Okay, okay, so I didn’t manage to get our planned whew-I-survived-PNWA treat up yesterday, as I had hoped, as a quick breather between talking about how to handle conference pitching with aplomb and today’s plunge into how to handle a request for manuscript pages — which will still be happening later today, you will be delighted to hear. I have an excellent excuse, however: the other day, a truck burst into flames outside the salon where I was having my hair cut.
The first those of us inside the salon heard of it was the giant pop when the windshield exploded. Not the best time to have one’s head in a sink, as it turns out. Both my stylist and I jumped so much that I have a gigantic bump on the back of my noggin. It’s rendered it just a trifle difficult to focus on a computer screen.
And that, in case any of you had been wondering, is why fiction has to be so much more plausible than nonfiction — and why simply slapping real-life events on the novel page so often doesn’t ring quite true. Quite a lot of what happens in this zany world of ours would seem completely absurd if it popped up in a novel.
Case in point: would you believe it if Our Heroine not only rushed to her blog the instant she could see straight after that out-of-nowhere explosion, but posted twice in one day? Surely, that pushes the bounds of credulity; the fact that it is actually going to happen would be irrelevant.
Is my vision still a bit blurry, or are some of you sighing and shifting impatiently in your chairs? “Yes, yes, Anne,” those of you eager to get requested materials out the door mutter, “I’m sorry for your whacked head, but we’ve been talking about practical matters for the last week. I’ve appreciated that, as I have a manuscript request burning a hole in my metaphorical pocket from my recent successful conference pitch and/or a query that hit the right note. I’m begrudgingly honoring your advice to read my submission IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and perhaps even OUT LOUD before I send it off to the agent of my dreams. But honestly, a cozy chat about plausibility in fiction? Or a discussion of craft with a respected historical fiction author, as the title of this post implies you’re about to have? How can I do that and remain monomaniacally focused upon popping my manuscript into the mail as soon as I have satisfied your insane demands?”
All part of my evil plan, impatient shifters (but please, don’t say popping to me right now; it makes my head throb). As it happens, evil plans, plausibility in fiction, craft, and the all-important issue of how to keep the faith throughout what can be a long, attenuated submission process — even if you hit SEND immediately after today’s late-night post on how to present your work professionally, it’s not at all uncommon for submitters not to hear back for months — are all part of this afternoon’s treat.
So is the question of how to render over-the-top realities plausible on the page. Or wasn’t plausibility something for which you had been scanning while you were re-reading the pages you intend to submit IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and, if you want to make me happy, OUT LOUD?
Okay, that’s why you might want to pay close attention to the content of this discussion, impatient shifters. Now, allow me to introduce my discussant, a highly-respected historical novelist deeply gifted at bringing even the most over-the-top events of years past into vivid, plangent, and utterly plausible life on the page: Nicole Galland.
Nicole Galland’s terrific new retelling of OTHELLO, I, Iago came out a few months back, and although you of all people know I am not prone to gushing, I think it’s one of the best historical novels of recent years. I also think it’s both a terrific read and a great example for those of you toiling away in the currently popular vineyard of reconceiving classic tales. From the publisher’s blurb:
From earliest childhood, the precocious boy called Iago had inconvenient tendencies toward honesty—a “failing” that made him an embarrassment to his family and an outcast in the corrupted culture of glittering, Renaissance Venice. Embracing military life as an antidote to the frippery of Venetian society, he won the glowing love of the beautiful Emilia, and the regard of Venice’s revered General Othello. After years of abuse and rejection, Iago was poised to win everything he ever fought for…
…until a cascade of unexpected betrayals propel him on a catastrophic quest for righteous vengeance, contorting his moral compass until he has betrayed his closest friends and family and sealed his own fate as one of the most notorious villains of all time.
Pretty exciting, eh? Actually, for once, a blurb has undersold the dramatic action — and the genuinely astonishing twists of the plot.
Yes, even if one happens to know Othello awfully darned well. I do, as it happens: I’ve acted in it. Heck, I’ve played more than one role in it. And more than one turn of events made me not only gasp out loud, but put that pen with which a prudent author interviewer always takes marginal notes right through the page.
Think about that. Usually, I don’t jump for anything less than a nearby explosion.
Seriously, one of the occupational hazards of being an editor is the deadening of one’s capacity for surprise. Editors are notorious for rolling their eyes over mild foreshadowing on page 14 and murmuring, “Oh, great, now I know how the book ends.” If you are the type of person that likes to receive a story arc in sequential chunks, I would strenuously advise against accompanying an editor to a movie.
That suggestion is brought to you, incidentally, by the unlucky soul that happened to be occupying the adjacent loge seat when I saw The Sixth Sense. The first time the mother appeared onscreen and did not ask how her child’s therapy session had gone, everyone within three rows heard my annoyed huff, if not my whispered, “Oh, so the mother can’t see the therapist; he must be a ghost. I’m bored now.”
As you might imagine for a reader with that kind of attitude problem, it’s rare that a plot catches me by surprise. So how is it possible that reading a story whose ending I know as well as Othello’s kept me up all night reading because I wanted to know how it was going to turn out?
Which is, of course, the central problem in retelling any well-known classic. It’s always a writing challenge to draw readers into a story, particularly one that takes place long ago, but it’s an especially high dive with Shakespeare — and not merely because of the intimidation value of tackling one of the theatrical world’s greatest tragedies. Even readers that routinely turn pale at the very thought of their high school English class’ discussion of Hamlet may reasonably be expected to be familiar with the outlines of the plot: General Othello and the lovely Desdemona are in love, Iago convinces Othello to become madly jealous, and the stage quickly becomes littered with corpses.
To make the dive even higher, the literary world has in recent years applauded — and even expected — new takes on culturally well-known tales not only to render them fresh and accessible for current readers, but to do so from the point of view of the villain. In reimagining Othello, that presents quite a difficulty: Iago does some pretty loathsome things to the people around him, rendering him hard to like — and, unusually for chatty Shakespeare, the play’s audience is actually not treated to much explanation of his motives.
How did Nicole conquer these twin challenge? By means of a writing choice that I think will delight and instruct those of us devoted to writing fiction: by delving so thoroughly into Iago’s past and personality development that as he takes each step toward infamy, the reader is cajoled into saying, “Oh, okay — I can go along with that.”
The result is hugely engaging. I, IAGO not only seduced me into liking the villain — something I would not have thought possible — but left me feeling by the tumultuous last quarter of the book that by having empathized with his increasingly warped sense of right and wrong, I had become enmeshed in his fate. Yet even though I could see it coming, even though I had picked up the book knowing that it had to come, the trip there kept catching me off guard, because I was experiencing it moment-to-moment with the protagonist-villain.
And that, my friends, is not something that happens all that often to those of us that murmur at the first mention of a character’s hard childhood, “Oh, so he’s the serial killer.”
An unexpected fringe benefit that friends of the Bard will love: this story is so steeped in the Shakespearean ethos that small hints of his other works seem to have been built into the very plaster of the ballrooms and steel of the swords. Here is an image plucked from a sonnet; there is descriptor reminiscent of Juliet. And could that possibly be a reference to Pericles, Prince of Tyre?
It is, in a word, fun — not word I generally associate with tragedy. If I have a critique (other than having lost sleep to this story), it’s that I would have liked to see both Desdemona’s very genuine wit and Othello’s descent into overwhelming paroxysms of jealousy in a bit more detail. Why was this great mind so easily overthrown?
But that’s a minor quibble. As an established fan of Nicole’s writing — and, in the interest of full disclosure, as someone who first met her during an audition for Measure for Measure at Harvard, back in the Reagan era — naturally, I expected to be charmed by the writing. I have to say, though, I think this is far and away her best book to date, and certainly one I have been frantically handing to every aspiring historical novelist I meet as a prime example of how it’s done.
So, equally naturally, when she made a flying visit to Seattle recently, I dragged her into my back yard, turned a camera on her, and implored her to share her writing secrets. Unfortunately, before we began, I took off the hat I had been wearing on that hat day first, so you’ll have to excuse my hair.
Seriously, its state requires excuse, so much so that had this not been such a meaty interview with such an old friend, I might have held off on posting it until I could find a gifted retoucher of videotape. But I promised you a treat, so I shall cast vanity to the winds.
How I suffer for your art, eh? Concentrate instead, please, on this year’s bumper crop of lilacs — and a great conversation about craft with one of the best. Enjoy!
I wasn’t kidding about the hair, was I? Those of us whose tint is, as Truman Capote put it so succinctly for all time, somewhat self-induced would do well to get into the habit of peeking at oneself in a mirror prior to doing any book promotion at all, much less a taped interview. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, present and future authors.
But let’s get back to the problem of constructing an inherently hard-to-like protagonist so that the reader will like him well enough to want to follow him throughout an entire book. First-time novelists — especially those writing in the first person for the first time, and that’s a lot of firsts — often don’t think about this crucial part of the author’s tacit agreement with the reader, but in either a first-person or tight third-person narrative, the protagonist is the reader’s guide to the story. We’re committed to seeing everything from his point of view.
So if that protagonist is too passive to ask relevant questions the reader wants to know, or not sufficiently nuanced in his worldview to be able to observe in useful detail, or too unpleasant to be good company for a few hundred pages, the reader may feel slightly cheated. Yes, even if the plot is very exciting: would you want to go on a tour of a haunted house with a guide that steered you away from the dark corners, did not seem to know much about the house’s history, or declared every fifteen seconds that anyone who believed in ghosts was an idiot?
Of course not. You want your guide to fit with the atmosphere. By the same token, in a historical novel, you want your protagonist to be both plausibly of his era and fascinating to follow.
Nicole’s protagonist and narrator is abundantly both, on both overt and subtle levels. At first, Iago seems merely sensitive and observant, a boy not born into a social class that would permit him the luxury of picking his own career. Increasingly determined to set his own course despite a demanding father’s demands (especially well-drawn) and a frivolous social order not given to recognizing real worth, he has to fight hard to remain honest, and it frequently costs him dearly.
So when he begins to feel just a bit resentful of others’ advancement, who can blame him? Why shouldn’t he gain the wife he wants, the promotion he craves, the spot at the exotic newly-minted general’s side? Shown through Iago’s eyes, his wants seem so reasonable, even moderate, and his opposition so privileged that we cannot help but cheer him on as he navigates the complex world of Venetian military and social politics.
By the time he starts to display enough sharp-edged jealousy to startle us, the reader is already implicated in what gradually emerges as a slow-acting, closely-observed madness from the point of view of the madman. Iago genuinely wants to believe he is doing the right thing as he continues to do more and more egregiously wrong ones.
The great characterization trick that keeps the reader following him: his justifications remain insidiously plausible, right up to the point when not even he can believe what he has done. But by then, as in all great tragedy, self-knowledge can no longer save him — or anybody else. The die is cast.
That’s not a characterization feat that could have been pulled off by just telling the reader all of these things. But how the heck does one show progressive madness from the increasingly mad character’s point of view?
So there’s another tip for those planning to give or conduct video interviews: don’t sit under a large, bug-attracting tree. Or add nice, juicy chunks of fruit to your iced tea.
Apparently, flying insects are real camera hogs. Stick with water, okay?
That practical tip out of the way — you know me; I’m always toiling to help make the life literary a bit easier for writers — I don’t want to set up the next clip too much. The discussion turned shortly thereafter from perspective and craft to more fundamental characterization issue of inhabiting one’s character thoroughly enough to be able to see his world through his eyes — and feel it with his skin.
But I promised you a solid discussion of plausibility, did I not? Here it is — and, as plausible fiction always is, it’s detail-oriented and down-to-earth. Those of you constructing fight scenes might want to pay particularly close attention to this segment; it’s full of practical tips.
Here’s the promised link to Nicole’s previous novel, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade. Heck, while we’re at it, let’s take a gander at the publisher’s blurb for that, too:
In the year 1202, tens of thousands of crusaders gather in Venice, preparing to embark for Jerusalem to free the Holy City from Muslim rule. Among them is a lowly vagabond Briton, rescued from damnation by a pious knight who burns with zealous fire for their sacred undertaking. And so they set sail, along with dedicated companions—and with a beautiful, mysterious Arab “princess” whom the vagabond liberates from a brutish merchant. But the divine light guiding their “righteous” campaign soon darkens as the mission sinks ever deeper into catastrophe, disgrace, and moral turpitude—as Christians murder Christians in the Adriatic port city of Zara, tragic events are set in motion that will ultimately lead to the shocking and shameful fall of Constantinople.
Impeccably researched and beautifully told, Nicole Galland’s Crossed is a stunning tale of the disastrous Fourth Crusade—and of the hopeful, brave, and driven who were caught up in and irrevocably changed by a corrupted cause and a furious battle beyond their comprehension or control.
And now let’s move on to the my favorite clip, a discussion of how the opinions of others so often shape writers’ conceptions of their own talent. Those of you prone to late-night anxieties about your writing may want to bookmark this part.
Let me underscore one of those points: never give anybody else the power to tell you not to write. Because we live in a society that believes that if a book is any good, it will automatically get published — since, as we all know, the Book Fairy magically appears on every talented aspiring writer’s doorstep the instant after the writer has typed THE END, bearing the perfect agent and a publication contract — it’s incredibly easy for aspiring writers to come to believe that they are not real writers until they have a book out. Or until they land an agent, or win a literary contest.
Yes, talent is necessary to achieve these laudable goals, but it’s not the only requisite. Luck plays a role, too, as does perseverance. As literally everyone who has ever handled manuscripts for a living could tell you — yet surprisingly seldom do — plenty of brilliant books never make it into print. Plenty of marvelous writers never land an agent. And plenty of agents and editors shake their heads every day over promising queries and submissions, murmuring, “Gee, I would love to live in a world in which I could sell this book.”
One could regard that as depressing. One could also regard it as a fabulous reason to keep writing — and querying, and submitting. The literary world’s tastes change all the time. Perhaps today isn’t the day that agent or editor is living in the right world for your book, but tomorrow may well be.
You’ll never know unless you have your manuscript ready and waiting, will you?
Please join me in thanking Nicole Galland for sharing her wit, wisdom, and insight with us — and please, have faith in your writing. These two pros are here to tell you that ultimately, you need no one’s permission to write.
I hope that those of you attending the PNWA’s annual shindig this weekend will pardon my delaying the promised final post on writing conferences — after the tragic events of Thursday night and Friday morning, I felt that we could all use a bit of a breather from stark reality. Besides, I thought my online time would be better used responding to individual questions: I’ve heard from about a dozen conference attendees who have apparently been taking breaks between sessions to nip back to their respective hotel rooms, log onto the Internet, and shoot me a question about pitching. Or look up a how-to in the Author! Author! archives. Or just to remind themselves that, contrary to what eager aspiring writers often hear from the dais at writers’ conferences, the outlook for publishing is not all gloom and doom.
We try to be upbeat here at Author! Author! Which is why what I’m about to tell those of you who have just successfully pitched your work to an agent or editor may come as something of a surprise: no matter how excited you are about receiving a request for pages, do not even consider sending your manuscript to that agent or editor right away. Take the time to re-read it yourself first.
Half of you just turned pale with dread, right? “But Anne,” post-pitch writers everywhere exclaim, “that will take hours, or maybe even days! I want to get this out the door!”
Of course you do; it’s tremendously exciting when a real, live agent or editor wants to read your work. If you’re like most conference pitchers, you’re probably thinking that it would be a good idea to get it under his or her nose as soon as humanly possible, while s/he is still excited about it. Or, to put it more cynically, while s/he still remembers your pitch.
That’s an understandable impulse, but relax — pitch-hearers typically take good notes; they also often hear dozens of pitches at any given conference. That means, in practice, that you don’t need to rely upon that agent or editor’s memory of your pitch to guarantee a warm reception for the requested pages. All you have to do is include a cover letter thanking the agent or editor for asking for your manuscript.
And, realistically, yours is not going to be the only manuscript that agent or editor has requested over the last six months. That means, to get cynical again for a moment, that no matter how excited that agent or editor seemed to be about your book concept, it’s not standard practice for them to clear their schedules immediately after returning from a writers’ conference in order to read all of the requested materials super-eager writers will have e-mailed within hours of the pitch meeting. Nor do they tend to stand by the incoming mail chute, fretting about why that writer has not yet mailed that manuscript. Why, it’s been a whole week!
Trust me, that’s not going to happen. Contrary to what you may have heard on the conference rumor mill or read on the Internet, there’s no ambient expectation that a writer will send requested materials the day she receives the request, or even within a few weeks. Nor will cranking out pages instantly win a pitcher Brownie points at most agencies. Especially if, as is so often and so unfortunately the case with super-swift submissions, the manuscript is not either professionally formatted or what the pros call clean: free of typos, spelling gaffes, missing words, grammar problems, or any other writing faux pas that might detract — and distract — from the quality of the writing.
Translation: you not only have time to make sure that every word in those pages creates precisely the impression you want; it’s very much in your best interest to make the time to do it. You have time to spell-check; you have time to grammar-check; you have time to fine-tune characterization. That being the case, and knowing that any well-established agent receives enough well-written, book category-appropriate, perfectly clean manuscripts in any given year to fill the agency’s new client requirements many times over, why would a savvy writer not be willing to take the time to make sure that his work will make the best possible impression?
That question is not entirely rhetorical, by the way. Our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, mutters it above promising-but-flawed submissions pretty much every day of conference season.
See why I was a trifle reluctant to dump that much hard reality upon everyone when the national news was already depressing? Don’t worry; the rest of this post will be much more upbeat. It will, however, be stuffed to the gills with practical advice about handling yourself professionally in a pitching situation — and after the fact.
But first, let’s cheer ourselves up by contemplating the photo at the top of this post. That’s an actual stone in my yard, believe it or not, one that apparently went out of its way to anthropomorphize itself for my illustrative pleasure. If rocks can be that helpful and friendly, it gives me great hope for human beings.
It also reminds me of a friendly hillside that featured prominently in one of the UNCLE WIGGLY books, but that’s not why I like to run this photograph every year when I talk about pitching. I post it to remind all of you writers brave enough to sit down in front of an agent or editor and make an argument for your book that getting into print is often a long haul, even for the most beautifully-written manuscript or most trenchant book proposal.
You’re going to want to pace yourself.
Part of pacing your efforts involves — and you may well have seen this coming — not becoming so excited about a successful pitch or query that you submit your writing to professional scrutiny before it’s sufficiently polished. As we discussed last time, no matter how well you and the agent or editor to whom you pitched your book seemed to hit it off, no professional reader in his right mind would take on a manuscript simply because she liked the writer, or even because the pitch sounded good. Unless you happen to be a celebrity, a pro’s decision about whether to take on a manuscript is based primarily upon — wait for it — the manuscript.
Or, as agents and editors like to say, “It all depends on the writing.”
That often comes as a gigantic surprise to writers riding the heady adrenaline rush of having given a successful conference pitch. It also, unfortunately, also tends to come as a huge surprise to writers whose pitches were greeted with, “No, thanks,” as well as the many, many conference-attending writers that do not work up the nerve to pitch at all.
There’s a pretty good reason for that, actually: the overwhelming majority of writers’ conferences that feature pitching imply in their literature that if a pitch is good enough, the agent or editor hearing it will sign the writer on the spot. Since that simply does not happen — chant it with me now: no agent in her right mind would take on a manuscript or book proposal without reading it — it’s not altogether astonishing that writers that walk into conferences with this expectation often walk out of even the most successful pitch feeling somewhat let down.
Equally understandably, given such unrealistic expectations, they often walk into their pitch meetings believing that presentation is more important than substance. First-time pitchers often harbor fears of inadvertently making a poor impression upon an agent or editor in a social situation, thereby nullifying their chances of being able to wow ‘em with a pitch in a formal meeting.
I wish I could say that this is an unfounded fear, but actually, it’s pretty reasonable: one doesn’t have to spend much time hanging around that bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference in North America to hear a few horror stories about jaw-droppingly rude writers. And I don’t know about you, but one of my more dubious gifts as a human being is an uncanny ability to find the most institutionally powerful person in the room and catch him in a misstatement or crack a joke that skewers his ego, generally before I know who he is.
Hard to imagine how this particular trait would have provided my ancestors with enough of a survival advantage to justify its being passed down the evolutionary line, but I do seem to have been born with it. Many are the family stories about the toddler critiquing the pediatrician’s sartorial choices.
Honestly, does anybody look good in those tacky white polyester coats?
Before any of my fellow compulsive truth-tellers begin to panic, let me hasten to add that agents’ and editors’ anecdotes are almost invariably about genuinely outrageous approach attempts, not minor faux pas. And that’s not just because “You’re not going to believe this, but a pitcher just forgot to tell me whether is book is fiction or nonfiction” isn’t nearly as likely to garner sympathetic murmurs from fellow bar denizens as “This insane writer just grabbed my arm as I was rushing into the bathroom and refused to stop talking for 20 minutes.”
For one thing, the former is too common a phenomenon to excite much of a response from other agents. Unhappily, though, the latter happens often enough that some agents turn against hallway pitching for life. As, indeed, many a product of the post-conference rumor mill can attest.
However — and this is a big however — in my experience, the aspiring writers who sit around and fret about being the objects of such anecdotes are virtually never the folks that ought to be worrying about it. These are not the kind of gaffes that your garden-variety well-mannered person is likely to commit.
The result: polite people end up tiptoeing around conferences, terrified of doing the wrong thing, while the rude stomp around like Godzilla with P.M.S. And then, once an agent who has been smashed into by one Godzilla too many complains on a blog or in an interview about how impolite writers are, the naturally courteous cringe, while the rude remain unfazed. Thus are the polite rendered more and more fearful of running afoul of an unspoken rule or two.
Case in point: a technologically-savvy reader wrote in a couple of years back to ask if it was considered appropriate to take notes on a laptop, iPad, or phone during conference seminars. It’s still not very common (surprising, given how computer-bound most of us are these days) but yes, it is acceptable, under two conditions.
First, if you do not sit in a very prominent space in the audience — and not solely because of the tap-tap-tap sound you’ll be making. Believe it or not, it’s actually rather demoralizing for a lecturer to look out at a sea of faces that are all staring at their laps. Are these people bored out of their minds, the worried speaker wonders, or merely taking notes very intensely?
Don’t believe me? The next time you attend a lecture of any sort, keep your eyes on the speaker’s face, rather than on your notes, your Blackberry, or that Octavia Butler novel you’ve hidden in your lap because you can’t believe that your boss is making you sit through a talk on the importance of conserving paper clips for the third time this year.
I guarantee that within two minutes, the speaker will be addressing half of his comments directly to you; consistent, animated-faced attention is THAT unusual in a lecture environment. The bigger the audience, the more quickly she will focus upon the one member visibly interested in what he is saying.
Heck, at the university where I used to teach, active listening was so rare that occasionally, one or another of my colleagues would get so carried away with appreciation that he would marry a particularly attentive student. One trembles to think what these men would have done had they been gripping enough lecturers to animate an entire room.
Back to the iPad issue. It’s also considered, well, considerate to ask the speaker before the class if it is all right to use any electronic device during the seminar, be it computer, iPhone, or tape recorder.
Why? Think about it: if your head happens to be apparently focused upon your screen, how is the speaker to know that you’re not just checking your e-mail? If you grin suddenly, how can the speaker be sure that it was at the one-liner she just tossed off, and not at some friend’s quip on Facebook? Also, in these decadent days, when the antics of unwary pets and clumsy humans often go viral, how may a speaker be sure that you are not recording her with an eye to posting her speech beneath unflattering lighting on YouTube?
Enough about the presenters’ problems; let’s move on to yours. Do be aware that attending a conference, particularly your first, can be a bit overwhelming. You’re going to want to– and this should sound familiar by now — pace yourself.
“But Anne!” conference brochure-clutching writers everywhere pipe up. “The schedule is jam-packed with offerings, many of which overlap temporally! I don’t want to miss a thing!”?
Yes, it’s tempting to take every single class and listen to every speaker, but frankly, you’re going to be a better pitcher if you allow yourself to take occasional breaks. Cut yourself some slack; don’t book yourself for the entire time.
Why? Well, let me ask you this: would you rather be babbling incoherently during the last seminar of the weekend, or raising your hand to ask a coherent question?
Before you answer that, allow me to add: since most attendees’ brains are mush by the end of the conference, it’s generally easier to get close to an agent or editor who teaches a class on the final day. Fewer lines, less competition.
Do make a point of doing something other than lingering in the conference center for three or four days straight. Go walk around the block. Sit in the sun. Grab a cup of coffee with that fabulous literary fiction writer you just met. Hang out in the bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference; that tends to be where the already-agented and already-published hang out, anyway.
And don’t you dare feel guilty about doing any of these things. Skipping the occasional seminar does not constitute being lax about pursuing professional opportunities: it is smart strategy, to make sure you’re fresh for your pitches. If you can’t tear yourself away, take a few moments to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, to reset your internal pace from PANIC! to I’m-Doing-Fine.
I know that I sound like an over-eager Lamaze coach on this point, but I can’t overemphasize the importance of reminding yourself to keep breathing throughout the conference. A particularly good time for a nice lung-filling is immediately after you sit down in front of an agent or editor.
Trust me: your brain could use the oxygen right around then. It will help you calm down so you can make your most effective pitch.
And at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, please, please, PLEASE don’t expect a conference miracle. Writing almost never sells on pitches alone, no matter how many times you have heard that apocryphal story about THE HORSE WHISPERER. You are not going to really know what an agent thinks about your work until she has read some of it.
Wait — haven’t I heard something like that before?
Seriously, it’s almost unheard-of for an agent to sign up a client during a conference — and it’s been practically unheard-of since roughly the advent of the personal computer. So I have no idea why so many conference-organizers blithely hand out feedback forms asking if you found an agent at the event. Even the most successful conference pitchers generally don’t receive an offer for weeks, if not months.
See how having realistic expectations can help improve the conference experience, even in retrospect? Remember, your goal here is not to be discovered on the spot, but to get the industry pro in front of you to ask to read your writing. Period.
Yes, I know: I’ve said this before. Repeatedly. And I’m going to keep saying it as long as there are aspiring writers out there who walk into pitch meetings expecting to hear the agent cry, “My God, that’s the best premise since OLIVER TWIST! Here’s a representation contract — and look, here’s my favorite editor now. Let’s see if he’s interested. I want this book sold by midnight!”?
Then, of course, the editor falls equally in love with it, offers an advance large enough to cover New Hampshire in $20 bills, and the book is out by Christmas. As an Oprah’s Book Club selection, naturally, even though neither the Oprah show nor her book club exist anymore.
Long-time readers, chant along with me now: this is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works…
Did I say that you could stop repeating it?
The key to being a happy conference-goer — and, even more importantly, a happy post-conference writer — is not only to realize that the popular conception of how books move from manuscript to publication is dead wrong, but to believe it. Having to make a significant effort in order to get an agent to read your manuscript is normal.
Thus the appeal of conference pitching: done well, it will allow you to skip the querying stage and pass directly to the submission stage. So being asked to send pages is a terrific outcome for this situation, not a distant second place to an imaginary reality.
Admittedly, though, that is easy to forget in the throes of a pitch meeting. Almost as easy as forgetting that a request to submit is not a promise to represent or publish. Out comes the broken record again:
Whatever an agent or editor says to you in a conference situation is just a conversation at a conference, not the Sermon on the Mount or testimony in front of a Congressional committee. There is no such thing as an implied offer of representation or publication; there are only concrete offers and preliminary conversations. Everything is provisional until some paper has changed hands.
This is equally true, incidentally, whether your conference experience includes an agent who actually starts drooling visibly with greed while you were pitching or an editor in a terrible mood who raves for 15 minutes about how the public isn’t buying books anymore. (Not true, incidentally.) Until you sign a mutually-binding contract, no promises — or condemnation, for that matter — should be inferred or believed absolutely.
Try to maintain perspective. If you can’t, stop and take a few deep breaths.
Admittedly, perspective is genuinely hard to achieve when a real, live agent says, “Sure, send me the first chapter,” especially if you’ve been shopping the book around for eons. But it is vital to keep in the back of your mind that eliciting this request is not the end of your job as a marketer. To slap another golden oldie from the broken record collection on the turntable:
Regardless of how much any given agent or editor says she loves your pitch, she’s not going to make an actual decision until she’s read at least part of it. And she’s not going to clear her schedule for the rest of the month to read it, either.
So even if you are over the moon about positive response from the agent of your dreams, please, I beg you, do not stop pitching to any other agent that might conceivably be a good fit for your book. Try to generate as many requests to see your work as you can.
Why, yes, you’re right: that is going to be a heck of a lot of work. Your point?
No matter who says yes to you first, you will be much, much happier two months from now if you have a longer requested submissions list. Ultimately, going to a conference to pitch only twice, when there are 20 agents in the building, is just not efficient.
Far too many aspiring writers will just give up after one successful pitch, assuming, often wrongly, that a friendly pitch meeting means a predisposition to like a submission or an implied promise to read it quickly. It doesn’t, and it isn’t. So it is very much in your interest to send out submissions to several agents at once, rather than one at a time.
I heard that gasp, but no, there is absolutely nothing unethical about this, unless (a) one of the agencies has a policy precluding multiple submissions (rare) or (b) you actively promised one agent an exclusive. (I would emphatically discourage you from granting (b), by the way — and if you don’t know why, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category at right before you even consider pitching at a conference.)
Some of you look concerned, but trust me, this is what the agents will be expecting you to do. If an agent wants an exclusive peek, she will ask for one point-blank; there’s no such thing as a tacit request for a solo submission. By all means, tell each of the agents in the cover letter that others are looking at it, but don’t make the hugely pervasive mistake of granting an effective exclusive that the agent does not expect, simply because she was the one you liked best.
I see some of you blushing: you were thinking that, weren’t you, conference-goers? Or you have in the past, and then ended up waiting six months to hear back from that agent. Or did not hear back at all, right?
“Wow, Anne!” gasp those of you who have lived through this highly unpleasant experience. “What kind of a crystal ball are you wielding these days? That’s precisely what happened to me!”
No crystal ball needed on this one: it happens to pitchers all the time. They misunderstand the level of connection they made with agents at conferences, committing themselves in principle before the agents in question have even seen their work. “Well, we just clicked,” these writers say.
What they tend not to add is that let’s face it, it’s a heck of a lot less work — not to mention less wearing on the nerves — to send out one submission than, say, seven or eight. It’s also less stressful not to keep querying while that nice agent from the conference considers your submission.
And then one sad day, months after the conference, pitchers that think this way receive the rejection, often as a form letter. “What happened?” one-at-a-timers cry. “I thought we clicked! And now I feel like it’s too late to send out those requested materials to other agents.”
Actually, if less than a year has passed since the conference, it isn’t. But just think how much happier a writer who could say, “Well, I’m sad that the agent I liked best decided against representing my book, but at least those four other agents are still considering it,” would be in that moment. Or even one in a position to sigh with relief and murmur, “Wow, am I ever glad that I kept querying throughout these last six months. Now, I have other requests for materials.”
Besides, your time is valuable: sending out those post-conference submissions one at a time, waiting for a response from each before moving on to the next, could eat up months. Years, even, if you’re dealing with agencies that practice the increasingly common rejection tactic of simply never contacting the writer if the answer is no.
Yes, really. Even if the agent requested the entire manuscript. See now why a savvy writer never grants a tacit exclusive?
Just mention in your cover letter to each that other agents are also reading it, and keep moving forward. Trust me, hearing that it’s a multiple submission not going to annoy anyone that did not explicitly tell you that he does not expect an exclusive peek. That old saw about agents’ getting insulted if you don’t submit one at a time is absolutely untrue. Let’s toss another broken record onto the turntable:
Unless an agent asks for an exclusive look at your work, it’s neither expected nor in your interest to act as if s/he has. In fact, hearing that others are interested may even make your book seem more attractive.
Yet another reason you should keep on pitching in those hallways: it tends to be a trifle easier to get to yes than in a formal pitch. Counter-intuitive, isn’t it? Yet in many ways, casual pitches are more persuasive.
Why? For one simple reason: time. In a hallway pitch, agents will often automatically tell a writer to submit the first chapter, simply in order to be able to keep on walking down the hall, finish loading salad onto their plates, or be able to move on to the next person in line after the agents’ forum.
Seriously, it’s true. If the agent handles your type of work, the premise is interesting, and you are polite, he will usually hand you his business cards and say, “Send me the first 50 pages.”
Okay, pop quiz to see who has been paying attention over the past few days. After the agent says this, do you:
(a) regard it as an invitation to talk about your work at greater length?
(b) regard it as an invitation to a lifetime of friendship?
(c) regard it as a promise to make you the next bestselling author?
(d) say, “Gee, you’re a much nicer human being than {insert name of other agent here}. He turned me down flat,” and go on to give details about how mean he was?
(e) launch into a ten-minute diatribe about the two years you’ve spent querying this particular project?
(f) thank her profusely and vanish in a puff of smoke, so you may pitch to another agent? And before you send out the requested pages IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD?
If you said anything but (f), I can only advise you run, not walk, to read my Pitchingpalooza series — conveniently gathered for your perusing pleasure under the PITCHING heading on the archive list at right — and as well as the entirety of the INDUSTRY ETIQUETTE category. You need to learn what’s considered polite and reasonable in the industry, pronto.
It will also help you gain a more realistic sense of the immense importance agents and editors attach to their time. In a face-to-face pitch in a formal meeting, agents tend to be more selective than in a hallway pitch. The reason is, you guessed it, time: they’ve got more of it than in a hallway pitch. In a ten-minute meeting, there is actual leisure to consider what you are saying, to weigh the book’s merits.
In short, enough time to save themselves some down the line by rejecting your book now.
Why might this seem desirable to them? Well, think about it: if you send it to them at their request, someone in their office is ethically required to spend time reading it, right? By rejecting it on the pitch alone, they’ve just saved their Millicent 5 or 10 minutes.
In a perverse way, a formal pitch can be significantly harder to give successfully than a casual one. Sitting down in front of an agent or editor, looking her in the eye, and beginning to talk about your book can be quite a bit more intimidating than launching into a hallway pitch.
Think of it this way: every time you buttonhole an agent and say those words is one less query letter you’re going to need to send out.
Still breathing at least once an hour? Good; I’ll move on.
As a veteran of many, many writers’ conferences all over the country, I can tell you from experience that they can be very, very tiring. Especially if it’s your first conference. Just sitting under fluorescent lights in an air-conditioned room for that many hours would tend to leech the life force out of you all by itself, but here, you will be surrounded by a whole lot of very stressed people while you are trying to learn as much as you possibly can.
As you may have noticed, most of my advice on how to cope with all of this ambient stress gracefully is pretty much what your mother said to you before you went to your first party: be polite; be nice to yourself and others; watch your caffeine and alcohol intake, and make sure to drink enough water throughout the day. Eat occasionally.
And you’re not wearing that, are you?
Actually, on the only occasion when my mother actually made that comment upon something I was wearing, she had made the frock in question. For my senior prom, she cranked out a backless little number in midnight-blue Chinese silk that she liked to call my Carole Lombard dress for an occasion where practically every other girl was going to be wearing something demure and flouncy by Laura Ashley. It was, to put it mildly, not what anyone expected the valedictorian to wear.
She hastened to alter it. Even with the addition of quite a bit of additional fabric, most of the male teachers followed me around all night long. The last time I bumped into my old chorus teacher, he spontaneously recalled the dress. “A shame that you didn’t dress like that all the time,” he said wistfully.
Oh, what a great dress that was. Oh, how inappropriate it would have been for a writers’ conference — or really, for any occasion that did not involve going out for a big night on the town in 1939. But then, so would those prissy Laura Ashley frocks.
Which brings me back to my point (thank goodness).
I wrote on what you should and shouldn’t wear to a conference at some length in an earlier post, but if you find yourself in perplexity when you are standing in front of your closet, remember this solid rule that will help you wherever you go within the publishing industry: unless you will be attending a black-tie affair, you are almost always safe with what would be appropriate to wear to your first big public reading of your book.
And don’t those of you who have been hanging around the industry for a while wish someone had shared that little tidbit with you sooner?
To repeat a bit more motherly advice: do remember to eat something within an hour or two of your pitch meeting. I know that you may feel too nervous to feel hungry, but believe me, if you were going to pick an hour of your life for feeling light-headed, your first encounter with your future agent is not a wise choice. If you are giving a hallway pitch, or standing waiting to go into a meeting, make sure not to lock your knees, so you do not faint.
And practice, practice, practice before you go into your meetings. This is the single best thing you can do in advance to preserve yourself from being overwhelmed.
Fortunately, conferences are peculiarly rich in opportunities to practice talking about your book. As I pointed out last time, you will be surrounded by hundreds of other writers. Introduce yourself, and practice pitching to them. Better still, find people who share your interests and get to know them. Share a cookie; ask whether they know a good place to get lunch; talk about your work with someone who will understand.
Because, really, is your life, is any writer’s life, already filled with too many people who get what we do? You will be an infinitely happier camper in the long run if you have friends who can understand your successes and sympathize with your setbacks as only another writer can.
I was thinking about this the other day, when I snuck into the PNWA conference to videotape an interview with a recently-published author and longtime member of the Author! Author! community about his novel. Had the muses abruptly snatched me up, carried me through the air, and flung me down at any similar gathering in the world, I would have known within seconds that I was at a writers’ conference, and on the first day, too.
How did I know? Because the lobby, the bar, and the restaurant in the hotel where the conference was being held was filled with nervous-looking people sitting by themselves. Half of them were peering at pieces of paper, their mouths moving: clearly, they were practicing their pitches. While just a few feet away, a perfectly nice fellow writer was doing precisely the same thing.
As someone who has over the years met hundreds of fabulous people by the simple expedient of turning to the nearest pitch-practicer in a situation like this and saying, “So what do you write?”, I have to say, I find this dynamic sad. I hope that these isolated souls did eventually work up the nerve to say hello to one another, but astonishingly often, I see writers leaving conferences without seeming to say goodbye to anyone.
I cannot urge you strongly enough not to be one of those conference attendees. Make some friends. Because, honestly, a writer’s life cannot be too full of other writers.
Why not? Well, who else is going to be as thrilled to hear that you have landed an agent? Or sold a manuscript? Who else is going to rush out and buy your book the instant it appears in print, because it’s so empowering to see a fellow writer succeed?
Again, I speak from experience: the first people I told about my first book deal — after my SO and my mother, of course — were writers I had met at conferences. Why call them before, say, my college roommate? Because ordinary people, the kind who don’t spend their spare time creating new realities out of whole cloth, honestly, truly, sincerely, often have difficulty understanding the pressures and timelines that rule writers’ lives.
I was lucky: I already knew a lot of writers, including my college roommate — who recently sold her first novel to Algonquin, by the way. (Well done, Julie!) But the very first words my erstwhile SO’s mother uttered after hearing that my memoir had sold were, “What do you mean, it’s not coming out for another couple of years? Can’t you write any faster than that?”?
This kind of response is unfortunately common, and frankly, most people’s eyes glaze over about 42 seconds into an explanation of how a print queue works. I don’t think any writer ever gets used to seeing her non-writer friends’ faces fall upon being told that the book won’t be coming out for a year or two, at least, after the sale that’s just happened, or that upon learning that signing with an agent does not automatically equal a publication contract, or upon receiving the startling revelation that not every book is headed for the bestseller list.
Thought I got off track from the question of how to keep from getting stressed out, didn’t you? Actually, I didn’t: finding buddies to go through the conference process with you can help you feel grounded throughout both the conference and your writing life.
Not only are these new buddies great potential first readers for your manuscripts, future writing group members, and people to invite to book readings, they’re also folks to pass notes to during talks. (Minor disobedience is a terrific way to blow off steam, don’t you find?) You can hear about the high points of classes you don’t attend from them afterward.
And who wouldn’t rather walk into a room with 300 strangers and one keynote speaker with a newfound chum than alone?
Making friends within the hectic conference environment will help you retain a sense of being a valuable, interesting individual far better than keeping to yourself, and the long-term benefits are endless. To paraphrase Goethe, it is not the formal structures that make the world fell warm and friendly; friends make the earth feel like an inhabited garden.
So please, for your own sake: make some friends at the conference, so you will have someone to pick up the phone and call when the agent of your dreams falls in love with your first chapter and asks to see the entire book. And get to enjoy the vicarious thrill when your writing friends leap their hurdles, too.
Oh, you think it didn’t make my day when Julie’s book sold? It made my month. It showed that being serious, talented, and smart can indeed pay off in the long run.
Writing can be a very lonely business. Nothing brightens the long, slow slog like opening your e-mail when you’re really discouraged to find a message from a friend who’s just sold a book or landed an agent.
Well, okay, I’ll admit it: getting a call from your agent telling you that YOU have just sold a book is rather more of a day-brightener. As is the call saying, “I love your work, and I want to represent you.”
But the other is still awfully darned good. Start laying the groundwork for it now.
Something else that can help keep you from stressing out too much: while it’s always nice if you can be so comfortable with your pitch that you can give it from memory, it’s probably fair to assume that you’re going to be the teensiest bit nervous during your meetings. So do yourself a favor — write it all down; give yourself permission to read it when the time comes, if you feel that will help you.
Really, it’s considered perfectly acceptable, and it will keep you from forgetting key points. Please humor me by writing on the top of the paper, in great big letters: BREATHE!
I sense some of you shifting uncomfortably in your seats, stubbornly refusing to breathe. “But Anne,” you point out, “I keep seeing pitching advice online that says if I can’t recite my pitch from memory, I might as well not give it at all.”
Ah, I have seen that advice, too. Almost invariably, it’s talking about pitching a script, not a manuscript — snd a script pitch, my friends, is much, much shorter than the average book pitch. Isn’t it amazing how often terms cross industry lines, yet people assume that since the word is that same, it must mean the same thing in every context in which it is used?.
Besides, people who work with manuscripts for a living understand wanting to write things down. Don’t be ashamed to consult your notes if you get stuck; believe me, everyone involved will be much, much happier to see you read it than to sit there uncomfortably while you struggle to remember the next bullet point on your list.
Do remember to pat yourself on the back occasionally, by the way, for being brave enough to put your ego on the line for your work. As with querying and submitting, it requires genuine guts to submit your ideas to the pros; I don’t think writers get enough credit for that.
In that spirit, I’m going to confess: I have one other conference-going ritual, something I do just before I walk into any convention center, anywhere, anytime, either to teach or to pitch. It’s not as courteous or as public-spirited as the other techniques I have described, but I find it is terrific for the mental health. I go away by myself somewhere and play at top volume Joe Jackson’s song Hit Single and Jill Sobule’s (I Don’t Want to Get) Bitter. Here’s the first:
A charming story about dumbing down a song so it will stand a better chance of making it big on the pop charts, HIT SINGLE includes the perfect lyric to hum while walking into a pitch meeting:
And when I think of all the years of finding out What I already knew Now I spread myself around And you can have 3 minutes, too.
If that doesn’t summarize the difference between pitching your work verbally and being judged on the quality of the writing itself, I should like to know what does. (Sorry, Joe: I would have preferred to link above to your site, but your site mysteriously doesn’t include lyrics.) Here’s the second song:
For those of you reading this at work (hey, it happens) and thus not able to play the song, this ditty about complaining concludes with a pretty good mantra for any writing conference-goer:
So I’ll smile with the rest, wishing everyone the best. And know the one who made it made it because she was actually pretty good. ‘Cause I don’t want to get bitter. I don’t want to turn cruel. I don’t want to get old before I have to. I don’t want to get jaded. Petrified and weighted. I don’t want to get bitter like you.
I hum that one a lot during conferences, I’ll admit — and not because you can’t throw a piece of bread at a major writers’ conference without hitting someone just delighted to moan about how hard it is to get published these days. Cynicism often masquerades as knowledge. I tend to start humming when a bestselling author who landed his agent 25 years ago, when the task was significantly easier, but does not seem aware that ambient conditions for aspiring writers have changed radically. Or a more recent success whose agent is her cousin’s next-door neighbor’s husband tells a roomful of people who have been querying for the past five years that good writing will inevitably find a home.
Perhaps, but certainly not easily. The Agency Fairy just receives too many requests for help these days. Anyone who tells you that the only possible barrier to landing an agent is the quality of your writing simply isn’t familiar with the current reality of the representation market.
What you’re trying to do is not easy or fun, but you can do it. You are your book’s best advocate; act like it. And remember, all you’re trying to do is to get these nice people to take a look at your writing.
No more, no less. It’s a perfectly reasonable request for an aspiring writer to make to an agent, and you’re going to be terrific at making it. How do I know? Because you’ve been sensible and brave enough to face your fears and prepare like a professional.
Kudos to you for taking your writing that seriously. Beginning Monday, I shall be talking about how to go about doing something that will help that agent or editor that asked to see your manuscript take your writing seriously: presenting it professionally and packing it off sensibly.
Oh, you thought I had stopped harping on the whatever you do, don’t send requested materials right away. Far from it. But first, I shall be keeping my promise from earlier in the week: tomorrow, I have a treat in store for you.
Keep breathing, everyone, and keep up the good work!
As I hope every young writer within the reach of my keyboard is aware, I am now and have always been deeply committed to making age no barrier to membership in the Author! Author! community. I encourage questions and comments from writers just starting out; I try to keep the voice and vocabulary here at an extremely democratic reading level; I don’t allow profanity, even in the comments, so that filter programs at libraries or parental controls won’t block readers’ access. Heck, I once wrote a three-week series on how publishing does and doesn’t work in response to an extremely intelligent question from an 13-year-old.
He’d just completed his first novel and wasn’t sure what to do with it.
I do all of this, among other reasons, because in my opinion, there’s not enough good, solid discussion of writing for the under-18 crowd. Much of what is there strikes me as, well, a trifle condescending. And despite the fact that the fine print on the back of my adult card dictates that I should believe that youthful pursuers of my chosen profession could not possibly understand how it works, I can’t think that vague advice that would have insulted my intelligence in middle or high school would be a boon for writers in middle or high school now.
Call me zany, but I’m inclined to think that a smart, sensitive, creative person is a smart, sensitive, creative person at any age. I’m also inclined to think that it’s much, much harder for young writers to rack up the types of writing credentials that impress agents than it is for adults.
That massive groan you just heard was every aspiring writer in the continental United States writhing with frustration. It’s not easy for them, either. But let’s face it, there just are not a lot of contests out there for young writers that are not academically-oriented.
