Posted on - 12 Comments on The Point-of-View Nazis return, bigger and badder than ever

The Point-of-View Nazis return, bigger and badder than ever

I was thinking about all of you at a film festival earlier today, during a short film showcase. (Yes, it was kind of arty film fest where one sees experimental shorts. I like to keep up with a wide variety of artistic expression.) In a documentary called Absolute Zero, a man freezes to death in what he believes to be a refrigerated (it isn’t) railway car. Trapped, with no prospect of escape, he documented his sensations while yielding to apparently psychosomatic hypothermia by writing on the car’s walls at periodic intervals. After it finished, I leaned over to my date and whispered, “Now THAT’s an active protagonist!”

See? It can be done.

Actually, I’m posting significantly later tonight than usual, because I found I was too disturbed in the wake of one of the evening’s full-length films to be either funny or objective before the dead of night arrived. The culprit: quite the creepiest film about stalking EVER, a little flick called For Love and Stacie. Not my usual fare (or even my preferred narrative style), but cleverly done and very thought-provoking.

Let’s just say that the protagonist was very active indeed, and leave it at that.

I had planned to launch into the burning issue of juggling multiple protagonists today, but all of the control issues of that film must have seeped into my consciousness: I had written only a few paragraphs before I noticed that I had already used the term “Point-of-View Nazi” in passing twice. Rather than making those of you new to this site guess what this means, I thought I might go the wacky route of spending today’s post defining it, and THEN use it in later discussion.

Hey, if you’d seen these films, you would need a little distraction, too.

So who is the Point-of-View Nazi, and how can he harm those of you who favor, say, the use of multiple protagonists?

A Point-of-View Nazi (POVN) is a reader — most often a teacher, critic, agent, editor, or other person with authority over writers — who believes firmly that the ONLY way to write third-person-narrated fiction is to pick a single character in the book or scene (generally the protagonist) and report ONLY his or her (usually his) thoughts and sensations throughout the piece. Like first-person narration, this conveys only the internal experience of a single character, rather than several or all of the characters in the scene or book.

In other words, the POVN is the Millicent who automatically throws up her hands over multiple protagonist narration REGARDLESS OF HOW WELL IT IS DONE. And while this ilk of screener has been less prominent in recent years than formerly, those of you who play interesting experiments with narrative voice definitely need to know of her existence.

Now, of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with tight third person narration focused upon a single character, inherently: it combines the advantages of a dispassionate narrator with the plotting and pacing plusses of a single perspective. It permits the author to sink deeply (or not) into the consciousness of a chosen character without losing the emotional distance of an omniscient narrator. Since no one else’s POV is depicted, it can render the later actions of other characters more surprising to the reader, which can in turn help build suspense and conflict on the page.

It is not, however, the only third-person narrative possibility — a fact that drives your garden-variety POVN positively mad with rage.

Okay, not I’m-gonna-cause-some-mayhem mad, but certainly I’m-gonna-reject-this-manuscript mad.

All of us have our own particular favorite narrative styles, naturally, and many of us have been known to lobby for their use. What distinguishes a POVN from a mere POV enthusiast is his active campaign to dissuade all other writers from EVER considering the inclusion of more than one POV in a third-person narrative.

Just ask one — trust me, he would be more than glad to tell you how to write your book. He would like multiple-consciousness narratives to be wiped from the face of the earth with all possible speed, please. He has been known to tell his students — or members of his writing group, or his clients, or the writers whom he edits or represents — that multiple POV narration in the third person is, to put it politely, terrible writing.

It should be stamped out, he feels — by statute, if necessary. And definitely by rejection letter.

So much for most of the fiction currently being published in the English-speaking world, I guess. And so much for Jane Austen and most of the illustrious third-person narrative-writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who used multiple perspectives to great effect.

I bring up our forebears advisedly, because one of the reasons that POVNs are so common is that in the post-World War II era, the prose stylings of the 18th and 19th centuries tended to be rejected as old-fashioned (and therefore bad) by writing teachers. “Downright Dickensian,” many a POVN has cried, covering her students’ first forays into fiction with gallons of red ink. “How can we possibly follow the story, with so many characters’ perspectives?”

I should stop here and make a distinction between the POVN and a good professional reader who objects when a narrative that HAS been sticking to a single POV suddenly wanders into another character’s head. That can be genuinely confusing to any reader, regardless of preexisting belief systems.

Think about it: if a book has been looking out of the protagonist’s eyes for 147 pages, it is a little jarring for the reader to be abruptly introduced to another character’s thoughts. The implication is that the protagonist has magically become psychic, and should be benefiting, along with the reader, from hearing the thoughts of others.

No matter what perspective you have chosen for your book, it would behoove you to give it a once-over, checking for this species of slip; it drives those of us who read manuscripts for a living batty.

A POVN, however, is not merely the kind of well-meaning soul who will point out this type of slip to aspiring writers. No, a POVN will jump upon ANY instance of multiple perspective, castigating it as inherently unacceptable, even unpublishable writing — and will rather smugly inform the author that she has broken an ironclad writing rule by doing it.

They believe it, too. Many of today’s more adamant POVNs are merely transmitting the lessons they were taught in their first good writing classes: for years, many English professors set it down as a general rule that multiple POVs were inherently distracting in a third-person narrative.

Take that, CATCH-22!

Personally, I think the focus of the narrative voice is a legitimate stylistic choice, up to the writer, rather than something that can be imposed like the Code of Hammurabi on every novel wavering on human fingertips, waiting to be written. My primary criteria for judging voice is whether a writer’s individual writing choices serve her story well, rather than rejecting a manuscript outright because of a preconceived notion of what is and isn’t possible.

Again, call me zany.

To be fair, though, as an inveterate reader of literary fiction, I have a special affection for authors whose talent is so vast that they can pull off breaking a major writing commandment from time to time. Alice Walker’s use of punctuation alone in THE COLOR PURPLE would have caused many rigid rule-huggers to dismiss her writing on page 1, but the result is, I think, brilliant.

(Fortunately, and probably not entirely coincidentally, she already had an agent when she wrote it, so she did not have to subject that stylistic choice to the vagaries of Millicent and her ilk.)

I love to discover a writer so skilled at her craft that she can afford to bend a rule or two. Heaven forefend that every writer’s voice should start to sound alike — or that writing should all start to sound as though it dropped from a single pen. Which is precisely what hard-and-fast rules of narrative style tend to produce, across a writing population.

One effect of the reign of the POVNs — whose views go through periods of being very popular indeed, then fall into disuse, only to rise anew — has been the production of vast quantities of stories and novels where the protagonist’s POV and the narrator’s are astonishingly similar. (And, wouldn’t you know it, those POVs are overwhelmingly upper-middle class, college-educated thinkers rather than doers. The kind of people who might, say, have the time and resources to go through a low-residency MFA program. Astonishing coincidence, eh? Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the POVN’s teachers were also the ones who kept barking, “Write what you know!” could it?)

The POVNs have also given us a whole slew of books where the other characters are EXACTLY as they appear to the protagonist: no more, no less. The rise of television and movies, where the camera is usually an impersonal narrator of the visibly obvious, has also contributed to this kind of “What you see is what you get” characterization (if you’ll forgive my quoting the late great Flip Wilson in this context).

The result is a whole lot of submissions that just beg the question, “Why wasn’t this book just written in the first person, if we’re not going to gain any significant insight into the other characters?”

I suspect that I am not the only reader who addresses such questions to an unhearing universe in the dead of night, but for a POVN, the answer is abundantly obvious. The piece in question focused upon a single POV because there is no other way to write a third-person scene.

Tomorrow, I shall, I suspect, take issue with this, after the effects of that disturbing film (which was, I now realize, very much a single-perspective view) have won off a little. Be safe, everybody, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The plague of passivity IV: HELP! I’m tied to a train track!

The plague of passivity IV: HELP! I’m tied to a train track!

I’ve been thrilled to see the response to this series on protagonist passivity, my friends: even if you are not a habitual reader of comments, you might want to check out the subsequent discussions on the passivity posts; they’ve been very interesting, prompting me to get more and more specific in my advice. For example, charming new reader Ashleigh wrote in over the weekend with some great follow-up questions, ones that really got me thinking. Quoth Ashleigh:

You encouraged us to go through our manuscripts and mark places where the protagonist is not the primary actor and where she is merely observing. What about those instances when a character is reacting to an external stimulus? Does that make her the secondary actor rather than the primary actor? Can a protagonist be passive because they are too reactive and not proactive enough?

Doesn’t that get right to the core of the matter? Before I realized it, I had written four pages (standard format) in response. Then I thought: hey, shouldn’t I be sharing this with the rest of the class? Shouldn’t I, in fact, extend it into an entire post?

So the topic for today is how active is active enough, when the perspective is focused upon a particular character?

In any story, the protagonist is going to be acted upon by external sources. Certain matters are beyond the control of even the most active protagonist. A tree falling upon her house, for instance, or a boss’ annoying whims. Her boyfriend’s being gay. Civil rioting. Not winning the quilting prize at the county fair. Death. That sort of thing.

In each of these cases, it would be unreasonable to expect the protagonist to be the generator (or generatrix, in this case) of the action of the scene. Gravity made that tree fall, after all, coupled perhaps with a little root rot.

Obviously, the protagonist is going to respond to these external stimuli. A passive protagonist will respond primarily, from the reader’s point of view, with descriptive information about the effects of the catastrophe du jour. (“My God! Why did that tree have to fall on Aunt Eugenia’s tea service!”) Often, this takes the form of self-recrimination (“Why oh why did I not listen to that handsome arborist?”) or resentment against the cause of the problem (“Daddy never got around to retrofitting the house. Mama always told him the roof would cave in someday!”)

As informative and entertaining as such responses frequently are, they don’t actually change the situation at hand, do they? And that should be your rule of thumb when deciding whether a protagonist’s response to external stimulus is too passive: is anything within the situation DIFFERENT as a result of the protagonist’s response?

For instance, if protagonist Angela is living through an earthquake, she is not what is making the ground shake: unless she possesses some godlike powers, she is being acted upon by the ground. But the writer can choose to have her just crouch under a table, riding it out (a good plan in real life) or show her doing something in response (saving a puppy from falling glass, perhaps.)

In neither instance is Angela the cause of the primary event of the scene, but the first case, she is passive; in the second, she is not.

That was an easy instance; it becomes more complicated when other, more action-generating people are involved. This time, let’s have Angela be acted-upon by another human being: she’s waiting in line at the bank when a robber walks in and threatens everybody.

Again, in real life, Angela would probably be best served by being passive — she might well choose to down on the floor as requested, waiting all a-tremble for the robber to get the money and go. On the other hand, she would be most active if she jumped up, wrestled the gunman to the floor, and once again snatched a puppy from the jaws of imminent harm.

But realistically, Angela could still be active in her response, even without heroics. She could, for instance, surreptitiously work her coat over that puppy while she is lying on the floor, ostensibly following the robber’s directions, or whisper encouragement to the hysterical old man lying next to her who might be shot if he keeps whimpering.

In both these cases, although an outside observer might consider Angela passive, the reader knows better: she is struggling against her fate in small, believable manners. And that makes her the primary actor in the scene, if the narrative perspective remains focused upon her.

Which is, I suppose, a long-winded way of saying that Ashleigh’s last question went right to the heart of the matter. The protagonist does not need to cause the action in a given scene to be an actor in it, for our passivity-analysis purposes — she merely has to ACT. Necessarily, she’s not always going to be the primary actor, but she can always do or say something, however tiny, in response to what is going on, to keep herself in the game.

I’m not saying it’s always going to be easy to discover how to demonstrate this on the page, particularly for shy characters. The greater the external stimulus, the more difficult it is to find that spark of autonomy: when people feel helpless, “How can I alter this situation in an indirect manner?” is not usually the first question that leaps to their minds.

But the attempt to change the situation — not necessarily the success of that attempt — honestly does make a great difference from the reader’s perspective. On the page, whether a murder victim scratches her attacker or freezes in fear — both completely understandable reactions, right? — can be the line between an active protagonist and a passive one.

Although I applaud any author brave enough to write from the perspective of someone on the bottom end of that extreme a power differential, victims in fiction are all too commonly, well, victims. Personally, I think it is far sadder when a vibrant, complex individual character’s life is destroyed than a passive one’s; I like to see characters living fully until they go phut.

Even if this means going away somewhere else in thought, because there is no other course of action available. Let’s say that Angela is now tied up on a railroad track, poor girl, à la The Perils of Pauline. Clearly, there’s not a lot of physical action she can take in this instance, or even verbal action: trains make a lot of noise, after all.

So whatever can she do? She could just lie there and scream, waiting for someone to rescue her, of course, while the villain twirls his moustache in glee: passive. Or she could, in the face of imminent death, project herself into a fantasy of ascending the peak of Mt. Everest, seeking cool while the locomotive’s hot breath is bearing down upon her: active.

Tell me, which would you rather read?

When your protagonist is acted-upon, concentrate upon finding that instant of autonomy, rather than trying to force the protagonist to take control of a scene that would realistically be beyond her control. Figure out where a miniscule change is possible, or where an attempt to fight back would be plausible.

Do I hear some snickering out there? “Right,” I hear some of you gigglers say. “Tell me, Anne, how is that protagonist going to find autonomy against the reality of that falling tree?”

A whole bunch of ways, O snickerers. She could get out of its way, for instance, or snatch that ubiquitous puppy away from its far-reaching branches just in the nick of time. She could drag everyone within dragging distance into the wine cellar, anticipating the end of the world. Or she could try to run into the house to save Aunt Eugenia’s tea service — even if she’s stopped by that handsome arborist or a concerned neighbor, her attempt to do SOMETHING to save the situation is going to give her power in the scene.

