Posted on - 7 Comments on Creating time and space to write: nothing up my sleeve…

Creating time and space to write: nothing up my sleeve…

I’m feeling a bit down today — I’ve just received word that an old acquaintance of mine committed suicide. The news comes courtesy of my alma mater. Ever-intent upon creating a far greater sense of community amongst its graduates than it ever was at promoting it amongst its undergraduates (at least while I was one of them), its staff tirelessly ferret out information about all of us and promulgate it ruthlessly, both on a bimonthly basis and in a peculiarly vicious form of sadism known as the reunion book, where poor, quivering souls are expected to account for the last five years of their terrestrial existence. Altogether, the university manages to give us all the impression that we’re all of such abiding eternal interest that we must all want to be kept updated on marriages, promotions, publications, and deaths in perpetuity.

Which means, in practice, that one seems always to be opening one’s junk mail and exclaiming, “Oh, I didn’t know he had died. I liked him.” The fine folks at the alumni office cheerfully informed me when they hit me up to give a eulogy earlier this year that the older one gets, the more often one should expect that to happen.

Good to know, I suppose.

Apart from the usual any man’s death diminishes me me malaise about someone I frankly hadn’t thought about in quite a number of years, Alex’s death had got me thinking about my membership in that other group that tends to exhibit an elevated suicide rate: artists in general and writers in particular. He, too, was a writer, and a good one. The sensitive nervous tissue I mentioned a few days ago, that stuff that allows us to perceive lovely ephemeral moments in life and capture them for all time, seems to have a harder time dealing with all of those slings and arrows outrageous fortune sees fit to fling at us all.

Or maybe we’re just better at composing last words than other people. In any case, one of the side effects of a lifetime spent interacting with the kind of fascinating, mercurial, observant souls who devote themselves to coughing up their visions of the world, often at great personal cost, for the delectation of others seems to be finding oneself saying on a fairly regular basis, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that! S/he was talented,” even without the intervention of a shared alumni publication.

It’s one of the costs of leading an interesting life. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

There are even those who argue, and cogently, that the urge to produce art is in itself is essentially a self-defensive response to an unjust world. “To devote life to a constantly disappointed hope of happiness,” Mme. de Staël wrote, is to make it even sadder. It is better to direct one’s efforts to going down the road from youth to death with some degree of nobility, and with reputation.”

Amazing that someone who never had to query agents was able to come up with that, isn’t it?

Should you ever find yourself wondering why I put so much time and energy into this blog — over and above, of course, having a general fondness for advising people what to do that’s no doubt buried deep in my little Mediterranean lady genes, along with a pathological propensity for feeding bystanders until they burst — you need look no farther than my fellow writers who have fallen by the wayside. I’m not just talking about fine, creative souls like Alex, whose negative was so very final, but to all of the hundreds and thousands of genuinely talented people who have given up writing because the road to recognition is so very, very difficult.

It is thus with a sense of solemnity and a full appreciation of the irony of what I’m about to do that I return to our topic du jour: carving time and space out of a busy life for writing on a regular basis.

I’ve been dancing around this particular topic all autumn, ever since I took my October writing retreat. Back then, I asked you to start pondering a very serious question: what do you actually need in order to write happily and well?

Over the last couple of weeks, I have periodically reminded you of this request, urging you to give the matter a bit more strenuous thought. So if you weren’t expecting a pop quiz to turn up on the horizon, well, you obviously have never taken one of my classes.

Actually, it’s less of a pop quiz than the assignment of additional homework. Last time, if you will recall, I posed a number of questions that any writer serious about making a career of it is going to need to tackle sooner or later, preferably sooner. To recap for the benefit of those of you who missed them:

(1) What conditions would you actually need in order to write productively for a significant, unbroken chunk of time? What are your necessary minimum conditions — not just generic ones, but yours — for retreating to write, even just for a day?

(2) What specific factors — ambient noise conditions, lighting, seating, height of monitor, being able to lock a door, whatever — are of tangible assistance in your creative process, and what is merely nice?

(3) Is there anything that you currently use that you could do without? If you could snap your fingers and replace a neutral factor with a useful one, what would it be?

(4) Conversely, what conditions render the actual act of writing more difficult for you? Be as specific as you can, please: cold drafts blowing across your keyboard, telemarketers calling every fifteen minutes, a bookshelf that threatens to dump its contents onto your head as you attempt to type next to it, fear of rejection? Write ‘em all down.

(5) If you believe taking a writing retreat of any length to be impossible or well-nigh impossible for you, why? Again, the more specific you can make your reply, the better.

(6) What feels like support for your writing? What are others in your life already doing that’s helpful to your writing progress, and what seems like a stumbling-block?

Yes, these are indeed unusual questions to spring upon people at holiday time, when light, fluffy queries like Where can I find the best deal on cashmere socks?, If I add five pounds to the amount of weight I’m planning to lose after New Year’s, is it okay to eat this seventh cookie?, and, of course, Will Rudolph be able to save Santa’s delivery schedule? are ostensibly supposed to be occupying our minds.

However, as anyone who has been reading this blog for more than twelve months could undoubtedly tell you, I believe that the pervasive practice of writers torturing themselves through New Year’s resolutions demanding such unreasonable feats as finishing that long-delayed novel within the next month or landing an agent before Mardi Gras causes a whole lot of unnecessary misery, ultimately rendering the path to publication emotionally harder than it needs to be.

So there.

Call me zany, but in my experience, slow and steady tends to be a better long-term strategy for those seeing fame and fortune through writing than the occasional — or annual — two-week burst of effort, followed by a month of disappointment when those efforts do not yield results akin to Jack’s having planted those magical beans and awakened the next morning to find a beanstalk. Not to mention the months of disappointment with oneself for not having pulled a rabbit out of a hat yet again this year.

Allow me to suggest a much more sensible New Year’s resolution: this year, don’t make any New Year’s resolutions related to your writing at all.

Instead, why not figure out just a few small changes that would help you write more regularly? Or to rearrange your life in a small-but-significant respect to garner more emotional support for sending out a new query every time you find a rejection letter in your mailbox? Or to commit to removing a distraction that regularly comes between you and your genuine passion to write. Oh, if only you had a list handy of what does and doesn’t help you write…

Wait — what’s that you have clutched in your hot little hands, those of you who obediently donned your thinking caps when I requested it? And you thought you couldn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Presto!

Because everyone’s list is bound to be different, I’m not going to presume to tell you how to prioritize the items on yours. At least not today. I’m going to leave you to ruminate on it a bit more, while we devote ourselves to applying the knowledge gleaned from that list to the long-delayed question of how to set up your own private writing retreat.

Yes, I am trying to clear out my to-write list before the end of the year! How did you guess? Since that’s such a big topic, I’m going to tackle the personal retreat next time.

I do have a little something up my sleeve, however, of a practical nature, to round out our time together today: remember in my last post, when I suggested asking your kith, kin, coworkers, canary, neighbors, and any stray children you may have happened to have taken in recently to cooperate with you in setting aside chunks of time sanctified for writing, agreeing not to bug you with anything less than an earthquake during these regularly-scheduled periods? Let’s give some thought today to how one might go about presenting that request in a manner that elicits neither thigh-slapping and guffaws, blank incredulity, nor doe-eyed moppets moaning, “Don’t you love me anymore, Mommy?”

For starters, I wouldn’t recommend just charging up to your nearest and dearest and accusing them, albeit nicely, of sabotaging your writing progress with their continual demands upon your time and attention. I can tell you from long experience observing and advising writers at various stages of their careers that however dramatically satisfying standing up at dinnertime and declaiming, “Support my writing or I’m leaving, Reginald!” may be in fantasy, it seldom yields positive results in practice.

Why, you ask? For the exceedingly simple reason that in all likelihood, Reginald probably no idea that he hasn’t been particularly supportive of your writing. He leaves you alone while he watches football in either the American or the international sense of the term, doesn’t he? Granted, you may not feel that bellowing at the television in the next room is particularly helpful to your artistic endeavors, nor is wandering into your writing space periodically to demand where his favorite pair of socks are, and sure, these orgies of spectatorship often take place during parts of the weekend when the kids want to be driven from activity — but for heaven’s sake, he’s trying, isn’t he?

Then, too, you may be so myopic that you can’t see that your mother’s nagging you to use your long-planned writing day to visit Grandma more often (because she’s not getting any younger, as opposed to the rest of us, but please don’t feel guilty) is her way of showing that she loves you, you sensitive so-and-so. Or that when you tell your best friend that you have rearranged your schedule so that you can spend Saturday mornings writing for several hours, that what she actually hears you say is, “I have some free time — let’s go to brunch!”

If you haven’t forced your nearest and dearest into a comfortable seated position recently and held them in place until you have explained that you regard such time as one of the greatest blessings of life, consider doing so, pronto. They may genuinely not understand why your writing time needs to be sacrosanct.

And why should they, really, unless they happen to be creative artists themselves? The fact is, dearly beloved, that to most non-writers, the idea of spending hours at a time sitting in front of a keyboard, composing a story from scratch where the grammar and spelling actually count, is not a particularly appetizing prospect. In interrupting your writing time, they may actually be trying to save you from what they perceive to be a grisly fate.

Don’t expect them to read your mind — or wait until you have been interrupted so many times that the only option left for expressing your desires on the subject is in a piercing scream. If you explain calmly and kindly why time and space are important to you, as well as how you would like them to act with respect to it, well-meaning souls will surprisingly often exclaim, “Oh, I had no idea! Of course I’ll leave you alone on Thursday afternoons from 4:45 to 6:15!”

Even better, they may actually do it. Naturally, like most New Year’s resolutions, their commitment to keeping out of your hair may falter over the course of a few weeks or months, but if you presented your case reasonably in the first place, you have laid the groundwork for a gentle reminder, haven’t you?

In order to encourage these sweet souls to make good on their promises, give ‘em a little practical help. Don’t answer the phone during your dedicated writing time, unless you are actually awaiting a heart transplant — and if you are, or if you’re not comfortable making yourself unavailable while your kids are in the house/out of the house/not yet old enough to vote, invest in caller ID or establish special ring tones so you know which calls are actually emergent and which merely Reginald eager to find out where you’ve hidden his favorite sweater after you washed it.

I’m quite serious about this. I know several successful authors who have gone so far as to get pagers and give the numbers only to their children, their elderly parents, and their agents.

Also, avoid the all-too-common trap of keeping your e-mail program or IM open while you are trying to write. They’re just too distracting — and as much as it may annoy your bored friends if you do not respond right away to visitors to your Facebook page, have you EVER received such a message that couldn’t actually have waited an hour or two for your response?

Speaking of distraction, some of you are still thinking about my crack about Reginald’s seeming inability to put away his own laundry, aren’t you? Your antennae are not steering you wrong, my friends: I am about to suggest that you sit down with the other members of your household to chat about how the domestic duties might be reapportioned to give you more writing time.

To put it another way, are the chores you do habitually are actually of such a nature that they can be done by your good self, or have you been doing them because, good heavens, if you don’t, who will? Or — brace yourself, neatniks — because you were brought up to believe that if laundry sits in a hamper longer than three days, it will transform into Godzilla and go rampaging through your house?

If you are the household doer-of-chores, expect some resistance to the suggestion that you are not equipped with an extra pair of hands specially designed for the purpose. As I mentioned last time, engrained habits are hard to dislodge.

Which is why I would not suggest walking into such a discussion unarmed: your argument will be more convincing if you are toting some proof that such chores are eating up quite a bit of your time. A great way to establish this is to take an average week and keep track of everything you spend more than ten consecutive minutes doing. Make your record as detailed as possible, then at the end of the week, tote up how much time you spent on each task.

If you’re like many conscientious chore-doers, you may be astonished at the totals. And if you’re like most time-fritterers, seeing how you’re spending your time may be equally enlightening.

Regardless of whether you will be confronting anyone but your pet cat or goldfish with the results (“I invested three hours playing with you last week, Fluffy! Your tyranny over my time must cease!”), keeping a meticulous record of how you spend your time for a week or two is a good idea. Be completely honest about it, so you may discern patterns.you can always destroy the document afterwards.

Yes, even if you’re embarrassed about some of the time-eaters you’ll need to list. After all, it won’t help you to pretend you spent six hours re-reading Marcel Proust’s À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU when you actually spent it watching reruns of Project Runway, will it? I offer no judgments — as a matter of fact, I’m rather fond of Project Runway — but presumably, if you felt you were already devoting enough time to writing, you wouldn’t be trying to find more.

Think of it as a time budget. If you know how and where are you currently spending your time, you will have an easier time figuring out what time expenses, so to speak, can be dropped. Or, to put it another way, would you prefer to invest your time elsewhere?

After you have a reasonably detailed account in your hands, try breaking your normal routine for a week or ten days, to get a clearer idea of what is and is not immutable in your usual schedule. This may require a bit of advance thought, but the results can be fabulously educational.

Switch around chores with your spouse; if you pick up the kids after school, try rearranging your carpool so you drive them there in the morning instead; it may well be that this will leave you fresher for evening writing. If you always do the dishes or laundry in the morning, do it late at night; maybe it will turn out that early morning is your prime writing time, and if so, do you really want to fill up that time with housework?

In short, just how much of that cast-in-stone schedule is actually cast in stone? What could go, at least in the short run, in order to free up more writing time

At the end of your week or ten days of messing with your schedule, after your routines are good and disrupted, look back over your account of how you spent your time. What worked and what didn’t? Where could you fit in chunks of solid writing time on a regular basis?

Could you use this information to rearrange your life so you could get more writing done? It may require some genuine bravery and ingenuity, but most of the time, the answer is a resounding YES.

Yes, it’s a lot of work, but changes implemented in this manner are far, far more likely to still be around six or even three months from now than if you pursue the infinitely more popular route of simply demanding more work from yourself while altering nothing else in your life.

Hey, there’s a reason that the average New Year’s resolution lasts only three weeks.

To minimize the resentment of the rest of your household, as well as to gain a more accurate sense of how you would use your untrammeled time, I advise going on a media fast for that week or ten days when you begin the new Schedule of Joy. It won’t hurt your worldview to turn off the TV and radio for that long, nor to skip the daily newspaper.

Not only will this allow you to assess just how much time every day you are currently spending being entertained and/or informed, to see if you could purloin some of that time for writing, but it will also help you get back into the habit of listening to your own thoughts without distraction.

I go on one of these fasts every year, and it honestly is amazing how much it calms the thoughts. It also arouses the pity and wonder of my household, and reminds my kith and kin just how important it is to me to have inviolate writing time. It reminds them that they, too, are contributing to my success, if only by remembering not to telephone during my writing time. It reminds them that they can actually LOOK for a stamp when they need it, rather than asking me.

Not to mention schooling the cats in who is actually in charge of when that furry mouse gets thrown for fetching purposes.

It also reminds everyone concerned why I am so strict throughout the rest of the year about not wanting to hear what is happening on the currently hot sitcom. For me, getting sucked into an ongoing plot line is a big dispensable time waster. I have seen a grand total of one episode of FRIENDS, two SEX AND THE CITYs, and no Seinfeld at all, but I have written several pretty good books.

I’m aware that the list above is woefully out of date, thanks, and I’m not sure that I could pick Jennifer Aniston out of a lineup. (She was on the first show I mentioned, right?)

Have I made my point?

Is getting a book project finished worth being temporarily out of touch with pop culture? Only you can answer that, but frankly, I doubt that even the most devoted television watchers will be clutching their throats like Vincent Price on their deathbeds, moaning ruefully, “Oh, if only I had kept up with my sitcoms better! If only I had followed reality television more faithfully, I would have no regrets departing this terrestrial sphere!”

And yes, in answer to what three-quarters of you just thought, I don’t believe that anyone Alex left behind wishes that he had spent more time watching television, either.

Which is why, in case you were wondering, that I’m not going to tell you how much time per day, week, month, or year is the idea amount for you to invest in your writing. How you choose to spend your time on earth — your leisure time, anyway — is up to you. If you want to set aside time to express yourself, be my guest; if you’d rather only work on your book sporadically, you have my blessing, too. Ditto with sending out your queries with the clockwork regularity necessary to land an agent vs. stuffing your manuscript pages into the bottom drawer, never to see the light of day. Whatever makes you happy, you should do.

All I’m asking — and I realize that it’s a big, big request, so feel free to say no — is that you make those choices consciously, rather than allowing yourself to be pushed around by the fact that a new year is going to begin in a few days or other people have not to date spontaneously offered to lighten your burdens so you may devote more time to writing. Creating a stellar piece of writing does not happen by accident; 99.9999% of the time, a glorious book is the result of quite a bit of advance planning and sacrifice.

Please do give some thought, in short, to the tender, loving care of your talent and all of that nervous tissue. To help you do so, I can do no better than to show you that Mme. de Staël quote in its entirety:

 

So let us rise up under the weight of existence. Let us not give our unjust enemies and ungrateful friends the triumph of having beaten down our intellectual faculties. They reduce people who would have been satisfied with affection to seeking glory; well, then, we have to achieve glory. These ambitious attempts may not remedy the sorrows of the soul, but they will bring honor to life. To devote life to a constantly disappointed hope of happiness is to make it even sadder. It is better to direct one’s efforts to going down the road from youth to death with some degree of nobility, and with reputation.

 

 

As John Irving urged us in THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, keep passing those open windows, everyone. And as I have been known to advise a time or two here, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part X: where you stand depends on where you sit, sometimes literally

Great gifts for writers with great gifts, part X: where you stand depends on where you sit, sometimes literally

In my last post, I lingered on the desirability of making physical space in your home — or somewhere else, if you can afford separate office space — specifically dedicated to writing. Like playing the same music every time you sit down to write, lighting your desk area more brightly than the rest of the house in midwinter, or painting your kneecaps bright green as a pre-writing ritual, setting aside a space where you do nothing but write can be very helpful in fending off writer’s block, seasonally-induced or otherwise.

Why, you ask? Well, like the other sensual cues mentioned last time, walking into a dedicated writing environment makes the transition from mundane (non-writing) time to creative time clear to not only your daytimer, but to your body. Just as nice, clean towels coming out of the dryer tell my cats that it’s time to curl up and have a nap, walking into my writing space tells me that it’s time to get to work.

You can TELL your body that it’s time to write until you’re blue in the face, but let’s face it, we’re animals at base, and creatures of habit to boot. That pancreas of yours will need a non-verbal hint or two, and when’s the last time your T2 vertebra listened to reason?