Which is why this year, instead of sponsoring only one Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence competition, I’m offering two: one aimed at adult writers writing for the adult market and one for writers currently in middle school and high school, as well as those writing for readers in those age groups. Thus was the Make Us Want to Eat It Literary Competition of 2012 born, to create what we here at Author! Author! like to call Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy, writing credentials that will make your query letter stand out from the crowd.
I could have just felt good about that and gone home, of course. But having talked to a lot of young writers over the years, I have learned that one of the most common reasons that they don’t enter the few contests out there is that they’re afraid they are not going to put the entry together right.
At the risk of having my adult card revoked, allow me to let you in on a little secret: adult aspiring writers harbor that fear, too. In fact, they’re a bit more likely to be afraid of what a contest judge or agent will say; if they have been trying to get published for a while, they have probably been rejected quite a bit. And while anyone currently working within the publishing industry could tell them — and you — that getting rejected is a perfectly normal experience for writers that later end up selling their books to perfectly reputable publishers, it still hurts to hear no.
So many aspiring writers of all ages just give up, believing — not always correctly — that their work got rejected because their writing wasn’t good enough. Or because the market just wasn’t buying books like theirs. Or due to some deep hatred the staff at the agency of their dreams feels toward innovative prose stylings.
In practice, though, many, if not most, rejections do not stem from any of these sources — or, indeed, have much to do with what a writer would consider quality of writing. Queries and manuscripts get rejected all the time for purely technical reasons. Misspellings, for instance, or grammar problems. Lack of clarity. Overuse of clich?s. Not punctuating dialogue correctly. Not having been sent to an agent that represents that type of book.
Or — and this is one of the most common rejection triggers of all — not presenting the writing professionally.
Actually, I think younger writers have an easier time understanding technical rejections than those of us who have been kicking around the world longer typically do. Students are constantly running up against seemingly arbitrary rules and snap judgments. It may not be fair, but on the whole, smart kids learn to regard silly regulations and stereotyping philosophically. They’re just a part of going to school.
They’re just a part of holding a job, too, but writers often forget that professional writing is in fact a profession, with rules and standards just like any other. All too often, aspiring writers fall into the trap of believing that the publishing industry in general and agencies in particular are non-profit enterprises, selflessly devoted to the promotion of literature. So when an agent responds to a well-written manuscript like the businessperson she is, saying that she does not think she can sell it in the current literary market, aspiring writers often react with horror.
Or by giving up. Or by assuming that all agencies and publishing houses are uninterested in previously-unpublished writers. Or all of the above.
The fact is, though, that good writing by unknown writers gets published all the time. Previously-unpublished writers land agents literally every day. But I’m not going to lie to you: among the other factors that separate these writers’ manuscripts from, well, everybody else’s is that they are spelled correctly, grammatically sound, clearly written, free of clich?s, contain properly punctuated dialogue, and have been submitted to an agent that represents that type of book.
Oh, and they’re virtually always formatted correctly. In publishing circles, having taken the time to learn how book manuscripts are supposed to look is considered a sign of seriousness in a writer.
Which is why, in case you had been wondering, I spend so much time here on the blog talking about — wait for it — spelling, grammar, clarity, clich? avoidance, dialogue, and book category. And perhaps my favorite topic of all, standard format for book manuscripts. (Which, contrary to popular online opinion, is not identical to either what a published book looks like or proper format for short stories and articles.) I want my readers’ writing to be taken seriously.
In order to encourage learning the skills that will help them be taken seriously, I both explain the rules of standard format frequently and at great length here (with visual examples!) and require entrants in Author! Author! contests to format their entries correctly. Why, just the other day, I wrote aimed at helping entrants in the adult contest adhere to the rules of standard format. It’s not enough, I think, merely to provide writers with the opportunity to pick up some ECQLC; I want their manuscripts to be able to wow everybody’s favorite agency screener, Millicent. Like most of us that read manuscripts for a living, she’s distracted by improper formatting.
Which is a much better way to think of having to learn the rules of putting a manuscript together than to dismiss them as unimportant or ridiculous: not presenting your pages properly will make Millicent concentrate on something other than your good writing. She might not reject a submission or disqualify a contest entry on that basis alone, but it will almost certainly — chant it with me now, those of you who have been paying attention — take it less seriously.
Do I spot some raised hands out there? “But Anne,” those of you brand-new to the writing world will protest, “how do I get started? I’m more than willing to learn, but I’m frightened that Millicent won’t treat my early attempts with scorn. Why isn’t there a less high-stakes way I can try out my new presentation skills than sending my manuscript to an agency?”
Ah, but there is, bright rookies. You can enter a writing contest for practice.
Less intimidating than risking rejection, is it not? To make it even less scary, tell you what I’m going to do: for the rest of today’s post, I’m going to walk you through every syllable of the rules for Make Us Want to Eat It Literary Competition, giving you visual examples of how to apply those guidelines to your contest entry. And if you have questions, please ask them — I honestly do want to render the learning process as easy for you as possible.
Just remember to thank me on the Acknowledgements page of your first published book, okay?
Everybody ready? Okay, here goes. The contest’s rulesare in boldface; my explanations and helpful hints are in regular text.
The Make Us Want to Eat It Literary Competition of 2012
As I mentioned when I announced the previous contest for adult writing, although people experience life via all of their senses — sight, sound, taste, smell, touch — many, many of the manuscripts those of us who read them for a living see on a daily basis seem to assume that characters can only see and hear. Or that readers expect to know nothing about a character’s sensations except what an actor might be able to convey to us if we saw him playing that character on T.V.
But you’re a better writer than that, aren’t you? And you’re certainly a better reader.
This opening bit might not seem as though it’s important, but often, writing contest organizers will tell entrants up front what they want to see in a winning entry. It’s a good idea, then, not just to zoom in on the rules. It’s an even better idea to come back after you have finished writing your entry and re-read how the contest is presented, to make sure that what you are planning to send matches what the organizers are seeking.
This contest’s opening paragraphs will show you why: this says point-blank that the judges will be looking for entries that use all of the human senses in their descriptions. That means, in practice, that no matter how good the writing may be in the scene you were planning to enter, it’s unlikely to win unless the main character or the narration experiences what’s going on through many different sense organs — eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin.
That’s the goal of the contest. Let’s move on to see if the contest’s organizers have told us how they want us to achieve that goal.
Because I’m pretty confident that my readers are good at writing about what it’s like to be alive, I’m calling for young writers and adults that write for young readers to enter short scenes — anywhere from 2 to 8 pages in length — that present food in a manner that incorporates more than two senses.
Here’s the catch: the scene can’t take place in a kitchen — or at a dining table.
Why? Because I’d love to see you exercise your creativity, that’s why. That’s my idea of a proper reader-oriented spectator sport.
Ah, now we know what the entry will need to be: a 2-8 page scene about food, set somewhere other than a kitchen or table. Since it would be really, really easy to spend your entire writing time just coming up with new material for literary contests, the first thing a savvy writer should do with this kind of information is ask: have I already written a scene that might meet this description?
If the answer is no, that’s fine; this is a short enough page limit that you could write something fresh before the deadline (which, although we haven’t yet gotten to it in the rules, is September 30th). But your next question should be: do I have enough time to write a scene that I like before the entry is due?
Please consider this question carefully; it’s more important than most contest entrants realize. Having been a very good English student, I’m perfectly aware that it is in fact possible to toss off something good enough at the last minute — oh, as if you’ve never done that with a class assignment! — but in a writing contest that’s not for school, it really isn’t worth your time to do a half-hearted job. If you don’t think you will have the time to create something that you will be proud to share with the world, you’ll be better off investing your creative energies in something else.
Yes, yes, I know: pretty much every teacher you have ever had will have told you something different on this point. But writing for a reading audience is a completely different thing than writing for a grade; it takes one heck of a lot of bravery to bare your creations to the world.
Why? Well, readers will be basing 100% of their impressions of you upon those pages. You’re going to want them to see your writing at its absolute best, right?
While you are mulling over that one, let’s see if there are other restrictions on what you can enter. After all, you might be able to adapt something you already have on your hard drive.
In order to give young writers more freedom to stretch those creative limbs, you may enter either fiction or nonfiction. (Sorry, adult writers: you may enter only YA fiction. You can always enter your memoir in this summer’s adult contest ) If you are entering memoir and don’t want to use your real name, it’s fine to use a fake one; just make sure that you let us know, so we announce the right name when you win.
Either way, no profanity, please — and please have all of your characters fully clothed. I want to keep this site accessible for young writers whose parents have set up content filters on their computers. So if you wouldn’t want your parents to find a YouTube video of you doing something your characters do, give it a pass in the entry, okay?
My, that’s a lot of information a contest entrant in too much of a hurry to read anything but the numbered rules might have missed, isn’t it? (Try saying that sentence three times fast. I dare you.) Basically, it’s saying that the rules are different for adults that write for young readers and for young writers: if you’re in middle or high school, you can enter everything from a completely made-up piece of writing or one that’s a direct transcript of something that happened to you. Except, of course, without any swearing.
And you don’t even have to do it under your own name! Talk about risk-free.
If this is starting to sound as though I’m asking you to have an active conversation with any writing contest’s rules, you’re catching on. Literary competition organizers assume that writers can read really well; they will expect a winning entrant to have sat down with the rules and made a list of what is required. Being a passive reader — or, even more common, just giving a quick glance at the rules and assuming that you know what they are asking — is not a good strategy for pleasing contest judges.
Or anyone that reads for a living, for that matter. You would not believe how many college essays get bad grades because the student seems not to have understood the question being asked. A good half the time, students will just glance at an essay question, pick out a few words here and there — and go on to write an answer to the question they expected to be asked, not the one the professor actually did. This type of bad reading is so common that when I was teaching at a large state university with a rather well-known football team, the graders had an acronym to scrawl at the ends of tests that had this problem: R.T.F.Q.
It stood for read the question. (Hey, I told you this was a family-friendly blog.)
Now that we know in broad terms what the contest organizers want us to do, let’s see what’s in it for us if we win:
Winners will not only receive fabulous prizes (hold your horses; we’re getting to those), but may have their scenes and accompanying synopses both published and critiqued in a post here at Author! Author! for all the world to see and admire. And, if you’re a student, we’re going to recognize the teacher you feel has helped you most with your writing as well.
The grand prize winner in each category will receive a half-hour Mini Consult in order to discuss any aspect of writing. That means I will read up to 20 pages of your writing — a query? A synopsis? The opening pages of the manuscript you’ve been writing? — and call or Skype you in order to have a lovely, long talk about it. I’m also going to post your winning entry here on Author! Author! and tell everyone you know just how terrific your writing is.
Talk about having your writing taken seriously! This is your chance to get a professional editor take a look at your writing — not just the contest entry, but any writing you choose — and give you feedback. And since anything posted online is technically published (and this blog is pretty well respected in publishing circles, if I do say so myself), not only will thousands of people be able to read your entry, but you will have a publishing credential.
Think how good that’s going to look in a query letter someday. Not to mention on a college application.
It’s always a good idea, though, to find out what entries that don’t win top honors will get. Let’s take a gander.
First and second place winners will have their entries posted and critiqued on this blog.
So you don’t have to win the whole thing in order to get feedback on your work. Even better, if you choose to enter under a pen name, you can get that feedback anonymously — yet still use the contest placing years from now, when you are querying agents under your own name. (Had I mentioned that in the literary world, there’s no expiration date on writing credentials? Or pointed out that the name of the contest says nothing about how old you were when you won or placed in it?)
All winners will also be asked to nominate the teacher that they feel helped them most in their quest to become a writer. Choose carefully: if the nominated teachers agree, I shall posting their names, a short bio, and a photograph here at Author! Author!, thanking them publicly for having done such a good job with these students. The judges and I shall also be putting our heads together on a pretty fabulous certificate of appreciation, recognizing the teacher as one of the great encouragers of future authors.
Obviously, this means that you will eventually have to ask the teacher’s permission, but if you’re shy — and many, many writers are — you don’t need to do that until after you have won. And then it’s going to be a pretty pain-free question, “Hey, how would you like international recognition for being a great teacher?”
Incidentally, adult YA writers, this part applies to you, too. As the rules go on to explain:
And yes, I do mean all winners, even in the adult writers of YA category. You think their favorite teachers shouldn’t be recognized? I couldn’t disagree more.
Hadn’t I mentioned that my mother was not only an editor, but also my junior high school librarian? Or that my completely fabulous seventh-grade English teacher is still one of my heroes?
Congratulations: you’ve made it through the contest’s description. That already gives you a significantly greater chance of winning or placing than the average entrant, regardless of age. Let’s move on to the more nit-picky rules.
Here are the specific steps required to win. Do read them all carefully, and post any questions you may have.
1. Write or select a scene no more than eight pages in length from your manuscript or manuscript-in-progress that best shows off a sense-based description of food.
Did that make the sharper-eyed among you do a double-take? If so, good for you: someone who read only the numbered rules might not have caught what you just did.
Oh, you missed it? Earlier, the contest’s description said that the entry must be 2-8 pages. In Rule #1, however, the phrasing leaves open the logical possibility that you could enter a 1-page story. (Don’t laugh; perhaps because reading contest entries is really, really time-consuming, there are plenty of writing competitions out there that call for what are called short-short stories.)
Literary contest rules do this kind of thing all the time, saying the rules calls for something in one part of the contest’s description and something else in another part. See why it might be a good idea to read everything the contest organizers post, making a list of requirements as you go?
That’s not a bad approach to answering an essay question for school, by the way, especially if it’s a question you’re expected to take a long time to answer. Read it in its entirety, making a list of all of the things it is asking you to do. If you are taking the test in a blue book, you might even want to construct an outline for your essay — college professors routinely give partial credit for items mentioned in outlines that a student did not have time to include in the answer. Then start writing.
Hey, I wasn’t kidding about the skills a writer has to learn to work as a professional being helpful in school. And that Godzilla-like shriek you’re hearing is all of the adults reading this wishing someone had explained about reading the whole question to them when they were in school.
“But Anne,” some of you ask, cradling your weary heads, “which of these two rules should I follow? Since it implies at some point in the contest rules that I can enter a single page, I’m safe if I do, right?”
Actually, usually not. When in doubt, go with the more restrictive rule.
So in this instance (which, if I’m honest about it, I didn’t notice until I began writing this post; that particular species of conflict-blindness is also not all that uncommon on contest websites), that would mean sticking with the 2-8 pages. But what length of pages does that mean? Let’s see if the rules address that.
How will you figure length? Glad you asked.
2. Pages must be double-spaced in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier., with one-inch margins and a slug line at the top containing your last name/title/page #.
That’s pretty specific, isn’t it? The left and right margins must be 1″. So must the top and bottom margins. It must be in one of the fonts mentioned here — which are, incidentally, the standard ones for the book publishing industry. It must also contain what the pros call a slug line: the entrant’s last name, separated by a slash, followed by the title of the piece (or the book from which it comes), slash, plus the page number.
Would it surprise you to learn that even with the requirements spelled out this much, many contest entries will disqualify themselves? (Again, most contest entrants don’t read the rules very closely.) So you don’t run that risk, here’s what the result would look like in 10th-grader Ima Newatit’s entry. If you’re having trouble seeing all of the details, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.
So far Ima has followed the rules pretty well, right? But wait — has she? The rules continue:
“Good,” Ima says with satisfaction. “I looked up what a slug line is — if Anne hadn’t just described it here, there are many examples of how to do it under the SLUG LINE ILLUSTRATED category on the archive list conveniently placed at the lower right-hand side of this page — and it always contains the page number. So my formatting work is done, right?”
Actually, it isn’t, Ima, as you would know had you followed the link the contest organizers so thoughtfully placed in that rule, leading you to the rules of standard format. Since most contest entrants would have done precisely as you did, however, let’s move on. That way, we can see just how disastrous the effects of not reading the rules in their entirety can be.
3. All entries must be in English. Whether you choose to write in American English, Canadian English, or U.K. English, however, is entirely up to you. Just let us know which — and make sure it’s spelled correctly.
Oh, this is an interesting one: it tells us that we can expect entries to be coming from all over the English-speaking world, as well as that the judges will expect Ima to have spell-checked her entry. (Always a good idea, right?) When a contest’s rules go out of its way to mention this, it usually means that the judges will stop reading after the first or second misspelling or grammar mistake.
That’s pretty common for college applications as well, by the way. In fact, e-mails from adults that you may have seen to the contrary, in the literate world, spelling always counts. So does grammar.
And think about it: why should Millicent take a writer seriously if he hasn’t taken the time to spell-check? If her boss, the agent of that writer’s dreams, did pick him up as a client, who does he think will correct the typos? Not the agent.
There’s another, less obvious contest requirement here, though, something that might also disqualify an entry from a writer that did not read carefully. Any guesses?
If you immediately leapt to your feet, crying, “I know! Even if I’m sending this from within the U.S., I must say that I am writing in American English,” you deserve a gold star for the day. Publishers, agents, and contest organizers alike virtually always expect submissions to be in the form of English prevailing in the city in which they operate. So pervasive is this expectation that most of the time, agency submission guidelines and contest rules will not even mention it. They’ll just consider spellings from other places wrong.
Since this contest’s rules made a point of talking about it, Ima should assume that this restriction is going to be taken seriously at judging time — and that she can’t just presume that if she doesn’t specify, American English is the default setting. She needs to say.
But where? Relax; we’ll be getting to that later in the rules. Let’s keep going through them in the order they were presented.
4. The scene must center on food, but it cannot take place in a kitchen or at a dining table. That should sound familiar, right?
Why, yes, it does: we talked about that one earlier. But let me ask you: do you think that Ima’s entry is focused enough on food to qualify? Yes, she’s just eaten a big sandwich, but that happened before the scene began.
I’m not going to answer that one — it’s a genuine judgment call. That means it’s up to you, creative writer.
5. The scene must include depictions of at least two human senses, but cannot include any profanity or references to sexual activity. No exceptions. Humans have a lot of other senses. Remember, too, that the judges will be looking for a variety of senses to be addressed in the scene.
“Check,” Ima says, “check, and check. Moving right along…”
Not so fast, Ima. Yes, this entry is free of the forbidden elements, but let’s go through and count the number of senses used. Since the contest is specifically focused upon sensation, it’s a good idea to double-check. Sound is highlighted in green, touch in yellow, sight in purple, and taste in gray.
Ima didn’t do so badly here, did she? She has definitely included more than two senses. But did you notice how the second page keeps alternating between just touch and hearing? In a contest devoted to writing about sensation, the judges are probably going to want her to mix it up more.
“But Anne!” I hear some of you shout, and who could blame you? “Why didn’t you highlight all of that food in the first paragraph? Surely, that’s sense-based detail.”
Actually, it isn’t — it’s just a list of sandwich ingredients. It would be possible for the reader to guess what each tasted like, but here, Ima seems to be going out of her way not to describe them.
Now that you’ve read the text of her entry through twice (at least, I hope you have), though, did you happen to catch the typo that would have disqualified this entry in most contests? Hint: it’s in line 6 of page 1.
The swimming pool stretched out before him, the stench of chlorine rising from its depths.
See it now? Clearly, in an earlier draft, this scene was about a boy.
Yes, it’s a relatively simple leftover from that earlier version, but contest judges, like Millicents, don’t really care why typos happen. It’s not their job, after all. And since this is not a gaffe that a spell-checker would have caught, what should Ima have done here?
Take 14 stars out of petty cash if you exclaimed, “Why, she should have read her entry IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD!” Yes, even for a contest that accepts only electronic entries. Since the human eye reads about 70% faster on a backlit screen than on a page, it’s quite a bit more difficult to catch small blunders like this if you’re only rereading your work on your computer screen.
And no, it’s not safe to assume that a contest judge or Millicent will not spot it in an electronic entry. They read for a living; trust them to be good at it. Besides, it’s not all that unusual for the finalists in an e-mailed-entry contest to get printed out so the judges can discuss them in a face-to-face meeting.
So a word to the wise: proofread. Always.
6. Polish your scene to a high gloss and save it as a Word document, as a .doc file. Only .doc entries in Word will be accepted — not TextEdit, PDF, or any other formats, please. Please title the Word file your name and the abbreviated title of your book (Austen Pride & Prejudice), not just as contest entry or the ever-popular Anne Mini contest (The last time I ran a contest like this, I received 42 entries with one of the other file name.)
All of this is fairly self-explanatory, I hope — and even if a contest’s rules do not specify file format, it’s usually a better bet to send your work as a .doc file than as .docx. That way, it will be possible for someone running any of the last decade’s worth of Word versions to open it.
Oh, you may laugh, but believe it or not, many, many offices devoted to the promotion and production of books do not operate on the most recent versions of any word processing program. Heck, I know agents still working with Windows 95.
7. In a separate Word document, give your name, state (or country, if entering from outside the U.S.), age, name of your school (if you are enrolled in one), and e-mail address, as well as the category you are entering.
That seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? Yet here again, we can see the benefits of reading all of the rules, not just the numbered ones.
Oh, you didn’t spot what’s missing from this list? How about some mention of what English-speaking country’s version of the language the entrant will be using?
If you have been jotting down contest requirements — and you should be — make sure that you get each and every element on that list. It’s not at all unheard-of for writing contest entries to get disqualified, or at least knocked out of finalist consideration, because the writer simply forgot some technical bit like this. It may not have anything to do with the quality of the writing in the entry, but remember, in order to make a living as a writer, you’re going to have to be able to follow your agent and editor’s directions. This is one place that a writer demonstrates a willingness to do that.
One of the most common omissions in an entry: the category. This drives contest organizers nuts by making it harder to make sure that the entry ends up in the right judge’s hands. Since it’s in your best interest that it does turn up in the right place — almost universally, if a contest entry is not categorized correctly, it will be disqualified — why not make their lives as easy as possible?
To that laudable end, let’s take a peek at the categories, shall we?
Telling the judges the category will save a lot of confusion. The possible categories are:
Category I: Fiction on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in middle school
Category II: Nonfiction/Memoir on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in middle school
Category III: Fiction on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in high school
Category IV: Nonfiction/Memoir on food by writers currently attending or about to enroll in high school
In theory, it should be quite simple to figure out which category to enter, right? Ima has only to match her grade with the category, then choose the fiction or nonfiction category, as appropriate. Yet you would be surprised at how often writers will glance at a list like this — which often, like this one, contain repeated words and phrases — and select the wrong option. Since this can get an entry disqualified, make sure to read carefully,
Hmm, where have I heard that before?
You have noticed, I hope, that in this section, the rules have not said whether this page needs to be in a particular typeface or have a specific format. When in doubt, though, it will look more professional if you submit any extra materials in the same format as the entry itself. So Ima’s second document would look like this:
Even though Ima had more room here, and the rules didn’t specifically rule out using a different font, sticking with the same as the entry is less distracting. Remember, people in publishing don’t consider typeface in a manuscript a legitimate stylistic choice. You’re better off sticking to the ones they are used to seeing.
Part of reading closely — and of jotting down notes as you do — involves figuring out whether any of the rules listed don’t apply to the category you are entering. But you can’t know whether you can afford to skip a section unless you read it all, right?
Category V: YA fiction on food by adult writers If you are entering Category V, please see Rules #8 and #9. Everyone else can skip to Rule #10.
8. If you are entering in the adult writer category, on the same page as the material in Rule #7, please include a 1-paragraph explanation of how the scene you are entering fits into the overall story of the book. This is the only chance you’re going to get to set up the scene for the judges, so make it count!
9. If you are entering in the adult writer category, on the second page of the document described in #7, please include a synopsis of no more than 1 page, giving the judges an overview of the book’s premise, its main characters, and its central conflict. Again, this synopsis must be in standard format. If you are unfamiliar with either standard format or how to write a 1-page synopsis, you will find explanations (along with examples) under the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT and HOW TO WRITE A 1-PAGE SYNOPSIS categories on the archive list located on the right-hand side of this page.
Since all of these rules apply only to the adult YA writers’ category, Ima may safely disregard them. (But if any of you adult writers have questions about what to do here, please drop me a line in the comments.)
Rule #10, however, applies to everybody. And wow, does it have major implications!
10. Make sure that both documents are properly formatted: precisely as they would appear in a manuscript submission. Part of the goal here is to help young writers learn how to submit their work professionally. If it is not double-spaced, in 12-point type, and featuring a slug line (Author’s last name/book title/page #) in each page’s header, the judges will not consider the entry.
At first glance, this reads like Rule #1, doesn’t it? But actually, it clarifies why the contest’s organizers wanted entrants to follow that link to the rules of standard format: in order to win this contest, we now learn, it’s not enough for the manuscript to be double-spaced, with one-inch margins all around and a slug line in the header. It has to be in standard format for book manuscripts.
How is that different? To save you some clicking time, here are the restrictions of standard format (which, again, are not the same as the proper format for short stories or articles). As we go through them, I shall keep modifying Ima’s entry, to reflect each new rule.
a) Standard format for manuscripts is not identical to the format of a published book; book manuscripts differ from published books in many important respects and for many reasons. To a classically-trained agent or editor, presentation is not a matter of style: what may appear to a writer to be a cool, self-expressive choice will strike a professional reader as a distraction from the writing.
b) All manuscripts should be typed or printed in black ink on 20-lb or heavier white paper. (I encourage my clients to use bright white 24-lb paper; it doesn’t wilt.)
c) All manuscripts are double-spaced, with 1-inch margins on all four edges.
d) All manuscripts are printed on ONE side of the page and are unbound in any way.
No worries here: we knew about (a) and (c) already, right? And (b) and (d) don’t apply to contest that accepts only e-mailed entries. No text change required yet, therefore. Let’s move on.
e) The text should be left-justified, not block-justified. The left margin should be straight, the right uneven.
Actually, Ima’s text did this one pretty much automatically: a straight left margin (meaning that every line of the text starts at the same point on the page) and an uneven right margin (although 1 inch is the smallest the white space can be, every line ends at a different point, as the words in it dictate) is the default setting for Word. Just to make sure that everyone understands what’s being requested here, let’s take a look at what Ima’s page would look like block-justified, as you might see it in a published book or magazine.
Making that right margin fall in a straight line down the page does all kinds of strange things to the spacing within the lines of text, doesn’t it? If you’re having trouble spotting it, check out the pages above again, then take a gander at the same pages with the proper ragged right margin.
Everybody clear on the difference now? If not, please speak up.
While you are thinking about whether to ask a question, let’s zoom through a few rules that should by now seem awfully familiar.
e) The preferred typefaces for manuscripts are 12-point Times New Roman or Courier.
f) No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the entire manuscript in the same font and typeface.
g) Each page should feature a standard slug line in the header, preferably left-justified: Author’s Last Name/Title/# This should appear in the same plain 12-point type as the rest of the manuscript. The page number should appear in the slug line and nowhere else on the page.
We’ve already taken care of all of those under Rule #1, right? And the next few rules, as it happens, do not apply to this contest. Just so you will know how your book’s manuscript should be formatted, though, let’s give them a quick once-over.
h) Every page in the manuscript should be numbered except the title page. Do not include it in a page count. The first page of text is page 1, regardless of whether it is the beginning of Chapter 1 or a preface.
i) The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title centered at the top.
j) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, not page 1.
Got all of that filed away in your brainpan for future use? Good. Here’s something more directly applicable to entering this contest:
k) The beginning of each paragraph should be indented .5 inch, including the first paragraph of each chapter, no matter what you have seen in a published book.
l) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.
m) Section breaks are formed by skipping one double-spaced line, not by # # # or any other marker UNLESS you are writing a short story, article, or entering a contest that requires the inclusion of a specific symbol.
We’ve already taken care of these, right? The first lines of all of Ima’s paragraphs are indented (instead of being lined up against the left margin, as they would be in an e-mail), so there is no need to skip a line between paragraphs (as, again, you usually need to do in an e-mail, because most e-mail programs discourage indented text). And since this contest calls for just one scene, and section breaks come between scenes, (m) is not likely to be relevant here.
n) Do not use boldface anywhere but on the title page — and even there, it’s optional.
o) Words in foreign languages should be italicized, as should emphasized words and titles of copyrighted works like songs. Nothing in the text should be underlined.
Ima has gotten all of these right, too. The easiest way to remember these two rules: don’t do anything fancy to your text, if you can possibly help it — or unless you are borrowing a title (from a song or a publication) or a phrase from another language (sacre bleu!). While you can use italics to emphasize words (I’m so angry!), it’s usually not the best strategy in a contest entry: judges, agents, and editors tend to prefer writing that relies upon words for meaning, not italics that tell the reader how to read them.
Still hanging in there? Good, because our example has violated the last two rules of standard format — and in this contest, that could result in disqualification. Take a peek:
p) All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25.
q) Dashes should be doubled — hyphens are single, as in self-congratulatory. Dashes should also have spaces at each end — rather than—like this.
Didn’t spot either in the last example, did you? If so, I’m not surprised — since these are peculiarities of book manuscripts, they usually only jump out at those of us that read professional writing for a living. But remember how I said earlier that formatting your writing like a pro will make it look more polished to Millicent?
To everyone else, the differences will be pretty subtle, I admit. Here’s Ima’s entry again, completely in standard format.
I sense some of you rolling your eyes, and frankly, I can’t really blame you. From the writer’s side of the submission desk, it’s not apparent why these changes are necessary. But from the editor’s side, it couldn’t be plainer: both (p) and (q) are guarantees that a typesetter in a hurry won’t misread the author’s intended symbols.
And congratulations — you have now learned all of the rules necessary not only to enter this contest, but also to submit a manuscript to an agency in the U.S. That wasn’t such a painful learning curve, was it?
Okay, perhaps I don’t really want a reply to that question. Let’s finish up the rest of the rules of the contest.
11. Attach both Word documents to an e-mail. Please include FOOD! and the category number in the subject line. Please also mention the category In the body of the e-mail. (It makes it easier to process the entries.)
Make sure to say who you are, too, so we don’t get entries mixed up. It’s also a nice touch to say something pleasant (like “Howdy, Anne!”) in the e-mail itself. Just a nice habit for a writer to have acquired before starting to work with an agent.
Yes, these are just logistical requests, now that you mention it; they don’t really have anything to do with the writing in your entry. But honestly, it’s a false saving of energy to ignore common-sense rules like this. Just trust that the contest’s organizers have good reasons for asking — you wouldn’t believe how much more interesting it is for me to receive entries with notes attached — and be polite enough to honor these requests.
And if you’re not naturally polite enough to go along with this, consider: a contest entrant can never know for sure whether ignoring rules like this will get an entry disqualified. I’m just saying.
12. E-mail the whole shebang to contest(at)annemini(dot)com by Sunday, September 30, 2012, at midnight in your time zone. If you are entering more than one category, please submit each entry in a separate e-mail.
Don’t even try to push a deadline in a writing contest — they’re not movable. But in a web-based contest like this one, it’s always worth checking a few days before an entry deadline to see if it’s been extended. Surprisingly often, they are.
13. Because winners will also be awarded life-long bragging rights and coveted ECQLC , the judges reserve the right to award as many (or as few) prizes as the quality and quantity of the entry pool in any given category warrants. That’s a fancy way of saying that if we don’t receive enough wonderful entries in one of the categories, we may not give an award for it. So you might want to urge your friends to enter.
Most contests will include statements like this, although usually not with the motivations behind them so clearly explained. Since contest organizers tend to value their prizes quite highly — even if the monetary value of the prize is low, they want a contest win to count for something special — it’s not at all unusual for organizers to add a clause saying that if the overall quality of the entries is not high enough, they will not award one or more of the prizes. It’s also pretty common for writing contests, especially those that ask readers to vote for winners, to eliminate a category if not enough people respond. Read carefully before you enter.
But that’s the overall moral of today’s exceedingly lengthy lesson, isn’t it? Be an active reader of contest rules, and you’re much more likely to end up in the winner’s circle.
And again, if any of this does not make complete sense to you, please ask. Helping aspiring writers is what I’m here to do, after all. Best of luck with your entries — and, as always, keep up the good work!
Every since I announced Author! Author!’s Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012 a couple of weeks ago, I have been barraged with questions. Admittedly, these questions have not, by and large, been posted as comments here on the blog — where, say, my response to them might be visible to potential entrants other than the one that happened to buttonhole me in a bookstore or e-mail me privately. (The comment section is there for a reason, people!)
If seven years of blogging (as of next month) have taught me anything, though, it’s that for every one aspiring writer brave enough to post a question or accost me in a dark alley, demanding literary answers, there are hundreds or even thousands that never work up the nerve to ask. Or perhaps have not yet progressed from a vague feeling of discomfort to a fully-formulated question. Or, as those that come up and tap me on the shoulder at the grocery store keep insisting is their problem, simply not having the time or the patience to type out a nuanced concern on the tiny keyboards of their smartphones in between quick peeks at the blog.
Whatever the reason, I worry about all of those shy questioners. Writing for a contest entry — or for publication — is a pretty complex business; it’s not as though I could just toss off a 500-word column that would answer every conceivable question floating around out there in the ether. As much as fans of brevity might like me to make the attempt (oh, those people comment!), there are plenty of websites out there that profess to tell aspiring writers everything they need to know about formatting a manuscript or writing a successful contest entry in just a few hundred words, if not a few dozen bullet points, that I have no qualms about not adding to the number.
Besides, in my experience, pretending that complex matters are simple just confuses people. As my extensive archives (conveniently organized by category at the lower right-hand side of this page) demonstrate, I’m perfectly happy being the blogger that aspiring writers seek out for detailed answers to difficult questions.
But in order for me to do that, I need to know what those questions are.
And no, I’m not always able to guess. As I have pointed out many times in this very forum, the issues I might speculate that my readers would like me to address are not necessarily those that would occur to someone brand-new to the challenges of entering a writing contest or submitting to an agency.
Why? Well, to those of us that read manuscripts for a living, matters of formatting and style are fairly self-evident: like our old pals, Millicent, the agency screener, and Mehitabel, the veteran contest judge, I have seen so many professionally-formatted, beautifully-written manuscript pages, as well as myriads that missed the mark, that I can tell at a glance if something’s off. And, like Millie and Hitty, if something’s off with the presentation, it makes it harder for me to concentrate upon the writing itself.
Well might you roll your eyes, contest entrants and submitters: ideally, it would be nice if all that counted in a submission or entry were the writing itself. But Millie, Hitty, and I all know that’s not a realistic expectation — and, frankly, that we would not be doing aspiring writers any favors in the long run if we pretended presentation did not count. Millicent knows that in order for her boss, the agent of your dreams, to be able to sell your manuscript to an editor, it would first need to be free of typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors; Mehitabel is aware that if an entry she likes is to have a fighting chance in the finalist round, it must adhere to the contest’s rules.
And my years of experience helping writers move from concept to publication have taught me that if I just nodded and smiled when those writers insisted that it was a waste of their time to adhere to the rigors of standard format for book manuscripts, they would have gotten rejected by Millicent before their good writing had a chance to impress her. Because there’s just no getting around the fact that to a professional reader, improper presentation is every bit as eye-distracting as a page that repeats the word being on every other line or never contains a single correct spelling of either.
So it honestly wasn’t merely a matter of nit-pickery when I included in the rules for this season’s adult writing competition the stark requirement that entries must be in standard format for book manuscripts, in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier. Work that is not double-spaced, contains shrunken margins, or otherwise differs from standard format will be disqualified. Nor was it an accident when I included a link to the rules of standard format immediately thereafter.
A lesser writing contest organizer might have left it at that. So might a writing guru with less experience fielding questions from aspiring writers. But I know that everybody learns slightly differently — and not everyone has the time, patience, or web access minutes left this month to follow such a link.
I know, in short, enough to ask those of you contemplating entering the contest: how many of you have ever actually seen a professionally-formatted book manuscript in person? Or a contest entry that won a major prize?
I thought not. So today, for your viewing pleasure, I am going to walk potential entrants (and anyone else that might be interested) through the contest rules, giving visual examples of how an entry that clung to them tenaciously would look on the page.
That’s right, campers: today, I’m going to show you the technical side of how to win.
You’re welcome. And please, should anything in this set of explanations puzzle you, even for an instant, do me a favor and leave a comment asking for clarification. Believe me, if you are wondering, others will be, too. And I can’t answer questions I don’t know readers have.
(Okay, so I frequently do. Humor me this time, will ya?)
One caveat before we start: for reasons best known to itself, my blogging program chooses to reproduce page shots small, dark, and inexplicably blurry. I’ve cleaned them up as best I can, but since the details are the point here, I would strenuously advise those of you reading this on a computer to hold down the COMMAND key and pressing + repeatedly to enlarge the images. (Those of you reading this on smartphones are on your own.)
Everyone seated comfortably? Excellent. Let’s begin where all sensible contest entrants start when figuring out how to pull together a contest entry, at the top of the rules.
The Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012
Although the last time any of us here at Author! Author! checked, human beings experience the known world through their sensory organs, the overwhelming majority of manuscripts seem to rely mostly upon just two: sight and sound. That’s understandable, of course, since the world is stuffed to the gills with television, online, and movie storylines that must depend upon only those two senses to convey meaning. On the printed page, however, there’s seldom a reason for a narrative to limit itself to only what could be observed on a screen.
In order to encourage aspiring writers to incorporate more senses — and more specific sense-oriented detail — in their manuscripts, the Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012 is calling upon you to wow the judges with just how thoroughly you can make them feel that they are there for one scene in your book.
The catch: it cannot be a scene that contains overtly sexual activity. Find other ways to engage the senses. And the scene in question must be 8 pages or less.
Winners will not only receive fabulous prizes (hold your horses; we’re getting to those), but may have their scenes and accompanying synopses both published and critiqued in a post here at Author! Author! for all the world to see and admire. To be specific:
The grand prize winner in each category will receive a half-hour Mini Consult on a query, synopsis, and first 10 pages of the manuscript from which the winning scene was excerpted, as well as having the winning entry, bio, and an author photo posted on Author! Author!
First and second place winners will have their entries posted and critiqued on this blog.
That’s pretty self-explanatory so far, is it not? The crux of the contest entry is a scene of 8 pages or less that contains nicely-written and creatively-conceived writing about the senses. Smut disallowed.
And already, I spot a forest of hands sprouting up out there. “But Anne,” those of you new to how people in publishing paginate point out, and rightly so, “why doesn’t this contest give a word count as a guideline, instead of a maximum page count? After all, 8 pages single-spaced would contain quite a few more words than the same number of pages triple-spaced — and my computer can produce type in a wide array of sizes, ranging from very small to very large. So am I reading the rules correctly to say that as long as I can cram everything I want to say onto 8 pages, it’s fair game?”
In a word, no. Contest judges are like Goldilocks: they like those pages to be just right.
What would just right mean in this context? Let’s scroll down to the specific rules and see if they offer any further elucidation.
1. Select a scene no more than eight pages in length from your manuscript or manuscript-in-progress that best demonstrates the use of sense-oriented description and/or imagery. Scenes may be excerpted from any point in the book, but do be aware that the judges will be assessing the writing by only this scene and your synopsis (see Step #5).
Pages must be in standard format for book manuscripts, in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier. Work that is not double-spaced, contains shrunken margins, or otherwise differs from standard format will be disqualified.
Ah, there we go: the entry must be 8 or fewer pages in standard format — in other words, precisely the way a savvy writer would present the scene in a book manuscript intended for the eyes of an agent or editor. So that those of you without the time/inclination/remaining minutes won’t have to follow the link above, here are the rules.
a) Standard format for manuscripts is not identical to the format of a published book; book manuscripts differ from published books in many important respects and for many reasons. To a classically-trained agent or editor, presentation is not a matter of style: what may appear to a writer to be a cool, self-expressive choice will strike a professional reader as a distraction from the writing.
b) All manuscripts should be typed or printed in black ink on 20-lb or heavier white paper. (I encourage my clients to use bright white 24-lb paper; it doesn’t wilt in the hand.)
c) All manuscripts are printed on ONE side of the page and are unbound in any way.
d) The first page of a chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title centered at the top.
e) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, not page 1.
Okay, all of that is useful to know for manuscript-formatting in general, but this is a contest that you will be entering via e-mail, right? So for the moment, we don’t need to worry about paper quality or a title page. Let’s move on.
f) All manuscripts are double-spaced, with 1-inch margins on all four edges.
g) The text should be left-justified, not block-justified. The left margin should be straight, the right uneven.
That’s helpful, right? If a contest entrant (let’s call him Grover) were constructing his scene from scratch, he would begin by setting up the page like this:
Everybody clear on the margin requirements? Now is the time to speak up, if not. In the meantime, let’s move on with the rules of standard format — which, lest we forget, do not apply only to this contest entry. These are the requirements of a professional book manuscript for the U.S. market.
But for now, we’re still trying to figure out how many words you can fit on a page, are we not?
h) The preferred typefaces for manuscripts are 12-point Times New Roman or Courier.
i) No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the entire manuscript in the same font and typeface.
That last one, frankly, gets broken so often that many Millicents just roll their eyes over 24-point italics on the title page and flip impatiently to page 1. Mehitabel, however, cannot afford to be so tolerant. In most contests, the quickest way to get disqualified is to ignore font restrictions.
Since our last visual aid adhered strictly to both (h) and (i), I don’t feel the need to post another positive example. Just in case any of you might fall prey to that most common of contest-entrant brainstorms, the one that goes gee, no one will notice if I tinker just a little with the font and/or margins, to get a bit more on the page, though, let’s take a gander at what that same page would look like with both fudged.
Do your best to trick us, Grover. I’m curious to see if our audience can figure out on a first quick read what precisely is different.
Any guesses how Grover bought himself some extra lines here? First, the text was transmuted into Arial Narrow, a smaller font than Times New Roman. Then he changed it to 11 point. The margins also shrunk: each is .9 inch, instead of a full inch.
I ask you, though: looking at these two examples next to each other, is there any chance you would not have noticed that there were quite a few more words in the second version? The probability’s even lower for Mehitabel and Millicent, who scan many, many properly-formatted pages at a sitting.
The result in either context? “Next!”
Now that Grover’s presumably learned his lesson about cheating, let’s not rub it in. Instead, let’s proceed to a couple of more standard format requirements that could benefit from practical demonstration.
j) Each page of text should feature a standard slug line in the header, preferably left-justified:
Author’s Last Name/Title/#
This should appear in the same plain 12-point type as the rest of the manuscript. The page number should appear in the slug line and nowhere else on the page.
k) Every page in the manuscript should be numbered except the title page. Do not include it in a page count. The first page of text is page 1.
Let me tackle (k) first, because aspiring writers so often misconstrue it. In any manuscript, the title page is not numbered, because it is not a page of text. Thus, it should not include a slug line, either.
That means, in practice, that if a contest calls for a certain page limit for entries, the title page is not included in the total. In this contest, for example, if Grover decided to include a title page with his entry — not required, but not forbidden, either — he could submit up to nine pages: the title page plus up to eight pages of text. The first page of the scene would be page 1.
Millicent and Mehitabel are perennially shocked at how often submissions and entries disregard (j), by the way. Since manuscripts are not bound (unless a contest’s rules specifically call for them to be), it seems flatly crazy to professional readers that any writer would seriously expect them to read unnumbered pages — or to track down pages that might go wandering into what is often an entire desktop of manuscript.
So (h) is for your benefit as much as theirs, really: it enables M & M to make sure that they are reading the right person’s submission in the right order. Adding a slug line in the header is a small price to pay for that security.
That’s right — I said in the header, not on the first line of text on the page. The slug line is the only text permissible in the top margin; it should fall .5 inch from the top of the page. Like so:
Everyone clear on where it should go? Note, please, that the page number appears in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page. Some contests and agencies do harbor other preferences; check rules and submission guidelines carefully. If they do not mention a specific alternate location, though, you will never go wrong placing the page number in the slug line.
l) The beginning of each paragraph should be indented .5 inch, including the first paragraph of each chapter, no matter what you have seen in a published book.
This is an especially important one to observe in a contest that allows entry via e-mail. Why? Because the rise of e-mail has prompted many, many aspiring writers to believe — wrongly — that indentation is no longer required in English prose. As a direct and deplorable result, both Millicent and Mehitabel very frequently open both paper and e-mailed submissions to find entries that look like this:
Or — sacre bleu! — like this:
While an unusually tolerant Millicent might conceivably keep reading beyond the first line of the former (but don’t count on it), contest rules will almost always force Mehitabel to disqualify an entry like this on the spot. Or at least to dock the entry points for it. And neither professional reader is likely to read the second faux pas at all.
Oh, pick your jaws up off the floor; the publishing industry perceives itself, and rightly, as the protector of a language that’s increasingly seeing its rules blurred. Perhaps that’s why professional readers find standard format so undistracting to read — it enforces norms that have been around for quite a while.
Ignoring the indentation imperative is not the only reason that last example would raise M & M’s umbrage, however. This use of spacing confuses a paragraph break with a section break.
m) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.
n) Section breaks are formed by skipping one double-spaced line, not by # # # or any other marker UNLESS you are writing a short story, article, or entering a contest that requires the inclusion of a specific symbol.
I would show you an example of a section break, but since the Sensual Surfeit contest calls for only a single scene, it should not be necessary for entrants to use one. (Puzzled? Don’t be: section breaks come between scenes, not within them.)
Continuing our practice of concentrating our efforts upon what will help a contest entrant most, let’s proceed to something that might well crop up in a sense-heavy scene: the urge to emphasize.
o) Words in foreign languages should be italicized, as should emphasized words and titles of copyrighted works like songs. Nothing in the text should be underlined.
p) Do not use boldface anywhere but on the title page — and even there, it’s optional.
Basically, these two can be boiled down to a very simple precept: in a book manuscript, the only permissible fancy variant upon plain text is italicized text. (Short story format is different, but it’s not applicable here.) Use it where appropriate. As Grover has here:
Ah, that’s starting to look more like a scene that might appeal to this contest’s Mehitabels, isn’t it? Just two more rules, and we’ll have the formatting down pat.
q) All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25. Dates, times, and currency, however, are rendered as numbers when they are precise (3:02 p.m., June 12, 2012, $1,257), but in words when they are more general (a quarter to three, the fifteenth or sixteenth of June, a thousand dollars).
r) Dashes should be doubled, while hyphens are single, as in self-congratulatory. Dashes should also have spaces at each end — rather than—like this.
Oh, you want to see those in action, do you? Well, it’s late, but I think I have another example in me. Here you go:
(q) genuinely confuses a lot of aspiring writers, and with good reason: in A.P. style (what’s used in U.S. magazines and newspapers), only numbers under 10 are written out. Every part of publishing has its own standards; it’s not worth your energy to try to argue that the norms in one area are equally applicable to another.