So there.

If you can find the time, a great exercise for developing a sense of active response is to write a scene where a protagonist is listening to a non-stop talker, a situation where it would require actual rudeness to get in a word edgewise. How can the protagonist control or alter the interaction, if only for a second at a time?

Okay, how can she do it without picturing herself on the peak of Mt. Everest?

There are no easy answers here, my friends, only meaty challenges to your creativity. I know you’re up to it. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 14 Comments on The plague of passivity IV: HELP! I’m tied to a train track!

The plague of passivity IV: HELP! I’m tied to a train track!

I’ve been thrilled to see the response to this series on protagonist passivity, my friends: even if you are not a habitual reader of comments, you might want to check out the subsequent discussions on the passivity posts; they’ve been very interesting, prompting me to get more and more specific in my advice. For example, charming new reader Ashleigh wrote in over the weekend with some great follow-up questions, ones that really got me thinking. Quoth Ashleigh:

You encouraged us to go through our manuscripts and mark places where the protagonist is not the primary actor and where she is merely observing. What about those instances when a character is reacting to an external stimulus? Does that make her the secondary actor rather than the primary actor? Can a protagonist be passive because they are too reactive and not proactive enough?

Doesn’t that get right to the core of the matter? Before I realized it, I had written four pages (standard format) in response. Then I thought: hey, shouldn’t I be sharing this with the rest of the class? Shouldn’t I, in fact, extend it into an entire post?

So the topic for today is how active is active enough, when the perspective is focused upon a particular character?

In any story, the protagonist is going to be acted upon by external sources. Certain matters are beyond the control of even the most active protagonist. A tree falling upon her house, for instance, or a boss’ annoying whims. Her boyfriend’s being gay. Civil rioting. Not winning the quilting prize at the county fair. Death. That sort of thing.

In each of these cases, it would be unreasonable to expect the protagonist to be the generator (or generatrix, in this case) of the action of the scene. Gravity made that tree fall, after all, coupled perhaps with a little root rot.

Obviously, the protagonist is going to respond to these external stimuli. A passive protagonist will respond primarily, from the reader’s point of view, with descriptive information about the effects of the catastrophe du jour. (“My God! Why did that tree have to fall on Aunt Eugenia’s tea service!”) Often, this takes the form of self-recrimination (“Why oh why did I not listen to that handsome arborist?”) or resentment against the cause of the problem (“Daddy never got around to retrofitting the house. Mama always told him the roof would cave in someday!”)

As informative and entertaining as such responses frequently are, they don’t actually change the situation at hand, do they? And that should be your rule of thumb when deciding whether a protagonist’s response to external stimulus is too passive: is anything within the situation DIFFERENT as a result of the protagonist’s response?

For instance, if protagonist Angela is living through an earthquake, she is not what is making the ground shake: unless she possesses some godlike powers, she is being acted upon by the ground. But the writer can choose to have her just crouch under a table, riding it out (a good plan in real life) or show her doing something in response (saving a puppy from falling glass, perhaps.)

In neither instance is Angela the cause of the primary event of the scene, but the first case, she is passive; in the second, she is not.

That was an easy instance; it becomes more complicated when other, more action-generating people are involved. This time, let’s have Angela be acted-upon by another human being: she’s waiting in line at the bank when a robber walks in and threatens everybody.

Again, in real life, Angela would probably be best served by being passive — she might well choose to down on the floor as requested, waiting all a-tremble for the robber to get the money and go. On the other hand, she would be most active if she jumped up, wrestled the gunman to the floor, and once again snatched a puppy from the jaws of imminent harm.

But realistically, Angela could still be active in her response, even without heroics. She could, for instance, surreptitiously work her coat over that puppy while she is lying on the floor, ostensibly following the robber’s directions, or whisper encouragement to the hysterical old man lying next to her who might be shot if he keeps whimpering.

In both these cases, although an outside observer might consider Angela passive, the reader knows better: she is struggling against her fate in small, believable manners. And that makes her the primary actor in the scene, if the narrative perspective remains focused upon her.

Which is, I suppose, a long-winded way of saying that Ashleigh’s last question went right to the heart of the matter. The protagonist does not need to cause the action in a given scene to be an actor in it, for our passivity-analysis purposes — she merely has to ACT. Necessarily, she’s not always going to be the primary actor, but she can always do or say something, however tiny, in response to what is going on, to keep herself in the game.

I’m not saying it’s always going to be easy to discover how to demonstrate this on the page, particularly for shy characters. The greater the external stimulus, the more difficult it is to find that spark of autonomy: when people feel helpless, “How can I alter this situation in an indirect manner?” is not usually the first question that leaps to their minds.

But the attempt to change the situation — not necessarily the success of that attempt — honestly does make a great difference from the reader’s perspective. On the page, whether a murder victim scratches her attacker or freezes in fear — both completely understandable reactions, right? — can be the line between an active protagonist and a passive one.

Although I applaud any author brave enough to write from the perspective of someone on the bottom end of that extreme a power differential, victims in fiction are all too commonly, well, victims. Personally, I think it is far sadder when a vibrant, complex individual character’s life is destroyed than a passive one’s; I like to see characters living fully until they go phut.

Even if this means going away somewhere else in thought, because there is no other course of action available. Let’s say that Angela is now tied up on a railroad track, poor girl, à la The Perils of Pauline. Clearly, there’s not a lot of physical action she can take in this instance, or even verbal action: trains make a lot of noise, after all.

So whatever can she do? She could just lie there and scream, waiting for someone to rescue her, of course, while the villain twirls his moustache in glee: passive. Or she could, in the face of imminent death, project herself into a fantasy of ascending the peak of Mt. Everest, seeking cool while the locomotive’s hot breath is bearing down upon her: active.

Tell me, which would you rather read?

When your protagonist is acted-upon, concentrate upon finding that instant of autonomy, rather than trying to force the protagonist to take control of a scene that would realistically be beyond her control. Figure out where a miniscule change is possible, or where an attempt to fight back would be plausible.

Do I hear some snickering out there? “Right,” I hear some of you gigglers say. “Tell me, Anne, how is that protagonist going to find autonomy against the reality of that falling tree?”

A whole bunch of ways, O snickerers. She could get out of its way, for instance, or snatch that ubiquitous puppy away from its far-reaching branches just in the nick of time. She could drag everyone within dragging distance into the wine cellar, anticipating the end of the world. Or she could try to run into the house to save Aunt Eugenia’s tea service — even if she’s stopped by that handsome arborist or a concerned neighbor, her attempt to do SOMETHING to save the situation is going to give her power in the scene.

So there.

If you can find the time, a great exercise for developing a sense of active response is to write a scene where a protagonist is listening to a non-stop talker, a situation where it would require actual rudeness to get in a word edgewise. How can the protagonist control or alter the interaction, if only for a second at a time?

Okay, how can she do it without picturing herself on the peak of Mt. Everest?

There are no easy answers here, my friends, only meaty challenges to your creativity. I know you’re up to it. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 3 Comments on The plague of passivity III: oh, what am I to DO?

The plague of passivity III: oh, what am I to DO?

Toward the end of my last post, I snuck in an aside about how writers often use passivity as a means of increasing their protagonists’ perceived likeability. Likeability tends to be a sore point amongst fiction writers, especially for those of us who write about female protagonists: when we include characters in our work whose political views are a bit challenging, for instance, or have sexual kinks beyond what the mainstream media currently considers normal, or even pursue their goals too straightforwardly, we are often told that our characters are not likeable enough.

Translation: according to New Yorkers, this chick might not play in Peoria.

Frankly, I think the industry tends to underestimate Peorians, but the fact remains, it actually isn’t all that unusual for an agent or editor to ask a writer to tone down a particular character’s quirks. Usually, these requests refer to secondary characters (as in, “Does Tony’s sister really have to be a lesbian?” or “Could the Nazi brother be just a little bit right-wing instead?”) or to specific scenes (“Need she tie Bob down?”).

Occasionally, though, the request is not quite so helpfully phrased: “I didn’t like the protagonist,” an editor will say. “If you fix her, maybe I’ll pick up the book.”

(Did I just hear some jaws hitting the floor? Yes, Virginia, it has become quite common for editors to ask for major revisions PRIOR to making an offer on a novel. Sometimes several rounds of revisions, even, so the writer is essentially performing rewrites on command for free. THAT’s how tight the fiction market is right now; ten years ago, most good agents would have laughed at such a request before a contract was signed.)

Much of the time, the author responds to such requests by making the character MORE passive — a bad move. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s a common writerly mistake to believe that a passive protagonist is automatically a likeable one.

It’s understandable, of course: Passive Paul’s a courteous fellow, typically, always eager to step aside and let somebody else take the lead. Almost all of his turmoil is in his head; he tends to be rather polite verbally, reserving his most pointed barbs for internal monologue.

Why, his boss/friend/wife/arch enemy can taunt him for half the book before he makes a peep — and then, it’s often indirect: he’ll vent at somebody else. His dog, maybe, or a passing motorist.

Romantically, Paul’s a very slow mover, too; he’s the grown-up version of that boy in your fifth-grade class who had a crush upon you that he had no language to express, so he yanked on your pigtails. He’s been known to yearn at the love of his life for two-thirds of a book without saying word one to her. Perhaps, his subconscious figures, she will spontaneously decide she likes me with no effort on my part — and astonishingly, half the time, his subconscious ends up being right about this!

Our Paul most emphatically did not cause the central problems of the plot — far from it. He’s usually the guy who tries to get everyone to calm down. Passive Paul has taken to heart Ben Franklin’s much-beloved maxim, “He in quarrels interpose/must often wipe a bloody nose.” He just doesn’t want to get INVOLVED, you know?

Oh, he SAYS he does, and certainly THINKS he does, but deep down, he’s a voyeur. All he really wants is for the bad things happening to him to be happening to somebody else four feet away. As a result, he watches conflict between other characters without intervening, as if they were on TV.

Yes, plenty of people feel that way in real life, especially Ordinary Joes who are unwittingly drawn into Conspiracies Beyond their Ken. We all have our moments of adolescent yearning when we long to have the entire universe rearrange itself around us, in order to get us what we want.

But as appealing and universal as that fantasy may be, it is very hard to turn into an exciting plot. What tends to end up on the page is a great deal of what we here on the West Coast call processing: lengthy examination of self, loved ones, and/or the situation in order to wring every last drop of psychological import from one’s life.

What does this look like on the page, you ask? Paul encounters a thorny problem. (Writers LOVE working through logical possibilities in their heads, so their protagonists seldom lack for mulling material.) So he dons his proverbial thinking cap…

…and two pages later, he’s still running through the possibilities, which are often very interesting. Interesting enough, in fact, that they would have made perfectly dandy scenes, had the author chosen to present them as live-action scenes that actually occurred. Instead, they are summarized in a few lines, told, rather than shown.

Did that set off warning bells for anyone but me?

Yes, there are plenty of good books where the protagonists sit around and think about things for chapters at a time. But before you start quoting 19th-century novelists who habitually had their leads agonize for a hundred pages or so before doing anything whatsoever, ask yourself this: how many novels of this ilk can you name that were published within the last five years? Written by first-time novelists?

Okay, how about ones NOT first published in the British Isles?

Come up with many? If you did, could you pass their agents’ names along to the rest of us with all possible speed?

Because, honestly, in the current very tight fiction market, there aren’t many North American agents who express this preference — and still fewer who act upon it in establishing their client lists. They see beautiful writing about inert characters more than you might think.

(Especially if they represent literary fiction; unfortunately, there seems to be a sizable and actively writing portion of the literary community who proceeds on the assumption that literary fiction SHOULDN’T be about anything in particular. But literary fiction refers to the writing style, not the plotline: Cormac McCarthy’s hyper-literary current hit THE ROAD is a reworking of a premise long familiar to any SF/Fantasy reader, after all.)

Protagonists who feel sorry for themselves are particularly prone to thought-ridden passivity: life happens to them, and they react to it. Oh, how lucidly they resent the forces that act upon them, while they wait around for those forces to strike back at them again! How redolent of feeling do the juices in which they are stewing become!

This is fine for a scene or two, but remember, professional readers measure their waiting time in lines of text, not pages.

To say that they bore easily is like saying that you might get a touch chilly if you visited the North Pole without a coat: true, yes, but something of an understatement, and one that might get you hurt if you relied upon it too literally.

“But wait!” I hear some of you shouting. “Now I’m so paranoid about Passive Paul and his lethargic brethren and sistern that I’m terrified that my book will be rejected every time my protagonist pauses for breath! I’m no longer sure what’s being nice and what’s being passive!”

Never fear, my friends. When you are in doubt about a scene, ask yourself the following series of questions about it, to reveal whether your protagonist is taking an active enough role in, well, his own life. If you can honestly answer yes to all of them, chances are good that you don’t have a passivity problem on your hands.

(1) Is it clear why these events are happening to my protagonist, rather than to someone else? (Hint: “Because the book’s ABOUT Paul!” is not an insufficient answer, professionally speaking.)

(2) Does the scene reveal significant aspects of my protagonist’s character that have not yet been seen in the book?

(3) Is there conflict on every page of this scene? If yes, is my protagonist causing some of the conflict?

(4) Does the conflict arise organically? In other words, does it seem to be a natural outcropping of a person with my protagonist’s passions, skills, and background walking into this particular situation?

(5) Does this scene change the protagonist’s situation with respect to the plot? Is either the plot or an important interrelationship between the characters somehow different after the scene than before it? If not, is this scene absolutely necessary?

(6) Is my protagonist doing or saying something to try to affect the outcome or change the relationships here? Is the protagonist integrally involved in that change, or merely an observer of it?

