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Book Marketing 101: when your querying list starts to thin out

I’ve been writing for a few weeks now (on and off, as my health permits) about nifty ways to figure out which agents would be most productive for you to add to your first-choice query list, which you might want to place farther down on the list, and which might just be a waste of an investment in stamps. As I argued last time, being the right agent for YOUR book requires more than merely being a person who represents authors for a living.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the definition of an agent, period?

Being the best choice for you requires, at minimum, all that, having a delightful propensity for saying yes to you, AND being eager, equipped, and able to get your manuscript under the right set of bloodshot editorial eyeballs. Oh, and it really, really helps if this sterling soul not only thinks your book is marketable, but truly well written as well.

So it’s an excellent idea to find out, if at all possible, what the candidates for this enviable position like to read — or at any rate, what they like to read professionally. As I MAY have mentioned several dozen times earlier in this series, the single best indicator of an agent’s taste in representation at the moment is to find out what she’s been selling lately.

Some weary brainpans beginning to gyrate out there, aren’t they? “But Anne,” some of you who have been treading the querying for a while whimper, “I’ve already done a boatload of research, combing the agency guides and tracking down the fine folks who represent my favorite authors. But frankly, I’m starting to run out of faves who write anything remotely like my work, and I don’t have unlimited reading time.”

In other words, what do you do AFTER you’ve gone through your ten or twelve favorite living authors and tracked down their agents? What about taking a gander at agents who habitually represent books aimed at you as a READER? Who is representing the books that are being marketed to people like you these days?

Stop chortling — I’m quite serious about this. Successful authors in a particular book category very frequently spring from its devoted readership.

Come closer, and I’ll whisper a secret seldom heard in the hallowed halls of writers’ conferences and classes: the people who run it don’t always have all that complex an idea of who reads, or even writes, any given type of book. Particularly in a relatively new category. They tend to assume that for all intents and purposes, the people who write in a particular subgenre and the people who read it went to high school together, or at any rate share substantial life experiences.

So believe it or not, it’s entirely possible that you are a precise fit for some agency’s already-formulated author profile, which might make them more willing to take a chance on you and your book.

Those of you who happen to have been female, under the age of 45, and trying to market an adult novel with a female protagonist to a US or UK agent or publisher during the brief-but-pervasive reign of chick lit have probably experienced this phenomenon in reverse, right? Back in the day, a woman born after the Johnson administration pitching a literary novel about a woman who lived in a damp cave in Antarctica could practically count upon being cross-examined about how she expected to market such a book to the readers of BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY, as if it were actually impossible for the pre-menopausal set to pen anything for any other audience.

This phenomenon has subsided a bit, thank goodness, since chick lit seems to have had its heyday, but if you fall into that demographic, you might be able to interest a chick lit-heavy (I know; that seems like a contradiction in terms) agency in your non-chick lit novel. After all, they’re already set up to deal well with authors in your demographic, right?

How might you go about this? Well, for starters, I might suggest finding out if any of the staff writers or columnists at your favorite magazines have written books, and querying THEIR agents, on the grounds of similar worldview and target audience.

For example, if you are a Gen X or Gen Y woman who writes books aimed at college-educated women — which is pretty much synonymous with the literary fiction market, lest we forget — you might want to take a good, hard look at the last year’s worth of issues of BUST, which is aimed squarely at your demographic.

Naturally, it’s not the only publication intended for those eyes, but BUST has something very definite to offer a young female writer: n every issue, their book review pages tout work by writers affiliated with the magazine. By definition, those books are being marketed to the same demographic as the magazine.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I would imagine that every single one of the authors of those reviewed books is represented by a literary agent. And that can add up to a hefty handful of queries beginning, “Since you so ably represented Book X…”

The same technique could easily be applied to any book-reviewing periodical designed to appeal to any group of target readers, right? If you’re not certain which publications to choose (or which review books), trot on over to your local library and strike up a conversation with the lovely person in charge of the magazine section. Chances are, s/he will be able to tell you precisely who reads which magazine.

A word to the wise, from someone’s who’s spent a lot of hours blandishing assistance from a lot of librarians: you’ll get a better response to this question if you (a) are polite, (b) have already identified your book’s target market (for tips, please see the IDENTIFYING YOUR TARGET MARKET category at right), and (c) don’t approach the librarian either five minutes before closing or when the joint is jumping. And don’t forget to jot down this helpful person’s name for later thanks in acknowledgments.

Obviously, you could work similar wizardry with magazines that publish your kind of writing — it’s often worth searching to see if article-writers are agented. An author does not necessarily need to have a book out to prove a good lead for you — a lot of magazine writers are aspiring book writers, and many of them already have agents.

(Before you literary fiction writers out there get too excited, I should probably add: THE NEW YORKER very seldom publishes fiction by any writer who isn’t already pretty well-established, so these authors tend not to be represented by agents over-eager for new blood, if you catch my drift. Starting with a less prestigious magazine might be a more efficient use of your research time.)

The other big advantage to checking out periodicals is that they will give you insight into what is coming out NOW, not five years ago, in your book category. Also, someone else — the editorial staff of the publication in question — is essentially doing your market research for you, pointing you toward the agents who are good at selling books aimed at your target demographic.

How so? Well, think about it: the average magazine receives review copies of hundreds of books every month; they obviously cannot review all of them, right? Someone is making a choice about what does and does not get reviewed in any given issue. Ostensibly, a magazine will pick a book for review for one of only three reasons: either the book is being marketed to the same target reader as the magazine (who will, we hope, be your reader, too, in time), the book was written by someone who writes for the magazine (who by definition is writing for your target market), or because the author is a crony of someone on staff. (I’m looking at YOU, BUST).

So essentially, in the process of selection, a review editor at a well-respected magazine geared toward your book’s target market is telling you what current books are being marketed best in your book’s area. Why turn up your nose at such well-informed advice — even if it does mean you occasionally end up querying the agent who represents the editor’s college roommate?

Has that gotten your brainstorming muscles warmed up a little? Next time, I shall delve a little more into how reviews can help you at the agent-finding stage. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: the pitch proper, part III, or, “Interesting. I’ve never heard that before.”

Last time, I went over the basic format of a 2-minute pitch, the kind a writer is expected to give within the context of a scheduled pitch meeting. Unlike the shorter elevator speech or hallway pitch (and if you’re unclear on those, please see the appropriate categories at right), the formal pitch is intended not just to pique the hearer’s interest in the book, but to convey that the writer is one heck of a storyteller, whether the book is fiction or nonfiction.

And your storytelling skills, lest we forget, are part of what you are selling here.

For that reason, it is absolutely vital that you prepare for those two minutes in advance, either timing yourself at home or by buttonholing like-minded writers at the conference for mutual practice. (Just so those of you attending PNWA know, the Pitch Practicing Palace will not be there this year, so as far as I know, there will not be pros on hand to help you refine your pitch. I know: sad.)

Otherwise, it is very, very easy to start rambling once you are actually in your pitch meeting, and frankly, 10 minutes — a fairly standard length for such an appointment — doesn’t allow any time for rambling or free-association.

This can dangerous, and not just because you may run out of time before you finish your story. Rambling, unfortunately, tends to lead the pitcher away from issues of marketing and into the kind of artistic (“What do you think of multiple protagonists?”), literary-philosophical (“I wanted to experiment with a double identity in my romance novel, because I feel that Descartian dualism forms the underpinnings of the modern Western love relationship.”), and autobiographical points (“I spent 17 years writing this novel.”) that he might bring up talking with another writer.

Remember, you are marketing a product here: talk of art can come later, after you’ve signed a contract with these people.

Even if you feel an instant personal rapport with the person across the pitching table, don’t forget that that the formal pitch is, in fact, is an extended, spoken query letter, and it should contain, at minimum, the same information.

And, like any good promotional speech, it needs to present the book as both unique and memorable.

One great way to increase the probability of its seeming both is to include beautifully-phrased telling details from the book, something that the agent or editor is unlikely to hear from anybody else. To put it another way, what specifics can you use to describe your protagonist’s personality, the challenges he faces, the environment in which he functions, that render each different from any other book currently on the market?

Think back to the elevator speech I developed last week for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: how likely is it that anybody else at the conference will be pitching a story that includes a sister who lectures while pounding on the piano, or a mother who insists her daughter marry a cousin she has just met?

Not very — which means that including these details in the pitch is going to surprise the hearer a little. And that, in turn, will render the pitch more memorable.

In a hallway pitch, of course, you don’t have the luxury of including more than a couple of rich details, but the 2-minute pitch is another matter. You can afford the time to flesh out the skeleton of your premise and story arc. You can, in fact, include a small scene.

So here’s a suggestion: take fifteen or twenty seconds of those two minutes to tell the story of one scene in vivid, Technicolor-level detail.

I’m quite serious about this. It’s an unorthodox thing to do in a pitch, but it works all the better for that reason, if you can keep it brief.

Do be specific, and don’t be afraid to introduce a cliffhanger — scenarios that leave the hearer wondering “how the heck is this author going to get her protagonist out of THAT situation?” work very, very well here.

Another technique that helps elevate memorability is to include as many sensual words as you can. Not sexual ones, necessarily, but referring to the senses.

The best way to find these is to comb the text itself. Is there an indelible visual image in your book? Work it in. Are birds twittering throughout your tropical romance? Let the agent hear them. Is your axe murderer murdering pastry chefs? We’d better taste some fois gras.

And so forth. The goal here is to include a single original scene in sufficient detail that the agent or editor will think, “Wow, I’ve never heard that before,” and ask to read the book.

There is a terrific example of a pitch with this kind of detail in the Robert Altman film THE PLAYER, should you have time to check it out before the next time you enter a pitching situation. The protagonist is an executive at a motion picture studio, and throughout the film, he hears many pitches. One unusually persistent director, played by Richard E. Grant, chases the executive all over the greater LA metro area, trying to get him to listen to his pitch. (You’re in exactly the right mental state to appreciate that now, right?) Eventually, the executive gives in, and tells the director to sell him the film in 25 words or less.

