Author! Author!:: Anne Mini's Blog

Hello, readers —

I missed posting yesterday — no, not because of a miraculous breakthrough with my memoir, alas, but due to one of the nice-but-stressful phenomena intrinsic to life represented by an agent: on Tuesday afternoon, I was asked if I was still interested in writing a book I had mentioned casually, almost in passing, months ago. (One of the cocktail party tricks one rapidly learns as a working writer is to propose any idea for a publishable work to one’s agent as soon as it occurs to one.) Well, apparently, this one stuck, and now, a publisher is moderately interested in it. Interested enough, at least, to ask to see a proposal.

For the sake of giving you an accurate impression of what to expect from the publishing industry, let me also add: it is my understanding that a certain amount of this interest stemmed from the publisher’s anticipating being confined to bed for some time with a lingering head cold, and thus bored; he wanted something to read. Hey, we take our opportunities as we find them.

In any case, my agent and the publisher’s both being New Yorkers, they asked if they could have the proposal by the end of business (East Coast time, natch) Wednesday, to catch the publisher’s cold-induced reading time before it expired. So, being a good little writer, I sat down and churned out a proposal in a day.

For the record, I do not recommend this. Thank goodness, I caught myself thinking while my fingers blurred across the keyboard, that I already have a usable author bio!

I had to laugh, remembering how I spent Tuesday’s blog haranguing you about the vital importance of being an upbeat, can-do kind of writer, the sort who says, “Rewrite WAR AND PEACE by Saturday? No problem!” Here was a perfect real-life illustration of the importance of conveying that kind of attitude. It enabled my agent to jump on an opportunity as soon as it appeared, for both of our potential benefits.

As the late great Billie Holiday so often sang, “The difficult/I’ll do right now./The impossible/will take a little while.” (Will it vitiate my moral too much if I add that the name of the song was “Crazy, He Calls Me”?)

While I was writing like crazy yesterday, I also thought about how lucky I was to have enough experience with the trade to be able crank out the requisite pieces of a formal book proposal with the speed of a high school junior BSing on her English Literature midterm. That facility is definitely a learned skill, acquired through having produced a whole lot of promotional materials for my work over the last decade. At this point, I can make it sound as if all of human history had been leading exclusively and inevitably to my acquiring the knowledge, background, and research materials for me to write the project in question.

The Code of Hammurabi, you will be pleased to know, was written partially with my book in mind.

A word to the wise: any promotional material for a book is a creative writing opportunity. Not an invitation to lie, of course, but a chance to use your writing skills to paint a picture of what does not yet exist, in order to call it into being. For those of you new to the game, book proposals — the good ones, anyway — are written as if the book being proposed were already written; synopses, even for novels, are written in the present tense. It is your time to depict the book you want to write as you envision it in your fondest dreams.

That I have this skill in my writer’s tool bag is very valuable to my agent — because actually, she is too prudent a character to have told the publisher he could have the proposal that quickly if she didn’t know from past experience that I could pull it off. (Agents tend to be prudent people; the publishing world is surprisingly full of risk-averse souls, as you may already know if you’ve been querying with a particularly innovative book lately.)

I mention all of this not for self-aggrandizement purposes (although I am pretty pleased with myself for finishing it in time, I must confess), but as inducement to you to write up as many of the promotional parts of your presentation package well in advance of when you are likely to be asked for them. This is a minority view among writers, I know, but I would not dream of walking into any writers’ conference situation (or even cocktail party) where I am at all likely to pitch my work without having polished copies of my author bio, synopsis, and a 5-page writing sample nestled securely in my shoulder bag, all ready to take advantage of any passing opportunity.

Chance favors the prepared backpack.

Okay, so after all of this build-up, I hope you are chomping at the bit to get at your own author bio. First of all, let’s define it: an author bio is an entertaining overview of the author’s background, an approximately 200-250 word description of your writing credentials, relevant experience, and educational attainments, designed to make you sound like a person whose work would be fascinating to read.

Let me get the standard advice out of the way: use third person. Start with whatever fact is most relevant to the book at hand, not with “The author was born…” Mention any past publications (in general terms), columns, lecturing experience, readings, as well as what you were doing for a living at the time that you wrote the book. Mention any and all educational background (relevant to the book’s subject matter or not), as well as any awards you may have won (ditto). If your last book won the Pulitzer Prize, for instance, this is the place to mention it.