(7) If the scene contains dialogue, is my protagonist an active conversational partner? (Hint: if Paul’s linguistic contributions consist of “What?” “What do you mean?” “How is that possible?” and/or “Really?” you should consider tossing out his lines and writing him some new ones.)

(8) If my protagonist is not saying much (or anything), does he care about what’s going on? If he doesn’t feel that the situation warrants intervention yet, are the stakes high enough for the reader to worry about the outcome of this conflict? If not, is this scene necessary to keep?

#8 may seem like a harsh assessment, but make no mistake about it, to the eye of someone who reads hundreds of submissions, a protagonist who observes conflict, rather than getting actively involved in it, seems as though he doesn’t care very much about what’s going on.

Or, to translate this into the language of the industry: if the protagonist isn’t passionate about what’s going on here, why should the reader be?

To be fair, this assumption may not have as much to do with your manuscript as with the last fifty manuscripts the screener read, half of which opened with slice-of-life vignettes that demonstrated conclusively that the protagonist was a really nice person who did everything she could to avoid conflict. After a couple of dozen of these, a rude and pushy Paul can start to seem rather refreshing.

Yes, these are a lot of questions to ask yourself about every questionable scene in the book — but kindly notice that I have considerately dumped this truckload of queries upon you immediately prior to a long holiday weekend, at least in the U.S. And if you don’t plan to implement them right away, there are always those sleepless summer nights ahead.

It’s a great alternative to counting sheep, after all: Passive Paul would never consider using his pondering time to such useful effect.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on The plague of passivity II: thinking…thinking…

The plague of passivity II: thinking…thinking…

Last time, I begin talking about the passive protagonist problem: when the action of a book occurs around the main character, rather than her participating actively in it. As I intimated yesterday, passive protagonists tend to annoy professional readers.

While naturally not every single agent, editor, contest judge, or screener in the biz will instantly stop reading the moment the leading character in a novel stops to contemplate the world around him, there are at any given moment thousands and thousands of submissions sitting on professional readers’ desks that feature protagonists who do just that. Often for pages and chapters at a time.

So perhaps it’s understandable that screeners’ reactions to encountering inert characters tends to be a trifle reflexive. One doesn’t need to pull all that many pans out of hot ovens without using mitts to start snatching one’s hands away from hot surfaces, after all.

“But if the pros dislike character passivity so much,” I hear some of you asking, “why don’t they just tell writers so? How hard would it be to post on their websites or include in their agency guide listings, ‘No passive protagonists, please?”

As is the case with so many basic facts of publishing, they DO talk about it — but usually in terms that you’d have to read 50 manuscripts a week to translate accurately. “I didn’t identify with the character” is a fairly common euphemism for Passive Protagonist Syndrome, as well as, “I didn’t like the main character enough to follow him through an entire book” and “There isn’t enough conflict here.”

That, and the ever-popular, “I just didn’t fall in love with the protagonist enough to pick up the book,” of course. However, since this last euphemism has about as many meanings as aloha, it’s often difficult to translate it exactly: I have seen it mean everything from, “The first paragraph bored me” to “I hate books about brunettes.”

You’d be amazed what a broad range of issues folks on the business side of the biz will lump under the general rubric of “writing problem,” too.

I wish they would be direct about their feelings about lackadaisical characters, because frankly, it is not a reaction that every reader would have. In fact, I suspect that writers tend to identify with passive protagonists.

There’s good reason for it, of course: we writers spend a lot of time and energy watching the world around us, capturing trenchant observations and seeing relationships in ways nobody ever has before. So we tend to think of people who do this as likeable, charming, interesting people.

The average agent, to put it mildly, does not share this opinion.

From a writer’ point of view, too, one of the great fringe benefits of the craft is the delightful ability to make one’s after-the-fact observations on a situation appear to be the protagonist’s first reactions — and one of the simplest ways to incorporate our shrewd observations on the human condition seamlessly into a text is to attribute them to a character. In the two of the three most common fictional voices — omniscient narrator, first person, and tight third person, where the reader hears the thoughts of the protagonist — the observing character is generally the protagonist.

And that’s fine, until the protagonist becomes so busy observing — or feeling, or thinking — that it essentially becomes his full-time job in the book.

Do be aware that from a reader’s point of view, a protagonist’s being upset, resentful, or even wrestling within himself trying to figure out the best course of action is NOT automatically dramatic — and even thought about interesting matters does not necessarily make interesting reading. In the throes of eliciting solid human emotion or trenchant insight, writers can often lose sight of these salient facts.

Why aren’t internal dynamics inherently dramatic? Because during it, all of the protagonist’s glorious energy expenditure typically is not changing the world around her one iota.

Here’s how it generally plays out in otherwise solid, well-written manuscripts:

1. The protagonist is confronted with a dilemma, so she worries about for pages at a time before doing anything about it (if, indeed, she does do anything about it at all).

2. If it’s a serious problem, she may mull it over for entire chapters.

3. When the villain is mean to her, instead of speaking up, she will think appropriate responses.

4. At some point, she will probably talk it all over with her best friend(s)/lover(s)/people who can give her information about the situation before selecting a course of action (see parenthetical disclaimer in #1).

5. Even in the wake of discovering ostensibly life-changing (or -threatening) revelations, she takes the time to pay attention to the niceties of life; she is not the type to leave her date in the lurch just because she’s doomed to die in 24 hours.

6. When she has assembled all the facts and/or figured out what she should do (often prompted by an outside event that makes her THINK), she takes action, and the conflict is resolved.

Is it me, or is this progression of events just a tad passive-aggressive? Especially in plotlines that turn on misunderstandings, wouldn’t it make more sense if the protagonist spoke DIRECTLY to the person with whom she’s in conflict at some point?

Often, writers will have their protagonists keep their more trenchant barbs to themselves in order to make them more likable, especially if the protagonist happens to be female. But an inert character who is nice to all and sundry is generally LESS likable from the reader’s point of view than the occasionally viper-tongued character who pushes situations out of the realm of the ordinary and into the conflictual.

Because conflict is entertaining. On the page, if not in real life.

Again, real-life situations do not necessarily translate well to the page. While pitting virtuous and forbearing protagonists against aggressive bad folks (who often bear suspicious resemblances to the writer’s “ex-friends, ex-lovers, and enemies,” as the bard Joe Jackson likes to call them) is probably a pretty healthy real-world response, emotionally speaking, it can be deadly on a page. Sitting around and resenting, no matter how well-justified that resentment may be, is awfully darned hard to convey well in print.

But that doesn’t stop us from trying, does it?

One of our collectively favorite means of showing resentment, angst, or just plain helplessness is to have the protagonist THINK pithy comebacks, uncomfortable reactions, pointed rhetorical questions, and/or outraged cris de coeur against intractable forces. Instead of, say, uttering these sentiments out loud, which might conceivably provoke a confrontation (and thus the conflict so dear to agents’ hearts), or doing something small and indirect to undermine the larger conditions the protagonist is unable to alter.

Yes, people mutter to themselves constantly in real life; few of us actually tell of the boss in the way s/he deserves. However, at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, just because something actually occurs does not necessarily mean that it will make good fiction.

What does make good fiction is conflict. This is not to say, of course, that every protagonist should be a sword-wielding hero, smiting his enemies right and left — far from it. But even the mousiest character is capable of acting out from time to time.

It’s well worth running through your manuscript, seeking out silent blowings-off of emotional steam. Whenever you find them, check to see if there is conflict on the rest of the page — and if your protagonist is taking part in it actively, or only in thought.

If it’s the latter, go over the moments when she is silently emoting. Is there some small tweak you could give to her response that would make it change the situation at hand?

Also, keep your eye out for situations that might allow your protagonist to take a stand, even on matters not related to the central problems of the piece. Resistance is a form of control, after all, and even the most penned-in person can alter tiny things in her environment.

Why not add conflict over something very small and not related to the bigger causes of resentment, for instance? A roomful of menopausal co-workers responding to their autocratic boss’ systematic harassment by violently quarreling amongst themselves over where the thermostat should be set during their various hot flashes is inherently quite a bit more dramatic than our heroine and her cronies typing away in resentful silence while their boss leers at one of them, isn’t it?

If you find yourself worrying that these textual tweaks may cumulatively transform your protagonist a charming, well-rounded lump of inactivity into a seething mass of interpersonal problem generation, consider this: agents and editors like to see themselves as people of action, dashing swashbucklers who wade through oceans of the ordinary to snatch up the golden treasure of the next bestseller, preferably mere seconds before the other pirates spot it. Protagonists who go for what they want tend to appeal to them.

More, at any rate, then they seem to appeal to most writers. Please bear in mind that before your work can speak to your target market of readers, it has to please another target market: agents and editors. Even if you have good reason to keep your protagonist from confronting his challenges directly — and you may well have dandy ones; look at Hamlet — he will still have to keep in motion enough to please this necessary first audience.

So while you’re editing, ask yourself: how can I coax my protagonist out of his head, and into his story? How can his actions or words alter this particular moment in the plotline, if only a little?

As individuals, we can’t always more mountains, my friends, but we can usually kick around a few pebbles. Give it some thought, and keep up the good work.

Posted on - 10 Comments on The plague of passivity

The plague of passivity

Before I get started on today’s self-editing extravaganza, my friends, let’s all hear it for new reader Kerry, who very generously posted a comment over the weekend about how to deal with that pesky Autoformat feature in Word that insists upon changing all of our standard format-mandated doubled dashes into emdashes, those long, word-to-word lines that we writers know better than to include in our manuscripts. Quoth Kerry:

On the Mac, you go to Tools, then Autocorrect…, then AutoFormat As You Type. You can then uncheck the “Symbol characters…” under “Replace as you type.”

You can do it on the PC, too, but it’s not in exactly the same place. On the PC (I’m using Word 2002), here’s what you do: Go to Tools, AutoCorrect Options…, AutoFormat As You Type, and unclick “Hyphens (–) with dash (emdash).”

Doesn’t the very notion of NOT having to swear under your breath while watching your computer undo your hard work lighten your spirits and make your little toes begin to tap? It certainly does mine. Thanks, Kerry!

After the sentence-level self-editing tips of the last week or so, the kind that had your eyeballs glued to your manuscripts, I thought it might be something of a relief to sit back for some conceptual editing. Today, I want to talk about editing to make your characters more active, both to improve your manuscript’s pacing and to make your protagonist more likeable.

We’ve all read books starring the passive protagonist, right? He’s the main character who is primarily an observer of the plot, rather than an active participant in it. Things happen to the passive protagonist as the plot put-puts along, rather than his internal drives moving the plot along.

Let me share a secret: any screener, agent, editor, editorial assistant, and/or contest judge who has been at it more than a week automatically rolls his/her/its eyes when such a protagonist lumbers his way across the pages of yet another manuscript. Because, you see, a similar malaise plagues the lead in, oh, 85% of the manuscripts they see. At least in a scene or two.

So tell me: how are they usually going to treat to a submission whose first chapter features a passive protagonist? Or whose first five pages does?

Starting to sense an overall pattern here? Folks in the biz see positive oceans of submissions with problems, so the more common a manuscript problem is, the more likely they are to have a knee-jerk response to it.

How knee-jerk, you ask? A very famous agent told me a few years ago that he automatically stops reading a submission the moment the protagonist sits down in a car or begins to drink coffee, tea, or any other non-alcoholic beverage in the company of another character. At that point, he says, the action almost invariably is put on hold.

Translation: a protagonist does not need to be passive for very long to be diagnosed as such. (Or even particularly passive.)

Over and above notoriously low thresholds of agent boredom, this phenomenon presents a genuine obstacle to the creation of a compelling narrative. It’s hard for a reader to sympathize with someone who is purely acted-upon without pushing back, at least in some miniscule way.

It’s no accident that early screenwriter Elinor Glyn advised those who would create screenplays never to allow their heroes to feel sorry for themselves for more than a minute on film.

She meant a literal minute, by the way, not a figurative one, but her advice easily translates into a page for our purposes here. If there’s an ongoing plot problem — and there should be more or less constantly throughout a story, to keep the pacing tight — audience members and readers alike prefer to see the protagonist DOING something about it. Even if that something is completely misguided.

Perhaps ESPECIALLY if it is completely misguided; poor life choices for a character are often great fun for the reader, right? One of the quickest ways to add complexity to a two-dimensional character is to have her act out of character at some point early in the book.

To be fair, the vast majority of protagonists are not uniformly passive (and for good reason: it’s a challenge to construct a storyline around a static character). In most manuscripts, the hero lapses only occasionally into total observation mode.

Unfortunately, they often do so during those interview scenes I was discussing a few weeks back. You know the ones: our guy Jerry is on the trail of a secret that could bring down City Hall while his brother, Arnold, is sitting on death row, accused of a murder he didn’t commit that was — mirabile dictu! — actually committed by someone at the bottom of THAT VERY SECRET. Jerry has been rushing all over town, dodging bullets, in order to seek out answers, yet anytime he bumps into someone who might be able to shed light on the matter, he just sits there while the source spills his proverbial guts.

Even, amazingly, when the source has just spent the last 50 years in excruciating emotional pain, keeping that particular portion of his guts inside. Go figure.

Frequently, Jerry doesn’t even have to ask a single question beyond, “What do you know about it, old timer?” to provoke this innard exposure. (Passive protagonists’ skin apparently secretes some sort of truth serum.)

As I mentioned before, TV and movies have inured most of us to this kind of spontaneous truth-telling; it has seeped into our collective consciousness to the point that it seems almost normal.