Pay particular attention to (r), please — you would be astonished at how often simply employing an emdash (that long line between words that my blogging program favors, much to my chagrin) will set off a red flag for a professional reader. Why? It instantly tells her that the writer is unfamiliar with the rigors of standard format — and thus that the writer will need more coaching than one that is better prepared for professional writing.
But you won’t require that extra coaching, right? We’ve just gone through all of the rules of standard format — and none of them were particularly oppressive to individual writing style, were they?
I’m going to leave you to ponder the implications for your entry. Yes, there are a few more rules to this contest (which you will find in full here), but most of them are matters of content — most notably, restrictions on profanity and sexual content required so that all readers may read the winning entries, without fear of their being blocked by content filters — or simply logistics. (You can handle saving your scene and your synopsis as two different Word documents, right?)
For those of you who would like a guided tour of an entire set of contest rules, tune in next time, when I shall be going over all of the nuances for this summer’s contest for young writers and adult YA writers. That will be as specific as it is possible to be.
A quick reminder before I sign off: if you wish to enter the Sensual Surfeit competition, you will need to whip your entry into shape by Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Monday, December 3, 2012, at midnight in your time zone — so please, if you have any questions about the entry requirements, ask them sooner, rather than later. That way, everyone can benefit from the answers during the brainstorming phase of creation.
I really am looking forward to seeing your entries. The Mehitabels and I are anxious to hand out a broad array of Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy. Keep up the good work!
Here, as promised, is the companion piece to yesterday’s back-by-popular-demand guest post: Joel Derfner’s lovely piece on revamping his comic memoir voice for his second book. I thought it might come in handy in case, say, anyone might be thinking about entering the Humor or Memoir categories of our recently-announced literary contest.
As those of you familiar with the labyrinthine coilings of my mind may already have suspected, I have an ulterior motive for reposting these two helpful bits of professional insight. Writing comedy well is a heck of a lot harder than it looks. And, as also-hilarious memoirist Bob Tarte shared with us yesterday, contrary to popular belief, even the most effortless-sounding humorous voice is not equally applicable to every story.
Or, to break would-be humorists’ hearts a bit more thoroughly: sometimes, just being a funny person who happens to be able to write well isn’t enough to make a reader laugh.
Or even smile wanly. At the risk of repeating myself — fatal to a comic voice on the page, yet a sitcom and skit comedy staple — just because an event is funny in real life does not mean it will automatically generate yucks on the printed page. Ditto with jokes that slay ‘em when told out loud and/or anecdotes that have left one’s kith and kin gasping with helpless laughter for years.
Comedy in a book is not, in short, exempt from the demands of craft. And if you’re going to listen to anyone (other than, naturally, your humble correspondent) on the craft of being funny, you might as well listen to the best, I always say.
I was thinking just the other day about how hard it is for humor writers new to the craft to be able to tell whether material that has been, as previously noted, killing ‘em at cocktail parties is working on the page. An acquaintance of mine — a friend of a friend of a friend, to be precise — walked up to me at a recent social function that may or may not have had anything to do with the 236th anniversary of the founding of our nation, yanked out her iPad, and demanded that I tell her if something she had just written was funny enough to get published.
If your jaw is currently grazing the ground at the very idea of bearding someone in the publishing industry this way, I can only assume that you don’t attend social functions with us much. Baseball may be the national pastime, but aspiring writers’ leaping out from behind tables of canap?s to demand professional feedback on the spot from authors, agents, and editors surely runs a close second.
Because it’s not as though, “Could I make a living as a comedy writer?” isn’t a question that can be answered after a 32-second perusal of a rough draft thrust under one’s nose while fireworks are going off, after all. It’s not the kind of question someone who actually does make a living at it might want to give some serious consideration or anything.
But a friend is a friend (or at least a friend of a friend of a friend is…well, you know), and frankly, I was curious — this is not someone I have ever actually heard tell a joke. Or recount an anecdote with humor and verve. Or, indeed, talk about anything with a sense of whimsy. Yet still waters have occasionally been known to run hilarious; if this person was funny on the page, I would be genuinely pleased.
So I peered at the piece on the screen: an anecdote about a party suspiciously like the one at which we were currently mingling. Single-spaced, in ten-point type, no less. And not, I’m afraid, remotely amusing.
I attempted to hand the iPad back to her, but she wouldn’t take it. “I think it needs a bit more work,” I suggested gently. “It’s awfully hard to break into the humor market. Also, you might want to let your humor sit for a bit before you run it by others — right after something funny happens in reality, it can be hard to get all of it down on the page. It’s just too easy to assume that the reader is seeing what you still have fresh in your mind.”
She looked back at me unblinkingly. “But you didn’t laugh. You must not have read it closely enough.”
In response to that fresh thud of jaws on the parquet: this is a more common type of response to professional feedback than one might think. She wasn’t unfunny; I was merely distracted. Or incompetent. Take two!
“I have a better idea.” I forced her fingers around the edges of the iPad. “Why don’t you read it out loud to me? That way, I can get a better sense of the tone you have in mind.”
Which, of course, is a completely unfair test of written humor — it’s not as though the author can stand next to a reader, bawling in his ear, “No, you read that wrong.” I, however, was thirsting for a piece of that watermelon on the other side of the patio, far, far away from the insistent lady trying to make me work on my day off.
She read it. In a passable impression of Jerry Seinfeld’s voice. I still didn’t laugh.
“Ah, I see,” I told her, edging toward the rapidly-disappearing watermelon. “You were probably thinking of this in your favorite comedian or sitcom character’s cadence. Since the reader won’t be, though, that’s always a dangerous strategy in print.” In the interest of scoring some melon, I did not add that sounding like a ten-year-old sitcom is not typically the best way to impress an agent that represents comic writing today. “There’s a professional trick for that: the more you can sound like you on the page, the less likely your humor writing is to fall prey to this common trap.”
I could have said more, but by then, the “Ooh!” and “Ahh!” of the fireworks-watchers would have drowned out further speech. While her head was turned, I snuck away. The last slice of watermelon was in fact very nice.
What, if anything, do I expect you to take away from this grisly little anecdote, other than the undeniable fact that chilled watermelon is popular on hot summer nights? Well, first, just because a pro is nice to a writer that accosts her at a social function — which, as I MAY have mentioned, happens all the time — doesn’t mean that the pro doesn’t resent it. Asking someone who reads for a living to peruse your work gratis is not all that dissimilar to expecting a doctor to perform an appendectomy while standing in line for a buffet at a wedding: we could both do it if it were an emergency, but honestly, wouldn’t it be more considerate to call our offices during business hours and make an appointment? The results in both instances are substantially less likely to leave a scar.
Second — and here’s the part that’s most applicable to Joel’s post — while part of every writer’s learning curve involves shortening the differential between the scene he’s envisioning and what’s actually on the page, that gap tends to be a bit wider for comic scenes. My accoster was actually pretty wise to seek outside feedback. Her mistake (other than timing the request) lay in not having enough faith in her own comic vision to present the scene from her unique perspective.
Why is that a problem, necessarily? Because the last time I checked, the world already had a Jerry Seinfeld. For my fellow party-goer to make a name for herself as a humorist, she was going to need to develop her own voice, not his.
With all of that firmly in mind, please join me in re-welcoming someone who actually is as funny in real life as he is on the page, Joel Derfner. Enjoy!
And no, you didn’t misread the blurb on the cover: it’s that Elton John. The little bird that flies around telling people things told me that he liked the original release of Joel’s memoir so much that he volunteered to blurb the second edition.
If you prefer not to receive your news from passing waterfowl, you can read a fuller account of this remarkable publication story in Joel’s earlier guest post on book promotion. While we’re on the subject of guest posts, Joel also charmed the Author! Author! community with an exceedingly useful guest post on obtaining permission to use song lyrics in your books, should any of you be contemplating setting foot on that particular Yellow Brick Road. (Or were you under the impression that memoirs and novels could quote songs willy-nilly? Au contraire, mon frère.)
Mssr. John was not the only one to fall in love with Joel’s deeply human, devastatingly honest, and often howlingly funny voice. I already knew how amusing and insightful Joel was before the book came out, yet as the neighbors that did not move away instantly at the sight can attest, certain sections of this book made me rush into the street, tap-dancing with glee. Sparklers may or may not have been involved.
Was I that hard up at the time for some humorous memoir? you ask, bemused. No, thank you, I write, read, and edit funny memoir all the time. What separated Joel’s first book from, well, everything else was not merely how consistently diverting it was — not an easy trick, with a life fully and well lived — but how unblinkingly truthful it was.
Yes, those of you rolling your eyes? “Oh, come on, Anne,” the memoir-jaded snort. “The whole point of memoir is that it’s true, isn’t it?”
Ah, but there’s true in the sense of having actually occurred — and true that sends shivers through your membranes because it shows you life in a way you had not seen it on a page before. There’s true that reads plausibly — and true that makes the reader gasp, “Wow, my therapist does not know me as well as I now know this memoirist.” And, as any memoir editor worth her salt and/or pepper could tell you, there’s true that’s well-written — and there’s true that’s so prettily phrased that one’s socks, shoes, and pinky rings get blown off.
Or, at the very least, that causes one to go running out into the street, looking for an innocent bystander to whom to read a particularly striking passage. (My neighborhood used to be so quiet before I met Joel.)
I’m certainly not the only professional reader that felt this way when his bombshell of a first memoir came out, incidentally. Some other bon mots from those that know about such things:
In a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit . . . [Derfner is] the next No?l Coward.? — Out.com
“Searing” — Washington Blade
“Derfner’s writing is perfect. . . . He’s your best friend. He’s your brother. He is you.? — EDGE Los Angeles
“Sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, always clever, and unpredictable.? — Philadelphia Gay News
What’s that you say? You’d like me to stop telling you the man can write and let him get on with showing you same? Reasonable enough. Let’s start with the publisher’s blurb for Swish:
Joel Derfner is gayer than you.
Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him—he’ll tell you himself).
In Swish, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to meet men — many, many men — or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones — but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets — is a hero destined for legend.
Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers — gay, straight, and in between.
Here again, we smack head-first into that bugbear of memoirists everywhere, the distinction between true and true. All of these statements are factually accurate about the book, but what struck me most about Joel’s memoir, what set my membranes humming, my feet tap-dancing, and my neighbors scurrying into the street to see why I was shouting is not mentioned in this blurb.
What’s missing, in my view? The fact — oh, okay, my opinion — that this is one of the best memoirs ever written on how darned hard it is to be a smart, sensitive human being in a world that habitually rewards neither.
And that, my friends, is what has made this book among the most tattered on my memoir shelf. Occasionally, life will throw a meandering curveball that knocks one of Joel’s beautifully-phrased insights out of my at this point stuffed-to-bursting memory vaults, sending me rushing right back to the text.
Oh, and in the spirit of this series, I should add: the guy’s paid his dues as a writer, and then some. He’s done it with wit, humor, and perseverance in the face of some pretty long odds. All of which has not only garnered my completely ungrudging respect (and you of all people know how high my threshold for grudge-free respect is), but a feeling that somewhere up there in the Muses’ palace, the Ladies in Charge have already reserved some serious shelf space for Joel’s subsequent literary achievements.
Ah, but there’s the rub, isn’t it? After a debut memoir like that, what precisely does one do for an encore?
I asked Joel that question, and rather than fleeing with the flailing arms and piercing screams such a seemingly flippant but subversively difficult question deserves, he gave it the alternately serious and humorous literary attention that has caused me to come to think of him as the memoirist little brother the Muses should have seen to it that I had. (With all requisite apologies to the nonfiction author big brother with whom they actually provided me — oh, you thought my parents would have put up with offspring that didn’t write?)
Here, then, is his response, and I have to say, I wish I had read it before I first sat down to write a memoir. In my checkered experience, it’s not only true — it’s true. Take it away, Joel!
Wait, that wasn’t Joel. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never seen him and Judy Garland in a room together. I’ve never seen Superman and Joel in a room together either, though, so…hey, wait a minute…
Here, then, is Joel as his usual charming self — and his usual wise self vis-? -vis the difficult path of the memoirists. Five, six, seven, eight!
I’m about to sign a contract for the publication of my second real book, whose working title is Lawfully Wedded Husband: How I Tried to Destroy America With my Gay Marriage.
When my last book, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, came out, many reviewers praised its combination of funny and wistful. It “bounce[d] back and forth,”? wrote one, “from tender and touching and deeply sad to wildly funny, sometimes in the space of a paragraph, or even a single sentence.”?
Yes! I thought when I read this. It’s a good thing this reviewer has a distinctive name, because now I can look him up online and stalk him and make him fall in love with me and then we can be happy together for the rest of our lives.
Part of what had allowed me so to bounce back and forth in Swish was that I was incredibly, incredibly depressed. I hadn’t been quite on the verge of suicide while writing the book, but I had certainly been within spitting distance, and I’d found it easy somehow to reach inside, touch a raw, exposed nerve, and twist it until something funny came out and I started crying.
I began Swish in 2005, and it was published in 2008. At some point in 2009, my agent said to me, “Joel, I need another book from you.” (I realize this sounds incredibly glamorous, but really I’d just begged her for a meeting because all I’d been able to afford for months was Taco Bell and I was hoping she would at least take me to TGIFridays or something.) (She didn’t.) So I said, “Okay, no problem, I’ll start working on another book.” My boyfriend had just proposed to me, and the issue of marriage equality seemed topical enough to be worth writing about, so I went home, turned my computer on, and started typing.
After an hour or so, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t interesting at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought a couple candy bars, came back, ate them both, and started over again.
A couple hours later, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t true at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought five candy bars, came back, ate them all, and spent the rest of the evening staring morosely at the television, because I had a very serious problem:
I was no longer unhappy enough.
In the years between 2005 and 2009, I had made a great many positive changes in my life, including but not limited to getting a therapist, going on massive doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and moving in with my boyfriend, and all those nerves that had been so raw and exposed before now had a modicum of protective covering. My two-candy-bar attempt had been uninteresting because I hadn’t been twisting any nerves; my five-candy-bar attempt had been dishonest because I was only pretending to twist nerves that weren’t in fact twistable, at least not in the way to which I was accustomed in writing.
My muse had disappeared.
Please don’t think for a second that I’m saying you have to be unhappy to write well. It wasn’t my writing that had suffered, you see; it was my subject matter.
I came quickly to think of this as the Tolstoy problem. Even if you haven’t read Anna Karenina you’re probably familiar with its famous opening sentence, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”?
It was easy to write with deep sadness and wild humor when that was all I had, and I had them in my own way, and could convey them with idiosyncratic verve.
But what was I going to write now? “?I cooked my boyfriend dinner. It was yummy. Then we watched Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and went to sleep. I love him.”? Who would want to read that for even a page, much less an entire book? I certainly wouldn’t.
But if I faked it–”?I cooked spaghetti for my boyfriend and accidentally used only one clove of garlic instead of two in the spaghetti sauce and he didn’t say anything about it so now I’m lying awake staring at my ceiling trying to figure out whether he didn’t notice or he noticed but didn’t want to say anything about it because it was the last straw and he’s going to break up with me tomorrow”?–well, that could work for a paragraph or two, maybe even a few pages, but it wasn’t true, and I knew there was no way I could sustain it for an entire book.
So what was I going to do?
This question paralyzed me for about a year. Occasionally I would sit down and start writing something, trying to be both interesting and honest, fail, and then stop thinking about it for another month or two, because not thinking about it allowed me to avoid discovering I could no longer write.
The problem was that not thinking about it was great as a strategy to avoid discovering I could no longer write, but as a strategy to write it left something to be desired. If the only way to avoid confronting my inability to write was refusing to write, then the whole thing sort of turned in on itself until everything collapsed and at some point the bodega was going to run out of candy bars.
So I figured, okay, why don’t I ease into this by writing about the issue itself first, not about my own experiences? If you’re quoting legal statutes you can hardly be expected to be wildly funny and deeply sad.
So I started with a sort of analytical/philosophical/whateverical chapter, and went from there. And as I wrote, I tried to find ways to touch and twist indirectly those nerves to which I no longer had easy access.
I think I’ve succeeded, to some degree. I think that when this book is at its best I’m able to explore things about feeling alone even in a relationship, about what a relationship can’t give you, about the difference between expectation and reality.
I’m sorry not to have a better or clearer way to talk about how I was about to get started again or what those indirect ways are. I think it’s because I’m still in the middle of the story–the story of me writing this book, I mean, not the story the book is telling–and I don’t have the perspective I need to understand what I’m doing differently.
I’m still very afraid that this book isn’t as good as my last one, because its sadness isn’t as deep nor its humor as wild. One reason I went with this particular publisher, though, was that the editor said he liked this book more than Swish, which was incredibly heartening, because it allowed me to hope that whatever I’ve replaced twisting raw nerves with might be equally valuable, or even more valuable–to hope that I’ve found a way, all unawares, to skirt the Tolstoy problem.
And if that’s the case, then, if I’m lucky enough to be invited to post again on this blog in a few years, maybe I can tell you how I did it.
Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and Gay Haiku author Joel Derfner is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard. A year after he graduated, his thesis on the Abkhaz language was shown to be completely wrong, as the word he had been translating as “who” turned out to be not a noun but a verb. Realizing that linguistics was not his m?tier, he moved to New York to get an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts.
Musicals for which he has written the scores have been produced in London, New York, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he joined Cheer New York, New York’s gay and lesbian cheerleading squad, but eventually he had to leave because he was too depressed. In desperation, he started knitting and teaching aerobics, though not at the same time. He hopes to come to a bad end.
I have time for only a quick one today, I’m afraid, campers, but at least the reasons are entirely appropriate, symbolically speaking: I shan’t be talking too much about humor in contest entries today because — wait for it — I’m in the throes of solidifying the contest rules for this summer’s Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. I shall be unveiling the criteria this coming Friday, but here’s a hint: at least one of the categories will be integrally related to something we shall be discussing today.
Ready, set — speculate!
On to the day’s business. Last week, I tempted the contest gods by bringing up the seldom-discussed topic of humor in entries and submissions. Contrary to popular opinion, not everything — or, alas, everyone — that seems funny to the writer will necessarily strike a professional readers as equally so on the printed page.
Or, as I put it last time:
Jokes that need to be explained after the fact are seldom funny to the reader.
While amusing real-life incidents often translate well directly to the visually-oriented worlds of film and TV, they do not always work equally well on the pages of a book.
Verbal anecdotes generally feature too little detail or context to be funny when reproduced as is onto the printed page.
Stop glaring at me. It’s true: funny anecdotes do not always funny prose make. Nor do hilarious real-life incidents. Also, verbal anecdotes are seldom redolent with character development, if you catch my drift. Caricature works beautifully there, but on the page, motivation becomes far more important. Not to mention backdrop and context.
All of that goes double for what’s funny on Facebook, unfortunately: quite a lot of everyday humor is situational. Or dependent upon the audience’s already being familiar with the characters and/or premise. As is quite a lot of sitcom humor, actually, but in social contexts, one’s kith and kin tend to cut one slack. Consequently, the amusement bar tends to hover quite a bit lower than it does in situations — like, say, when you enter a writing contest or submit to an agency — in which the prevailing standard of whether a piece of writing is funny is based upon whether it impresses impartial readers who could not pick the author out of a police line-up.
Translation: “But it made my friend/significant other/bus driver laugh out loud!” is not a reliable indicator of whether Mehitabel the veteran contest judge or Millicent the agency screener will find something funny on the manuscript page.
And how to put this gently?…often seems to come as a great big surprise to writers new to the art of making readers laugh, particularly memoirists and novelists that borrow heavily from their quotidian lives. “If an anecdote is funny verbally,” they apparently reason, “it should be equally amusing if I just describe the situation exactly the same way in writing, right?”
Actually, no. Why doesn’t this tend to work? Well, tone, for one thing: a talented anecdotalist puts on a performance in order to give his tale poignancy and point.
Good comic authors are well aware of this — did you know that both Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, renowned in their day as hilarious public readers, routinely used to read crowds versions of their writing substantially different from what those same readers might buy in a bookstore, or even hear in a theatre?
This was exceedingly smart, in case you were wondering. Funny on a printed page and funny in from a podium can be quite different animals. Also, it was brilliant marketing: people who had heard them read could boast about how much more amusing these authors were in person. Great way to sell tickets to one’s next lecture tour.
On the page, though, none of those stage tricks work. Mehitabel and Millicent will not be able to imagine you saying the words in your manuscript out loud, after all. Nor can they possibly see what you are picturing. All they can judge your comic vision by is what is actually on the page.
But most aspiring writers and contest entrants don’t think of that, do they? Or so agents and editors surmise from the fact that surprisingly few humorous passages in submissions seem to reflect a serious attempt to convey a comic tone. Why bother? The situation is inherently funny, right?
Not necessarily. If the narrative does not adequately convey what was humorous in that real-life incident, it’s going to fall flat on the page.
“But why?” you gasp, poised to sacrifice a goat to Thalia.
Because all too often, the writer assumes fleshing out the funny is not necessary: in that verbal anecdote that’s been slaying ‘em for years, the hearers already knew enough about the teller (and, often, the situation) to be able to fill in any narrative gaps.
That’s an extremely dangerous assumption in a contest entry or submission. Let’s face it, neither Mehitabel nor Millicent is much given to filling in the humorous blanks to the hefty percentage of jokes whose appeal is best described by the common expression well, I guess you had to be there.
But the reader — both the one that needs to fall in love with your work before it can get published and the one that you hope will want to buy it after it’s published — wasn’t there, by definition. And even if s/he was, it’s not the reader’s job to try to figure out why humor on the page is funny; it’s the writer’s job to set up the amusing bits so well that the joke does not need to be explained.
It just makes the reader — any reader — smile. Yet another reason that it’s a great idea to seek out impartial feedback: the success of the line that made your mother choke with mirth and fall out of her chair may well depend upon the reader’s knowing about something that’s not currently showing up on the page.
You can’t know for certain if the only people you’ve been showing your writing share your life, after all. Since the point of publishing a book is, presumably, to reach people who did not, say, give birth to you, sit in the cubicle next to yours, or trundle down an aisle with you whilst one or both of you were wearing white, it honestly doesn’t make sense to think of your kith and kin as your target readers.
But that’s precisely who aspiring writers usually do envision as readers, isn’t it? Or so the pros surmise from the exceedingly high percentage of first-time memoirists and autobiographical novelists that murmur early and often, “But what will they think of me after I publish this?”
I can set your mind at rest on that, actually: if you’re writing about real events, at least a few of the people that were there will think your book’s depiction is wildly inaccurate. Heck, even some people who previously knew about those events only through your verbal anecdotes may regard your written version as coming from out of left field. That’s the nature of memory, as well as individuality; since everyone experiences events differently, everyone remembers them differently.
That’s why we say you had to be there, right?
Forgetting that the human experience is subjective, and thus requires fleshing out on the page, is frequently an issue when writing the real, but it seems to trip writers up especially often when they are trying to convey real-life humor. It’s just so easy to presume that the reader can picture every aspect of a remembered event; the writer does, right? That presumption is often the reason that the anecdote that’s been sending coworkers rolling in the proverbial aisles, causing tears of glee to burst from relatives’ eye sockets, and prompting best friends to say at parties, “Oh, Antoinetta, please tell that one about the parrot and the fisherman!” for years tends actually to be less likely to elicit a chuckle from someone that reads for a living than fresher material.
Why? Because in scenes written entirely from imagination, the writer knows for certain that he cannot rely upon the reader’s outside knowledge. The narrative is less inclined to rely upon elements that you had to be there to know.
Thalia is a demanding mistress, you see: she has a great affection for specifics. In ancient Greek, ?????? translates roughly as abundant festivity or blooming. So I like to think of comedy writing as being about expansion — of a funny premise, an amusing situation, or an oddball character.
Where I think most contest entries — and manuscripts — go wrong is in a tendency to contract a funny scenes, rather than expanding them. Due, perhaps, to that tired old truism about brevity’s being the soul of wit. Like all sweeping generalizations, this is not always true.
There’s plenty of hilarious lengthy humor out there, after all. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either a great lover of writing aphorisms, unfamiliar with the breadth of witty writing in the English language, or just plain too impatient to read anything longer than the back of a cereal box.
So there.
That being said, allow me to add hastily that when I suggest expanding funny scenes, I’m not talking about pacing — as anybody who has watched a TV comedy that doesn’t quite work can tell you, funny that drags can rapidly become tedious. But that shouldn’t mean rushing through the comic elements — or cutting away from a hilarious moment and back to stern narrative the nanosecond after a good quip.
You don’t want that funny line to look like a fluke to Mehitabel and Millicent, do you?
Physical comedy often gets rushed on the page, unfortunately, sometimes so much so that it’s hard for the reader to follow what’s going on. That’s particularly likely to happen in a narrative containing a lot of run-on sentences, I’ve noticed: I guess that writers fond of them just like flinging events onto the page as quickly as humanly possible.
But as Gandhi said, there’s more to life than increasing its speed. To which I would add: there’s more to writing comedy than a rapid telling.
I sense some aphorism-huggers shaking their heads. You want proof that a too-speedy telling can flatten the funny. Fair enough. Here’s a slapstick moment, conveyed with the breathless pacing and overstuffed sentences Mehitabel and Millicent see so much.
Harriet grabbed her usual wobbly table at the coffee house, shoving her laptop, backpack, an extra-grande (whatever that meant) mocha, a dog-eared novel, and her lunch onto the too-small surface because she was in too much of a rush to get online and answer the e-mail that Bertrand must have sent her by now. Of course, he hadn’t, but she quickly became engrossed in reading the fifteen other e-mails cluttering up her inbox because it was Monday, when everyone came dragging into the office, then remembered an hour later the million things that they hadn’t done last week and rushed to blame their procrastination on somebody else, which she hated. When a handsome stranger brushed by to claim his latte from the counter next to her, he knocked over her drink. She jumped up to try to yank her possessions out of the way, but she was too late, everything was soaked. She only managed to save her laptop, backing up so hard that she shoved her chair into the lady sitting behind her, causing a domino effect of café patrons slamming into each other. And now it was time to get back to work, and she hadn’t eaten even a bite of her lunch.
Awfully darned hasty, isn’t it? There are some funny elements here, but they get a bit lost in the welter of frenetic activity. And cramming all of it into a single paragraph doesn’t really do the scene any favors, either, does it?
So we can’t really blame Mehitabel for wanting to shout, “Whoa! Slow down and show us what’s happening!”
Glad to oblige. Here’s that scene again, shown at a more reasonable pace.
The lunchtime crowd of caffeine-seekers had, as usual, avoided the three-legged table. Harriet always brought her own shim to shove under the short leg. By the time she had coaxed the tabletop into something close to horizontality, Alex had shouted twice that her extra-grande (whatever that meant) mocha must be getting cold.
As usual, the cup seared her hand. She carried it with her fingertips until she could balance it atop the tenuous pyramid she had constructed: laptop atop a dog-eared paperback novel supported by her backpack, with her bagged lunch teetering on the last few inches of table. Food could wait until she powered up her computer and answered the e-mail that Bertrand must have sent her by now.
Of course, he hadn’t. What a jerk. Irritably, she gnawed on a mushy apple, scrolling through pointless e-mails from her coworkers. Typical Monday: everyone came dragging into the office, then remembered an hour later the million things that they hadn’t done last week and rushed to blame their procrastination on somebody else.
“George!” Alex screamed. “Do you want your latte or not?”
Suitably chastened, a handsome hipster lunged toward the counter. Sympathetic to his embarrassment, Harriet pretended to be engrossed in what was in fact the single most boring e-mail ever constructed by human hand. The hipster’s mailbag swung through her peripheral vision, and abruptly, she was covered with coffee.
Automatically, she yanked her computer away from the spreading lake soaking her possessions. Leaping to her feet, she sent her chair sliding backward into the cramped couple at the next table. They scrambled to save their drinks, but their sandwiches flew onto the floor. The woman reached to retrieve the plates, unfortunately at the same moment that a good Samaritan at a neighboring table dove for them as well. Their heads smacked together with a sickening thud.
“Oh, God,” the hipster said, battering Harriet with fistfuls of paper napkins. “I’m so sorry.”
She wished she had time to enjoy his mauling. She had to get back to work, and she hadn’t eaten even a bite of her lunch. Typical Monday.
Much clearer what actually happened now, isn’t it? Do I hear a cheer for showing, not telling?
I sense some disgruntlement in the peanut gallery. “But Anne,” brevity-lovers moan, “that’s a lot longer! The contest I’m entering has a short page limit — if I expand my scenes like this, I won’t be able to enter as much of my manuscript as I had planned! And what if Millicent’s boss asked me for the first 50 pages of my manuscript. I want to get as much of the story under her nose as possible!”
Ah, these are both common concerns. Would it astonish you hear that they simply wouldn’t make any sense to Mehitabel or Millicent?
Why? Well, Millicent’s is perfectly aware that if submission request specifies a page limit, there’s going to be more manuscript beyond what the writer has sent. So will Mehitabel, if she’s judging a book category that calls for the opening pages and synopsis. That means, in practice, that a writer would be better off making those opening pages sing than trying to cram as much plot into them as possible.
If you’re genuinely concerned about length, there’s another option here, but I hesitate to suggest it: if the story overall is not humorous and it would take too much page space to render a comic bit unquestionably funny, consider taking it out altogether. Humor is a great way to establish your narrative voice as unique, but as I mentioned earlier in this series, it can be a risky contest entry strategy. Ditto with submissions. Funny that fails tends to be disproportionately punished.
Why, you ask? Comic elements in an otherwise serious manuscript can come across as, well, flukes. They don’t fit comfortably into the overall narrative; the individual laugh lines may be genuinely funny, but if there aren’t chuckle moments and fleeting smirk instants throughout as well, the funny bit can sometimes jar the reader out of the story.
I know: it’s kind of counter-intuitive. But true.
You might also consider cutting comic bits that you’re not positive will work on strangers. Unless you are lucky or brave enough to be a stand-up comic, a teacher, a prison guard, or have another job that allows you to test material on a live audience unlikely to run screaming from the room, you honestly cannot tell for sure if the bits that seemed hilarious to you in the privacy of your studio would be funny to anyone else.
In case I’m being too subtle here: it’s a bad idea for your first test of whether a joke or comic situation works to be submitting it to a contest, any more than it should be when you submit it to the agency of your dreams. The stakes are just too high, and it’s just too easy to imagine theoretical readers laughing at the funny parts.
Not that I’d know anything about that, writing a blog.
“But Anne,” some of you complain, and who could blame you? “I love my comic bits, but the contest deadline is imminent. I don’t have time to track down impartial first readers. Is there a faster method to test-drive my funny parts?”
Until you’re sure that your narrative voice is consistently diverting, it can be very helpful to read it out loud to somebody. See where the chuckles come, if ever. If an expected chuckle does not come, flag the passage and rework it, pronto. (I’ve been known to ask, when a line elicits only a fleeting smile, which of the following three possibilities is funniest.)
Reading out loud is also one of the few ways to weed out the phenomenon I mentioned last time, what movie people call bad laughs, the unintentional blunders that make readers guffaw AT a book, not with it.
Fair warning: any given listener will be able to respond spontaneously only once to a particular scene. So after you have reworked the problematic parts, you’re going to need to track down another victim listener.
Thalia is nudging me to point out that living with a comedy writer is no picnic. Yes, ma’am.
This strategy only works, of course, if you are philosophically open to the possibility that the sentence that you thought was the best one-liner penned in North America since Robert Benchley died is simply not funny, and thus should be cut. Admittedly, this kind of perspective is not always easy to maintain: it requires you to be humble. Your favorite line may very well go; it’s no accident that the oft-quoted editing advice, “Kill your darlings,” came from the great wit Dorothy Parker.
Yes, that’s right: she was talking about laugh lines. That’s not how your high school English teacher introduced you to the aphorism, was it? God, I hate sweeping generalizations about writing; they’re so often applied indiscriminately.
It is pretty good advice about comedy, though. Be ruthless: if it isn’t funny on paper, it should go — yes, no matter how much it makes you laugh. Or your best friend, or your spouse, or everyone around the water cooler at work. (Do offices even have water coolers anymore?)
As any good comedy writer can tell you, in the long run, actually doesn’t matter if the author laughs herself silly over any given joke: the reaction that matters is the audience’s. And no, the fact that your spouse/mother/best friend laughed heartily does not necessarily mean a line is genuinely funny. It may mean merely that these people love you and want you to be happy.
A little hard to resent that kind of devotion, isn’t it?
Lacking an audience, it is still possible to work your way into Thalia’s good graces by editing out the only marginally comical in your manuscript. As a contest judge and editor, I can tell you with certainty that aspiring comedians’ less successful efforts seem to rush to array themselves into easily-identifiable groups.
Next time, I’ll give you a guided tour of ‘em, so you may recognize them if — Thalia forefend! — they should rear their less-than-funny heads in your contest entries. In the meantime, polish up those laugh lines, burnish those chuckle-inducing moments, and keep up the good work!
Yes, I’m posting late again — and yes, my tardiness is due in part to the delightful rigors of fine-tuning the rules for the latest installment of the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence, a writing contest I shall be announcing this coming weekend. Not to pat myself on the back, but I flatter myself that this year’s iteration will please a broader swathe of writers seeking Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy than ever before.
Hint: the judges are going to be rewarding showing, not telling. But perhaps I have already said too much.
Back to the topic at hand. The prim miss sporting the clavicle-concealing garment above is, of course, Jane Austen, and she has come to preside over today’s topic, how to write comedy that ages well.
What’s that you say, potential literary contest entrants? That since writing contests tend to be annual events, any humor contained in your entry would have to seem fresh for only a few months, at most?
I can see why you might think so, but actually, Mehitabel the contest judge is usually as wary of jokes topical enough to have a short shelf life as Millicent the agency screener could possibly be. Why? Well, literary contest organizers hope that the works they reward with prizes, finalist ribbons, and other ECQLC will ultimately go on to be published. In a contest that accepts book-length unpublished writing, all of the Mehitabels will be quite aware that this year’s winners would at best be hitting the shelves a couple of years hence.
So I ask you: how well do you remember the pop culture events of two years ago? I thought not. Neither will Mehitabel.
Some of you have gone quite pale. Were you not aware that it typically takes quite some time for even the best-conceived manuscript to move through the traditional publication process? Even if you signed a book contract tomorrow, you might well not hold the bound book in your hand for a year or two. Sometimes more. And that’s not counting the time your agent might spend shopping the manuscript around to editors — or the time you might invest in landing an agent.
So for any cultural reference gracing your book not to seem dated to the reader of the future, it’s going to need to have at least a five-year expiration date. And if that doesn’t strike you as a trifle intimidating, may I remind you that back in 2007, iPhones were a brand-new phenomenon?
Oh, you don’t remember where you were when the last HARRY POTTER book was released? That’s okay; neither do Mehitabel or Millicent. So why would you expect them to recall, say, who the Secretary General of the U.N. was on January 3 of that year?
Oh, you may laugh (or, if you don’t follow the news, you may be wondering who the Secretary General is now), but you would be amazed at how often Millicent and Mehitabel encounter topical humor in submissions and contest entries. Or how often it’s the topical humor of a couple of years ago.
Don’t believe me? I recently read a scene in which approximately 95% of the hilarity was dependent upon the reader’s being able to recall the individual steps of the Macarena.
Well might you avert your eyes. Or roll them, if you happen to be too young to remember (shudder) a major political party’s candidate doing the Macarena on television. (I’d link to the video, but apparently, it’s so embarrassing that it’s been removed from YouTube.)
“Okay, Anne,” you say, trying desperately to believe that because it was so popular at the time, you could not possibly have looked ridiculous doing the Macarena (but knowing in your heart that was not the case), “I take your point. Before I send off a contest entry or manuscript submission, I should cast my eye over it to check for outdated or soon-to-be-outdated cultural references. But now I’m deeply curious: what makes you think that waving an admittedly rather comely line drawing of a 200-year-old author under my nose will help me remember to do that?”
An excellent question, former Macarena-doers. If you are familiar with Jane Austen’s work only through film adaptations, you might not be in the habit of thinking of her as a comedy writer, but for my money, she’s one of the most talented who ever scrawled English prose on a page. Her timing is impeccable — and, remarkably, her humor has not become less amusing with the passage of time.
Her books remain, as the British used to say, as fresh as paint.
Which is interesting, because the first novel she sold, NORTHANGER ABBEY (published posthumously in 1818, even though Aunt Jane had signed a publication contract more than a decade earlier; yet another reason that she should be the patron saint of modern novelists), was in fact very topical in its day. Quite a lot of its humor relies upon the reader’s familiarity with the most popular novels of the day.
Quick: what were the blockbusters of 1803, when she sold the manuscript for ten pounds? Or of 1798, when she evidently began writing it?
Here’s a hint: in the text, she very self-consciously identifies herself in as the literary descendant of one of the great early comic novelists, Fanny Burney. In fact, the title of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813) is a direct homage to Burney, a massively popular author a generation older than Austen. PRIDE and PREJUDICE — in all caps, no less — is are identified in Burney’s CECILIA (1782) as the main villains of the plot:
The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr. Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! And as if he had the power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr. Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember: if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination: for all I could say to Mr. Delvile, either of reasoning or entreaty — and I said all I could suggest, and I suggested all a man need wish to hear — was totally thrown away, till I pointed out to him his own disgrace, in having a daughter-in-law immured in these mean lodgings!…Such, my good young friends, is the MORAL of your calamities.”
I like to bring this up, not only because Burney was a fine comic writer in her own right (EVELINA is, after some rather pompous opening platitudes, arguably the funniest epistolary novel ever written), but also because most of us grew up in English classes that presented female writers as aberrations in an otherwise male-dominated field — or even acted as though Austen were the first worth reading. As a matter of historical fact, there have been prominent female novelists practically since the novel was invented. In the 19th century, it was considered predominantly a women’s art form. Aunt Jane not only grew up reading other women’s writing, but she tells us point-blank that she learned some of her craft from the best.
Which I strongly suspect would come as a surprise to my ninth-grade English teacher, if not yours.
But then, my ninth-grade English teacher was so suggestible that she once caught a cold because she believed that I had placed a hex upon her. Yes, really: she was famous for misplacing her chalk — not infrequently by depositing it upon the shelf just below the blackboard designed for its reception — so her students were forced to endure many, many repetitions of — wait for it — “Who took my chalk?” There are only so many times a humor-minded person can hear a rhetorical question without providing an answer. As I recall, “I used it to stuff a voodoo doll,” was neither my first nor my best riposte, but it was the one that got me sent to the principal’s office.
His response was much funnier: “I know there’s no voodoo doll. Tell her you destroyed it, anyway. Otherwise, she’ll be sneezing for the rest of the year.”
See, that’s a joke that’s likely to age pretty well, at least for the next decade or so: although not all readers (or, brace yourself, all currently-employed Millicents) may remember chalkboards, the voodoo doll and the clueless teacher are likely to be around for a good, long while. If I’d mentioned that I was wearing an English Beat t-shirt at the time, the story would have seemed more dated, wouldn’t it?
While we’re engaging in multi-temporal analysis, why is Austen so much more popular today than Burney, other than those often-humorless film adaptations? Partially, of course, it’s due to the heavy-handed moralizing: hot in the late 1700s, but as dated as last year’s catchphrase today.
Don’t believe me? Do you really want me to force you to shout, “Hey, Macarena!”
Also, Burney’s social satire is very specifically aimed at social problems that no longer trouble English-speaking readers all that much: the trials of an 18th-century maiden raised in retirement, then forced into high society without being aware of its rules, for instance, or the trials of an orphaned heiress in a country where a young woman did not have legal control over her own property would have resonated far more with readers when her books were originally published than now.
Whereas pretty much everyone can identify with an Austen heroine who is in love with someone who doesn’t seem to love her, whilst simultaneously being pursued by someone she can’t stand. Heck, even my ninth-grade English teacher was able to identify with that.
If you want more current evidence of just how badly topical comedy tends to age, look no further than a sketch comedy show like Saturday Night Live or its many imitators. Its satires on current events are seldom amusing even a few months after the show originally airs.
Are you wondering why I am bringing this up within the context of a series on contest entries? For one very simple and seldom-mentioned reason: many contests’ rating forms specifically ask the judge to assess whether the entry is likely to seem dated quickly.
Actually, older agents and editors tend to worry about this, too, out of sheer experience: you don’t have to be in the biz for very long to see how frequently books that appeal to the hip trend of the moment have very short shelf lives. These books become stale all the faster from their perspective, since they know — as we all do now, right? — that a book often takes a year or two to sell to a publisher –and then it’s typically at least another year before that book is available to the public.
So it really isn’t all that unreasonable for a contest judge to want to give higher marks to a book that will still not have readers scratching their heads in a few years, is it? In fact, I think it’s worth stating as an aphorism that what is humor today probably will not be in a decade, and one generation’s humor will not be another’s.
Or, to put it another way: hands up, anyone that still owns a pet rock.
Here’s a radical piece of self-editing advice for would-be comic writers of both fiction and memoir: go through your manuscript and highlight any jokes that you have borrowed from TV, movies, radio shows, other books, or the zeitgeist. Keep a sharp eye out, too, for recycling comic premises from any of the above.
Then go back and examine each in turn: would a reader find it funny five years from now? Or have found it funny five years ago? If not, it probably does not belong in a submission — and it definitely does not belong in a contest entry.
This is especially true of catchphrases or references to characters from movies or sitcoms, which go stale with a rapidity that would make your average loaf of French bread turn pale with dread and contemplate its own mortality. Take a gander, for instance, at these zingers out of context:
From 1968: The devil made me do it!
From 1977: Excu-u-use me!
From 1985: You look mahvelous!
From 2000: I don’t know karate, but I do know cah-razy.
From 2004: Make it work.
Now, most media-following adults in the U.S. probably have some association with at least one of these, right? So much so that I would bet that if you close your eyes and conjure up vivid images of Flip Wilson, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Owen Wilson, and Tim Gunn respectively, saying these lines, these old chestnuts might still elicit the odd chuckle. (Or perhaps some puzzled consideration about why female comedians are so seldom associated with popular catchphrases.)
Go ahead and chuckle your head off, if you are given to atavistic clinging to the popular culture of your past, but please, I implore you, do not make the (unfortunately common) mistake of reusing these kinds of once-popular catchphrases in a contest entry. Leaving aside the ethical problem of these jokes having been written by someone other than you and the fact that such bits seldom funny out of context, including them will almost certainly date your book — and thus potentially cost your entry some serious points.
Yes, even if your book’s target audience is of precisely the right age to harbor fond memories of when those catchphrases were popular. To be absolutely blunt, catchphrases from your heyday will necessarily carry a very different resonance for a judge 20 years older than you are. Or 20 years younger.
Remember, you cannot be sure that the Mehitabel to whom your entry will be assigned will be of the generation you have in mind. People tend to have very strong associations with particular periods in their lives, and for all you know, the reference you choose to use may be the very one most favored in 1978 by your dream agent’s hideously unkind ex, the one who lied in court during the divorce proceedings and hid assets so cleverly that their daughter’s college fund had to be used to pay those unexpected medical bills of Mother’s. Then the car broke down, and all of those checks bounced, and the orthodontist tried to repossess Angelica’s braces…
See what happened? One little pop culture reference, and POW! You’ve lost your judge’s attention entirely.
So even if you are using pop culture references to establish a particular period, do it with care. Be sparing. Even if your teenage son quoted SHANGHAI NOON endlessly for six solid months while the entire family cringed in a Y2K fallout shelter, do be aware that your reader might not have the associations you do with those jokes. There are a myriad of associational possibilities — and almost none of them will make your writing more memorable or seem fresher.
Originality tends to age better than borrowed amusement, anyway. But that’s a topic for tomorrow’s post.
For now, if you aspire to perfecting your comic voice, it might behoove you to take a good, hard look at the careers of Mssrs. Martin, Crystal, and Wilson, all of whom started out as comedy writers, writing material for themselves and others. All became progressively less funny (in my humble opinion, at least) as soon as they started performing comic material written by other people. Ditto for one of the great comedy writers of all time, Mae West; she first came to prominence as a playwright, not a sex symbol.
An accident? I think not. They became less funny because their individual comic voices had gotten lost, replaced by the catchphrases of the moment.
Oh, the people who were writing for them have tried to recapture their quite distinct original voices, but the copy is never as vivid as the original, is it? Why any of them stopped writing their own material is a mystery to me — particularly Mssr. Wilson, who is arguably one of the most talented comedy writers of his (which also happens to be my) generation.
If you doubt this, rent THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, please. Not many writers could have pulled off a graphic suicide attempt scene (evidently written years before later events rendered it sadly ironic, I should add, and penned with a writing partner) in the middle of a genuinely funny comedy about misused potential. It’s brilliant, so much so that it’s kept me interested for years in his writing, wondering how he is going to surprise me next. I suspect that it will still seem pretty brilliant when everyone of my generation is old and gray and full of sleep.
Why? Because it isn’t like anything else. And because, like Aunt Jane’s socially frustrated heroines’ woes, it’s not a situation that’s going to be outdated in a decade. It’s a situation with which people are likely to be able to identify for some time to come.
One of the advantages to using humor in your submissions is to demonstrate the originality of your voice — not Jane Austen’s, not Owen Wilson’s, not Steve Martin’s, and certainly not that anonymous person who originated that joke your best friend from college just forwarded to you.
If your individual voice is not inherently humorous, whatever you do, don’t try to force it to be by importing humor from other sources. Lifting material from elsewhere, even if it is genuinely funny, is not the best means of establishing that YOU are funny — or that yours is a book well worth reading. Or, for our purposes today, deserving of a bright blue ribbon — today, tomorrow, and for the next three hundred years.
Make your Aunt Jane happy: be yourself. And if you want to make me happy — I ask so little — keep up the good work!
Okay, I’ll admit it: the first part of that title is a tad cumbersome. I got tired of typing COUNTDOWN TO A CONTEST, PART {fill in Roman numeral here}. The contest deadline to which I was counting down has passed (how do people feel their entry process went, by the way?), and besides, much of what I’m discussing in this part of the series would apply — stop me if you have heard this before — equally well to refining contest entries and submissions to agencies.
I know, I know. Some day, I’m going to have to come up with more descriptive titles for my posts.
Let’s get back to courting the comic muse. Or, more accurately, to our discussion of how aspiring writers often think they are courting her, without actually winning her favor. Or so we must surmise, from the fact that such a high proportion of attempted humor leaves both Mehitabel, everybody’s favorite fictional veteran contest judge, and her niece Millicent, intrepid screener of manuscripts at a theoretical agency, with distinctly untickled funny bones. Further evidence might be gleaned from the startling frequency with which entries and submissions elicit spontaneous, uninhibited laughter with lines the writer did not think would pass anywhere near those aforementioned funny bones.