Rather than launching into the plot of the film, however, the director does something interesting. He spends a good 30 seconds setting up the initial visual image of the film: a group of protestors holding a vigil outside a prison during a rainstorm, their candles causing the umbrellas under which they huddle to glow like Chinese lanterns.

“That’s nice,” the executive says, surprised. “I’ve never seen that before.”

If a strong, memorable detail of yours can elicit this kind of reaction from an agent or editor, you’re home free! Give some thought to where your book might offer up the scene, sensual detail, or magnificently evocative sentence that will make ’em do a double-take.

Or a spit-take, if your book is a comedy. A good pitch for a funny book makes it seem entertaining; a great pitch contains at least one line that provokes a spontaneous burst of laughter from the hearer.

Which leads me to ask those of you whose works are still in the writing phase: are there places in your manuscript where you could beef up the comic elements, sensual details, elegant environmental descriptions, etc., to strengthen the narrative and to render the book easier to pitch when its day comes?

Just something to ponder. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 11 Comments on Book marketing 101: literary and women’s fiction, part II

Book marketing 101: literary and women’s fiction, part II

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m gloating today — three regular blog readers have let me know that they have been named finalists in this year’s PNWA literary contest. All three in major categories, no less. Not all wanted to be congratulated here, so I am holding off on specifics, but really, I couldn’t be more tickled.

And if there are more of you out there with good news, please let me know! I love being able to report that hard work and talent are being recognized.

Back to work. Yesterday, I unearthed the spectre of books that might theoretically belong in one category, but might be placed for non-content reasons in another. Since (as I pointed out yesterday) female authors are often surprised find their work labeled as women’s fiction by their agents, I thought that I should revisit the issue again today to show that there might be very good marketing reasons for reclassification — and that in many instances, either category can be justified.

The marketing reasons are simple: as I mentioned yesterday, women’s fiction is the single best-selling category, year after year after year. Selling how well, you ask? Well, of the five best-selling novels of the 20th century, three of them would now most likely be marketed as women’s fiction — but if sales are any indication (and they are), these books are as mainstream as mainstream can get.

I’m going to show you the first fifty words (the limit of fair use) of each, to show you how thin the line between mainstream and women’s fiction can be. See if you can guess what they are from these openings, and who their target market would be. In ascending order of sales, here is the first:

Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it…

I’m assuming that you guessed at the first word that it was the best-selling novel in America for more than 20 years, GONE WITH THE WIND. But judging just from this opening, how would you categorize it? Women’s fiction? Mainstream? Romance?

See why agents and editors like to be told what the category is on the title page? It’s often hard to tell. On to the next:

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he…

Wild guesses? Hint: when they made it into a movie, the script transformed this first-person narrative from the point of view of a little girl into being primarily the story of her father.

It’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD; your high school English teacher probably told you it was literary fiction. But if you had to categorize this on those first 50 words alone, though, would you place it there? Or would it be women’s fiction, because it’s a coming-of-age story told by a girl? (And from these first few lines, who is the protagonist?)

Not so easy, is it? Okay, one more:

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold…

Anyone? Would it help if I told you the critics nicknamed the author Pandora in blue jeans? Or that the mainstream press hailed this 1957 book’s success in as the end of literature?

It’s PEYTON PLACE — but if you did not know that, how would you categorize it for pitching and querying purposes?

My point, of course, is that book categories are not always cut-and-dried; ultimately, the book’s category is going to be a matter for discussion between you, your agent, and potentially your editor as well. (A MILLION LITTLE PIECES was, if memory serves, dubbed fiction by its author and agent; the publishing house, I’m told, made the decision to release it as a memoir.) So you’re not necessarily going to be stuck with your choice forever.

Be flexible — and choose the category that seems most likely to serve your book best at the agent-finding stage.

“But Anne,” I hear the literary-minded amongst you crying out, “what if my work genuinely IS literary fiction? Should I lie and say it’s something else, in order to make it seem more marketable in my pitch or query letter?”

Whoa, Sparky — no need to go that far that fast. Before you make any rash decisions, I would advise making absolutely sure that the book IS literary fiction.

While that may seem like a strange statement — after all, no one goes around challenging writers of mysteries to prove their chops — the fact is, the vast majority of books pitched or queried with a literary label are not. Without reading all of their work — which, as we saw above, is really the only way to categorize any book properly — it’s impossible to tell whether a book so pitched honestly is experimenting with new directions in style and construction (which is not a bad definition of literary fiction), or if its author merely want to convey that they believe their work is well-written.

The latter, as I mentioned yesterday, tends to fall upon the ears of agents and editors like the buzzing of housefly: persistent and attention-grabbing, yes, but ultimately not a pet you’re likely to bring home with you to cuddle.

But there’s something very sexy in the label literary fiction being applied to one’s own work, though, isn’t there? Let’s be honest about it: most of us like to think our writing has literary value, and critical opinion about what is High Literature changes with alarming frequency. It definitely sounds cool when you say at parties, “Oh, I write literary fiction,” as opposed to that stuff that sells in the millions.

Listen sometime to how people use the term at writers’ conferences; it’s almost a synonym for high-quality, especially amongst those who believe that most successful mainstream books are not very good. To these folks, the label says loud and clear that they haven’t sold out their talent; they are more than content to cultivate a small but devoted readership, without sullying their keyboards with all of that sordid commercial appeal. Quite the counter-culture roués, they are, with their goatees and bongos and poetry readings in basements.

Having been raised by parents who actually WERE beatnik artists, I feel eminently qualified to give a salient little piece of advice: be careful what you wish for your books. The literary fiction market is consistently very, very small, so small that many excellent published writers do not make a living at it.

Which brings me back to my point from yesterday: labeling your work as literary will NOT necessarily make it more marketable in the industry’s eyes, but less. Think very carefully about your desired target market before you label your work. If you really think it has broad appeal, label it as mainstream.

If I am hammering on this point with unusual vigor, because so many aspiring writers believe all really good fiction is literary. That’s just not true: there is excellent writing out there in every category. To set the needle on that broken record yet again: these are marketing categories, not value judgments, and mislabeling your work will most likely result in its ending up on the wrong desk — and you in the wrong pitch meeting.

So why don’t the pros simply listen to pitches and suggest alternative labeling, as I did above? Because, as I said, the only way to tell for sure whether a book is literary fiction is from the writing — and that would require investing far, far more time in a book than either hearing a pitch or reading a query letter.

Also, literary is the least-defined major category; I have yet to meet an agent or editor who can give me a definition of literary fiction less than a paragraph long. Like the Supreme Court’s famous definition of pornography, they can’t tell us precisely what it is, but apparently they know it when they see it.

Or so they claim. Ask any three agents whether THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE SHIPPING NEWS, and THE COLOR PURPLE are mainstream or literary, and you will probably get at least two different answers on each book.

How would I categorize these three? Well, none of these crossover books would be well enough known for all of us to have a discussion about them if they hadn’t been mainstream successes. So my instinct would be to label them all as mainstream, in retrospect. I don’t know if I would have been that wise, though, before they hit the big time.

If you find yourself in a serious quandary over whether your book is sufficiently literary to need to be marketed as literary fiction, apply one of two tests. First, take a good, hard look at your book: under what circumstances can you envision it being assigned in a college English class?

I’m completely serious about this. If the subject matter or plot is the primary factor, chances are the book is not literary; categorize it by content. If you can honestly picture an upper-division undergraduate seminar spending a few hours discussing your symbolism and word choices, it probably is, and should be labeled as such.

The other test — and I swear I am not suggesting this merely to be flippant; industry professionals use it — is to open your manuscript randomly at five different points and count the number of semicolons, colons, and dashes per page. Especially the semicolons. If there are more than a couple per page, chances are your work is geared for the literary market.

Or you should disable the colon/semicolon button on your keyboard.

Don’t believe me? Spend an hour in any reasonably well-stocked bookstore, wandering from section to section, pulling books off the shelf randomly, and applying the punctuation test. Seeing a lot of semicolons in novels that aren’t literary?

Almost certainly not — and here’s why: mainstream fiction assumes a roughly tenth-grade reading level; literary fiction assumes an audience educated enough to use a semicolon correctly, without having to look up the ground rules. If you are writing for most genre audiences (science fiction and fantasy being the major exceptions), most agents and editors prefer to see simpler sentence structure.

Do be careful, however, when applying this second test, because we writers LOVE fancy punctuation, don’t we? Oh, I know this is going to break some tender hearts out there, but if you want to write fiction professionally, you need to come to terms with an ugly fact: no one but writers particularly LIKE semicolons. If you are writing for a mainstream audience, you should consider minimizing their use; if you are writing most genre fiction, you should consider getting rid of them entirely.

Again, I don’t make the rules: I merely pass them along to you.

And yes, Virginia, I DO use a lot of fancy-pants punctuation here in this blog. I am writing for an audience composed entirely of writers, so I can use all of the punctuation I please. Heck, I can even use an emdash if I want to—take that, standard format!

Next time, I shall discuss the another building block to your pitch: identifying your target market. For those of you out there who thought that I was just going to cut to the chase and head right for the pitch proper: keep your shirts on. Or don’t, if you’re trying to get a suntan. But either way, be patient, because following me through all of these interim steps will ultimately help you construct a stronger pitch.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 11 Comments on Book marketing 101: literary and women’s fiction

Book marketing 101: literary and women’s fiction

For my last couple of posts, I have been proceeding on the assumption that most of you intending to pitching books whose subject matter would dictate a fairly comfortable fit in just a couple of book categories. A novel might legitimately walk the line between suspense and thriller, perhaps, but it is unlikely to fit in the uneasy triangle where horror, chick lit, and Western intersect, right?

Although I would dearly love to take a gander at the latter book.