To put the length in easier-to-understand terms (and so I don’t get an avalanche of e-mails from readers worried that their bios are 15 words too long), this is 2-3 paragraphs, a 1/3 — 1/2 page (single-spaced) or 2/3 — 1 full page (double-spaced). And, as longtime readers of this blog have probably already anticipated, it should be in 12-pt. type, Times, Times New Roman or Courier, with 1-inch margins.

Yes, you read that bit in the middle of the last paragraph correctly: unlike positively everything else you will ever produce for passing under an agent or editor’s beady eyes, it is sometimes acceptable to single-space an author bio. Generally speaking, though, bios are only single-spaced when the author bio page contains a photograph of the author. I shall talk about this contingency tomorrow.

Got that length firmly in your mind? It should seem familiar to you — it’s the length of the standard biographical blurb on the inside back flap of a dust jacket. There’s a reason for that, of course: increasingly, the author, and not the publisher’s marketing department, is responsible for producing that blurb. So busy writers on a deadline tend to recycle their author bios as jacket blurbs.

Before you launch into writing your own bio, slouch your way into a bookstore on your day off and start pulling books of the shelves in the area where you hope one day to see your book sitting. Many of my clients find this helpful, as it assists them in remembering that the author bio is, like a jacket blurb, a sales tool, not just a straightforward list of facts. If you write funny novels, read a few dozen bio blurbs in funny novels already on the market. If you write cyberpunk, see what those authors are saying about themselves. Is there a pattern?

In good bios, there is: the tone of the author bio echoes the tone of the book. This is a clever move, as it helps the potential book buyer (and, in the author bio, the potential agent and/or editor) assess whether this is a writer in whose company she wants to spend hours of her life.

Now, I should warn you now about a disappointment you are likely to encounter as you read through book jacket blurbs: there are a LOT of lousy bios out there, littering up the dust jackets of otherwise perfectly fine books. Reading these may seem like a waste of your time, but actually, you can learn a lot from the bad ones, which typically share some common traits. You can learn what to avoid.

What makes them bad quickly becomes apparent. The bad ones are too similar, which makes them inherently dull. At their worst, they are merely lists of where the author went to school, if anywhere, what the author did (or does) for a living before (or besides) writing, where they live now, and their marital status. So scores of writers end up sounding something like this:

“Turgid McGee was born in upstate New York. After attending the Albany Boys’ Reformatory, he served a term in the U.S. Air Force. After graduating from Princeton University, McGee attended law school at the University of Oklahoma.

“Now retired, McGee now lives in Bermuda with his wife, Appalled, and his three children, Sleepy, Dopey, and Sneezy. He is currently working on his second book.”

Yawn. But inducing boredom is not ol’ Turgid’s worst offense here — the biggest problem with this blurb is that it’s poor marketing material. Quick, based solely on that bio:

What is Turgid’s book about?

Why is he uniquely qualified to write it?

If you picked up this book in a used bookstore years from now, would you have any interest in checking the shelves to see what his second book was?

Turgid also made a subtle mistake here, one that perhaps only those who have read a whole lot of author bios — such as, say, an agent or an editor — would catch. Turgid says he attended the University of Oklahoma, not that he graduated from it. This is the standard industry euphemism for not having finished a degree program, and thus problematic, since (and knowing dear old Turgid so well, I can say this with authority,) he actually did obtain his law degree. But when a publishing professional reads “Daffy Duck attended Yale University” in an author bio, she is automatically going to assume that poor Daffy dropped out after a year.

Moral: if you graduated from a school, say so. (And as a personal favor to me, never, ever say that you graduated a school; retain the necessary preposition. I can’t tell you how many times I have been introduced as the speaker who “graduated Harvard.” It makes my molars grind together.)

Looking at my own bio on this website, I’m not sure that I’ve avoided all of Turgid’s mistakes, but as far as the industry is concerned, the 50-word bio and the 250-word bio are entirely different animals. The former does tend to be a list, but the latter is the author’s big chance to prove to the publishing industry that she is not only a talented writer, but a person who might actually be interesting to know. My personal rule of thumb: if the full-fledged author bio doesn’t give the impression that if you were trapped in a snowstorm for three days with the author, the author would be capable of keeping you entertained with anecdotes the whole time, the bio isn’t interesting enough.