Why, just last night, I was tapping away on my computer while my SO Rick was watching the season finale of one of the five million LAW & ORDER franchises. By the time I had finished my post and sat down next to him, there were only ten minutes left. A harried-looking woman was on the witness stand, being grilled about a long-ago rape. Apparently, she’d kept the identity of her rapist a secret for the past 26 years.

I got up to fix myself a sandwich.

“How can you leave at such an exciting point?” Rick asked.

I yawned. “Because she’s about to blurt out that she was raped by her father. Are you hungry?”

THAT’s how common this kind of interview scene has become: the instant we in the audience learn that a character is hoarding a great big secret, we EXPECT the whole truth to pop out of her mouth within minutes.

So hard, in fact, that it’s not uncommon for agency screeners to be told to use the protagonist’s passivity for more than a page as a reason to reject a submission.

Yes, you read that correctly: more than a PAGE. And in the opening scenes of a novel, often even less than that.

You can see your assignment coming, can’t you? Don’t worry; it’s not going to be as bad as you think.

Go through your manuscript, scene by scene. No need to read for specifics; the general sense will do. If your protagonist is not the primary actor in any given scene, mark it, as well as any scene where she is observing action around her rather than participating in it.

Employ different kinds of markers for these two types of scenes; top and bottom folded page corners or Post-It™flags will do. If you really want to be thorough, you can make a list of scenes as you go, marking them accordingly.

After you’ve rated the scenes, go back and revisit those where the protagonist is not the main mover and shaker. Could adding a line or two here or there beef up her presence in the scene? Could she ask some of the questions currently in the mouth of a third party, for instance, or take a more aggressive stand against a villain? Or against her mother?

Could you, in short, inject some conflict into every page of the scene? How about every half-page?

Now turn to the scenes where the protagonist is watching what is going on. This one is going to sting a little: ask yourself honestly, without weighing in the balance how much you like the writing, whether this scene is actually essential to the book. If not, could you cut it?

I know, I know: some of my favorite scenes are quiet, too. But it’s often apparent to an outside observer (like, say, an editor) that a protagonist is merely observing a scene because it’s not central to the plot or to her character’s development. And when a scene adds to neither, it’s a prime candidate for trimming.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into the nitty-gritty of ferreting out protagonist passivity. In the meantime, enjoy shutting off that annoying Autoformat feature, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 10 Comments on And? And?

And? And?

Hey, great news, everybody: reader Jeff Jacobson has written in to say that he has landed an agent! A good one, too: Steve Laube of the Steve Laube Agency.

Congratulations, Jeff! May your writing career continue to prosper – and may I continue to have such wonderful news to report about my readers early and often.

So keep your chins up, everyone – it CAN be done.

Yesterday, I urged you to scan your submission pages (in particular, the first five) for over-use of the words and, but, and then; in fact, I suggested that you print out these pages and highlight these words throughout, so that you might get a sense of just how often you tend to utilize them.

What was I thinking, you ask, to advise such a time-consuming (and potentially ink-consuming) exercise? Well, quick-reading agency screeners and contest judge are routinely ordered to subtract points for grammatical errors – and that habitual roommate of conjunctions, the run-on sentence, is always high on their penalty list. As is word repetition.

So take up your marked pages, please, and let’s observe the frequency of and.

If you’re like most writers, your marking project probably revealed two major patterns of usage: in lists and in the HUGELY popular X happened and then Y happened structure. See if you can spot ‘em here:

Abe took a deep breath and ran his palms over his face. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the red and black tattoo over his left eyebrow. Outwardly composed, he smiled and extended his hand to Emile.

Although these types of repetition may sound merely chatty when read out loud, they come across as structurally redundant on the page. Let’s look at this same paragraph with a screener’s heightened antennae:

Abe took a deep breath and ran his palms over his face. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the red and black tattoo over his left eyebrow. Outwardly composed, he smiled and extended his hand to Emile.

See? The repetition of all those ands can be downright hypnotic – they lull the reader, even if the action being described on either end of the and is very exciting indeed. Why? Because the eye automatically jumps between repeated words on a page. The result: submission pages that are read far, far more quickly than any of us might wish.

The best way to avoid triggering this skimming reaction is to vary your sentence structure, but while you are editing, it’s also a good idea to keep an eye out for any sentence in which the word and appears more than once. As in:

Ezekiel put on his cocked hat, his coat of many colors, and his pink and black checked pantaloons.

It’s a subtle problem, but did you spot it? To eyes trained to catch redundancy, even this minor word repetition can set editorial teeth on edge. Because we writers tend to think of words according to their respective functions within any given sentence, this kind of repetition often flies under our self-editing radars; unless one is looking for it, it’s easy to overlook.

Thus the highlighting pens.

The other common and structure, X happened and Y happened, is a very frequent stylistic choice for relatively new writers. It’s appealing, as I mentioned yesterday, because like beginning sentences with and, it artificially creates the impression conversation-like flow.

You’re already cringing, aren’t you, in anticipation for the conclusion that so often follows upon a declaration that a writing device is pervasive?

Yes, I’m afraid it’s true: agents, editors, and contest judges tend to have a very low tolerance for over-use of this particular sentence structure. Seriously. I’ve seen pens poked through manuscripts at the third usage of this kind of sentence within half a page.

While you are self-editing, then, it’s a dandy idea to rework any sentence in which and appears more than once. Chances are high that it’s a run-on:

In avoiding the police, Zelda ran down the Metro stairs and out onto the platform and into the nearest train.

This is a classic run-on: too much information crammed into a single sentence, facilitated by those pesky conjunctions.

Some writers, of course, elect to include run-on sentences deliberately in their work, for specific effect. If you choose to do this, strategically speaking, you should avoid using it ANYWHERE else in the text except in these arpeggios of evocative lists.

Why minimize it elsewhere? Well, this device tends to create run-on sentences with and…and…and constructions, which are technically grammatical no-nos. You may be doing it deliberately, but as with any grammatical rule, many writers who do not share your acumen with language include them accidentally.

Let me ask you this: how is a super-quick agency screener to tell the difference? Usually, by noticing whether the device appears only infrequently, which implies deliberate use, or every few lines, which implies writing habit.

Even in literary fiction, it’s rather dangerous to include grammatically incorrect sentences in a submission — to someone who hasn’t read more of your work, it’s impossible to tell whether you are breaking the normal rules of grammar in order to create a specific effect, or because you don’t know the rule. If an agency screener concludes that it’s the latter, the manuscript is going to get rejected, almost invariably.

Thus, unless you are getting a valuable effect out of being ungrammatical, it’s best to save your few opportunities to do so intentionally for when it serves you best.

At the very least, make sure that two such sentences NEVER appear back-to-back, to avoid your submission’s coming across as the work of –gasp! — a habitual runner-on.

As with the use of then, it pays to be extremely selective. Sometimes the repeated ands work rhythmically, but to an agent or editor, a manuscript that employs X happened and Y happened as its default sentence structure it just starts to read like uncomplicated writing — which makes it less appealing to the pros.

The other common conclusion trained eyes often draw from over-use of this technique smacks of either the narrative’s trying to rush through an otherwise not very interesting series of events.

This is not always a fair assessment, of course. But when you do find patches of ands in your text, step back and ask yourself honestly: do I really need to tell the reader this? Or is there a way that I could make the telling more interesting by adding more detail? (X happened and Y happened sentences tend to be light on telling specifics, I have noticed.)

Which leads me to the opposite possibility, and a more conceptual editing question: in paragraphs where ands abound (or, sacre bleu, sentences!), are you rushing through the action of the scene too quickly?

Is the repeated use of and in fact your manuscript’s way of saying COME BACK TO THIS LATER?

Almost every writer has resorted to this device at the end of a long writing day, haven’t we? Or when we have a necessary-but-dull piece of business that we want to gloss over in a hurry? When the point is just to get lines down on a page – or to get a storyline down before the inspiration fades — X happened and Y happened and Z happened is arguably the quickest way to do it.

It’s a great strategy – as long as you remember to go back later and vary the sentence structure. Oh, and to make sure that you’re showing in that passage, not telling.

The results for the scene can be a bit grim when we forget to rework these flash-written paragraphs. Relying heavily on the and construction tends to flatten the highs and lows of a story: within them, actions come across as parts of a list, rather than as a sequence in which all the parts are important. This leads to overloaded sentences where four or five genuinely exciting actions are all crammed together.

Which – you guessed it — encourages the reader to gloss over them quickly, under the mistaken impression that these events are being presented in list form because they are necessary to the plot, but none is interesting enough to sustain an entire sentence.

Which is not exactly the response you want from an agency screener, right?

When in doubt, revise. I hate to come down unfairly on any grammatically correct sentence, but the fact is, the X happened and Y happened structure is just not considered very literary in the business. So the automatic assumption if it shows up too much is that the material covered by it is to be read for content, rather than beauty of prose.

I would prefer to see your submissions getting long, luxurious readings, on the whole. Keep those highlighters handy — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on And, but, then

And, but, then

I took the weekend off from posting, to try to catch up on all of those editing projects that I had to put on hold during my late bout of hospitality-induced influenza. If there’s one rule that governs freelance editing, it’s do not edit while feverish. It’s a good thing I did, as it reminded me that while I was lobbying for reduced repetition in your manuscripts, I had yet to discuss those ever-popular inhabitants of Conjunction Junction: and, but, and then.

(Okay, so then isn’t strictly speaking a conjunction; however, enough writers are now using it as it were – as in, Sophia kneaded the bread, baked it, then fed it to her forty-seven children – that I feel justified including it here.)

Now, back in the bad old days, it was considered improper to begin ANY sentence with and, but, or then. As my mad old Uncle Alec used to scrawl in the margins of letters I had written when he returned them to me, by definition, a conjunction connects one part of a sentence to another. (There are easier things than growing up in a family of writers and editors.) Toward the end of his life, he was even known to inform the TV screen of that salient fact when newscasters began their sentences with conjunctions.

But despite Uncle Alec’s best efforts, time and the language have been marching on, and at this point in North American history, it’s considered quite acceptable to begin the occasional sentence with a conjunction. In fact, as you may have noticed, I do it here all the time.

That mournful sound you just heard was Uncle Alec and his late cronies from the LA Free Press stomping their feet on the floor of heaven, trying to get me to cut it out, already.

Back to your celestial poker game, boys – it isn’t going to work. Conjunction-opened sentences frequently mirror actual speech better than other sentences, and conjunctions can be very valuable for maintaining an ongoing rhythm in a paragraph.

And, as anyone who has ever been trapped in a conversation with a non-stop talker can tell you, beginning sentences in this way gives an impression of consecutiveness of logic or storyline. Even when no such link actually exists, the conjunctions give the hearer the impression that there is no polite place to interrupt, to turn the soliloquy-in-progress into a dialogue.

For this very reason, though, conjunctions can be problematic: aspiring writers just LOVE to tuck them in all over the place, apparently for flow.

Sometimes, this can work beautifully, but as with any repeated stylistic trick, there’s a fine line between effective and over-the-top. Because it is a device that professional readers see so very much, you might want to screen your submission for its frequency.

Particularly, if you’ll forgive my being a bit pushy here, in the early pages of your manuscript. And absolutely on the first page.

Why especially the opening? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: agents and editors tend to assume that the writing on pages 1-5 is an accurate representation of the writing throughout the entire manuscript. Heck, many of them proceed on the assumption that what is found on the first page, or even the first paragraph, is an infallible indicator of subsequent writing quality.

This often-unwarranted assumption, in case you were interested, is how they justify dismissing submissions so very quickly: once you’ve seen a modicum of this author’s writing, they reason, you’ve seen enough.

No comment.

Strategically, it’s vital to realize that if you over-use a particular narrative tool in those early pages, they’re not going to stick around to see whether you’ve mended your ways, alas. They’re going to stop reading, so they may move on to the next submission.

Yes, I know: it’s as unfair as unfair can be; many, many writers take a chapter or two to warm up to their topics. But as I believe I may have mentioned before, I run neither the industry nor the universe, and I want your work to succeed. So instead of complaining about the status quo, I’m going to talk about how to minimize the problem early on, so your work can get a comparatively fair reading.

So whip out your trusty highlighter pens, and let’s get to work.

Print out your first 5 pages; if you want to be very thorough, print a random page from each subsequent chapter as well. Pick a color for and, one for but (go ahead and use it for the howevers and yets as well), and one for then, and start marking.

Not just where these words open a sentence, mind you, but EVERY time they occur. Why? Well, these particular words tend to get a real workout in the average manuscript: when writers are trying to cover material rapidly, for instance, and, but, and then often appear many times per page. Or even per paragraph.

All finished marking? Good. Now go back and note every use of then in those open pages: could you revise those sentences to cut the word entirely?

Seems draconian, doesn’t it? Believe me, I have an excellent reason for suggesting it: many professional readers have a visceral negative reaction to this word that sometimes borders on the paranoiac.

Why? Well, it’s one of the first words any professional editor would cut from a text: in written English, pretty much any event that is described after any other event is assumed to have happened later than the first described. For instance:

Herve poached the eggs in a little butter, slid them onto the plate, then served them.

Is logically identical to:

Herve poached the eggs in a little butter, slid them onto the plate, and served them.

Then, then, is almost always omittable as a purely temporal marker, yet it is very widely used. To professional eyes, it’s redundant, if not a sign that the writer is getting a bit tired of writing interestingly about a series of events. In your first five pages, you would be wise to avoid provoking this reaction by cutting all of the thens.

Actually, a good self-editing rule of thumb is to omit temporal thens altogether UNLESS the event described after them is a genuine surprise or happened suddenly. As in:

Herve poached the eggs in a little butter, slid them onto the plate – then flung their steaming runniness into Anselmo’s astonished face.