For the next couple of days, I want to talk about the two categories where content is not necessarily the deciding factor, literary fiction and women;s fiction. The first has to do with HOW a particular novel is written, not what it’s about; the second label is sometimes applied because of who is expected to read the book, and sometimes by whom it was written.

See why I saved these two for last?

Let’s take literary fiction first, because it is the less understood. Remember how last time, posing as your literary fairy godmother, I waved my magic wand and knocked, “…but it is written like literary fiction,” out of your pitching vocabulary? I removed it, I said, because saying it during a pitch (or within the context of a query letter) can confuse the hearer, an agent or editor who is undoubtedly thinking in terms of a single label for the book.

Why did I single out this phrase in particular? Pervasiveness: by my count, it is muttered apologetically within the context of somewhere between a third to a half of all pitches. Because, you see, most of us deep down secretly long for an agent to read a paragraph of our work, spring to her feet, and shout, “My God, this is the most beautiful prose I have ever read!”

Okay, maybe it’s not so secret a wish. But the fact is, from the industry’s point of view, MOST beautiful writing is NOT literary fiction.

Yes, you read that correctly. Contrary to popular belief, no one in the publishing industry uses the term “literary fiction” as a secret code for “very nicely written prose.” Instead, it is non-secret code for a specific book category of novels whose PRIMARY appeal lies in the interesting use of language, rather than plot.

Literary fiction tends to win awards, but actually it represents a miniscule proportion of the domestic fiction market — about 4%, in a good year. Its readership is almost exclusively female, and largely college-educated; these are the books that win Pulitzers and are taught in English classes, after all.

Or, to cast it in the mindset of the industry, these are the books that sell the least. No kidding: a first literary fiction work that sells 10,000 copies is considered a pretty roaring success.

See why you might want to think twice about insisting that your novel is literary fiction, rather than the mainstream or genre fiction its subject matter might suggest it is? To the ears of agents who do not represent literary fiction, this is like arguing that Mickey Mouse should be marketed to only an elite group of effete poets who, like Emily Dickinson, prefer to scribble away in their garrets, occasionally sending away for the latest in literary fiction to feed their rarified souls.

“My dear,” the industry pictures such souls simpering to one another, “you must cast your languid eye over this exquisite line of prose! No, no, don’t buy your own copy — I’m sure that the library has one.”

Now, admittedly, those who write on the literary/mainstream fiction cusp have an especially tough time with categorization: in a prettily-written, character-driven novel, it can genuinely be hard to tell. So time and time again, I meet writers at conferences who tell me, “Well, my book walks that thin line between mainstream and literary.”

They say it proudly, as if book category ambiguity were in itself a selling point — and as if literary fiction typically sold BETTER than mainstream fiction. To market-oriented ears, this sounds, well, backwards.

It’s perfectly understandable pride, though: they’re identifying with those rare American literary writers who’ve hit the big time. Alice Walker, for instance, or Annie Proulx. Thomas Pynchon. Philip Roth. Toni Morrison. Some might suggest early John Irving as well, say pre-1976. (Although if you want to start a vigorous debate in any circle of publishing professionals, ask whether they consider THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP literary or mainstream fiction. I’ve seen grown men come to blows over this burning issue.)

Feel free to start a list of your own, counting on your fingers and toes, but remember to include only living American writers: no fair wiggling a piggie for Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie, or anyone currently occupying space under sod.

How did you do? Unless you are the type of reader who rushes out and buys every volume on the Pulitzer short list, or are an inveterate fan of literary fiction, I’m guessing that you probably didn’t run out of tootsies before names stop popping to mind. Bless the writers who have experienced major success with literary fiction, but there aren’t all that many making a spectacular living at it.

And frankly, pretty much all of them published a few largely unrecognized books before hitting the big time. Some of them, too, are literary fiction authors who have written mainstream books, rather than making it big with their former style of literary prose.

Pop quiz: who out there read Alice Walker’s MERIDIAN before THE COLOR PURPLE came out? Step forward, so literary fiction writers can add you to their mailing lists. Heck, so they can build you a monument.

To cite a more recent crossover book, the pros categorize THE ROAD as literary fiction, because that’s what its author’s previous books were. But if it were a new book by an unknown writer, I think there would be genuine debate over how it should be labeled: its use of language is undoubtedly literary; its essential storyline is classic futuristic fantasy; it’s a bestseller. So should the title page say that it’s literary fiction, SF/fantasy, or mainstream fiction?

There’s no easy answer, but if I were pitching it, I would take the cynical route. I would bill it as mainstream most of the time, since that’s a category that sells well, as fantasy to agents who represented that, and as literary to the tiny fraction of agents interested in it.

Because calling a book literary will not help sell it to most agents. Or editors, for that matter, unless they are specifically interested in literary fiction.

The moral: ALWAYS check if an agent has a proven track record of representing literary fiction before even BREATHING the phrase.

Another group of writers who have an especially hard time categorizing their work are writers who write literate books about female protagonists, aimed at female readers. Even if the writing is very literary indeed, they often find their work billed by agents and editors as women’s fiction.

Why might this be problematic, potentially? In the popular mind, women’s fiction tends to be (incorrectly, from the industry’s point of view) regarded as synonymous with romance, it can come as something of a shock to the writers in question.

Often, they’re insulted, but take a look at the statistics: women’s fiction is far and away the consistently largest category, in terms of sales. However, that’s a trifle misleading, because women buy roughly 80% of the fiction sold in this country.

Including, incidentally, virtually all of the literary fiction. But then, if we were just going by sales, all fiction EXCEPT suspense, thriller, some mysteries, and some SF should properly be called men’s fiction; women are the primary readers of almost everything else.

So if a book is about a woman, and intended for female readers, is it automatically women’s fiction, no matter how it is written? Well, no, not necessarily: if it falls more comfortably under the rubric of a specific genre, it belongs there. (If you do not know whether your novel belongs under women’s fiction or romance, go ask the Romance Writers of America; they will be able to tell you a whole lot more about the various and ever-expanding subgenres of romance than I could.)

Technically, the differential between mainstream fiction with a female protagonist and women’s fiction really depends how important the relationships are in the book: if we’re hearing a lot about the protagonist’s mother or her children, chances are it’s women’s fiction; if we’re hearing primarily about her work, it’s probably not. But truth compels me to say that I have seen what I would consider very mainstream fiction about female doctors and professors labeled as women’s fiction, evidently simply because the author was female.

I suspect this may sound rather familiar any woman under the age of 45 who attended a writer’s conference during the height of the chick lit boom. Remember, ladies? To fill you in, gentlemen: back then, to walk into a pitch meeting with active ovaries was to be told that if one was not writing chick lit, one ought to be. It was grim.

Or, as one agent put it to me after hearing my pitch for some very serious political fiction, “Honey, why do you want to be poor? If you call it literary fiction, maybe a thousand people will read it, but add some humor and slap another label on it, and it could be the next BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY.”

And although I believe that my response to her contained several pointed references to going over to the dark side (I am no fan of the Jones), from a marketing point of view, she definitely had a point. Labeling work as literary DOES render it harder to sell; insisting upon calling a book mainstream when there’s a women’s fiction agent clamoring for it is a bit quixotic.

If you’re uncomfortable with the women’s fiction label — which, again, is an indicator of a book’s target market, not a value judgment about its writing quality — you could engage in a bit of strategic equivocation. When in doubt, “mainstream fiction that will appeal especially to women” is about as much as it is safe to waffle in a pitch; if you really want to be Machiavellian, you could always pitch such a book as mainstream to agents who represent mainstream and as women’s fiction to those who represent that.

Hey, I’m on your side, not theirs. I want to see you land an agent.

I think situational category-hopping is a legitimate strategy in general, to tell you the truth: if your book honestly falls into more than one major category, use the category that best suits your needs in the moment. If you have written a comic horror novel, there’s nothing to stop you from billing it as humor when you were pitching or querying an agent who represents humor, and describing it as horror when you are approaching one who represents that.

After all, the book category label is there to help market your book, not limit it. Right?

But don’t worry, literary fiction writers — I’m not going to leave you in the lurch. Tomorrow, I shall give you some tips about how to tell if a book is in fact literary fiction, or just well-written, and how to present it if it’s the former.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did that set off warning bells for anyone but me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 10 Comments on And? And?

And? And?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus the highlighting pens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - 7 Comments on And, but, then

And, but, then

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is logically identical to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on - 6 Comments on On beyond Dick and Jane

On beyond Dick and Jane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanna risk it at the submission stage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vary your word choices!

That ripple of titters you hear out there in the cosmos, dear readers, is the sound of every soul for whom I have ever critiqued a manuscript guffawing: the title of today’s post is something that I have been scrawling in the margins of manuscripts authored by writers living and dead since I first started proofing galleys in my early adolescence. Today’s piece of self-editing advice comes deep from the lair of my most fire-breathing editorial pet peeve: repetition.

It is not an uncommon source of annoyance amongst professional readers; as any good line editor can tell you, a tendency to become a trifle miffed in the face of writing that could be better is, while perhaps a handicap in polite society, a positive boon in his line of work. I was, of course, trained to react to it from my cradle: in my family, developing a strong editorial eye was considered only slightly less important than learning to walk; it was simply assumed that the children would grow up to be writers. My parents would not so much as commit my name to a birth certificate without first figuring out how it would look in print.

It’s true. Ask the nurse who kept trying to get them to fill out the paperwork.

I come by my pet peeves honestly, in other words, and believe me, this one gets some exercise, especially now that computer use is practically universal amongst writers.
Why? Word and phrase repetition is substantially harder to catch on a computer screen than in hard copy, even on the great big editor’s model currently gracing my desk. I’ve seen 25-pound Thanksgiving turkeys carried on smaller surfaces, but even so, I prefer to edit on paper. And even then, I still read the final version out loud, to check for flow and repetition problems.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant with me now: NEVER let a submission tumble into a mailbox until after you have read it in its ENTIRETY, in HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD. There are manuscript problems that simply cannot be diagnosed any other way.