And, perhaps, if you’re lucky, something in your bio will stick in your agent’s mind enough down the road that it will occur to her to pitch your offhand reference to it to a sniffly editor in an elevator. That’s the kind of thing that happens to interesting people.

I’ll go into the mechanics a bit more tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’m feeling fairly optimistic today — and, as we all know, a tendency toward cockeyed optimism is an invaluable trait in a writer in the biz for the long haul. Today, though, I am optimistic for a reason — but because things are going better, I can’t tell you about them. Ironic, no? Once again, my memoir’s doings are shrouded in legally-induced secrecy (hypothetically, of course): shadowy behind-the-scenes negotiations are taking place in far-away rooms. Options are being discussed, you will be pleased to hear.

And all the while, yours truly, bedraggled champion of what I honestly do believe is a hell of a good story, keeps pushing for the right to have that story heard. The memoir’s saga is beginning to feel to me like a surrealistic update of one of those chivalric romances — you know, the ones where Sir Gawain or Lancelot have to undergo a seemingly endless series of tests before falling exhausted into the arms of their respective ladyloves and being offered a goblet of mead. Medieval ladyloves, like NYC-based publishers, are a testy lot: they liked to have their champions prove their devotion over and over and over again.

Yes, a writer’s life is indeed a romantic one. Just not the kind of romance most of us envision.

A few weeks ago, I had promised to talk about how to write an author bio, so you could have one all ready when an agent or editor asks to see it — at, say, a major conference taking place near SeaTac in a few months’ time. Or as a supplement to the rest of your novel, after someone at an agency has already fallen in love with the first 50 pages and asked to see the rest.

They will ask, in short, when your mind is on other things, like doing a lightning-fast revision on your book proposal so you can send it to that nice editor who listed to your pitch.

The request for a bio often catches writers by surprise. Agents and editors tend to toss it out casually, as if it’s an afterthought: “Oh, and send me a bio.” The informality of the request can be a bit misleading: your one-page author bio is actually a very important tool in your marketing kit.

How important, I hear you ask? Well, it’s not unheard-of for editors, in particular, to decide to pass on the book they’re being offered, but ask to see other work by the author, if the bio is intriguing enough. So actually, it is not a tremendously good idea just to throw a few autobiographical paragraphs together in the last few minutes before a requested manuscript, proposal, or synopsis heads out the door.

Which is, I am sorry to report, precisely what most aspiring writers do.

Big, big mistake: if the bio sounds dull, disorganized, or unprofessional, agents and editors tend to assume that the writer is also dull, disorganized, or unprofessional. Publishing types tend not to be the most imaginative of people. After all, they reason (or so they tell me), the author’s life is the material that he should know best; if he can’t write about that well, how can he write well about anything else?

A good bio is especially important for those who write any flavor of nonfiction, because the bio is where you establish your platform in its most tightly-summarized form. All of you nonfiction writers out there know what a platform is, don’t you? You should: it is practically the first thing any agent or editor will ask you when you pitch a NF book. Your platform is the background that renders you — yes, YOU — the best person on earth to write the book you are pitching. This background can include, but is not limited to, educational credentials, relevant work experience, awards, and significant research time.

For a NF writer, the author bio is a compressed résumé, with a twist: unlike the cold, linear presentation of the résumé format, the author bio must also demonstrate that the author can put together an array of facts in a readable, compelling fashion.

Tall order, no?

Lest you fiction writers out there think that you are exempt from this daunting challenge, think again. At least NF writers know in advance when they will be expected to produce an author bio: it’s typically the last piece of the NF book proposal. (For an overview on the basics of writing a book proposal, please see my blogs from August 23rd -29th, stored in the handy archives displayed on the right-hand side of this page.)

Fiction writers, on the other hand, are seldom warned in advance that they will have to write an author bio at all, much less that they will probably need it before anyone in the industry actually reads their work in its entirety. “A bio?” novelists say nervously when agents and editors toss out the seemingly casual request. “You mean that thing on the back cover? Won’t the marketing department write that for me?”