Now THAT’s a then that signals a change in sentence direction! Reserving the device for this use will render your thens substantially more powerful.

Let’s turn now to the buts, howevers, and yets on your marked-up pages. In each instance, is the clause that immediately follows the word ACTUALLY a shift from what has come immediately before it? If not, consider excising the words.

But, however, and yet all imply contradiction to what has already been stated, but many aspiring writers use these words simply as transitions. So much so that this device has become, you guessed it, a common editorial pet peeve.

Are you starting to get the impression that it doesn’t take much for a tendency to graduate to industry pet peeve? Actually, in real terms, it does take quite a bit of provocation: it just doesn’t take very long manning the screening desk to discover the first 100 submissions that all share the same narrative device.

Admittedly, this IS a maddeningly nit-picky level of editing, but trust me, agents and editors alike will bless you if your manuscript is relatively light on these overworked words. English is a marvelous language for prose because contains so very many different words; it enables great precision of description.

While I would never urge you to swallow a thesaurus whole, dragging in pretentious words when simple words would do, varying your word choice almost always makes a better impression upon professional readers than leaning too heavily on the basics. That’s a fact that I wish more first-time submitters knew.

Don’t toss out those marked-up pages, please: tomorrow, it’s on to the ands. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 6 Comments on On beyond Dick and Jane

On beyond Dick and Jane

Last time, I brought up the issue of repetitive structure, the phenomenon of a writer’s falling in love with a certain kind of sentence and consequently over-using it throughout a text. Like word and phrase repetition, professional readers find this distracting, and tend to dock manuscripts for it.

Do I detect some eye-rolling out there? A few cries of, “Oh, great – yet another nit-pick to worry about in the dead of night!” bouncing off the rafters in writers’ garrets across the globe?

Admittedly, this is pretty advanced self-editing. But I think you’re up to it.

The pros have a point here, you know. Even when the word choices vary enough to keep things interesting, it’s simply more tiring to read the same kind of sentence over and over than to read text where the form varies more. To see why this is true, we need look no farther than the early reader books of our youth.

You know the type: see Spot run. See Spot bite Dick. See Dick shiv Jane.

Dull, from an adult perspective, weren’t they? But dull with a purpose: since part of their point was to encourage new readers to recognize letter patterns as particular words, varying the sentence structure enough to render the insipid story interesting to more advanced readers would merely have distracted from the task at hand. So we were treated to the same sentence structure for what seemed like the entire book.

I’ll spare you my choice comments to my first-grade teacher about this particular authorial choice. Suffice it to say that she quickly learned to send me to the library for alternate reading material.

When a professional reader sees a manuscript that uses the same sentence structure over and over, the specters of Dick, Jane, and Spot seem to rise from the page, moaning, “This is not very sophisticated writing!” This is true, surprisingly, even if the chosen structure is quite complex.

Why? Well, when one’s eye is trained to note detail, it’s doesn’t take much redundancy to trigger a negative reaction. A good professional reader will often catch a repetition the first time it recurs – it’s not unheard-of for an editorial memo to contain a angry paragraph about “your fondness for phrase X” when phrase X shows up only three or four times in the entire text.

Imagine, then, how much more annoying they find it when every third sentence begins with, “As Sheila was doing X…” or “George was…” To repetition-sensitive eyes, the effect is like badly-done CGI in movies, where battle scenes between thousands of characters are created by filming 50 extras flailing at one another, copying that image, and plastering it seventeen times across the scene, perhaps alternated with two or three other images of the same actors in different positions.

Honestly, to those of us who count patterns for a living, it can be downright migraine-inducing.

“But wait!” I hear you self-editors out there exclaiming. “English grammar only permits so many ways of arranging sentences properly. Isn’t any manuscript going to exhibit a certain amount of pattern repetition?”

Yes – but that does not give writers carte blanche to use the same structures back-to-back, or to utilize a favorite complex sentence form twice per page. It’s not at all uncommon for submissions to contain paragraphs like this:

Rubbing his sides for warmth, Stephen glanced unhappily at his fellow cheerleaders. Waving his pom-poms in a wan impression of good sportsmanship, he reminded himself never to be stupid enough to accept one of his sister’s bets again. Pulling up his flesh-colored tights – oh, why hadn’t he listened to Brian, who told him to wear nylons under them on this near-freezing night? – he wondered if Tammy would be vicious enough to demand the performance of the promised splits before the game ended. Sighing, he figured she would.

Individually, there is nothing wrong with any given sentence in this paragraph, right? Yet taken communally – as sentences in submissions invariably are – the repetition of the same kind of opening each time starts to ring like a drumbeat in the reader’s head, distracting her from the actual subject matter AND the quality of the writing. And that’s a problem, because, for the most part, agents and editors cannot afford to work with specialists in a single type of sentence.

The sad thing is, most of the time, writers don’t even realize that they’re repeating patterns, because it ISN’T every sentence. Even non-consecutively, though, too-frequent use of the same kind of sentence can seem repetitious. Let’s take a look at what this might look like in practice:

As the car door opened, Bernice swallowed a horrified gasp. It was Harold’s severed hand, dragging itself around the latch mechanism, one grisly fingertip at a time. As she reached for the gun, her intestines palpitated, but she forced her arm to remain steady. While she loaded the bullets into the chamber, she thought about how much she had loved Harold, back when his constituent parts were all still interconnected as a human’s should be. It was a shame, really, to have to keep blowing him to bits. But blow him to bits she would continue to do, as often as necessary.

To most self-editors, this paragraph would not seem especially problematic. However, to a professional reader, it contains two of the most commonly-repeated structures, the While X was Happening, Y was Occurring and the It Was, both big favorites with the writing set.

Again, standing alone, either form is perfectly valid, of course; the problem arises when either appears too frequently on the page. To a professional reader, this is how the paragraph would scan:

As the car door opened, Bernice swallowed a horrified gasp. It was Harold’s severed hand, dragging itself around the latch mechanism, one grisly fingertip at a time. As she reached for the gun, her intestines palpitated, but she forced her arm to remain steady. While she loaded the bullets into the chamber, she thought about how much she had loved Harold, back when his constituent parts were all still interconnected as a human’s should be. It was a shame, really, to have to keep blowing him to bits. But blow him to bits she would continue to do, as often as necessary.

Okay, so I wanted to show off that my newly-upgraded blogging program would now allow me to use italics and boldface. (Yippee!) But see how even spread-out repetition jumps off the page, once you’re sensitized to it?

Of course, you may strike lucky: your submission may be read by a screener who hasn’t been at it very long, or an agent whose tolerance for pattern repetition is unusually high. Heck, your work may even land on the desk of that rara avis, the saint who is willing to overlook some minor problems in a manuscript if the writer seems to have promising flair. In any of these cases, you may be able to put off winnowing out pattern repetition until after the book is sold to an editor, who is VERY unlikely to be so forgiving.

Wanna risk it at the submission stage?

Because editorial response to this kind of repetition tends to be so strong – I wasn’t kidding about those migraines — you would be well advised to check your first chapter, ESPECIALLY your opening page, for inadvertent pattern repetitions. The easiest way to do this is in the same manner that you would screen for word and phrase redundancy: sit down with a number of different colored pens and mark each kind of sentence in its own color for five or ten pages in a row.

If you start to see one color turning up many times per page — or two or three times per paragraph – you might want to think about reworking your structures a little.

You probably already know what your favorite kinds of sentence are, but it would probably be a good idea to pre-designate colors for not only the ever-popular While X was Happening, Y was Occurring and the It Was sentences, but also for the X happened and then Y happened and Gerund Adverb Comma (as in Sitting silently, Hortense felt like a spy.) forms as well. (Actually, since quick-skimming pros tend to concentrate upon the openings of sentences, you can get away with just checking the first few words after every period, in a pinch.)

If this all seems terribly nit-picky to you, it is. But the more you can vary the structure and rhythm of your writing, the more interesting it will be for the reader – and, from a professional perspective, the more it will appeal to educated readers.

Think about it: good literary fiction very seldom relies heavily upon a single sentence structure throughout an entire text, does it?

You know what kinds of books use the same types of sentences over and over? The ones marketed to consumers with less-developed reading skills. If that is your target readership, great – run with the repetitive structure. (Run, Jane, run!) But for most adult markets, the industry assumes at least a 10th-grade reading level.

And agency screeners and editorial assistants typically hold liberal arts degrees from pretty good colleges. That’s a long, long way from the reading level that was contented to watch Dick and Jane running all over the place with Spot, isn’t it?

Let your structural choices be as exciting as the writing contained within them. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 3 Comments on The screen goes wavy

The screen goes wavy

In my last installment on self-editing, I went to town on the twin dangers of factual redundancy intended to remind readers of salient points (“As I mentioned back in Ch. 2, Maude, I stand to inherit a hefty chunk of change when my Uncle Mortimer dies.”) and screen clichés that have made their way into real life (“Say ‘ah,’” kindly Dr. Whitehairedman told the child.). As I pointed out, both species are problematic in submissions, because they are so common.

Translation: professional readers get really, really tired of seeing examples of them.

But both types of repetition also tend to be, I am happy to report, some of the easiest lines to cut. Redundant lines can often be trimmed wholesale, with no cost to the text at all. And clichés, like pop culture references and jokes that don’t quite work, are often digressions in a scene or dialogue, rather than integral to it. Much of the time, they can be deleted without adding any additional writing.

Which is a pretty good indicator all by itself that a line should be cut anyway, actually: if you wouldn’t miss it if it were gone, it should probably go.

Take, for instance, the following piece of purple prose, full of sentences just begging to hop into the tumbril and ride to the guillotine. Note just how much trimming could occur without harming the relationships or plot of the scene:

***Marcus Aurelius paced the room, frowning, revisiting in his mind his last encounter with Cardinal Richelieu, two months before, when they had shot those rapids together in the yet-to-be-discovered territory of Colorado. Despite moments of undeniable passion, they had not parted friends. The powerful holy man was known for his cruelty, but surely, this time, he would not hold a grudge. “Can I bum a cigarette?” Marcus asked, to buy more time to recap the plot in his head.

Richelieu laughed brutally, but with an undertone of affection. “Tobacco had not come to Europe in your time.” He shook two out of the pack and stuck both into his mouth. “And barely in mine.”

He lit the pair and handed both to his erstwhile lover. They sat in silence for a moment, the smoke winding its way around the cardinal’s red hat and through the halo of St. Jerome, who was standing nearby.

Finally, Marcus Aurelius decided he could take this brutal wordlessness no longer. “I’ve come for some information, Armand.”

Richelieu’s hand tightened on his sawed-off shotgun. “You’re wasting your time.”

“I’m not leaving until you tell me what I need to know.”

“It might,” St. Jerome suggested gently, “go a little faster if you were more specific.”

“Yes, do come to the point.” Richelieu waved a bejeweled hand toward his wall-sized TV screen. “American Idol is on in an hour.” ***

Tell me, how much cutting did you manage to do? Other than the obvious, that is — as a major Stoic, Marcus Aurelius clearly would not have folded so quickly under the pressure; I give you that. But even ignoring the philosophical problems and the time travel that seems to have happened here, there’s room for some fairly painless trimming that would speed up the scene:

***Marcus Aurelius paced the room, frowning. The powerful holy man before him was known for his cruelty, but surely, he could not still be holding a grudge about how they’d parted in Colorado. “Please tell me, Armand. For old times’ sake.”

Richelieu laughed brutally, but with an undertone of affection. The smoke from his cigarette wound its way around his red hat and through the halo of St. Jerome, who was standing nearby.

“It might,” St. Jerome suggested gently, “be helpful if you were more specific about what you wanted.”

“Yes, do come to the point.” Richelieu lifted a bejeweled hand from his sawed-off shotgun to wave languidly toward his wall-sized TV screen. “American Idol is on in an hour.” ***

That’s 123 words, down from 231, a substantial cut obtained through the simple expedient of removing the movie clichés (the double cigarette bit is straight out of the Bette Davis vehicle NOW, VOYAGER) and unnecessary repetition.

How did I know, within the context of an isolated excerpt, that the references to the Colorado scene probably referred to something that happenedearlier in the book? Call it well-honed editorial instinct: this kind of micro-flashback almost invariably recaps a scene told more fully elsewhere – and when it isn’t shown at some point in the book, it probably should be.

Seem paradoxical? It isn’t.

A micro-flashback usually provides one or more characters’ motivation(s) in the scene occurring at the moment: here, the earlier romantic interlude has set the stage for Marcus’ belief that Richelieu would do him a favor, as well as Richelieu’s current attitude toward Marcus. Clearly, then, this past episode is important enough to the development of both characters that the reader would benefit from seeing it in its entirety.

Which makes removing the micro-flashback from this scene an easy editorial call. To work as character development – as explanatory asides that deal with motivation must, right? – the reader really should have this information prior to the scene.

So if the Colorado rapids scene did happen earlier in the book, the micro-flashback would be redundant; if it did not, the micro-flashback is not memorable enough in itself to make a lasting impression upon the reader.

In other words: snip, snip.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant it with me now: emotionally important scenes are almost always more powerful if they are SHOWN as fully-realized scenes, rather than merely summarized. (Oh, come on – you DON’T want to know what happened on those rapids?)

Keep an eye out for those micro-flashbacks, my friends: they’re often flares telling the editor what needs to be done to improve the manuscript.

In this case, the cut can only help: by removing the explanatory summary here, the author will need to make sure that the earlier scene made enough of an impression upon the reader that she will remember it by the time Marcus Aurelius comes looking for information.

Yes, even if that means going back and writing the earlier scene from scratch. Sometimes, adding a fresh scene is actually a quicker and easier fix for a manuscript that drags than merely trimming the existing text.