I had a hard lesson in this truth myself recently, after I had spent a couple of months working on a book proposal. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of trying to market a nonfiction book, a proposal is as nit-picky a document as they come. Rather than demonstrating that the proposed book is interesting and well-written by, say, handing the finished book to editors, the book proposal limits the actual chapters seen to only one or two — and even those come at the end.

What comes first? A lengthy description of what the book is about, why the author is the best current inhabitant of the earth’s surface to write it, and how it is going to blow every other similar book on the market out of the water. The author is expected to name the volumes to be thus trajected into the air specifically, critiquing them with the full knowledge that the editors who worked on them might well be reading the proposal imminently. Next follows a raft of marketing information, identifying the target readership, naming every mortal organization that might conceivably welcome a speaker on the topic, and so forth. After this exercise in tact, the hapless author is expected to come up with entertaining, well-written descriptions of chapters that have not yet seen the light of day.

THEN comes the sample chapter.

In other words, the NF writer has to prove, over the course of 50 or so pages of discussion of matters inherently less interesting than the subject matter of the book itself, that she can write. Piece o’ cake. It is a format in which a typo is both more important and harder to catch — because, let’s face it, the less fascinating a document is, the more the brain wants to skim through it.

By the time I began printing out the 15 copies for submission, I was relatively certain that the proposal was typo-free, so I did not proof it in hard copy. That was not purely an ego-based decision: there were other readers, too. I am writing the book with a very accomplished woman who lives on the other side of the country, in that OTHER Washington, so every draft of every page has flown back and forth electronically dozens of times. My agent (who wrote a great blog post on THE ROAD the other week, by the way. Would I be represented by someone UN-opinionated?) is an excellent line editor in his own right, and he had given feedback on two versions of it. Surely, I was safe.

You can see this coming, can’t you?

So there I am, printing up copy 12. (I like to print all the physical copies of my work that my agents will be circulating, so I can check each page individually. If a photocopier mangles pg. 173, it’s hard to catch.) Out of habit, I read the latest page out of the printer — and realized with horror that for some reason, three lines on page 47 were in 11-point Times New Roman, not 12-point.

It was a difference so subtle that only a professional reader would have caught it — and then only in hard copy. None of the three of us had noticed in the electronic versions, and I have no idea at what point the switch could have occurred, but that typeface change did subconsciously make those lines seem less important. Since it was a page in the middle of the proposal, though, fixing it would require reprinting ten pages of every single copy I had already printed.

Oh, please — was there even a second of viable suspense here? Of course, I reprinted it. I could always use the discarded pages for scratch paper, and then recycle them. Heck, I could even use them to print up a hard copy draft of the next manuscript I’m planning to send to my agent, so I can check for this kind of mistake properly.

My point is, no matter how sharp-eyed you are, or how smart — my proposal had been read numerous times by two people with Ph.D.s AND an agent, recall — you’re better off proofing in hard copy. A fringe benefit: on paper, it is far more apparent when you’re overusing certain words and phrases.

Which brings me back to my pet peeve. Editors hate repetition for a very practical reason: text that repeats a particular word, phrase, or even sentence structure close together is more tiring for the eye to read than writing that mixes it up more.

Why? Well, let me give you an illustration, as well as I can on a computer screen. Try to read through the coming paragraph as quickly as you can:

Without turning in her seat, Mandy suddenly backed the car into the garage. The garage door closed, sealing her and the car inside. The car was warm, cozy, a great place to die. No one would come into the garage for a week, possibly more, and the children never came in here at all. Thinking of the children, Mandy sank back into her seat, the car’s solidity as comforting as a sturdy umbrella in the midst of a sudden downpour. Without thinking, Mandy pushed in the car’s lighter, heating its coils for the benefit of some future cigarette that might never be smoked.

Okay, stop. Notice anything about how your eye moved down the lines? If you’re like most quick readers, your eye tried to jump from the first use of Mandy’s name directly to the next; it’s a very efficient way to skim. If you’re a more sensitive reader, the repetition of “the garage” twice within four words and “the car” twice within five might have led you to skip the next line entirely.

Apart from encouraging skimming — the last thing you want an agency screener to start doing to your work, right? — word and phrase repetition gives a professional reader the impression that the target market for the book in question is not as well-educated than more diverse set of word choices would indicate. (This is true, incidentally, even if a repeated word is polysyllabic, although to a lesser extent.) The more literary your writing, the more problematic such a perception can be.

The average adult novel is aimed at roughly a tenth-grade reading level; literary fiction tends to assume a college-educated reader, and uses vocabulary accordingly. So whenever you see those ubiquitous Mark Twain and Somerset Maugham quotes about never using a complex word when a simple word will do, realize that both wrote for audiences that had not, by and large, shifted the tassel on a mortarboard cap.

There is yet another reason to avoid word and phrase repetition whenever possible: it tends to slow down the pace of a scene. Let’s take another look at poor Mandy’s final moments with all of those redundant words removed and replaced with specific details — note how much snappier her trip to meet her Maker is in this version:

Without turning in her seat, Mandy suddenly backed into the garage. The door closed, sealing her inside. The car was warm, cozy, a great place to die. No one would come to this end of the mansion for a week, possibly more, and the children never ventured in here at all. She sank back into the rich leather upholstery, the Mercedes’ solidity as comforting as a sturdy umbrella in the midst of an unexpected downpour. Without thinking, she pushed in the lighter, heating its coils for the benefit of some future cigarette that might never be smoked.

It’s definitely a smoother read, isn’t it, without all of those eye-distracting repeated words? Yet look how many more character-revealing specifics I was able to incorporate — why, Mandy moved up several tax brackets in the second-to-last sentence alone. And although it reads more quickly and comfortably, it’s actually not substantially shorter: the original was 103 words, the revised version 97.

If weeding out repetition in just one paragraph can yield this kind of dramatic result, imagine all of the room you could clear for telling little details if you eliminated similar redundancies throughout an entire manuscript. You might want to print out a copy of your book — perhaps on the back of all that paper I had to discard from my proposal — and try it sometime.

There are, of course, many flavors of redundancy to torment editorial souls. Next time, I shall dive into another very common species that, in its most virulent form, has broken the tension of many an otherwise worthy scene. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

PS: Congratulations to long-time reader Brian Mercer, who has just sold an article to Llewellyn Publications. Way to go, Brian!

(And please, everybody, remember to keep sending in news of your triumphs, so we can all celebrate. I love reporting good news about my readers’ writing careers!)

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More fun with marking pens

For those of you joining this series in progress, I’ve been writing for the last week or so about keeping the pacing of your work tight. Slow manuscripts make editors grind their teeth and agents shake their heads in private, yet astonishingly few writing books and seminars address the issue at all, except to opine that for the purposes of submission, faster is, on the whole, better than slower.

There are a couple of good reasons for this genteel avoidance of an unpleasant subject, I suspect. First, editing for length and pace IS an unpleasant subject for contemplation where dear self is concerned, isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but most of the writers of my acquaintance (including, I’ll admit it, yours truly) get kind of annoyed when an agent or editor says, “Love your writing! How about giving us 15% less of it?”

Or, to take what used to be a stock agents’ pronouncement a few years back, when we are told that a first novel should be more than 100,000 words, regardless of what might actually work best for the text. (That’s 400 pages in Times New Roman, by standard estimation techniques.) The truism on the subject has become a little more lax in the past year or two, thank goodness: now, pronouncement-mongers tend to say anywhere between 80,000 (320 pages) to 120,000 (480) is usually fine.

As someone who attends quite a few writers’ conferences in any given year, I, for one, was pretty darned relieved when the wisdom du jour changed. During the arbitrary 100,000 period, I always hated that inevitable moment when someone stood up and asked an agent how long was too long for a manuscript. The air of gloom that descended upon the room at the reply was palpable.

As much as I object to arbitrary standards — 125,000 words strikes me as less arbitrary, because binding costs do get higher at that point — I have to say, like most of us who edit for a living, I’m a fan of the tightly-paced manuscript. I practice what I preach, too: in the novel currently in my agents’ capable hands, I cut 20 pages entirely through eliminating individual lines.

So believe me, I feel your pain, self-editors. But like most people who read manuscripts by the score, that doesn’t mean that I don’t start muttering, “Get on with it.” Sorry.

The second reason I think the issue of manuscript-tightening doesn’t get much attention in conference classes, writing seminars, and publications aimed at writers is that just as it’s genuinely difficult to say with any precision how long a book one has never read should be, it’s also hard to give general advice about pacing that applies to every manuscript. Every writer has different ways of slowing down or speeding up text.

Thus my asking you to take marking pens to your manuscript. To identify what could use trimming, you need to recognize your particular writing patterns.

So back to the nitty-gritty. Yesterday, I asked you to sit down with some of your favorite chapters throughout your book and differentiate by colored markings abstract vs. concrete sentences. Obviously, every manuscript needs both, and the appropriate ratio of abstract to concrete varies quite a bit by genre.

Think about it: could you really get away with a summary sentence like, “She had legs that stretched all the way from here to Kalamazoo,” in a genre other than hardboiled mystery, bless its abstraction-loving fan base? (All right, I’ll admit it: one of the all-time best compliments I have ever received came from a writer of hardboiled; he commented on a dress I was wearing by telling me I looked like trouble in a B movie. I cherish that.)

However, it is worth noting that agents and editors see a WHOLE lot more summary sentences in the course of any given day of manuscript-screening than concrete ones — which renders a genuinely original telling detail quite a refreshment for weary professional eyes.

So generally speaking, if you can increase the frequency with which such concrete details appear, you’ll be better off.

Dig up those yellow-and-red pages from yesterday and pull out that yellow highlighter again. This time, mark all the sentences where your protagonist (or any other character whose thoughts are audible to the reader) THINKS a response to something that has just happened, instead of saying it aloud or the narrative’s demonstrating the reaction indirectly.