Ooh, nicely executed spit take, everybody. “Wha–?” would-be humorists across the English-speaking world cry, their eyes bugging out of their heads like cartoon characters (oh, you thought you were the first writer to use that simile?). “How can something intended to be unfunny provoke that response? I can understand a joke’s falling flat, but I hate the idea that Mehitabel and/or Millicent might be chuckling over my Great American Tragedy.”
Good question, eye-buggers. But didn’t the previous question answer it?
If the previous paragraph did not make you giggle, well, you are either delightfully innocent (and thus might want to avert your eyes from the next paragraph, in order to remain so), not a very detail-oriented reader (as Mehitabel and Millicent invariably are), or, perish the thought, the joke I just made was not very funny. Given the exceptionally high probability that all three are true, allow me to compound the mistake of having cracked not particularly wise by explaining why it should have been funny, as well as illustrative of my ongoing point. To render the narrative error even more representative of what M & M tend to see on the page, allow me to explain my failed joke as pedantically as possible.
You see, the would-be humorists asked how a piece of writing could provoke laughter if its author did think it was funny. I then said it was a good question — something I’m pointing out because I don’t have sufficient faith in the reader to believe s/he can remember what s/he has just read — but then turned that compliment on its head by addressing the imaginary questioners with a double entendre. That, for those of you new to the term, is when the comic value of a phrase arises from its meaning one thing literally, but also being subject to a sexualized interpretation. In this instance, eye-buggers could refer to those whose eyes protrude unusually far between their lashes, but it also — and herein lies the yuck factor — could imply that those same imaginary questioners are in the habit of performing a physically improbable sex act upon eyeballs in general. Get it? Get it? Compounding the humor: the sentence that followed raised the possibility that the phrasing in the previous sentence might have been unintentional — and thus likely to spark unintended laughter at the entry or submission stage. Har de har har har!
Hands up, those of you who thought my bad joke was funnier before I explained it. Keep those hands up if you found yourself wishing by a couple of lines into the subsequent explanation that I’d just accept that the joke hadn’t worked and move on.
Welcome to Mehitabel and Millicent’s world. They’re constantly treated to unfunny, marginally funny, and might-have-been-funny-after-a-couple-of-rewrites humor attempts. They are also, for their sins, frequently forced to read painful attempts to render an unamusing quip funny in retrospect. Over-explanation is one popular means — and, as we have just seen, it seldom works. Equally common:
Or having a character laugh in order to alert the reader that what’s just appeared on the page was intended to be humorous:
As the head bagger stomped away, Herman pictured a large brown bag descending upon him, scooping him up. Now trapped at the bottom, Ambrose would be helpless as a giant hand flung boxes of cereal and canned goods upon him, perhaps topped by a carton of eggs. He laughed at the mental image.
This, I am sorry to tell you, would cause Mehitabel to roll her bloodshot eyes. “Thanks prompting me to laugh,” she snorts, “because I couldn’t possibly have told that you meant this to be funny otherwise. I see you have also helpfully let me in on the secret that pictured referred to a mental image. Otherwise, I might have thought that the narrative had suddenly shifted from gritty slice-of-life fiction into magical realism.”
Let that be a lesson, would-be humorists: if a bit isn’t funny on the page, having a character find it amusing won’t make it more so. Also, as Mehitabel has just so kindly demonstrated for us, since readers cannot hear tone, sarcasm often does not come across well on the page. From which we may derive a subsidiary lesson: just because something generates a laugh when you say it out loud does not mean it will necessarily be similarly guffaw-inducing on the page.
Why did I put that in bold, you ask? Millicent and Mehitabel requested it; they’re tired of reading manuscripts out loud to try to figure out what on earth Herman thought was so darned funny.
Then, too, professional readers as a group tend not to like being told how to react to writing, period. Mehitabel has every right to feel irritated at being told that she should find what she has just read humorous. Self-review tends not to play well on the page, even if it is very subtle.
Oh, you don’t think what Herman’s creator did was self-review? M & M would regard it that way. They would also see the following fruitless authorial effort as reaction-solicitation. Any guesses why?
“The bookstore is closed for the night,” Gemma snapped, gesturing to the CLOSED sign on the door. “What are you two still doing here?”
“Oh, we’re just browsing,” Angelina said airily.
Bonnie laughed. “Yeah, we’re looking for a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit.”
Gemma looked puzzled. “Why would you need to be wearing ski masks for that?”
If you leapt to your feet, crying, “Bonnie’s laughter is intended to order Mehitabel to laugh, too,” you deserve a gold start for the day. It doesn’t render Angelina’s joke any funnier, does it? Since M & M do not, as a rule, enjoy being told how to evaluate the writing in front of them, they would have been more likely to find the quip amusing if it had appeared like so. While we’re at it, let’s excise those other professional reader-irkers, concept redundancy and having a character vaguely point to something in order to let the reader know it’s there.
Gemma fixed the closer one with her flashlight. “The bookstore is closed for the night. What are you two still doing here?”
“Oh, we’re just browsing,” Angelina said airily, smiling through her ski mask.
Bonnie aimed her rifle just to the right of Gemma’s head. “Yeah, we’re looking for a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit.”
“Oh, why didn’t you say so right away?” Gemma felt under the cash register for her favorite throwing knife. “We’re always happy to move some Dickens.”
Better, isn’t it? It’s funnier because the narrative trusts the reader’s intelligence more. As opposed to, say, the ubiquitous practice of just telling the reader point-blank that something is funny:
Barbara flung her banana peel on the ground. Her snarky coworker did not see it, trod upon it, and slipped. It was hilarious.
In case I’m being too subtle here: very, very few contest entries are genuinely funny. Oh, many of them try to be, and some attempts at amusing actually would be chuckle-worthy if spoken out loud, but humor is a capricious mistress. In order to work on the page, how a writer chooses to frame the funny is every bit as important as the joke itself.
Yes, really. You may have written the best one-liner since Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire, but if it’s not set up correctly, it’s going to fall flat. And that, my friends, is going to come as a huge disappointment to a humor-loving Mehitabel or Millicent.
Why, you ask? A funny entry, or even a funny joke in an otherwise serious entry, feels like a gift to your garden-variety professional reader. A deliberately-provoked laugh from a judge can result in the reward of many presentation points, and often additional points in the voice category as well.
Notice that I specified a deliberately-provoked laugh. An unintentional laugh, what moviemakers call a bad laugh because it springs forth from the audience when the filmmakers do not want it to occur, will cost a contest entry points. And it should: a bad laugh can knock the reader right out of the scene.
We’ve all burst into bad laughter at movies, right? My personal favorite cropped up in the most recent remake of LITTLE WOMEN. It’s quite a good trick, too: provoking a bad laugh in a scene that’s not only arguably one of the best-known in children’s literature, as well as one in which the filmmakers remained very faithful to the original text, can’t have been easy.
I’m about to show you the moment in question, but first, let’s take a gander at how Louisa May Alcott presented it to her readers. The March girls have just learned that their father, a chaplain in a Civil War regiment, is dangerously ill. Their mother, not unnaturally, wishes to travel across many states to nurse him back to health, but the trip will be very expensive. Everybody’s favorite little woman, Jo the tomboy, is frantic to help. After having disappeared for most of the day, she returns home with a wad of cash, and her family, equally unnaturally, wants to know whence it came.
…she came walking in with a very queer expression of countenance, for there was a mixture of fun and fear, satisfaction and regret, in it, which puzzled the family as much as did the roll of bills she laid before her mother, saying, with a choke in her voice, “That’s my contribution toward making father comfortable and bringing him home!”
“My dear, where did you get it? Twenty-five dollars! Jo, I hope you haven’t done anything rash?”
“No, it’s mine honestly; I didn’t beg, borrow, or steal it. I earned it, and I don’t think you’ll blame me, for I only sold what was my own.”
As she spoke, Jo took off her bonnet, and a general outcry arose, for all her abundant hair was cut short.
“Your hair! Your beautiful hair!” “Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty.” “My dear girl, there was no need of this.” “She doesn’t look like my Jo any more, but I love her dearly for it!”
As everyone exclaimed, and Beth hugged the cropped head tenderly, Jo assumed an indifferent air, which did not deceive anyone a particle, and said, rumpling up the brown bush, and trying to look as if she liked it, “It doesn’t affect the fate of the nation, so don’t wail, Beth.”
Now, Mehitabel and Millicent might well quibble over whether expression of countenance is redundant (technically, it is) or the unidentified speakers, or the unfortunate choice to demonstrate simultaneous speech by tossing aside the one speaker per dialogue paragraph rule. I also cherish the hope that you are all shaking your heads over Aunt Louisa’s regrettable affection for run-on sentences.
But there’s nothing to provoke a bad laugh here, right? It’s a sweet, evocative YA moment: the teenage heroine can’t stand to feel helpless, so she chooses to make a personal sacrifice in order to help her family. That’s a good plot twist. And if Amy (we assume) telling her that she’s now ugly hurt her feelings — “Your one beauty!” is a remarkably nasty thing to say, but she has a point: Jo’s effectively rendered herself unmarriageable for the next year or two — that’s good relationship development. And if she cries about it later that night, that’s good character development.
Here’s that moment again, as it appeared in the film. Note how the focus of the scene has shifted, doubtless as a reflection of the fact that cutting one’s hair was not nearly as shocking to moviegoers in 1994 as it would have been to readers in 1868. My apologies about the commercial at the beginning; it was the only version I could find.
See the problem? As in most filmed versions of LITTLE WOMEN, the young lady playing Jo — here, the inestimable Winona Ryder — is physically the most attractive of the bunch. Not to fault her portrayal of Jo, but Ms. Ryder arguably possessed at that point in her career the kind of face that artists over the centuries have willingly mortgaged their souls in order to depict with anything that approached tolerable accuracy.
So, predictably enough, at “Your one beauty!” the theatre positively rocked with mirth — and so much so that the next few exchanges were completely inaudible. Thus what was one of the dramatic high points of the book was transformed into an occasion for bad laughter.
And yet, amazingly, the script chose to feature that particular bad laugh TWICE: once as live action, and once as a voice-over flashback. When I saw the film, the second time engendered widespread chuckling, as moviegoers had their own little flashbacks about how completely ridiculous that particular moment had been. Good times were had by all.
Just once, I would like to see a version of LITTLE WOMEN where the casting reflected the book. Jo March was plain (in the novel, Meg was the pretty one); her hair actually was her only point of physical beauty. Her sacrifice in cutting it off in order to sell it, therefore, was significantly greater than if she had been otherwise gorgeous. It also, in my opinion, made it substantially easier to identify with her. Jo’s not a fantasy: she’s a real girl, with real problems.
Which were not merely a reflection of Louisa May Alcott’s real problems, incidentally, as readers (and reviewers) have historically assumed. It’s a surprising misconception, given that she wrote about her own wartime experiences so extensively: Louisa was the one that went off to war, not her father; she served a nurse in a Union hospital.
Oh, and those fantastic stories all of the filmed versions of LITTLE WOMEN (and, to a lesser extent, the text) lead us to believe the author considered bad, harmful writing? Alcott apparently actually preferred them to her children’s writing. She wrote many pretty good romantic thrillers — and, like Jo, she supported her family with them. She even sent her sister May (the prototype for Amy) to art school with the proceeds.
Why, yes, that is a digression, now that you mention it. I just get so sick of the automatic presumption that anything a woman writes must necessarily be autobiographical. In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s later life, people apparently asked her all the time who she knew that had managed to bring a corpse back to life. Because it’s not as though a woman who had lost all but one of her children before the age of 5 could have imagined FRANKENSTEIN, right? It’s not as though she were the daughter of two famous novelists or anything.
But I digress. We were talking about comedy, not tragedy.
The question of how real life translates to the page is not irrelevant to humor, however. It can be genuinely difficult for a writer to tell what does and does not come across as funny on his own printed page, especially if the scene in question bears some relation to the author’s life. So if you write comedy, or even want to ascertain that a single quip in a manuscript you are planning to submit is funny, it’s a serious strategic mistake to have Mehitabel or Millicent be the first human being besides yourself to read it.
I heard that gasp — the Jo March fantasy of writing in secret, then triumphantly announcing to incredulous kith and kin that one is published, is almost as common as semi-autobiographical first novels. (With apologies to Madame Shelley.) But if you are trying to be funny, good feedback — especially the kind of impartial feedback you might get from someone who does not happen to love you — is crucial.
Why especially? Well, what is funny in real life is often not amusing on the page, at least not to someone who was not privy to the actual event. There’s a reason, after all, that “You had to be there, I guess,” is so commonly uttered by anecdotalists the world over: real-life funny often arises from mishaps, actions out of character, or events whose comic juxtapositions would be entirely lost upon a bystander who is not already intimately familiar with the players and their respective situations.
Thus the desirability of soliciting first readers who have not, say, given birth to you, held your hand why you were crying over a break-up, walked down the aisle of any sacred edifice with you while either of you was wearing white…or actually was present for any occasion you depict in a manuscript. Or heard you talk about those events second-hand. They harbor preconceived notions that color their reading. That makes it awfully hard for them to judge either the event or the writing by what’s on the page alone.
By definition, a contest judge (or, for that matter, any professional reader to whom you might hand an excerpt from a larger work) is a bystander with no prior associations with the situation described. That tends to render them both less likely to find writing funny and more likely to succumb to bad laughter.
Which is why, I suspect, so many aspiring writers try to make up for that impartiality by over-selling the humor — or by trying to justify it afterward. But let’s face it, nothing kills a joke faster on paper than the narrative’s scurrying to provide an explanation of why it’s funny after the action or bon mot has already passed under the reader’s eyes. To cite a fairly popular species of this particular misguided effort:
“Why, Monique, you’ve grown so thin!” Antonia exclaimed. “Have you found a monumentally successful new diet, or have you merely been deathly ill?”
It was both an attempt at humor and a sincere question. Yes, people often do lose weight when they suffer from a major illness. But in this time period — although, obviously, not today — people often spoke about weight loss as though it were a magic trick, a secret the successful dieter was sworn never to reveal.
Monique steadied herself on the banister. “Ill, you’ll be delighted to hear.”
Pretty clunky, isn’t it? The subsequent explanation sucks the life out of what could have been a mildly funny speech, had it been left alone. It also brings the energy of the scene — and the tone of the exchange — to a screeching halt for lines on end. Besides, if it were actually crucial to the quip that the reader know the information conveyed in that second paragraph (and I don’t think it is here), wouldn’t the text be far more likely to elicit a spontaneous laugh if the reader knew about it before Antonia said it?
Many, many writers combat this problem by including guffawing onlookers as the sort of laugh track we saw in action at the top of this post: whenever a joke appears in the dialogue, the reader is told that someone nearby laughs in response. Yes, one sees this tactic used in movies and on TV all the time — sitcoms film before live audiences or use laugh tracks for a reason — but it seldom translates well to the page.
I sense some of you still don’t believe me. Take a gander, please, at another ubiquitous type of attempt to engender hilarity.
“Hi, Mac,” the bartender said. “We haven’t seen you for a while.”
Mac flashed a brilliant smile, twirling one of his guns. “I’ve been busy. You know, with the ladies.”
Everyone within earshot burst into delighted laughter, slapping their thighs and jostling one another. One patron even fell off his barstool.
“Oh, Mac,” the can-can girl with the heart of gold purred, sidling up to him, “you’re so funny.”
No, lady, he isn’t — or at least, the writer hasn’t shown him being so. The humor may well lie in his tone, or Mac may have funny teeth, but the reader is left to fill in that blank for herself. Rather than investing the creativity and elbow grease in coming up with something funny for Mac to say, the writer here has indulged in a lazy narrative trick.
To an experienced professional reader, this shortcut detracts from the humor of the scene, rather than adds to it; the bigger the onlookers’ reaction, the less funny it seems. and not merely because the Greek chorus of laughter typically does not make the joke seem funnier. To a judge, agent, or editor who has been around the literary block a few times, the onlooker’s guffaw is a flag that the author has some significant doubts about whether the joke is actually funny.
Yes, really. It’s frequently a marker of discomfort, a peek behind the scenes into the writer’s mind, distracting from the story at hand. And once the reader suspects that the writer isn’t amused, it’s only a small step to the reader’s not being amused, either.
Before anyone asks: no, you cannot construct a joke so funny that it obviates all chance of this reaction. People who laugh at their own jokes — which is how this tactic comes across on the page, right? — are seldom as amusing as people who allow their audience to decide whether what they are saying is funny or not.
You can lead a judge to funny, but you can’t make her laugh. Humor is highly subjective.
That last bit may seem self-evident, but think about it with respect to contest judging: the things that make you (and/or your nearest and dearest) chortle with glee may not be a contest judge’s proverbial cup of tea. Just as it’s never wise to assume that those passing judgment on your writing share your sex, sexual preference, political beliefs, etc., it’s not a good idea to proceed on the assumption that they will share your sense of humor.
Attempting humor is riskier than writers tend to believe. Yes, pulling off a good joke is likely to win you disproportionate points for voice — as I said, a truly amusing narrative voice, or even a stellar one-liner, is awfully welcome toward the end of a long day’s reading ultra-serious prose — but just like Olympic gymnasts or high divers who attempt a super-difficult maneuver, the chances of failure are high.
Those of you that just clutched your stomachs know where I’m going with this, I take it: attempting to be funny and missing the mark will typically cost a manuscript more than being devoid of humor. It’s not an uncommon instant-rejection reason, if Millicent stumbles across it within the first couple of pages of a submission. And if a contest entry tries to be funny and fails — especially if the dead-on-arrival joke is in the exposition, rather than the dialogue — most Mehitabels will fault the voice, dismissing it (sometimes unfairly) as not being fully developed enough to have a sense of its impact upon the reader.
Please take that risk with caution — and run the results past an impartial reader or two to ascertain every single one of those jokes will fly. It usually doesn’t take more than a couple of defunct ducks in a manuscript to move it into the not-for-us pile. If you’re not absolutely positive that it’s funny, it should go, pronto.
While I’m on the subject of purely subjective criteria, I’d like to talk about a little something that I like to call the Ta da! factor. It’s hard to define precisely, it’s when a manuscript exudes the sort of mercurial charisma that Elinor Glyn (author of that Edwardian scandal, the romance THREE WEEKS) dubbed It when it occurs in human beings. (Thus Clara Bow, the It Girl, an Elinor Glyn discovery. She also dug up a minor charmer named Rudolf Valentino.)
As Madame Glyn argued, we may not be able to define what It is, but many of us seem to drool over those who have It, when we encounter them in real life. But just telling a reader that is not going to make anyone drool.
Like It, the Ta da! factor makes a manuscript shine, practically demanding that the judge give the entry high marks. In fact — although you are not hearing this from me — a healthy dose of the Ta da! factor might even prompt a judge to fudge a little in the other categories, so as to assure the entry a point total that will launch it into the finalist round.
To achieve the Ta da! factor — well, if I could tell you that, I would chuck the blogging business entirely and establish myself as the world’s most expensive writing guru, wouldn’t I? I do know that mere professionalism is not enough. Yes, all of the technical aspects of the work need to be right, as well as the execution. The writing style needs to be strong and distinct, and it helps a lot if the story is compelling.
Beyond that, it’s a little hard to say how precisely the Ta da! factor gives a manuscript its sheen, just as it’s difficult to pin down just what makes a great first line of a book so great. Perhaps it’s rhythm, and a certain facility for telling detail.
But most of us who love literature know it when we see it, don’t we? Here’s a definite example of the Ta da! factor in action:
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and four chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train.
That’s the opening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Truman Capote’s masterpiece — which, speaking of odd casting, somebody really ought to make into a movie someday; the Audrey Hepburn version bears only a passing resemblance to it. (The original novella concerns a friendship between a straight woman and gay man in their late teens; the movie is about a love story between a straight man and a woman in, if you look at George Peppard charitably, their late thirties. Oh, and the endings are quite different.)
But just look at the use of language here. You could sing this opening; it’s positively bursting with the Ta da! factor.
Perhaps, too, a certain sense of showmanship is required. Bask in this one:
He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. There was no tallying the gifts of Charvet handkerchiefs, art moderne ash-trays, monogrammed dressing-gowns, gold key-chains, and cigarette-cases of thin wood, inlaid with views of Parisian comfort stations, that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for with the money of unwitting husbands, which is acceptable any place in the world.
That, my friends, is the opening to Dorothy Parker’s short story DUSK BEFORE FIREWORKS — and let me tell you, if a short story like that fell onto my desk as a contest judge, I would not only shower it with the highest possible marks (yes, even though I do not agree with all of Ms. Parker’s punctuation choices in this excerpt); I would nag the category chair unmercifully about pushing it into the finalist round.
Not only that: I would go to the awards ceremony, cheer if it won, and make a point of meeting the author. I might even introduce the author to my agent. Because, my friends, it exudes the aura of the Ta da! factor as distinctly as a bowl of excellent clam chowder exudes aroma.
I mention this, not to cow you with examples of writing by extremely talented writers, but to fill you with hope, in the midst of this long discourse on all the technical ways you can gain or lose points in the contest judging process. Ultimately, talent does supersede almost every other consideration, as long as the work is professionally presented.
This is not to say that you should not go to great lengths to avoid making the point-costing mistakes I have pointed out over the course of this series — you should, because genuinely talented writers’ work is knocked out of competition (and into agents’ rejection piles) all the time for technical reasons.
When talent is properly presented, though, the results are magical.
“One of the miracles of talent,” Mme. de Sta?l tells us, “is the ability to knock your readers out of their own egoism.” (Another favorite writer of mine; every woman who writes should read her brilliant novel CORINNE at some point. She wrote it in 1807, but apart from the travelogue sections, it’s still fresh as piping-hot cinnamon rolls today.) The Ta da! factor does just that, grabs the reader’s attention and simply insists upon this book’s being read, right now.
Under the sway of all of the publishing fads continually buffeting us, it’s all too easy for writers to forget what power really good writing has. Publishing fads, like fashions in beauty, come and go. Talent doesn’t.
Just as so many of the actors held up as exemplars of beauty now would not have been considered especially attractive in, say, the Italian Renaissance, or even a hundred years ago, I believe that many of the books published today will not be considered essential reading a hundred years from now. But the work of some authors — Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Mme. de Sta?l, to name just a few — has something about it that elevates it above the passing fad, just as there are some actors who, it is perfectly obvious to us all, would have been considered absolutely lovely in any period of human history.
“Oh, Jo! Your one beauty!” notwithstanding.
See how right I was earlier in this post? If I hadn’t set that up, it would have fallen completely flat. Indeed, to a reader who had not read the first half of this post, the last paragraph would merely have been confusing.
The lengths to which I will go to make a point, eh?
I was serious about the Ta da! factor, though. Keep your chins up, my friends, through all the hard work of perfecting your manuscripts and contest entries; you’re toiling in a noble vineyard. Real talent is not, after all, necessarily measured in the short term.
Just ask Aunt Louisa; she’d been writing — yes, and publishing across a broad array of genres — for years before she hit the big time. Keep up the good work!
Sorry that I have not posted for a few days — earlier this week, I was saddened, as so many readers were, to hear of the death of the great Ray Bradbury. I’ve been listening for days to folks praise his novels, deservedly so, and his television work, which was — well, in respect to his memory, I’ll just say that it was less consistent. Yet strain my ears as I might, I’ve heard barely any retrospective celebration of what is arguably one of the best American short story collections ever gathered between covers, I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC.
Perhaps I am prejudiced: this collection contains one of my all-time favorite short stories in the English language, a little charmer called Tomorrow’s Child. The premise, introduced by Mr. B. himself above, is unparalleled, or perhaps I should say intriguingly paralleled: ordinary parents produce a child normal for a different dimension. Metaphorically, I think it’s one of the most sensitive, nuanced depictions of the problems of love, societal expectations, and fitting in ever written.
Not that your garden-variety writer would have any life experience with those types of problems. Nothing trajects a person more decidedly toward a literary adulthood than a perfectly happy childhood and stunningly untroubled adolescent, right?
Those of you who have even the faintest interest in how fantasy narratives can be handled, should run, not walk, to plunge into that lovely story. And while I’m shooing you toward Mr. B’s writing and we all have childhood on the brain, if you know a young person that you suspect might want to grow up to be a writer, or just want to clap your eyes on a darned fine example of evocative showing, not telling, you might want to pause in your headlong scurrying to pick up a copy of THE HALLOWEEN TREE.
Was that far-away moan of wind a group of slightly tardy banshees mourning the gentleman’s passing, or are some of you surprised that my brief eulogy did not sound precisely like the literally thousands of virtually identical tributes that have been floating around the airwaves over the past few days? “But Anne,” those glued to electronic devices point out, “you’re digressing. Furthermore, you’re breaking the rules. In order to fit in with this officially-designated period of public mourning, you’re supposed to be talking about FAHRENHEIT 451. Everyone else is.”
Why, yes, they are. Practically to the exclusion of anything else. Am I alone in feeling that is not necessarily the most meaningful way to remember the rich, diverse career of an incredibly prolific author?
Yes, yes, I know: those of us devoted to science fiction and fantasy are supposed to be falling all over ourselves with gratitude that a practitioner of a once-reviled (and still often looked down upon in high literary circles) genre is receiving any public recognition at all, but honestly, the man was a pioneer in two of ‘em. Doesn’t he deserve recognition for more than just one or two of his works?
Or is the other horrifying possibility coming to pass? Is it me, or do 97% of the people talking about him on the airwaves seem to be completely unaware that he wrote both science fiction and fantasy? Or, indeed, that there’s any distinction between the two? And if television news types do not make that fairly fundamental distinction, what other important distinctions are they not making?
What hellish new world is this? Does gravity even operate here?
And a forest of hands sprouts in the ether, bringing my tirade on respecting our literary elders to a screeching halt. “Um, Anne?” a few of you offer timidly. “I’ve been referring to my manuscript Science Fiction/Fantasy in casual conversation for years, because that’s how the bookshelf that holds similar books is labeled in my local bookstore. Yet your satirical scorn in the previous paragraph leads me to suspect that my old nemesis, Millicent the agency screener, might think I have conflated a couple of well-established book categories.”
Don’t feel bad if you fell into this particular trap — Millicent does in fact see it all the time. And for good reason: the distinction between the two is often as nebulously-defined as literary fiction; ask any six agents that handle that kind of books, and you’ll hear at least six different definitions. Perhaps seven or eight.
So I like to fall back on the classic definitions: science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable. Oh, and while I’m at it, literary fiction is closely-observed, character-driven storytelling via unusual or experimental narrative devices, assuming a well-read (and generally college-educated) audience.
Well, that solves three of the great cosmic mysteries. I guess my work is done for the day. Before I go, and so I won’t leave you hanging, here is the second part of that oddly-cast Ray Bradbury Theatre production of Tomorrow’s Child.
Just kidding; I know that some of you would like a bit more clarification of those categories. Traditionally, science fiction contains strong technological elements — thus the name — but not all science fiction presupposes advances in gadgets. Quite a lot of science fiction involves exploration of the improbable in the natural world: The world doesn’t actually work like that, but what if it did? Take the classics by H.G. Wells or Jules Verne: by making the improbable (time travel, a foodstuff that creates giant creatures, a journey to the center of the earth, etc.) possible, they were able to take those incredible premises and write about their implications in a largely realistic manner.
In a fantasy, however, the premise can, and often does, involve something that couldn’t possibly happen in the world as we know it, so there’s no need to adhere to the rules of the normal universe. The aforementioned parents finding themselves cuddling a blue pyramid, for instance. A child’s noticing that something remarkably similar to the man paying the bills in his household growing in a vat in the garage. Dorothy and Toto’s being swept up by a tornado and whisked off to Oz. A vampire and a werewolf compete for a mortal teen’s affections.
Oh, come on: you think vampires in the real world sparkle? Where’s your notion of probability?
I see half of you rolling your eyes at the very notion of having to commit to a book category, but just think about how reductive most of the eulogies we’ve been hearing about Mr. Bradbury have been: science fiction writer, period.
Perhaps, if we’re lucky, accompanied by a passing reference to his having written a few Twilight Zone episodes. That’s far more limited than a Millicent working at an SF/fantasy-representing agency would have been in describing his writing.
Let’s face an unpleasant fact that I think most writers would change if our world were occupying a fantasy: we live in a reductive-minded period of history. One of the perennial annoyances of literacy lies in just how often one has to hear people clearly unfamiliar with one’s favorite authors’ work rhapsodize about them after they have died — and in how frequently one has that sinking feeling that the writing is being devalued in the process. As fond as anyone who might actually have read FAHRENHEIT 451 might be of it, it’s hard not to become slightly less so after the third or fourth newscaster mangles the plot. Or after the fifteenth or sixteenth celebrity gushes about it as though it were the only thing Ray Bradbury ever wrote.
Oh, I’m pretty sure I can tell you why we’ve been hearing about such a narrow swathe of his work: even though the man was no chicken, not everyone seemed to have a eulogy ready to hand. The television (and a surprising amount of the web) response seemed to be entirely informed by a quick trip to IMBb, rather than, say, his website. Or, if the would-be eulogizers did visit his website, they don’t seem to have read beyond the first three novels listed in his bio (FAHRENHEIT 451, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN).
Don’t get me wrong: all of these are fine pieces of writing. I would be the last person on earth to dissuade a reader from falling into a story after having been grabbed like this:
“Hey, the Illustrated Man!”
A calliope screamed, and Mr. William Philippus Phelps stood, arms folded, high on the summer-night platform, a crowd unto himself.
He was an entire civilization.
Now, I’m no fan of opening a narrative with a quote from an unidentified speaker (neither are most Millicents, incidentally), but that’s some lovely writing. But we haven’t been hearing Mr. B’s fiction quoted very much over the last few days, have we?
That’s the problem with telling about a writer’s talents, rather than showcasing his work: it’s not an adequate substitute. And in this case, I have to say that I also find it just a little snobbish. Short stories are writing, too — so isn’t it a trifle odd that the public mourning for one of the finest short story writers this country has ever produced should have included so few references to his short stories?
It seems a trifle, well, ungrateful, literarily speaking. (Especially since Morrow brought out such an excellent collection of a hundred of them a few years back. Which anyone interested in how to put a short story together might conceivably want to flip through. I’m just saying.)
A sense of continuity would be more fitting. So would a sense of history.
To be fair, though, my feeling that Ray Bradbury was insufficiently appreciated does predate his death by a couple of decades. Now that perfectly respectable adults read science fiction and fantasy as openly and shamelessly as folks read literary fiction in public, it’s hard to remember just how difficult it was for the science fiction and fantasy authors of Bradbury’s generation to get their writing taken seriously as writing. The prevailing wisdom used to be that only adolescent boys habitually read either — and that they would grow out of the taste.
Talk about fantasy, eh? Yet it had a very tangible real-world effect: for many years, newspapers and magazines seldom reviewed adult science fiction or fantasy novels at all.
That meant, among other things, that until fairly recently, science fiction and fantasy writers seldom had the luxury of assuming, as their more literarily-acceptable brethren and sistern did, that their publishing houses and book reviewers would do all of the necessary work of alerting potential readers about their books. They started going to conventions long before even writers in other genres did; they would travel far and wide to meet their readers. And, like Bradbury, they tended to have to do a heck of a lot of writing in order to make a living at it.
Okay, so that last bit hasn’t changed all that much.
All of which might perhaps explain something that should not have happened in a well-organized world: in the mid-1990s, I was walking between stores on the second floor of a large mall in a North American city that shall remain nameless when I spotted Mr. Bradbury sitting all by himself in front of a chain bookstore on the lower floor. Just waiting behind a card table and a large stack of books, ready to sign one for anyone that wanted it, without so much as an index card Scotch-taped to the front of the table to let people know who he was. No one seemed to notice him.
Seems almost unimaginable, doesn’t it, given how the media’s been talking about him for the last few days? Naturally, I trotted down to the bookstore to say hello and give him my mother’s regards; after some prompting and the purchase of several books, a store employee scared up a chair for me. And in the almost two hours we sat there, not a single passerby stopped to buy a book. Heck, no one even paused to shake his hand. And no one, but no one, dropped by to say, as we’ve been hearing the media say all week, “Hey, Mr. B., thanks for FAHRENHEIT 451. It changed my conception of (fill in the reader’s personal mental revolution here).”
Tell me, do you think one of the nation’s most beloved author’s being ignored like that is a better example of the improbable made possible, or the impossible made probable?
So can you really blame me if, each time I heard one of those doubtless heartfelt praises of FAHRENHEIT 451 or THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, and of them alone, I found myself recalling that Thomas Seward poem: “Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead/Through which the living Homer begged his bread”? Or if, the next time I heard an author complain about the necessity of promoting her book, I treated to her a quite possibly over-the-top diatribe about how she should be proud to participate in a long-standing genre tradition?
Aren’t you glad that I held off from posting?
I’m eager to get back to the business at hand now, however — which was, if you can recall as far back as a couple of weeks ago, an ongoing, in-depth discussion of what does and does not tend to work in a literary contest entry. Not too many of you have been commenting upon this series, I have noticed; hard to know whether that’s due to relatively few of you planning to enter a writing contest anytime soon or to the undeniable fact that smartphones and iPads have transformed many formerly-commenting blog readers into non-interacting column-perusers.
Speaking of how times have and have not changed. I honestly do like to hear from my readers.
Because so much of what tends to trip up the average contest entry can also annoy Millicent the agency screener, I shall be pressing ahead with this series for the nonce. To render it more broadly useful, however, I shall veer away from that subject dear to Mehitabel the veteran contest judge’s heart — how to avoid technical violations that might get your entry disqualified — and steer us into the murkier waters of ways in which writing often loses points for larger reasons.
That’s right, people: we’re going to be talking about style.
And the masses shout for joy. I can’t say as I blame you: before we paused for our recent Series Series of guest blogs, I had been urging those of you who like to enter contests to run through your entries with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, searching not only for spelling, grammar, and formatting errors, but tiny rule violations as well. Somewhere in the ether, writers’ subconsciouses were wailing, “But I thought the point of a literary contest was to judge the quality of the writing, not how well I could follow directions or if I know how to format a manuscript correctly.”
I sympathize with that cri de coeur. Truly, I do. But it is my sad duty to remind potential contest entrants — and potential submitters to agencies and publishing houses, while I’m at it — that to a professional reader’s eyes, incorrect formatting, odd typefaces, and other unexpected manuscript peculiarities are darned distracting. Reading past them is sort of like trying to enjoy a ballet while a drill team performs maneuvers with large flags in the orchestra pit.
To continue our running theme: while it is possible for a determined Mehitabel or Millicent to concentrate upon the artistic values of the performance, it’s not particularly probable, even with the best will in the world. Revising your good writing to minimize those distractions is essentially showing that drill team the door, so the ballet may proceed undisturbed. (And so the orchestra will have somewhere to sit.)
Yes, it’s a rather unpleasant process, especially on a tight deadline — but hey, welcome to the life of a professional writer. We’re constantly having to revise our work on deadlines. It’s grumpy-making. And at the risk of depressing you, for most authors, that grumpiness never really goes away.
Don’t believe me? If you want proof, try having a civil discussion about grammar with an author who is proofing his galleys. Caged tigers ten minutes before feeding time are friendlier.
So I like to think of pre-contest (and pre-submission) revision as the farm team games for the major leagues of writing. No one hits fifteen home runs in a row the first time she picks up a baseball bat, right? The pros put in a heck of a lot of batting practice before they get good at it.
In that spirit, I have an observation– and what I’m about to say next may startle some of you, so go ahead and grab onto the nearest heavy object, to brace yourself: the less a writer enjoys revision, the more important the pre-entry once-over is.
And not merely for the sake of the entry — although, since virtually no writer’s first draft is so polished that it couldn’t use a spot of revision, it is a genuinely good idea to make a sweep for common problems, over and above a standard spell-check. The ability to look at one’s own work critically is a vital skill for a professional writer.
Why? Because even if the Archangel Gabriel himself dropped a perfectly-formatted manuscript by Shakespeare, proofread by Mme. de Sta?l, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen, and Confucius, and with ready-made jacket blurbs from Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and Sophocles onto the desk of the most literature-hungry agent in the land, I guarantee you that the agent will ask for at least one revision.
And that’s before the editor gets her hands on it. Or anyone even begins to consider the problems of attracting one’s admiring public to a book signing.
This comes as a shock to most writers who have just landed an agent or sold a first book — but their reaction is a minor tremor compared to the major earthquake that writers who have not learned to read their work critically experience. Writers who have never gained the skill of accepting feedback as part of the job of writing, rather than a personal attack, tend not only to be knocked off their feet by their first encounters with professional feedback, but to feel as if a tidal wave hit them as well.
This sight always makes me feel just a bit sad, partially because there’s so little sympathy in the industry for this particular stripe of culture shock. As I’ve mentioned many times before, professional readers don’t typically pull their punches: if they’re critiquing your work, it’s because they think you have talent; if you didn’t, they would not take the time. So learning to take critique gracefully, as well as rejection, is a valued skill in a writer.
If you’d like to know just how strongly your garden-variety agent prefers writers capable of self-revision after feedback to ones that have meltdowns about it, drop in at that bar that’s never more than a hundred yards from the registration desk at any given conference, wait until the third round is in hand, and ask the nearest agent to tell you her favorite client horror story. 99.9% of the time, that story will involve an author whose response to feedback was negative.
Brace yourself, though, for every other agent and editor in the bar to have a story like this to tell. You may be in for a long night.
I can feel some of you shifting uncomfortably in your chairs. “Um, Anne?” I hear a few voices murmur, “I thought we were going to be moving on to style. Have you merely digressed, or are you telling us all of this just to pass along general information about working in the biz? Or — and I have a feeling this is what you’re doing — are you trying to brace us for the shock of the next set of standards you’d like us to apply to our entries before sending them out?”
Set your minds at ease, my darlings: I’ve been doing both. I’m about to encourage you to add another valuable wrench to your writer’s tool bag. The next common contest entry problem is going to require you to muster all of your concentration to weed out, but believe me, once you learn to spot it, you’ll wonder how you ever self-edited before.
I’m referring, of course, to skipping logical steps in arguments or plots, assuming that the reader will simply fill in the gaps for herself. This pervasive problem affects both coherence and continuity — and can consequently cost an entry a ton of points.
One really does have to see this phenomenon in action to understand why. I can do no better than to refer my faithful readers to Nietzsche’s THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA as an illustration. (Take that, literary snobs that don’t believe well-educated people read science fiction or fantasy.) Try following this little gem from Part II. I dare you:
Behold, this is the hole of the tarantula. So you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web; touch it, hat it tremble!
There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sits black on your back; and I also know what sits in your soul. Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge.
Thus I speak to you in a parable — you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word justice. For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.
Hands up, anyone who didn’t say, “Huh?” at least once while reading that.
That’s not the only confusing passage in the book, either. Following the narrative of Nietzsche’s book is like watching a mountain goat leap from crag to crag on a blasted mountainside; the goat may be able to get from one promontory to another with no trouble, but those of us tagging behind actually have to walk up and down the intervening gullies. The connective logic between one point and the next is frequently far from clear, or even downright wacko — and in a book that proposes that the writer and reader both might be logically superior to other people, that’s a serious coherence problem.
Would you believe that this type of argumentation actually isn’t all that uncommon in contest entries? Particularly in nonfiction entries on political or social topics — where, as in this case, the author can make the fatal mistake of assuming that Mehitabel will share his political and/or social beliefs. Even a judge who didn’t feel that the metaphor was forced and tautological (Nietzsche likes neither tarantulas nor egalitarians, so they must perforce be similar enough to have the same motivations?) might well dismiss the argument as prejudiced (he’s presuming that tarantulas are all mean, whereas I have known some very sweet ones not at all inclined to bite philosophers).
What would most likely get a contest judge to run screaming from this passage, though, is not the overworked metaphor, but the skipped logical steps. Let’s take a look at why this phenomenon is so disturbing in print. An argument with a logical leap in it appears from the reader’s perspective to run rather like this:
1. Socrates was a man.
2. Socrates was wise.
3. Therefore, men who want to be wise should not wear socks.
Clearly, there is some plank of the argument missing here. In order to prove Proposition 3, the writer would first have to show that
(a) Socrates did not wear socks (I have no idea if this is true; the statue above is no help on the subject. But hey, Greece is a warm country, so it’s entirely possible he didn’t.)
(b) non-sock wearing had some tangible and demonstrable effect upon his mental processes that cannot be explained by other contributing factors, such as years of study or having a yen for conversation with smart people, and
(c) the bare ankle experiment’s success was not dependent upon some exogenous variable, such as the fact that socks would have looked really stupid worn with a toga.
It would make sense, too, to establish that Socrates is a proper role model for modern men to emulate, as opposed to scruffy old sock-wearing moral thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps the book could even include a compare-and-contrast of the intellectual achievements of famous sock-wearing individuals versus those of the air-blessed ankles. By the end of such a well-argued disquisition, the reader might well become converted to the author’s premise, and cast his footwear from him forever with a cry of grateful liberation.
And half of you are once again rolling your eyes. “Talk about the improbable made possible!” you hoot. “This could not possibly be common in contest entries or submissions to agencies!”
You obviously have never been a judge in a literary contest. (Or advised an undergraduate thesis in political philosophy, for that matter. I could tell you tales.)
Admittedly, Nietzsche allegedly wrote his book in a three-day frenzy while confined to an insane asylum due to a — avert your eyes, children — particularly virulent case of syphilis, so perhaps it is not fair to expect world-class coherence from him. The average literary contest entrant, however, does not have so good an excuse, and should not expect the judges to cut him any slack in the logic department.
If Millicent ever has the opportunity to write connective logic??? in one of your margins, your presentation score is sunk. Ditto if your pages are lurking under Millicent’s pen.
So I must advise: make sure you’re filling in the relevant gullies. Read over your entry for coherence.
Should I be concerned about those of you that have sunk to the floor, moaning? “I could take the discussion of death,” the overpowered gasp, “as well as the sober contemplation of just how little support living authors, even famous ones, often receive for their literary efforts. I even kept my chin from trembling while you were telling me it was my responsibility as a serious writer to get used to submitting my work for unblinking critique. But now you’re telling me that I might not even be able to tell without re-reading my work if my narration is coherent? I feel myself slipping into a stupor.”
Oh, dear. What can I do to cheer you up?
Oh, I know: Nietzsche did one thing in THUS SPAKE ZARTHUSTRA that might help him win back style points from Mehitabel — include genuinely funny lines. It’s actually quite an amusing book, coherence problems aside, and not only because of them.
On the remote chance that I’m being too subtle here: very, very few contest entries are genuinely funny — and you wouldn’t believe how much even a single good laugh from an entry will improve the average Millicent’s opinion of it. I’ve seen it add enough points to raise a borderline entry into the finalist round, in fact.
I’m not talking about just fleeting smile funny, mind you, but stop reading long enough to laugh aloud funny. But that’s a subject for another day. For now, I leave you to ponder the joys and benefits of logical coherence. For practice, perhaps you might like to examine how I brought this little essay through short, comprehensible consecutive steps from a discussion of writerly hypersensitivity to a contemplation of comedy.
Hey, I’m a professional; it took years of practice to perfect that trick.
It also, in case you had been wondering, took me years of contest judging and manuscript editing to appreciate Millicent’s frustration with the ubiquity of the borrowed-from-short-stories plotting practice of not leaving the reader with a well-defined, dramatically-satisfying ending. Not sure why? Well, let me ask those of you that watched the first two parts of Tomorrow’s Child: didn’t you want to know how it ended?
So will both Millicent and Mehitabel. It’s a natural human urge to want to see a storyline dramatically resolved. So here you go.
Thank you for everything, Mr. B; you will be missed. Far off in the literary heavens, I know you will be keeping up the good work.
And no, you didn’t misread the blurb on the cover: it’s that Elton John. The little bird that flies around telling people things told me that he liked the original release of Joel’s memoir so much that he volunteered to blurb the second edition.
If you prefer not to receive your news from passing waterfowl, you can read a fuller account of this remarkable publication story in Joel’s earlier guest post on book promotion. While we’re on the subject of guest posts, Joel also charmed the Author! Author! community with an exceedingly useful guest post on obtaining permission to use song lyrics in your books, should any of you be contemplating setting foot on that particular Yellow Brick Road. (Or were you under the impression that memoirs and novels could quote songs willy-nilly? Au contraire, mon fr?re.)
Mssr. John was not the only one to fall in love with Joel’s deeply human, devastatingly honest, and often howlingly funny voice. I already knew how amusing and insightful Joel was before the book came out, yet as the neighbors that did not move away instantly at the sight can attest, certain sections of this book made me rush into the street, tap-dancing with glee. Sparklers may or may not have been involved.
Was I that hard up at the time for some humorous memoir? you ask, bemused. No, thank you, I write, read, and edit funny memoir all the time. What separated Joel’s first book from, well, everything else was not merely how consistently diverting it was — not an easy trick, with a life fully and well lived — but how unblinkingly truthful it was.
Yes, those of you rolling your eyes? “Oh, come on, Anne,” the memoir-jaded snort. “The whole point of memoir is that it’s true, isn’t it?”
Ah, but there’s true in the sense of having actually occurred — and true that sends shivers through your membranes because it shows you life in a way you had not seen it on a page before. There’s true that reads plausibly — and true that makes the reader gasp, “Wow, my therapist does not know me as well as I now know this memoirist.” And, as any memoir editor worth her salt and/or pepper could tell you, there’s true that’s well-written — and there’s true that’s so prettily phrased that one’s socks, shoes, and pinky rings get blown off.
Or, at the very least, that causes one to go running out into the street, looking for an innocent bystander to whom to read a particularly striking passage. (My neighborhood used to be so quiet before I met Joel.)
I’m certainly not the only professional reader that felt this way when his bombshell of a first memoir came out, incidentally. Some other bon mots from those that know about such things:
In a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit . . . [Derfner is] the next No?l Coward.?Out.com
“Searing.” — Washington Blade
“Derfner’s writing is perfect. . . . He’s your best friend. He’s your brother. He is you.” — EDGE Los Angeles
“Sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, always clever, and unpredictable.” — Philadelphia Gay News
What’s that you say? You’d like me to stop telling you the man can write and let him get on with showing you same? Reasonable enough. Let’s start with the publisher’s blurb for Swish:
Joel Derfner is gayer than you.
Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him — he’ll tell you himself).
In Swish, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to meet men — many, many men — or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones–but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets–is a hero destined for legend.
Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers–gay, straight, and in between.
Here again, we smack head-first into that bugbear of memoirists everywhere, the distinction between true and true. All of these statements are factually accurate about the book, but what struck me most about Joel’s memoir, what set my membranes humming, my feet tap-dancing, and my neighbors scurrying into the street to see why I was shouting is not mentioned in this blurb.
What’s missing, in my view? The fact — oh, okay, my opinion — that this is one of the best memoirs ever written on how darned hard it is to be a smart, sensitive human being in a world that habitually rewards neither.
And that, my friends, is what has made this book among the most tattered on my memoir shelf. Occasionally, life will throw a meandering curveball that knocks one of Joel’s beautifully-phrased insights out of my at this point stuffed-to-bursting memory vaults, sending me rushing right back to the text.
Oh, and in the spirit of this series, I should add: the guy’s paid his dues as a writer, and then some. He’s done it with wit, humor, and perseverance in the face of some pretty long odds. All of which has not only garnered my completely ungrudging respect (and you of all people know how high my threshold for grudge-free respect is), but a feeling that somewhere up there in the Muses’ palace, the Ladies in Charge have already reserved some serious shelf space for Joel’s subsequent literary achievements.
Ah, but there’s the rub, isn’t it? After a debut memoir like that, what precisely does one do for an encore?
I asked Joel that question, and rather than fleeing with the flailing arms and piercing screams such a seemingly flippant but subversively difficult question deserves, he gave it the alternately serious and humorous literary attention that has caused me to come to think of him as the memoirist little brother the Muses should have seen to it that I had. (With all requisite apologies to the nonfiction author big brother with whom they actually provided me — oh, you thought my parents would have put up with offspring that didn’t write?)
Here, then, is his response, and I have to say, I wish I had read it before I first sat down to write a memoir. In my checkered experience, it’s not only true — it’s true. Take it away, Joel!
Wait, that wasn’t Joel. Although, come to think of it, I’ve never seen him and Judy Garland in a room together. I’ve never seen Superman and Joel in a room together either, though, so…hey, wait a minute…
Here, then, is Joel as his usual charming self — and his usual wise self vis-?-vis the difficult path of the memoirists. Five, six, seven, eight!
I’m about to sign a contract for the publication of my second real book, whose working title is Lawfully Wedded Husband: How I Tried to Destroy America With my Gay Marriage.
When my last book, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, came out, many reviewers praised its combination of funny and wistful. It “bounce[d] back and forth,”? wrote one, “from tender and touching and deeply sad to wildly funny, sometimes in the space of a paragraph, or even a single sentence.”?
Yes! I thought when I read this. It’s a good thing this reviewer has a distinctive name, because now I can look him up online and stalk him and make him fall in love with me and then we can be happy together for the rest of our lives.
Part of what had allowed me so to bounce back and forth in Swish was that I was incredibly, incredibly depressed. I hadn’t been quite on the verge of suicide while writing the book, but I had certainly been within spitting distance, and I’d found it easy somehow to reach inside, touch a raw, exposed nerve, and twist it until something funny came out and I started crying.
I began Swish in 2005, and it was published in 2008. At some point in 2009, my agent said to me, “Joel, I need another book from you.” (I realize this sounds incredibly glamorous, but really I’d just begged her for a meeting because all I’d been able to afford for months was Taco Bell and I was hoping she would at least take me to TGIFridays or something.) (She didn’t.) So I said, “Okay, no problem, I’ll start working on another book.” My boyfriend had just proposed to me, and the issue of marriage equality seemed topical enough to be worth writing about, so I went home, turned my computer on, and started typing.
After an hour or so, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t interesting at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought a couple candy bars, came back, ate them both, and started over again.
A couple hours later, I looked at what I’d written, realized it wasn’t true at all, deleted it, went to the bodega on the corner, bought five candy bars, came back, ate them all, and spent the rest of the evening staring morosely at the television, because I had a very serious problem:
I was no longer unhappy enough.
In the years between 2005 and 2009, I had made a great many positive changes in my life, including but not limited to getting a therapist, going on massive doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and moving in with my boyfriend, and all those nerves that had been so raw and exposed before now had a modicum of protective covering. My two-candy-bar attempt had been uninteresting because I hadn’t been twisting any nerves; my five-candy-bar attempt had been dishonest because I was only pretending to twist nerves that weren’t in fact twistable, at least not in the way to which I was accustomed in writing.
My muse had disappeared.
Please don’t think for a second that I’m saying you have to be unhappy to write well. It wasn’t my writing that had suffered, you see; it was my subject matter.
I came quickly to think of this as the Tolstoy problem. Even if you haven’t read Anna Karenina you’re probably familiar with its famous opening sentence, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”?
It was easy to write with deep sadness and wild humor when that was all I had, and I had them in my own way, and could convey them with idiosyncratic verve.
But what was I going to write now? “I cooked my boyfriend dinner. It was yummy. Then we watched Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and went to sleep. I love him.” Who would want to read that for even a page, much less an entire book? I certainly wouldn’t.
But if I faked it–”I cooked spaghetti for my boyfriend and accidentally used only one clove of garlic instead of two in the spaghetti sauce and he didn’t say anything about it so now I’m lying awake staring at my ceiling trying to figure out whether he didn’t notice or he noticed but didn’t want to say anything about it because it was the last straw and he’s going to break up with me tomorrow” — well, that could work for a paragraph or two, maybe even a few pages, but it wasn’t true, and I knew there was no way I could sustain it for an entire book.
So what was I going to do?
This question paralyzed me for about a year. Occasionally I would sit down and start writing something, trying to be both interesting and honest, fail, and then stop thinking about it for another month or two, because not thinking about it allowed me to avoid discovering I could no longer write.
The problem was that not thinking about it was great as a strategy to avoid discovering I could no longer write, but as a strategy to write it left something to be desired. If the only way to avoid confronting my inability to write was refusing to write, then the whole thing sort of turned in on itself until everything collapsed and at some point the bodega was going to run out of candy bars.
So I figured, okay, why don’t I ease into this by writing about the issue itself first, not about my own experiences? If you’re quoting legal statutes you can hardly be expected to be wildly funny and deeply sad.
So I started with a sort of analytical/philosophical/whateverical chapter, and went from there. And as I wrote, I tried to find ways to touch and twist indirectly those nerves to which I no longer had easy access.
I think I’ve succeeded, to some degree. I think that when this book is at its best I’m able to explore things about feeling alone even in a relationship, about what a relationship can’t give you, about the difference between expectation and reality.
I’m sorry not to have a better or clearer way to talk about how I was about to get started again or what those indirect ways are. I think it’s because I’m still in the middle of the story–the story of me writing this book, I mean, not the story the book is telling–and I don’t have the perspective I need to understand what I’m doing differently.
I’m still very afraid that this book isn’t as good as my last one, because its sadness isn’t as deep nor its humor as wild. One reason I went with this particular publisher, though, was that the editor said he liked this book more than Swish, which was incredibly heartening, because it allowed me to hope that whatever I’ve replaced twisting raw nerves with might be equally valuable, or even more valuable–to hope that I’ve found a way, all unawares, to skirt the Tolstoy problem.
And if that’s the case, then, if I’m lucky enough to be invited to post again on this blog in a few years, maybe I can tell you how I did it.
Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and Gay Haiku author Joel Derfner is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard. A year after he graduated, his thesis on the Abkhaz language was shown to be completely wrong, as the word he had been translating as “who” turned out to be not a noun but a verb. Realizing that linguistics was not his m?tier, he moved to New York to get an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts.
Musicals for which he has written the scores have been produced in London, New York, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). In an attempt to become the gayest person ever, he joined Cheer New York, New York’s gay and lesbian cheerleading squad, but eventually he had to leave because he was too depressed. In desperation, he started knitting and teaching aerobics, though not at the same time. He hopes to come to a bad end.
Yes, it’s another dead-of-night post, but that seems appropriate for our next guest blogger, YA novelist Kate Evangelista. If her name seems familiar, well, it should: Kate is a longtime Author! Author! community member, a diligent commenter, and, as those of you who tuned in earlier this month may recall, a proud first-time author: her debut, Taste, was released in e-reader format by Crescent Moon Press earlier this month. Now, it’s also available in hard copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or, for those of you that prefer patronizing indie booksellers, Powell’s.
Today, by special request (okay, outright blandishment), Kate is here not only to contribute her wit and wisdom to our ongoing series on series writing; she’s also going to share her direct-from-the-front-lines insights on breaking into print in the hyper-competitive YA fantasy market. Can’t you feel the atmosphere crackling with excitement?
You should, because Kate is one of Author! Author!’s homegrown success stories. To apply the overused phrase properly for once, she was once standing (or, more probably, sitting) precisely where most of you fine people are right now — reading through these posts, writing her heart out, hoping someday to break into the biz.
Do I hear an it can be done?
Because Kate is one of our own, I’d like to take a rather unusual approach to giving you a sense of her authorial chops, one that’s more reflective of the progression from composition to published book. First, let’s take a gander at an excerpt from Taste in manuscript form, as we might have seen it if we were lucky enough to participate in the same critique group as today’s guest. As always, if you are having trouble making out the individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.
Quite the intriguing YA voice, isn’t it? The tone is evocative, yet the prose is nicely spare. Here’s what some reader reviewers — including another longtime member of the Author! Author! community — had to say about Kate’s voice and story:
“Intriguing, mysterious, and a taste is not all you will get! Must read!” — K.M. Whittaker
“My new favorite novel.” — Wendy Russo
“Awesome-sauce! A delicious book to taste and devour.” — Book4Juliet
What is this story of which they speak so highly? Glad you asked. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for her book.
At Barinkoff Academy, there’s only one rule: no students on campus after curfew. Phoenix McKay soon finds out why when she is left behind at sunset. A group calling themselves night students threaten to taste her flesh until she is saved by a mysterious, alluring boy. With his pale skin, dark eyes, and mesmerizing voice, Demitri is both irresistible and impenetrable. He warns her to stay away from his dangerous world of flesh eaters. Unfortunately, the gorgeous and playful Luka has other plans.
When Phoenix is caught between her physical and her emotional attraction, she becomes the keeper of a deadly secret that will rock the foundations of an ancient civilization living beneath Barinkoff Academy. Phoenix doesn’t realize until it is too late that the closer she gets to both Demitri and Luka, the more she is plunging them all into a centuries-old feud.
Or, as the book trailer puts it (and rather well, too):
Rather fun to see her writing move through the stages, is it not? Often, when an aspiring writer is in the throes of nailing down her voice, it’s hard for her to see beyond the page in front of her — or to dream beyond holding the finished book in her hand. But a story goes through many, many more stages than that on its way to publication: the first baby steps toward showing one’s work to others, the incorporation of serious feedback, wrestling it into professional presentation format, working with an editor’s expectations, a blizzard of production decisions, and finally, unveiling it to the world.
Kate has been kind enough to join us under cover of dark to talk about all of these things — and why we should all keep the faith. Speak to your people, Kate — I’m sure they are listening intently.
Gather ‘round, campers. I’m Kate, and I will be your hostess for today. Yes, you too, Charles. *points at skeptical camper in the corner who refuses to join the group*
The awesome-sauce Anne has graciously allowed me to take over Author! Author! for this discussion, and I must say it is both a terrifying and exhilarating experience. Well, maybe more like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping Superman will catch you before you splat on the very hard ground below.
Now that we’ve all gathered, I would like to begin by asking, does anyone need a bathroom break? *looks at the campers gathered* No? *claps hands once* Well, buckle up, ladies and gents, it’s going to be a long one. Please feel free to raise your hand and ask a question at any point during this discussion. I welcome them, and as one of my professors used to say, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Of course, many of my classmates got sent out of the room for testing this theory one too many times. I suggest we not do that here. *sly smile*
As you can all see from the title of this post, I am here to discuss commitment and when it’s time to cheat.
I see lots of skeptical faces in this group. But, Kate, I thought we were talking about writing today? One or many of you might be thinking.
Put away the pitchforks, folks. We are in fact discussing a few fundamentals of writing. And I’m very happy to help in any way that I can. Here comes the disclaimer: please bear in mind that I am basing what I’m sharing here with all of you based from experience. I am by far not an expert in the topic of writing and everything the profession/hobby/passion/insert-how-you-see-your-writing-here entails. It has just come to my attention that sometimes it’s easy to get attached to a single work for years without any inclinations of moving on.
Ah, I see a raised hand.
Kate, I love the story I have written. It has taken me years to write it and I will submit it over and over again, no matter how many years it takes until it finally finds a home. Are you saying I shouldn’t do that?
All good and valid points. Of course you should keep editing and submitting your work. After all, you never know when an agent or publisher would say: “Hey, there’s something here and I want to represent/publish this.”
I’m not here to dissuade any of you from improving your work. If fact, I admire your tenacity for continuing to submit. What I’m here for is to hopefully open your minds to a little sum’n sum’n on the side, if you know what I mean. *winks* Surely, as a writer, you have more than one story in you?
Yes, I see you, Tess. *points to the camper with raised hand*
Are you saying we should write more than one story at a time?
*smiles* Bingo! Gold star for Tess.
Writing is a commitment. But where is it set in stone that you should commit to just one story all your life? Surely there are a multitude of characters in your head begging for attention? But before we get into the gritty, I first want to define commitment.
According to Webster, a personal friend of mine, commitment is an instance of being obligated or emotionally impelled. There are three other definitions for commitment, but for this post, we’ll stick to the sense of obligation that comes with committing. Usually, commitment is used in the context of relationships.
In this case, we will see writing as a relationship between the writer and the work. There are many times when we become attached to the work that we no longer see the forest for the trees, or the bigger picture, as some of you might say.
Still with me? *scans the crowd and nods* Okay.
There is nothing wrong with writing more than one story. By all means, I encourage it. Your first work will not begrudge you spending your time on a new WIP (work in progress) now and again. Mistresses are allowed in this union. In fact, this is one of the only times I will give you permission to cheat.
I see your shocked faces. I know. *takes a deep breath* What I’m proposing is crazy.
Kate! *someone stands in indignation* I cannot leave the story I have worked so hard on to start something new! It’s sacrilege, I say.
*raises both hands to calm the increasingly agitated crowd* I understand your concern. Please, take a seat and give me a few more minutes of your time. I never said this discussion would be an easy one. If you step away from this thinking of the possibilities, then my job here is done. I ask for nothing more. Just an open mind and a patient ear would do.
Maybe it will be easier if I immerse this discussion within the context of my personal process as a writer. It would definitely be easier for me. Write what you know, they say.
So, huddle up and give me your eyeballs. Okay, not literally. How morbid would that be? I digress.
When I decided to take my writing seriously, I began with a high fantasy YA novel entitled Queen Rising, which during years of editing evolved into an urban fantasy YA novel entitled ‘Til Death (now a trilogy contracted with Entangled Publishing). I was young and naïve when I started writing Queen Rising. I knew nothing of the publishing business, much less about writing query letters and submitting to agents and publishers.
I didn’t even know the difficulties of breaking into the high fantasy genre. I was horrible at what I was doing, hiding behind the mask of thinking I was actually walking in the right direction. But that’s something I reserve to discuss with my future shrink.
Once I finished writing Queen Rising, I was eager to submit query letters. Note what I wrote in the paragraph above: I knew nothing. This lack of knowledge led to several rejections. Discouraged by these rejections, I thought to start something new. A new story that I’d been thinking about for quite some time.
Why did you let the discouragement of rejections stop you from submitting Queen Rising? you might ask.
Well, I was young and naïve, and very sensitive for my own good. Little did I know that this moment of feeling discouraged would lead me down a better path. One that would lead to three publishing contracts with three different publishers.
As I started writing my second novel (Lunar Heat eventually evolved into Taste, available now where books are sold. Yes, I am not ashamed to plug), I made sure to do my research. I joined several websites that cater to writers. I don’t feel the need to name them here because they are not what this post is about. And I’m sure you know which ones I’m referring to. I also stumbled upon a blog called Author! Author! You might know it. *laughs*
Armed with new knowledge and a new book, I began the submission process again. And this time, while I was waiting for responses, I went back to Queen Rising and began editing. The great thing about my time away from the text (writing something new) is that it allowed me to reenter its world with fresh eyes.
If you stick with one manuscript for years on end, you potentially lose your fresh eyes because you already know what happens in every twist and turn and forget there are other possibilities within the story, new avenues to take. Since I had written Lunar Heat, I discovered different ways to plot, found answers to character motivation, and learned to develop character further, to name a few, that I didn’t know about when I was writing Queen Rising.
With each new novel you write, not only are you increasing the chances of getting published, but you are also evolving as a writer. Each story allows you to be different. To stretch your creative muscles and explore different characters, situations, and writing styles. In this case, cheating actually makes you a better lover to your first.
If your first novel is in the third person point of view, why not try writing in the first person for the next novel?
But that’s not the way I write, Kate.
That’s the point of trying something new, stretching those writing muscles. If you don’t practice, like any skill, you can become stuck and start to stagnate. This is not good for you or your writing mental health. You owe it to your sanity to explore other avenues. And in the process become a better writer because of it.
If you’re still averse to cheating on your current manuscript, let’s take a different tack: during this road to publication, I realized the one thing about writing that writers don’t often mention: The waiting.
There’s a lot of waiting involved when submitting to critique partners, agents, and editors. During this submission process, tweaking your novel on submission can be counterproductive, because anything new added would not be to the knowledge of those who have your manuscript.
I would suggest that while waiting, start a new story. That WIP you’ve been itching to write. That character who’s been bugging you for his or her own novel.
Writing is never a waste of time. If it’s something you truly enjoy, then sticking to just one story is almost like disrespecting your talent. I know there are many published writers out there who only have one book out, but we can’t all be Harper Lee. You’re doing your craft a disservice if you restrain yourself from writing something new, because you never know who will say yes to your latest WIP.
Since you already have one novel under your belt, you have the experience needed to start a second one. The confidence of having completed a novel is invaluable when starting a new WIP.
Your growth as writer can depends on the number of novels or WIPs you’re willing to explore and create. When I broke up with my agent (long and horrible story), I had in my possession four completed YA novels with a fifth on the way. Lunar Heat became Taste. Queen Rising became ‘Til Death. Blind became Reaping Me Softly. And my fourth is called Impulse.
Believe it or not, I submitted all of them at the same time…to different people, of course. When one agent rejected one novel, I would submit the next, which helped me maximize the chances of receiving partial and full submission requests. Because of this method, Taste is with Crescent Moon Press and out now. ‘Til Death is a trilogy with Entangled. Reaping Me Softly is another trilogy with Omnific Publishing. Impulse is currently on full submission with Entangled.
It was because I took a chance in writing something new that now all the novels I have written so far have found a home. This is what can happen to you too. *smiles at everyone*
Hide those skeptical faces, ladies and gents. Having more than one novel to offer definitely increases your chances of getting published. Once one door opens for one of your novels, the rest will follow.
There is nothing wrong with taking a chance on writing something new. It doesn’t mean your abandoning your first novel. It means you’re gaining experience so when you return to your first novel you are a whole different writer, a better writer, which could only benefits everyone involved.
So, campers, if I haven’t shocked you into a fainting swoon, switch genres. Explore the possibilities.
You don’t need to commit to just one novel. There are many, many more that you could write, that you could develop. In this commitment, it doesn’t have to be “‘til death do us part.” Open up your relationship. Cheating is very much encouraged because you never know what your new fling might bring.
I end this discussion with a parting thought…well, more like a parting hope: start your new novel today. I can’t repeat it enough.
Okay, that’s about it for my stay here at Author! Author! It’s been a blast sharing my experiences with all of you wonderful campers. *smiles and waves*
I would like to take this moment to thank Anne, not only for allowing me to crash the party today, but for all her guidance. Anne, your posts are invaluable to writers. I wouldn’t have achieved my goals without learning from you. And I don’t think I would have been published without the wonderful insights your blog has given me. Thank you, thank you, thank you! *tackle hugs*
When Kate Evangelista was told she had a knack for writing stories, she did the next best thing: entered medical school. After realizing she wasn’t going to be the next Doogie Howser, M.D., Kate wandered into the Literature department of her university and never looked back. Today, she is in possession of a piece of paper that says to the world she owns a Literature degree. To make matters worse, she took Master’s courses in creative writing.
In the end, she realized to be a writer, none of what she had mattered. What really mattered? Writing. Plain and simple, honest to God, sitting in front of her computer, writing. Today, she has four completed Young Adult novels.
Yes, it’s another dead-of-night post, but that seems appropriate for our next guest blogger, YA novelist Kate Evangelista. If her name seems familiar, well, it should: Kate is a longtime Author! Author! community member, a diligent commenter, and, as those of you who tuned in earlier this month may recall, a proud first-time author: her debut, Taste, was released in e-reader format by Crescent Moon Press earlier this month. Now, it’s also available in hard copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or, for those of you that prefer patronizing indie booksellers, Powell’s.
Today, by special request (okay, outright blandishment), Kate is here not only to contribute her wit and wisdom to our ongoing series on series writing; she’s also going to share her direct-from-the-front-lines insights on breaking into print in the hyper-competitive YA fantasy market. Can’t you feel the atmosphere crackling with excitement?
You should, because Kate is one of Author! Author!’s homegrown success stories. To apply the overused phrase properly for once, she was once standing (or, more probably, sitting) precisely where most of you fine people are right now — reading through these posts, writing her heart out, hoping someday to break into the biz.
Do I hear an it can be done?
Because Kate is one of our own, I’d like to take a rather unusual approach to giving you a sense of her authorial chops, one that’s more reflective of the progression from composition to published book. First, let’s take a gander at an excerpt from Taste in manuscript form, as we might have seen it if we were lucky enough to participate in the same critique group as today’s guest. As always, if you are having trouble making out the individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.
Quite the intriguing YA voice, isn’t it? The tone is evocative, yet the prose is nicely spare. Here’s what some reader reviewers — including another longtime member of the Author! Author! community — had to say about Kate’s voice and story:
“Intriguing, mysterious, and a taste is not all you will get! Must read!” — K.M. Whittaker
“My new favorite novel.” — Wendy Russo
“Awesome-sauce! A delicious book to taste and devour.” — Book4Juliet
What is this story of which they speak so highly? Glad you asked. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for her book.
At Barinkoff Academy, there’s only one rule: no students on campus after curfew. Phoenix McKay soon finds out why when she is left behind at sunset. A group calling themselves night students threaten to taste her flesh until she is saved by a mysterious, alluring boy. With his pale skin, dark eyes, and mesmerizing voice, Demitri is both irresistible and impenetrable. He warns her to stay away from his dangerous world of flesh eaters. Unfortunately, the gorgeous and playful Luka has other plans.
When Phoenix is caught between her physical and her emotional attraction, she becomes the keeper of a deadly secret that will rock the foundations of an ancient civilization living beneath Barinkoff Academy. Phoenix doesn’t realize until it is too late that the closer she gets to both Demitri and Luka, the more she is plunging them all into a centuries-old feud.
Or, as the book trailer puts it (and rather well, too):
Rather fun to see her writing move through the stages, is it not? Often, when an aspiring writer is in the throes of nailing down her voice, it’s hard for her to see beyond the page in front of her — or to dream beyond holding the finished book in her hand. But a story goes through many, many more stages than that on its way to publication: the first baby steps toward showing one’s work to others, the incorporation of serious feedback, wrestling it into professional presentation format, working with an editor’s expectations, a blizzard of production decisions, and finally, unveiling it to the world.
Kate has been kind enough to join us under cover of dark to talk about all of these things — and why we should all keep the faith. Speak to your people, Kate — I’m sure they are listening intently.
Gather ‘round, campers. I’m Kate, and I will be your hostess for today. Yes, you too, Charles. *points at skeptical camper in the corner who refuses to join the group*
The awesome-sauce Anne has graciously allowed me to take over Author! Author! for this discussion, and I must say it is both a terrifying and exhilarating experience. Well, maybe more like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping Superman will catch you before you splat on the very hard ground below.
Now that we’ve all gathered, I would like to begin by asking, does anyone need a bathroom break? *looks at the campers gathered* No? *claps hands once* Well, buckle up, ladies and gents, it’s going to be a long one. Please feel free to raise your hand and ask a question at any point during this discussion. I welcome them, and as one of my professors used to say, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.†Of course, many of my classmates got sent out of the room for testing this theory one too many times. I suggest we not do that here. *sly smile*
As you can all see from the title of this post, I am here to discuss commitment and when it’s time to cheat.
I see lots of skeptical faces in this group. But, Kate, I thought we were talking about writing today? One or many of you might be thinking.
Put away the pitchforks, folks. We are in fact discussing a few fundamentals of writing. And I’m very happy to help in any way that I can. Here comes the disclaimer: please bear in mind that I am basing what I’m sharing here with all of you based from experience. I am by far not an expert in the topic of writing and everything the profession/hobby/passion/insert-how-you-see-your-writing-here entails. It has just come to my attention that sometimes it’s easy to get attached to a single work for years without any inclinations of moving on.
Ah, I see a raised hand.
Kate, I love the story I have written. It has taken me years to write it and I will submit it over and over again, no matter how many years it takes until it finally finds a home. Are you saying I shouldn’t do that?
All good and valid points. Of course you should keep editing and submitting your work. After all, you never know when an agent or publisher would say: “Hey, there’s something here and I want to represent/publish this.â€
I’m not here to dissuade any of you from improving your work. If fact, I admire your tenacity for continuing to submit. What I’m here for is to hopefully open your minds to a little sum’n sum’n on the side, if you know what I mean. *winks* Surely, as a writer, you have more than one story in you?
Yes, I see you, Tess. *points to the camper with raised hand*
Are you saying we should write more than one story at a time?
*smiles* Bingo! Gold star for Tess.
Writing is a commitment. But where is it set in stone that you should commit to just one story all your life? Surely there are a multitude of characters in your head begging for attention? But before we get into the gritty, I first want to define commitment.
According to Webster, a personal friend of mine, commitment is an instance of being obligated or emotionally impelled. There are three other definitions for commitment, but for this post, we’ll stick to the sense of obligation that comes with committing. Usually, commitment is used in the context of relationships.
In this case, we will see writing as a relationship between the writer and the work. There are many times when we become attached to the work that we no longer see the forest for the trees, or the bigger picture, as some of you might say.
Still with me? *scans the crowd and nods* Okay.
There is nothing wrong with writing more than one story. By all means, I encourage it. Your first work will not begrudge you spending your time on a new WIP (work in progress) now and again. Mistresses are allowed in this union. In fact, this is one of the only times I will give you permission to cheat.
I see your shocked faces. I know. *takes a deep breath* What I’m proposing is crazy.
Kate! *someone stands in indignation* I cannot leave the story I have worked so hard on to start something new! It’s sacrilege, I say.
*raises both hands to calm the increasingly agitated crowd* I understand your concern. Please, take a seat and give me a few more minutes of your time. I never said this discussion would be an easy one. If you step away from this thinking of the possibilities, then my job here is done. I ask for nothing more. Just an open mind and a patient ear would do.
Maybe it will be easier if I immerse this discussion within the context of my personal process as a writer. It would definitely be easier for me. Write what you know, they say.
So, huddle up and give me your eyeballs. Okay, not literally. How morbid would that be? I digress.
When I decided to take my writing seriously, I began with a high fantasy YA novel entitled Queen Rising, which during years of editing evolved into an urban fantasy YA novel entitled ‘Til Death (now a trilogy contracted with Entangled Publishing). I was young and naïve when I started writing Queen Rising. I knew nothing of the publishing business, much less about writing query letters and submitting to agents and publishers.
I didn’t even know the difficulties of breaking into the high fantasy genre. I was horrible at what I was doing, hiding behind the mask of thinking I was actually walking in the right direction. But that’s something I reserve to discuss with my future shrink.
Once I finished writing Queen Rising, I was eager to submit query letters. Note what I wrote in the paragraph above: I knew nothing. This lack of knowledge led to several rejections. Discouraged by these rejections, I thought to start something new. A new story that I’d been thinking about for quite some time.
Why did you let the discouragement of rejections stop you from submitting Queen Rising? you might ask.
Well, I was young and naïve, and very sensitive for my own good. Little did I know that this moment of feeling discouraged would lead me down a better path. One that would lead to three publishing contracts with three different publishers.
As I started writing my second novel (Lunar Heat eventually evolved into Taste, available now where books are sold. Yes, I am not ashamed to plug), I made sure to do my research. I joined several websites that cater to writers. I don’t feel the need to name them here because they are not what this post is about. And I’m sure you know which ones I’m referring to. I also stumbled upon a blog called Author! Author! You might know it. *laughs*
Armed with new knowledge and a new book, I began the submission process again. And this time, while I was waiting for responses, I went back to Queen Rising and began editing. The great thing about my time away from the text (writing something new) is that it allowed me to reenter its world with fresh eyes.
If you stick with one manuscript for years on end, you potentially lose your fresh eyes because you already know what happens in every twist and turn and forget there are other possibilities within the story, new avenues to take. Since I had written Lunar Heat, I discovered different ways to plot, found answers to character motivation, and learned to develop character further, to name a few, that I didn’t know about when I was writing Queen Rising.
With each new novel you write, not only are you increasing the chances of getting published, but you are also evolving as a writer. Each story allows you to be different. To stretch your creative muscles and explore different characters, situations, and writing styles. In this case, cheating actually makes you a better lover to your first.
If your first novel is in the third person point of view, why not try writing in the first person for the next novel?
But that’s not the way I write, Kate.
That’s the point of trying something new, stretching those writing muscles. If you don’t practice, like any skill, you can become stuck and start to stagnate. This is not good for you or your writing mental health. You owe it to your sanity to explore other avenues. And in the process become a better writer because of it.
If you’re still averse to cheating on your current manuscript, let’s take a different tack: during this road to publication, I realized the one thing about writing that writers don’t often mention: The waiting.
There’s a lot of waiting involved when submitting to critique partners, agents, and editors. During this submission process, tweaking your novel on submission can be counterproductive, because anything new added would not be to the knowledge of those who have your manuscript.
I would suggest that while waiting, start a new story. That WIP you’ve been itching to write. That character who’s been bugging you for his or her own novel.
Writing is never a waste of time. If it’s something you truly enjoy, then sticking to just one story is almost like disrespecting your talent. I know there are many published writers out there who only have one book out, but we can’t all be Harper Lee. You’re doing your craft a disservice if you restrain yourself from writing something new, because you never know who will say yes to your latest WIP.
Since you already have one novel under your belt, you have the experience needed to start a second one. The confidence of having completed a novel is invaluable when starting a new WIP.
Your growth as writer can depends on the number of novels or WIPs you’re willing to explore and create. When I broke up with my agent (long and horrible story), I had in my possession four completed YA novels with a fifth on the way. Lunar Heat became Taste. Queen Rising became ‘Til Death. Blind became Reaping Me Softly. And my fourth is called Impulse.
Believe it or not, I submitted all of them at the same time…to different people, of course. When one agent rejected one novel, I would submit the next, which helped me maximize the chances of receiving partial and full submission requests. Because of this method, Taste is with Crescent Moon Press and out now. ‘Til Death is a trilogy with Entangled. Reaping Me Softly is another trilogy with Omnific Publishing. Impulse is currently on full submission with Entangled.
It was because I took a chance in writing something new that now all the novels I have written so far have found a home. This is what can happen to you too. *smiles at everyone*
Hide those skeptical faces, ladies and gents. Having more than one novel to offer definitely increases your chances of getting published. Once one door opens for one of your novels, the rest will follow.
There is nothing wrong with taking a chance on writing something new. It doesn’t mean your abandoning your first novel. It means you’re gaining experience so when you return to your first novel you are a whole different writer, a better writer, which could only benefits everyone involved.
So, campers, if I haven’t shocked you into a fainting swoon, switch genres. Explore the possibilities.
You don’t need to commit to just one novel. There are many, many more that you could write, that you could develop. In this commitment, it doesn’t have to be “‘til death do us part.†Open up your relationship. Cheating is very much encouraged because you never know what your new fling might bring.
I end this discussion with a parting thought…well, more like a parting hope: start your new novel today. I can’t repeat it enough.
Okay, that’s about it for my stay here at Author! Author! It’s been a blast sharing my experiences with all of you wonderful campers. *smiles and waves*
I would like to take this moment to thank Anne, not only for allowing me to crash the party today, but for all her guidance. Anne, your posts are invaluable to writers. I wouldn’t have achieved my goals without learning from you. And I don’t think I would have been published without the wonderful insights your blog has given me. Thank you, thank you, thank you! *tackle hugs*
When Kate Evangelista was told she had a knack for writing stories, she did the next best thing: entered medical school. After realizing she wasn’t going to be the next Doogie Howser, M.D., Kate wandered into the Literature department of her university and never looked back. Today, she is in possession of a piece of paper that says to the world she owns a Literature degree. To make matters worse, she took Master’s courses in creative writing.
In the end, she realized to be a writer, none of what she had mattered. What really mattered? Writing. Plain and simple, honest to God, sitting in front of her computer, writing. Today, she has four completed Young Adult novels.
Welcome back to our ongoing Series Series! No, that’s not a typo, as those of you joining us late just thought very loudly indeed: all last weekend, through this week, and into next weekend, I have been, am, and shall continue to invite some of the hardest-working, most creatively-interesting authors I know to talk about the ins and outs of writing a series.
Today’s guest post is very dear to my community-minded heart: it comes to us from a longtime member of the Author! Author! community, the incisive and lyrical literary novelist, Michael Stutz, author of a beautifully-crafted 2011 debut Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age, Volume I. In one of those delightful twists of publishing fate that has only become possible due to the explosion of the Internet and the concomitant diversification of publishing, he’s also recently become the proud author of his second literary novel, Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age, Volume II. And I have it on pretty good authority that this third book, entitled — wait for it — Circuits of the Wind: A Legend of the Net Age, Volume III will be coming out this summer.
That’s right, those of you who just turned a bright, minty green with envy: it’s literary fiction; it’s a trilogy; all three parts are coming out essentially at once. You literary fiction aficionados are going to want to hear what he has to say, and pronto.
Especially if you happen to be one of the many, many literary novelists chafing against length restrictions. But perhaps I have already said too much.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to set up proper suspense. What Michael has to say on the subject is so delightful — and, I suspect will be so helpfully inspiring (and possibly even inspiringly helpful) to those of you agonizing on how to meet the prevailing expectations for first novel length that I would not dream of spoiling the surprise.
Before I back swiftly off the stage and allow Michael to step to the podium, though, I’d like to introduce him via any writer’s best calling card, his writing. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for his first novel, available, appropriately enough for a story of the ‘Net era, not only in trade paper and as a Kindle download, but also in preview form.
VOLUME ONE of the CIRCUITS OF THE WIND trilogy follows a young Raymond from his ’70s childhood — and first gropings with the telephone — to the home computers and bulletin boards of the ’80s, where he leads a double life as a wanderer of the wires. But when even his virtual best friend unplugs, Raymond might have to leave it, too — because isn’t real life supposed to be offline?
Not your garden-variety literary fiction subject matter, is it? Possibly because Michael honed his craft across a variety of writing categories: starting out as a journalist, he’s also published steampunk short stories, memoir, and short-shorts. (Yes, yes, I know: all of you literary fiction writers are clamoring for insights into carrying a literary voice across venues. Levi Asher recently did such a nice interview on the subject with Michael on Literary Kicks, however, that I’m reluctant to tread the same ground here.)
I find the result a pretty potent blend — but again, as literary fiction is the book category for which it is most true that any sane person should let the writing speak for itself, I’m all for letting Michael get on with doing so toute suite. I’m not averse, however, to letting a few reviewers speak for him:
“A link to the entire world may blind you to the world. Circuits of the Wind is the story of Ray Valentine, who became hooked to the Internet in its infancy, and found his adulthood there. A coming of age tale of the early internet and the impact on an unsuspecting world, Circuits of the Wind provides a very human story set on a backdrop of technology few truly understand, very much recommended.”
“Lyrical and moving, Circuits of the Wind ranges from the nightmarishly detached to the passionately connected. Stutz understands that no matter how many hours we spend alone before our computer screens, we’re still what we’ve always been: desperate human beings longing for acclaim, achievement, friendship, and ultimately, love.”
Tony D’Souza, author of Whiteman, The Konkans, and Mule
“As is with the breed of fine American writers, the capacity to dream and hope is as much apart of the writer’s genetic makeup as it is of the literary tradition itself. The desire to reach the unfathomable has always been at the epicentre of the American dream, firmly passing away with the emergence of Modernism.
Michael Stutz introduces us to the Virtual American Dream, a world that exists solely through currents, circuits and waves, but is more alive and teeming with activity than you can ever imagine…Stutz writes with a grandness that exceeds the deadpan expectations that are associated with his generation of writers…The current his boat is against is now the electrical pulse that continues to evolve beyond our human control, showing how we are forever ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”
That Fitzgerald reference is not entirely coincidental: Michael’s narrative rhythm, a strong heartbeat pulsing through the novel, actually is, in the overworked critical phrase, rather reminiscent of THE GREAT GATSBY. See if you can hear the music in the book’s opening lines:
To know the legend of a world that has been lost, first you must go back. To even catch a meagre glimpse at any cost, first you must go back. You have to take the bow of history, pull it back, project yourself onto an orbic stage with phantom cast; then you will be back.
Not hearing it yet? Okay, here’s the opening to the next chapter:
He knew the telephone early. Where there had once been indifference, when first he’d only noted just an olive-colored blemish on the wall, soon came recognition and finally even curiosity. In time the thing took on great significance.
Pretty distinctive, is it not? And that’s speaking as a jaded professional reader. (Which enables me to point out something that those of us that read for a living have often remarked about first novels: did you notice how many times the term first appeared in those two excerpts? That’s one of the charming, unconscious ways that new writers tend to announce without meaning to that they are approaching the literary world with fresh eyes.)
That driving rhythm and sophisticated narrative touch carry over into Volume II — as you may see for yourself in this preview, or, for those of you better able to commit, in trade paper or as a Kindle download. Or, if you’re in a hurry, you could just read the publisher’s blurb:
In VOLUME TWO of the CIRCUITS OF THE WIND trilogy, the net arrives all glimmering when Ray is starting college: it’s brighter, quicker, better than he ever knew. It’s the early 1990s — a time of golden youth and of joyriding on the growing Internet, where he rises as a leader of the global generation, the ones who saw it as the gilded portal to a fabulous new age everyone was about to enter. But he’s coasting aimlessly — and when his college friends move on and fashions change he sees how real life actually might not be working out.
With no further ado, then, please join me in welcoming one of our own made very good indeed. Take it away, Michael!
Conceiving, writing, refining, and seeing a book — or a series of them — through to publication is laborious and discouraging and hard. What I’ve learned is that if a part of that process isn’t working, you can’t let yourself lock up. What you can’t lose is time. You have to keep moving, try something different, and not be afraid to experiment. Experiments always yield results. They may not be the expected ones, they may be mystifying, or may even appear stupidly obvious, but there will be some kind of outcome — and they have a way of helping you find your way out when you are stuck.
It happened to me when Circuits of the Wind became a trilogy, because it was not originally planned to be one. Technically, it’s still a unified and single work. But as an undivided novel, yes, by current standards, it’s a bit long — I think it’s about 20,000 words longer than The Corrections. The length had been an issue, even as I knew that some books are double that size, or bigger, yet it seemed to be the way I do things; immediately before this I’d written a book five times as long.
Fortunately, there was a way out of this — it turned out to be a matter of possibility. Circuits of the Wind is being published serially in three volumes: Volume 1 came out late last year, Volume 2 has just been published now, and Volume 3 should arrive some time this summer.
Dividing the novel into multiple books for serial publication is not how I’d initially planned it. I hadn’t considered it even when I was urged to try it. I’d never thought of myself as a series author or an author of “trilogies” — and yet, thinking of it now, in some way the germ of it was always there: I’ve always felt that my work fits tightly together as a single legend, the books all interconnected. I like the idea of weaving all the characters and episodes and scenes together through my books, and I see all of my eventual stories as part of an interconnected world.
But the story of how Circuits of the Wind became a trilogy really begins late in the game, when I had already finished it and was trying to sell it.
I was living in a little bungalow at the time, tucked away in an obscure corner of the nation, far from most everything that was going on — this was the house I’d found myself in not long after escaping college, and despite the love that visitors would give it, telling me constantly how they thought it was so comforting and quaint, and with such a warm inviting rustic air, I didn’t like it at all. In fact I deplored it — the neutralizing 90s “updates” of the previous owner, the backwater location far away from the pulse of the world, the weird layout all constantly got to me.
(My feelings on this have since mellowed: that little town now feels inviting and homey when I’m passing through it, and the townies I knew from back in the day all have kids now but are still happily leading their wooded-lot lives with nights under the fluorescent yellows of the roadside bar, and I see that from the road that house does hold a kind of warmth and agrestic quaintness.)
But even back then I’d admit to anyone that the place had a few great benefits — the first being proximity to airport and highway.
What it also gave, and which was best of all, was a quiet place in which to work. The house was built at the edge of an enchanted wood, where the stone wall of an ancient footbridge lay sunken, broke-backed, into the ditch, and through the daylight hours there would be the varied song and call of many birds.
I had a workroom in the back corner of the house, tiny as a cell, with the same bare, pearl-white walls as the rest of the place. A window overlooked the woods. It had new carpet. This was the perfect place for me to spend my days in work.
The other propitious asset of the place was the neighbor, a bookish retired woman who spent her days reading, talking on the phone and gardening — but mostly reading. She was aware of my work and struggles.
When I’d begun sending out the completed manuscript, I told her about my new dilemma: according to all the rules, first novels “had to be” between about 80,000 and 120,000 words. Anything more was seriously pushing it even for an established novelist, and something nearly three times that length was not so much pushing it anymore as it was thrusting it off in jet-fueled insanity.
She spoke before I was finished with my breath: “Can’t you cut it up into a trilogy? Can’t you make a series out of it?”
I laughed, agreed that at least then I’d have three normal-sized books, but I admit that I didn’t consider it in the least. Trilogies? Series books? That’s genre fiction: bodice-rippers, medieval fantasies, dystopian sci-fi epics, vampire sagas, grisly detective thrillers. They all had their successful trilogies and series books, but my book didn’t fit in with any of those genres or worlds. I was writing something else, what I thought of as mainstream literary fiction — reality fiction — so I shut the door on the idea and didn’t allow myself to even consider it.
It seemed plain that I was right — the world of contemporary literary fiction, at least, didn’t have a place for plot-centered trilogies or series books. And at the time I was latching onto the “literary fiction” tag pretty hard, not out of any special community or bond but because I was attempting to create something outside of those other genres, something that wasn’t in vogue at all. I couldn’t point to another current book as a good concrete example of what I was trying to do; I just knew that it was exactly the kind of book that I desperately wanted to read.
I kept the faith with it, but it eventually turned out that my former neighbor was much more right than I had thought, and it took the help of another friend to see that and to make me realize what I had been doing wrong.
He’s an interesting character, an American slacker archetype: in his twenties he’d lived in New York and LA, dated the daughter of a famous Beat figure, hung out with punk bands and cult filmmakers, seemed to have connections to everyone, he always knew about everything. And then what he chose to do when settling down into his thirties was incredible: he moved to a groggy coastal resort town — one of those places with a picturesque little harbor, a walkable Main Street of tiny boutiques, miles of cottages surrounding it, and brochures on the interstate to let you know which exit to take so that you don’t miss it. He went out there and took a job as the night clerk at the tiny Dari Mart at the far edge of town.
He spends his time on the net, still learning about everything, posting on forums, and he’s always reading a book. Every time I find myself out there, I’ll step into the Dari Mart to pick something up and it ends up being four hours before I walk back out the door. I imagine how the store security cameras record us having these big literary conversations all night, trading references and links across the counter while meanwhile the cottagers are streaming in and out for their smokes and six packs.
One night over a year ago I was telling him about my then-current struggle with the book — how the length had been constantly a dealbreaker, and yet how on the other hand it was structured so symphonically that the entire movement of the book fit into a tight, planned scheme from the first word to the last.
He didn’t even blink. “It’s a trilogy.”
“What?”
“A trilogy. You’ve got a trilogy. You’ve got to cut it up into three separate books. It’s all there.”
As soon as he said that, I thought back to where I used to live, and remembered the advice of my former neighbor who had then just passed away, and I realized how completely dense I’d been: I’d been so adamant to say that no, of course this wasn’t genre work, it had to come out as one big fat literary doorstopper (with deckled edge and dust jacket, naturally, and no trade paperback at all), that I failed to see exactly where I could go, or what I was doing wrong.
The dust jacket and the deckled edge were not important — getting the story out and in front of appreciative readers was the important thing, and I’d lost sight of that. Once I had that realization, everything went easy. Or no — it was still hard, and the road was still long and lonesome, but I was finally moving forward once again.
After I became willing to cut the book into volumes, I’d also realized that many works of literature had been published like that, works that had even influenced me and were in the same vein I’d been writing in, and in fact were even — d’oh! — by some of my favorite authors!
The chapters of Circuits of the Wind had been arranged into titled sections called “books,” six total plus an epilogue, and I’d kept looking at them and not seeing the greater structure. I’d wondered with some dismay at first whether I’d have to remove these “books” and find some other points to divide it.
It actually turned out to be much simpler than that. In the process of “serializing” it, no changes were made to the manuscript at all — it was simply cut into three neat sections, but kept exactly as it had been written.
I saw that those “books” clustered into three main movements of the story — each even has its own voice and inflection, its own time granularity and theme. You have the first hunk, which is the hero’s childhood through to the end of high school, and then comes the quick chaotic rush of his college years, and finally it ends with the first several years in the work world; all of these periods in the hero’s life also coincide perfectly with major periods in the life of the net: the ancient days of home computers, the fever of the early UNIX-based net, and then the huge dialup dot-com explosion of the Web. The volumes reflect and complement each other perfectly, and if you omit the final epilogue they might even function as standalone works.
When I saw that, and realized what I had, the manuscript broke into three piles almost with the sudden force and guidance of an outside power: it was like the parting of the Red Sea. And then getting through it was a cakewalk.
MICHAEL STUTZ coined the phrase “net generation” while working as a reporter for Wired News — and in the early 1990s kicked off the Wikipedia era by being the first to take “open source” beyond software. He lives in Space Age Central, the former home of the NASA rocket scientist who planned the Apollo Project.
Before I introduce today’s installment in our guest blog series by hardworking authors about the ins and outs of moving smoothly from one book to the next, let me ask you: is this not one of the best, most mood-evocative book covers you have ever seen?