The metaphor that I like to use for this kind of revision comes from flower arranging, believe it or not. Listen:

Think of your draft as a wonderful bouquet, stocked with flowers you have been gathering over the last couple of years. It’s lovely, but after it has been rejected a few dozen times, you’ve come to realize that maybe it’s too big for the room in which the agent of your dreams wants to place it; it does not fit comfortably into the only vase she has.

So you need to trim it – but how? A good place to start would be to pull out half of the daisies; a few are nice, but handfuls make the daisy point a bit more often than necessary.

Then you could start searching for the flowers that have wilted a little, or are not opening as well as others. Pulling out the wilted flowers renders the bouquet both smaller and prettier – and the ones that wilt the fastest are the ones that are borrowed from other sources, like movie tropes, which tend to date a book, anyway.

Already, your bouquet is looking lighter, more vibrant, but you liked the color that some of the discarded flowers added. Rather than pulling the cast-off blooms out of the compost bin and putting them back into the vase (as most self-editors will do), adding a fresh flower here and there is often more beneficial to the overall beauty of the bouquet.

So be open to the possibility that trimming your manuscript may well mean writing a fresh scene or two, for clarification or character development. Search your manuscript for micro-flashbacks that may be telling you what needs further elucidation. If you apply a truly diligent eye, you may well find that a single, well-developed scene inserted early on will replace scores of micro-flashbacks down the line.

It happens. All the time, in fact. Like a good joke, motivation goes over better with the reader if it can be presented cleanly, without excess in-the-moment explanation. Bear that in mind, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 7 Comments on Okay, I’m flattered

Okay, I’m flattered

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What is this shiny logo floating above today’s post, you ask? The excellent blogger Sean Ferrell has tagged my site for a Thinking Blogger Award, and I must say, I am extremely flattered. It’s a prize given to bloggers by other bloggers — specifically, by those who have won it before — writers who know from personal experience the joys and tribulations of opening oneself up in this unique way.

What makes me particularly happy about this is that the award is not merely given to well-written blogs willy-nilly: the rules specify that it should be bestowed upon blogs that made the nominator THINK. I couldn’t be more tickled, really, because I try very hard to make my posts thought-provoking, and it’s nice to know that a writer of Sean’s caliber recognized that.

Part of the award certainly belongs to the readers who have written in with comments — which I encourage everyone to do. You have helped expand this space from one person’s spouting off into a community for writers; thank you. Especially those of you who have suggested topics for posts or who have challenged me. I believe — and I hope the blog consistently illustrates this — that one of the primary gifts of the Internet is its ability to bring people together to share opinions.

Okay, enough of the Oscars™ speech; on to the nominations. In addition to getting to display this nifty little virtual plaque, recipients of the Thinking Blog Award are allowed to select 5 future winners. Only five! Where to begin?

I have been agonizing over the choice for the past week.

Seriously, it’s hard — there are a LOT of great blogs out there. First, I thought I would stick entirely to bloggers who, like myself, write on writing. But part of the purpose of this process is to introduce my readers to other blogs, and I know (via that most reliable of sources, a little bird) that many of those of you kind enough to visit here also visit other writing sites. Time to set my sites wider.

So I sat down and made a list of blogs that gave great practical advice, and another list of those whose writers made the mouth water with great writing packed with sensual details, and another of ones that stood out to me as being especially good at generating reader response…

97 nominees later, I decided I needed to simplify my criteria just a bit.

The list below represents a cross-section of blogs that I think deserve a wider readership. Thought-provoking and well-written, they cover a broad array of subject matter, from the ultra-practical matter of feeding oneself to the philosophical questions of everyday life. Best of all, each has changed my mind about something, big or small, through a post. Here they are:

Jordan’s Muse: those of you who were reading Author! Author! last summer probably remember Jordan Rosenfeld’s guest blogs; she’s the upbeat writer, editor, and writing teacher who cheers us up when the road to publication gets long, urging us to concentrate upon what we want to achieve, rather than the slings and arrows of rejection. We could all use more cheerleaders for the art like this.

Orangette: I’m a HUGE fan of good food writing; having done it (under a nom de plume), I know from experience how difficult it is to convey the sensations of taste, aroma, and texture well on the page. Orangette’s writing is delightful, of course, but for me, what makes her blog stand above the many other excellent food blogs out there is how well she writes about the recipes that DON’T work out — this is definitely not a blog written by someone pretending to be the perfect chef. She makes me laugh, cook, AND think, a potent combination.

Greentime: technically, Rhett Aultman and Amy Hale’s provocative (and relatively new) site is a vlog, but it includes enough good writing that I feel justified in including it. Concentrating upon practical environmentalism, Greentime combines great discussions with solid research. I can honestly say that this site has made a difference in how I live my life on a day-to-day basis.

Dude, Why Do You Have a Winnowing Fork? After my save-the-world last choice, I wanted my next nominee to be pure joy — and given my comic predilections, I could hardly not have included a funny blog, could I? Polly Tropia’s site is in many ways the Platonic blog: it ranges all over the place; it’s thoughtful, and it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. (Her post “No Atheists in Bed” is a particular favorite of mine.)

Lifehack: is a reliably thought-provoking blog devoted to the practicalities of organizing one’s life and time, always a big issue for every writer. While it is a trifle visually busy, if you have ever found yourself procrastinating for more than a day or two on a big writing project, you should run, not walk, to this helpful Australian site. Although Lifehack does regularly take on the big self-help books’ myths on productivity, it primarily concentrates upon pointed, hands-on particulars that actually can help you clear time and desk space to work on your next book.

Congratulations, all 5: you have been tagged for a Thinking Blogger Award. If you find your site on this list, here’s what you should do:

1. If (and ONLY) if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits (i.e., relative content) and above all – blogs that really get you thinking!

2. In that post, link the award site so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.

3. Optional: Proudly display the Thinking Blogger Award. It’s also nice if you post a comment on the Thinking Blog’s site with a link to the post that you wrote, so its list of winners can remain current.

To all of these bloggers, to all of my readers, and especially to Sean Ferrell, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The end of the line

The end of the line

A brief announcement for those of you who were planning on seeing me at the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association conference this summer or taking my Seattle-area pitching class prior to it: the Pitch Practicing Palace’s staff has decided that we will not be operating at PNWA this year, and I have already informed the PNWA that I will not be teaching the class for them again. I have, in fact, resigned from the organization after many years’ membership.

Struggling through negotiations to provide these services for conference attendees was taking up far too much of my time, energy, and patience. I believe I can do more good here than by fighting with people who apparently do not understand that pitching is both stressful and a learned skill. I won’t bore everyone recapping the events of April 2 and thereafter, or dealing with the personalities involved. Suffice it to say that my mission here is to be upbeat and supportive of my readers, and I believe I can do a better job of that if I sever all ties to an organization that has made it quite clear that it now wishes it had never asked me to be its Resident Writer for 11 months in 2005-2006.

There’s no accounting for taste, eh?

My deepest apologies to any of you who made plans in the expectation that the PPP would be available or who were looking forward to the class. I shall try to find another venue for the latter, but rest assured, I shall be writing EXTENSIVELY about pitching between now and then.

Enough of all this unpleasantness. Let’s all get back to work.

Posted on - No Comments on This blog is NOT owned by the PNWA (in case you mistakenly got that impression)

This blog is NOT owned by the PNWA (in case you mistakenly got that impression)

Dear readers –

I have been asked to make an announcement, one that I had previously believed to be self-evident: I own this site, and the opinions expressed here are my own. I pay for the site myself, and my opinions are — as indeed I have always presented them — mine.

I sincerely doubt that anyone seriously needed to be told this, but a board member of the PNWA sent me this extraordinary e-mail today, implying otherwise. I reproduce it here, because, frankly, I find it hard to believe, even though it is sitting in front of me:

“Anne,
It seems that a few agent/editors have found inaccuracies in your blog entries about them, this year and last, and are annoyed. I know you don’t want to piss off agents!

Also, some of your comments about PNWA seem a bit mean spirited (sic) to me, and since the PNWA really, really wants to be inclusive of all writers, is there a way to “make nice” (sic) a bit or not appear to criticize?

Many, including me, love your frank observations. If you are an instructor at PNWA, however, your opinions might appear to speak for the organization, and that is the rub.

For your own reputation, I really {sic) really (again) suggest you get the facts right about these agents, because we all know what a small world theirs is.

In short- {sic) 2 things. Be accurate in your agent (sic) editor bios and know that they are reading them, too.
And
Be (sic) clear that you are expressing your opinion and in no way is this the opinion of anyone but the very wise Ms. Mini.

OK?”

I have to say, I don’t find this okay at all — and that’s DOCTOR Mini, by the way, to strangers — but let me waste a day’s post in making every point raised here clear enough that no one could possibly mistake it in future. (Normally, I would not do this, but my reputation has specifically been threatened.)

For the record, I OWN THIS SITE. No one at the PNWA or any other organization has a right to tell me what I may or may not post on MY website. I hope that no one has ever thought otherwise.

About the accuracy of the profiles, I have done a grand total of ONE this year. Ginger Clark, if you feel I have misrepresented your work, kindly post any corrections on THIS website — you know, the one I own, not the PNWA’s.

But frankly, I doubt that Ms. Clark has so little to do, or that she considers the opinion of someone she has never met so important, that she would have taken the time to find my blog within the last two days, read it, track down the PNWA (who, in case anyone is still confused on this point, DOES NOT OWN THIS SITE), and complain.

Suffice it to say: if there have been ANY complaints so far this year, I have not heard about them. From anyone. However, if I am sent proof that I have been mistaken on some specific point — or, more likely, that the sources I combed extensively to glean this information were somehow tainted — I shall be delighted to make changes.

On to last year. I did not receive a SINGLE complaint from ANY agent or editor at last year’s conference — nor did ANYONE affiliated with the PNWA suggest until today that there had been any complaints. In fact, many of agents and editors THANKED me for the profiles.

If the PNWA did indeed receive complaints about my write-ups, it did not pass them along to me in the intervening year, as surely it had an ethical obligation to do. Which implies a certain lack of vim on the part of the insulted, at best.

If there have been any actual complaints, please, anyone who has heard them — even as vague rumors — post them as comments on the appropriate profile. I’m sure anyone researching these agents will like to hear about anything I’ve misreported.

Since I habitually do EXTENSIVE research for each profile, if I have actually posted anything inaccurate, it means that there were inaccuracies in the standard databases, articles, etc. that I read to formulate these profiles — please, if anyone knows of any specific inaccuracies, let me know, so I may inform these other sources. (Which, incidentally, were by and large the same sources that anyone researching agents and editors would have used.)

My impression, based upon what the agents and editors actually said to me, was quite the opposite. At the PNWA conference last year, one of the editors even sought me out at the Pitch Practicing Palace and told me (in front of a witness) that she would not have attended if she had not seen the profile I had done of her on my blog. (Presented, of course, as my opinion.) She had been scheduled for two back-to-back conferences, and was coming down with a cold, so she had intended to cancel her trip to PNWA. Then she saw my post on her, and thought, “Gee, if they’ve gone to all the trouble of tracking down all this information on me, I guess I should go.” She said, in fact, that she had been forwarding the link to other people.

That was 100% MY work, boys and girls. Not the PNWA’s. I’m sorry if anyone was confused about that.

Furthermore, the agency that represents ME sends an agent to PNWA every year. Last year, I profiled this agent, along with the rest. After the conference, I specifically checked in with my agency to find out if there had been even a BREATH of discontent amongst the pros about ANYTHING I had written about the attending agents or editors. No one had heard anything.

And, as my correspondent above points out, agenting is a small world.

On the subject of accuracy. As I have said in each and every blog on the subject, my information has always come from the standard industry databases, books, and asking people in the know. I do as thorough a search of all the publicly-available information as I can find. I have literally NEVER reported anything for which I did not have solid evidence. When I cannot find information, I say so.

In both EVERY blog on the subject this year and EVERY blog on the subject last year, I SAID that what I was giving was only my opinion; frankly, I think that no one who actually read the blogs in their entirety could think anything else. I’m an opinionated gal — which is, correct me if I am wrong, considered DESIRABLE in a blogger. I do not, therefore, believe that this critique is being leveled by anyone familiar with my writings on the subject.

Although of course, that’s only my opinion. I could be wrong.

Also, for the record, I am NOT scheduled to be a presenter at PNWA this year; as I have already mentioned here, I am in negotiations to reprise my PRE-conference pitching class from last year (although I was not paid for last year’s class), as well as to bring a sharply scaled-down version of the Pitch Practicing Palace back to the conference.

You know, that service that so many of you said on your evaluation forms was the best thing about last year’s conference.

Therefore, I don’t think any sane person would take my opinions — which, as I have said, I have been very careful to present all along as MY OPINIONS — as those of the spokeswoman of an organization with which I am only marginally affiliated at this point.

Everybody clear on that? Did any of my regular readers think otherwise, even for a second? Do I actually have to cancel my membership in the PNWA in order not to confuse anyone?

On to the issue of whether I have been mean-spirited, I was honestly surprised by this. For the moment, let’s leave aside the issue that anything I have said has been ON MY OWN BLOG, which exists solely to express MY opinion. (Clear on that yet?) But, by that same token, this blog does not exist to promote the PNWA, nor is it reasonable for that organization to expect that it should.

I have tried to be impartial, in fact, which means I call ‘em as I see ‘em. Given my relationship with the PNWA last summer, not coloring those opinions with my personal experience has required something very close to saintliness to pull off. (Or was that a too mean-spirited thing to say, because it’s true?)