These kinds of sentences are harder to show out of context, so bear with me through a small scene. The sentences destined for yellow overcoats are in caps. (Sorry about that; one of the limitations of the blog format is the difficulty in incorporating italics and other such frivolities to designate certain text.)

I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE SAID THAT, BERTRAND THOUGHT.

WHY WASN’T HE ANSWERING? “What’s wrong?” Emintrude asked, rubbing her tennis-sore ankles. “Are you feeling sick to your stomach again?”

OH, WOULD ONLY THAT HIS ONGOING DISSATISFACTION WITH THEIR MARRIAGE STEMMED FROM A SOURCE AS SIMPLE AS NAUSEA. WAS HIS WIFE HONESTLY SO SOULLESS THAT SHE COULDN’T FEEL THEIR WELL-MANICURED LAWN CREEPING UP THE DOORSTEP TO SMOTHER THEM IN SEDUCTIVE NORMALCY? “No,” Bertrand said. “I just had a long day at work.”

Again, you’re not judging the quality of writing by determining what to highlight, or sentencing any given observation to the chopping block by marking it. You are simply making patterns in the text more visible.

Finished? Okay, now humor me a little and get a third color of pen — let’s say green, and complete the Rastafarian triumvirate — and mark any sentence where your protagonist’s reactions are conveyed through bodily sensation of some sort. Or depicted by the world surrounding him, or through some other concrete detail. You’re probably going to find yourself re-marking some of the red sentences from yesterday, but plow ahead nevertheless.

Starting to notice some narrative patterns? Expressing character reaction via physicality or projection is a great way to raise the telling little detail quota in your manuscripts.

Does this advice seem familiar? It should, for those of you who regularly attend writing workshops or have worked with an editor. It is generally expressed by the terse marginal admonition, “Get out of your character’s head!”

I wish feedback-givers would explain this advice more often; too many writers read it as an order to prevent their characters from thinking. But that’s not what “Get out of your character’s head!” means, at least not most of the time. Generally, it’s an editor’s way of TELLING the writer to stop telling the reader about the character’s emotional responses through dialogue-like thought. Instead, (these feedback-givers suggest) SHOW the emotion through details like bodily sensation, noticing a telling detail in the environment that highlights the mood, or… well, you get the picture.

In other words, it’s yet another way that editors bark at writers SHOW, DON’T TELL. What will happen to your manuscript if you take this advice to heart?

Well, among other things, it may well be more popular with professional readers — because, believe me, protagonists who think rather than feel the vast majority of the time disproportionately people the novels submitted to agencies and publishing houses. Thus, a novel that conveys protagonist response in other ways a significant proportion of the time will enjoy the advantage of surprise.

Why are characters who think their responses so VERY common? One theory is that we writers are so often rather quiet people, more given to thinking great comebacks than saying them out loud. (A girl’s best friend is her murmur, as Dorothy Parker used to say.) Or maybe we just think our protagonists will be more likable if they think nasty things about their fellow characters, rather than saying them out loud.

That, or there are a whole lot of writers out there whose English teachers made them read HAMLET one too many times, causing them to contract chronic soliloquization.

Whichever it is, most manuscript would be better received if they exhibited this type of writing less. Done with care, avoiding long swathes of thought need not stifle creative expression. Let’s revisit our little scene of domestic tranquility from above, this time grounding the characters’ reactions in the flesh and the room:

By the time Ermintrude was midway through her enthusiastic account of the office party, Bertrand’s stomach had tied itself into the Gordian knot. The collected swords of every samurai in the history of Japan would have been helpless against it.

“Bertrand!” Ermintrude’s back snapped into even greater perpendicularity to her hard chair. “You’re not listening. Upset tummy again?”

He could barely hear her over the ringing of his ears. He could swear he heard their well-manicured lawn creeping up the doorstep to smother them in seductive normalcy. The very wallpaper seemed to be gasping in horror at the prospect of having to live here any longer. “No,” Bertrand said. “I just had a long day at work.”

See the difference? The essentials are still here, just expressed in a less obviously thought-based manner.

Go back and take another look at your marked-up manuscript. How yellow is it?

All of the types of sentence you just identified are in fact necessary to a successful narrative, so ideally, you have ended up with a very colorful sheaf of paper. Using too many of one type or another, believe it or not, can be boring for the reader, just as using the same sentence structure over and over lulls the eye into skimming.

If you don’t believe this, try reading a government report sometime. One declarative sentence after another can be stultifying.

The telling details of your manuscript will be nestled in those red- and green-marked sentences — note how frequently they appear in your chapters. If you find more than half a page of yellow between those Christmas colors, you might want to go back and mix it up more.

If you find any pages that are entirely yellow, I would suggest running, not walking, to the nearest used bookstore, buying three or four battered paperback editions of books that sell well in your chosen genre, and carting them home to perform the three-marker experiment on them. Could you revise your manuscript so that the yellow-to-color ratio in it replicates that in those books?

Yes, this is time-consuming, and a test like this is rather nerve-wracking to apply to your own work, but it’s a great way to start getting in the habit of being able to see your pages as someone who does not know you might. (If you want to get a REALLY clear picture of this, trade chapters with a writer you trust, and apply the same experiment.) Good self-editing takes bravery, my friends — but I know you’re up to it.

Keep up the good work!

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Being chatty — in the right way

After the unpleasantness that prompted my last post (not resolved, but I am following up on it), I thought a nice, helpful post on craft would prove soothing to everybody. Although, in keeping with my newly-discovered rumored status as a Dangerous Iconoclast and Annoyer of the Mighty, I have decided to take on a craft-related topic I have literally never seen addressed in a conference or a class: keeping your pages interesting.

To paraphrase the most frequent exclamations from folks in the industry about it, via a quote from Nietzsche: “Against boredom, even the gods struggle in vain.”

While I think we can all agree Nietzsche would have made a lousy agency screener, this might be a good adage to bear in mind while preparing your manuscripts for submission. For one very simple reason: the average agent or editor’s maximum tolerance for boredom in a manuscript is approximately well under a minute.

Not a lot of room for fudging there. So if you’ve ever heard yourself saying, “Just wait until page 15 — it really picks up there,” you might want to give some thought to how to make your submissions more user-friendly for a reader with the attention span of an unusually persistent mosquito.

And THAT is why, in case you were curious, writing gurus urge students to begin their works with a hook, to establish interest right away. But capturing a reader’s interest — particularly a professional reader’s interest — is not like tag: once you’ve hooked ’em, they don’t necessarily remain hooked. Think of maintaining interest as being akin to love: no matter how hard someone falls for you at first, if you do not keep wooing, that interest is going to flag sooner or later.

Too many aspiring writers take their readers’ interest for granted, an often-costly assumption. So let’s talk wooing.

In the industry, the standard term for what keeps a reader turning pages is tension. All too frequently, tension is confused with suspense, and thus taken less seriously as a writing necessity by writers in other genres. Suspense is plot-specific: a skillful writer sets up an array of events in such a way as to keep the reader guessing what will happen next. In a suspenseful plot, that writing-fueled curiosity keeps the reader glued to the page between plot points.

Suspense, in other words, is why one doesn’t get up in the middle of a Hitchcock film to grab a bag of baby carrots from the fridge, unless there’s a commercial break. You want to see what is going to happen next.

Tension, on the other hand, can stem from a lot of sources, mostly character-generated, rather than plot-generated: the reader wants to know how the protagonist is going to respond next, a different kettle of fish entirely. Sometimes tension-rich dilemmas are plot points, but not always — and this gives the writer a great deal of freedom, since it’s a rare plot that can maintain a major twist on every page.

Or even every other page. (THE DA VINCI CODE, anyone?)

Some of the greatest contemporary examples of well-crafted, consistent tension in novels are — don’t laugh — the HARRY POTTER books. (Yes, I know that they’re for children, but children grow up, and it would behoove anyone who intends to be writing for adults ten years from now to be familiar with the Harry Potter pacing.) Actually, not a lot happens in most of the books in this series, particularly in the early chapters: kids go to school; they learn things; they have difficulty discerning the difference between epoch-destroying evil and a teacher who just doesn’t like them very much; Harry saves the world again.

Of course, the lessons they learn in the classroom ultimately help them triumph over evil, but that’s not what makes the HARRY POTTER books so absorbing. It’s the incredibly consistent tension.

I’m quite serious about this. If J.K. Rowling’s publisher infused each page with heroin, rather than with ink, her writing could hardly be more addictive; there’s a reason that kids sit up for a day and a half to read them straight through. With the exception of the first 50 pages of the last book (hey, I’m an editor: it’s my job to call authors on their writing lapses), the tension scarcely flags for a line at a time. Technically, that’s a writing marvel.

This miracle is achieved not by magic, but by doing precisely the opposite of what the movie and TV scripts with which we’re all inundated tend to do: she gives her characters genuine quirks substantial enough to affect their relationships and problems that could not be solved within half an hour by any reasonably intelligent person.

Rather than making the reader guess WHAT is going to happen next, well-crafted tension lands the reader in the midst of an unresolved moment — and then doesn’t resolve it immediately. This encourages the reader to identify with a character (usually the protagonist, but not always) to try to figure out how that character could get out of that particular dilemma. The more long-term and complicated the dilemma, the greater its capacity for keeping the tension consistently high.

A popular few: interpersonal conflict manifesting between the characters; interpersonal conflict ABOUT to manifest between the characters; the huge strain required from the characters to keep interpersonal conflict from manifesting. Also on the hit parade: sexual energy flying between two characters (or more), but not acted upon; love, hatred, or any other strong emotion flying from one character to another, spoken or unspoken. Or even the protagonist alone, sitting in his room, wondering if the walls are going to collapse upon him.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad rule of thumb for judging whether a scene exhibits sufficient tension: if you would be comfortable living through the moment described on the page, the scene may not provide enough tension to keep the reader riveted to the page. Polite conversation, for instance, when incorporated into dialogue, is almost always a tension-breaker.