It is, for those of you reading this in some strange universe in which the Internet does not come with pictures, the cover art for the always-hilarious Bob Tarte‘s latest foray into memoir, Kitty Cornered. I’m going to have a lot to say in praise of Bob — for my money, one of the consistently funniest memoirists working in American English, and certainly one of the best documenters of the wackiness of life — but first, let’s talk about why this is such a tremendously good book cover.
Actually, scratch that, so to speak: before we slide into first, allow me to pause a moment to let you in on how I know for a fact that this is an unusually eye-catching book cover: my 13-year-old neighbor was absolutely riveted by it when he visited the other day. Not only did he instantly pounce upon the book and begin leafing through it — the moment he walked into my library, he made what can only be called a beeline for it.
Actually ran to get his I’m sorry to report grubby paws upon that book. As if it were — sorry, but it must be said — catnip.
Now that’s a cover that does its job, and then some. Kudos to the marketing and art departments at Algonquin Press for a magnificent achievement in a notoriously difficult medium.
Fair warning: if read this book in a public place, be prepared for total strangers to come running up to you and ask what on earth you’re reading. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. If I were planning into, say, a crowded writers’ conference anytime soon and wanted to make some friends fast, I would nonchalantly tote this book under my arm. (Again, well done, Algonquin.)
Why am I so impressed by this cover? Well, you try to come up with a photo that makes that winsome kitty appear intent upon beating Godzilla in a race to stomp on Tokyo. It provides a great twist on the expected. But that’s not the only reason I like it: it’s rare that a cover captures the spirit of the book within this well. That mad-eyed cat, combined with the offbeat lettering, tell the reader pretty plainly that this is going to be — and having read the book, I’m not too afraid of going out on an interpretive limb here — an uproarious memoir about living with a small battalion of marauding cats.
Which, as luck would have it, is precisely what the book is about. Check out the publisher’s blurb:
Bob Tarte had his first encounter with a cat when he was two and a half years old. He should have learned his lesson then, from Fluffy. But as he says, I listened to my heart instead, and that always leads to trouble.” In this tell-all of how the Tarte household grew from one recalcitrant cat to six — including a hard-to-manage stray named Frannie–Tarte confesses to allowing these interlopers to shape his and his wife’s life, from their dining habits to their sleeping arrangements to the placement and furriness of their furniture.
But more than that, Bob begins seeing Frannie and the other cats as unlikely instructors in the art of achieving contentment, even in the face of illness and injury. Bewitched by the unknowable nature of domesticated cats, he realizes that sometimes wildness and mystery are exactly what he needs.
With the winning humor and uncanny ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks a success, Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our narrow human perspective to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more grounded in the simplicities of love–and catnip.
Just between us, Bob has a pretty great eye for image composition himself. I would highly encourage those of you interested in marvelous critter pics to check out his Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter @BobTarte; he posts new bird and beast photos there with charming regularity.
Of course, authors seldom have any direct say over their cover art — you knew that, right? — but they do often provide their author photos. Bob always has superlative ones. Check out his latest:
Bob with Maynard and Frannie
Doesn’t leave you in much doubt about the subject matter of his memoir, does it? Nor does it leave his platform in question: the guy obviously knows cats.
Again, that’s good promotional strategy: what’s more boring than the standard-issue, flatteringly-lit jacket photo? I say hear, hear for author photos that actually make the author look like he might have some real-world experience with his subject matter. And isn’t it a perennial source of astonishment how few author photos actually do?
But all of that is secondary to the purpose of this series: to blandish hardworking, successful authors into sharing their thoughts on something we literary types virtually never talk about amongst ourselves, the difficult task of switching gears — and sometimes authorial voices — between books. That’s a rather strange topic to avoid, from my perspective, because if one is going to be a working author, one presumably will need to tinker with one’s original voice to fit the next story.
Oh. you thought the Voice Fairy stole with little cat feet into writing studios across this fine land of ours, whacking established authors on their august noggins, and twittering, “There, my dear — write away!”
Obviously, that’s not happening — but let’s face it, writers new to writing humor often believe something almost as implausible. They (and, if the author does her job right, her readership) often labor under the mistaken impression that a funny voice pops out of a gifted storyteller as spontaneously as breathing. Or — sacre bleu! — that all a person that’s good at telling amusing anecdotes has to do is provide a transcript of what she might sound like in a bar, and poof! Hilarity ensues.
Cue the Humor Fairy. You’ll find her in the dressing room she shares with the Pathos Pixie, the Dialogue Dervish, and the Opening Grabber Genie.
Mind if I inject a little reality into that fantasy? Yes, a great humorous memoir voice will come across on the page as effortless, but a truly fine, memorable, and in Bob’s case simultaneously side-splitting and deeply honest voice doesn’t happen all by itself. It takes work. And throughout this series, I’m going to be asking authors to be generous and brave enough to talk about that often-difficult process.
I’m particularly delighted to be able to bring you Bob’s thoughts on the process. Not only is he a well-recognized master of spinning a yarn, but he also had to mine his creativity to fine-tune his already quite successful voice to a new breed of story.
And no, I’m not going to cut out the cat puns anytime soon, but thanks for asking.
As tempted as I am to let the cat out of the bag (don’t say I didn’t warn you), far be it from me to stand between a gifted storyteller and his audience. I suspect, though, that what follows will be even more instructive — and even more fun — if I give you a swift guided tour of Bob’s earlier work, on the off chance that some of you have not yet had the opportunity to become familiar with Bob’s work (or perchance missed his earlier guest blogs on developing a unique authorial voice for memoir and dealing with reader expectations).
When Bob Tarte left the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He’d write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything.
Then he married Linda. She wanted a rabbit. How much trouble, he thought, could a bunny be?
Well, after the bunny chewed his way through the electrical wires and then hid inside the wall, Bob realized that he had been outwitted. But that was just the beginning. There were parrots, more rabbits, then ducks and African geese. The orphaned turkeys stranded on a nearby road. The abandoned starlings. The sad duck for sale for 25 cents.
Bob suddenly found himself constructing pens, cages, barriers, buying feed, clearing duck waste, spoonfeeding at mealtime. One day he realized that he no longer had a life of quiet serenity, but that he’d become a servant to a relentlessly demanding family: Stanley Sue, a gender-switching African grey parrot; Hector, a cantankerous shoulder-sitting Muscovy duck; Howard, an amorous ring-neck dove; and a motley crew of others. Somehow, against every instinct in him, Bob had unwittingly become their slave.
He read all the classic animal books — The Parrot Who Owns Me, The Dog who Rescues Cats, Arnie the Darling Starling, That Quail Robert, The Cat Who Came for Christmas — about the joys of animals, the touching moments. But none revealed what it was really like to live with an unruly menagerie.
Bob Tarte’s witty account reveals the truth of animal ownership: who really owns who, the complicated logistics of accommodating many species under one roof, the intricate routines that evolve, and ultimately, the distinct and insistent personalities of every animal in the house – and on its perimeter. Writing as someone who’s been ambushed by the way in which animals — even cranky ones — can wend their way into one’s heart, Bob Tarte is James Herriot by way of Bill Bryson.
Bob Tarte’s second book, Fowl Weather, returns us to the Michigan house where pandemonium is the governing principle, and where 39 animals rule the roost. But as things seem to spiral out of control, as his parents age and his mother’s grasp on reality loosens as she battles Alzheimer’s disease, Bob unexpectedly finds support from the gaggle of animals around him. They provide, in their irrational fashion, models for how to live.
It is their alien presences, their sense of humor, and their unpredictable behaviors that both drive Bob crazy and paradoxically return him to sanity. Whether it’s the knot-tying African grey parrot, the overweight cat who’s trained Bob to hold her water bowl just above the floor, or the duck who bests Bob in a shoving match, this is the menagerie, along with his endlessly optimistic wife Linda, that teaches him about the chaos that’s a necessary part of life.
No less demanding than the animals are the people who torment Bob and Linda. There’s the master gardener who steps on plants, the pet sitter applicant who never met an animal he didn’t want to butcher, and a woman Bob hasn’t seen since elementary school who suddenly butts into his life.
With the same biting humor and ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks such a rousing success, Bob Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our small human perspectives to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more wholly grounded in the simplicities of love — even across species lines.
With both of those intriguing premises firmly in mind, let’s see what words of wisdom on strategizing voice are wiggling on the end of the string that’s…I mean, let’s get on with stalking…wait — fireman, what’s that up in that nearby tree?
Oh, I give up. Please join me in welcoming back Bob Tarte!
I had big, fat, goose-size hopes for Enslaved by Ducks back in 2003. In my fantasies, the book would become such a huge honking success that I could spend the rest of my days humming cheerily as I effortlessly churned out sequels.
Unfortunately, I had overestimated the clout of readers who kept ducks as pets. The total population of duck owners in the US probably couldn’t fill a single theater in a shopping mall multiplex. In fact, they probably couldn’t fill a jumbo popcorn tub. So their enthusiasm only got me so far. Enslaved by Ducks sold steadily, but slowly. I wanted to do better.
For my second book, I decided that I would break out of the traditional pet book mold and vault into the ample lap of the general public. I didn’t take the ducks, geese, parrots, rabbits, cats, and other critters out of Fowl Weather. Instead I wrote about how they affected my life during a stressful period of time in which I lost my dad, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and ghost cats haunted our basement. The result was a book that some folks thought was the funniest thing that they had ever read and others decided was mega-depressing.
NPR’s Nancy Pearl occupied the former camp, and thanks to her enthusiastic January 22, 2008 “Under the Radar” review on Morning Edition, Fowl Weather was briefly the sixty-third best selling book on all of Amazon. But after that it sunk like a rock tied to an anvil, never making it out of hardcover — even as Enslaved by Ducks gradually waddled into its thirteenth paperback printing in 2012.
So what went wrong with my sequel? Lots of things. Pushing the animals even slightly into the background wasn’t the smartest approach, since critters were what my readers wanted. And the subject matter was dark compared to Enslaved by Ducks. Because there were so many narrative threads and no single string strong enough to hang a catchy subtitle on, Fowl Weather also proved to be tricky to market. Death and Alzheimer’s weren’t suitable subjects for a humorous back cover blurb. And the non-waterfowl-owning segment of the population that had enjoyed Enslaved by Ducks presumably spotted the duckling on the cover of Fowl Weather and decided that it was a rerun.
In other words, Fowl Weather was simultaneously too different and too similar to my first book. It took me years to figure out how to follow it up, even though the solution lay right under my nose. It was as close as the nearest litter box.
It took me twice as long to write Kitty Cornered as it had to write either of my first two books. It didn’t start out as a cat book. I kept trying to find new ways to write about our birds and other pets. While the cats kept clawing their way into the narrative, I never even considered making them the subjects of a book, because I couldn’t shake loose of the image of myself as the duck guy. I couldn’t shake loose of any good ideas, either. In an attempt to add some verve to a sagging repertoire of avian anecdotes, I concocted an increasingly unlikely series of devices, culminating in — I’m embarrassed to admit — a goose egg crystal ball that revealed incidents from my pre-pet past. This didn’t work out any better than it sounds here.
Fortunately a skittish white-and-black stray cat showed up to rescue me from author’s oblivion. As soon as I decided to write about this complicated little being that we named Frannie, I felt as if a huge goose-size burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I incorporated the strongest aspects of my first two books into Kitty Cornered, keeping the sunny-to-partly-cloudy tone of Enslaved by Ducks and the overlapping narratives of Fowl Weather, all the time returning the focus to Frannie as I wrote about all six cats.
My re-invention as a cat guy seems to have worked. Kitty Cornered was on the independent bookstore indie bestseller list during its first two weeks on the shelves, and when it was just short of a month old, it went into a second printing. Naturally, I’m hoping that it continues to gain momentum. It sure would be great to be able to knock out a couple of sequels, you know?
Bob Tarteand his wife Linda live on the edge of a shoe-sucking swamp near the West Michigan village of Lowell. When not fending off mosquitoes during temperate months and chipping ice out of plastic wading pools in the depths of winter, Bob writes books about his pets.
Emmy Award-winning actress Patricia Heaton has taken on an option on the dramatic rights to Enslaved by Ducks. Fowl Weather was selected as an “Under The Radar” book for 2008 by Nancy Pearl on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Bob wrote the Technobeat world music review column for The Beat magazine from 1989 to 2009. He has also written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Miami New Times newspapers.
Bob also hosts a podcast for PetLifeRadio.com called What Were You Thinking? that’s supposedly about “exotic pets” as a general topic, but the show just as often turns into a chronicle of life with his own troublesome critters.
Bob and Linda currently serve the whims of parrots, ducks, geese, parakeets, a rabbit, doves, cats, and hens. They also raise and release orphan songbirds (including woodpeckers) for the Wildlife Rehab Center, Ltd. in Grand Rapids and have the scars to prove it.
I could blame my last few days of visible silence on having polished off the task I set for myself in this series: we did count down to the entry deadline for a major literary contest, and I did manage to talk about the major technical bugbears that dog contest entries. I could also pat myself on the bat for giving those of you that did enter that contest a few days to recover afterward. Let’s face it, while entering a writing contest is one of the best ways for an aspiring writer with no previous publications to garner ECQLC (Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy), it’s also exhausting, demanding, and more than a little stressful to prepare an entry well.
Oh, those are both true, and both pretty good justifications for not posting for a few days. But the fact is, I’ve just been too depressed to blog. It being your humble correspondent, my reasons for tumbling down the great blue hole that writers know so well were almost entirely literary.
How so, you ask, backing away because you fear whatever it is might be catching? Well, over the past week, I’ve had occasion to observe first-hand a couple of dozen authors (first-time, established, old hand) promoting their books. Or at least trying to promote them. Surprisingly often, that takes the form of contacting someone like me.
Not a bad choice: my family’s been in and out of publishing since the 1920s, and substantial portions of my kith and kin were writing political fiction in the 1930s and 40s, or science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s and 1960s, both now-recognized genres that nice, literate people used to pretend in public that they didn’t read, then devour in private. Just sitting back and assuming one’s publisher would take care of book sales was a luxury these authors did not have. As a direct and, I think, entirely laudable result, I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know that no matter how good a publishing house’s marketing department might be, it was ultimately up to the author to convince at least a few readers to buy a book.
And I have distinct memories of events seen through the bars of my playpen. That being literarily gifted does not excuse one from attending to the business part of the publishing business has always seemed as much a fact of life to me as gravity making things fall down instead of up.
Imagine my dismay, then, when a very good author of a decade’s worth of exceptionally fine novels asked me for advice on how to promote her soon-to-be-released book. Immediately, I began churning out suggestions for online promotion, as is my wont.
She stopped me after three low-cost promotional ideas. “Oh, I can’t do any of that. I would look desperate.”
“Um, Ambrosia?” I asked, for Ambrosia was not her name but an undetectable pseudonym. “Have you not noticed that pretty much everyone with a book out is just a touch desperate these days? Or are you under the impression that people who read don’t understand that authors would like to make a living at it, and that making a living at it is dependent upon readers buying books?”
She lit up at what I can only guess in retrospect were a few non-consecutive words in that last sentence. “Yes, exactly — my last book did not sell very well, and I’m worried about the next. If only the author weren’t completely helpless in this situation!”
Was it heartless of me to burst into peals of laughter, campers? I’d just given Ambrosia at least a month’s worth of ways not to be helpless, promotional moves that would have cost him nothing but time and energy. To add icing to what was already a mighty fine cake, she’s a friend, so this was free advice, too. (Oh, you thought Author! Author! was the only place I couldn’t stop myself from holding forth?) Yet here she was, falling all over herself not to take it.
Now, I could have just given up. It’s the golden age of authorial outreach, after all; it’s now more or less expected that an author will get actively involved in online promotion. Yet I get Ambrosia’s point of view: she started writing back in the days when it was in fact considered a bit gauche for a high literary fiction author to do anything but wait to see if the reviews were good and smile graciously at the signings her publisher’s hardworking marketing department set up for her.
Of course, I talked her down — what do you take me for? After the requisite half an hour of disbelieving what I was telling her, followed by the equally requisite ten minutes of acting as though the new realities of authorship were entirely my fault, she hung up the phone a sadder but wiser pseudonym. She might even take some of my advice.
This kind of exchange is, alas, far too common these days for it alone to have depressed me — although it does make me sad to see a good author not understand how reaching her audience has changed over the last ten years. Especially when I’m relatively certain that her assigned publicist (a terrific lady who definitely knows the current market and is enough of a boon to her publishing house that if she hadn’t specifically forbidden me to name her on my blog, lest incoming authors stampede her office, would now praise to the skies) had already tried to get Ambrosia to do some of the things I was suggesting. I did suggest that she tell her that she, like the overwhelming majority of authors new to online promotion, had been thinking of her Facebook and Twitter accounts as if they were book signings: if it’s there, the fans will just show up, right?
More on that half-true authorial presumption in a moment. I want to tell you about something that happened the next day.
I was enjoying a nice cup of tea with Trevor, another author friend and someone who also has a book in the spring’s new offerings list. As a shameless friend (and every good writer needs many), I naturally had bought a copy of his book the nanosecond it came out, because those gratis copies his publisher gave him were intended for promotion, not to hand out to kith and/or kin. (You’ve already started disabusing your friends and neighbors on that point, right? The best way to help an author is to buy his book, and the sooner your Aunt Sadie accepts that, the happier you’ll be when you have a book out. Tell her you’ll be happy to sign it.) I also, although Trevor did not think to ask his shameless friends to do this, cranked out a review and posted it on Amazon and a few other sites.
“Oh, and before I forget,” I told him, “I noticed mine is the only review on Powell’s and B & N. A single reader review can come across as a fluke, so you’re going to want to ask a few friends to post there, too, as well as Amazon.”
As a fan of the gentle art of comedy, I can tell you that his subsequent spit-take was flawlessly executed. After he had rushed over to the nearest table with back-up napkins, apologizing profusely, he returned to help me sop up the remains of our shared cookie plate. “How did you know,” he hissed as soon as our neighbors stopped staring at us, “that I’d recruited any reviews at all?”
“Experience? And the fact that nobody but your mother and the second reviewer has ever called you Trevvie?”
Okay, so I made up that last part to amuse you; his mother’s review was far subtler than that. I did hasten to assure him, though, that he had been smart to ask his relatives, friends, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends to read the book and post reviews. It’s a fairly standard practice now, if only to get the ball rolling during the inevitable lag between the professional reviews (which sometimes appear quite a bit before the book’s release) and readers who do not know the author personally having read the book.
He did not, therefore, suffer from either a shortage of helpful friends (thanks, Mom!) or qualms about accepting their help. Subsequent conversation revealed, however, that he had been squeamish about asking those very same people to post a simple hey, my son/college roommate/coworker in his hated day job had a book out — and here’s a link! on their already-extant social media pages. Or — and this made me choke on my fresh cup of tea — to post such a request on his Facebook fan page.
I’ll spare you the conversation that followed, as well as an enumeration of all the café staff and habitués that pounded me on the back in turn. Suffice it to say that I was surprised: as far as any of us knew, the people who read his fanpage were, in fact, fans. Why wouldn’t people who already enjoyed his writing want to help him promote his book, especially when he could make it so easy for them by posting a link with the request?
Since we were already the pariahs of the teashop, he had no qualms about answering that last question out loud: because most of the people kind enough to have hit the LIKE button on his fanpage were — you saw this coming, didn’t you? — precisely the same generous souls he had asked to write reviews. Since he’d already asked a favor — two, since he’d asked most of them to take pity on him and hit LIKE — he felt funny about asking another.
“I guess that means that you wouldn’t be comfortable asking them to turn your book cover-outward anytime they’re in a bookstore,” I said. “A browser’s much more likely to pick it up.”
As with Ambrosia, what made me sad about this exchange (other than that last suggestion’s practically driving Trevor to tears) was not that he was too shy to make these relatively simple requests of people he already knew loved him, but that he was apparently unaware that it would behoove him to reach out to potential readers he did not already know. Indeed, he argued with me on that point, during that requisite ten minutes of target practice aimed at the messenger I mentioned earlier: “If you don’t know,” he sniffed, as though my suggestions were terribly lowbrow, “nothing makes people more uncomfortable than a sales pitch. If the reviews are good, then the book will sell.”
“Not always,” I said gently, bracing myself for the next barrage. “And not if your potential readers don’t know about them. All I’m suggesting is that you ask your established readership to offer their friends some encouragement to follow a link to those reviews.”
Again, I’ll spare you the subsequent debate; I’m sure you clever, imaginative souls can flesh it out unassisted. To get you started: apparently, it’s cynical and literature-hating to believe not only that readers will not buy a book if they have never heard of it, but that posting something — anything — online won’t instantly attract millions of looks. Call me zany — and Trevor did, several times — but I believe that signposts are helpful in getting people from Point A to Point B.
“But you’re a blogger,” he accused, in a tone that implied the term was synonymous with convicted poisoner of dozens; need I mention that his marketing department has been urging him fruitlessly for years to start blogging? “You of all people know that if you post it, they will come.”
“Ah, but I’ve been blogging for nearly seven years.” I did not add that when I started blogging, my memoir’s scheduled release was within six months. “And I’ve only had a Facebook fanpage for about a year. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever asked my blog’s readership if they would be kind and generous enough to follow a link there and press the LIKE button; I shall have to rectify that sometime soon. It would certainly make my agent happy.”
“Oh, come on,” Trevor said. “You know there’s no way to do that gracefully.”
I swear I did not that last observation up. Trevor has promised to keep an eye on my fanpage‘s likes over the next few weeks. Would you mind terribly helping me convince him that it would be worth his while to make a polite request of people who already know and appreciate his writing by following that link and LIKE-ing my page?
Again, though, I do understand why he feels overwhelmed: there’s just a lot more for an author to do these days. My upbringing leads me to believe that’s a good thing — what makes one feel more helpless than not being able to do anything to improve one’s prospects? — but I do realize that Trevor, like the vast majority of aspiring writers, began writing under the assumption that if he wrote a good enough book, it actually would sell itself. Or at least that the fine folks employed by his publishing house would do it for him, which, in terms of effort expenditure, amounts to very much the same thing.
Before I leave you to ponder all of this vis-à-vis your own current and future books and get back to talking about ECQLC-generating contest entries — oh, you thought I had abandoned my teaching goals for the day? — I would like to share the final literary depressive factor of the week. It will amuse you, Trevor, to see that it was an event a publisher had arranged in order to promote not just one, but several quite good books. It was a group signing at a large, well-stocked bookstore.
Naturally, I hied myself hence: I know one of the authors, and one of the nicest things a shameless friend can do to help an author is to help swell the ranks at a book signing. (If one wants to be a genuine peach, one ostentatiously buys the book at the signing, to encourage others to do so; of course I did.) To make it an even more efficient use of my literary booster time, another of the authors on the dais writes in the same book category I do — and if I have to explain to you why it’s in a writer’s best interest to make sure her chosen book category sells well, or why one of the best ways to assure editors to keep publishing writing in that category is to buy those books, and regularly, well, I can only wring my hands and wonder where I went wrong in the past seven years.
Hying myself hence was no easy task, however, because one of the local arts-oriented websites had misreported the time it started. Another paper, a free one that’s the only print paper to list author readings habitually, had recommended the signing and listed the correct time, but had referred readers to another page of the publication for an explanation of why it would be worth their time to attend. There was no mention of the event on the other page.
No way to anticipate any of that, of course, but those were not the only attendance-discouraging factors. The event had been scheduled for the same time as the opening of the Seattle International Film Festival — and about a block and a half away. Parking was nonexistent. John Irving was also speaking across town that night; even I thought twice about which event to attend.
Considering everything, then, the event’s organizers should be quite proud of themselves: about 25 people showed up. (And in response to those of you who just clutched your chests: that’s quite a respectable turn-out for a book signing; it’s not all that uncommon for authors to end up spending an hour or two addressing one fan, two bookstore employees, and a roomful of empty chairs.) They also had piles of the various authors’ books readily available — well done! — and had obviously collected a group of intelligent, articulate, interesting authors.
Most of whom looked positively terrified throughout the entire event. A few made a substantive effort to interact with the audience, but not all of them participated in answering questions. A couple of them did not even try to have conversations with the fans handing them books. The sweet 12-year-old who’d lugged his copies of every book one of the authors had ever written was, to say the least, a little surprised that his hero talked to one of the other authors while signing his way through the stack.
Sensing a pattern here, or at least a similarity to Ambrosia and Trevor’s promotional attempts? No? Okay, let me fill in a few more depressing details.
It’s fairly standard at book signings for authors to read from their work…and do I even need to finish this sentence? Not a word. It’s also usual for the authors, or at any rate the person introducing them, to give a short overview of what the books they would like to sign are about. Nor a murmur. Why would they? Everyone in the room had already read those books, right?
Anyone but me see this as a problematic assumption at an event devoted to selling the books in question? But it’s understandable, in the light of Trevor and Ambrosia: since the books would of course sell themselves, one shows up to a book signing to reward those that have already read them, not to try to coax new readers. If I have to explain why that attitude might be a trifle self-defeating at an event featuring more than one author…again, where did I go wrong in raising you?
In the unlikely event that I am now or have ever been too subtle on this point: book signings and readings are not about bolstering the authorial ego; they’re about selling books. They’re performances.
Speaking of which, as if all of that were not enough to keep nearby browsers from dropping by to see what was going on — none of them did, although that’s pretty standard for author signings, too — not all of the authors were audible to the back row of the audience when they did speak. Nor did the moderator repeat questions, so everyone there could hear them.
Now, I’ve given talks in that particular room of that particular bookstore, so I would be the first to admit that the acoustics are terrible. The bookstore’s wonderful staff admits it, too; as I can tell you from experience, they routinely offer to set up microphones for occasions like this. So if chatterers wandering around the shelves were sometimes more audible than some of the authors, I’m disinclined to blame the bookstore’s acoustics.
Will anyone accuse me of being cynical if I suggest that it might be prudent for authors to arrive a little early check out the acoustics at any venue at which they plan to speak? Or to rack up a little practice in being charming to readers nice enough to want to have their books signed?
Or at least not to be surprised when only 7 of those 25 audience members bought books?
To be clear, I’m not saying any of this to be critical of those authors, the bookstore’s staff, or the publisher that set up the event. (Although personally, I might have checked the local events listings before I set it up.) I’m just saying that it might have gone better had everyone concerned thought about it from the attendee’s point of view. Especially that delightful 12-year-old: should I have been the only adult in the room who asked him why he loved that armload of books?
I know: hands up if you have ever been that kid. Can you imagine how thrilled he would have been had his favorite author taken the time to treat their interaction as anything but routine fan maintenance? It’s not hard to make a devoted reader feel special, especially one that staggers into an event like this with a dozen hardcover books.
Lest anyone suggest that since this bright, articulate kid had already bought the books in question, the event was not really aimed at him: that kid goes to school; that kid goes online; that kid has friends and siblings that read (his older sister staggered under her own armload of books). Wouldn’t it actually have been a great way to get the word out the author’s new book to treat him in a way that will make the boy rush to tell everyone he knows about how nice his idol was to him? And, since this was a group event, wouldn’t it have helped everybody if the author had made a few recommendations for future reading?
That’s why, in case any of you had been wondering, I was so adamant throughout last winter’s Queryfest that it’s in a writer’s best interest to give some pretty serious thought to who her target reader is. I could have told the author in question that smart 12-year-olds read his work; after talking to the fan, I can tell you now that there’s a better than even chance this 12-year-old is going to grow up to be a writer. And that means that he’s going to be looking to his favorite authors for guidance about how to act while promoting a book.
Oh, that hadn’t occurred to you? It probably didn’t occur to the author, either, but it could not have been more obvious to me. I grew up watching devoted readers toting stacks of books into science fiction conventions and book signings, so my relatives and friends could sign them. An inspired fan has a light in her eye, a glow to her face; it’s visible from across the room.
So am I cynical or literature-loving to believe that creating a positive experience for that reader at a signing is an essential part of the author’s job? Or that the opportunity to do so is something for which a savvy author should be exceedingly grateful?
Can you wonder now that I left depressed? Not all of the authors missed those fundamentals, but enough did that even I, who loves good writing enough to have devoted my life to it, wondered if I should have attended the event at all.
I have not asked my friend on the dais (who, I am delighted to report, interacted with her fans exceedingly well) if her colleagues, the bookstore, or the publisher were disappointed by the sales generated by the event; my guess is that they were not. Lackluster sales at readings and signings are one of the reasons many publishers sponsor fewer these days. It’s common to blame the fans for that.
Just something to ponder. If even one of you finds yourself facing an eager 12-year-old fan across a signing table and decides to make not only his day, but change the course of his life by taking a sincere interest in him, I will indeed feel that I have done all I can here.
Back to business — and yes, I’m going to talk about contests now, because I know that some of you tuned in for it. It’s important not to disappoint one’s readership, after all.
For the sake of those of you who tuned in because you’re in the habit of tuning in, though, bless you. I’ll keep it relatively brief. I wouldn’t want to eat into any time you were planning to devote to liking things on Facebook this weekend, after all.
As I pointed out earlier in this series, although marketability is surprisingly seldom listed as one of the judging criteria in contest rules, it is very, very frequently in the judges’ minds when they read — which means, all too frequently, that if you offend their sensibilities, they will conclude that your work isn’t marketable enough to make it to the finalist round. Or at least not enough so to please current market tastes.
I introduced the change of subject too abruptly, didn’t I? As soon as I typed it, I heard the moods that had risen again after my downer of an opening over deflate hissingly once again. Sorry about that; I’m afraid that there’s just no upbeat way to shatter the ubiquitous misconception that the only thing a literary contest judge ever considers is the inherent quality of the writing in the entry.
But as we’ve been discussing, what constitutes good writing at one time — or in one book category — is not necessarily what was or will be considered good writing at all times or in all settings. The literary market is notoriously volatile. Then, too, contest judges, like agents, editors, and any other reader, harbor personal tastes. We would all have different takes on what makes a book good, what sentiments are acceptable, and, perhaps most for the sake of contest entry, different ideas of what is marketable. Or even of what fits comfortably under a particular contest category.
However, there are a few simple ways you can minimize the possibility of raising red flags before the eyes of our old pal, Mehitabel the veteran contest judge. Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, quite a few of these pitfalls tend to turn up on pet peeve lists in agencies and publishing houses as well.
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #1: avoid clichés like the proverbial plague.
Oh, you may laugh, but clichés are amazingly common in contest entries, for some reason I have never understood — unless it is simply that clichés become clichés because they are common. It puzzles Mehitabel, too, because isn’t the goal of entering writing in a contest to show how you phrase things and conceive of stories, not how people tend to phrase things in general or how TV shows present storylines?
You really do want to show contest judges phraseology and situations they’ve never seen before, so try to steer clear of catchphrases (I know, right?), stock characters (Here’s your badge back, rookie-who-cannot-follow-the-rules, and here’s your new partner. He’s supposed to retire next month!), tried-and-true plot twists (You don’t mean — you’re my FATHER?!?), and anything, but anything, that you’re tempted to include just because it’s cultural shorthand for how a particular group of people act (“Whatever!” said the teenager, rolling her eyes.
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #2: minimize current pop culture references.
In general, you should avoid pop culture references in contest entries, except as indicators of time and place. Not only do they tend to be clichés (Hey, Betty Sue, want to go down to the malt shop and sock-hop to the latest Chuck Berry record in your poodle skirt?), but in a contest entry, they take up space that could be used for more original description.
Yes, yes, I know: dropping in the odd Bee Gees reference to a story set in 1976 feels like verisimilitude. It can be. But you wouldn’t believe how often Mehitabel sees entries that seem intent upon proving that every single soul on the planet liked the same music in 1976.
Current cultural references run all of these risks, but they suffer from an additional problem: even the most optimistic judge would be aware that an unpublished work entered in a contest could not possibly be in print in less than two years from now — and thus the reference in question needs to be able to age at least that long.
In answer to that collective gasp I just heard from those of you new to the publishing world: books don’t typically hit the shelves for at least a year after the publication contract is signed — and often more than that. Print queues are long, and before a first-time author’s work enters one, the acquiring editor often requests changes in the text.
That’s not counting the time the agent spends shopping the book around first, of course. And that clock doesn’t even begin to tick until after the writer has found an agent for the book in the first place.
So even if a cultural reference is white-hot right now, it’s probably going to be dated by the time it hits the shelves. For instance, do you really think that anyone will know in five years who Paris Hilton is, or why she was famous? (I’m not too sure about the latter now.)
Also, writers tend to underestimate how closely such references tend to be tied to specific eras, regions, and even television watching habits. Which brings me to…
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #3: never assume that the judge will share your worldview.
You would be astonished at how often the writer’s age — or, at any rate, generational identification — is perfectly obvious from the cultural references used in a contest entry. Ditto with political views, or lack thereof, sex, gender (not the same thing), socioeconomic status…
All of that is fine, especially for a memoir or first-person fiction, but you need to be careful that the narrative does not assume that the judges determining whether your work makes it to the finalist round share your background in any way. Why? Well, nothing falls flatter than a joke that the reader doesn’t get, unless it’s a shared assumption that’s shared by a group to which the reader does not happen to belong.
It’s exceedingly common for contest entrants to assume (apparently) that the judges assessing their work are share their age group, sex, sexual orientation, views on foreign policy, you name it. So much so that they tend to leave necessary references unexplained.
And this can leave a Mehitabel who does not happen to be like the entrant somewhat perplexed. Make sure that your story or argument could be followed by any English-reading individual without constant resort to the encyclopedia or MTV.
Did you catch the problem with that last sentence? It shows my age.
That’s right: I’m old enough to remember when MTV was entirely devoted to music videos. Seems strange now, doesn’t it? I’m also old enough (but barely), to shake my head over the fact that if Mehitabel is of the Internet generation, she may never have touched a hard-copy encyclopedia.
It could easily go the other way, of course — and probably will, in a contest entry. (Most literary contests require some writing or publishing background before allowing someone to judge.) It’s not beyond belief that Mehitabel will never have seen a music video. Or know what Glee is, beyond a good mood.
The best way to steer clear of potential problems: get feedback on your entry from a few readers of different backgrounds than your own, so you can weed out references that do not work universally. Recognize that your point of view is, in fact, a point of view, and as such, naturally requires elucidation in order to be accessible to all readers.
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #4: if you are taking on social or political issues, show respect for points of views other than yours.
This is really a corollary of the last. If you’re going to perform social analysis of any sort, it’s a very, very poor idea to assume that the contest judge will already agree with you — especially if everyone you know agrees with you on a particular point. A stray snide comment can cost you big time on a rating sheet.
I’m not suggesting that you iron out your personal beliefs to make them appear mainstream — contest judges tend to be smart people, ones who understand that the world is a pretty darned complex place. But it’s worth bearing in mind that Mehitabel may well get her news from sources different than yours; her view of current events might well make your jaw drop, and vice-versa.
And that’s a problem, because an amazingly high percentage of contest entries, particularly in the nonfiction categories, are polemics. Novels often they use the argumentative tactics of verbal speech. But while treating the arguments of those who disagree with dear self as inherently ridiculous can work aloud (although it’s certainly not the best way to win friends and influence people, in my experience), they tend to work less well on paper.
So approach your potential readers with respect, and keep sneering at those who disagree with you to a minimum. And watch your tone, especially in nonfiction entries, lest you become so carried away in making your case that you forget that a member of your honorable opposition may well be judging your work.
This is a circumstance, like so many others, where politeness pays well. Your mother was right about that, you know.
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #5: recognize going in that you have absolutely no control over how an individual judge will respond to your work. All you can control is how you present it.
Trust me, you will be a much, much happier contest entrant if you accept that you cannot control who will read your work after you enter it into a contest. Sometimes, you’re just unlucky. If your romance novel about an airline pilot happens to fall onto the desk of someone who has recently experienced major turbulence and resented it, there’s really nothing you can do about it.
Those of you trying to land an agent recognize this dilemma, right? It’s precisely the same one queries and submissions to agencies face.
To revert to my favorite gratuitous piece of bad luck: if Millicent the agency screener has scalded her tongue on a too-hot latté immediately prior to opening your submission, chances are that she’s going to be in a bad mood when she reads it. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about that.
The same holds true for a contest entry. Ultimately, you can have no control over whether Mehitabel has had a flat tire on the morning she reads your entry, any more than you can control if she has just broken up with her husband, or has just won the lottery.
All you can do approach the process with a sense of professionalism: make your work the best it can be, and keep sending it out until you find the reader who gets it. Which brings me to…
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #6: don’t expect a single contest entry to make your writing career all by itself.
Okay, so this one is really more about your happiness than the judges’, but do try to avoid hanging all of your hopes on a single contest. That’s giving way too much power to a single, unknown contest Mehitabel.
Yes, even if there is only one contest in your part of the world for your kind of writing. Check elsewhere.
And, of course, keep querying agents, magazines, and small presses while your work is entered in a contest. (No, this is not a contest rule violation, in most cases: contests almost universally require that a entry not be published prior to the entry date. You’re perfectly free to keep submitting after you enter it — and to enter the same work in as many contests as you choose.)
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #7: be alert for subtle clues about style expectations that may not match your writing.
As I mentioned earlier in this series, if a contest does not have a track record of rewarding your type of work, it’s just not a good idea to make it your single entry for the year. You might even want to think twice about entering that contest at all.
Yes, even if the rules leave open the possibility that your kind of work can in theory win For instance, a certain contest in my area has a Mainstream Fiction category that also accepts literary fiction — and in many years, has accepted genre as well.
Care to guess how often writing that wasn’t explicitly literary has won in this category? Here’s a hint: for many years, the judges had a strong preference for work containing lots and lots of semicolons.
Still unsure? Well, here’s another hint: in recent years, the category description had devoted four paragraphs to defining literary fiction. Including a paragraph specifying that they meant the kind of work that tended to win the Nobel Prize, the Booker Award, the Pulitzer…
In case that didn’t shake up those of you considering entering an honestly mainstream work, I should also add: there have been years in which there were only four paragraphs in the description.
This is yet another reason — in case, you know, you needed more — to read not only the contest rules very carefully, but the rest of a contest’s website as well. Skim a little too quickly, and you may not catch that contest organizers have given a hint to what kinds of work they want to see.
You know, something subtle, like implying that they expect their contest winners to be future runners-up for the Pulitzer.
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #8: be alert for subtle clues about content.
Most literary contests will break down judging categories by writing style and book category, rather than content, but a surprising number of them harbor content preferences. They tend to be fairly upfront about them, too., referring to them either overtly (in defining the categories) or covertly (in defining winning criteria for the judges).
This is particularly true in short story and essay competitions, I notice. Indeed, in short-short competitions, it’s not at all uncommon for a topic to be assigned outright. At the risk of repeating myself, read ALL OF THE RULES with care before you submit; such contests assume that entrants will be writing work designed exclusively for their eyes.
This should not, I feel, ever be the expectation for contests that accept excerpts from book-length works. Few entrants in these categories write new entirely new pieces for every contest they enter, with good reason: it would be quixotic. Presumably, one enters a book in a contest in order to advance the book’s publication prospects, not merely for the sake of entering a contest, after all.
Because the write-it-for-us expectation does sometimes linger, make sure to read the category’s definition before you decide to enter work you have already written. If the category is defined in such a way that writing like yours is operating at a disadvantage, your chances of winning fall sharply. The best way to careful with your entry dollar, and enter only those contests and categories where you have a chance of winning.
Mehitabel-pleasing strategy #9: make sure that you’re entering the right category — and that it’s the category you think it is.
Stop laughing. I would love to report that entries never come in labeled for the wrong category, but, alas, sometimes they do.
Why should you worry about something so easily corrected on the receiving end? Contests almost never allow judges to drop a misaligned entry into the correct category’s pile. Leaving Mehitabel to read the out-of-place entry, and to wonder: did the entrant just not read the category descriptions closely enough?
Often, this turns out to be precisely what happened.
This is not a time merely to skim the titles of the categories: get into the details of the description. Read it several times. Have a writer friend read it, then read your entry, to double-check that your work is in fact appropriate to the category as the rules have defined it.
This may seem like a waste of time, but truly, it isn’t. I have seen miscategorized work disqualified — or, more commonly, given enough demerits to knock it out of finalist consideration right away — but never, ever have I seen an entry returned, check uncashed, with an explanation that it was entered in the wrong category.
Next time, I shall discuss category selection a bit more. Yes, entering a literary contest is a complex task, but you’re a complex writer, aren’t you? You can do this.
Admit it: you’ve known that you could do it since you were 12 years old. And if you are 12 years old now, do you have any idea how jealous your elders are that blogs like this exist now? Why, back in my day…
Notice how close to 100 years old I sound already? Not an accident. Mind those cultural references, and keep up the good work!
Okay, you caught me: that’s not ice cream; it’s tiramisù. What do you want from me? The ice cream truck does not start circulating my neighborhood until summer starts.
But enough frivolity: I’m worried about your recovery from yesterday’s magnum opus on contest entry formatting. Surprisingly stressful, isn’t it, to go over contest rules that closely? That never palls, for some reason; I judge contests, and I still found writing last night’s post a trifle nerve-wracking.
Why, other than my habitual deep and abiding empathy for the writer just starting out? I guess it’s because writing contests are in some ways the last bastion of what aspiring writers everywhere would so like to believe the literary world to be: many, if not most, actually are devoted to rewarding good writing first and foremost.
If that’s not the only criterion, well, it’s hard to blame anyone concerned: style is quite a bit more complex to judge than most contest entrants suppose, and it’s only human nature to want their winners to go on to get published. Of course, the market-readiness of the text is legitimate to judge. So is aptness of subject matter, and vocabulary vis-à-vis intended audience. And realistically, how can the first- and second-round contest judges not give some thought to how an entry in a book-length category is likely to fare in the current book market, when the opinions and tastes of the agent, editor, or established author judging the finalist round have been formed (or at any rate informed) by market trends?
“Whoa!” some of you purists shout indignantly. “This is beginning to sound an awful lot like how our old nemesis, Millicent the agency screener, looks at submissions. Next, you’ll be telling me that if my contest entry does not conform to some specific cosmetic standard, it won’t make the finalist round, no matter how well-written it is.”
Oh, didn’t you read yesterday’s post? It’s rare that a literary contest doesn’t require entries to conform to at least a few specific cosmetic standards of presentation. That’s why I always urge serious contest entrants to go over every syllable of contest entry literature with a magnifying glass, bloodhound, and possibly a psychic, to make sure that you are aware of every tiny little rule that might be lurking in the small print.
Try not to think of such strictures as extraneous to the question of writing quality. Try to think of it as evidence of Mehitabel the contest judge’s being so committed to evaluating writing style that she does not want any mere presentation concerns to get in the way of that laudable endeavor.
How so? Just as submitting a manuscript in standard format minimizes the probability that Millicent will be concentrating on anything but your writing, following contest rules to the letter is a writer’s best bet for assuring the judge the freedom to focus on the words on the page. That’s what you want, isn’t it, purists?
What’s that you say? You hadn’t been thinking of deviations from contest rules as distractions from your good writing? How could they not be, to someone who reads entry after entry in the same format?
I must caution you, though, that not every writing contest embraces the same format — and not every category within a contest might call for the same formatting. Read the rules carefully every single time.
Yes, even if you have entered the contest in question before; contests change their rules all the time. Don’t assume that what was required the last time you entered a contest will be what’s required next time.
What kind of things might change, you ask with fear and trembling? Well, the last time I wrote a series on this topic, a local writers’ contest of my acquaintance stated very clearly in its entry guidelines: Have the title of the submission and page numbers located in the upper right hand corner of each page.
Other than the grammatical problem with that sentence, do you see any problems it might raise, in light of what we discussed yesterday? Why, the slug line for this contest is on the opposite side of the page from what’s expected in standard format for books! And it’s also on the opposite side of the page from where this same contest dictated the slug line should be the previous year!
Followed much woe and uproar, as you might imagine, as well as much speculation amongst repeat contest entrants. “Are the organizers trying to place those of us familiar with standard format at a disadvantage?” entirely theoretical potential entrants came to me in private to complain, as if I were still affiliated with the organization sponsoring the contest. “Or are they just attempting to discourage those of us who have been entering this contest every year since space travel was only a pipe dream?”
Who do I look like, the Amazing Kreskin? I have no idea what was going on in the rule-changers’ minds. Having served often as a contest judge, however, I can engage in some wild speculation about why it might be to the organizers’ advantage to change the rules from time to time on issues like this.
Okay, on with the unsubstantiated guesswork: it would render weeding out entries in the first round quite a bit quicker. How? By making it instantly apparent to Mehitabel which entrants had read the rules carefully and those who simply took their names out of the slug lines of the manuscripts they were already submitting to agents, printed up the requisite number of pages, and submitted them as they were to the contest.
And I do mean instantly apparent. Specifying an odd location for the slug line may not seem as though it would change the entry much, but actually, it would be one of the easiest rule violations possible to spot, other than using the wrong typeface or not indenting paragraphs. Take another look at our example from earlier in this series — and, to make it interesting, I’m using one that adheres to another of the Unnamed Local Contest’s rather oddball requirements, asterisks to designate section breaks.
Now, that page would make pretty much any Millicent in the land happy, in terms of formatting, right? The asterisk line is a bit old-fashioned (translation: Millicent’s boss is going to make you take it out if she signs you), but still, it’s basically in standard format otherwise. And it would been considered perfectly acceptable in a ULC submission at any point between, say, Apollo I and the advent of the space shuttle.
But see how different the same page looks with the slug line as the ULC’s rule change directed a few years back:
Don’t need the aforementioned bloodhound or magnifying glass to spot that difference, do you? Neither would Mehitabel.
I’m not saying, of course, that ease of first-round disqualification was the actual motive behind the rule change; as I said, I’m engaging in irresponsible speculation here. I’m saying that this year, the ULC’s contest guidelines specified that All pages of the submission must have the category number, manuscript title, and page number listed in the upper right-hand corner.
Which means, of course, that both our first and second examples would be, if not actually disqualified, then at least had enough points subtracted to render making it to the finalist round particularly likely. And all for a change that, while it would leap off the page at Mehitabel, might not even be noticed by a reader unfamiliar with manuscript format — and that would drive those of us accustomed to properly-formatted book manuscripts nuts.
The space shuttle has been grounded, and time has moved on. Take a gander:
“But Anne,” the eagle-eyed among you will no doubt exclaim, “that’s not the only difference between this example and the previous two. Earlier, there were five asterisks indicating the section break; here, there are only three. What gives?”