You’ve probably already noticed the stimulus-bodily reaction phenomenon manifesting in less positive ways. The body’s no fool. When you have a job you hate, merely walking into the building raises your stress levels markedly, doesn’t it? The smell of baking bread or cookies cheers most people up, regardless of what else is going on, and incessant holiday music following one from store to store so stuns the nervous system after a while that one begins to buy frantically in self-defense, just to get out of there.

(No one can tell me that last effect isn’t calculated. I was in a children’s choir for many years, doomed to wander puckishly from rest home to shopping mall to stage to insane asylum all throughout the holiday season, piping carols at the top of our childish voices. The sounds we were yelping were generally considered high-quality, but let me tell you, spectators’ eyes glaze over like Santa’s swimming pool before the end of the second verse of even the most beautifully-rendered carol. They’ve been hypnotized by sheer repetition.)

Having a dedicated space usually helps with that other common writerly tendency, jumping up after only a minute or two to do something else. The less comfortable your writing area, the more likely that urge is to overwhelm you.

(Confidential to the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver who might still be snuffling around for meaningful means to mark a Hanukkah evening: have you considered giving an office chair with really good back support? Not a generic office chair, but one that fits the writer’s body specifically? Or a copy of THE NOW HABIT, psychologist Neil Fiore’s excellent and accessible book on breaking procrastination patterns?)

A solid fit between computer user and furniture can help avoid all kinds of writing-delaying problems, as many of us now know to our cost. Business offices are notorious for trying to force every body type into identical chairs, as are colleges. When I was an undergraduate, my college saw fit to equip each and every dorm room with large, square wooden desk chairs like the one above, emblazoned with the school’s insignia — so, you know, if we forgot the school’s motto, we could just turn around and read it. My friends who happened to be 6’2” hockey players claimed that the chairs were most comfortable.

Everyone else ended up with sore backs and overworked arms. And in my day, whippersnappers, those chairs did not come equipped with that festive pillow, so after an hour or two of studying, what I shall delicately call the end of the spine began to complain as well.

Perhaps because there is no such thing as a good, supportive one-size-fits-all desk chair, one can surprisingly often find quite decent barely-used ones at thrift stores, I’ve noticed. You may need to canvas your entire city to find one that suits you and take a carpet-cleaner to it before you use it, but the eye-popping discounts are often worth it.

To return to my previous point: once you have established a space, song, lighting condition, specific chair, etc. as THE signal to begin serious writing, your body will soon come to understand that it’s time to stop distracting you with minor matters like the desire to eat, sleep, or have meaningful human contact and get down to work. Perhaps equally important, having a dedicated space — particularly one with a door that closes firmly on loved ones’ noses — tells everyone else in your household that you are not to be disturbed.

So it’s not only your habits that we’re hoping to recondition here. When intensive writing schedules work, EVERYONE in the household is cooperating to make that happen, starting in babyhood.

Oh, you laugh, but having grown up in a family of writers, I can tell you with absolute confidence: a career writer’s kid learns to go to sleep by the sound of typing (and speaking of conditioned reflexes, the sound of a manual typewriter still makes me distinctly sleepy). To this day, I seldom raise my voice above quiet conversational level, lest there be someone writing in the next room.

It’s habit, like everything else.

It’s also absolutely necessary, incidentally, for the household of a writer working on a deadline — and lest your kith and kin be harboring any fond illusions on the subject, the more successful you are as a author, the more deadlines you are going to have and the tighter they are going to be. It’s just a fact that at some point, no matter how nice a successful writer is, s/he is going to have to say to loved ones, “My writing needs to be my #1 priority right now. Which, by definition, places your needs slightly lower on the list.”

And mean it. So why not avoid the proverbial Christmas rush and start getting your kith and kin in the habit of hearing it now?

Did the last few paragraphs make you a trifle uncomfortable? If so, you’re certainly not alone: many writers are too sweet-tempered or too responsible or too habit-bound or just to gosh darned nice to expect their family members to change ANYTHING about THEIR schedules in order to make room for Mama or Papa or Sissy’s writing. Mama or Papa or Sissy simply give up sleep or recreation or dating in order to finish that book in spare moments when nobody else is making demands upon their time; Mama, more often than not, trains herself to drop her train of thought in mid-sentence the nanosecond anything remotely resembling a request for assistance or care falls upon her distracted ear.

Since this is the season of giving, may I suggest that this would be an excellent time to reexamine that attitude just a little?

Of course, I’m not suggesting that writers’ children should be taught to stifle their cries over their bleeding, severed limbs (although admittedly, writers’ kids of my generation often did). I’m merely throwing out the notion that everyone in the household might make supporting the writing project a top priority on an ongoing basis, rather than leaving the poor writer to struggle with trying to carve out time and space alone.

Why, yes, you may pause in your perusal of this post at this point to read that last bit out loud to your significant other, children, upstairs neighbor, or dog. I’m perfectly happy to wait. Tell ‘em it’s my idea, not yours.

While I’m being subversive — and to wrap up my series on gifts that the average writer would love to receive — FNDGG, why not give the writer in your life the gift of TIME TO WRITE on a regular basis?

After all, a few hours a week is a gift that even fairly small children could give to an overworked writer-parent. Maybe Santa could be induced to whisper some suggestions during that usually one-way communication on his lap; I know many, many writers to whom a pack of hand-made gift certificates, each good for an hour of uninterrupted time, would be the best stocking-stuffer EVER.

Monetarily, it would be hard to find a less expensive present — or New Year’s resolution, for that matter. In most aspiring writers’ households, though, it would require some fairly significant reshuffling of priorities to institute.

Which brings me to another very, very good reason that you might want to speak up about desiring dedicated time and space now, rather than holding your tongue until the happy day that you land an agent, sign a book contract, or see your nom de plume jauntily topping the New York Times’ bestseller list. Remember how I mentioned at Thanksgiving time that the vast majority of North Americans have absolutely no idea how books come to be published or how long it typically takes? Until they see the bound volume for sale at Borders or Chapters, even the most habitually kind and considerate of these well-meaning souls is prone — nay, likely — to express puzzlement and even disappointment at the most exciting tidings falling from their writer friends’ lips.

It’s usually expressed through hoping they’ve misunderstood you. “You signed with an agent?” they will say, uncomprehending smiles playing about their faces. “Great — when is the book coming out?”

They don’t do it to hurt you, honestly: they just don’t understand how many stages (or how much work) is involved in shepherding a book from first bright idea to successful publication. Or even unsuccessful publication. From the outside, a writer who isn’t being paid to sit and tap at a keyboard can look an awful lot like an unusually obsessed hobbyist nursing repetitive strain injuries.

Why? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: because practically everyone in the English-speaking world, or at any rate English-reading one, mistakenly believes that when a genuinely gifted writer adds the last bon mot to any book worth reading, agents, editors, and scouts for the Oprah Winfrey show magically and spontaneously appear on his or her (usually his, in this fantasy) doorstep, clamoring to bring the magical book out tomorrow.

In the face of that preconceived notion, anything less than instant, massive literary recognition for the writer one actually knows personally is bound to seem like a bit of a letdown.

To be fair, plenty of aspiring writers buy into this fantasy, too — at least until they learn how the publishing industry actually works. In reality, even the writer of a book destined to be a classic a hundred years from now will often spend years querying, pitching, submitting, and revising before being picked up by an agent. Even after that legitimately thrilling achievement, there’s no guarantee that the agent will be able to sell the book to a publisher, or if s/he can, how soon it will be.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but I’ve met literally hundreds of authors who didn’t attain any serious recognition of their writing until their third or fourth books, not third or fourth month marketing them to agents.

I’m bringing this up not to depress you (although I could see where it might conceivably have that effect) but so that you will not talk yourself out of considering asking for more time, space, and support for your work just because you’ve been looking for an agent for a while — or talking yoursel into making one of those lamentably common New Year’s resolutions that demand landing an agent or a publishing contract by the end of the year.

You’ll be happier in the long run — and, dare I say it, less likely to fall prey to writer’s block — if your view of what a good writer can hope to achieve in the short run is realistic.

These days, even the IRS recognizes that ultimately very successful authors often expend years of effort without making a profit at their craft before hitting the big time. (It’s true; look it up.) If the government can accept the unappetizing fact that they’re going to have to wait to tax your book sales, is it really too much to expect those who love you to do the same?

Astonishingly often, it seems to be, but again, try not to blame your kith and kin too much. When everyone one knows seems to believe that an unpublished book must be by definition inherently flawed — because if it weren’t, it would already be published and featured on Oprah, right? — one is likely to look a trifle askance at a dream that takes a long time to come true. Or which appears to be coming true in small increments whose importance the observer doesn’t really understand.

All of which is to say: if you were planning to wait until your writing caught a break before politely requesting that your kith and kin

(a) stop nagging you to get published and go on Oprah,

(b) arguing that other activities are inherently more important than preserving your writing time and/or space,

(c) installing fitness equipment in the only logical space in the house for your desk,

(d) interrupting your scheduled writing time with the crisis du jour,

(e) interrupting your scheduled writing time for phone calls, and/or

(f) interrupting your scheduled writing time because someone just said something funny in a sitcom (improbable, but within the realm of possibility, certainly),

it might not be worth the wait. What is to a writer a major event — the realistic possibility of completing a novel within the next three months, for instance, or an agent’s request for materials, or finally selling that book proposal to a small publisher — may not be to them the unanswerable argument for support you’ve been expecting it to be. They may not respond as you would like, because after all, if your book were REALLY destined for greatness…

Well, you know the tune by now, don’t you?

And that, to slip into the vernacular for a moment, is going to suck, because at that point, you’re going to want to drop everything and devote yourself to your art. Trust me, because I speak from long, long experience and observation: at that ostensibly-joyous-yet-practically-stressful juncture, even the most sweet-tempered author is bound to feel bubbles of ulcer-inducing resentment welling up against her solar plexus.

Consider, then, the alternative. There are many advantages to gathering one’s significant other, paramour(s), children, parents, grandparents, friends, coworkers, pets, and anyone else who might be at all likely to disturb your writing time and announcing, “Now hear this! Starting this very minute and until this project is complete, I’m going to need all of your help. Raise your right hands and repeat after me: ‘Unless the house is actually on fire, I shall not interrupt my beloved writer while s/he is working…”

I’m feeling waves of panic floating from the timid at the very notion of saying such a thing. “But Anne,” I hear some of you kindly souls squeak fearfully, “isn’t that a little, you know, drastic? After all, they do leave me alone to write sometimes; I don’t want them to think I’m not grateful for that. I’ve got a much, much better idea: what if I don’t say anything at all, and just hope that they’ll take the hint?”

I understand your reluctance, oh gentle souls, but I have one question to ask in response: how has that strategy worked out for you so far?

As lovely as it would be if one’s families, roommates, and friends would spontaneously cry, “You know, honey, I’ve been thinking, and you would have two and a half hours of clear extra time per week to work on your book if I did the grocery shopping for the next six months. Please let me do this for you!” in my experience, it doesn’t happen all that often. Habit is habit, unlikely to change without somebody laying out some awfully good reasons that it should.

(Although for the benefit of any Significant Others, paramours, cats, etc. who may be reading this: anyone who DID murmur such words under the mistletoe — and actually followed through on them — would be exceedingly likely to find by spring that every writer of his/her sweetie’s acquaintance is bright green with envy. I just mention.)

Call me a cynic, but I believe that one is far, far more likely to get what one wants if one asks for it, rather than waiting for those in a position to give it to read one’s mind. Especially when, as so many aspiring writers do, you’ve probably been juggling your writing and the rest of your life well enough that from the outside, it might not look like the strain it undoubtedly is.

So instead of relying upon your loved ones to realize that you could use a bit of extra time, why not come out and request it? Or — don’t faint on me here — decree establishing time and space to write as your holiday present to yourself?

Your writing is important to you. You are NOT being selfish to ask for time and a place to do it.

Before any of you tell me that you are far, far too busy for this to be practicable — I can tell which ones intend to make this objection by the loud guffaws of disbelief and tears of mirth running down your faces — let me hasten to add that I’m thinking about some fairly small increments of undisturbed tranquility. What if, say, you were no longer the one doing the laundry? Or your teenager cooked dinner twice per week? Or you stopped playing canasta with those neighbors you never really liked in the first place? Or — and I suspect this one might resonate with some of you at this particular season — you opted out of hosting your thirty-person family’s holiday dinner next year?

How much time would that free for your writing? And, more crucially, just what message would such a step send to your kith and kin about precisely how important your writing actually is to you?

Because, if you don’t mind my asking, if you’ve never asked them to sacrifice anything for it, even momentary pleasure, are you positive that they honestly understand that you consider it your real life’s work, your genuine passion, regardless of whether your writing ever actually gets published?

Assuming, of course, that you feel this way. Most of the dedicated writers I know do.

Yes, working up the nerve to convey this to non-writers is hard, but anyone who ever told you that being a writer is easy was — well, let’s say inadequately informed. I’m going to talk more next time about how one might go about expressing this to one’s kith and kin, as well as some practical means of figuring out what can and cannot be altered in order to make more time and space for writing in your life. Before you groan, believe me, the rewards of self-expression are massive and ongoing. It is well worth reassessing the demands upon your time and space to make room for you to try.

At least think about it, please: even writers with great support and lovely, comfortable, well-lit writing spaces can usually figure out where there’s room for improvement. As Emily Dickenson wrote so charmingly, “We never know how high we are/till we are called to rise.”

She was talking about something completely different, of course, but it brings me back to a question I asked you to start considering way back in October: what do you actually need in order to write happily and well?

You didn’t honestly think that I was going to content myself with a mere pep talk today, did you?

To render subsequent discussions of October’s burning question and today’s modest proposal both more useful and more interesting, let’s expand that general question into a number of more focused ones:

(1) What conditions would you actually need in order to write productively for a significant, unbroken chunk of time? What are your necessary minimum conditions — not just generic ones, but yours — for retreating to write, even just for a day?

(2) What specific factors — ambient noise conditions, lighting, seating, height of monitor, being able to lock a door, whatever — are of tangible assistance in your creative process, and what is merely nice?

(3) Is there anything that you currently use that you could do without? If you could snap your fingers and replace a neutral factor with a useful one, what would it be?

(4) Conversely, what conditions render the actual act of writing more difficult for you? Be as specific as you can, please: cold drafts blowing across your keyboard, telemarketers calling every fifteen minutes, a bookshelf that threatens to dump its contents onto your head as you attempt to type next to it, fear of rejection? Write ‘em all down.

(5) If you believe taking a writing retreat of any length to be impossible or well-nigh impossible for you, why? Again, the more specific you can make your reply, the better.

(6) What feels like support for your writing? What are others in your life already doing that’s helpful to your writing progress, and what seems like a stumbling-block?

Yes, yes, I know: these are some pretty weighty questions, downright fundamental to who you are and how you write. That’s why I’ve given you a couple of months — and the upcoming weekend — to ponder them. They are questions that every successful professional writer has to face sooner or later, not as daydreams, but as practical realities that can be changed as necessary.

Usually, the answers become apparent about three days before a major deadline, but I think we can do better than that, don’t you? Give ‘em some thought — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Courage, my friends!

Courage, my friends!

Yesterday, I began talking about a series of questions that trouble aspiring writers the world over in the dead of night, at least those who have submitted (or are planning to submit) requested materials to agents. Since no one, but no one, is better at coming up with complicated scenarios with which to while away the insomniac hours than a truly talented writer (novelists are particularly gifted at it, I notice), I shall not even pretend to come up with a complete list of these burning midnight issues, but some of the more popular ones include:

(1) Is it ever okay to submit a manuscript without a direct request from an agent?

(2) Now that I have a direct request from an agent to submit the first 50 pages, may I send the first 52, since that’s the end of that chapter and it contains a really nifty cliffhanger?

(3) I got that request to submit materials an awfully long time ago. May I still send them, or has the agent forgotten all about me and my book?

(4) Now that I have gotten my act together and sent those requested materials, how soon will I hear back?

(5) It feels like months since I sent those requested materials, but consulting my handy calendar, I see that it’s only been a few weeks. Should I read something into the fact that I haven’t heard back yet from the agent of my dreams?

(6) Now that it’s been a couple of months since I sent those pages, is it time yet to start reading something into the delay in hearing back?

(7) Now that it’s been several months since I sent those pages, which of the fourteen scenarios I have constructed in my mind about why I haven’t yet heard back is the correct one?

(8) Now that it’s been half a year since I sent those pages, am I even positive that the agent of my dreams received them in the first place? Will I insult her if I ask at this juncture? Or have I already waited too long?

This list goes on and on, of course, but you’re seeing a general trend here, right? No matter what course the aspiring writer chooses, until it’s been validated by a “Hey, I would LOVE to represent you!” call from an agent, it can cause worry, if not outright self-flagellation, in the night: am I about to do the right thing? Have I done the right thing? How will I know if I’ve done the right thing?

Now, if I were a bossier sort of person, or one who regarded the literary world as simple, straightforward, and run according to a monolithic set of rules to which every agent in North America swore a blood oath to uphold through storm and tempest, I might be tempted to soothe writerly worries by short, dogmatic, one-size-fits-all answers on the order of:

(1) No.

(2) No.

(3) Yes.

(4) Whenever the agent gets around to it.

(5) No.

(6) No, not until twice the length of time the agency states as its average has passed. Then, and only then, may you follow up.

(7) In all probability, none of them.

(8) Wait — you haven’t checked by now?

Terse, isn’t it? Pronouncements based upon the prevailing wisdom often are — and are seldom, I have found, very comforting (or even all that enlightening, in many instances) to the living, breathing human being troubled by Questions 1-8.

Now, admittedly, brevity has never been the soul of my wit. As long-term readers of this blog are no doubt clock-watchingly aware, I often spend an entire post, or even an entire series, on even a single one of these types of questions. Since the literary market is in constant flux, especially lately, I like to give my readers as much of the logic behind the prevailing wisdom as possible.

And if you doubt that, feel free to check out the archived posts in any of the 194 categories ont he list at right. No one can say that I don’t like to cover bases THOROUGHLY.

As it happens, none of Questions 1-8 is the subject of today’s base-covering. However, since I’ve gotten you worrying about them, here are some less-terse answers:

(1) Not unless the agency has posted submissions on its website or in its listing in one of the standard agency guides asking for queriers to include certain materials with their query letters. Technically, though, this is not a requested submission; it just means that the agents at that particular agency like to have a bit more evidence in front of them before they decide to reject a query or ask to see a manuscript.

(2) I wouldn’t advise it, since sending more than the agent requested sends the message that the submitter can’t follow directions very well. The way an experienced submitter (or contest entrant) handles this dilemma is to revise the submission pages so that the nifty cliffhanger ends up on p. 50; after all, one can always revise it back to the original length after the agent asks to see the rest of the book. (Cynical, perhaps, but hardly an uncommon practice.)