“But wait!” I hear some of you slice-of-life aficionados out there cry.
“Shouldn’t dialogue reflect how people speak in real life?”

Well, yes and no. Yes, it should, insofar as good dialogue reflects plausible regional differences, personal quirks, and educational levels. I’ve heard many an agent and editor complain about novels where every character speaks identically, or where a third-person narrative reads in exactly the same cadence and tone as the protagonist’s dialogue. Having a Texan character use terms indigenous to Maine (unless that character happens to be a relative of the president’s, of course) is very likely to annoy a screener conversant with the dialect choices of either area.

Yes, Virginia, the pros honestly do notice these little things. That’s one of the many, many reasons that it is an excellent idea for you to read your ENTIRE submission IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD before you mail it off; it really is the best way to catch this flavor of writing problem.

But it’s just a fact of the art form that the vast majority of real-life dialogue is deadly dull when committed to print. While the pleasantries of manners undoubtedly make interpersonal relationships move more smoothly, they are rote forms, and the problem with rote forms is that utilizing them absolutely precludes saying anything spontaneous. Or original.

Or — and this is of primary importance in a scene — surprising. Think about it: when’s the last time someone with impeccable manners made you gasp with astonishment?

Even rude real-life conversation can be very dull to read. If you don’t believe this, try an experiment: walk into a crowded café alone, sit down at a table near a couple engaged in earnest conversation, and start taking notes. Then go home and write up their actual words — no cheating — as a scene.

Read it over afterward. 99% of the time, even if the couple upon whom you eavesdropped were fighting or contemplating robbing a bank or discussing where to stash Uncle Harry’s long-dead body, a good editor would cut over half of what the speakers said. If the two were in perfect agreement, the entire scene would probably go.

Why? Because real-life conversation is both repetitious and vague, as a general rule. It also tends to be chock-full of clichés, irrelevancies, non sequiturs, jokes that do not translate at all to print, and pop culture references that will surely be outdated in a year or two.

In a word: boring to everyone but the participants. It’s an insult to the art of eavesdropping.

“Boring,” of course, is absolutely the last adjective you want to spring to an agency screener’s mind while perusing your work. Even “annoying” is better, because at least then the manuscript is eliciting a reaction of some sort.

But once the screener has a chance to think, “I’m bored with this,” if the next line does not re-introduce tension, chances are that the submission is going to end up in the reject pile.

That’s the VERY next line; you can’t count upon your manuscript’s ending up on the desk of someone who is going to willing to be bored for a few paragraphs. As a group, these people bore FAST.

How fast, you ask? Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, my friends, but many of the fine people currently reading submissions across this great land of ours are disconcertingly capable of becoming bored within the first paragraph of a novel. Or, at the very most, by the bottom of the first page.

While we could talk all day about the ethics of agencies and publishing houses employing screeners and assistants with attention spans comparable to the average three-year-old’s — and I’m talking about a three-year-old who has just eaten two big slices of birthday cake here — I have to say, I’ve read enough manuscripts in my time to understand why: most manuscripts suffer from an ongoing lack of tension.

And dull dialogue that does not reveal interesting things about the characters saying it is a primary cause. I know, I know, being courteous SEEMS as though it should make your protagonist more likable to the reader, but frankly, “Yes, thank you, George,” could be spoken by anyone. It doesn’t add much to any scene. And reading too many pages of real-life dialogue is like being trapped in a cocktail party with people you don’t know very well for all eternity.

“Deliver us from chit-chat!” the agency screeners moan, rattling the chains that shackle them to their grim little desks clustered together under those flickering, eye-destroying fluorescent lights. “Oh, God, not another attractive stranger who asks, ‘So, have you been staying here long?'”

Eliciting that kind of reaction — now THAT’s the kind of agent and editor annoying-tactic I think is worth investing some serious energy into exploring. But then, that’s just my opinion.

More on tension next time. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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And this above all things: label your book correctly

Last week, I talked a good deal about the risks that writers of literary fiction and others who play with the standard structures and usages of the language take in submitting their unusual work to agencies and editors. While I’m on the subject, this is probably a good time to revisit a very common writerly prejudice about literary fiction. To whit:

It is commonly believed that all good writing is literary, and that referring to one’s own work as literary is synonymous with saying that it is well written. Neither of these propositions is true.

Literary fiction is a marketing category, just as fantasy or historical romance are marketing categories. It refers to the 3-4% of the fiction market designed to be read by readers with college educations (or at any rate, large vocabularies), a high tolerance for introspection, and no inherent distrust of high falutin’ punctuation frills like the semicolon. The beauty of the writing is a major part of the point of the book, and character development trumps plot, generally speaking.

So when a writer walks up to an agent or editor at a conference and says something like, “It’s a thriller, but it’s written like literary fiction,” it does not translate as, “Gee, this is a really well-written thriller,” but as, “This writer doesn’t know the market.” It’s almost as great a faux pas as when an author speaks of his own work as a “fiction novel” (all novels are fictional) or “a nonfiction memoir” (all memoirs are nonfiction). It’s an admission that the writer isn’t very familiar with the lingo of the trade.

And we all know how fond agents and editors are of explaining the nuances of the industry to up-and-coming writers.

But sounding like a neophyte is not the only reason to avoid muddying your category distinction by adding the literary label as if it were the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Why, the average agent will think upon being told that a genre work is literary, doesn’t this writer write in the language of his chosen genre? Every genre has its handful of conventions; is this writer saying that he’s simply decided to ignore them? Why write in a genre, if you’re not going to write in the genre’s style? And why am I asking myself this string of rhetorical questions, instead of listening to the pitch this writer is giving or paying attention to the query in front of me?

See the problem? Calling non-literary work literary sounds a bit sheepish, as if you were saying that given your druthers, you would be writing literary fiction instead of what you have in fact written. If you want to write literary fiction, fine: I hope you win a Nobel Prize. However, if you write in a genre, you should be proud of the fact, not apologetic — if not for your own sake, then for the sake of the impression you will make when you pitch it. Think about it: is someone who has devoted her life to the promotion of science fiction and fantasy going to THANK you for indirectly casting aspersions on the writing typical of that genre? There’s a lot of beautifully-written SF and fantasy out there — it’s just written within the confines of the genre.

So the quicker you can shake the unfortunately pervasive rumor that a genre label automatically translates in professional minds into writing less polished than other fiction, the better. No, no, no: genre distinctions, like book categories, are indicators of where a book will sit in a bookstore; they’re not value judgments. Simple logic would dictate that an agent who is looking for psychological thrillers is far more likely to ask to see your manuscript if you label it PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER than just as FICTION. And an agent interested in psychological thrillers will not even sniff at a book labeled LITERARY FICTION.

This is not to say that agents do not sometimes tag their clients’ work with, “but it reads like literary fiction” or “it’s on the mainstream-literary cusp,” if they feel this is a selling point for a particular book. But remember those signs on roller coasters that say, “You must be this tall to ride the Ultra-Mega Flume of Doom,” that made you so angry as a kid? In the industry, there are invisible signs reading, “You must be with this important an agency to blur publishing categories.”

Really. Just as editors are conditioned to regard an author who calls twice per week to talk about promotional opportunities a pest, but an author whose agent calls just as often with exactly the same information a joy, they respond better to certain phrases when agents say them.

During the big-break-seeking period of a writer’s career, the more accurately a book is labeled, the more likely it is to catch the eye of an agent or editor who honestly wants to snap up that kind of book. Think of it as a professional courtesy: hyper-specific category labels are a shortcut that enables them to weed out pitches outside their areas almost instantly; that, in case you were wondering, is why agents like to be told the category in the first paragraph of the query letter. It saves them scads of time if you tell them instantly whether your book is a hardboiled mystery or a caper mystery: if it isn’t the variety they are looking for today, they can reject it almost immediately.

Think of it as your little Christmas present to them. And to yourself: why waste your already-overburdened time catering to someone who doesn’t handle what you write?

I learned the hard way just how category-minded folks in the industry can be. I write mainstream fiction and memoir, but I once had the misfortune to be assigned for a conference critique to an editor who did not handle either. I was disappointed, of course, but I am a great believer in trying to turn these conference matching accidents into learning opportunities. So, gritting my teeth like a nice girl, I listened patiently to what he had to say about the first chapter of my novel.

What he had to say, unsurprisingly, was that while he found the writing excellent, he would advise that I change the protagonist from a woman to a man, strip away most of the supporting characters, and begin the novel with a conflict that occurred two-thirds of the way through the book, the fall of the Soviet Union. “Then,” he said, beaming at me with what I’m sure he thought was avuncular encouragement, “you’ll have a thriller we can market, dear. I’d been happy to take another look at it then.”

Perhaps I had overdone the politeness bit; I hate it when total strangers call me dear. I’m not THAT cute, I tell you. “But it’s not a thriller.”

He could not have looked more appalled if I had suddenly pulled a switchblade on him. “Then why are you talking to me?” he huffed, and hied himself to the bar for what I believe was yet another double Scotch.

In retrospect, I can certainly understand his annoyance: if I had been even vaguely interested in writing thrillers, his advice would have been manna from heaven, and I should have been droolingly grateful for it. I would have fallen all over myself to thank him for his 20-minute discourse about how people who read thrillers (mostly men) dislike female protagonists, particularly ones who (like my protagonist) are well educated. The lady with the Ph.D. usually does not live beyond the first act of a thriller, he told me, so yours truly is going to keep her pretty little head sporting its doctoral tam in another genre. Dear.

I learned something very important from this exchange: specialists in the publishing biz are extremely book-category myopic; the thriller editor and I could not have had less to say to each other if he had been speaking Urdu and I Swedish. To his mind, every way in which my work deviated from what he wanted to publish was a black mark against my novel. Books outside a publishing professional’s area of expertise might as well be poorly written; in his mind, no other kinds of books are marketable.

