questions from well-meaning non-writers most emphatically do not cease after one lands an agent. Quite the contrary: they increase, often exponentionally.

Why? Well, the average citizen of this fine republic has only a vague sense of what a literary agent actually DOES with a book; it is not all that uncommon for one’s kith and kin to conflate an agent with an editor. Or even — brace yourselves, those of you who have signed with agents within the last year — landing an agent with landing a book contract.

As any agented-but-not-yet-published writer can tell you, this is an extremely common confusion. Although they may not say it outright, most people will just assume that because a writer is so excited to have landed an agent, the agent must therefore have BOUGHT the book.

“So,” these kind-hearted souls chortle at holiday time, sidling up to a writer who has been sitting on the proverbial pins and needles for four interminable months, waiting to hear back on a round of submissions to editors, “when will I be able to buy your book?”

They mean to be supportive, honest. Which is why they will not understand at all when you burst into tears and empty your glass of eggnog all over their sparkly holiday sweaters. They will think, believe it or not, that you’re overreacting.

Because they genuinely mean so well, you must not, under any circumstances, kill such well-meaning souls for asking what are, from a writer’s perspective, phenomenally stupid questions. No, even if the implication of such questions is that these would-be supporters apparently haven’t listened to ANYTHING you have ever told them on the trials of writing a book, finding an agent, working with an agent after one has found one, meeting editorial deadlines, or any of the other myriad trying phenomena associated with aspiring authorship. Nor is it considered polite to scream at them, or even glare in a manner that might frighten any small children who might happen to be gnawing on a drumstick nearby.

And, nice person that you are, you are going to honor these restrictions. Even if you’re not all that nice, you certainly want to retain George on your mailing list for the happy day when you DO have a book out for him to purchase.

So what’s a writer to do, especially when these questions come during unusually stressful times, such as when that agent you met at a conference has had your first fifty pages for three months and counting, or when you’ve just received three requests for material (because you were so good about SIOAing those query letters in early November) and are frantically trying to get those packets out the door before the end of the year?

(My, that was a long sentence, wasn’t it? You might want to avoid paragraph-long questions in those submissions. Yes, I know that Henry James was a great advocate of page-long sentences. I’m fond of his work, but I suspect that he would have rather a hard time getting a manuscript past Millicent today.)

Well, you COULD regard the question as a serious inquiry, and talk for the next fifteen minutes about characterization, the desirability of semicolon usage vis-à-vis Millicent’s literary tastes, and just how much you hate form rejection letters.

If you are gifted at disregarding your interlocutor’s eyes glazing over for minutes at a time, this actually isn’t a bad strategy: once you have established a firm reputation for waxing long, humorless, and/or angry on the subject, the non-writers in your social circle may well learn not to ask. Depending upon how sensitive one happens to be to such questions, that might be a reasonable goal.

If your kith and kin’s avoiding the topic of your writing like the proverbial plague is not your idea of a comfortable Thanksgiving gathering, I would save this tack for when you are speaking with other writers. Like any shop talk, it’s far more interesting to those who deal with it regularly than to anyone else.

Alternatively, you could, most politely, take your favorite cousin by the arm and say confidentially, “You know, Gladys, I spend so much time obsessing over my book that I’m likely to bore you if I start to talk about it. Do you mind if we give my brain a rest and talk about something completely different?”

I hate to break it to you, but Gladys may actually be relieved to hear this.

Why? Because of the naïve-but-pervasive belief in the inevitability of publication for talented writers — what, do they think that our fairy godmothers go around whacking editors at publishing houses over the head with their wands on our books’ behalf? Don’t be silly; that’s the agent’s job — non-writers (and writers who have not yet worked up the nerve to submit) are often puzzled by the intensity of writerly reactions to casual inquiries about their work.

Especially if they only asked in the first place to be polite, just as they would have asked you about fly-fishing had that been your passion. (People do, you know.) Again, the people who are going to be the most fascinated in your book’s ups and downs at every stage are going to be other writers.

Actually, after you’re agented, other writers may be your most persistent questioners, especially writers who have not yet had a book subjected to the microscopic analysis that is editorial scrutiny. It can be a very lengthy process, the timing of which is utterly outside the author’s control, but even most writers don’t know that until they have been through the submission wringer themselves.

But if they haven’t, they think they’re just supporting a fellow writer when they ask, “So, has your agent managed to sell that book of yours yet? What’s the hold-up?”

Or — not that I have any first-hand experience with this or anything — “What’s new with that memoir of yours that publisher bought a few years ago? Are they still frightened by the lawsuit threats? I can’t believe how long it’s been.”

As if you would have sold — or finished, or released — your book but neglected to shout the news from the rooftops. Or at least to your Christmas card list.

I like to think that they ask out of love — as in they would LOVE to be able to celebrate the triumphs of a writer that they know. Admittedly, it sometimes takes some determination on my part to cling to this inspiring little belief (when one’s memoir has been on hold at a publishing house for a couple of years, people do tend to express sympathy by venting frustration about the delay at one), but ultimately, I’m quite sure I’m happier than I would be if I took every iteration of the question as a demand that I instantly drop everything I’m doing and rush off to rectify the situation.

Because that’s not really what they mean, is it? No matter how much such well-meant indignation might sound like criticism to the writer at whom it is aimed, badgering was probably the last thing on the commenter’s mind.

I know, I know; it doesn’t feel that way, and it may be kind of hard to believe that your Uncle Gregory, the guy who has relentlessly picked to pieces everyone you have ever even considered dating, is trying to be non-judgmental about your publishing success. Just hear me out on this one.

This is a translation problem. Most of the time, neither writers nor non-writers mean their enthusiastic cries of, “Is it done/sold/out yet?” as criticism about not being the latest Oprah book club pick. Not even if they walk right up to you and say, as if it had never occurred to you or as if every writer in the world didn’t aspire to it, “You know, your book belongs on Oprah.”

What they mean is, “I like you. I want you to succeed. And even though I don’t really understand what you’re going through, I want to acknowledge that you’re trying.”

A little Pollyannaish of me to translate it that way? Perhaps. But permit me to suggest a little stocking-stuffer that writers can give their kith and kin this holiday season: just for this one dinner party or get-together, assume that that IS what they do mean, even if they express it poorly. And respond to the underlying sentiment, not the words.

Just my little suggestion for keeping the peace on that typically not-the-most-silent of nights.

Let me throw the question open to you, readers: how do you cope with this avocation-specific form of holiday stress? Have you come up with clever comebacks, succinct explanations, cunning evasions, or other brilliant coping mechanisms that you would like to share with the Author! Author! community?

Or, alternatively, a funny story about the time that you couldn’t stand it anymore and tossed a candied yam at an over-persistent relative who kept asking why you haven’t given up by now? (I probably shouldn’t encourage such behavior, but I have to admit, I would probably get some vicarious pleasure from hearing about it. Am I the only one?)

I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say. In the meantime, I’ve got vats of cranberry jelly to make, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have forgotten to stock up on cinnamon sticks.

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