(3) It depends what you mean by a really long time ago. Speaking of thoroughness, please see yesterday’s rather lengthy blog post for elaboration (and many, many reiterations of it depends.)

(4) It depends upon how many submissions the agent and her screeners happen to be processing at the moment, but 6-8 weeks is fairly average for a mailed submission; check the agency’s website and/or agency guide listing to see what they say their turn-around time usually is. E-mailed submissions often experience speedier turn-around times, but anecdotal evidence implies that they’re also more likely to be rejected than a physical submission.

(5) It probably isn’t in your interest to do so, because agencies do get backlogged. If you haven’t heard back, chances are that it’s because no one at the agency has read it yet. Relax, have a nice cup of tea — then send out ten more queries, to hedge your bets.

(6) After a couple of months, you should probably check with the agency to make sure that they actually received your submission; if they didn’t, or if they have lost it, they usually want to know. Phrase the follow-up as politely as possible (vindictive statements implying that they should have gotten back to you weeks ago tend not to play well), but do follow up.

(7) In all probability, none of them is a pretty good response, actually, but I don’t think that it addresses the underlying issue here, which concerns how long a writer should wait for a response. Once the months have started to add up, the most productive way to spend your energy is (a) double-checking that the agency has indeed received your submission, if you have not already done so, (b) triple-checking that the agency doesn’t have a policy that no news = rejection (some do; check their websites), and/or (c) querying and submitting to other agents.

(8) It really isn’t a good idea to wait as long as six months to follow up on your submission unless the agency states point-blank that its turn-around times are genuinely that long. You are perfectly free to ask for an update, but at this juncture, the people who handled the submission probably will not remember it. Ask politely for information, but don’t hold your breath, awaiting a response: move on.

Philosophically, I notice a common thread running through many of these questions, an anxiety that I’ve crop up with astonishing frequency amongst writers of my acquaintance over the years. Frankly, it keeps me up at night, worrying about writers who have fallen prey to it.

It’s a syndrome that, in its mild form, can drive writers to lose confidence in their work after only a few queries, and in its most virulent form, can alienate agents and editors before they’ve even read a word that the writer has penned. And, to make it harder to head off at the pass, or to diagnose before symptoms develop, this syndrome leads to behavior in which a professional writer, one who was actually making a living at it, would never even consider engaging.

So, naturally, until I started teaching marketing classes to writers and hanging out at conferences, it had never occurred to me that writers I know, good ones with probably quite bright futures, were engaging in it — and that this syndrome might conceivably be harming their publication prospects, as well as their nightly rest.

So today I’m going to flag it, so none of my dear readers get caught in this quite common trap.

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

Or, potentially even more damaging, that a submission SHOULD receive that level of attention, and that the writer has a right to expect instantaneous responses. Or even very quick ones.

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

Oh, those of you with extensive querying and submission experience may laugh, but deep down, let’s face it — most of us would love to believe that our work is so redolent with talent that it will be the exception to the long turn-around time norm.

The fantasy is a compelling one: place a stamp on a query on Monday, receive a request for the full manuscript by the end of the week, sign before a fortnight has elapsed, sell to a prominent publisher by Arbor Day. For those who query via e-mail, the expected timeline runs even faster: query tonight, request tomorrow, sign by next Wednesday, sale by April Fool’s Day.

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

Yes, you did indeed read that correctly: I’m saying, in the nicest and most supportive way I possibly can, that most queriers and submitters don’t have particularly realistic expectations about how the industry is going to treat their work. Since unrealistic expectations can give rise to a whole lot of grief, worry, and doubt about one’s talent, would anyone mind if I suggest, gently, that one of the best holiday presents an aspiring writer could possibly give herself is a rather depressing long, hard look at the actual norms of the biz?

Just a suggestion.

Before anyone out there gets defensive, let me hasten to add that there are a number of excellent reasons that writers might have unrealistic views of how new talent is received — the most pervasive and best being that, as we have discussed before, the general public tends to harbor a pretty rosy vision of how a first book typically comes to publication.

Often, this vision specifically includes the approval of the inimitable Ms. Oprah Winfrey, the New York Times Book Review, and the Today Show. Yes, a small proportion of the books released in English every year are indeed celebrated in all of these venues, just as a small proportion the high school seniors who graduate each year are accepted to Harvard.

But is either route the norm? Statistically speaking, not by a long shot — so wouldn’t it make more sense to examine the treatment of the rest of the books published every year (or the college-admission successes of the rest of any year’s crop of high school graduates, for that matter) in order to understand the system, rather than the exceptions?

The problem is, it can be pretty hard for a writer to find out what the average first-time author’s trajectory to publication actually is. The vast majority of queriers and submitters work in isolation, without the opportunity to see how other writers at their level of recognition are being treated.

Naturally, under those conditions, long turn-around times can start to feel awfully darned personal. (You were wondering when I was going to get back to the topic at hand, weren’t you?) But while the anxiety certainly affects one personally, the factors that cause it are very, very seldom directed at a particular individual.

While you ponder that little paradox, I’m going to move on to the practical implications of not learning what those norms are.

Giving in to the notion that good work gets picked up immediately may cause a writer to take years to cover the requisite array of agents to find the right one, or even to stop querying in frustration after only a few tries.

Strategically, either is a bad idea. In case any of you have missed the other 147 times I’ve said it over the last three years, it just doesn’t make sense to query or submit to agents one at a time, no matter how much a writer happens to like a particular agent. Competition over who is going to represent you, like competition over who is going to publish your book, can only help you.

Besides, as I MAY have mentioned here in the past (or past couple of days), unless an agent asks you point-blank for an exclusive peek at a manuscript or a writer chooses to approach an agency with an exclusives-only policy, these days, most agents ASSUME that a writer is sending out simultaneous submissions.

The larger assumption, the one that dictates an expectation that ANY book is a drop-my-other-hundred-projects occasion for an agent or editor, is even more dangerous, because — you might want to pour yourself a drink before reading the rest of this sentence; I’ll wait — as anyone in the industry can tell you, there is no manuscript for which every agent is holding his breath.

Oh, naturally, everyone would like to snap up the next bestseller, of course, but since no one really knows what that will be — particularly in this troubled and rapidly-changing book market — and they spend their lives surrounded by so much paper that the average agency could use it for insulation seventeen times over, it would simply be too exhausting to leap upon each new submission as though it contained the philosopher’s stone.

Yes, even if that book ultimately turns out to be HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.

What does this mean for the submitters we saw gnawing their fingernails to the quick at the beginning of this post? I hate to be the one to break it to them, but they need to be patient.

Agents need time to read, and no matter how much any given writer would like his to be the only submission on his dream agent’s desk at any given moment, his is probably going to be one of fifty. Or a hundred.

So there can be no legitimate reason, in their minds, for a writer to act as if his book is THE one. Even if it is. It’s just not good for a writer’s health, happiness — or even, in some instances, his long-term career prospects.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a parable.

Marcel has been working on his novel for a decade. Finally, after showing it timorously to his lover, his mother, and a couple of rouès claiming to be artistes he met at the corner cafè (not in that order), he decides it is ready to submit to agents. Being a careful sort of person, he researches agencies, and finally settles on the one that represents his favorite writer.

He submits his work, fully expecting to hear back within the week. By the end of a month, he is both flabbergasted and furious: why hasn’t that agent gotten back to him?

As the sixth week ticks by, he decides that there is no point in hoping anymore. When his SASE and manuscript finally arrive back on his doorstep at the beginning of week 9, he doesn’t even bother to open the packet. He pitches them straight into the recycling bin.

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

Okay, where did Marcel misstep here? (Other than drinking absinthe, which I’m told is pretty lethal.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sympathetic observer might have reached a different conclusion: Marcel believed so deeply in the notion that good writing is always picked up immediately that his faith in his talent was utterly, completely crushed by the very first rejection. He thought it meant something that it most emphatically did not: a message from every professional reader in the world that he should never have tried to sell his work in the first place. His subsequent bluster, then, is a bold attempt to pretend that he wasn’t hurt as deeply as he actually was.

Which is the more likely explanation for any of the individual Marcels each of us might happen to know? Beats me; only they know for sure. All I know is that when I meet someone like this, my first thought is, “Oh, I’m so sorry that you’ve given up on your dream.”

I didn’t bring Marcel to your attention to make you feel sorry for him, however, but to remind you that you’re too clever and brave to follow Marcel’s route in any of those respects, aren’t you?

For the sake of my much-needed good night’s sleep, please tell me that you are. You know that a single rejection cannot logically mean that the book is unmarketable, that your writing is no good, or that you should give up writing altogether. Even a dozen rejections do not necessarily mean that, nor do a hundred.

What an individual rejection means is that the agency in question didn’t like something about the submission. Period.

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

I mention all of this not to depress you, but to plant a seed that I hope will germinate when some of you are staring at the dark ceiling over your beds, worrying about just what’s happening with your submissions. An agent’s being slow to respond has nothing to do with you or your submission, in all probability, and everything to do with the fact that agencies are up to their gills in manuscripts. Not to mention the fact that the latest news from the big publishing houses is unavoidably pretty darned frightening to those who make a living selling other people’s books.

So please try not to take it personally. Please, please don’t mistake the normal operations of a busy workplace for a referendum on your talent. And please, please, PLEASE don’t give up on a good book because finding an agent for it takes a long time.

Admittedly, the waiting is hard to take; so is the inevitable rejection before one gets to yes. But in the end, isn’t taking that chance worth it?

Yes, being one of that happy (if frequently stressed-out) minority of human beings born with the gifts of acute observation and graceful self-expression, of the smaller subsection of that legion with the stick-to-itiveness to bring a book to completion, or of the even tinier sub-subgroup with the tenacity to, as much-rejected-before-she-hit-the-YA-bestseller list Louisa May Alcott wrote, “make a battering-ram of my head, and make my way through this rough-and-tumble world” of publishing frequently isn’t easy. A lot of us lose a lot of sleep over it. But that’s the price we pay for engaging in what I believe is the highest expression of the human spirit.

Keep your chins up, campers: humanity would be, if not actually lost, at least far less interesting without you. And keep up the good work.

Posted on - 2 Comments on Let’s talk about this: the perils of chatting about one’s writing over the Thanksgiving turkey — and I’m not referring to missing the mashed potatoes as they pass by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I want candy!

We begin today with great news about a member of our little Author! Author! community, campers: reader Jake La Jeunesse’s OLD FRIENDS has taken an Honorable Mention in the Stage Play category of the 2008 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition. Congratulations, Jake! Way to build up your ECQLC!

That’s short for Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy, for those of you joining us late.

Ah, ECQLC, those lovely little tidbits that make Millicent the agency screener’s weary eyes light up in the biographical paragraph of a query letter. Placing in contests (particularly ones known to attract many entries and stiff competition, like Writers’ Digest’s), acceptances to writers’ residences (such as the ones I discussed yesterday, which also usually involve one’s writing fighting its way through heavy competition), writing programs (either degree-granting or of the intensive workshop variety), public speaking experience, even consistent participation in a well-established critique group — all of these are legitimate professional credentials for a writer, every bit as much as previous publications.

Make sure to mention ‘em in your query letters.

If you are in the querying stage of your writing career, or plan to be there within the next year or two, it’s definitely worth giving some thought — and entering the occasional contest — to building up your ECQLC quotient. Credentials generally take time to accumulate, after all; heck, a three- or four-month turn-around time for a contest entry is positively abnormally quick. And it can take time to convince the editor-in-chief of your community paper to let you write a couple of book reviews, even if you do it for free, in order to be able to list it as a publication credential.

Do I sense some squirming discomfort out there from those of you who have read my last couple of posts? “But Anne,” I hear a harassed few exclaim, “you’ve just been telling us that we need to make time for our writing, so I thought you understood. I have a full-time job, family, friends, obligations — as it is, I feel as though I have to fight tooth and nail to carve out any time to write at all! Come to think of it, one of the things I resent most about the querying process is how much time it sucks away from creating new work.

“Given the choice,” these intrepid souls continue, “why would I — or any sane aspiring writer — place our books on a back burner in order to devote still more of that scant time to entering contests or writing free pieces for local papers, just so I’ll have clippings?”

Interesting point, time-pressed many. For the most part, I’m with you on this one: marketing (which querying certainly is), learning about craft, attending conferences, making connections with other writers who may help you improve your writing now and/or help you down the line — these are all time-consuming and often expensive. As you say, you could be using those resources to complete your book-in-progress.

See? I do get it.

For that reason, I wouldn’t advise letting the pursuit of ECQLC make serious inroads into your writing time. You don’t, after all, have unlimited amounts of it, and all of the marketing classes and networking in the world won’t make a particle of difference if your book is not well-crafted.

Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration: we’ve all stumbled across volumes in the bookstore that made us gasp, “Okay, who does THIS author know” (to put it politely) “to have been able to land an agent for THIS?” But presumably, if you were already a celebrity or had connections that would permit you to bypass — again, putting it politely — the craft-related steps of the production of the book, you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?

Oh, don’t deny it. You’d be off hobnobbing with your fancy friends, with no thought for those of us who nursed you as a pup.

For those of us operating under the normal restrictions of landing an agent and getting published, I would consider it reasonable — better than that: cleverly career-minded! — of you to set aside deliberately, say, 5% of your writing time for professional development activities like contest entry, taking classes, going to book readings to meet local authors, etc.

Why 5%, you ask? Because if you write on a regular basis, it’s enough time actually to accomplish something, yet it’s not a high enough chunk of your writing time to prove a major obstacle to the progress of your book. Think of it as a smart investment in your future.

Before any purists out there start screaming that I’m mercenary-minded, allow me to add quickly: for the sake of our art, I wish I could tell you that the publishing world routinely rewards single-minded writers who rigorously refuse to be distracted by the less creative aspects of the business. But I’m not going to lie to you — over the years I’ve seen many, many, many truly talented writers passed over by agents and their Millicents.

Why, you cry to the heavens? Because it’s far, far easier to dismiss an uncredentialed writer than one with some ECQLC.

Yes, regardless of the quality of their respective writing. Long-time readers, take out your hymnals and sing along with me: if you can’t get an agent or editor to READ your manuscript, the quality of the writing isn’t going to help get it published.

Sorry about that. If I ran the universe…well, you know the rest. In the universe I don’t run, here is what I hope is a pleasant flashback to your childhood, to help cheer you up:

All nice and calm again? Excellent. Let’s get back to the topic at hand.

Toward the end of my last post, I suggested that it might behoove you to make a list of the conditions you believe you would need in order to have a productive writing retreat. All right, everybody, hand in your homework, so I can grade it.

Just kidding; no need to post your lists as comments. But your breath caught for just a moment out of long-ago school habit, didn’t it?

I do hope that you’ve been giving some serious thought to what should be on your list, however. If you haven’t started, or if you’re having trouble even beginning, let me rephrase the question: what is the absolute minimum you would need to have with you/over your head in order to dig in for anywhere from a long weekend to a couple of months and to literally nothing but WRITE.

Did you catch the logical problem with what I just said? Obviously, no human being can write 24/7, with no breaks at all. Eating, for example, is more or less indispensable to the maintenance of human life, contrary to what some of us thought in the mid-80s. So, I’m told, is sleep.

You’d be amazed by how frequently writers forget to budget time or money for either when they’re planning to retreat.

Completely understandable, of course: it’s not all that hard to picture a gleeful writer, pleased almost to the point of disbelief at the prospect of being able to devote unbroken time to a writing project, packing in unseemly haste, muttering, “6 days — that’s 144 hours of work. I can finish my revision in 144 hours, if I don’t take breaks and live on protein bars stuffed in my cardigan pockets, so I don’t have to move even a few feet in order to feed myself…”

Stop right there: trust me, you can’t. And you will be (a) completely miserable, (b) quickly become unproductive, and eventually (c) make yourself sick if you even try.

So promise me you won’t, so I don’t have to stay up at night worrying about you. Thank you.

The impulse to overtax oneself on retreat is, I suspect, part and parcel of a mindset that often afflicts time-strapped writers, whether they are lucky enough to be able to go on retreat or not. See if this scenario sounds at all familiar:

Stephanie so yearns for sustained writing time that when she is finally assured she’s going to have an entire day (or two, or twelve…work with me here, people) to herself, she’s beside herself with joy. In a frenzy of excitement, she spends the week prior to her writing day(s) feverishly making lists of everything she plans to do: finish Chapter 12, write Chs. 13-15, compose a new and improved query letter from scratch, compose synopsis…the list goes on and on. As the day itself approaches, Stephanie finds herself doing housework and running errands during her regularly-scheduled normal writing time: ah, well, no matter; she can make it up later.

Once her planned writing intensive begins, though, Stephanie sits down, makes sure everything around her is perfect — and two hours later, is in tears because she can’t seem to write. What happened? she wonders angrily.

What did happen to Stephanie? Any guesses?

If you suggested that perhaps she had raised her expectations of what she could achieve in her allotted time, give yourself a gold star for the day. Aspiring writers do this all the time — they build up the pressure on themselves to perform that they set themselves up for…well, not necessarily failure, but at least for disappointment in themselves.

The common name for this is writer’s block.

Allow me to share a professional writer’s secret: in the long run, it’s far more sensible to set small, reasonable tasks, eating away at a big project like completing a novel in ladylike little bites, rather than trying to write an entire book in a sitting.

Oh, you may laugh, but at every formal writing retreat I’ve ever visited, I’ve met at least one writer who was attempting to polish off her long-neglected novel during a week- or month-long residency, because she just didn’t know when she’d have time to get back to it again, driving herself crazy in the process. Or who was trying to start one and get halfway through it before he left.

Keep your expectations about what you can achieve during your writing time reasonable. Really, you’ll accomplish more in the long run, I promise.

For those of you who would like some extra credit, here’s a follow-up question: Stephanie did something else that made her intensive retreat time less likely to be successful. What was it?

35 points (on a scale of what? Who can say?) if you immediately piped up to point out that she stopped honoring her usual daily writing time. Why was this a poor idea, since she knew she had some spare time coming up? Because that raised the expectations for her own productivity during her intensive writing time even higher, rendering falling short of them even…class?

That’s right, even greater. Help yourself to a lollypop on your way out the door after the bell rings.

On that candy-related note (I knew I’d get back to it somehow), I’m going to wind down for the day, but before I do, allow me to place the proverbial bug in your ear while that lollypop is in your mouth: when planning intensive writing time, it’s a really, really good idea to budget in — over-budget, even — thinking time into it.