Just in case you think that I’ve just been being governessy in urging you again and again to be as polite as possible to EVERYONE you meet at ANY writers’ conference: that near-sighted editor is now a high mucky-muck at the publishing house that later bought my memoir — which, I can’t resist telling you, covers in part my years teaching in a university. Chalk one up for the educated girls. But isn’t it lucky that I didn’t smack him in his condescending mouth all those years ago?

So label your work with absolute clarity, and revel in your category affiliation. Think about it: would Luke Skywalker have been able to use the Force effectively in a mainstream romantic comedy? No: the light sabers shine brightest in the science fiction realm.

In other words, to thine own genre be true; if you’re good at what you do, there’s no need it tart your work up with extravagant claims. Let your excellent writing speak for itself. And keep up the good work!

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The limitations of style, or, is there a way I can make my submission screener-proof?

Is everybody thawed out yet? Nothing like a good cold snap to inhibit driving and drive us all back to our writing studios, I always say. During the recent shivery period, I’ve been going back to questions readers have posted as comments that really deserve entire posts of their own. Today, I have a question that I know will interest all of you writers of literary fiction out there: how to prevent the pretty language experiments you like to unleash upon the world from being misinterpreted by the average agency screener. Take, for example, intelligent and insightful reader Mary’s dilemma:

“I am frantically working on a proposal to be submitted within the next week or two. As I am working on my sample chapters, I’ve realized that part of my writing style consists of sentences that are fragments.

“I have an excellent grasp of grammar and have no trouble writing in complete sentences. But the style I have developed over the years owes part of its rhythm to fragments. I like the emphasis they provide, and the way they “pace” the writing.

“I’m concerned, however, about putting fragments in my sample chapters. What if agents think I don’t know how to write in complete sentences? But without the fragments, my writing feels formal and a little bland.

What’s the scoop? Are fragments allowed in otherwise grammatically correct writing, or are they to be avoided like the mange in those critical sample chapters?”

Hoo boy, Mary, is this ever a complex question, and one that I have heard debated long into the night by many, many well-established writers of literary fiction, who have precisely this fear about boneheaded critics not understanding the interesting things they like to do with language from time to time. Basically, the underlying concern is that someone in some dark corner of the industry will not be able to tell the difference between the CHOICE to bend the rules of grammar a trifle and a simple ignorance of those rules.

As someone who reads a LOT of manuscripts, let me set your mind at least partially at ease: said difference is usually ABUNDANTLY clear to a professional reader. A writer unaware of the basic rules of grammar will make mistakes consistently, but an experienced writer will make them selectively. Also, if a good writer decides to use a stylistic quirk, such as sentence fragments, those quirks will affect only as small fraction of the sentences in the manuscript. In a submission by writer who does not understand the rules of sentence construction, on the other hand, this ignorance will show up in most of the sentences, and probably in all of the paragraphs.

And yes, Virginia, the difference is generally apparent on the first page. If someone has genuine writing talent, a professional reader will often already be excited by the end of the first paragraph.

So the short answer, Mary, is that if the sentence fragments are integral to your style — which certainly seems to be the case, from what you describe — keep ‘em. Usually, if fragments are part of a well-developed rhythm, it will be pretty apparent to a good reader’s eye that their use is a well-thought-out choice.

That being said, there are agents and editors out there who hate fragments like the mange you mention. (Great analogy, by the way, for the way grammar-hounds tend to think of it.) They are certainly in the minority these days — I mean, come on, most published writers will use a sentence fragment from time to time for emphasis, and let’s not even talk about how Joan Didion has raised the acceptance of the once-verboten one-sentence paragraph — but there are indeed industry folks whose English teachers beat into them that only complete sentences will do.

These people, I imagine, lunch with the Point-of-View Nazis, bemoaning the decline of American letters and plotting how to subvert anyone who is even thinking about doing something interesting and original with language. And after they finish sipping their post-prandial cognac, they stiff the waiter and go out kicking those Santa Clauses who ring bells on city street corners for charity. Or so I surmise. Then they go back to work, screening manuscripts.

Seriously, they’re not too common, and for good reason: this taste would basically render it impossible for these people to work much with literary fiction or NF written by journalists (who are trained to use fragments for effect). So you can usually avoid them by sticking to agencies that, well, deal with writers who break the occasional grammatical rule. But again, if the rest of your writing is solid, it’s unlikely that a seasoned professional would mistake a legitimate stylistic choice for lack of grammatical acumen.

However, the folks in power are not the only ones you need to worry about. As I believe I have mentioned before, at an agency or publishing house of any size, the first reader of a requested manuscript will almost certainly not be the agent or the editor herself, but at least one level of screener or assistant. Even a medium-sized agency will often employ a screener or two.

This is why, in case you were wondering, that requests for the rest of the book are often so vague. Few agents are brave enough to say outright, “Well, Thing One and Thing Two, my faithful screeners, really liked your first 50 pages. I haven’t read it yet, but if they read the rest of your manuscript and tell me it is worthwhile, I’m definitely interested.”

Why should the employment of screeners worry the occasional bender of grammatical rules? Well, while most agencies will school their screeners in what they should use as rejection criteria, the usual assumption is that the screeners will already be familiar with the basic standards of good writing. Most of the time, screeners are simply told to weed out the submissions with grammatical problems, but not necessarily given a crash course in the difference between stylistic choice and error first.

Uh-oh.

As those of you who kept up with the recent Idol series are already aware, plenty of screeners have freshly tumbled out of English departments of varying degrees of credibility. If it’s very freshly, they tend to perpetuate their professors’ pet peeves until they have read enough submissions to develop pet peeves of their own. And this can sometimes be problematic for submitters, because while screeners do not have much power within their agencies, they definitely do have veto power over submissions. If some over-eager intern screener fresh from his first serious English class takes umbrage at your use of fragments, there’s not much you can do about it.

Whether your submission ends up screened by such a sterling character is, alas, largely a matter of chance. So yes, you are taking a bit of a risk in including them; with such people, you would in fact be better off without the fragments. However, if the fragments add considerably to your writing, in your opinion, I am inclined to think that you would be better off not associating with agents and editors — or screeners, or editorial assistants — who don’t understand what you’re trying to do.

After all, almost anyone in the industry will tell you that it’s a mistake to mess with a style that works. Fragments are not all that rare anymore — heck, Annie Proulx even won the Pulitzer for a work chock full of ‘em. If you love them, they should probably stay.

Especially if your book’s category is one where fragments have a track record for being used with success. In literary fiction, for example, their use is very much accepted — but before I say more about that, I am going to need to talk about what is and isn’t literary fiction, and that, my friends, is the topic of another day.

Keep up the good work!

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Help! It’s the point-of-view Nazis!

A couple of postings ago, I used the term “point-of-view Nazi” in passing. Several readers have asked me since what it means, if I made it up, and what was I doing making light of Nazism, anyway? For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the phrase, I shall write about this phenomenon at length today.

 

No, I did not invent the term: it’s fairly widely-known industry jargon. A point-of-view Nazi (POVN) is a reader — often a teacher, critic, agent, editor, or other person with authority over writers — who believes firmly that the ONLY way to write third-person-narrated fiction is to pick a single character in the book or scene (generally the protagonist) and report ONLY his or her thoughts and sensations throughout the piece. Like first-person narration, this conveys only the internal experience of a single character, rather than several or all of the characters in the scene or book.

 

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of narration: it combines the advantages of a dispassionate narrator with the plotting and pacing plusses of a single perspective. It permits the author to sink deeply (or not) into the consciousness of a chosen character without losing the emotional distance of an omniscient narrator. It renders the later actions of other characters more surprising to the reader. It is not, however, the only third-person narrative possibility — a fact that drives your garden-variety POVN wild.

 

All of us have our own particular favorite narrative styles, and many of us have been known to lobby for their use. What distinguishes a POVN from a mere POV enthusiast is his active campaign to dissuade all other writers from EVER considering the inclusion of more than one POV in a third-person narrative. He would like multiple-consciousness narratives to be wiped from the face of the earth, if you please. He has been known to tell his students — or members of his writing group, or his clients, or the writers whom he edits or represents — that multiple POV narration in the third person is, to put it politely, bad writing. It should be stamped out, by statute, if necessary.

 

So much for Jane Austen and most of the illustrious third-person narrative-writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who used multiple perspectives to great effect.

 

I bring up our forebears advisedly, because one of the reasons that POVNs are so common is that in the post-World War II era, the prose stylings of the 18th and 19th centuries tended to be rejected as old-fashioned by writing teachers. Many of today’s more adamant POVNs are merely transmitting the lessons they were taught in their first good writing classes: for years, many English professors set it down as a general rule that multiple POVs were inherently distracting in a third-person narrative.

 

Now, I have to admit something: I am not a big fan of this species of sweeping rule. I like to read an author’s work and consider whether her individual writing choices serve her story well, rather than rejecting it outright because of a preconceived notion of what is possible.

 

In fact, I have a special affection for authors whose talent is so vast that they can pull off breaking a major writing commandment from time to time. Alice Walker’s use of punctuation alone in THE COLOR PURPLE would have caused many rigid rule-huggers to dismiss her writing utterly, but the result is, I think, brilliant. I had always been told that it is a serious mistake to let a protagonist feel sorry for himself for very long, as self-pity quickly becomes boring, but Annie Proulx showed us both a protagonist AND a love interest who feel sorry for themselves for virtually the entirety of THE SHIPPING NEWS, with great success. And so on.