What gives, ladies and gentlemen, is yet another change in long-standing contest rules. This year, the wording changed at the bottom of the rule page: Indicate scene breaks (such as: POV/Location/Time change) by three spaced asterisks.
The moral of the story is — let’s all shout it together, shall we? — always, always, ALWAYS go over the contest rules more than once and follow them to the letter. Don’t assume that you know what they say after only a cursory glance, and for heaven’s sake, don’t blindly follow the advice of any given yahoo with a website who happens to give advice to writers.
Yes, including yours truly. Heck, I WON that contest once, and if I hadn’t combed the new rules, I would not have been aware of either of these newfangled requirements.
That being said, let’s move on to another element many contest entrants overlook: the title page for your contest entry.
Already, I hear dissension in the ranks. “But Anne,” I hear those of you planning to enter next year’s version of the ULC, “I realize that the contest you were discussing yesterday did require a title page, but if I’m reading the rules correctly, the contest I’m entering doesn’t ask for one. I’m afraid of breaking the rules — do I really need to add it?”
I understand your fear, cringing pre-entrants, but in my opinion, yes, you do need one, for precisely the same reason that a professional writer always includes a title page with any book-length manuscript or excerpt therefrom she plans to submit to an agent or editor. It’s just the way the pros do things.
Not to mention that a title page in standard format is stuffed to the proverbial gills with all kinds of information that’s highly useful to folks in the industry. Look at what Millicent would expect to see topping a manuscript:
See? A great many of the basic facts an agent would need to know to acquire and sell a book are right there at her fingertips: what kind of book it is, how long it is, the title, the author — and, most importantly from our point of view, how to get ahold of that gifted author in order to proffer a representation contract. (For more of the hows and whys of a standard format title page, please see the aptly-named HOW TO FORMAT A TITLE PAGE category on the archive list at right.)
For a contest, however, these are not the relevant facts Mehitabel needs to know — in fact, the mention of a couple of ‘em might well get you disqualified. But almost without exception, contest rules will specify that an entrant must provide certain additional information — and the logical place to do that is on a title page.
Let’s take, for instance, the ULC’s entry guidelines — or are these the guidelines from a few years ago. Do check. At one time, at least, its rules demanded that, in addition to filling out an entry form, the entrant should include other information:
*The Contest Category name and number (e.g. Category 3: Romance Genre) must be printed on the first page of the submission and on the mailing envelope. *All pages of the submission (chapters and synopsis) must have the title of the manuscript. *Do not type your name on any page of the submission. It should appear only on your registration form and return envelope.
And, from elsewhere in the rules, our old friend:
*Have the title of the submission and page numbers located in the upper right hand corner of each page.
We dealt with quite a few of these criteria yesterday and earlier today, right? Even though the rules do not invoke the magical words slug line, we’ve all had enough experience now with manuscripts to know that is what they’re talking about, right? So no worries here.
Except for that pesky requirement to name the category. Sure, it says to place it on the first page of the submission, but does that mean on a title page or on the first page of text?
Most contest entrants go for the latter. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this — except for the fact that including information other than the chapter name and number on the first page of text makes it look to anyone familiar with standard manuscript format as though the writer just doesn’t know the difference between short story format.
Oh, you’re not familiar with the latter? It looks like this:
And the proper format for the first page of a book-length manuscript, which looks like this:
I ask you once again: did you require either a magnifying glass or a bloodhound, or even a psychic, to ferret out the difference between those two pages? I’m hoping not, but if you did, you might consider consulting a qualified eye specialist.
So while you could comply with the rules (if they are for the right year) by shoving the title, category, and genre onto the first page of text, it’s not going to look very market-ready to trained eyes. And we all know by now how your garden-variety contest judge feels about marketability, don’t we?
Before you stress out too much about this seeming Catch-22, your fairy godmother is here to make it all better. I’ve got a simple, elegant solution that will both satisfy the rule-huggers and make your entry look spotlessly professional.
You guessed it: by adding a title page.
Don’t worry about its adding length to your entry: as I mentioned in passing yesterday, in neither contests nor manuscripts are title pages either numbered or counted in page counts. What might it look like otherwise, you ask? Well, obviously, it would vary slightly from contest to contest, depending upon what the rules called upon the writer to provide, but were our pal Gus entering the ULC, I might advise him to make his entry’s title page look a little something like this:
Admittedly, there have been more exciting title pages in the history of the world, but this one offends no one, adheres to the contest’s stated guidelines, and gives the necessary information. Everybody wins, so to speak.
Note, too, that just like a title page in standard format, the contest entry title page is in the same font and typeface as the rest of the manuscript. Resist the temptation to add bells and whistles such as boldfacing, larger type, or (heaven preserve us) designs. This is not the place to show your creativity: it’s the place to show your professionalism.
Show your creativity in the text you submit.
Resist, too, the astonishingly common impulse to include an epigraph of any sort on either the title page or the first page of your entry. You know what I’m talking about, right? Those little quotations and/or excerpts of poetry that authors so love to tack on to the front of their work, presumably to demonstrate that they are well-read, the source of their inspiration for the book to follow, or a subtle announcement that this work is ready to join the community of well-loved published writing.
I have to admit, I like ‘em, too, but do you know what they start to look like to professional readers after only a year or two of seeing them emblazoned on title pages, first pages, or pages of their own in manuscripts? Like little picket signs reading, I’m just as good as the writer I’m quoting — take my word for it.
To which the professional reader is likely to respond, after being confronted with the 1500th manuscript this year similarly picketed, “Oh, yeah? You’ve just raised the bar to prove it, baby. You’d better write like Gustave Flaubert!”
Just don’t do it in a contest entry, no matter how integral to the plot that opening poem may be, even if you wrote it yourself. Even if one of the characters wrote it. The judges show to assess your writing, not those of the people you like to quote.
I sense some of you scratching your heads. “But Anne,” deep thinkers everywhere ask, and who could blame them? “I don’t get it. Oh, I get why a contest’s organizers might want to render it this tricky to follow its rules. They’re entitled to test which entrants are paying attention. What I don’t get is why, if they’re going to do it that way, they don’t just post the rules for standard format.
That’s a good question, thinkers. I suspect that if you asked most contest organizers and judges, they would be flabbergasted at the suggestion that writers who haven’t been submitting their work fairly regularly to agents, editors, and magazines would be entering their contest at all. “So wouldn’t,” Millicent muses, “their writing already be in standard format?”
If you doubt this, take a gander at most literary contests’ rules: most of the time, specific expectations are compressed under terse statements such as, submit in industry standard format.
That should make those of you who have been hanging out on this site for a while feel pretty darned good about yourselves — because, believe me, having some idea what standard format should look like, or even that such a thing exists, places you several furlongs in front of aspiring writers who do not. (If you fall into the latter category, you might want to hie yourself hence to the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT category at right.) Because — correct me if your experience contradicts this — this is an industry that tends to conflate lack of professional knowledge with lack of artistic seriousness.
That is as true for contest entries as for submissions to agents. That’s why, in case you have been wondering, I harp on standard format so much here. No one is born aware of how the industry expects to see writing presented, but the rules are seldom shared with those new to the game — and almost never explained in much detail.
Certainly not on your garden-variety contest entry guideline page. Admittedly, sometimes one sees the rules asserted in an aggressive do this or fail! tone, but it’s pretty difficult to apply a rule unless you know what it’s for and how it should be implemented.
That’s my feeling about it, anyway. Call me zany, but I would rather see all of you judged on the quality of your WRITING than on whether your manuscript or contest entry adheres to a set of esoteric rules. But unless it does conform to those (often unspoken) rules, it’s just not going to look professional to someone who is used to reading top-of-the-line work.
So try to think of quadruple-checking those rules as the necessary prerequisite to getting a fair reading for your writing — and bear in mind that most judges will expect the author of that winning entry to have been hanging around the industry for a good long time.
The two categories where this expectation is most evident are screenwriting and poetry. Almost any contest that accepts screenplays will use the same draconian standard that the average script agent does: if it’s not in positively the right format (and in the standard typeface for screenplays, Courier), it will be rejected on sight.
Now, I’m going to be honest with you here: I am not a screenwriter. So if you are looking for guidance on how to prep a screenplay entry, I have only one piece of advice for you: GO ASK SOMEONE WHO DOES IT FOR A LIVING.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I don’t want any of my readers to be laboring under the false impression that this is the place to pick up screenplay formatting tips. Happily, there are both many, many websites out there just packed with expert advice on the subject, and good screenplay formatting software is easily and cheaply available. I would urge those of you with cinema burning in your secret souls to rush toward both with all possible dispatch.
I can speak with some authority about poetry formatting, however. Remember how I mentioned yesterday that where contest rules are silent, their organizers generally assume that writers will adhere to standard format — which is to say, the form that folks who publish that kind of writing expect submitters to embrace? Well, that’s true for poetry as well.
So what does standard format for poetry look like? Quite a bit as you’d expect, I’d expect:
* Single-spaced lines within a stanza
* A skipped line between stanzas
* Left-justified text, with a ragged right margin
* Centered title on the first line of the page
* 1″ margins on all sides of the page
* 12-point typeface on white paper, printed on only one side of the page.
In other words, it shouldn’t be formatted the way you might see it in a book, where the left margin might be a few inches in, or on a greeting card, where the text floats somewhere closer to the center of a page. Basically, the average poetry submission looks like…well, let me go ahead and borrow a manuscript page from a favorite poet of mine, Wallace Stevens:
Pretty straightforward, eh? Now let’s see what how a contest rules might call for something slightly different. To pick one set at random, let’s take a random year’s worth of the ULC’s:
* Submit three complete poems.
* Single-space within stanza, double-space between stanzas.
* Maximum length of collection: 3 pgs.
* Use 12pt Times New Roman or Times (Mac).
At the point I checked — today? Last year? Fifteen years ago? — there were all of the category-specific guidelines listed. By scrolling to a different part of the ULC’s entry guidelines page, I found others:
* One-sided 8 1/2 x 11 standard WHITE paper.
* 1” margins all around.
* Have the title of the submission and page numbers located in the upper right hand corner of each page.
* Each submission MUST show the name of the category to which it is submitted.
Okay, what can we learn from this, other than that it’s always a good idea to read the contest’s entry guidelines in its entirety, rather than merely the section on one’s chosen category? Any occasion for our pal Wallace to panic about the breadth of necessary changes to his already-formatted poem?
Not really. Oh, the rules seem pretty hostile to the notion that any worthwhile poem could possibly be longer than a single page (take that, Lord Byron!), as well as unaware that Word for Mac does in fact feature the Times New Roman font — and has for many years. But otherwise, there’s not a lot here that ol’ Wallace is going to have to change.
Except, of course, for taking his name out of the slug line and moving it to the other side of the page, along with the category number.
Do I hear some confused muttering out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you point out, and who could blame you? “What about needing to place the title in the slug line? Each of the three less-than-page-long poems will have a different title, won’t it?”
Great question, unseen mutterers. I’ll complicate it further: in the ULC’s rules for book-length works, there’s an additional regulation that may apply here:
* The Contest Category name and number (e.g. Category 3: Romance Genre) on the first page of the submission and on the mailing envelope.
Yes, yes, this bit does appear in the section of the rules that apply to categories other than poetry. But tell me: do you want your entry to be the one that tests whether the ULC’s organizers don’t think this rule should apply to the poetry category?
I didn’t think so. If I were a poet, I certainly would not omit scrawling Category 9: Poetry on the outside of my entry envelope.
You, of course, are free to do as you wish. But remember how I demonstrated earlier in this post that adding a title page can help smooth over quite a few little logistical problems? Look what happens to the opening of our pal Wallace’s entry if he takes that advice to heart:
Both of these pages are in Times New Roman, incidentally, created on a Mac. (Hey, I couldn’t resist.) But, in case you didn’t notice, they adhere to the 2008 rules, and it is now 2012.
Oh, Wally. Haven’t you been listening?
It’s a shame, too, because by the ULC’s standards of 2008, Wally would have neatly avoided any rule violations. Oh, he could have given his collection of poetry (if a mere three poems can legitimately be called a collection; if he were a collector of, say, teapots, he would be considered merely a hobbyist collector if he had only three) a more exciting overarching title, but this gets the job done. It also satisfies the contest’s rule requiring that the title be in the slug line, along with the page number.
What’s not to like? Other than the fact that he was operating off a 4-year-old list of rules, that is.
Amazing what a lot of explanation — and a lot of stress — a seemingly simple set of rules can engender, isn’t it? Next time, we shall depart the barren landscape of nitpickery for the fertile valleys of style. Keep up the good work!
Well, the day has finally arrived campers — or, rather, the eve has arrived: the deadline for entering this year’s William Faulkner/William Wisdom Literary Competition is, if I am reading my calendar correctly, tomorrow. As I promised way back at the beginning of this series, although I shall continue talking about the larger issues of contest entry preparation over the next week and a half or so (I have a special treat in store for you for Memorial Day weekend), this evening, I shall be demonstrating how to do something that every conscientious writing contest entrant should be doing immediately before hitting SEND or popping that entry in the mail: going over the rules of the contest in question with, if not the proverbial fine-toothed comb, than at least a great big ol’ magnifying glass.
Because the deadline is so close — tomorrow at midnight for e-mailed entries! — I am going to try to keep this post brief. I realize that I’m writing for two constituencies here, those of you planning to enter this particular contest this year and those who are interested in improving your familiarity with the contest-entry process in general. Rest assured, I shall return to longer, in-depth analyses the day after tomorrow, but for tonight and tomorrow, I shall try to keep it brief and to the point.
Let’s dive right in, then. Most contests require entrants to submit an entry form, and the Faulkner/Wisdom competition is no exception. Their form is quite straightforward, though, so in the interests of time, I shall keep my remarks minimal.
Like many contests, although it specifies electronic entries, it asks entrants to download the form, print it out, fill it out, and submit it via regular mail along with the entry fee. Generally speaking, when contests list this quite common requirement, the form and check must be postmarked by the contest’s deadline.
The thing to notice about the form itself: check for a signature line. Virtually any contest will require entrants to sign something, either literally or electronically, indicating that they agree to the terms of the contest. That means, in practice, that if there is any fine print indicating that a writer is signing away rights to submission — in this case, first publication rights for short pieces, or excerpts for longer works — it tends to appear on the entry form, just above the signature line. It is in your best interest to read this section very carefully before you either sign or submit the entry fee.
“But Anne,” impatient contest entrants across the English-speaking world shout, “I’m in a hurry to get this out the door! I don’t have time to take a magnifying glass to the fine print!”
I know, I know — but I’m telling you to do it, anyway. The more reputable a contest is, the less likely you are to find surprises there, but just as you should never sign a representation or publication contract without first (a) reading it, (b) making sure you understand to what you are agreeing by signing it, and if you have any doubts about (b), (c) asking relevant questions and/or (d) getting someone conversant with such contracts to give you some advice (the Authors’ Guild offers (d) to its members, I’m told), you should not sign a contest form unless you are positive that you understand what you are empowering contest’s organizers to do with the writing you enter.
And no, I am not going to walk you through this contest’s fine print or any other. I am not an attorney; please do not ask me for advice on writing-related contracts. All I can legitimately do is urge you to be careful what you sign — and to whom you send your work.
But if you joined this series late and want some tips on how to figure out if a literary contest is legit — and not all are, alas, I can certainly help you there: you will find several posts’ worth of sifting criteria beginning here.
So much for the form. The next thing you are going to want to check for is for general entry guidelines. Don’t be surprised if, as is the case for the contest we’ve been discussing, you need to scroll down the page from the category guidelines or even click to a different page to find them. It is the entrant’s responsibility to follow every rule the sponsoring organization has established for its contest, whether it has elected to post them in one place or not. Double-check that you have not missed some provisions.
Oh, I hear some of you snickering, but you would not believe how often contest entries will adhere strictly to, say, the category guidelines, while totally ignoring the general rules. Or vice-versa. Don’t expect Mehitabel the contest judge to cut you any slack; the judging restrictions will probably forbid it.
Stop rolling your eyes. That’s not a matter of meanness: those rules were established for a reason. Remember, ignorance of posted rules is not a valid excuse here; if the organizers took the time to post them, they will expect all successful entrants to abide by them.
Pretty much every set of general guidelines will include a section on who is and is not eligible to enter the contest. Check these restrictions carefully: as we discussed earlier in this series, it is a waste of a writer’s time, energy, and entry fee to enter a contest he does not have a realistic chance of winning.
Unless, of course, he’s doing it just for the practice in entering contests. That’s not the world’s worst idea, actually: as we have been seeing, there’s more to preparing a winning contest entry than just printing up what you’ve already written, signing a check for the entry fee, and popping it in the mail. Some of this stuff is genuinely counterintuitive. A dry run now might improve your chances down the line.
And then there will be the general rules. This is the part you are going to want to check, double-check — and then go through it again with a pad and pen, making your own list of what’s required. Then, if you’re prudent, you’ll have someone with good reading skills go over both your list and the rules, to make sure that they jibe.
Oh, you may laugh, but believe me, there’s nothing sadder for Mehitabel to see than a well-written entry that scuttles itself because it’s missing a required element. Or is formatted incorrectly, by the contest’s individual standards. Or is instantly disqualified because the entrant forgot to sign the entry form.
Fair warning: the rules may not be presented in a format that’s particularly easy on the eyes, or even organized as a list. They also might not be labeled as straightforwardly as CONTEST RULES. It’s up to the entrant to track them down and read them carefully, to catch the nuances.
Let’s go over the rules for our example contest together, to see what that might entail in practice. If you’re having trouble reading individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.
I wasn’t kidding about it’s being hard on the eyes. Grab a pen and paper, please, and go back through the Manuscript Requirements, making two lists: a to-do list for pulling together your entry, and an eligibility requirement list.
Yes, yes, I know: it’s a tedious exercise, and this particular contest, like most, had a separate general statement about eligibility. What I’m talking about here are the specific entry requirements, not the disclaimers. Besides, but wouldn’t you rather do this for the first time when I’m doing it, too, so we can compare notes?
How’d you do? Here’s my gleaned list of eligibility requirements:
1. If I want to submit more than one piece of writing — whether in the same category or different ones — I will need to e-mail them separately, as well as filling out a separate entry form and paying a separate entry fee.
Although this provision appears late in the Manuscript Requirements, I’m placing it front and center, due to its importance to the entrant’s decision about what to send. Each short story, poem, novel-in-progress excerpt, etc. will require a separate entrance fee, and must be presented separately.
Please take both the fees and the time per entry seriously. And don’t even think of trying to get around this provision by trying to pass off a collection as an individual entry. As we shall see below, their Mehitabels have no patience for that kind of rules origami.
2. Any writing I enter cannot have been published before in its current form.
Remember last week, when we were discussing what would happen if a book you entered in a contest got picked up by an agent or acquired by a publisher between the time you entered it and the time the winners were announced? Helpfully, this contest’s rules have spelled out explicitly what would happen in this instance; in other contests, you may have to search the aforementioned fine print for this information.
3. If what I want to enter has been published anywhere — even online — at least of 50% of its current phrasing must be different than the published version. It’s fine if it’s been quoted at length elsewhere, though.
Again, this is spelled out much more carefully than your garden-variety contest rules; that’s nice for the entrants. No fine points of law here: if it’s been published before in a mostly similar form, don’t enter it.
4. Self-publishing counts toward (2) and (3), if it sold more than 500 copies.
Nice to see this spelled out, too. Count only sales as of the contest’s entry deadline.
5. Online publishing counts toward (2) and (3), too.
I’m rather glad to see this one, actually: technically, writing posted online is published. The key phrase here is published in its entirety on the Internet ; if you’re in doubt about reusing material that’s been part or in a different form, consult rule #2.
6. I should not even consider entering anybody’s writing but my own. Oh, and it must be in English.
This is just common sense, really. So why might a contest’s organizers think to include provisions like this? Probably because they have been burned by plagiarized entries in foreign languages in the past. Or perhaps just one or the other. At the very least, they have heard of another contest’s winner being caught doing so.
Don’t laugh — it’s not all that uncommon for a contest’s rules to reflect the organization’s experience at contest-throwing. Speaking of which…
7. If I try to enter a short story or essay collection in a book-length category, it will be disqualified.
Again, that reads like the result of experience. As does this provision:
8. I must commit to what I want Mehitabel to judge: “please do not send us your collections and expect us to select one piece as the entry.”
But that’s starting to make more sense now, isn’t it? Let’s press on.
9. That goes double if I’m submitting poetry: “Poets! Do not send us multiple poems and expect us to select one.”
Wow, this cri de coeur even features an exclamation point. Translation: if you want to submit more that one poem, see rule #1.
10. On the bright side, I can send in as many separate entries as I have time, money, and patience to assemble.
Bearing in mind that…
11. I must submit each entry as a Word attachment to an e-mail. Each entry must be in its own e-mail, and I must mail a separate entry form and check for each.
If you don’t have the e-mail experience to be confident about this part, recruit somebody that does. You’ll only have one chance to get this right.
12. If I copy and paste my entry into an e-mail, I will be disqualified.
Sorry to phrase it so baldly, but I wanted to make sure that all of you caught the implication here. Take it seriously.
How did you do? Coming up with that list wasn’t as easy as you thought it would be, was it?
Note, too, that the criteria on this list were gleaned from across both of the sections above; that should also be true of the to-do list. That’s the result of careful reading. Please, for your own sake, never assume that all of the rules that apply to your category appear in only one part of the contest’s website or rules document.
But you did, didn’t you? How do I know? Because I stacked the deck, that’s how. Hadn’t you been wondering what the entry fee was?
Oh, hadn’t you noticed that it did not appear in our earlier explanatory documents? It’s located in a completely different section of the rules, under Divisions of this Competition — and it turns out that the entry fee varies depending upon what is being entered. On the website, this information appears quite a bit above the general rules.
See? A savvy contest entrant isn’t afraid to do a bit of exploring. Since it’s broken down by category, I’m not going to reproduce it all here. Since most of my readers write books, let’s take a gander at that category designation.
Have I sufficiently made my point about reading contest rules IN THEIR ENTIRETY and VERY CAREFULLY INDEED? This part throws quite a different complexion on the decision to enter: unlike the vast majority of literary contests (and, indeed, agencies), these kind folks recognize that sometimes, a story takes more than 400 pages to tell. They allow prolific writers to enter longer manuscripts; they merely charge a non-unreasonable extra handling fee.
Which gives us a two more entry criteria, right?
13. I shall need to read every relevant contest category’s information IN ITS ENTIRETY, to check for any special requirements specific to that category — and to find out how much the entry fee will be.
Spoiler alert: every category in the competition has its own additional criteria. I shall not list them all here; do check.
14. I need to do an honest word count of my manuscript — and think very carefully whether I want to pay extra to cover additional length, or to revise the work to make it shorter.
Only you can decide this, of course. While you are deliberating, however, do bear in mind that actual word counts tend to be a whole heck of a lot higher than publishing industry estimates. By current estimation techniques, a 400-page manuscript in standard format in Times New Roman is 100,000 words (250 words/page x # of pages). An actual count of precisely the same pages would probably run closer to 120,000 words.
“But wait!” some of you shout, and with good reason. “I notice there’s nothing here about whether I can enter the same piece of writing in multiple years of the same contest. What if I placed in Novel-in-Progress last year — could I enter it again this year, since it’s still in progress?”
Excellent question, repeat entrant-wannabes. I had to wander all the way down to the bottom of an exceedingly well-stuffed webpage to find the answer to that one: “Winners in one competition year will not be eligible to win again in the same category. Work for different categories, however, will be accepted from previous winners. Entries rejected in one competition year will be eligible for entry in subsequent years with significant revisions if accompanied by a letter explaining briefly how the manuscript has been revised.”
That’s nice and clear, right? Fringe benefit: while I was poking around down there, I dug up a few hints about what criteria Mehitabel might be weighing extra-heavily in assessing entries. Take a gander: “We strongly suggest that authors have their work read by disinterested third parties for purposes of correcting spelling, grammar, and typographical mistakes, prior to finalizing entries. We also strongly suggest that authors give major attention to beginnings and endings, dialogue, transitions, and character development, as our experience has been that these are the areas which preliminary judges focus on when selecting work to progress to final rounds.”
That’s helpful, isn’t it? I love it when contest guidelines give this kind of hint — it’s generous to entrants.
Now that you have a complete list of entry criteria in hand, make it useful. Consider very carefully, please, whether what you had planned to enter meets all of the requirements on that list. If it doesn’t, save your time, money, and hope: the contest’s organizers have already told you that such an entry cannot win.
Is all of that clear? Now is the time to speak up, if not.
Let’s move on to my to-do list for preparing an entry — recognizing, of course, that since every writing contest has its own rules, the to-do list for this contest cannot be applied usefully to preparing an entry for any other contest out there. Specificity is the name of the game here, people.
1. Prepare a separate checklist for each piece of writing I’m entering, because each is considered a separate entry — and thus entering more than one piece of writing will require filling out a separate entry form and entry fee.
Again, I’m opening with this one because it will affect everything that comes thereafter. If you are planning to prepare more than one entry, maintain a separate checklist for each one. Otherwise, it’s just too easy for a stressed-out mind to reason, “Oh, I’ve already done step 8 for all of my entries,” whereas in fact Entry #3 is winging its way across the continent unaccompanied by the material step 8 would have provided.
Yes, it does happen. All the time. Yet another phenomenon that makes Mehitabel sad.
2. Save any writing I plan to enter as its own Word document, as a .doc file, not .docx, so I may send it as an attachment to an e-mail.
Please take this restriction seriously — not all versions of Word can open .docx files. If you want to submit your entry as a .docx file, or in any other format other than Word, do not bother to enter.
I’m serious about this. Mehitabel will not care that you prefer to work with PDFs or fell in love with WordPerfect. Microsoft Word is the current industry standard for manuscripts, period, and she knows it. She will disqualify entries that do not meet this criterion without thinking twice.
Do not, whatever you do, simply plan on attaching your working file of your manuscript. If it is currently in standard format, it violates a contest rule.
3. Go to the header of this document and remove the author’s name from the slug line.
The slug line, if you will recall, is the bit in the upper left-hand margin of a properly-formatted book manuscript that reads: Author’s Last Name/Title/page #. The manuscript may not be numbered anywhere else on the page.
Obviously, though, for a blind-judged contest, an ordinary slug line would result in disqualification, as it contains the entrant’s last name. Your contest entry slug line should look like this: Title/#
That means, incidentally, that if you are entering a memoir, you must change all of the names before you enter it in this contest. Because this is such a common means of disqualification for memoir entries, I would go the extra mile and place a note on the bottom of the title page, reading: To preserve anonymity, all names have been changed.
A bit paranoid? Perhaps. But to coin a phrase, better safe than sorry. Let’s move on.
4. Figure out the actual word count for each piece I am entering.
Careful here: the contest’s rules are asking for something different than what an agent would. Do not estimate the word count: highlight the entire text and use the WORD COUNT feature in Word to come up with an actual number.
5. Print out one entry form for each piece of writing I plan to enter and fill it out.
Remember, for this contest, the filled-out entry form — signed, mind you — and the check for the entry fee must be mailed, while the entry itself is e-mailed. Plan to get both on their way before the deadline.
Don’t write in cursive — yes, really. Use either block printing or track down somebody with a typewriter.
Why do this at this particular juncture? So you may double-check that all the information on it matches exactly what you say on…
6. Prepare a separate Word document (again, saved as a .doc file) with all of the requested contact sheet information.
What was that information again? Let’s recap:
(a) My name (real name, please — this is not the time to take your nom de plume for a test drive. If you win, you’ll want the contest organizers to write the check in the name by which your bank manager knows you, right?
(b) My mailing address (don’t assume that since you are sending this via e-mail, they can just hit REPLY)
(c) My e-mail address (ditto)
(d) Daytime phone number, designated as such (Oh, you didn’t catch that one? That’s because this was not on the list of required elements in the Manuscript Requirements section; it was in the What Constitutes an Entry section. Didn’t I tell you to read everything very carefully?)
(e) Evening phone number, designated as such (ditto)
(f) FAX number (ditto again. If you don’t have a FAX sitting on your desk — and who does, these days? — just say no FAX number
(g) The title of the piece I am submitting in this entry (yes, entrants mix up multiple entries all the time)
(h) The actual word count of the entry (aren’t you glad you figured that above?)
(i) The category of the contest I am entering (more on that later)
Save the whole shebang as a .doc file, not as a .docx file and set it aside. You’re going to be attaching it to your entry e-mail.
7. Reopen the Word document I created in Step #2 (saved as a .doc file, of course) and add a new page 1, a page break, then the 1-page synopsis, followed by another page break.
In other words, this document should include, in the following order:
(a) A title page containing ONLY the title and category It should not be numbered, nor should it be included in the word count.
(b) That 1-page synopsis we discussed at such great length this past weekend If the entry is a book-length work, that is. In the current Word document, this should be page 1, but not included in the word count.
(c) The writing you are planning to enter, in standard format EXCEPT for not having your last name in the slug line. Because of the requested order here, the first page of the text of your book will be page 2. Try not to let it bug you.
Do not include a second title page, an epigraph on a separate page (those nifty quotes so often seen at the beginning of books), or a table of contents. Just the text in standard format — except, of course, for the altered slug line.
What you should have now is a single Word document (.doc, please!) with all three of these elements. Save it. This, too, is going to be attached to your entry e-mail.
8. If I am writing memoir, do a search of this second document for my own first name — and then for my own last name.
Oh, you thought your entry couldn’t get disqualified if you changed your name from Irma Grub to Bella Butterfly — and then the guy to whom Bella refers consistently as Dad is identified in the text as Mr. Grub?
9. Oh, heck, no matter what I’m writing, I’m going to want to go back and make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that my name does not appear anywhere in my entry except in the two specified places.
Remember, your name can appear only on the contact sheet from Step #6 (which will be a separate attachment from your entry, the entry form (which you will be sending via regular mail), and, presumably, your check (which you shall gracefully tuck into the envelope with the entry form, perhaps shuddering slightly as you do so).
Wait — how much should that check be written for, and to whom? Thank goodness, the rules are explicit about that.
10. Check the word count from Step #4 against the pricing list in the category section. Write check/money order/traveler’s check accordingly.
You think you’re done now, don’t you? Ah, not so fast. Since the price of making even a relatively small mistake is so high — getting points knocked off at best, getting disqualified at worst — I’d like you to do two more things. No, make that three.
11. Go back through this checklist and make sure that I have actually done every single thing on it.
Honestly, you would be surprised how often even the most conscientious contest entrant misses something. Then…
12. Go back though the entry requirements checklist to make absolutely certain that what I’m about to enter still meets all of those criteria.
Don’t make that face at me. Your sense of this may well have changed over the course of preparing the entry.
Still have a few moments left before you have to hit SEND and/or rush the entry form to the post office? If you can possibly manage it, take this extra step.
13. Hand the checklist to someone I trust and ask him or her to quadruple-check that my entry contains all of the required elements.
Humor me on this one. Sometimes, a second set of eyes can catch a previously unnoticed problem — especially if the first set of eyes is bleary and bloodshot from having stayed up for days on end, preparing a contest entry.
Everything in its place? Excellent. Now you’re ready to send it off. Or are you?
14. Compose a nice, polite e-mail to the contest’s organizers, and attach the two Word documents to it.
Oh, you were planning to attach them to a blank e-mail? Isn’t that a trifle rude to the stalwart volunteers who will, out of the goodness of their hearts and their deep devotion to literature, be opening all of those entries and making sure that none of them have violated the rules?
But before you send it off…
15. At any point in this process, did it occur to you to spell- and grammar-check your entry?
You would be flabbergasted at how often the answer seems to be no. Certainly, Mehitabel and I are pretty flummoxed by it. Spelling counts here, people.
Obviously, my preference would be for you to read your entry IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD before you send it off, but working against a tight deadline, you may not have that luxury. Do be aware, though, that tired people do occasionally hit CHANGE when the spell-checker makes a ridiculous suggestion (“Cotillion instead of coalition? When did I agree to that universal change?”), and that for some reason I cannot fathom, my version of Word occasionally suggests that I change a contextually correct their to an incorrect there. Let the check-user beware.
16. Now you can hit SEND, seal the envelope with the entry form and fee, and toddle off to the mailbox.
Phew! That was a lot of work, wasn’t it? And that was just to make sure that the entry clung to the rules like an unusually tenacious leech; polishing your actual writing to the high shine requisite to impress Mehitabel will take time over and above all of this.
Ah, the things we do for Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy. Best of luck, everyone, and keep up the good work!
Ready to talk conference rules, campers? I’m rather excited about it, to tell you the truth. Why? Lean in close, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: those of us that work with manuscripts for a living like it when talented aspiring writers enter contests. It’s a way that they can help themselves to succeed.
Yes, it’s true: the publishing world honestly does like writers that help themselves. Especially these days, when being a successful author so often means being one’s own publicist — and copyeditor.
Which is why, before I begin, I would like to say that I’m quite sorry to be posting the promised advice on how to read literary contest rules so much later than I intended, and after most readers’ weekends will have ended. I meant to post this hours ago. Heck, I meant to post it on Saturday morning, but several things came up. I spent the first half of my weekend ill (yet still reposting back issues, so to speak, relevant to the contest-entry experience) and the second half answering questions readers e-mailed me rather than posting here on the blog.
Oh, yes, this happens all the time, I’m sorry to report, especially on weekends. Why is the traffic higher then? Well, I’m not positive, but my sense is that either that’s when writers have spare time — or that they assume I would be answering in my spare time, and thus not on the clock as a writing consultant. After all, each seems to reason, he would be the only one approaching me privately, right? How much of my time could it possibly take?
Quite a lot, actually. This weekend, seven people contacted me on that basis. Only one of them had a question that was even remotely likely to cause problems if posted as a comment.
So I hope you will pardon me if I restate the policy: as the rules for posting comments here at Author! Author! explain, I entertain a vast preference for readers’ posting their questions here in the comments, rather than e-mailing them to me. I write a blog so that my advice is easily accessible to whoever wants to read it, after all. If I answer questions individually, I end up answering the same questions over and over again without future readers being able to benefit from the information.
I appreciate that so many of my readers like to think of me as their friend in the business, but as you may or may not have noticed, this is not a sponsored site. Translation: no one pays me to answer questions here; I do it because I believe that the information good writers need should be readily available. Thus the extensive archives, broken down by common questions.
If you have a question and cannot find a relevant category on the archive list, well, I’d be surprised, but I’m always happy to answer readers’ questions, provided that they ask them politely and in the proper manner. It’s excellent training for working with an agency or publishing house, actually. This is, after all, a business in which courtesy counts.
That’s why, in case any of you had been wondering, writers in general have gotten kind of a bad rap for being inconsiderate. It’s not that we are, as a group; it’s that a persistent few have been, well, overly persistent. For every hundred shy, courteous aspiring writers, there are ten who are, in a word, pushy. In fact, this attitude is so pervasive that quite a few pros simply develop a policy of avoiding giving any advice to up-and-comers at all.
One doesn’t have to encounter too many such boundary-leapers to start contemplating erecting some pretty hefty walls in self-defense. Which is why, in case any of you recent conference-goers had been wondering, it can be very hard to corner some of the speakers to ask a pertinent question or track down an attending agent for a hallway pitch. They’ve probably been the victims of aspiring writers who mistook momentary interest, the willingness to answer a complex question, or even just plain old common courtesy for a commitment to provide hours, weeks, or even years of non-stop assistance.
Oh, I understand the impulse to push it from the aspiring writer’s perspective: since can be so hard to catch a pro’s eye that when you meet someone in the know who is actually nice to you, it can feel pretty wonderful. It can also feel an awful lot like the beginning of a friendship. And it may be — down the line. But from the pro’s point of view, all that friendly interaction was, or could possibly be construed as being, is just that, a friendly interaction with a stranger.
So imagine the pro’s surprise when she arrives back in her office to find five e-mails from that stranger, each more desperate and demanding than the last.
Wildly different understandings of the same interaction are especially prevalent at conferences that schedule pitching appointments for attendees. Many first-time pitchers walk into their sessions so terrified that if the agent or editor smiles even a little and listens sympathetically, they just melt. Here, at last, is a personal connection in an industry that can seem appallingly impersonal from the outside. So when the agent or editor concludes the meeting with a fairly standard request for pages, these pitchers sometimes conclude that the pro only made the request to be nice; s/he couldn’t possibly have meant it.
That’s the less common reaction. The significantly more common is to act as though the agent or editor has already committed to taking on the book. If not actually serving as best man or maid of honor at the writer’s wedding.
Yes, really — I see it at conferences all the time. The writer rushes home, instantly prints up his manuscript, and overnights it to his new friend. Or she rushes home, opens her e-mail account, and instantly sends the requested pages as an attachment to her new friend. Even if they received requests from other agents or editors, they won’t send ‘em out — that might offend the new friend, who clearly by now has a deep stake in signing the writer.
Then both writers fill Hefty bags with Doritos and plop themselves down between their telephones and their computers, waiting for the positive response that will doubtless come any minute now. And they wait.
Many of them are still waiting, in this era where some agencies have policies where no response equals assumed rejection. Others are stunned to receive form-letter rejections that contain no mention of their positive personal interaction at the conference at all. Some are unwise enough to follow up upon either of these reactions with a hurt or angry e-mail to that faithless new friend.
Who will, I guarantee you, be mystified to receive it. “Why is this writer taking my rejection so personally,” they murmur to their screeners, “not to mention so unprofessionally? We talked for five minutes at a conference; it’s not as though I made a commitment to help him. It’s my job to talk to writers at conferences, after all.”
“Hey, look,” Millicent says, pointing at her boss’ e-mail inbox, “your new protégé has just sent you yet another e-mail. Ooh, there’s a third. And a fourth!”
The agent buries her head in her hands. “Cancel my e-mail account. I’m moving to Peru to become a llama herder.”
What we have here, my friends, is a failure to communicate. Agents, editors, conference speakers, and writing gurus are nice to aspiring writers, when they are, because they are nice people, not because any of us (not the sane ones among us, anyway) are likely to pick a single aspirant at random and decide to devote all of our resources to helping him. Any of us who interact with aspiring writers on a regular basis meet hundreds, if not thousands, of people just burning for a break, yet not one of us possesses the magical ability to stare deeply into the eyes of a writer we’ve just met, assess the talent coiled like a spring in that psyche, and determine whether she, alone of those thousands, is worth breaking a few rules to help get into print. Nor are most of us living lives of such leisure that we have unlimited time or resources to devote to helping total strangers.
(Yes, yes, I know: this blog is devoted to helping total strangers along the road to publication, and I do in fact post far more information on any given day than many advice-givers do in a month. Don’t quibble; I’m on a roll here.)
Yet that level of instant, unlimited devotion is precisely what many aspiring writers simply assume is the natural next step after a pleasant initial interaction with a publishing professional. While most, thank goodness, have the intrinsic good sense or Mom-inculcated good manners not to start demanding favors instantly or barrage that nice pro with e-mails asking for advice or a leg up, the few who do are so shameless that, alas, they give all aspiring writers a bad name.
The moral: your mother was right — politeness pays off in the long run.
(What’s that you say? Yesterday was Mother’s Day? Everyone was praising dear old Mom yesterday; you don’t think she would appreciate it today as well?)
Okay, I feel better now. Time to get back to doing today’s last favor, just one, for masses and masses of writers I have never met. After that, I’m off the charitable clock — and it only two in the morning.
Already, eager hands fly into the air. Yes? “Please, Anne,” those of you who paid attention to the prologue to this post ask politely, doffing your urchin caps, “while you already in counting mode, and before you leave the contest synopsis behind, may I please as how one number its pages?”
Ah, that’s a nice, straightforward question — and phrased so courteously, too. So much so that I wish I could give you a more straightforward answer than it varies from contest to contest.
Check the rules for each, rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all approach will meet its requirements. Most of the time, contests will simply specify that all pages of the entry should be numbered; some request that the synopsis or other support materials be numbered separately.
If the rules say to number the synopsis sequentially with the rest of manuscript, by all means do so: if an entry consists of (in the order they appear) a title page, 24 pages of text, and a 3-page synopsis, the title page would be neither numbered nor counted, the text would be pp. 1-24, and the synopsis would be pp. 25-28. If they call for separate numbering, the title page and text would be the same, but the synopsis would start over at page 1.
Surprised that there is no standard answer to this, nor is there any substitute for going over the contest’s rules with the proverbial fine-toothed comb? Don’t be; as we discussed earlier in this series, contests sometimes include slightly oddball rules to render it a bit easier to weed out entries in the first round of judging.
How should a savvy contest entrant handle these dissimilarities? I would HIGHLY recommend going through any contest’s rules with a fine-toothed comb, as well as a nit-pick — and then making a checklist of ALL of the requirements, so you may check them off as you fulfill them.
Actually, if it were my entry, I would go a few steps farther: making the list, checking it twice for accuracy — and then photocopying it a couple of times. Why would a sane contest entrant require three copies? So you can work your way through the contest’s requirements, checking off each item as you complete it on List #1. Then, just before sealing the envelope or hitting SEND, whip out List #2 and check again, to make sure that you didn’t miss anything in the rush to get the entry off to the judges.
And perhaps you would even have the foresight to do as clever reader Tad’s suggested a while back: hand List #3 to your significant other, flat mate, tennis partner, or some other sharp-eyed soul who either loves you enough to do you an unpleasantly tedious favor or is otherwise too polite to say no, and ask him/her/them/it to go through and check your entry for required elements.
I’m not just talking about making sure that you actually remember to include that synopsis you slaved over for so long, either. I’m also referring to adhering to formatting requirements — and yes, Virginia, those too often vary from contest to contest.
Don’t swear, please. Your mother might be listening.
“Okay,” some of you mutter, visibly restraining yourselves from calling upon whatever deity might happen be listening, “let’s assume that I am entering a contest that requires a synopsis. Are you saying that my first stop should be to consult the rules, just in case the contest’s organizers have hidden some trap there?”
No, I’m suggesting that you scan the rules to see if there are special ways they would like to see it formatted. Same action, different attitude. If the rules do express a preference — any preference — follow it to the letter.
Do this even if you believe what they are asking you to do is silly, unheard-of, or downright obsolete. A certain local literary conference of my acquaintance, for instance, insists that section breaks in entries should be denoted by at least three centered asterisks, like this:
Now, those asterisks are not entirely without reason: back in the days of typewriters, they were indeed how a writer alerted the manual typesetter to a section break. Now that publishing houses expect writers to turn manuscripts over to them after contract signing in both hard and soft copy, the asterisked section break is no longer considered proper in a book manuscript. (Short story format is different; at the risk of repeating myself, if you are planning on submitting a short story to a contest or magazine, run, don’t walk, to consult the submission requirements.)
In book manuscripts and proposals, however, those asterisks have gone the way of the horse and buggy. It’s still possible to get around that way, but folks on the highway are going to get a mite annoyed with you.
So while it would be exceedingly foolish to risk disqualification by ignoring the asterisk requirement if you were planning on entering the page above in the aforementioned contest, if you were submitting the same page to an agent or editor, you would be best served by presenting it looking like this:
Which only goes to underscore the point that I have kept banging upon, drum-like, throughout this series on constructing a successful contest entry: contrary to popular belief amongst aspiring writers, the sheets of paper you submit to a contest and to an agent or editor should not necessarily be identical.
Different contexts require different formats, after all. It’s only polite to present your work as the people you want to reward it have asked to see it.
“May I interrupt for a moment, Anne?” some of you ask, handing me bouquets of flowers. “I have been going over the rules of the contest I intend to enter, as you advise, and they do not indicate any special formatting conditions apply. How, then, should I format the pages of my entry?”
An excellent question, and my, those tulips are lovely; thank you so much. You’re going to want to adhere to standard manuscript format, where the rules do not specifically call for something different.
What makes me so sure about that? Since standard format is in fact industry standard (thus the name), contest judges expect to see it. In fact, if an entry is not in standard format (other than the little tweaks the contest’s organizers have amused themselves by adding to the rules), it usually loses either presentation or marketability points.
Remember, the judges want the finalists’ work to be market-ready — which means in the format that agents and editors prefer.
Do I hear some disgruntled shifting of feet out there? Your mothers cannot possibly know that you scuff your nice shoes like that. “But Anne,” some of you mutter, “if they’re so hot on marketability, why don’t they just set up the rules so they’re identical with standard format and call it good?”
Ooh, good question, disgusted mutterers. If contest rules were set afresh every year, or even every decade, that would make abundant sense. They are not; some have not been updated since the Eisenhower administration. Yet contest organizers will frequently insist (in feedback, anyway) that the contest’s rules are standard format, even when — as in the case of the asterisks — that’s no longer true.
But the fact is, contest rules are not revised regularly, generally speaking: in the vast majority of cases, the same rules have been used since the contest began, with additions as contest organizers thought of them, entrants objected, logical problems were noticed, and so forth. (This is often true, incidentally, even of organizations that update their websites frequently.)
I single out no particular contest here, of course. No matter what contest you plan to enter, you should scan its rules carefully for quirks. It’s also a good idea to double-check the category definitions for EVERY category you intend to enter AND the entry form for minute differences. Especially if you happen to be entering a major contest based within my area code, if you catch my drift.
Why is the onus on the writer to catch any discrepancies? Because, realistically, if a contest judge duns you for not following a regulation that was not prominently displayed in the official rules, there’s not much you can do about it in retrospect. Think of it as the difference between the laws on the books and how a judge interprets them from the bench: you may be right in your interpretation, but the judge is the person in the room with the power to throw others in jail for contempt.
For all practical purposes, while you’re in his courtroom, his interpretation is the law. This is why we have appellate courts.
Literary contests, however, do not have a Supreme Court to which writers may appeal. (Although it’s an interesting notion.) Unless a contest gives entrants feedback, it’s unlikely that you’d even find out what the particular charges against your entry were.
Let’s play a little game to show how differently an author, a regular reader, and a contest judge might view the same page of text. Here’s that first contest entry page again, an excerpt from E.F. Benson’s MAPP AND LUCIA: what’s wrong with it, from a judge’s point of view?
Spot anything? Spot many things? (If you’re having trouble seeing the details of the text, try right-clicking on the image and saving it to your desktop.)
This is quite hard; I’ve set a multi-level test for you here. A few things you might want to be on the lookout for on your second read-through:
1) There’s an error that would be a disqualification-level offense for almost any contest,
2) a fairly universal pet peeve,
3) a common causer of knee-jerk reactions,
4) a couple of matters of style that would probably have lost Benson a crucial point or two, and
5) a subtler problem that almost any professional reader would have caught, but most writers would not unless they were reading their own work out loud.