Or, as your horrified mind probably just referred to it, time when you’re neither writing, eating, or sleeping.

No, I haven’t gone mad, nor am I nudging you surreptitiously toward lowering your performance expectations even more. (Although, hey, I wouldn’t stop you from doing the latter, by any means.) I’m talking, my friends, about what the pros call processing time.

That being said, I’m going to wind up today by repeating my question from yesterday: what factors would you actually need to have in place in order to work productively on a writing retreat? May I suggest adding to your list time to eat, sleep, and just plain think about things?

Hey, let’s run with that and add a secondary set of goals to our list: tweak it to include conditions you would need in order to do these not-writing-yet-necessary-activities happily and well. Because, believe me, planning for those will assist you in the pursuit of your primary goal, scoring yourself some prime-quality intensive writing time.

So, at the risk of sounding redundant across blog posts, give some thought to what you would need. I promise you, we will put your homework to good use.

Keep up the good work!

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Synopsis-writing 101, part IX: a much-needed pep talk, or, when and where primal screaming is and is not constructive

I’ve been worrying about something: has my advice that virtually any aspiring writer will be better off sitting down to construct a winning synopsis substantially before s/he is likely to need to produce one coming across as a trifle callous, as if I were laboring under the impression that the average aspiring writer doesn’t already have difficulty carving out time in a busy day to write at all? Why, some of you may well be wondering, would I suggest that you should take on more work — and such distasteful work at that?

I assure you, I have been suggesting this precisely because I am sympathetic to your plight. I completely understand why aspiring writers so often push producing one to the last possible nanosecond before it is needed: it genuinely is a pain to summarize the high points of a plot or argument in a concise-yet-detail-rich form.

Honestly, I get it.

As it is such a different task than writing a book, involving skills widely removed from observing a telling moment in exquisite specificity or depicting a real-life situation with verve and insight, the expectation that any good book writer should be able to produce a great synopsis off the cuff actually isn’t entirely reasonable. In fact, the very prospect of pulling one together can leave a talented writer feeling like this:

the-scream-detail.tiff

Yet since we cannot change the industry’s demand for them, all we writers can do is work on the supply end: by taking control of WHEN we produce our synopses, we can make the generation process less painful and generally improve the results.

Okay, so these may not sound like like the best motivations for taking a few days out of your hard-won writing time to pull together a document that’s never going to be published before you absolutely have to do it. Unless you happen to be a masochist who just adores wailing under time pressure, though, procrastinating about producing one is an exceedingly bad idea.

But as of today, I’m no longer going to ask you to take my word for that. For those of you who are still resistant to the idea of writing one before you are specifically asked for it I have two more inducements to offer you today.

First — and this is a big one — taking the time to work on a synopsis BEFORE you have an actual conversation with an agent (either post-submission or at a conference) is going to make it easier for you to talk about your book. And that’s extremely important for conference-goers, e-mail queriers, and pretty much everyone who is ever going to be trying to convince someone in the publishing industry to take an interest in a manuscript, because (brace yourselves) the prevailing assumption is that a writer who cannot talk about her work professionally probably is not going to produce a professional-quality manuscript.

I know, I know — from a writer’s point of view, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; we all know (or are) shy-but-brilliant writers who would rather scarf down cups of broken glass than give a verbal pitch, yet can produce absolute magic on the page. Unfortunately, in contexts where such discussion is warranted, these gifted recluses are out of luck.

I know it’s hard, but try to think of this phenomenon in a positive light: an aspiring writer who has learned to discuss his work professionally is usually better able to get folks in the industry to sit down and read it.

Investing some serious time in developing a solid, professional-quality synopsis can be very, very helpful in this respect. The discipline required to produce it forces you to think of your baby as a marketable product, as well as a piece of complex art and physical proof that you have locked yourself away from your kith and kin for endless hours, creating.

Even writers who are absolutely desperate to sell their first books tend to forget that it is a product intended for a specific market. As I have mentioned earlier in this series, in the throes of resenting the necessity of producing a query letter and synopsis, it is genuinely difficult NOT to grumble about having to simplify a beautifully complicated plot, set of characters, and/or argument.

But think about it for a second: any agent who signs you is going to HAVE to summarize the book in order to market it to editors. So is any editor who falls in love with it, in order to pitch it to an editorial committee.

There is just no way around summarization, in other words. Just get on with it.

Here’s another good reason to invest the time: by having labored to reduce your marvelously complex story or argument to its basic elements, you will be far less likely to succumb to that bugbear of pitchers, the Pitch that Would Not Die.

Those of you who have pitched at conferences know what I’m talking about, right? As anyone who has ever sat down for coffee or a drink with a regularly conference-attending agents can tell you, pretty much all of them have at least one horror story about a pitch that went on for an hour, because the author did not have the vaguest conception what was and was not important to emphasize in his plot summary.

Trust me, you do not want to be remembered for that.

For those of you who haven’t yet found yourself floundering for words in front of an agent or editor, allow me to warn you: the unprepared pitcher almost always runs long. When you are signed up for a 10-minute pitch meeting, you really do need to be able to summarize your book within just a few minutes — harder than it sounds! — so you have time to talk about other matters.

You know, mundane little details, such as whether the agent wants to read the book in question.

Contrary to the prevailing writerly wisdom that dictates that verbal pitching and writing are animals of very different stripes, spending some serious time polishing your synopsis is great preparation for pitching. Even the most devoted enemy of brevity will find it easier to chat about the main thrust of a book if he’s already figured out what it is.

Stop laughing — I have been to a seemingly endless array of writers’ conferences over the years, and let me tell you, I’ve never attended one that didn’t attract at least a handful of aspiring writers who seemed not to be able to tell anyone else what their books were about.

Which is, in case you were wondering, the origin of that old industry chestnut:

Agent: So, what’s your book about?
Writer: About 900 pages.

The third inducement: a well-crafted synopsis is something of a rarity, so if you can produce one as a follow-up to a good meeting at a conference, or to tuck in with your first 50 pages, you will look like a star.

You would be astonished (at least I hope you would) at how often an otherwise well-written submission is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off in the ten minutes prior to the post office’s closing, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t to be evaluated at all. I don’t think that sheer deadline panic accounts for the pervasiveness of the disorganized synopsis; I suspect resentment.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, I’ve met countless writers who don’t really understand why the synopsis is necessary at all, and thus hate it. All too often, the result is a synopsis that gives the impression not that the writer is genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, but rather that he is deeply and justifiably angry that it needed to be written at all.

Believe me, to an experienced eye, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis.

No, really, the peevish, just-the-facts-ma’am synopsis is the norm, not the exception; as any Millicent would be happy to tell you, it’s as though half the synopsis-writers out there believe they’re entering their work in an anti-charm contest. The VAST majority of novel synopses simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

Frustrated by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement, many writers just throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it. It’s the first 50 pages that count, right?

Wrong. In case you thought I was joking the other 47 times I have mentioned it over the last couple of weeks, EVERYTHING you submit to an agent or editor is a writing sample. If you can’t remember that full-time, have it tattooed on the back of your hand.

While frustration is certainly understandable, it’s self-defeating to treat the synopsis as unimportant or (even more common) to toss it out in a last-minute frenzy. Find a more constructive outlet for your annoyance — and make sure that every page you submit is your best writing.

Caught your attention with that constructive outlet quip, didn’t I? Realistically, it’s not going to help your book’s progress one iota to engage in passive-aggressive blaming of any particular agent or editor (or, even less sensible, their screeners and assistants). They did not make the rules, by and large.

And even if they did, let’s face it — in real life, almost nobody is actually brave enough to say to an agent or editor, “No, you can’t have a synopsis, you lazy so-and-so. Read the whole damned book, if you liked my pitch or query, because, as any fool can tell you, that’s the only way you’re going to find out if I can write is to READ MY WRITING!”

Okay, so it’s mighty satisfying to contemplate saying it. Picture it as vividly as you can, then move on.

I’m quite serious about this. My mental health assignment for you while working on the synopsis: once an hour, picture the nastiest, most aloof agent in the world, and mentally bellow your frustrations at him at length. Be as specific as possible, but try not to repeat yourself; the goal here is to touch upon every scintilla of resentment lodged in the writing part of your brain.

Then find the nearest mirror, gaze into it, and tell yourself to get back to work. Your professional reputation — yes, and your ability to market your writing successfully — is at stake.

I know, the exercise sounds silly, but it will make you feel better to do it, I promise. In fact, I think it would be STERLING preparation for either the querying process or a conference to name your least-favorite sofa cushion the Industry and pound it silly twice a day. I’m all in favor of venting hostility on inanimate objects, rather than on human ones.

Far better that your neighbors hear you screaming about how hard it all is than that your resentment find its way into your synopsis. Or your query letter. Or even into your verbal pitch.

Yes, I’ve seen all three happen — but I’ve never seen it work to the venting writer’s advantage. I’ll spare you the details, because, trust me, these were not pretty incidents.

Next time, I shall delve into the knotty issue of how a synopsis folded up behind a cold query letter might differ from one that is destined to sit underneath a partial. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The logic — and illogic — behind the SASE, or, how to be prepared if something falls on you from a zeppelin

The logic — and illogic — behind the SASE, or, how to be prepared if something falls on you from a zeppelin

A few days back, I promised to run through the care and feeding of the infamous and ubiquitously-requested SASE, industry-speak for the Stamped, Self-Addressed Envelope that should accompany EVERY query letter and/or submission packet. The expectation that an aspiring writer will ALWAYS include a SASE is universal, at least among U.S. agencies and publishers, so much so that I’ve noticed that many agencies don’t even explain what it means on their websites or listings in the standard guides anymore.

Call me zany, but as those of you have been reading this blog for a while are already aware, I’m not a big fan of unspoken assumptions; they place the writer new to the game at a serious strategic disadvantage. So I hope those of you who have been at this for some time will forgive my taking a day or two to explain to those new to querying what a SASE is and why, to put it bluntly, the writer is expected to pay the postage for a rejection letter or returned manuscript.

Oh, you hadn’t been thinking of the SASE in those terms? Or was that giant whoosh I just heard not a collective gasp but a whole bunch of eyebrows out there hitting the ceiling?

Probably the latter, I’m guessing, because I’m constantly meeting aspiring writers who are unaware that a SASE should also accompany a manuscript. And I’m not just talking about the stamped, self-addressed #10 envelope one would send with a mailed query letter: I’m talking about a package with enough postage to get all of those requested pages back to the writer in one piece.

It can get cumbersome. Not to say expensive, especially for writer submitting to NYC-based agencies from outside the country, who not only have to figure out what the return postage would be in dollars instead of their local currency, but have to get their eager fingertips around some US stamps.

Don’t worry, foreign readers; there’s a trick to it. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, though, let’s talk through the logic behind providing a SASE at all.

I think such a discussion is necessary. The last time I covered this topic, during the notorious four-month Book Marketing 101 series in the summer of 2007 (conveniently gathered, for those of you who are interested, under a category of the same name in the list at right), I was barraged with very good questions from readers about why, in the age of fairly universal paper recycling and cheap, high-quality printers, a writer shouldn’t just ask an agent to recycle a rejected manuscript. Quoth, for instance, clever reader Melospiza:

Why on earth would you want your manuscript back (after it has been rejected)? It won’t be pristine enough to send out again. Why spend the money? And any parcel over one pound can’t be dropped in a mailbox, but must be taken to the post office, not something an agent will appreciate. Let the agent recycle the paper and enclose a (business-size) SASE only.

I’m SO glad Melospiza brought this up, because this is one of those secret handshake things — you know, a practices that the industry just assumes that any writer who is serious about getting published will magically know all about without being told.

There’s a rather basic, practical reason to include the SASE for safe return of the manuscript: NOT including one leads to automatic rejection at most agencies.

Yes, you read that correctly: leaving a SASE out of the packet can, and often does, result in a submission’s being rejected unread; ask about it sometime at a writers’ conference. The vast majority of agents will be perfectly up front about the fact that they train their screeners accordingly.

The owners of all of those eyebrows are clutching their heads now, aren’t they, thinking of all of those SASEless submissions — or, more likely, submissions accompanied by a #10 SASE, rather than one with sufficient postage for the manuscript’s return — they sent out in the dark days of yore. “In heaven’s name,” these head-clutchers cry, “why would an agent who asked to see pages reject them unread?”

Good question, oh retrospective panickers. The short answer: because it’s obvious to Millicent that a writer who submits without a manuscript-size SASE doesn’t know the secret handshake.

The longer answer is hardly more comforting. In the publishing industry, it’s considered downright rude for a writer not to include a SASE both large enough and loaded down with enough pre-paid postage to send EVERYTHING enclosed back to the sender. Which means, in practical terms, that if the agency is going to keep its side of the tacit agreement allowing it to read a writer’s unpublished work, IT is going to have to shell out the dosh to mail the rejected manuscript back.

Ditto with a query letter that arrives unaccompanied by a SASE. An envelope and a stamp to respond to a forgetful writer may seem like a negligible expense — but multiply it by the 800 or 1000 queries the average agency receives every week, and we’re talking about a considerable investment in writers whose work they’ve already decided not to represent.

The result in both cases is generally a form-letter rejection.

I implore you, no matter how little you want to see that manuscript again, do NOT omit the SASE for the return of the manuscript — UNLESS the agency’s website or listing in one of the standard agency guides says specifically that they will recycle rejected manuscripts. (Practically none of them do.)

Okay, before the disgruntled muttering out there gets too deafening, let’s voice it: “You must be pulling our collective leg,” I hear some of you saying. “Okay, maybe SASEless queries do tend to get rejected unread, but I can’t believe that it happens to submitted manuscripts or book proposals. By the time an agency or publishing house is sufficiently interested in you to want to see actual chapters of your book, your foot is too firmly in the door for your submission to be tossed aside unread for a reason as unrelated to the quality of the writing as not including a SASE. I mean, really, what purpose would being that touchy serve?”

A fairly tangible one, actually: it would be one less manuscript for Millicent to read.

Admittedly, from the submitter’s point of view, a good argument could be made that this practice would tend to lead to, as Melospiza rightly points out, a big ol’ waste of money, not to mention trees, without really providing much benefit to the people who actually pay for the return postage. After all, a SASE included with a submission is only going to be used if the news is bad. If the agency likes the MS, they’re going to ask to see the rest of the manuscript — which means your initial submission will get filed, you will send another packet (with another SASE), and your first SASE may well end up in the trash.

Or, if you’re really lucky, you’ll never see it again, because it will end up in a file drawer in your new agent’s office.

If they don’t like it, all you are doing by providing the postage is paying to get the news that they’re turning you down in a way that will make your postal carrier’s back ache, rather than via a nice, light #10 envelope. So why not just send the manuscript along with a business-size SASE, and be done with it?

Because that’s not how the industry works, that’s why. (See commentary above about secret handshakes.)

Yet originally, believe it or not, it was set up this way in order to PROTECT writers. The sad thing is, though, the logic behind this one is so pre-computer — heck, it’s pre-recycling — that it’s likely to be counterintuitive to many people new to the biz.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when books were widely read, writers didn’t need agents, and the photocopier had not yet been invented. Prior to personal computers (and nice laser printers in workplaces that might be accessible after the boss goes home for the day), you could not print out spare copies of your precious manuscript to submit to every Tom, Dick, and Random House in the biz; equally obviously, no sane human being would send out his only copy.

So how did writers reproduce their work to submit to several publishing houses simultaneously? They retyped it, that’s how. Every single page, every single time.

Think those hardy souls wanted to get their rejected manuscripts back? Darned tootin’. It might save them weeks of retyping time.

My long-term readers will have heard my favorite concrete example of how these returned manuscripts helped writers before, but it’s a terrific illustration of just how much the SASE helped the average aspiring writer way back when. Back in the far-away 1950s, my mother, Kleo, was married to Philip, a struggling science fiction writer. While she toiled away at work and went to school, Philip spent his days composing short stories.

Dozens of them. Type, type, type, week in, week out.

As writers did in the days prior to e-mail, Philip and Kleo stuffed each of those short stories into a gray Manila envelope with a second envelope folded up inside as a SASE and sent them off to any magazine that had evinced even the remotest interest in SF or fantasy. (Kleo was also taking both his writing and her own to be critiqued by other writers and editors at the time, which is actually how Philip got his first story published. But I digress.)

Each time a short story was rejected — as, in the beginning, all of Philip’s and Kleo’s were — and landed once again in their mailbox with the accuracy of a well-flung boomerang, they acted as professional writers should act: they submitted the rejected story to another magazine immediately. To minimize retyping, they would iron any pages that had gotten bent in the mail, slip the manuscript into a fresh envelope (yes, with a fresh SASE), and pop it in the mail.

Since there were not very many magazines that accepted SF or fantasy back then, they had to keep impeccable records, to avoid sending a rejected story back to a magazine that had already refused it. But Philip kept typing away, and kept as many stories in circulation at once as possible.

How many? Well, no one knows for sure anymore — since occasionally the only copy of a story got sent by mistake, some inevitably got lost.

(Which reminds me to nag those of you sending out manuscripts in the computer age: when was the last time you made a back-up of your manuscript? If, heaven forfend, a gigantic anvil fell from one of those anvil-toting zeppelins we’re always seeing overhead these days onto your main writing space, would it crush both your computer and your back-ups? Bears some consideration, doesn’t it?)

One day, the young couple opened their front door to find 17 rejected manuscripts spread all over their miniscule front porch. Their tiny mailbox apparently hadn’t been able to hold that many emphatic expressions of “No!”

So what did the aspiring writer of yesteryear do when faced with 17 rejections on the same day? Did he toss all of that paper into the recycling bins that had not yet been invented? Did he rend his garments and give up writing forever? Did he poison his mail carrier for bringing so much bad news all at once? All of the above?

No, he did what professional writers did back then: had his wife iron the pages so they could be sent out again and resubmitted.

Lest you find the story depressing, the science fiction writer was Philip K. Dick, and I have it on good authority that one of those stories was THE MINORITY REPORT. Which a director who shall remain nameless (because he changed the ending in a way that would have caused any author’s resentful spectre to dive-bomb LA, howling) made into a rather lucrative movie, decades later.

Which only goes to show you: contrary to the common writerly fantasy/daydream/self-flagellation-after-rejection theme, even the best writers generally have to brazen through quite a bit of rejection before hitting the big time. As my mother likes to say, the only manuscript that stands NO chance of getting published is the one that sits in the bottom drawer, unseen by human eyes.