 

One effect of the reign of the POVNs — whose views go through periods of being very popular — has been the production of vast quantities of stories and novels where the protagonist’s POV and the narrator’s are astonishingly similar — and where the other characters are exactly as they appear to the protagonist, no more, no less. (The rise of television and movies, where the camera is usually an impersonal narrator of the visibly obvious, has also contributed to this kind of “What you see is what you get” characterization, if you’ll forgive my quoting the late great Flip Wilson in this context.) Often, I find myself asking, “Why wasn’t this book just written in the first person, if we’re not going to gain any significant insight into the other characters?”

 

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

 

Philosophically, I find this troubling. In my experience, there are few real-life dramatic situations where everyone in the room absolutely agrees upon what occurred, and even fewer conversations where all parties would report identically upon every nuance. I think that interpretive disagreement is the norm amongst human beings, not the exception.

 

So do I like to hear the thoughts of multiple players in a scene, to capture the various subtleties of interpretation? You bet. If I want to hear a single POV, I reach for a first-person narrative. Call me wacky.

 

These are merely my personal preferences, however; I am perfectly willing to listen to those who disagree with me. And there I differ from the POVN, who wishes to impose his views upon everyone within the sound of his voice, or reach of his editorial pen.

 

To be fair, too-frequent POV switches can be perplexing for the reader to follow — and therein lies the POVN’s primary justification for dismissing all multiple POV narratives as poor writing. One of the more common first-novel problems is POV switching in mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence. But heck, that’s what the RETURN key is for, to clear up that sort of confusion.

 

If you are involved with a writing teacher, writing group compatriot, agent, or editor who is a POVN, you need to recognize his preference as early in your relationship as possible, in order to protect your own POV choices. Otherwise, you may end up radically edited, and some characterization may be lost. Take, for example, this paragraph from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE :

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

 

I might quibble about Austen’s use of semicolons, but it’s not too difficult to follow whose perspective is whose here, right? Yet, as a POVN would be the first to point out, there are actually THREE perspectives in this single brief paragraph, although there are only two people involved:

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry…” (Elizabeth’s POV)

 

“but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (the POV of an external observer)

 

“Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her…” (Darcy’s POV)

 

A POVN in Jane’s writing group would undoubtedly urge her to pick a perspective and stick to it consistently throughout the book; a POVN agent would probably reject PRIDE AND PREJUDICE outright, and a POVN editor would pick a perspective and edit accordingly. The resultant passage would necessarily be significantly different from Jane’s original intention:

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody. Darcy remained silent.”

 

At this rate, the reader is not going to know how Darcy feels until Elizabeth learns it herself, many chapters later. Yet observe how easily a single stroke of a space bar clears up even the most remote possibility of confusion about who is thinking what:

 

“Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody.

 

Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her. He really believed, were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.”

 

The moral here, my friends, is that you should examine writerly truisms very carefully before you accept them as invariably true. Grab that gift horse and stare into its mouth for awhile. You may find, after serious consideration, that you want to embrace being a POVN, at least for the duration of a particular project; there are many scenes and books where the rigidity of this treatment works beautifully. But for the sake of your own growth as a writer, make sure that the choice is your own, and not imposed upon you by the beliefs of others.

 

To paraphrase the late Mae West, if you copy other people’s style, you’re one of a crowd, but if you are an honest-to-goodness original, no one will ever mistake you for a copy.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini

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More terms you should know

Last week, I started a glossary of terms that every book-loving, agent-seeking aspiring writer should know, phrases that are tossed about in writer-oriented publications with a blithe disregard of whether those new to the field might not know them. (And not just the newbies: I have been a professional writer and editor for over a decade, and I still run across terms I do not know from time to time.) So it’s time to bite the bullet and learn what those phrases mean.

 

Again, if there is a term that you were really hoping I would define here that did not make the list, please send me a message via the COMMENTS function, below, now or at some point in the future. I am always happy to track down definitions for my readers.

 

My apologies to readers of my last posting: alphabetically, the first listing of today’s should have been in last Friday’s. However, someone suggested over the weekend that I include it, and I’m not about to let the tyranny of the alphabet deprive my dear readers of a necessary definition.

 

ELEVATOR SPEECH, n.: The three-minute version of a book, designed to be spoken aloud while in transit, containing the essential PREMISE, the target MARKET, and hitting all of the MARKETING POINTS of the book. All too often, aspiring writers walk into conferences with a PITCH (the three-sentence version) all prepared, but neglect to develop this longer selling tool. As a result, authors often run out of steam a minute into an all-important first meeting with an agent. The essence of a good elevator speech is knowing when to stop talking. (The more I define this, the more I think it deserves a blog of its own – watch for it in the coming week.)

 

JACKET BLURB, n.: The short synopsis of the book typically printed inside the flaps of a hardback’s dust cover. Generally runs about 100 words. (Not to be confused with BLURB, defined last week.)

 

LITERARY FICTION, n.: (1) Another ambiguous category of prose. Depending upon whom you ask, it can mean either character-driven fiction where the writing style is more important than the plot or character-driven fiction that assumes its target audience has a college-level vocabulary. (The average book published in North America assumes a tenth-grade vocabulary, by contrast.) If you want to start a lively controversy at any literary gathering, start asking people whether they consider John Irving’s work literary or mainstream. (2) Any work of fiction that contains a semicolon.

 

MAINSTREAM FICTION, n.: The vast majority of fiction sold in North America. Conforming to none of the standard genre classifications, mainstream fiction appeals to readers from across demographic groups. When mainstream fiction is well-written, or when it receives either a significant prize or critical adulation, it tends to be categorized as literary fiction. If you want to start a lively controversy at any literary gathering, start asking people whether they consider Alice Walker’s work mainstream or literary.

 

MANUSCRIPT, n. (often abbreviated MS): An unbound, single-sided complete draft of a book, for submission to editors and agents. Manuscripts differ from published books in a number of important ways: for instance, they always have at least 1-inch margins, are double-spaced, and are in 12-point type. For other ways in which manuscripts differ from published books, see STANDARD FORMAT.

 

MARKET, n.: (1) The demographic group most likely to buy a specific book, as in “Wow — your book would do really well in the YA market.” You should know the target market of your book, and why your book will appeal to that market, BEFORE you start pitching your work. (2) The current selling environment for books, as in “I can’t place this book in the current market.”

 

MARKET, v.: To present work to people who might buy it. Thus, a novelist markets his work to an agent; the agent then markets it to an editor; the editor markets it to the rest of the publishing firm, and the publishing company markets it to the public.

 

MARKET ANALYSIS, n. (also known as a COMPARATIVE MARKET ANALYSIS): A semi-objective view of the other books currently available on your topic AND an examination of the demographics of who might buy your book. For nonfiction, this is a formal section of the book proposal; for fiction, it’s just a good idea to for the author to conduct. In a conversation about your work with a publishing professional, under NO circumstances should you EVER admit that you have not performed a market analysis, because from the point of view of an agent or editor, the FIRST thing an author should do upon coming up with a great idea is to find out who else has written something similar.

 

MARKETING POINTS, pl. n.: Any facts about you or your book that will make it easier to sell. Make sure that your query letter AND your pitch both include the major marketing points for your book.

 

OUTLINE, n.: For nonfiction, an outline is essentially an expanded table of contents: a list of chapter or section titles, with each title accompanied by a 2-3 sentence summary of what that chapter or section will contain. Generally, when discussing fiction, the person using this term actually means a SYNOPSIS. Double-check.

 

PACKET, n.: An array of materials about a proposed book, used to attract interest within the publishing community. For fiction, this might include a synopsis, a bio, and the first chapter of the novel; for nonfiction, it would include the BOOK PROPOSAL and a cover letter.

 

PITCH, n.: (1) Verbally, your 30-second synopsis of your book. Frequently, agents and editors at conferences will prefer to hear pitches from authors, rather than reading any of the author’s work. (2) In writing, the three-sentence teaser for a book. (3) The second paragraph of most query letters to agents. (See my earlier postings about how to write query letters, if this is news to you.)

 

PITCH, v.: To recite your pitch to an agent or editor. If you are really doing your job at a conference, you should be pitching at least several times an hour, to anyone who will listen. It’s great practice.

 

PLATFORM, n.: For nonfiction, the array of credentials, expertise, and life experience that qualifies you as an expert on the topic of your book. Generally, the first thing an editor will want to know about a prospective NF author.

 

PREMISE, n.: The underlying logical proposition of a piece of fiction; often synonymous with the HOLLY WOOD HOOK. Usually, the premise is easier to identify for genre fiction (“hardboiled detective with a soft spot for curvy dames gets embroiled in city hall intrigue”) than for MAINSTREAM or LITERARY FICTION. In the latter case, the premises of, for instance, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY (“A butler butles for years on end.”) or THE ENGLISH PATIENT (“A severely burned man lies still and has flashbacks.”) must have required considerable embroidery upon the underlying premise to pitch successfully.

 

PRESS KIT, n.: An array of materials used to convince newspapers, radio stations, and television stations that you and your work deserve attention. It used to be that publishing houses put these together for authors, but now, most authors need to assemble and distribute their own press kits. (Don’t worry; it will be the subject of a future blog.)

 

That’s all for today – I should be able to finish the rest of the alphabet tomorrow.

 

But while I still have your attention, I am going to digress from my very serious subject matter to pursue the shade of the lovely and talented Ralph Fiennes. This weekend, I took a MUCH-NEEDED break from manuscript revision to see THE CONSTANT GARDENER and CORPSE BRIDE, a double feature with a whole lot of dead women in it. Has anyone but me noticed that, cinematically speaking, the mortality rate of any female character that gets romantically involved with a Ralph Fiennes character in a movie is 100%? This film, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, THE END OF THE AFFAIR, SCHINDLER’S LIST… What’s next, ANNA KARENINA? I’m sure women worldwide would have much happier fantasy lives if his love interests were occasionally allowed to survive the final frame. If I met him in a dark alley – or, still worse, in a desert – I would instantly run in the opposite direction.

 

All right, there is your dose of serious career-building information AND total whimsy for the day. Go out and enjoy the first days of autumn.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

– Anne Mini