As some of you know, I was formerly the Resident Writer of the PNWA, blogging (as a volunteer activity) for their website and providing virtually all of its content for 11 months in 2004-2005. My blog there was very popular, by everyone’s admission. During that time, no one on the PNWA board ever commented to me about my blog, even once; I had no reason to believe that any of them had ever read it. But I had tangible proof that it was helping the membership, so I continued to write it.

On the day following last year’s PNWA conference, I logged to their blog and found that my password had been cancelled and all of my content had disappeared. With no warning, and with no explanation. Since this happened immediately after I had organized the HUGELY successful Pitch Practicing Palace, which heard more than 350 pitches over three days — again, for free; none of the PPP staff were paid — I was, to say the least, surprised.

I am mentioning this now because, as those of you who were reading the blog at the time already know, I did not talk about ANY of this on my blog at the time — nor, indeed, about any of the other rudenesses to which I was subjected.

Why? Because I didn’t want to trash the PNWA, that’s why. Because it’s an organization that has helped many writers over the years, and I have respect for that.

Since I believed the blog to be helpful to many aspiring writers, I scrambled, with the very generous assistance of webmaster Brian Tanaka and Suzanne Brahm, to get a new blog — UNDER MY OWN NAME, and AT MY OWN EXPENSE — up and running within a week, so as not to leave my readers in the lurch immediately after a conference, when they might conceivably be sending out requested materials. It seemed a better use of my time and energy than responding to how I had been treated.

When contest time approached this year, knowing that many of my readers were planning to enter the PNWA contest, I spent A MONTH of blog time prepping people for it. As I have heard from many far-flung readers since, they would not have entered that particular contest had I not being discussing it here. Thus, far from harming the PNWA, I have every reason to believe that my website has been promoting it.

I considered not doing agent and editor profiles this year, and if you will recall, I posted it as a question last month. Those who responded did want me to do them, so I have. Believe me, they are no fun to do, because of the EXTENSIVE research involved, and I only took on the task again because I believed them to be helping people.

And why did I think that? Because literally all the feedback I received last year told me so.

In fact, many readers told me that my helping to demystify the agent- and editor-selection process was part of the reason they chose to attend the PNWA conference, as opposed to any other. Which, correct me if I’m wrong, was helpful to the organization.

However, I now think I’ve been too generous — or perhaps misguided — to gloss over what happened last summer. And maybe, just maybe, it was not a good idea to promote one conference over any other on this site, even if I was planning to be available to my readers at that conference this year, as I was last.

So: I’m not going to finish the agent/editor series this year, except to profile the agent coming from my own agency. Because that way, I can get permission directly from the source, and no one can come to me a year from now and imply otherwise.

I am going to leave the category at the right up for a while, though, to make it easier for people to find THIS post. Because I wouldn’t want anyone to get confused.

My deepest apologies to those of you who were looking forward to these profiles. But I’m extremely busy, and I’m tired of being unappreciated by people for whom I have done great big favors in the past. I would much rather expend my volunteer energies helping my readers — and if I can do that best by never mentioning the PNWA here again, that is what I shall do.

For the record, I don’t actually believe that anything I have ever written about any of these agents or editors could possibly harm YOUR chances with these people — that, after all, would be really, really passive-aggressive, not to say childish. But if there is even the slightest chance of any aspiring writer’s being harmed by indirect aggression at me, as the message above implies, it’s just not worth it. (Especially since doing the EXTENSIVE research underlying the agent/editor profiles is a TREMENDOUS amount of work for me — in part because I took the time to verify with independent sources that everything I was saying was true.)

Thanks for your patience with this announcement. I’m very, very sorry if anyone was skimming my posts so quickly that they became confused about who was speaking. It shan’t happen again. But if someone’s ever in doubt, all she has to do is to raise her eyes a couple of inches to the masthead.

Posted on - 2 Comments on The agents and editors scheduled to attend PNWA this year

The agents and editors scheduled to attend PNWA this year

All right, enough prologue-ing about how and why the blurbs provided by conferences about their invited agents and editors tend to be woefully insufficient. On to figuring out what we can learn from them, as well as from other sources.

For those of you who were not yet reading this blog last spring, what I like to do is go through the scheduled attendees one by one, finding out as much information about their professional activities as I can. Then I read their posted blurbs in light of this information, to try to gain as much insight as possible into what kind of books they might be interested in picking up this summer. Then I compress it all here into a pithy little post, for your referencing pleasure.

Why? To make it easier for readers who are planning to attend the PNWA conference to pick which agents and editors would be the best fit for their books — and rank them accordingly. (The PNWA, like many conferences, tries to match attendees with their preferred targets as often as possible, so their registration form will ask you to list your appointment choices in order of desire.)

But since this information is undoubtedly useful for anyone thinking about querying these people, it should make for interesting reading for those of you not planning to attend as well.

I will be presenting these agents and editors in alphabetical order, just so you know, not ranked in any sort of hierarchy of excellence or interest, and over enough days’ blogs to justify the length of time it took to track the information down. (The research is seriously time-consuming, enough so that at the end of last year’s binge, I swore I would never do it again. However, readers really loved it last year, so…)

Please note, though: what I will be presenting here is my impression of these people’s book preferences, based upon information available from various publishing industry resources and what I have heard on the quite extensive publishing grapevine. This is not intended to be an authoritative overview, nor the last word on these people. In fact, I would actively encourage you to do your own additional research on any agent or editor you are considering approaching.

Please be aware, too, that the sales and acquisition info I’ll be passing along here is from the standard publishing databases, which are not always entirely up-to-date or totally accurate. Not all agents routinely report their sales to Publishers Marketplace, for instance.

Kindly remember as well that any list of sales will reflect only those clients for whom these agents have actually sold books, rather than their entire client lists, which may not give a truly representative (so to speak) picture.

All of this is beyond my control, I tell you. Stop poking me with that sharp stick.

One last thing: as I mentioned yesterday, I shall not be covering every agent and editor scheduled to attend PNWA, just the ones who did not attend last year. You may find my last year’s write-ups on the returnees in the clearly-marked category at right.

Do be aware that even including these, we may not end up with a complete list of the ultimate attendees. It is far from uncommon for agents and editors (particularly editors) to bow out of conference commitments at the last minute. Happens all the time, in fact, and I’ve literally never heard of a conference’s refunding a registrant’s money because the agent of his dreams cancelled his trip.

Yes, it’s unfair. It is also entirely beyond my control, so please do not ask me to predict possible switches or complain to me if this happens at PNWA this year — or any other year, for that matter. (Contrary to popular belief, I have absolutely no pull at the PNWA — my almost year-long tenure as their website’s Resident Writer earned me precisely diddly-squat plus the opportunity to teach my how to pitch class again this year.)

Okay, all of those disclaimers out of the way, let’s see what we can learn from our first glance at this year’s crop of agents and editors.

Fewer repeats than I had anticipated: of the agents who came last year, the returnees are (in alphabetical order) Jennifer Cayea, Catherine Fowler, Michelle Grajkowski, Kate McKean, Rita Rosenkranz, and Alice Volpe, all of whom I profiled last year.

What, if anything, can we read into the fact that they plan to return? Well, there are two likely explanations. First, they could have been impressed with the quality of the talent they found at last year’s conference, and are eager to tap that pool of talent again. Or — and this happens more often than writers tend to think — they could have a brother, sister, boyfriend, girlfriend, child, college roommate, etc., who lives in the greater Seattle area, and want to use the conference as an excuse to make a tax-deductible visit.

Is this the right place to deny any knowledge of that pervasive local rumor about the VERY influential agent who used to come to PNWA every year because his mistress danced with the Pacific Northwest Ballet? If such a person existed, and if he stopped making the trip west after they broke up, I know nothing about it.

Assuming that all of the returnees are on the up-and-up, however, it would be very useful to know if any of them actually signed any writers they met at PNWA last year, as it would give a rather solid sense of how serious they are about picking up clients at conferences. Someone might want to ask them that at the agents’ forum, in fact.

Please don’t depend upon me to ask this question during the forum — I shall not be in the room. I go to the conference to run the Pitch Practicing Palace, which will ONLY be operating on Thursday, the first day of the conference, this year. (I.e., not on either of the days when attendees would be pitching.)

I know, I know: it was not my decision. (See my earlier comment about my not having any pull at the PNWA.)

Some of the agencies that send representatives every year are sending someone again, just different people; in a way, this is actually better for the writers who attend every year, since it prevents the rather awkward problem of pitching the same book to the same agent or editor twice. Loretta Barrett Books is sending Nick Mullendore this year, instead of Loretta Barrett; Folio is sending Scott Hoffman, instead of last year’s {name removed at agent’s request; for explanation, please see post of May 10, 2006, when I originally wrote about him}, and Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (DGLM, the agency that represents me) is sending Jim McCarthy, instead of Lauren Abramo. And Elizabeth Wales, although she skipped last year, has been a regular feature at PNWA for years.

It’s worth paying attention when an agency commits to sending a representative year after year: it speaks well of the conference, or at any rate of the agency’s perception of the conference. It implies that the recidivist agencies believe that the conference, or at least its ambient writing community, prepares its writers well for entering the professional sphere.

Or, if you’re cynical, it implies a grateful recognition of the conference location’s ability to attract such affection-generating relatives, friends, and lovers for agents to visit. Either way, these people are coming out from New York (for the most part), and you will be able to pitch to them.

Sometimes, though, agencies will send representatives to a particular conference year after year because they have a specific interest in that region of the country — and if that’s the case, any of you who write novels set in the Pacific Northwest will DEFINITELY want to pitch to them. So it well worth asking agents from these repeatedly-sending agencies whether the agency picked up any new clients at this conference last year, or within the last couple of years, and why.

(See comment above about the probability of my being in the room to ask that question for you.)

My point is, agents seldom show up at a conference randomly. Good agents want to attend conferences where they will meet good writers, and repeat attendance is the primary way that agencies show where they think their representatives are most likely to attain that end.

So think about what we have learned just from glancing over the list of attending agents: of the 17 scheduled, 10 either attended the conference last year, have in the past, or work for agencies that have sent agents here before. That implies a certain industry faith in the level of writing talent PNWA attracts.

And that, my friends, is why I broke my last year’s vow not to profile its attending agents and editors again. It’s a well-respected conference.

Okay, so there’s a sentimental reason I do it, too: I landed MY agent at PNWA. With a pitch. So I know from the very best possible authority that it is possible to pull off.

Details on individual agents follow, of course. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Picking the right conference for you, part II: walking in with your eyes open

Picking the right conference for you, part II: walking in with your eyes open

Yesterday, I began wading into the weird and wonderful world of literary conferences, letting you in on some guidelines for figuring out which conference is right for you and your book. The timing on this is not entirely coincidental: early registration for the PNWA conference this coming July is now open, and there is a nifty benefit associated with signing up quickly: an extra appointment with an agent to pitch your work.

So while last year, I waited until the end of April to start reviewing the sales records of the agents and acquisition records of the editors planning to attend PNWA, this year, I am getting to it early, to help you make your choices about whom to request. Quite a few of last year’s agents and editors are returning this year, so if you are looking to get the skinny on them right away, please see the brand-new category at right — named, with startling originality. Agents/Editors Who Attend PNWA.

In the interests of full disclosure, there is a reason that I annually single out the PNWA conference for my august attention: not only is it one of the larger ones, and noted for its many great pitching opportunities, but I will also be there, along with the Pitch Practicing Palace staff, to help attendees refine their pitches, target the best agents and editors for their work, and generally calm everyone down.

Yes, I just got word today that it is going to happen again this year – many thanks to all of you who contacted the PNWA to say that you wanted the PPP to offer its services again this year. (Fair warning, though: we may only be open for the first afternoon of the conference – i.e., the Thursday – instead of all three days, as we were last year. We’re still working out the details, though.)

So I confess it: I would love to see as many of my readers attend PNWA as possible, so I can meet you. Is that selfish of me?

Before I get down to agent and editor specifics, though, I am spending a few days going over how to pick a conference, as well as general criteria for selecting the agents and editors for your appointments. (For those of you new to the conference circuit, most big conferences will ask you to rank your preferences, so they can try to give you appointments with the agents and editors you want.)

Hint: the conference closest to you geographically may not be the best fit for the book you are promoting. Nor, hard as it may be to believe, the conference regionally closest to ME.

So back to the brass tacks of selection. When you are browsing a conference’s literature or website to see whether you want to register for it, it is not only important to determine whether you are likely to have the level of agent/editor contact you want, as I discussed yesterday – you will also need to take some time to figure out whether the agents and editors scheduled to attend are ones with whom you would WANT to have contact.

In other words, how likely is the array of agents and editors available at any given conference to pick up your book?

Contrary to an astonishingly pervasive belief amongst aspiring writers, not every agent or editor is the right fit for every book. Agents and editors specialize, and furthermore, they have personal preferences as well. The more you know about their areas of representation and interests, the more precise a match you can find for your work.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant along with me now: the industry is not monolithic; no single agent or editor’s opinion represents the entire publishing world. So, logically, it matters very much that you pitch to not just any agent, but one who is predisposed to like books like yours.

Before you even consider signing up for a conference, go through its list of attending agents and editors and ascertain that there is at least one of each who represents books in your category. Ideally, at a big conference, you would like to find more than one, especially if your category is a broad one. Agents do occasionally switch specialties, and believe me, the last thing you want to hear when you’re sitting in a pitch meeting is, “Oh, I don’t represent that kind of book anymore; actually, I’m not sure if anyone here at the conference does.”