She knows whereat she speaks — and it’s as true today as it was 55 years ago, when there were no photocopying machines, no computers, and no guarantee that the copy you sent would ever be retrievable if it went astray in some publisher’s office.

For our purposes today, the important thing to take away from this story is not the warm glow from the implied pep talk (although that’s nice, too), but the understanding that agencies don’t ask for SASEs in order to inconvenience, annoy, or impoverish aspiring writers. They do it today for precisely the same reason that they did it in the 1950s: to get your work back to you as expeditiously as possible, so you may try its fortunes elsewhere.

So yes, Virginia, as hard as it to believe, in the beginning, the SASE was intended to save the submitting writer money and time, not to drain both.

Also, it was intended to protect the writer’s copyright: just as an e-mailed attachment could conceivably end up, through the magic of multiple forwarding, anywhere on the planet, a loose manuscript that isn’t either in an agent or editor’s office, safely tucked away in that proverbial bottom desk drawer, or being conveyed through sleet, snow, and/or dark of night between one and the other could in fact be stolen.

I know; creepy even to consider. But think about it: is it more or less likely than something falling on your house from a zeppelin?

I’ll answer that one for you: it does happen from time to time, so a savvy writer keeps very, very good track of who precisely has his manuscript when. (If this prospect tends to keep you up at night, as it does many writers, please see the SHOULD I WORRY ABOUT MY WORK BEING STOLEN? category on the list at right for tips on how to protect your work.)

More on SASE tradition and practice follows tomorrow, if you can stomach it, and then we’ll move on to the gentle art of synopsis-crafting. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Query letter troubleshooting, part II: more toiling in the literary vineyard

Query letter troubleshooting, part II: more toiling in the literary vineyard

Happy Labor Day, all! I was tickled to find this image from the Book of Hours to gladden our hearts today, because it is such an accurate depiction of how so many aspiring writers view the work of querying these days: a long, toilsome effort aimed toward impressing the powerful folks in the white castle on the hill — who may or may not be paying attention — under a sky that (we hope) conceals at least a few minor deities rooting for the underdog’s eventual success.

Oh, right — I was the only writer who felt that way while I was trying to find the right agent. Thanks for clearing up that little misconception.

But on the off chance that I wasn’t the lone writer who ever shivered in the face of seemingly unalterable industry coldness, I feel an obligation to point out from the other side of the Rubicon that even those newest to querying are not as entirely helpless in the face of it as we writers tend to tell ourselves we are. Although much of a writer’s progress along the road to publication is dependent upon factors outside her control — fads in style, fashions in content, and what kind of memoir has garnered the most scandals recently, to name but three — how she presents her work to the industry is in fact entirely under her own control.

Which is a really, really nice way of saying that from a professional reader’s point of view, scads of query letters traject themselves like lemmings straight from the envelope into the rejection pile with scarcely a pause in between. Sadly, the vast majority are rejected for reasons that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the potential personality fit between the author and agent, the agent’s ability to sell the book in question, or even the quality of the writing.

Why, you cry? Because agents and their screeners read hundreds of the darned things per week: even if only 20 of them share the same basic mistake — and trust me, more of them will — the 21rst query that carries even a shade of similarity is likely to trigger a knee-jerk reaction so strong that even Dr. Pavlov would shake his head and say, “No kidding? Just because the letter was addressed to Dear Agent, instead of an individual?”

Oh, yes, Dr. Pavlov, there are few epistolary errors that engender a stronger — or quicker — negative response than a Dear Agent letter. But that’s merely the best-known of the notorious query-reader pet peeves…and I’m getting ahead of myself.

Call me zany, but if a query elicits a rejection for any reason other than that the storyline or argument in the proposed book didn’t grab Millicent or her boss, my first question is not, “Oh, how could the screener have made such a mistake?” but “May I have a look at that letter, so see how the writer may improve it?”

Why do I tend to leap straight to that conclusion, you ask? Experience, mostly. If there is a single rule of thumb that may be applied at every stage of any successful author’s career, it’s that it ALWAYS behooves us to look critically at our own writing before assuming that the only possible explanation for frowned-upon writing lies in the eye of the predisposition of the reader to frown.

My, that was a convoluted sentence, wasn’t it? Let me put it more simply: Millicent may indeed be a bit rejection-happy at times, but any writer can learn how to avoid provoking her. As with a manuscript, the writer of a query will virtually always be better off taking steps to improve what she can control than blaming the rejection upon other factors.

It is possible, in other words, to learn from one’s own mistakes, even in the current agency environment, where the vast majority of queriers are never told precisely what made Millicent slide their letters directly into their SASEs with a copy of the agency’s prefab one-size-fits-all rejection note.

In the spirit of trying to avoid that dismal fate, I began running through a checklist of some of the most common query letter mistakes yesterday. Let’s recap, shall we?

(1) Is my query letter longer than a single page in standard correspondence format?

(2) If my query letter just refuses to be shorter, am I trying to do too much here?

(3) If my query letter is too long, am I spending too many lines of text describing the plot?

(4) Is my query letter polite?

(5) Is it clear from the first paragraph on what precisely I am asking the agent to represent?

(6) Does my letter sound as though I am excited about this book, or as if I have little confidence in the work? Or does it read as though I’m apologizing for querying at all?

(7) Does my book come across as genuinely marketable, or does the letter read as though I’m boasting?

Please do take the time to re-read your query before you answer these questions or the ones to come. Yes, even if some of these points sound a trifle redundant to those of you who have been reading my blog for a while: you would be well within your rights to think, honestly, don’t all of us know by now to avoid sounding bitter in a query letter? Or to be polite while doing it?

Well, probably so — but humor me here, because queriers often do not change anything but the first paragraph, address, and salutation between each time they sent out their letters, more or less insuring that a mistake made once will be replicated a dozen times. It’s quite easy to fall into the habit of pumping out those queries without really pondering their content — or whether this particular letter is the best means of marketing to that particular agent.

In short, it’s worth reviewing what’s going out every once in a while. Which, coincidentally, brings me to the next question on the checklist:

(8) Have I addressed this letter to a specific person, rather than an entire agency or any agent currently walking the face of the earth? Does it read like a form letter?

Many aspiring writers approach quite a few agents simultaneously — and with good reason. At this point in publishing history, when many agencies don’t even respond to e-mailed queries if the answer is no, waiting to hear back from one agent before approaching the next is poor strategy. One-by-one queries can add years to the agent-finding process.

Do I hear some restless murmuring out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you conference veterans protest, “I heard that some agents will become furious if they find out that a writer is sending out many queries simultaneously. I don’t want to scare them away from my book by breaking their rules right off the bat!”

I’m not sure why this rumor remains so pervasive, because exclusivity requests almost invariably refer to submissions, not queries — and without exception, agencies that prefer to have exclusive looks at either make that fact PERFECTLY OBVIOUS in their listings in the standard agency guides, on their websites, and at conferences. So if you have checked to ascertain that the agent of your dreams — or at least the next on your list — does not have an exclusivity policy, you should assume that s/he doesn’t.

Trust me, if an agent who does prefer an exclusive peek doesn’t want other agents seeing it, s/he will let you know. Until then, it’s a waste of your valuable time to grant a de facto exclusive to someone who hasn’t asked for it. (For some tips on dealing with an actual request for an exclusive, if and when it comes up, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category on the list at right.)

I suspect that the astonishing persistence of the rumor that most agents secretly crave exclusives (and thus penalize queriers who don’t read their minds and act accordingly) is a direct result of agents’ standing up at writers’ conferences and saying, “For heaven’s sake, don’t send out mass queries — if I see a query that’s clearly been sent to every agent in the book, I send straight it into the rejection pile.”

Since everyone in the room will nod sagely in response, the agent will not unnaturally assume that the entire audience knows that s/he is referring not to the practice of querying several agents simultaneously, but to the astonishing common feat of sending (often via e-mail) an IDENTICAL query letter to, say, a hundred agents all at once. (And if you don’t know why that’s a bad idea, you might want to check out this archived post before you launch a flotilla of your own.)

As we have discussed, a letter designed to please all is unlikely to be geared to the specific quirks and literary tastes of any particular agent — one of the many reasons that this shotgun approach seldom works. The other, believe it or not, is that mass submitters often render the fact that they don’t know one agent on their lists from another by sending out what is known in the biz as a Dear Agent letter. As in one that begins:

Dear Agent,

I haven’t the vaguest idea who you are or what you represent, but since the big publishing houses don’t accept submissions from unagented authors, I come to you, hat in hand, to beg you to represent my fiction novel…

Why, when there is so much to resent in this (probably quite honest) little missive, would the salutation alone be enough to get this query rejected without reading farther? Well, to folks who work in agencies, such an opening means only one thing: the writer who sent it is sending an identical letter to every agent listed on the Internet or in one of the standard agency guides.

Willy-nilly, with no regard to who represents what and consequently who is likely to be interested in the book at hand.

Which means, they reason, that it is unlikely to the point of laughability that the book being proposed is going to fit the specific requirements and tastes of any of the agents currently domiciled at the agency. And, most will additionally conclude, the writer hasn’t bothered to learn much about how the publishing industry works.

Since virtually any Millicent will simply pitch a Dear Agent letter into the reject pile, if not actually the trash (Dear Agent letter-writers seldom know to include SASEs), it’s in your best interest to make it quite, quite obvious to whom you are addressing your missive. In fact, the query most likely to succeed is one that is specialized not only in the salutation, but in the first paragraph as well.

How, you ask? Good question.

(9) Do I make it clear in the first paragraph of the letter SPECIFICALLY why I am writing to THIS particular agent — or does it read as though I could be addressing any agent in North America?

This is a corollary of the last, of course — to put it another way, writers aren’t the the only ones screaming at the heavens, “Why me? Why me?” Agents scream it, too, albeit with a slightly different meaning.

No, but seriously, agents (and their screeners) wonder about this. Given half a chance and a martini or two, many agents will complain vociferously about queries that read as though the writer simply used a mail merge to address letters to every agent listed on a particular website or in a given guide.

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while may find this question SLIGHTLY familiar, and for good reason: this is a NOTORIOUS agents’ pet peeve.

So it’s worth taking a look at your query letter and asking yourself if it answers the question: there are hundreds and hundreds of literary agents in the United States alone — why did you choose this one, out of all others, to query? What specifically about this agent’s track record, literary tastes, and/or bio led you to say, By gum, I would like this person to represent my work?

And no, in this context, because she is an agent and I desperately want to sell my book, is not a reason likely to impress Millicent. She hears it too often.

Remember, agents — like most other people — tend to be proud of their best work: if you want to get on their good side, showing a little appreciation for what they have done in the past is just good strategy. Especially if you can honestly compliment them on a project they really loved, or one that was unusually difficult to sell.

See why I kept urging you earlier this summer to ask those panels of agents at conferences some pointed questions about their favorite projects? I was just looking to help you glean some useful information.

I picked this little trick up not at writers’ conferences, but in academia. When a professor is applying for a job, she is subjected to a form of medieval torture known as a job talk. Not only is she expected to give a lecture in front of the entire faculty that is thinking of hiring here, all of whom are instructed in advance to jump on everything she says with abandon, but she is also expected to have brief private meetings with everyone on the faculty first.

It’s every bit as horrible as it sounds, like going through a series of 20 or 30 interviews with authors who think simply everyone in the universe has read their work. (Everyone smart, anyway.) If you’re the job candidate, you’d better have at least one pithy comment prepared about each and every faculty member’s most recent article, or you’re toast.

Gee, I can’t imagine why I didn’t want to remain in academia. But it did teach me something very valuable indeed: pretty much every human being affiliated with every book ever published likes to be recognized for the fact.

And it’s so very easy to work a compliment into a query letter without sounding cheesy or obsequious! If the agent you are querying has represented something similar to your work in the past, you have a natural beginning: “Since you so ably represented X’s book, I believe you may be interested in my novel…”

I had lunch a while back with a writer who used this method in a pitch with triumphant success. The agent was blown away that the writer had taken the time to find out whom she represented and do a little advance reading.

There are many ways to find out what an agent has represented. Check the acknowledgments of books you like (authors often thank their agents), or check the agency’s website to see whom the agent represents. If all else fails, call the book’s publisher, ask for the publicity department, and ask who the agent of record was; legally, it’s a matter of public record, so they have to tell you.

Actually, with small publishers, this isn’t a bad method for finding out what they are looking to publish. I once had a charming conversation with an editor at a small Midwestern press, who confided to me that when she had acquired the book about which I was inquiring, the author did not yet have an agent. Sensing an opportunity, I promptly pitched my book to her — and she asked me to send her the first fifty pages right away.

Moral: sometimes opportunities are hiding in some unexpected places. As, for instance…

(10) If I met this agent or editor at a conference, or am querying because I heard him/her speak at one, or picked him/her because s/he represents a particular author, do I make that obvious immediately?

I am surprised at how often writers seem reluctant to mention this, but since such a low percentage of the aspiring writers out there attend conferences (under 4%, according to the last estimate I saw), attending a good one that the agent you’re querying also attended is in fact a minor selling point for your book: the prevailing wisdom goes that writers who make the investment in learning how to market their work professionally tend to have more professional work to present.

A kind of old-fashioned notion, true, but if you’re a conference-goer, one you should be riding for all it is worth.

If you have heard the agent speak at a conference, read an article she has written in a writer’s magazine or online, or even just noticed that your favorite author thanked her in the acknowledgments of a book you liked, mention that in the first line of your query letter. If you have no such personal reason, be polite enough to invent a general one: “Since you represent literary fiction, I hope you will be interested in my novel…”

I would suggest being even more upfront than this, if the conference in question was a reputable one and you did in fact attend it. Why not write the name of the conference on the outside of the envelope, in approximately the same place where you would have written REQUESTED MATERIALS had you pitched to the agent successfully there? And if you are an e-querying type, why not mention it in the subject line of the e-mail?

Oh, and lest I forget to mention it later in this series:

(11) Am I sending this query in the form that the recipient prefers to receive it? If I intend to send it via e-mail, have I double-checked that the agency accepts e-mailed queries?

Stop laughing, hard-core web fiends. The publishing world runs on paper — it’s far from unusual for a prestigious agency not to accept e-submissions at all. Even agencies with websites (which not all of them maintain, even today) that accept submissions directly through the website often employ agents who prefer paper queries, even from writers residing in foreign countries for whom getting the right stamps for the SASE is problematic. (Don’t worry, those of you reading this abroad: I’m going to be talking next week about how to deal with the stamp problem.)

Double-check the agency’s policy before you e-query. This information will be in any of the standard agency guides, and usually on the website as well.

If you’re in any doubt, query via regular mail — strategically, it’s a better idea, anyway.

Yes, you read that correctly. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of querying via e-mail, for the exceedingly simple reason that it’s far, far less work to reject someone by the press of a single button than by stuffing a response into a SASE. A truly swift-fingered Millicent can reject 50 writers online in the time that it would take her to reject 10 on paper.

Not to mention the fact that the average reader scans words on a screen 70% faster than the same words on paper. (Or at least she did the last time I checked the statistics.) I can’t conceive of any writer who has thought about it actively longing to have Millicent spend less time reading his letter than she already does, can you?

The relative speed of scanning e-queries is why, in case you’re wondering, quite a few of the agencies that actively solicit online queries tend to respond more quickly than those that don’t. Or not at all — which means that it’s also worth your while to check an agency’s policy on responding to e-queries before you approach them; many have policies that preclude responding to a querier if the answer is no.

I sense an unspoken question hanging in the air right now. Go ahead; ask.

“But Anne,” I hear many of you shout, “what happens if I accidentally send an e-query to an agent who doesn’t like them, or a paper query to one who prefers to be approached electronically? That won’t result in an automatic rejection, will it?”

Not necessarily, no. But let me ask you this: who would you prefer to read your letter, an agent calmly going through a stack (or list) of queries, or an agent whose first thought upon seeing your epistle is, “Oh, God, not another one! Can’t any of these writers READ? I’ve said in the last ten years’ worth of Herman’s Guides that I don’t want to be queried via e-mail!”

I don’t know about you, but given my druthers, I would select the former.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that just as it’s polite to address a person the way he prefers to be addressed, rather than by a hated nickname, a courteous writer should approach an agent in the manner she prefers to be approached. Those with strong preferences either way seldom make a secret of it; double-check before you send.

And before anyone out there asks: yes, most agents will assume that a writer worth having as a client will have gone to the trouble of learning something about their personal preferences. If they have expressed a pet peeve in one of the standard agency guides, they will assume that you are aware of it.

While we’re on the subject of double-checking, allow me to sneak in one more quick question before I sign off for the evening:

(12) Am I absolutely positive that I have spelled the agent’s name correctly, as well as the agency’s? Am I positive that the letter I have addressed to Dear Mr. Smith shouldn’t actually read Dear Ms. Smith? Heck, am I even sure that I’m placing the right letter in the right envelope?

I hear some titters out there, but you wouldn’t BELIEVE how common all of these gaffes are. The last is usually just the result of a writer’s being in a hurry to get the next set of queries in the mail, and tend to be treated accordingly, but the first two constitute major breaches of etiquette.

And yes, an agent with a first name that leaves gender a tad ambiguous is every bit as likely to resent an incorrect salutation as a Rebecca or Stephen would. Often more, because a Cricket, Chris, or Leslie would constantly be receiving queries apparently addressed to someone of the opposite sex.

If you’re in serious doubt, call the agency and ask point-blank whether the agent is a Mr. or Ms. (Quick note for those querying US agents from other parts of the world: currently, Mr. or Ms. are the only two options; unless a woman makes a point of identifying herself as a Miss or Mrs., Ms. is the proper salutation.)

I know, I know: you’ve heard 4500 times that a writer should NEVER call an agency until after he has a signed representation contract in hand or the agent has left a message asking him to call back, whichever comes first. While it is quite true that allowing the agent to set the level of familiarity in the early stages of exchange is good strategy, most offices are set up to allow a caller to ask a quick, anonymous question, if he’s polite about it. As long as you don’t ask to speak to the agent personally and/or use the occasion to pitch your book, you should be fine.

Have you noticed how many of these tips boil down to some flavor of be clear, do your homework, and be courteous? That’s not entirely accidental: as odd as it may seem in an industry that rejects so many so brusquely, manners honestly do count in this business.

As my grandmother was fond of saying, manners cost nothing. But as I am prone to tell my clients and students, not exhibiting courtesy can cost an aspiring writer quite a lot.

So sit up straight, brush your teeth, and help little old ladies across the street; it will be great practice for working with an agent or editor.