Give up? Okay, here’s what the page would look like to a contest judge. The colored bits are the problems, one color per gaffe; I’ve backed up in the text a little, to make the more elusive problem clearer, so now it’s on two pages. (All the better to see standard format in action, my dear.) The one that would get the entry booted from most competitions is in red.
See ‘em more clearly now? Let’s go through the problems one by one.
1) In a blind-judged contest, any reproduction of the author’s name usually results in instant disqualification. (Yes, even in a memoir.) So quadruple-check that slug line.
2) As the notes in orange point out, these paragraphs are pretty long, and do not necessarily break where the underlying thought does. Also, some of these sentences are pretty lengthy — okay, let’s just go ahead and use that dreaded term from English class, run-on sentence.
Contrary to popular opinion, run-on sentences do not make a narrative seem more conversational in tone, at least to your garden-variety contest judge: most of the time, they just look long. As do paragraphs more than half a page long. The average contest judge’s heart sinks at the first glimpse of either.
3) Notice the underlined bits in teal? There, the text has fallen into passive constructions. Like most Millicents, many contest judges respond to the passive voice with a negativity that most people reserve for rattlesnake bites, fender-benders, and telemarketing calls. In their minds, the passive voice is pretty much synonymous with poor writing.
It’s not fair, of course; plenty of good writers use the passive voice occasionally, because it can be darned useful. But that’s not an argument you’re going to win in a contest entry. Purge the passivity.
4) If you’re going to use semicolons (pink), make sure that you are using them correctly. In English, ; and is technically redundant, because a semicolon is an abbreviated form of comma + and. So a list should read: Jessamine gathered armfuls of lavender, bushels of poppies, two thousand puppies, and a bottle of Spray-and-Wash.
Were you surprised to see then show up in color? Most contest entries overuse this word — which isn’t hard to do. But in writing, if action A appears in the text prior to action B, it is always assumed that B followed A, unless the text gives some specific reason to believe otherwise. So then is almost always unnecessary, particularly in a list of actions.
5) See all of that blue? It looks like a sapphire inkwell came here to die — and that’s precisely what that much repetition of and looks like to a contest judge. It’s annoying to read, because it is so easy for the eye to stray accidentally from one line to the next.
I know, I know: people do use connective ands instead of periods in spoken English. That doesn’t mean it will work on the page.
It’s not a bad idea to go through your contest entry with a highlighter, marking all of the ands, for where more than one appears per sentence, you will usually find run-ons. Had I mentioned that people who sign up to judge contests are usually sticklers for grammar?
Did that vicious little run-down make you want to shove your contest entry back into the drawer to hide from human eyes? That would be understandable, but I choose rather to view this little exercise as empowering for an entrant: your chances of polishing your work to contest-winning shininess is much, much higher if you know before you seal that envelope just how close a scrutiny the judges are likely to give it.
Is it shallow of me to like it when my readers win, place, and make the finals in contests? Possibly. But if judges react so strongly to textual problems like #2-5, how much more negatively are they likely to respond to an entry that breaks one of the contest’s rules?
Do not assume that your entry will be read by the laid-back, in other words. Read the rules, reread the rules, and follow them as if your life depended upon it. If you don’t find yourself waking in the night, muttering that under your breath, the night before you’re planning to drop your entry in the nearest mailbox, I can only advise that your first action the next morning should be to go back and DOUBLE-CHECK THAT YOU HAVE FOLLOWED THE RULES.
And then read the whole darned thing out loud, to weed out possible knee-jerk reaction-triggers. Like, for instance, the first two words of the previous sentence.
Tomorrow, politeness permitting, I shall tackle a specific contest’s rules with the aforementioned fine-toothed comb, to see what an entry that adhered to those rules might look like on the page. Thank your mother for teaching you such nice manners, everyone, and keep up the good work!
Hello again, campers — Okay, I promise that this is the last time I shall post an extra post (for this weekend, at least), but after the last couple of days’ intensive discussion of how to write a 1-page synopsis, I thought some of you might appreciate a little guidance on how to tell whether what you have come up with is ready to be sent off.
As it happens, I had such a post rattling around my archives. Who knew?
For the last few posts, I’ve been concentrating upon that bane of writers everywhere, the 1-page synopsis. A 1-page synopsis should be a quick, pithy introduction to the premise, the protagonist, and the central conflict of the book. Or, to cast it in terms that those of you who followed my recent Querypalooza series should find very familiar, an extended version of the descriptive paragraph in a query letter.
So hey, all of you queriers who have been clutching your temples and moaning about the incredible difficulty of describing your 400-page manuscript in a single, pithy paragraph: I’ve got some good news. There are agencies out there who will give you a whole page to do it!
Does that deafening collective groan mean that you’re not grateful for triple or even quadruple the page space in which to describe your book? Is there no pleasing you people?
Okay, okay — so it may not be a piece o’ proverbial cake to introduce the premise, the protagonist, and the central conflict of the boo within a single page in standard format, but by this point in the series, I hope the prospect at least seems preferable to, say, confronting an angry cobra or trying to reason with pack of wolves. Constructing an eye-catching 1-page synopsis is more of a weeding-the-back-yard level of annoyance, really: a necessarily-but-tedious chore.
Seriously, successfully producing a 1-page synopsis is largely a matter of strategy, not creativity, and not even necessarily talent. As long as you don’t fall down the rabbit hole of one of the most common short synopsis-writing mistakes — trying to replicate each twist and turn of the plot/argument; generalizing so much that the book sounds generic; writing book jacket promotional copy rather than introducing the story — it’s simply a matter of telling Millicent what your book is ABOUT.
Preferably in a tone and at a vocabulary level at least vaguely reminiscent of the manuscript. Is that really so much — or so little, depending upon how you chose to look at it — to ask?
By contrast, the 5-page synopsis – which, until fairly recently, was far and away the most common requested length, as it still is for those already signed with agents and/or working with editors at publishing houses — should tell the STORY of your book (or state its argument) in as much vivid, eye-catching detail as you may reasonably cram into so few pages. Preferably by describing actual scenes, rather than simply summarizing general plot trends, in language that is both reflective of the manuscript’s and is enjoyable to read.
Why concentrate upon how you tell the story here, you ask, rather than merely cramming the entire plot onto a few scant pages? Why, to cause the agent, editor, or contest judge reading it exclaim spontaneously, “Wow — this sounds like one terrific book; this writer is a magnificent storyteller,” obviously.
Again, piece of cake to pull off in just a few pages, right?
Well, no, but don’t avert your eyes, please, if you are not yet at the querying stage — as with the author bio, I strongly recommend getting your synopsis ready well before you anticipate needing it. As I MAY have mentioned before, even if you do not intend to approach an agent whose website or agency guide listing asks for a synopsis to be tucked into your query packet, you will be substantially happier if you walk into any marketing situation with your synopsis already polished, all ready to send out to the first agent or editor who asks for it, rather than running around in a fearful dither after the request, trying to pull your submission packet together.
Even if you think that both of the reasons I have just given are, to put it politely, intended to help lesser mortals not anywhere near as talented than your good self, whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for the very last moments before you stuff a submission or entry into an envelope. That route virtually guarantees uncaught mistakes, even for the most gifted of writers and savviest of self-promoters.
In fact, you take nothing else away from Synopsispalooza, please remember this: writing a synopsis well is hard, even for the most seasoned of pros; be sure to budget adequate time for it. Forcing yourself to do it at the last minute may allow you to meet the technical requirement, but it is not conducive to producing a synopsis that will do what you want it to do and sound like you want it to sound.
If the task feels overwhelming — which would certainly be understandable — remind yourself that even though it may feel as though you effectively need to reproduce the entire book in condensed format, you actually don’t. Even a comparatively long synopsis shouldn’t depict every twist and turn of the plot.
Yes, even if the agency or contest of your desires asks for an 8- or 10-page synopsis. Trust me, people who work with manuscripts for a living are fully aware that cutting down a 370-page book to the length of a standard college term paper is not only impossible, but undesirable. So don’t even try.
What should you aim for instead? Glad you asked: in a 3-8 page synopsis, just strive to give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic summary of the primary plot, rather than all of the subplots. Show where the major conflicts lie, introduce the main characters, interspersed with a few scenes described with a wealth of sensual detail, to make it more readable.
Sound vaguely familiar? It should; it’s an extension of our list of goals for the 1-page synopsis. Let’s revisit those, shall we?
(1) introduce the major characters and premise,
(2) demonstrate the primary conflict(s),
(3) show what’s at stake for the protagonist, and
(4) ideally, give some indication of the tone and voice of the book.
Now let’s add in the loftier additional goals of the slightly longer synopsis:
(5) show the primary story arc through BRIEF descriptions of the most important scenes. (For nonfiction that isn’t story-based, present the planks of the overarching argument in logical order, along with some indication of how you intend to prove each point.)
(6) show how the plot’s primary conflict is resolved or what the result of adopting the book’s argument would be.
I sense some squirming from the summary-resistant out there. “But Anne,” some of you protest, “am I missing something here? You’ve just told us not to try to summarize the entire book — yet what you’re suggesting here sounds a heck of a lot like sitting down and doing just that!”
Actually, I’m not doing any such thing, summary-resisters. The distinction lies in the details: I’m advising you to winnow the story down to its most essential elements, rather than trying to list everything that happens.
Yes, of course, there’s a difference. What an appallingly cynical thought.
If you’re having serious difficulty separating the essential from the merely really, really important or decorative in your storyline, you may be staring too closely at it. Try to think of your story as a reader would — if a prospective reader asked you what your book was about and you had only a couple of minutes to answer, what would you say?
And no, I’m not talking about that ubiquitous writerly response that begins with a gigantic sigh and includes a fifteen-minute digression on what scenes in the novel are based on real life. I’m talking about how you would describe it if you were trying to sound like a professional writer trying to get published — or, if it helps to think of it this way, like an agent describing a terrific new client’s work to an editor.
You wouldn’t waste the editor’s time rhapsodizing about the quality of the writing or what a major bestseller it was destined to be, would you? No, that would be a waste of energy: pretty much every agent thinks his own clients’ work is well-written and marketable. Instead, you would relate the story or argument in the terms most likely to appeal to readers who already buy similar books.
If you absolutely can’t get that account down to 5 minutes or so, try giving the 20-minute version to a good listener who hasn’t read a syllable of your manuscript, then asking her to tell the plot of the book back to you. The elements she remembers to include are probably — wait for it — the most memorable.
Or, if you don’t want to go out on a limb by recruiting others to help you, sit down all by your lonesome, picture your favorite English teacher standing over you, set the actual happenings of the novel aside for a moment, and write a brief summary of the book’s themes.
Oh, stop rolling your eyes; most authors are delighted to analyze their own books. Pretend that your book has just been assigned in a college English class — what would you expect the students to be able to say about it on the final?
No, the result will almost certainly not be a professional synopsis; this is an exercise intended to help you identify the bare bones of your storyline. It will also help you separate the plot or argument’s essentials from the secondary issues.
Why is that a necessary step? Well, lest we forget, a synopsis is a writing sample. It would hardly show off your scintillating literary voice or world-class storytelling acumen to provide Millicent with a simple laundry list of events, would it?
Please at least shake your head, if you cannot provide me with a ringing, “No, by jingo!” If you can’t even muster that, take a gander at how such a list might read:
SUZIE MILQUETOAST (34) arrives at work one day to find her desk occupied by a 300-pound gorilla (MR. BUBBLES, 10). She goes and asks her supervisor, VERLANDA MCFUNNYNAME (47) what is going on. Verlanda isn’t sure, but she calls Human Resources, to find out if Suzie has been replaced. She has not, but who is going to ask a 300-pound gorilla to give up his seat to a lady? Next, Verlanda asks her boss, JAMES SPADER (52), what to do, and he advises calling the local zoo to see if any primates might by any chance have escaped. Well, that seems like a good idea, but the zoo’s number seems to have been disconnected, so Suzie and Verlanda traipse to Highlander Park, only to discover…
Well, you get the picture: it reads as though the writer had no idea what to leave out. Not entirely coincidentally, it reads like a transcript of what most aspiring writers do when asked, “So what’s your book about?”
How does a seasoned author answer that question? As though she’s just been asked to give a pitch:
GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST is a humorous novel about how rumors get out of hand — and how power structures tend to cater to our fears, not our desires. It’s aimed at the 58 million office workers in the US, because who understands how frustrating it can be to get a bureaucracy to move than someone who actually works within one? See how this grabs you: Suzie Milquetoast arrives at work one day to find a 300-pound gorilla sitting at her desk. Is the zoo missing an inmate, or did HR make another hideously inappropriate hire?
A full synopsis? Of course not — but you have to admit, it’s a pretty good elevator pitch. It also wouldn’t be a bad centerpiece for a query letter, would it?
Which means, by the way, that it could easily be fleshed out with juicy, interesting, unique details lifted from the book itself. Add a couple of paragraphs’ worth, and you’ve got yourself a 1-page synopsis. Add more of the story arc, including the ending, toss in a few scene descriptions, stir, and voilà! You’ve got yourself a 3-page synopsis.
And how might you turn that into a recipe for a 5-page synopsis? Get a bigger bowl and add more ingredients, naturally.
But in order to select your ingredients effectively, you’re going to have to figure out what is essential to include and what merely optional. A few quiz questions, to get you started:
(a) Who is the protagonist, and why is s/he interesting? (You’d be astonished at how few novel synopses give any clear indication of the latter.)
To put it another way, what about this character in this situation is fresh? What about this story will a Millicent who screens submissions in this book category not have seen within the last week?
(b) What does my protagonist want more than anything else? What or who is standing in the way of her/his getting it?
(c) Why is getting it so important to her/him? What will happen if s/he doesn’t get it?
(d) How does the protagonist grow and change throughout pursuing this goal? What are the most important turning points in her/his development?
(e) How does the protagonist go about achieving this goal?
See? Piece of proverbial…hey, wait just a minute! Why, those questions sound a mite familiar, don’t they?
Again, they should: they’re the underlying issues of goals 1-3 and 5-6, above. If you answer them in roughly the same voice as the book, you will have met goal #4, as well — and, almost without noticing it, you will have the basic material for a dandy synopsis.
I told you: piece of cake.
Don’t, I implore you, make the extremely common mistake of leaving out point #6 — the one that specifies that you should include the story’s ending in the synopsis. Too many aspiring writers omit this in a misguided endeavor to goad Millicent and her ilk into a frenzy of wonder about what is going to happen next.
“But I want to make them want to read the book!” such strategists invariably claim. “I don’t want to give away the ending. Leaving the synopsis on a cliffhanger will make them ask to see it right away. Besides, how do I know that someone won’t steal my plot and write it as their own?”
To professional eyes, leaving out the ending is a rookie mistake, at least in a synopsis longer than a page. In fact, it’s frowned-upon enough that some Millicents have been known to reject projects on this basis alone.
Half of you who currently have synopses out circulating just went pale, didn’t you?
Perhaps I should have broken it to you a bit more gently. Here goes: from a professional point of view, part of the goal of an extended synopsis is to demonstrate to someone who presumably hasn’t sat down and read your entire book that you can in fact plot out an entire novel plausibly. Agents and editors regard it as the writer’s job to demonstrate this in an extended synopsis, not theirs to guess how the plot might conceivably come to a halt.
I hate to be the one to break it to you (at least before I’ve helped you all to a slice of cake), but a talented sentence-writer’s possessing the skills, finesse, and tenacity to follow a story to its logical conclusions is not a foregone conclusion. In practice, the assumption tends to run in the opposite direction: if the synopsis leaves out the how the plot resolves, Millicent and her cousin Maury (the editorial assistant at a major publishing house) will tend to leap to one of four conclusions, none of which are good for a submitter. They are left to surmise that:
a) the synopsis’ writer isn’t aware of the purpose of an extended synopsis, having confused it with back jacket copy, and thus is a fish that should be thrown back into the sea until it grows up a little.
In other words, next!
b) the synopsis’ author is a tireless self-promoter and/or inveterate tease, determined not to cough up the goods until there is actual money on the table. Since this is simply not how the publishing industry works, the fish analogy above may reasonably be applied here as well.
Again, next!
c) the synopsis’ author is one of the many, many writers exceptionally talented at coming up with stupendous premises, but less adept at fleshing them out. S/he evidently hopes to conceal this weakness from Millicent and Maury until after they have already fallen in love with the beauty of her/his prose and plotting in the early part of the book, in an attempt to cajole their respective bosses into editing the heck out of the novel before it could possibly be ready to market.
The wily fiend! Next!
d) or, less charitably, the synopsis’ author hasn’t yet written the ending, and thus is wasting their respective boss’ time by submitting an incomplete novel.
All together now: next!
Include some indication of how the plot resolves. Millicent, Maury, and their Aunt Mehitabel (the veteran contest judge) will thank you for it. They might even give you a piece of that delicious cake I keep mentioning.
Does that monumental gusty sigh I just heard out there in the ether mean that I have convinced you on that point? “All right, Anne,” synopsizers everywhere murmur with resignation, “I’ll give away the goods. But I have a lingering question about #4 on your list above, the one about writing the synopsis in roughly the same voice and in the same tone as the novel it summarizes. I get that a comic novel’s synopsis should contain a few chuckles; an ultra-serious one shouldn’t. A steamy romance’s synopsis should be at least a little bit sexy, a thriller’s a trifle scary, and so forth. But I keep getting so wrapped up in the necessity of swift summarization that my synopsis ends up sounding nothing like the book! How should I remedy this — by pretending I’m the protagonist and writing it from his point of view?”
Um, no. Nor should you even consider writing it in the first person, unless you happen to have written a memoir.
Nor is there any need to get obsessed with making sure the tone is absolutely identical to the book’s — in the same ballpark will do. You just want to show that you are familiar with the type of writing expected in the type of book you’ve written and can produce it consistently, even in a relatively dry document.
Piece of — oh, never mind.
There’s a practical reason for demonstrating this skill at the querying and submission stages: it’s a minor selling point for a new writer. Increasingly, authors are expected to promote their own books; it’s not at all uncommon these days for a publishing house to ask the author of a soon-to-be-released book to write a magazine or online article in the book’s voice, for promotional purposes, for instance. Or a blog, like yours truly.
Yes, I know; you want to concentrate on your writing, not its promotion. The muses love you for that impulse. But would you rather that I lied to you about the realities of being a working author?
I thought not. Let’s move on.
What you should also not do — but, alas, all too many aspiring writers attempt — is to replicate the voice of the book by lifting actual sentences from the novel itself, cramming them indiscriminately into the synopsis. I know that you want to show off your best writing, but trust me, you’re going to want to make up some new verbiage here.
Why, you ask? Hint: people who go into the manuscript-reading business tend to have pretty good memories.
Trust me, they recall what they’ve read. When I was teaching at a university, I was notorious for spotting verbiage lifted from papers I’d graded in previous terms; the fraternities that maintained A paper files actively told their members to avoid my classes.
Similarly, a really on-the-ball Millicent might recognize a sentence she read a year ago — and certainly one that she scanned ten minutes ago in a synopsis if it turns up on page 1 of the attached manuscript.
See the problem? No? What if I tell you that in a submission packet, the chapters containing the lifted verbiage and the synopsis are often read back-to-back?
Ditto with query packets. And good 30% of contest entries make this mistake, reproducing in the synopsis entire sentences or even entire paragraphs from the chapters included in the entry. Invariably, the practice ends up costing the entry originality points.
Do I see some raised hands from those of you who habitually recall what you’ve read? “But Anne,” some of you point out huffily, and who could blame you? “Didn’t you tell us just yesterday that it was a grave error to assume that Millicent, Maury , and/or Mehitabel will necessarily read both our synopses and the rest of our submissions?”
Excellent point, sharp-eyed readers: the operative word here is necessarily. While it’s never safe to assume that EVERYONE who reads your synopsis will also read your opening chapter, it’s also not a very good idea to assume that NO ONE will. Shooting for a happy medium — including enough overlap that someone who read only one of them could follow the plot without indulging in phrase redundancy — tends to work best here.
Should you be tempted to repeat yourself, I implore you to counter that impulse by asking this question with all possible speed: “Is there a vibrantly interesting detail that I could insert here instead?”
To over-writers, it may seem a trifle odd to suggest adding detail to a piece of writing as short as 5 pages, but actually, most synopses suffer from overgrowths of generalization and an insufficiency of specifics. So once you have a solid draft, read it over and ask yourself: is what I have here honestly a reader-friendly telling of my story or a convincing presentation of my argument (don’t worry, NF writers: I’ll deal with your concerns at length in a separate post), or is it merely a presentation of the premise of the book and a cursory overview of its major themes?
For most synopses, it is the latter.
Do I hear some questions amid the general wailing and gnashing of teeth out there? “But Anne,” a couple of voices cry from the wilderness, “How can I tell the difference between a necessary summary statement and a generalization?”
Again, excellent question. The short answer: it’s hard. Here’s a useful litmus test.
(1) Print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every summary statement about character, every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.
(2) Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines.
(3) Ask yourself for each: would a briefly-described scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a telling character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more interesting to read?
I heard that gasp of recognition out there — yes, campers, the all-pervasive directive to SHOW, DON’T TELL should be applied to synopses as well. Generally speaking, the fewer generalities you can use in a synopsis, the better.
I’ll let those of you into brevity for brevity’s sake in on a little secret: given a choice, specifics are almost always more interesting to a reader than vague generalities. Think about it from Millicent’s perspective — to someone who reads 100 synopses per week, wouldn’t general statements about lessons learned and hearts broken start to sound rather similar after awhile?
But a genuinely quirky detail in a particular synopsis — wouldn’t that stand out in your mind? And if that unique grabber appeared on page 1 of the synopsis, or even in the first couple of paragraphs, wouldn’t you pay more attention to the rest of the summary?
Uh-huh. So would Millicent.
It’s very easy to forget in the heat of pulling together a synopsis that agency screeners are readers, too, not just decision-makers. They like to be entertained, so the more entertaining you can make your synopsis, the more likely Millicent is to be wowed by it. So are Maury and Mehitabel.
Isn’t it fortunate that you’re a writer with the skills to pull that off?
If your synopsis has the opposite problem and runs long (like, I must admit, today’s post), you can also employ the method I described above, but with an editorial twist:
(1) Sit down and read your synopsis over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the primary plot or argument of the book.
(2) Go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones.
(3) Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book?
(4) If so — take a deep breath here, please; some writers will find the rest of this question upsetting – do the marked sentences really need to be there at all?
If you’ve strenuously applied the steps above and your synopsis still runs too long, try this trick of the pros: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1.
Sounds wacky, I know, but the vast majority of synopses spend to long on it. Here’s a startling statistic: in the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction.
So why not be original and trim that part down to just a few sentences and moving on to the rest of the plot?
This is an especially good strategy if you’re constructing a synopsis to accompany requested pages or even unrequested pages that an agency’s website or agency guide listing says to tuck into your query packet, or contest entry. Think about it: if you’re sending Chapter 1 or the first 50 pages, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your submission or query packet (its usual location), the reader will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book before stumbling upon the synopsis.
So I ask you: since space is at a premium on the synopsis page, how is it in your interest to be repetitious?
Allow me show you how this might play out in practice. Let’s continue this series’ tradition of pretending that you are Jane Austen, pitching SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to an agent at a conference. (Which I suspect would be a pretty tough sell in the current market, actually.) Let’s further assume that you gave a solid, professional pitch, and the agent is charmed by the story. (Because, no doubt, you were very clever indeed, and did enough solid research before you signed up for your agent appointment to have a pretty fair certainty that this particular agent is habitually charmed by this sort of story.) The agent asks to see a synopsis and the first 50 pages.
See? Advance research really does pay off, Jane.
Naturally, you dance home in a terrible rush to get those pages in the mail. As luck would have it, you already have a partially-written synopsis on your computer. (Our Jane’s very into 21st-century technology.) In it, the first 50 pages’ worth of action look something like this:
Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 50 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, at least in my well-worn little paperback addition. However, all of the plot shown above would be in the materials the agent requested, right? Do you really need to spend 2 of your allotted 5 pages on this small a section of the plot, even if it is the set-up for what happens later on?
Of course not. Being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline this portion of your submission synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:
And then go on with the rest of the story, of course.
See what space-saving wonders may be wrought by cutting down on the premise-establishing facts? The second synopsis is less than half the length of the first, yet still shows enough detail to show the agent how the submitted 50 pp. feeds into the rest of the book. Well done, Jane!
While all of you novelists are hard at work, trying to perform a similar miracle upon your synopses, next time, I shall be tackling the specialized problems of the nonfiction synopsis. Yes, that’s right: we’re going to have our cake and eat it, too.
Don’t just ignore that 300-pound gorilla; work with him. And, of course, keep up the good work!
My apologies to those of you who spent the afternoon and evening yesterday holding your breath, symbolically at least, in anticipation of my promised run-down on how to read, interpret, and follow contest entry rules. I honestly did mean to go into that last night — I’m all too aware that the postmark deadline for the William Faulkner/William Wisdom Literary Competition is this coming Tuesday — but health matters, alas, intervened. Long story. And if I have one rule I like to follow in life it’s not to give contest advice while on painkillers.
I’m still a bit groggy, so I’m going to cling to that excellent precept for at least a few hours longer. In the meantime, here is another of my favorite posts on how to write a 1-page synopsis. This one tackles the always-daunting challenge of trying to construct a synopsis for a multiple-perspective narrative.
Just in case anyone who might be thinking of entering a contest could use a few tips on the subject. Enjoy!
Still hanging in there, campers? I hope so, because we’ve been covering a whole lot of material in this expedited Synopsispalooza weekend: various lengths of novel synopsis on Saturday morning, an assortment of memoir synopses that evening, and this morning, different flavors of nonfiction synopsis. This evening, I had planned on blithely tossing off 1-, 3-, and 5-page versions of HAMLET told from multiple perspectives, as an aid to the many, many writers out there struggling with queries and submissions for multiple-protagonist novels — and then I noticed something disturbing.
As I often do when I’m about to revisit a topic, I went back and checked our last substantive Author! Author! discussion of diverse perspective choices. Upon scrolling through last April’s lively discussion of multiple-protagonist narratives (which began here, if you missed it), I realized that I had inadvertently left all of you perspective-switchers with a cliffhanger when I injured my back last spring: I devoted a post to writing a 1-page synopsis for a multiple-protagonist novel, fully intending — and, heaven help us, promising — that I would return to deal with 3- and 5-page synopses on the morrow.
You poor patient souls are still waiting, are you not? I’m so sorry — after my injury, I took a two-week hiatus from blogging, and I completely forgot about finishing the series. Then, to add insult to injury, I’ve been chattering about complex novel synopses under the misconception that those of you who followed last April’s discussion were already conversant with the basic strategy of synopsizing a multiple-protagonist novel.
Why on earth didn’t any of you patient waiters tell me that I had left you hanging? Who knows better than a writer juggling multiple perspectives that no single actor in a drama, however important, has access to the same sets of information that each other actor does?
No matter: I’m going to make it up to you perspective-jugglers, pronto. This post and the next will be entirely about writing a synopsis for a multiple-protagonist novel.
So that those new to the discussion will not have to play catch-up, this evening, with your permission, I would like to revisit the substance of that last post before I went silent, as it honestly does (in my humble opinion, at least) contain some awfully good guidelines for pulling off one of the more difficult tricks in the fiction synopsizer’s repertoire, boiling down a story told from several perspectives into a 1-page synopsis. To render this discussion more relevant to this weekend’s festivities, I shall be both updating it and pulling in examples from our favorite story, HAMLET.
You didn’t expect me to banish the melancholy fellow before the weekend was over, did you?
Let’s leap back into the wonderful world of the 1-page synopsis, then. I would not be going very far out on a limb, I suspect, in saying that virtually every working writer, whether aspiring or established — loathes having to construct synopses, and the tighter the length restriction, the more we hate ‘em. As a group, we just don’t like having to cram our complex plots into such short spaces, and who can blame us? Obviously, someone who believes 382 pages constituted the minimum necessary space to tell a story is not going to much enjoy reducing it to a single page.
Unfortunately, if one intends to be a published writer, particularly one who successfully places more than one manuscript with an agent or editor, there’s just no way around having to sit down and write a synopsis from time to time. The good news is that synopsis-writing is a learned skill, just as query-writing and pitching are. It’s going to be hard until you learn the ropes, but once you’ve been swinging around in the rigging for a while, you’re going to be able to shimmy up to the crow’s nest in no time.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the happiest metaphor in the world. But it is rather apt, as the bad news — you knew it was coming, right? — is that even those of us who can toss off a synopsis for an 800-page trilogy in an hour tend to turn pale at the prospect of penning a synopsis for a multiple-protagonist novel. It makes even the most harden synopsizer feel, well, treed.
Why? Well, our usual m.o. involves concentrating upon using the scant space to tell the protagonist’s (singular) story, establishing him as an interesting person in an interesting situation, pursuing interesting goals by overcoming interesting obstacles. Even if you happen to be dealing with a single protagonist, that prospect be quite daunting — but if you have chosen to juggle multiple protagonists, the mere thought of attempting to show each of their learning curves within a 1-page synopsis may well make you feel as if all of the air has been sucked out of your lungs.
Nice, deep breaths, everybody. It’s a tall order, but I assure you, it can be done. The synopsis-writing part, not just returning air to your lungs.
How? By clinging tenaciously to our general rule of thumb for querying a multiple-protagonist novel: the key lies in telling the story of the book, not of the individual protagonists.
Indeed, in a 1-page synopsis, you have no other option. So let’s spend the rest of this post talking about a few strategies for folding a multiple-protagonist novel into a 1-page synopsis. Not all of these will work for every storyline, but they will help you figure out what is and isn’t essential to include — and what will drive you completely insane if you insist upon presenting. Here goes.
1. Stick to the basics. Let’s face it, a 1-page synopsis is only about three times the length of the average descriptive paragraph in a query letter. Basically, that gives you a paragraph to set up the premise, a paragraph to show how the conflict comes to a climax, and a paragraph to give some indication of how you’re going to resolve the plot.
Not a lot of room for character development, is it? The most you can hope to do in that space is tell the story with aplomb, cramming in enough unusual details to prompt Millicent the agency screener to murmur, “Hey, this story sounds fresh and potentially marketable — and my, is this ever unusually well-written for a single-page synopsis,” right?
To those of you who didn’t answer, “Right, by jingo!” right away: attempting to accomplish more in a single-page synopsis will drive you completely nuts. Reducing the plot to its most basic elements will not only save you a lot of headaches in coming up with a synopsis — it will usually yield more room to add individual flourishes than being more ambitious.
Admittedly, this is a tall order to pull off in a single page, even for a novel with a relatively simple plotline. For a manuscript where the fortunes of several at first seemingly unrelated characters cross and intertwine for hundreds of pages on end, it can seem at first impossible, unless you…
2. Tell the overall story of the book as a unified whole, rather than attempting to keep the various protagonists’ stories distinct. This suggestion doesn’t come as a very great surprise, does it, at this late point in the weekend? Purely as a matter of space, the more protagonists featured in your manuscript, the more difficulty you may expect to have in cramming all of their stories into 20-odd lines of text. And from Millicent’s perspective, it isn’t really necessary: if her agency asks for a synopsis as short as a single page, it’s a safe bet that they’re not looking for a blow-by-blow of what happens to every major character.
Still not convinced? Okay, step into Millicent’s dainty slippers for a moment and consider which species of 1-page synopsis would be more likely to make her request the manuscript (or, in the case of a synopsis submitted with a partial, the rest of the manuscript). First, consider the common multiple-perspective strategy of turning the synopsis into a laundry list of what parts of the story are told from which characters’ perspectives:
Poor Will is so busy accounting for all of his narrative perspectives that he does not have room to present much of the plot, does he? This structural choice forces him to cover the same plot elements over and over again. Compare this to the same story told as a single storyline, a smooth, coherent narrative that gives Millicent a sense of the actual plot of the book:
There really is no contest about which presents Shakespeare as the better novelist, is there? That’s no accident: remember, in a 1-page synopsis, the primary goal is not to produce a carbon-copy of the entire book, but to tell what the book is about in a manner that will prompt the reader to want to hear more.
So tell Millicent just that, as clearly as possible: show her what a good storyteller you are by regaling her with an entertaining story, rather than merely listing as many of the events in the book in the order they appear.
In other words: jettison the subplots. However intriguing and beautifully-written they may be, there’s just not room for them in the 1-page synopsis. Trust me, Millicent is not going to think the worse of your book for having to wait until she actually has the manuscript in her hand to find out every nuance of the plot — or, indeed, how many individual perspectives you have chosen to weave together into a beautifully rich and coherent whole.
That last paragraph stirred up as many fears as it calmed, didn’t it? “But Anne,” complexity-lovers everywhere cry out in anguish, “I wrote a complicated book because I feel it is an accurate reflection of the intricacies of real life. I realize that I must be brief in a 1-page synopsis, but I fear that if I stick purely to the basics, I will cut too much. How can I tell what is necessary to include and what is not?
Excellent question, complexity-huggers. The short answer is that in a 1-page synopsis, almost everything should be excluded except for the book’s central conflict, the primary characters involved with it, and what they have to gain or lose from it.
If you still fear that you have trimmed too much, try this classic editors’ trick: write up a basic overview of your storyline, then ask yourself: if a reader had no information about my book other than this synopsis, would the story make sense? Equally important, does the story sound like a good read?
Note, please, that I most emphatically did not suggest that you ask yourself whether the synopsis in your trembling hand was a particularly accurate representation of the narrative as it appears in the manuscript. Remember, what you’re going for here is a recognizable version of the story, not a substitute for reading your manuscript.
Which leads me to suggest…
3. Be open to the possibility that the best way to tell the story in your synopsis may not be the same way you’ve chosen to tell it in the manuscript. Amazingly, rearranging the running order in the interests of story brevity is something that never even occurs to most struggling synopsizers to try. Yet in a multiple-perspective novel that skips around in time and space, as so many do, or one that contains many flashbacks, telling the overarching story simply and clearly may necessitate setting aside the novel’s actual order of events in favor of reverting to — gasp! — a straightforward chronological presentation of cause and effect.
Chronological order may not be your only option, however: consider organizing by theme, by a dominant plotline, or another structure that will enable you to present your complex story in an entertaining manner on a single page. Opting for clarity may well mean showing the story in logical order, rather than in the order the elements currently appear in the manuscript — yes, even if doing so necessitates leaping over those five chapters’ worth of subplot or ten of closely-observed character development.
Oh, stop hyperventilating. I’m not suggesting revising the book, just making your life easier while you’re trying to synopsize it. If you try to do too much here, you’ll only drive yourself into a Hamlet-like state of indecisive nuttiness: because no version can possibly be complete in this limited amount of space, no over-stuffed option will seem to be right.
For those of you still huffing indignantly into paper bags in a vain attempt to regularize your breathing again: believe me, #3 is in no way a commentary on the way you may have chosen to structure your novel — or, indeed, upon the complexity that tends to characterize the multiple-perspective novel. It’s a purely reflection of the fact that a 1-page synopsis is really, really short.
Besides, achieving clarity in a short piece and maintaining a reader’s interest over the course of several hundred pages can require different strategies. You can accept that, right?
I’m choosing to take that chorus of tearful sniffles for a yes. Let’s move on.
Storyline rearrangement is worth considering even if — brace yourselves; this is going to be an emotionally difficult one — the book itself relies upon not revealing certain facts in order to build suspense. Think about it strategically: if Millicent’s understanding what the story is about is dependent upon learning a piece of information that the reader currently doesn’t receive until page 258, what does a writer gain by not presenting that fact until the end of the synopsis — or not presenting it at all? Not suspense, usually.
And before any of you shoot your hands into the air, eager to assure me that you don’t want to give away your main plot twist in the synopsis, let me remind you that part of purpose of any fiction synopsis is to demonstrate that you can plot a book intriguingly, not just come up with a good premise. If that twist is integral to understanding the plot, it had better be in your synopsis.
But not necessarily in the same place it occupies in the manuscript’s running order. It may lacerate your heartstrings to the utmost to blurt out on line 3 of your synopsis the secret that Protagonist #5 doesn’t know until Chapter 27, but if Protagonists 1-4 know it from page 1, and Protagonists 6-13’s actions are purely motivated by that secret, it may well cut pages and pages of explanation from your synopsis to reveal it in the first paragraph of your 1-page synopsis.
Some of those sniffles have turned into shouts now, haven’t they? “But Anne, I don’t understand. You’ve said that I need to use even a synopsis as short as a single page to demonstrate my fine storytelling skills, but isn’t part of that virtuoso trick showing that I can handle suspense? If my current running order works to build suspense in the book, why should I bother to come up with another way to tell the story for the purposes of a synopsis that no one outside a few agencies and publishing houses will ever see?”
You needn’t bother, if you can manage to relate your storyline entertainingly in the order it appears in the book within a requested synopsis’ length restriction. If your 1-page synopsis effectively builds suspense, then alleviates it, heaven forfend that you should mess with it.
All I’m suggesting is that slavishly reflecting how suspense builds in a manuscript is often not the most effective way of making a story come across as suspenseful in a synopsis, especially a super-short one. Fidelity to running order in synopses is not rewarded, after all — it’s not as though Millicent is going to be screening your manuscript with the synopsis resting at her elbow, so she can check compulsively whether the latter reproduces every plot twist with absolute accuracy, just so she can try to trip you up.
In fact, meticulous cross-checking wouldn’t even serve her self-interest. Do you have any idea how much extra time that kind of comparison would add to her already-rushed screening day?
Instead of worrying about making the synopsis a shrunken replica of the book, concentrate upon making it a compelling road map. Try a couple of different running orders, then ask yourself about each: does this synopsis tell the plot of the book AS a story, building suspense and then relieving it? Do the events appear to follow logically upon one another? Is it clear where the climax falls? Or does it merely list plot events?
Or do those frown lines on your collective forehead indicate that you’re just worried about carving out more space to tell your story? That’s a perfectly reasonable concern. Let’s make a couple of easy cuts.
4. Don’t invest any of your scant page space in talking about narrative structure. Again, this should sound familiar to those of you who have been following this Synopsispalooza. It’s not merely a waste of valuable sentences to include such English Lit class-type sentiments as the first protagonist is Evelyn, and her antagonist is Benjamin. Nor is it in your best interest to come right out and say, the theme of this book is…
Why? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: just as this kind of language would strike Millicent as odd in a query letter, industry types tend to react to this type of academic-speak as unprofessional in a synopsis.
Again you ask why? Veteran synopsis-writers, pull out your hymnals and sing along: because a good novel synopsis doesn’t talk about the book in the manner of an English department essay, but rather tells the story directly. Ideally, through the use of vivid imagery, interesting details, and presentation of a selected few important scenes.
Don’t believe me? I’m not entirely surprised: convinced that the proliferation of narrators is the single most interesting and marketable aspect of the novel — not true, if the manuscript is well-written — most perspective-juggling aspiring writers believe, wrongly, that a narrator-by-narrator approach is the only reasonable way to organize a synopsis.
On the page, though, this seldom works well, especially in a 1-page synopsis. Compare the second example above with the following, a synopsis entirely devoted to analyzing the book as a critic might, rather than telling its story:
Not particularly effective at giving Millicent a sense of the overall plot, is it? Because the story is so complex and the individual characters’ perspectives so divergent, the seemingly simple task of setting out each in turn does not even result in an easily-comprehended description of the premise. Heck, the first three perspectives ran so long that our Will was forced to compress his fourth protagonist’s perspective into a partial sentence in the last paragraph.
Minimizing one or more narrators in an attempt to save space is a tactic Millicent and her aunt, Mehitabel the veteran literary contest judge, see all the time in synopses for multiple-protagonist novels, by the way. Protagonist-juggling writers frequently concentrate so hard on making the first-named protagonist bear the burden of the book’s primary premise that they just run out of room to deal with some of the others. In a synopsis that relies for its interest upon a diversity of perspectives, that’s a problem: as we saw above, an uneven presentation of points of view makes some look more important than others.
I sense the writers who love to work with multiple protagonists squirming in their chairs. “But Anne,” these experimental souls cry, “my novel has five different protagonists! I certainly don’t want to puzzle Millicent or end up crushing the last two or three into a single sentence at the bottom of the page, but it would be flatly misleading to pretend that my plot followed only one character. What should I do, just pick a couple randomly and let the rest be a surprise?”
Actually, you could, in a synopsis this short — which brings me back to another suggestion from earlier in this series:
5. Pick a protagonist and try presenting only that story arc in the 1-page synopsis. This wouldn’t necessarily be my first choice for synopsizing a multiple-protagonist novel, but it’s just a defensible an option for a 1-page synopsis as for a descriptive paragraph or a pitch. As I pointed out above, the required format doesn’t always leave the humble synopsizer a whole lot of strategic wiggle room.
Concentrate on making it sound like a terrific story. You might even want to try writing a couple of versions, to see which protagonist’s storyline comes across as the best read.
Dishonest? Not at all — unless, of course, the character you ultimately select doesn’t appear in the first 50 pages of the book, or isn’t a major character at all. There’s no law, though, requiring that you give each protagonist equal time in the synopsis. In fact…
6. If you have more than two or three protagonists, don’t even try to introduce all of them in the 1-page synopsis. Once again, this is a sensible response to an inescapable logistical problem: even if you spent a mere sentence on each of your nine protagonists, that might well up to half a page. And a half-page that looked more like a program for a play than a synopsis at that.
Remember, the goal here is brevity, not completeness, and the last thing you want to do is confuse our Millicent. Which is a very real possibility in a name-heavy synopsis, by the way: the more characters that appear on the page, the harder it will be for a swiftly-skimming pair of eyes to keep track of who is doing what to whom.
Even with all of those potential cuts, is compressing your narrative into a page still seeming like an impossible task? Don’t panic — there’s still one more wrench left in our writer’s tool belt.
7. Consider just making the 1-page synopsis a really strong, vivid introduction to the book’s premise and central conflict, rather than a vague summary of the entire plot. Again, this wouldn’t be my first choice, even for a 1-page synopsis — I wouldn’t advise starting with this strategy before you’d tried a few of the others — but it is a recognized way of going about it. Not all of us will admit it, but many an agented writer has been known to toss together this kind of synopsis five minutes before a deadline. That’s a very good reason that we might elect to go this route: for the writer who has to throw together a very brief synopsis in a hurry, it’s undeniably quicker to write a pitch (which this style of synopsis is, yes?) than to take the time to make decisions about what is and is not essential to the plot.
Yes, yes, I know: I said quite distinctly farther up in this very post that the most fundamental difference between a descriptive paragraph and a synopsis is that the latter demonstrates the entire story arc. In a very complex plot, however, sketching out even the basic twists in a single page may result in flattening the story, rather than presenting it as a good read.
This can happen, incidentally, even if the synopsis is well-written. Compare, for instance, this limited-scope synopsis (which is neither for a genuinely multi-protagonist novel nor for HAMLET, but bear with me here; these are useful examples):
with one that covers the plot in more detail:
See how easy it is to lose track of what’s going on in that flurry of names and events? (And see, while we’re at it, proof that it is indeed possible to hit the highlights of a complicated plot within a single page? Practice, my dears, practice.) Again, a pitch-style synopsis wouldn’t be my first choice, but for a 1-page synopsis, it is a respectable last-ditch option.
An overstuffed 1-page synopsis often falls prey to another storytelling problem — one that the last example exhibits in spades but the one just before it avoids completely. Did you catch it?
If you instantly leapt to your feet, shouting, “Yes, Anne, I did — the second synopsis presents Elizabeth primarily as being acted-upon, while the first shows her as the primary mover and shaker of the plot!” give yourself seventeen gold stars for the day. (Hey, it’s been a long post.) Over-crammed synopses frequently make protagonists come across as — gasp! — passive.
And we all know how Millicent feels about that, do we not? Can you imagine how easy it would be to present Hamlet’s story as if he never budged an inch on his own steam throughout the entire story?
Because the 1-page synopsis is so short, and multiple-protagonist novels tend to feature so many different actors, the line between the acting and the acted-upon can very easily blur. If there is not a single character who appears to be moving the plot along, the various protagonists can start to seem to be buffeted about by the plot, rather than being the engines that drive it.
How might a savvy submitter side-step that impression? Well, several of the suggestions above might help. As might our last for the day.
8. If your draft synopsis makes one of your protagonists come across as passive, consider minimizing or eliminating that character from the synopsis altogether. This is a particularly good idea if that protagonist in question happens to be a less prominent one — and yes, most multiple-protagonists do contain some hierarchy. Let’s face it, even in an evenly-structured multi-player narrative, most writers will tend to favor some perspectives over others, or at any rate give certain characters more power to drive the plot.
When in doubt, focus on the protagonist(s) closest to the central conflicts of the book. Please don’t feel as if you’re slighting anyone you cut — many a character who is perfectly charming on the manuscript page, contributing a much-needed alternate perspective, turns out to be distracting in a brief synopsis.
From earliest childhood, the precocious boy called Iago had inconvenient tendencies toward honesty—a “failing” that made him an embarrassment to his family and an outcast in the corrupted culture of glittering, Renaissance Venice. Embracing military life as an antidote to the frippery of Venetian society, he won the glowing love of the beautiful Emilia, and the regard of Venice’s revered General Othello. After years of abuse and rejection, Iago was poised to win everything he ever fought for…
In the year 1202, tens of thousands of crusaders gather in Venice, preparing to embark for Jerusalem to free the Holy City from Muslim rule. Among them is a lowly vagabond Briton, rescued from damnation by a pious knight who burns with zealous fire for their sacred undertaking. And so they set sail, along with dedicated companions—and with a beautiful, mysterious Arab “princess” whom the vagabond liberates from a brutish merchant. But the divine light guiding their “righteous” campaign soon darkens as the mission sinks ever deeper into catastrophe, disgrace, and moral turpitude—as Christians murder Christians in the Adriatic port city of Zara, tragic events are set in motion that will ultimately lead to the shocking and shameful fall of Constantinople.
When Bob Tarte left the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He’d write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything.
Bob Tarte’s second book, Fowl Weather, returns us to the Michigan house where pandemonium is the governing principle, and where 39 animals rule the roost. But as things seem to spiral out of control, as his parents age and his mother’s grasp on reality loosens as she battles Alzheimer’s disease, Bob unexpectedly finds support from the gaggle of animals around him. They provide, in their irrational fashion, models for how to live.