Or, still more common, “Yes, I represent YA,” — or romance, SF/fantasy, horror, mysteries, etc., depending on the agent — “but that’s not my age group /I only represent romantica/I don’t do werewolf stories/I’ve given up cozy mysteries…”

Doing a little background research on the agents and editors before you select them, even if that research is limited to reading the blurbs that conference brochures and websites routinely provide, can help minimize the possibility of this kind of unpleasant pitching outcome. And if you pick a conference that features more than one representative of your chosen area of endeavor, if one turns out to have switched specialties, you will have other options.

Checking the agents’ and editors’ areas of specialization may sound self-evident, but at every literary conference I have ever attended (and I’ve been attending them since I was in junior high school; a side effect of growing up amongst writers), I have met at least one good writer on the verge of tears because s/he realized only after s/he got there that there was no one there interested in her work – and thus s/he has just spent a significant amount of money and possibly traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles in order NOT to be able to pitch.

It’s sad to see, really it is.

There are good criteria for choosing which conferences to attend, and poor criteria. When asked, the overwhelming majority of conference attendees report selecting based upon factors that ultimately have little to do with the quality of the pitching experience: how close the conference is to home, who the keynote speaker is, snazziness of brochure, having relatives with whom to stay in Houston, never having been to Maui before.

While all of these are worth considering, if you are trying to find an agent or a publisher for your book, they are not vital considerations. (If you are not planning to pitch work, feel free to rely upon these factors.) What is vital is the array of attending agents and editors and the probability of your work being picked up by one of them.

In selecting amongst conferences, make this your mantra: since an agent who does not represent your kind of work is most assuredly not going to respond positively to your pitch, no matter how good it is, it will not serve your interests to pitch to him. If a conference does not have at least one agent whose DEMONSTRATED (not just stated) interests coincide with your work, choose another conference for pitching your book.

Tomorrow, a little more theory, then we launch into how to read those abstruse little agent and editor blurbs. (It’s not you – they really do tend to sound identical.) In the meantime, keep up the good work!

PS: Longtime reader and good writer Kris Swartz has an entry, “Fries, Lies, and Alibis” – good title, Kris — in the Borders/gather.com First Chapters Writing Competition. Winners are determined by reader reviews, so why not take a moment to hop on over to her entry and offer a fellow writer a bit of support? Her entry will be posted there through the end of this month.

Posted on - No Comments on Making it easy to help you, part V: why attention to etiquette is becoming a better and better idea

Making it easy to help you, part V: why attention to etiquette is becoming a better and better idea

This is my penultimate post on industry etiquette, at least for the nonce, and while I have been trying to keep this upbeat, I feel it would be remiss not to address some of the faux pas that are less inadvertent. Before I conclude this series, I want to spend a day dealing with some…well, one hates to use a term like dishonesty.

Let’s just say that these examples are frowned upon in the industry, and leave it at that.

I have mentioned the possibility of using an introduction from an established client as a stepping-stone to getting an agent’s attention. Generally speaking, there are two ways in which established writers make such an introduction without excessive trouble to themselves: either they can grant you permission to use their names in your query letter (as in the sterling beginning, “Your client Rufus Rudyard recommended that I contact you about my book…”), or they can forward your work to their agents themselves, with suitable commentary about how terrific you are.

Either way, the results are potentially very good for you. Such a recommendation usually means that the agent will actually see the query letter, rather than just a screener. At minimum, the query will be taken more seriously.

As we have seen, it seldom pays to assume that an offer of help automatically translates to the latter. Authors tend to have reservations about forwarding work themselves, for very good reasons: it’s a lot of responsibility, assuring an agent that the forwarded writer is the next great find; if the agent is slow or hostile in response, the referring author feels he’s let the writer down; if the writer turns out to be hard to work with, unprofessional, or just not very talented, the author’s credibility with his agent may be compromised. Oh, and by introducing his agent to another writer, the author is bringing into the agency someone with whom he will have to compete for the agent’s usually already stretched-thin time.

Given all of those disincentives, it’s not a great surprise that most authors are more than a little reluctant to go this route, is it?

The other, infinitely more common approach is to say, “Sure – this is my agent’s name; go ahead and say that that I recommended you to him.” While this may not at first blush seem like much of a favor, bear in mind that all of the disincentives above still apply – this route is merely less work for the author – so it is still a piece of assistance well worth your gratitude.

Because such recommendations are so valuable, over-eager aspiring writers occasionally fudge just a little in their use, implying more of a recommendation than the author in question was actually offering. The most famous form of this, of course, is the query that begins, “Saul Bellow said my work is the best thing he’s read for the last five years.”

A recommendation that would be considerably more impressive if Mssr. Bellow had been alive for more of those five years than he actually was, no?

Sometimes, though, recommendation blurring of reality is unintentional — the aspiring writer merely misunderstood how much of a leg up the author was actually offering:

Misguided approach 3: Rachel meets Rapunzel, a writer she has admired for years, at a book signing. Rachel, being a polite writer, approaches Rapunzel with respect: she arrives at the reading well-versed in Rapunzel’s work, including her latest novel, LIFE AFTER HAIR; she asks intelligent questions during the reading; she brings a book to have Rapunzel sign, and buys another for her mother, and she gushes at Rapunzel long enough after the signing that the author spontaneously asks her what she writes.

So far, so good, right?

In fact, they hit it off so well that Rapunzel invites her to e-mail with questions, and after a reasonable exchange, the author tells Rachel that she may use the valuable Rapunzel name as a reference in approaching her agent, Rafaela.

Rachel is thrilled – and promptly sends her entire manuscript off to Rafaela, saying that Rapunzel had told her to send it. She is astonished to see her manuscript returned within a week with a form letter rejection.

What did Rachel do wrong?

She misunderstood, quite innocently, what Rapunzel was offering her: the opportunity to use her as a reference in a query letter, period. If she had pursued this route, Rafaela probably would have asked to see the manuscript. By sending her manuscript before Rafaela asked for it, however, Rachel just sent an unsolicited submission. As such, it may not even have been read.

Here again, we see that asking follow-up questions could have saved the writer a lot of grief. But it’s hard to hold Rachel very responsible for the outcome: she simply did not know enough about how agencies worked to realize how much unsolicited submissions are despised. Not all referral mistakes are this innocent, however.

Misguided approach 4: Samuel met agented writer Samantha at a writers’ conference a few years ago. They have been cordial ever since whenever they met, and occasionally e-mail about their respective publishing progress. Having heard so much about Samantha’s agent, Sydney, Samuel feels as though he knows her.

One rainy Monday morning, Samantha is startled to see an e-mail from Sydney in her in-box. (At work: since she has only sold a couple of mid-list books, Samantha still can’t afford to quit her secretarial job.) “Can you tell me something about this writer you recommended?” Sydney writes. “I’ve been thinking about getting into representing this kind of book, but his bio was really sketchy. Can you fill me in?”

Huh? Samantha thought.

A few days later, Samuel receives his manuscript and a form-letter rejection with an angry scrawl in the margins. “Our client didn’t recommend you,” it reads.

What did Samuel do wrong? Without seeing his query, it’s a trifle hard to tell, precisely, but we can certainly make some educated guesses.

At best, Samuel fudged his initial query, turning an acquaintance into a recommendation. Perhaps, if asked, he would respond that since Samantha had spoken so often and so glowingly of Sydney, he thought she was making a recommendation. But regardless of why he did it, or if he intended to misleading, he’s blown his chance with Sydney (and his friendship with Samantha) forever: evidently, it didn’t occur to him that the agent might check.

Word to the wise: they do. Habitually. If you harbor even the slightest doubt about whether an agented author is offering a recommendation – and you should, unless the author has actually produced the words, “Tell my agent I sent you” — ASK.

Rather than wasting our energies upon trying to figure out what Samuel could have been thinking, let’s look at another version of the misused recommendation. This one is hard to read as anything but manipulative, but at least the exemplar in this instance is cautious about the possibility of the agent’s checking up on her:

Misguided approach 5: Tanya met agented author Tremaine through networking; he’s the friend of a friend. Because she seemed to be nice and was complimentary about his work, Tremaine was happy to answer a few of Tanya’s questions via e-mail. Lately, however, he’s been deliberately slowing his responses, because she’s starting to e-mail him every day.

Clearly, he thinks, Tanya is thinking of this as a friendship, rather than what it actually is, an author being nice to a reader.

One sunny Tuesday, Tremaine sees yet another e-mail from Tanya in his inbox. Sighing, he leaves it to answer another day. On Friday, he opens it, and is startled to find a cheerful missive from Tanya, telling him she has already sent a query to his agent, Trevor — using Tremaine’s name as a reference. Would Tremaine mind following up with Trevor, to confirm the recommendation and try to speed up the process?

Tanya’s put Tremaine in a tough situation here, hasn’t she? On one level, she has used his name without his permission, and he would be well within his rights to pick up the phone and tell Trevor that she used his name without his permission, killing her submission’s chances.

On the other hand, doing so would make him look bad in the eyes of his agent: if he confesses to having been used, the next time Tremaine actually does want to recommend an aspiring writer, he will have to pass the manuscript along to Trevor personally, to avoid the possibility of another misappropriation of his name.

Which, as we have seen, will be a whole lot of work for him.

Again, it was Tanya’s responsibility to ASK Tremaine for permission to use his name, not tell him about it afterward. And while it is possible that she DID ask, but Tremaine overlooked her question because of the sheer volume of her e-mails, it is never legitimate to assume that silence equals consent.

A good rule of thumb in any context, actually.

What happened to Tremaine happens to famous writers ALL the time, incidentally: unfortunately, there are plenty of aspiring writers out there who have mistaken professional kindness to a fan for the beginning of a lifetime friendship. And friends help one another, right?

Before you use a recommender’s name, make ABSOLUTELY sure that you have the recommender’s permission to do so; you may make an honest mistake, but because some unscrupulous folks have used this leg-up technique on purpose, the knee-jerk assumption on the agent’s end is almost certainly going to be that there was no misunderstanding at all. Just misappropriation.

It’s just not worth the risk.

A graceful way to confirm: if you are meeting in person, ask the recommender to write the agent’s name on a handy piece of paper for you. Then ask, “And it’s really okay for me to say that you sent me?” If said in a pleased, wondering tone, this will be perceived as a compliment — “Wow — YOU’re willing to recommend me?” — rather than doubting the author’s word.

Via e-mail, it’s even easier: if the language of the offer has been at all ambiguous, e-mail the recommender, saying that you are going to contact the agent. But make sure, unlike Tanya, you do it BEFORE you, well, contact the agent in question.

The overarching moral of all of the examples from the last few days: it is ALWAYS better to ask a follow-up question or two than to assume that someone intends to help you more than his words have stated specifically. If the recommender is indeed offering to help, the question is merely considerate; if not, it’s far better you know about it before you act, right?

And regardless of the outcome: remember to express gratitude for the help you did get. As well as, of course, keeping up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Any platform will do

Any platform will do

I had to laugh today, when I was reading the publishing news. I’d been telling editing clients and blog readers alike for years than when brainstorming about their qualifications to write particular books, they should not be afraid to bring in resume points that have little to do with the topic at hand.

I love it when I am proved right.

One’s collected selling points as a writer are known in the biz as one’s platform, and the higher it is, the better, generally speaking. Usually, though, writers limit themselves to their expertise only as it relates to the book at hand, as though platform were synonymous with credibility: one’s 25 years as a marriage counselor, for instance, would obviously add credibility to one’s self-help book for couples experiencing problems sharing the medicine cabinet.

Don’t sneeze at unrelated qualifications, however, if they are interesting. My doctorate has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of my memoir – but you’d better believe that it was part of my platform for marketing it.

Why? For the same reason that any skilled lawyer would establish my credentials if I were called as a witness to a crime: my Ph.D. would certainly not make me a better observer of a hit-and-run accident, but it would tend to make the jury believe that I was a reasonable human being.

A platform, I have been known to say over and over again like a mantra, is like a pitch for oneself, rather than one’s book: whereas a pitch makes it plain to people in the industry why the book is marketable and to whom, the platform demonstrates why a reader – or, more to the point, people in the media – might be interested in interviewing the author.

So while your extensive background as a supermodel might not be relevant to your credibility if you are writing the definitive book on weevils, for instance, it would most assuredly mean that you would be a welcome guest on TV shows. Perhaps not to talk about weevils, but hey, any publicity you can garner is bound to be good for your book, right?

Case in point, as reported today on Publishers Marketplace:

“Jenna Bush’s ANA’S STORY: A Journey of Hope, based on her experiences working with UNICEF in Central America, focusing on a seventeen-year-old single mother who was orphaned at a young age and is living with HIV, with photographs by Mia Baxter, to Kate Jackson at Harper Children’s, for publication in fall 2007 (Harper says they’ll print about 500,000 copies), by Robert Barnett at Williams & Connolly (world). Her proceeds will go to UNICEF, where she is working as an intern.”

I find this listing a miracle of platform-raising, both for what it says and what it doesn’t say. Plenty of people write books based upon time living and working abroad, and a YA book of this sort is certainly a good idea. However, this is an unheard-of run for such a volume, so we must look elsewhere for an explanation of what made the publisher decide that this particular YA book is so very valuable: the author is, of course, the President’s daughter, presumably following in the well-worn footsteps of Amy Carter, the author of a YA book herself.

Amy Carter, however, was not summarily ejected from any major Latin American country for hardcore partying at any point in her long and colorful career, unlike Ms. Bush and her sister. (How much carousing would one have to do to be declared undesirable in Rio, one wonders?) Ms. Carter did occasionally turn up chained to South African embassies next to Abbie Hoffman during the bad old days of apartheid, though, if memory serves.

It just goes to show you: when you’re building a platform, any kind of fame is a selling point.

So keep those credentials flowing, and keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did Caleb do wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save yourself some dosh.

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

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

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

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

What did Bartholomew do wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, what’s the rush?

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

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

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

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