More of the checklist follows tomorrow, of course. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 3 Comments on Query letter troubleshooting, or, no, Virginia, you don’t want to make the same mistakes as everyone else

Query letter troubleshooting, or, no, Virginia, you don’t want to make the same mistakes as everyone else

Happy Labor Day weekend, everybody! This is one of my favorite three-day holidays because, of course, most U.S. workers wouldn’t have weekends at all were it not for organized labor spending decades pushing for a 5-day work week. Seems appropriate, somehow, that so many folks get a day off to commemorate that achievement — and to celebrate child labor laws, OSHA, and other Really Good Ideas that have made workplaces across the country safer for all. (Not to mention less Dickensian.)

I’m sorry to have skipped a couple of days of posting, because I know that, appropriately enough, many, many aspiring writers stateside use this particular long weekend to prepare their next barrages of query letters and submissions. I like to be checking in often during query-heavy periods, to answer readers’ last-minute questions. However, since Millicent and her cronies will be dragging into the office two days hence, only to be greeted by (in some cases) a month’s worth of queries and submissions, it’s probably not the world’s worst idea to hold off for a week or so before you mail yours off, if only to wait until Millie’s in a better mood.

Ask a writer to justify anything, and you’re likely to get a well-stuffed paragraph of response, eh?

Seriously, though, I’m glad to devote the week to come to diagnosing and treating some of the ailments from which query letters and SASEs commonly suffer. (Yes, believe it or not, queriers often misunderstand the proper function of the SASE or leave it out altogether.) I’d much, much rather spend an extra week on the topic than to have any of you kicking yourselves a month from now, wishing you’d queried differently.

Do I see some hands being thrown skyward out there? “But Anne,” I hear those of you with query letters on the point of being stuffed into already-addressed envelopes, “isn’t this a trifle redundant? After all, you’ve been talking for the last few posts about big problems to which query letters are prone, so aren’t you preaching to the choir here?”

You’ve got a point there, hand-flingers: I, too, would dearly like to believe that all of my bright, brilliant, talented, and undoubtedly gorgeous and civic-minded readers already know to avoid the major pitfalls. In fact, over the course of the last three years (can you believe I’ve been posting for that long?), all of us here at Author! Author! have worked pretty hard to produce that outcome.

Go, Team Literate!

I must confess, though, that I worry about the reader who found this blog only a week ago, my friends, as well as the one who started reading faithfully, say, last April. These fine folks have not yet lived through one of my troubleshooting series — and, hard as it may be to imagine, not everyone has the hours — or, at this point, days — to spare to troll my archives. (Helpful hint to those in a hurry: the HOW TO categories on the list at right contain the briefest sets of explanations of a number of basic writerly skills, like query-generating; lengthier, more detailed accounts lurk under other category headings.)

I’m not going over this material again only for the sake of new or archive-shy readers, however. Even if a writer’s been at it a while, it can be pretty hard to see the flaws in one’s own query letters — and for some reason I have never been able to fathom, even aspiring writers savvy enough to be routinely soliciting feedback on their manuscripts often guard their queries jealously from any human eyes other than Millicent the agency screener’s.

Whose peepers, as those of you who have been visiting this blog for a good long time are already aware, are not generally charitably-oriented. So please, even if you are a querying veteran, at least cast your eye over this list of common query turn-offs.

Why? Well, for most aspiring writers, it takes quite a bit of rejection to open their eyes to the possibility that their missives themselves might be problematic. Okay, out comes the broken record, because I honestly do think the misconceptions around rejection are harmful to good writers: unfortunately, writers all too often automatically assume that it’s the idea of the book being rejected, rather than a style-hampered querying letter or a limp synopsis.

But how is this possible, without a level of mental telepathy on the agency screener’s part that would positively stun the Amazing Kreskin?

Are the rejecting agents seeing past the initial packet to the book itself, decreeing from afar that the writing is not worth reading — and thus that the writer should not be writing? Do they have some sort of direct cosmic connection to the Muses that allows them to glance at the first three lines of a query and say, “Nope, this one was last in line when the talent was handed out. Sorry,” before they toss it into the rejection pile?

No, of course not. Only editors have that kind of direct telephone connection to the demi-gods.

Yet this particular fear leaps like a lion onto many fledgling writers, dragging them off the path to future efforts: it is the first cousin that dangerous, self-hating myth that afflicts too many writers, leading to despair, the notion that if one is REALLY talented, the first draft, the first query, and the first book will automatically traject one to stardom.

It never – well, almost never — turns out like that: writing is work, and what gets the vast majority of queries rejected is a lack of adherence to professional standards. Which can, my friends, be learned, as we’ve seen over the last few posts.

But what if you already have a query letter that meets all the technical criteria, and it’s still not getting the responses you want? Pull up your chairs close, boys and girls: it’s time for the master class on querying.

Today, we’re going to begin to learn the fine art of diagnosis.

Word to the wise: even if you have already run your query through the wringer of my last set of diagnostic posts, you might want to cast your eye over these as well. Because the querying market is tighter than it was the last time I visited this issue — read: it’s as competitive now as it has been in my lifetime, and I’m not nearly so young as I look — I have beefed up the questions this time around. If you have already gone over your letter with an eye to my earlier advice, you should be able to sail through most of these questions; if not, you may have a few surprises in store.

Before you begin to feel for your submission’s pulse, read over everything in your query packet IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD: your query letter, synopsis, and, if you’ve been submitting it, first chapter. Better still, read them over AND have someone you trust read it over as well, checking for logical holes and grammatical problems. The best choice for this is another writer, ideally one who has successfully traversed the perils of the agent-finding ravine.

Let’s slap another broken record on the turntable: as much as you may love your mother, your spouse, and your best friend, they are, generally speaking not the best judges of your writing. Look to them for support and encouragement, not for technical feedback. Find someone whose opinion you trust – such as, say, a great writer you met at a conference, or the person in your writing group who keeps being asked to send sample chapters – and blandish her into giving your query letter and synopsis a solid reading.

(Lest you think I am casting unwarranted aspersions upon your mother, your spouse, or your best friend, let me add that my own fabulous mother spent her twenties editing the work of Philip K. Dick and others; fifty years later, she is one of the best line editors I have ever seen, in my professional opinion, but as she is my mother, I would never dream of using her as my only, or indeed even my primary feedback source. Naturally, that doesn’t stop her from line editing while she reads my work, as I do for hers — years of professional editing causes a particular type of myopia that prevents one from ever reading again without brandishing a vicious pen that attacks margins with the intensity a charging rhinoceros — but I respect my work enough to want first reader feedback from someone who was NOT there when I took my first toddling steps.)

Make sure that you read all of the constituent parts of your submissions in hard copy, not just on a computer screen. Proofreading is far easier – and more likely to be accurate — in hard copy. And I’m quite serious about treating this a final flight-check: don’t leave rooting out the proofreading and logic problems until the last minute, because it’s too easy to skip them when you’re in a hurry..

Once you have cleared out any grammatical or spelling problems and made sure your submission pieces say what you thought they were saying (you’d be surprised how many don’t), sit down with yourself and/or that trusted first reader and ask yourself the following questions.
Ready, campers? Let’s proceed.

(1) Is my query letter longer than a single page in standard correspondence format?
I covered this earlier in this series, but it bears repeating: even e-mailed queries longer than a page are seldom read in their entirety. I know it’s hard to cram everything you want to say to promote your work into a single page, but it’s just not worth it to go longer.

And please, for your own sake, don’t take the common escape route of shrinking the margins or the typeface; trust me, any screener, agent, editor, or contest judge with even a few weeks’ worth of experience can tell. (For a quick, visually-aid-assited run-down on why their being able to tell is bad news for the querier who does it, please see my last post.)

For those of you unclear on the difference between correspondence format and business format (or, to put it another way, those who are coming upon this checklist in my archives, rather than reading it as today’s post), please see my earlier post on the subject.

(2) If my query letter just refuses to be shorter, am I trying to do too much here?
Specifically, is your query trying to do more than get the agent to ask to see the manuscript?

Is it perhaps trying to convince the agent (or the screener) that this is a terrific book, or maybe including the plot, rather than the premise? Is it reviewing the book, rather than describing it? Is it begging for attention, rather than presenting the book professionally? Is it trying to suit the tastes of every agent to whom you might conceivably send it, rather than the one to whom it is currently addressed?

All of these are extremely common ways in which query letters over-reach. Don’t try to cram a half an hour’s worth of conversation about your book into a scant page; just present the information necessary to interest an agent in your manuscript, then STOP.

(3) If my query letter is too long, am I spending too many lines of text describing the plot?
The attempt to force the query to serve the purpose of the synopsis or book proposal is, of course, the most common letter-extender of them all. All too often, the plot or argument description overflows its alloted single paragraph so dramatically that other necessary features of the query letter — why the querier has selected THIS agent and no other, the intended readership, the book category — get tossed overboard in a desperate attempt to keep the whole to a single page.

The simplest fix for this, in most instances, is to reduce the length of the descriptive paragraph. Remember, your job here is not to summarize the book (that’s what the synopsis is for), but to pique enough interest to generate a request for pages. Keep it brief.

How brief? Well, let’s just say that if you can’t say the first two paragraphs of your query letter — the ones where you say why you are approaching that particular agent, the book category, and the premise — in under 30 seconds of normal speech, you might want to take a gander at the ELEVATOR SPEECH category at right.

(4) Is my query letter polite?
You’d be amazed at how often writers use the query letter as a forum for blaming the agent addressed for prevailing conditions in the publishing industry, up to and including how difficult it is to land an agent. But Millicent and her ilk did not create the ambient conditions for writers; treating them as though they did merely betrays a lack of familiarity with how the industry actually works.

And even if they had plotted in dark, smoke-filled rooms about how best to make writers’ lives more difficult, pointing it out either explicitly or implicitly would not not the best way to win friends and influence people. In my experience, lecturing a virtual stranger on how mean agents are is NOT the best tack to take when trying to make a new friend who happens to be an agent, any more than cracking out your best set of lawyer jokes would be at a bar association meeting.

I know — shocking.

I’ve seen some real lulus turn up in query letters. My personal favorite began, “Since you agents have set yourself up as the guardians of the gates of the publishing world, I suppose I need to appeal to you first…”

A close second: “I know that challenging books seldom get published these days, but I’m hoping you’ll be smart enough to see that mine…”

Remember, even if you met an agent at a conference (or via a recommendation from a client; I’ll be talking a bit about that next week) and got along with him as though you’d known each other since nursery school, a query is a business letter. Be cordial, but do not presume that it is okay to be overly familiar.

Demonstrate that you are a professional writer who understands that the buying and selling of books is a serious business. After hours staring at query letters filled with typos and blame, professional presentation comes as a positive relief.

Speaking of which…

(5) Is it clear from the first paragraph on what precisely I am asking the agent to represent?
This may seem like a silly question, but you wouldn’t believe how many otherwise well-written query letters don’t even specify whether the book in question is fiction or nonfiction. Or, as I mentioned earlier in this series, the book category. Or even, believe it or not, the title.

Why is it so VERY important to make absolutely certain that this information is clearly presented in the first paragraph? Because, as I mentioned last week, the vast majority of queries are not read in their entirety before being rejected.

Or, to put it another way: the first paragraph of your query is one of the very few situations in the writing world where you need to TELL, as well as show. If your first paragraph doesn’t tell Millicent either that the book in question is in fact the kind of book her boss is looking to represent or another very good reason to query her (having spoken to her at a conference, having heard her speak at same, because she so ably represented Book X, etc.), she is very, very likely to shove it into the rejection pile without reading any farther.

“But Anne,” I hear the more prolific of you protest, “I write in a number of different book categories, and I’m looking for an agent to represent all of my work, not just some of it. But won’t it be confusing if I list all of my areas of interest in the first paragraph of my query?”

In a word, yes — and generally speaking, it’s better strategy to query one book at a time, for precisely that reason. If you like (and you should like, if you have a publication history in another book category), you may mention the other titles later in your query letter, down in the paragraph where you will be talking about your writing credentials.

But in the first paragraph, no. Do you really want to run the risk of confusing Millicent?

(6) Does my letter sound as though I am excited about this book, or as if I have little confidence in the work? Or does it read as though I’m apologizing for querying at all?
We all know that writing query letters is no one’s idea of a good time. Well, maybe a few masochists enjoy it (if they’re really lucky, maybe they can give themselves a paper cut while they’re at it), but the vast majority of writers hate it, hate it, hate it.

Which, unfortunately, can translate on the page into sounding apprehensive, unenthusiastic, or just plain tired. Understandable, absolutely, but not the best way to pitch your work.

A query is not the place to express querying fatigue. Try to sound as upbeat in your seventeenth query letter as in your first. No need to sound like a Mouseketeer on speed, of course, but try not to sound discouraged, either.

While it is a nice touch to thank the agent at the end of the query for taking the time to consider your work, doing so in the first paragraph of the letter and/or repeatedly in the body can come across as a tad obsequious. Begging tends not to be helpful in this situation.

Remember, reading your query is the agent’s (or, more likely, the agent’s assistant’s) JOB, not a personal favor to you. No, no matter HOW long you’ve been shopping your book around.

By the way, if you have already pitched to an agent at a conference and she asked you to send materials, you do not need to query that same agent to ask permission to send them, unless she specifically said, “Okay, query me.” Many conference-goers seem to be confused on this point. In-person pitching is a substitute for querying, not merely an expensive extension of it.

And yes, this remains true even if many months have passed since that pitch session: if it’s been less than a year since an agent requested pages, there is absolutely no need to query, call, or e-mail to confirm that she still wants to see them. (If it’s been longer, do.) To the pros, being asked over and over again whether they REALLY meant that request is puzzling and, if it happens frequently, annoying.

(7) Does my book come across as genuinely marketable, or does the letter read as though I’m boasting?
In my many, many years of hanging out with publishing types, I have literally never met an agent who could not, if asked (and often if not), launch into a medley of annoyingly pushy, self-aggrandizing query letter openings he’s received. As I mentioned earlier in this series, they’ve already seen a lifetime’s supply of, “This is the greatest work ever written!”, “My book is the next bestseller!”, and “Don’t miss your opportunity to represent this book!”

Trust me, they don’t want to hear it again. Ever. (And if that’s news to you, please see my most recent post on the subject.)

So how do you make your work sound marketable? By identifying the target market clearly, and demonstrating (with statistics, if you can) both how large it is and why your book will appeal to that particular demographic.

Why, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Why, it’s almost as though I had been thinking ahead.

Perhaps that’s because figuring out how to identify your book’s target market and a few reasons that your book would appeal to that demographic were exercises we did earlier in the summer. (If you missed that part of the Book Marketing 101 series, I have carefully hidden the relevant posts under the obscure monikers IDENTIFYING YOUR TARGET MARKET and YOUR BOOK’S SELLING POINTS in the category list at right.)

Which means that all of you out there who have been following this series the whole time should give yourselves a big ol’ pat on the back: you’ve spent the summer assembling a serious writer’s bag of marketing tools, a collection that will, I hope, serve you well throughout the rest of your writing life. Learning to figure out a book’s ideal readership, how to identify a selling point, coming to describe a book in the manner the industry best understands — these are all skills that transcend the agent-finding stage of a writer’s career.

So well done, everybody. Tomorrow, I shall move on with the red flag checklist. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part IV: the good, the bad, and the shrunken

What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part IV: the good, the bad, and the shrunken

I’ve been talking for a few days about the goals of the query letter and how to achieve them without sounding as though you’re trying to sell the agent vacation home land in Florida. In that spirit, I thought some of you might find it useful to see what a really good query letter looks like. Not so you can copy it verbatim – rote reproductions abound in rejection piles – but so you may see what the theory looks like in practice.

To make the example more useful, I’ve picked a book in the public domain whose story you might know: MADAME BOVARY. (And if you’re having trouble reading it at its current size, try clicking on the image a couple of times.)

That’s an awfully good query letter, isn’t it? After the last few days’ posts, I hope it’s clear to you why: it that presents the book well, in businesslike terms, without coming across as too pushy or arrogant. Even more pleasing to Millicent’s eye, Mssr. Flaubert makes the book sound genuinely interesting AND describes it in terms that imply a certain familiarity with how the publishing industry works. Well done, Gustave!

(The date on the letter is when the first installment of MADAME BOVARY was published, incidentally; I couldn’t resist.)

For the sake of comparison, let’s assume that Mssr. Flaubert had not done his homework; what might his query letter have looked like then?

Now, I respect my readers’ intelligence far too much to go through point by point, explaining what’s wrong with this second letter. Obviously, the contractions are far too casual for a professional missive.

No, but seriously, I would hope that you spotted the unsupported boasting, the bullying, disrespectful tone, and the fact that it doesn’t really describe the book. Also, to Millicent’s eye, the fact that it was addressed to DEAR AGENT and undated would indicate that ol’ Gustave is simply plastering the entire agent community with queries, regardless of individual agents’ representation preferences. That alone would almost certainly lead her to reject MADAME BOVARY out of hand, without reading the body of the letter at all.

Setting aside all of these problems, there are two other major problems with this letter that we have not yet discussed. First, how exactly is the agent to contact Gustave to request him to send the manuscript?

She can’t, of course, because Mssr. Flaubert has made the mistake of leaving out that information, as an astonishingly high percentage of queriers do.

Why? I suspect it’s because they assume that if they include a SASE (that’s Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope, for those of you new to the trade, and it should be included with every query and submission), the agent already has their contact information. A similar logic tends to prevail with e-mailed queries: all the agent needs to do is hit REPLY, right?

Well, no, not necessarily; e-mailed queries get forwarded from agent to assistant and back again all the time, and SASEs have been known to go astray. I speak from personal experience here: I once received a kind rejection for someone else’s book stuffed into my SASE. I returned the manuscript with a polite note informing the agency of the mistake, along with the suggestion that perhaps they had lost MY submission. The nice agency assistant who answered that letter — very considerately, as it happens — grew up to be my current agent.

True story.

The moral: don’t depend on the SASE or return button alone. Include your contact information either in the body of the letter or in its header.

Gustave’s second problem is a bit more subtle, not so much a major gaffe as a small signal to Millicent that the manuscript to which the letter refers MIGHT not be professionally polished. Any guesses?

If you said that it was in business format, congratulations: you’ve been paying attention.

Any other ideas? Okay, let me infect the good query with the same virus, to help make the problem a bit more visible to the naked eye:

See it now? The letter is written in Helvetica, not Times, Times New Roman, or Courier, the preferred typefaces for manuscripts.

Was that huge huff of indignation that just billowed toward space an indication that favoring one font over another in queries is, well, a tad unfair? To set your minds at ease, I’ve never seen font choice alone be a rejection trigger (although font size often is; stick to 12 point). Nor do most agencies openly express font preferences for queries (although a few do; check their websites and/or agency book listings). However, I can tell you from very, very long experience working with aspiring writers that queries in the standard typefaces do seem to be treated with a touch more respect.

I know; odd. But worth noting, don’t you think?

Let’s take a look at another common yet purely structural way that good query letters send off an unprofessional vibe:

Not all that subtle, this: a query letter needs to be a SINGLE page. This restriction is taken so seriously that very, very few Millicents would be willing to turn to that second page at all, few enough that it’s just not worth adding.

Why are agencies so rigid about length when dealing with people who are, after all, writers? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: TIME. Can you imagine how lengthy the average query letter would be if agencies didn’t limit how long writers could ramble on about their books?

Stop smiling. It would be awful, at least for Millicent.

Fortunately, the one-page limit seems to be the most widely-known of querying rules. So much so, in fact, that aspiring writers frequently tempt Millicent’s wrath through conjuring tricks that force all of the information the writer wishes to provide onto a single page. Popular choices include shrinking the margins:

or shrinking the font size:

or, most effective at all, using the scale function to shrink the entire document:

Let me burst this bubble before any of you even try to blow it up to its full extent: this sort of document-altering magic will not help an over-long query sneak past Millicent’s scrutiny, for the exceedingly simple reason that she will not be fooled by it. Not even for a nanosecond. The only message such a query letter sends is this writer cannot follow directions.

Nor will an experienced contest judge, incidentally, should you be thinking of using any of these tricks to crush a too-lengthy chapter down to the maximum acceptable page length.

Why am I so certain that Millie will catch strategic shrinkage? For precisely the same reason that deviations from standard format in manuscripts are so obvious to professional readers: the fact that they read correctly-formatted pages ALL THE TIME.

Don’t believe the tricks above wouldn’t be instantaneously spottable? Okay, glance at them, then take another gander at our first example of the day:

Viewed side-by-side, the differences are pretty clear, aren’t they? And in the extremely unlikely event that Millicent isn’t really sure that the query in front of her contains some trickery, all she has to do is move her fingertips a few inches to the right or the left of it, open the next query letter, and perform an enlightening little compare-and-contrast exercise.

Just don’t do it. But avoiding formatting skullduggery is not the only thing I would like you to learn from today’s examples.

What I would also like you to take away from this post is the fact that, with one egregious exception, these were all more or less the same query letter in terms of content, all pitching the same book. Yet only one of these is at all likely to engender a request to read the actual MANUSCRIPT.

In other words, even a great book will be rejected at the query letter if it is queried or pitched poorly. Yes, many agents would snap up Mssr. Flaubert in a heartbeat after reading his wonderful prose – but with a query letter like the second, or with some of the sneaky formatting tricks exhibited here, the probability of any agent’s asking to read it is close to zero.

Let’s not forget an important corollary to this realization: even a book as genuinely gorgeous as MADAME BOVARY would not see the inside of a Borders today unless Flaubert kept sending out query letters, rather than curling up in a ball after the first rejection.

Deep down, pretty much every writer believes that if she were REALLY talented, her work would get picked up without her having to market it. C’mon, admit it, you’ve had the fantasy: there’s a knock on your door, and when you open it, there’s the perfect agent standing there, contract in hand. “I heard that your work is wonderful,” the agent says. “May I come in and talk about it?’

Or perhaps in your preferred version, you go to a conference and pitch your work for the first time. The agent of your dreams, naturally, falls over backwards in his chair; after sal volitale has been administered to revive him from his faint, he cries, “That’s it! The book I’ve been looking for my whole professional life!”

Or, still more common, you send your first query letter to an agent, and you receive a phone call two days later, asking to see the entire manuscript. Three days after you overnight it to New York, the agent calls to say that she stayed up all night reading it, and is dying to represent you. Could you fly to New York immediately, so she could introduce you to the people who are going to pay a million dollars for your rights?

Fantasy is all very well in its place, but while you are trying to find an agent, please do not be swayed by it. Don’t send out only one query at a time; it’s truly a waste of your efforts. Try to keep 7 or 8 out at any given time.

This advice often comes as a shock to writers. “What do you mean, 7 or 8 at any given time? I’ve been rejected ten times, and I thought that meant I should lock myself away and revise the book completely before I sent it out again!”

In a word, no. Oh, feel free to lock yourself up and revise to your heart’s content, but if you have a completed manuscript in your desk drawer, you should try to keep a constant flow of query letters heading out your door. As they say in the biz, the only manuscript that can never be sold is the one that is never submitted. (For a great, inspiring cheerleading essay on how writers talk themselves out of believing this, check out Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life.)

There are two reasons keeping a constant flow is a good idea, professionally speaking. First, it’s never a good idea to allow a query letter to molder on your desktop: after awhile, that form letter can start to seem very personally damning, and a single rejection from a single agent can start to feel like an entire industry’s indictment of your work.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one of the most self-destructive of conference-circuit rumors is the notion that if a book is good, it will automatically be picked up by the first agent that sees it. Or the fifth, for that matter.

This is simply untrue. It is not uncommon for wonderful books to go through dozens of queries, and even many rounds of query-revision-query-revision before being picked up. As long-time readers of this blog are already aware, there are hundreds of reasons that agents and their screeners reject manuscripts, the most common being that they do not like to represent a particular kind of book.

So how precisely is such a rejection a reflection on the quality of the writing?

Keep on sending out those queries a hundred times, if necessary. Because until you can blandish the right agent into reading your book, you’re just not going to know for sure whether it is marketable or not.

More querying tips follow anon. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 1 Comment on What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part III: suspense novel seeks LTR with agent

What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part III: suspense novel seeks LTR with agent

Throughout this latest barefoot run through the often rocky field of query letters, I have been thinking a lot about querying fatigue, that dragging, soul-sucking feeling that every querier — and submitter, and contest entrant — feels if and when that SASE comes back stuffed with a rejection. “Oh, God,” every writer thinks in that moment, “I have to do this again?” Unfortunately, if an aspiring writer wants to land an agent, get a book published by press large or small instead of self-publishing, or win a literary contest, s/he DOES need to pick that ego off the ground and keep moving forward.

That’s just a fact. So I hope that my last post, about the very, very short amount of time a writer has to grab an agent’s attention in a query letter, did not discourage anyone from trying.

Yes, querying is a tough row to hoe, both technically and psychologically. But here’s a comforting thought to bear in mind: someone who reads ONLY your query, or even your query and synopsis, cannot logically be rejecting your BOOK, or even your writing; to pass a legitimate opinion on either, she would have to read some of your work.

I’m quite serious about this — aspiring writers too often beat themselves up unduly over rejections, and it just doesn’t make sense. Unless the agency you are querying is one of the increasingly rare ones that asks querants to include a brief writing sample, what is rejected in a query letter is either the letter itself (for unprofessionalism, lack of clarity, or simply not being a kind of book that particular agent represents), the premise of the book, or the book category.

So, logically speaking, there is NO WAY that even a stack of rejection letters reaching to the moon could be a rejection of your talents as a writer, provided those rejections came entirely from cold querying. Makes you feel just the tiniest bit better to think of rejections that way, doesn’t it?

The sole goal of querying, as of pitching, then, is to generate a request to read some of it — not, as many queriers and pitchers seem to believe, to sell the book per se.

Why am I bringing this up in mid-series, you ask, other than to be a ray of sunshine on a rainy Seattle day? Well, it’s all part of a longer-term plan: earlier in the summer, if you will recall, I promised that learning how to pitch would help make you a better querier; last week and this, I have discussed how a savvy pitcher might apply those lessons to constructing a query letter; yesterday, I broached the often-neglected subject of the difference between query letters that claim to be the next bestseller, and those that provide an agent with some reasons to believe it.

Beginning to descry the outlines of my evil plan? I don’t want any of you to follow my querying guidelines blindly, but to UNDERSTAND the goals and pieces of the query letter well enough to write one that is actually original. I would like to see my readers not merely sending out professional-looking query letters, but ones that shout, “Hey, I’m not just a writer who has slapped my ideas into a boilerplate query — I’m a smart, thoughtful person with a good idea for a book who has taken the time to learn how the industry works.”

Overkill? Perhaps. But in my experience, more effective than just changing the words in the same template half the aspiring writers in North America are using this week — and believe me, fashions in querying change almost as often as fashions in hemlines.

All of which brings me back to a question thoughtful reader Jake wrote in to ask earlier in the summer, in the middle of my rhapsodies on pitching:

 

I’ve been applying this series to query writing, and I think I’ve written a pretty good elevator speech to use as a second paragraph, but there’s something that bothers me.

 

We’ve been told countless times not to write teasers or book-jacket blurbs when trying to pick up an agent. (“Those damned writer tricks,” I think was the term that was used)

I’m wondering exactly where the line between blurbs and elevator speeches are, and how can I know when I’ve crossed it. Any tips there?

Jake, this is a great question, one that I wish more queriers would ask themselves. The short answer:

 

A good elevator speech/descriptive paragraph of a query letter describes the content of a book in a clear, concise manner, relying upon intriguing specifics to entice a professional reader into wanting to see actual pages of the book in question.

 

whereas

 

A blurb is a micro-review of a book, commenting upon its strengths, usually in general terms. Usually, these are written by someone other than the author, as with the blurbs that appear on book jackets.

 

 

The former is a (brief, admittedly) sample of the author’s storytelling skill; the latter is promotional copy. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, many, if not most, queriers make the mistake of regarding query letters — and surprisingly often synopses, especially those submitted for contest entry, as well — as occasions for the good old American hard sell, boasting when they should instead be demonstrating.

Or, to put it in more writerly language, telling how great the book in question is rather than showing it. From Millicent’s perspective, the difference is indeed glaring.

So how, as Jake so insightfully asks, is a querier to know when he’s crossed the line between them? As agents like to say, it all depends on the writing, and as my long-term readers are already aware, I’m no fan of hard-and-fast rules. However, here are a couple of simple follow-up questions to ask while considering the issue:

(1) Does my descriptive paragraph actually describe the book, or does it pass a value judgment on it?

Generally speaking, agents and editors tend to be wary of aspiring writers who praise their own work, as I mentioned yesterday. To use a rather crude analogy, boasts in queries come across like a drunk’s insistence that he can beat up everybody else in the bar, or (to get even cruder) like a personal ad whose author claims that he’s a wizard in bed.

That’s at MAKING the bed, naturally, children.

My point is, if the guy were really all that great at either, wouldn’t otherpeople be singing his praises? Isn’t the proof of the pudding, as they say, in the eating?

The typical back-jacket blurb isn’t intended to describe the book’s content — it’s to praise it. And as counter-intuitive as most queriers seem to find it, the goal of a query letter is not to praise the book, but to pique interest in it.

See the difference? Millicent does.

(2) Does my query present the book as a reviewer might, in terms of the reader’s potential enjoyment, assessment of writing quality, speculation about sales potential, and assertions that it might make a good movie? Or does my query talk about the book in the terms an agent might actually use?

Does this question sound eerily familiar? It should, at least to those of you who followed me through the pitching series earlier this summer.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it again: an effective query or pitch describes a book in the vocabulary of the publishing industry, not in terms of general praise.

(3) Are the sentences that strike me as possibly blurb-like actually necessary to the query letter, or are they extraneous?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the average query letter is crammed to the gills with unnecessary verbiage. Just as your garden-variety unprepared pitcher tends to ramble on about how difficult it has been to find an agent for her book, what subplots it contains, and what inspired her to write the darned thing in the first place, queriers often veer off-track to discuss everything from their hopes and dreams about how well the book could sell (hence our old friend, “It’s a natural for Oprah!”) to mentioning what their kith, kin, and writing teachers thought of it (“They say it’s a natural for Oprah!”) to thoughtfully listing all of the reasons that the agent being queried SHOULDN’T pick it up (“You probably won’t be interested, because this isn’t the kind of book that ends up on Oprah.”)

To Millicent and her fellow screeners, none of these observations are relevant.

A successful query letter has ALL of the following traits: it is clear; it is less than 1 page (single-spaced); it describes the book’s premise (not the entire book; that’s the job of the synopsis) in an engaging manner; it is polite; it is clear about what kind of book is being pitched; it includes a SASE, and it is addressed to an agent with a successful track record in representing the type of book it is pitching.

You would not BELIEVE how few query letters that agencies receive actually have all of these traits. And to be brutally blunt about it, agents rather like that, because, as I mentioned in my last, it makes it oh-so-easy to reject 85% of what they receive within seconds.

No fuss, no muss, no reading beyond, say, line 2. Again, sound familiar?

A particularly common omission: the book category. Because, you see, many writers just don’t know that the industry runs on book categories; it would be literally impossible for an agent to sell a book to a publisher without a category label. And other writers, bless their warm, fuzzy, and devious hearts, think that they are being clever by omitting it, lest their work be rejected on category grounds. “This agency doesn’t represent mysteries,” this type of strategizer thinks, “so I just won’t tell them until they’ve fallen in love with my writing.”

I have a shocking bit of news for you, Napoléon: the industry simply doesn’t work that way; if they do not know where it will eventually rest on a shelf in Barnes & Noble, they’re not going to read it at all.

Yes, for most books, particularly novels, there can be legitimate debate about which shelf would most happily house it, and agents recategorize their client’ work all the time (it’s happened to me, and recently). However, people in the industry speak and even think of books by category — trust me, you’re not going to win any Brownie points with them by making them guess what kind of book you’re trying to get them to read.

If you don’t know how to figure out your book’s category, or why you shouldn’t just make one up, please, I implore you, click on the BOOK CATEGORIES section of the list at right before you send out your next query letter. Or pitch. Or, really, before you or anything you’ve written comes within ten feet of anyone even vaguely affiliated with the publishing industry.

But I’m veering off into specifics, amn’t I? We were talking about general principles.

I find that it often helps aspiring writers to think of their query letters as personal ads for their books. (Oh, come on: everyone reads them from time to time, if only to see what the new kink du jour is.) In it, you are introducing your book to someone with whom you are hoping it will have a long-term relationship — which, ideally, it will be; I have relatives with whom I have less frequent and less cordial contact than with my agent — and as such, you are trying to make a good impression.

So which do you think is more likely to draw a total stranger to you, ambiguity or specificity in how you describe yourself?

To put it another way, are you using the blurb or demonstration style> Do you, as so many personal ads and queries do, describe yourself in only the vaguest terms, hoping that Mr. or Ms. Right will read your mind correctly and pick yours out of the crowd of ads? Or do you figure out precisely what it is you want from a potential partner, as well as what you have to give in return, and spell it out?

To the eye of an agent or screener who sees hundreds of these appeals per week, writers who do not specify book categories are like personal ad placers who forget to list minor points like their genders or sexual orientation.

Yes, it really is that basic, in their world.

And writers who hedge their bets by describing their books in hybrid terms, as in “it’s a cross between a political thriller and a gentle romance, with helpful gardening tips thrown in,” are to professional eyes the equivalent of personal ad placers so insecure about their own appeal that they say they are into, “long walks on the beach, javelin throwing, or whatever.”

Trust me, to the eyes of the industry, this kind of complexity doesn’t make you look interesting, or your book a genre-crosser. To them, this at best looks like a rather pitiful attempt to curry favor by indicating that the writer in question is willing to manhandle his book in order to make it anything the agent wants. At worst, it comes across as the writer’s being so solipsistic that he assumes that it’s the query-reader’s job to guess what “whatever” means in this context.

And we all know by now how agents feel about writers who waste their time, don’t we?

Don’t make ’em guess; be specific, and describe your work in the language they understand. Because otherwise, they’re just not going to understand the book you are offering well enough to know that any agent in her right mind — at least, anyone who has a substantial and successful track record in selling your category of book — should ask to read all or part of it with all possible dispatch.

I know you’re up to this challenge; I can feel it.

Don’t worry, though — you don’t need to pull it off within the next thirty seconds, regardless of what that rush of adrenaline just told you. More discussion of the ins and outs of querying follows in the days to come, so take a nice, deep breath and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 1 Comment on What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part II: the inevitable effects of competition at the feeding bowl

What should a query letter look like, anyway? Part II: the inevitable effects of competition at the feeding bowl

As you may see, this summer’s litter of wee raccoonlets (I’d call them cubs, but the term fails to convey the relevant cuteness) have found our outdoor cat’s food bowl. In broad daylight, no less, with the kitty in question regarding them with singular disfavor from a few scant feet away. Since we fed the babies’ mother when she was a cub, and her parents when they were, I suppose I would be unreasonable to expect them to be shy. They scratch on my door when they’re hungry.

I don’t have a whole lot of leisure to watch them, unfortunately, because I’m still on relative hiatus (read: I’m writing this propped up on a couch, nearly buried in blankets, cats, and Kleenex, not the healthy person’s choice for stylish summer apparel), but by gum, I’m on the job. The task at hand: helping those of you new to constructing query letters learn to build a good one — and giving those of you who have been at it for a while some tips on making yours better.

To that end, my last couple of posts have been re-runs (yes, a bit lazy of me, but you try moving the cat who likes sleeping on top of my mousing arm) on what a query letter is and isn’t. For the rest of this week, I’m going to continue this trend — mostly, like today, combining some material from different past posts into fresh ones, then folding in some visuals. After we’re all good and clear on the basic concepts, I’ll move on to how to spot trouble spots in existing query letters. Sounds like fun, eh?

Well, okay, maybe not fun, but doesn’t it at least sound bearable?

At minimum, it should be exceedingly useful. Honest. Think of it as taking your query letter to the gym.

Now would be a great time to work on its muscle tone: for those of you who don’t know, most of the NYC-based publishing world goes on vacation from mid-August until after Labor Day. Throughout that sleepy, humid period, mail rooms back up and desks disappear under as-yet-to-be-read query letters and manuscripts, threatening to bury the lone, pale intern left behind to answer e-mails and phones (or, alternatively, the agent who likes to work uninterrupted, and thus took his vacation at some other time of year).

It’s not the best time to query or submit. Nor is immediately after Labor Day, when Millicent and her cronies return, groaning, to sort through that pile — if you picture the look on her face when she reappears in the office after the winter holidays, wincing at the sight of the thousands of envelopes sent by well-meaning keepers of New Year’s resolutions, you’re feeling the mood correctly.

Take a couple of weeks to polish your query or submission. Trust me, Millie will be in a better mood after the 10th or so.

Why — what a remarkable coincidence! I have a couple of weeks of query-burnishing posts planned. Why so many? Well, plenty of aspiring writers find the querying process quite intimidating.

And who can blame them, considering how short a query letter is supposed to be? “My God,” the little voice in the back of my head which I choose to attribute to you is saying, “how is all of that possible within the context of a single-page missive? How can I cram all I need to say to grab their attention in that little space?”

Um, are you sitting down? You don’t actually have the entire page to catch their attention; on average, you have about five lines.

Yes, you read that correctly.

While you already have the heart medication and/or asthma inhaler at the ready, it seems like a good time to add: most query letters are not even read to their ends by screeners.

Why? Because the vast majority of query letters disqualify themselves from serious consideration before the end of the opening paragraph.

Hey, I told you to sit down first.

Unfortunately, Americans are so heavily exposed to hard-sell techniques that many aspiring writers make the mistake of using their query letters to batter the agent with predictions of future greatness so over-inflated (and, from the agent’s point of view, so apparently groundless, coming from a previously unpublished writer) that they may be dismissed out of hand. Some popular favorites:

“This is the next (fill in name of bestseller here)!”
“You’ll be sorry if you let this one pass by!”
“Everyone in the country will want to read this book!”
“It’s a natural for Oprah!”
“This book is like nothing else on the market!”

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but to professional eyes, these are all absurd statements to find in a query letter. Yes, even if the book in question IS the next DA VINCI CODE.

Why? Because these aren’t descriptions of the book; they’re back-jacket blurbs, marketing copy, equally applicable to (and equally likely to be true about) any manuscript that crosses their desks. Even in the extremely rare instances that these statements aren’t just empty boasts based upon wishful thinking, consider: whose literary opinion would YOU be more likely to believe in Millicent’s shoes, the author’s vague claim of excellence about his own book or another reader’s recommendation?

Hitting too close to home? Okay, let me put it this way: if someone you’d never met before came up to you on the street and said, “Hey, I bake the world’s best mincemeat pies, the kind that can change your life in a single bite,” would you believe him? Would you trustingly place that total stranger’s good-looking (or not) slice of God-knows-what into your mouth? Or would you want some assurances that, say, this hard-selling Yahoo knows something about cooking, had produced the pie in a vermin-free kitchen, and/or hadn’t constructed the mincemeat out of ground-up domestic pets?

Oh, you may laugh, thinking that this isn’t really an apt parallel, but what is agents and editors’ desire to hear about a new writer’s past publication history — or educational background, or even platform — about, if NOT to try to figure out if that pie is made of reasonable materials and in a manner up to professional standards of production?

That’s why, in case you’ve been wondering, a good query letter includes what I like to call ECQLC, Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy. Not because agencies are determined to seem exclusionary toward previously unpublished writers (okay, not merely to seem exclusionary), but because specific references to specific past literary achievements are signals to a quick-scanning screener that this is a query letter to take seriously.

As will an opening paragraph that states clearly and concisely why the writer decided to query this agent, as opposed to any other; a well-crafted single-paragraph elevator speech for the book; some indication of the target market, and a polite, respectful tone — the same basic elements, in short, as an effective verbal pitch.

Did some light bulbs just flicker on over some heads out there? That’s right, campers — the difference between a vague boast and solid information about your book and why THIS agent is the best fit for it is actually a show, don’t tell problem, at base. Your goal in the query letter is to demonstrate through your professional presentation of your project that this is a great book by an exciting new author, not just to say it.

As in, “My friends say this is the greatest novel since THE GRAPES OF WRATH. It’s also a natural for Oprah.”

“But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “my book really is a natural for Oprah! I’m going on her show next week!”

Well, congratulations — go ahead and open your query letter with the date of your appearance on the show, and the best of luck to you. For the vast majority of you who have not already heard from her production staff, I wouldn’t suggest mentioning your book’s Oprah potential at all, either in the query letter or, if you write nonfiction, in the book proposal.

Why? Because, conservatively speaking, at least 40% of book proposals will mention the possibility of appearing on Oprah. As will most marketing plans, a hefty percentage of verbal pitches, and a higher percentage of query letters than I even like to say.

What’s the result of all of that repetition? Usually, Millicent will simply stop reading if a query letter opens with an empty boast, because to her, including such statements is like a writer’s scrawling on the query in great big red letters, “I have absolutely no idea how the industry works.”

Which, while an interesting tactic, is unlikely to get an agent or her screener to invest an additional ten seconds in reading on to your next paragraph.

That’s right, I said ten seconds: as much as writers like to picture agents and their screeners agonizing over their missives, trying to decide if such a book is marketable or not, the average query remains under a decision-maker’s eyes for less than 30 seconds.

That’s not a lot of time to make up one’s mind, is it?

Even the best-meaning Millicent might conceivably, after as short a time as a few weeks of screening queries, might start relying pretty heavily upon her first impressions. Consider, for instance, the English major’s assumption that business format is in fact not proper formatting for either query letters or manuscripts.

Again, think about it: it’s true, for one thing, and let’s face it, improper formatting is the single quickest flaw to spot. Let’s take another gander at what Millicent expects to see, a letter formatted observing standard English rules of paragraph-formation:

Now let’s take a look at exactly the same letter in business format:

Interesting how different it is, isn’t it, considering that the words are identical? In an e-mailed query, of course, the latter format would be acceptable, but on paper, it’s not the best strategic choice.

Which may, I gather, come as a surprise to some of you out there. Unfortunately, a lot of aspiring writers seem not to be aware that business format tends to be regarded in the industry as less-than-literate, regardless of whether it appears in a query letter, a marketing plan, or — heaven forfend! — a submitted manuscript. (If you don’t know why I felt the need to invoke various deities to prevent you from using business format your manuscripts, please run, don’t walk to the STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED category at right.)

In fact, I am always meeting writers at conferences and in classes who insist, sometimes angrily, that a query letter is a business letter, and thus should be formatted as such. They tell me that standards have changed, that e-mail has eliminated the need for observing traditional paragraph standards, that it’s the writing that counts, not the formatting.

I understand the logic, of course, but it just doesn’t apply here: not all businesses work in the same way. As anyone who works in an agency or publishing house would no doubt be delighted to tell you, there are many, many ways in which publishing doesn’t work like any other kind of business. One does not, for instance, require an agent in order to become a success at selling shoes.

If you’re looking for evidence of the biz’ exceptionalism, all you have to do is walk into a bookstore with a good literary fiction section. Find a book by a great up-and-coming author that’s sold only 500 copies since it came out last year, and ask yourself, “Would another kind of business have taken a chance like this, or would it concentrate on producing only what sells well? Would it continue to produce products like this year after year, decade after decade, out of a sense of devotion to the betterment of the human race?”

Okay, so some businesses would, but it’s certainly not the norm.

Yet almost invariably, when I try to tell them that publishing is an old-fashioned industry fond of its traditions, and that agents and their screeners tend to be people with great affection for the English language and its rules, I receive the same huffy reply from writers who dislike indenting: some version of, “Well, I heard/read/was told that a query/marketing plan had to be businesslike.”

I’m always glad when they bring this up — because I strongly suspect that this particular notion is at the root of the surprisingly pervasive rumor that agents actually prefer business format. I can easily envision agents stating point-blank at conferences that they want to receive businesslike query letters.

But businesslike and business format are not the same thing. Businesslike means professional, market-savvy, not overly-familiar — in short, the kind of query letter we have been talking about for the last couple of posts.

Business format, on the other hand, doesn’t dictate any kind of content at all; it’s purely about how the page is put together. There’s absolutely nothing about this style, after all, that precludes opening a query with the threat, “You’ll regret it for the rest of your natural life if you let this book pass you by!”

All of these negative examples are lifted from real query letters, by the way.

All that being said, there’s another reason that I would strenuously advise against using business format in your query letters — and a comparative glance at the two letters above will show you why.

Take another look, then put yourself in Millicent’s shoes for a moment and ask yourself: based upon this particular writing sample, would you assume that Aspiring Q. Author was familiar with standard format? Would you expect Aspiring’s paragraphs to be indented, or for him/her (I have no idea which, I now realize) NOT to skip lines between paragraphs?

Okay, would your answer to those questions change if you had a hundred query letters to read before you could get out of the office for the day, and you’d just burned your lip on a too-hot latte? (Millicent never seems to learn, does she?)

No? Well, what if it also contained a typo within the first line or two, had odd margins, or began with, “This is the best book you’ll read this year!” or some similar piece of boasting? Wouldn’t you be at least a LITTLE tempted to draw some negative conclusions from the format?

Even if you wouldn’t, Millicent would — and perhaps even should. Why? Because although most aspiring writers seem not to be aware of it, every sentence a writer submits to an agency is a writing sample. Even if the writer doesn’t treat it as such, a screener will.

After all, when that stranger comes up to sell you a meat pie, you’re going to be looking for whatever clues you can to figure out if he’s on the up-and-up.

Quick rejections are not about being mean or hating writers — they’re about plowing through the mountains of submissions that arrive constantly. The average agency receives 800-1000 queries per week (that’s not counting the New Year’s Resolution Rush, folks), so agents and screeners have a very strong incentive to weed out as many of them as possible as rapidly as possible.

That’s why, in case you were wondering, that agents will happily tell you that any query that begins “Dear Agent” (rather than addressing a specific agent by name) automatically goes into the rejection pile. So does any query that addresses the agent by the wrong gender in the salutation. (If you’re unsure about a Chris or an Alex, call the agency and ask; no need to identify yourself as anything but a potential querier.)

So does any query that is pitching a book in a category the agent is not looking to represent. (Yes, even if the very latest agents’ guide AND the agency’s website says otherwise.)

And you know what? These automatic rejections will, in all probability, generate exactly the same form rejection letter as queries that were carefully considered, but ultimately passed upon. Again: how precisely is an aspiring writer to learn what does and doesn’t work in a query?

By finding out what agency screeners like Millicent are trained to spot — and learning what appeals to her. So go to conferences and ask questions of agents about what kind of queries they like to see. Attend book readings and ask authors about how they landed their agents. Take writers who have successfully landed agents out to lunch and ask them how they did it.

But do not, whatever you do, just assume that what works in other kinds of marketing will necessarily fly in approaching an agent. After all, almost universally, they specifically ask aspiring writers not to use the hard-sell techniques used in other types of business: writers seeking representation are expected not to telephone to pitch, send unrequested materials, or engage in extracurricular lobbying like sending cookies along with a query letter.

Instead, be businesslike, as befits a career writer: approach them in a manner that indicates that you are aware of the traditions of their industry. And, of course, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 1 Comment on A few more thoughts on boilerplate query letters

A few more thoughts on boilerplate query letters

Hello, campers —

I’m still a bit under the weather, I’m afraid, but I wanted to post something today, to kick off our week of talking about query letters with, if not a bang, at least not with silence. In that spirit, I am re-running a pertinent post from last year below.

Don’t worry; new thoughts on the subject follow shortly.

In the meantime, bright and generous reader Memoirista has been kind enough to post as a comment some formatting advice for those of you who were stunned to discover that standard format calls for two spaces after a period or colon, instead of just one. She’s figured out a way to effect this change throughout an entire manuscript in just a few easy steps; I suspect many of you out there will find it useful. Thanks for being so public-spirited, Memoirista!

And now return with me to that most tortured of topics, the construction of a winning query letter. Lest I confuse anyone, let me state up front that there is no connection between the picture above and the post below. I just happened to be struck by something the landscaper was doing. (And yes, they’re STILL here. Or, rather, are here again after having vanished like Houdini for weeks at a time, in that mysterious manner so dear to the hearts of all those in the throes of home improvement.)

Enjoy!

In my last post, I set out a very basic structure for a query letter, using the skills and tools that we’ve been working on all summer during the Book Marketing 101 series (for those of you who missed it, please see the appropriately-named category on the list at right). I had fully expected to post a follow-up the next day, assuaging the fears of the nervous, adding nuances to the prototype, and generally spreading joy and enlightenment abroad.

Then there was a HUGE racing event at a certain track located more or less exactly halfway between my mother’s current home and the town where I grew up. So basically, I spent Saturday zigzagging all over Northern California, trying to get from one to the other without sitting for hours in racing-enthusiast traffic, to get to a minor class reunion.

I say minor, because it was not commemorating one of those nice, round year markers that professional event-organizers keep insisting that we all should celebrate like clockwork. (Or like calendar-work, even.) We’re two years from one of those, and frankly, the guy voted Most Likely to Succeed had to give the crowd a passionate pep talk on Saturday night to generate any enthusiasm at all about the next.

Which is funny, because I’m from the Napa Valley, and we tend to hold our reunions in wineries. As we did our prom, our jazz choir fundraisers, our Girl Scout cookie sales…you get the picture. Not the kind of places that one typically needs to use much blandishment to cajole people to visit.

It’s not that we’re averse to seeing one another — actually, it’s a pretty nice group of people, on the whole; the halfback who used to tease the small and the meek (speaking of clichés that turn up all the time in fiction…oh, wait, weren’t we talking about those?) was going around apologizing to people, even. It’s that going from kindergarten all the way through high school with the same 111 people (and I went to nursery school with 40 of them) can get a MITE claustrophobic in a town where the primary activities for teens are watching grapes grow (in answer to the question urbanites’ minds just shouted: slowly) and trying not to be run over by tourists who have over-sampled at the wineries.

I’m fairly confident that I set some sort of land-speed record when I left at 17.

I dreaded going to the reunion, but how could I stay away? One of the organizers, my best buddy during those dark days of Browniedom when our troop leader had what I suspect was a well-earned nervous breakdown — compounded, no doubt, by both the minor coup that we girls staged one day when we simply refused to cut up yet another set of aluminum cans to make decorative Christmas ornaments for the indigent elderly at the county home while little Roseanne ravished us with selections from her new accordion primer, and the dramatic reenactment of the troop leader’s hysterics that we staged for our parents’ benefit shortly thereafter (not my best writing, certainly, but it got the point across, and isn’t this a long sentence? Henry James would be so pleased) — ruthlessly described her 8-year-old daughter’s school year in precisely the same classroom where we had spent the third grade.

She continued in this vein until I threw my hands over my eyes and cried, “Enough! I’ll go!”

Once I got there, I was genuinely glad she’d blandished me. Because, of course, while pretty much everyone hated high school — since those who didn’t tend not to become writers, I feel fairly confident about making such a sweeping generalization here — it’s kind of hard to hold a grudge against the kid who spilled hot chocolate on you in the second grade much past your mid-thirties, isn’t it? And while reunion-goers tend to dread running into old nemeses and look forward to greeting old friends, it’s the folks one hasn’t thought about in a decade or two who often present the most delightful surprises.

All of which is to say: despite some pretty dangerous-sounding pre-reunion rumblings, Most Likely to Succeed was neither tarred nor feathered, run out of town on a rail, nor burned in effigy. No one was mean to anyone else; no one cried, and everyone seemed to have a pretty good time.

What does all this have to do with querying, you ask? Plenty.

(You thought I was just rambling about my weekend? Au contraire, mes braves.)

Querying, I think we can all agree, is a necessary evil: no one likes it; it generates a whole lot of inconvenience for writer and agency alike, and to engage in it is to put one’s ego on the line in a very fundamental way. Rejection hurts, and you can’t be rejected if you never send out your work, right? So you can either try to lie low, keeping your dreams to yourself, or you can attempt to approach those high-and-mighty gatekeepers of the industry, asking to be let inside the Emerald City.

Sounds a lot like high school, doesn’t it?

Just as many people stay away from reunions because they fear exposing themselves to the judgment of people whom past experience has led them to believe to be, well, kinda shallow and hurtful, many, many writers avoid querying, or give up after just a handful of queries, because they fear to be rejected by folks they have heard are kinda shallow and prone to be hurtful.

There are a variety of ways to deal with such fears. One could, for instance, not query at all, and resign oneself to that great novel or brilliant NF book’s never being published. One could query just a couple of times, then give up.

Or — and if you haven’t guessed by now, this would be my preferred option — you could recognize that while some of the people at the reunion may in fact turn out to be kind of unpleasant, you really only need to find the one delightful person who finds you truly fascinating to make the entire enterprise worthwhile.

You’ll be pleased to hear, though, that unlike gearing up to attend a reunion, there are certain things you can do before querying to increase the probability of a positive reception. Certain elements mark a query letter as coming from a writer who has taken the time to learn how the industry works.

Agents like writers like that. Ask ‘em.

The structure I proposed last time — which is, I assure you, NOT the only one possible by any means, or even the only one that works; it’s just what has worked best in my experience — also frees the writer from the well-nigh impossible task of trying to cram everything good about a book into a single page.

Which is, I have noticed over the years, precisely what most aspiring writers tend to try to do.

No wonder they get intimidated and frustrated long before they query the 50 or 100 agents (yes, you read that correctly) it often takes these days for a good book to find the right fit. To put this in perspective, a truly talented writer might well end up querying the equivalent of my entire high school class before being signed.

It’s no reflection on the book; it’s just the way the industry works. The only way that I know to speed up that process is to make the query letter itself businesslike, but personable.

Do keep in mind that the SOLE purpose of the query is to engender enough excitement in the reader that she will ask to see a representative chunk of the book itself, not to reproduce what you would like to see on the book’s back jacket or to complain about having to work through an agent at all.

If either of the last two options made you chuckle in disbelief, good. Believe it or not, I’ve seen both turn up many, many times in unsuccessful query letters. Boasting and petulance both abound, and both tend to discourage positive response.

Now, I know that my readers are too savvy to do this deliberately, but isn’t it worth sitting down with your query letter and asking yourself: could an exhausted agency screener like Millicent — in a bad mood, with a cold, having just broken up with her boyfriend AND burned her lip on that over-hot latte again — possibly construe that letter as either?

Yes, querying is a chore, and an intimidating one at that; yes, ultimately it will be the agent’s job, not yours, to market your work to publishers, and an agent or editor probably would have a far better idea of how to spin your book than you would.

Agents and their screeners (it is rare for agents at the larger agencies to screen query letters themselves; thus Millicent) are in fact aware of all of these things. You don’t need to tell them.

Your query letter needs to market your book impeccably anyway, in a tone that makes you sound like an author who LOVES his work and is eager to give agent and editor alike huge amounts of his time to promote it.

As I said: not a walk in the park, definitely, but certainly doable by a smart, talented writer who approaches it in the right spirit. Sound like anyone you know?

I shall overwhelm you with tips and tricks of the trade tomorrow, I promise. But for now, start thinking, please, about how to make your query the one that waltzes into the reunion with a positive attitude, not the one who storms in with a chip on its little shoulder, gunning for Mr. Most Likely to Succeed. Or, heaven forefend, the one that doesn’t stick its nose through the door at all.

Keep up the good work!