In a word, no. And readers, if you take nothing else from today’s blog, take this enduring truth and clutch it to your respective bosoms forevermore: whenever you are asked to provide extra material whilst marketing your work, train yourself not to equivocate. Instead, learn to chirp happily, like the can-do sort of person you are, “A bio? You bet!” Even if the agent or editor in question has just asked you to produce some marketing data that strikes you as irrelevant or downright stupid. Even if what you’re being asked for will require you to take a week off work to deliver. Even in you have to dash to the nearest dictionary the second your meeting with an agent or editor is over to find out what you’ve just promised to send within a week IS.

Or, perhaps more sensibly, drop me an e-mail and inquire. That’s what my blog is here for, you know: to help writers get their work successfully out the door.

Why is appearing eager to comply and competent so important, I hear you ask? Because professionalism is one of the few selling points a writer CAN’T list in an author bio — and to most people in positions to bring your work to publication, it’s regarded as a sure indicator of how much extra time they will have to spend holding a new author’s hand on the way to publication, explaining how the industry works.

How much extra time will they want to spend on you and your book, I hear you ask? (My readers are so smart; I can always rely on them to ask the perfect questions at the perfect times.) It varies from agent to agent, of course, but I believe I can give you a general ballpark estimate: none.

Yes, I know — all the agent guides will tell the previously unpublished writer to seek out agencies with track records of taking on inexperienced writers. It’s good advice, but not because such agencies are habitually eager to expend their resources teaching newbies the ropes. It’s good advice because such agencies have demonstrated that they are braver than many others: they are willing to take a chance on a new writer from time to time. Provided that writer’s professionalism positively oozes off the page and from her manner.

Trust me, the writers these agencies have signed did not respond evasively when asked for their bios.

Professionalism, as I believe I have pointed out several hundred times before, is demonstrated by manuscripts that conform to standard format. (And if you’re new to this blog and don’t know what standard format for manuscripts is, get thee hence without delay to my blog of February 19th. Submissions that are not in standard format tend to be rejected out of hand, without the courtesy of a full reading.) It is also, unfortunately for those new to the game, demonstrated through familiarity with the basic terms and expectations of the industry. Which most people only learn from experience.

So, as you have probably already figured out, “Bio? What’s that?” is not the most advisable response to an agent or editor’s request for same. Nor is hesitating, or saying that you’ll need some time to write one. (You’re perfectly free to take time to write one, of course; just don’t say so.)

Why is even hesitation problematic, I hear you ask? (Another terrific question; you really are on the ball today.) Well, let me put it this way: have you ever walked into a deli in New York unsure of what kind of sandwich you want to get? When you took the requisite few seconds to collect your thoughts on the crucial subjects of onions and mayo, did the guy behind the counter wait politely for you to state your well-considered preferences, or did he roll his eyes and move on to the next customer? And did that next customer ruminate at length on the competing joys of ham on rye and pastrami on pumpernickel, soliciting the opinions of other customers, or did he just shout over your shoulder, “Reuben with a pickle!” with the ultra-imperative diction of an emergency room surgeon calling for a scalpel to perform a tracheotomy with seconds to spare before the patient sustains permanent brain damage?

If you frequent the same delis I do, the answers in both cases are emphatically the latter. Perhaps with some profanity thrown in for local color.

NYC agents and editors eat in these delis, my friends. They go there to RELAX.

This regional tendency to mistake thoughtful consideration, or even momentary hesitation, for malingering or even idiocy often comes as an unpleasant shock to those of us who are West Coast bred and born. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we like to encourage meditation in daily life; there are emporia in the greater Seattle metropolitan area where the Buddha himself could happily hold a full-time job with no significant loss of contemplative time. “I’m here if you need anything,” the Buddha would say, melting into the background to think. “Just let me know if you have questions about those socks. Take your time.”

This is why, in case you are wondering, NYC-based agents and editors tend to treat all of us out here like flakes. In their minds, we’re all wandering around stoned in bellbottoms, offering flowers to strangers at airports and spreading pinko propaganda like, “Have a nice day.” I’ve met agents who are astonished that any of us out here have the mental capacity to type at all, much less write an entire book. I think my agent thinks I live in a yurt.

What does all of this mean, in practical terms, I hear you ask? That you should have an author bio already written by the time you are asked for it, that’s what, so you will not hesitate for even one Buddha-like moment when the crucial request comes. And that is my long-winded explanation of why I am going to spend the next few days teaching you how to write one. Write one now.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

No, I didn’t go quiet at the end of last week due to an excess of memoir-blockage-induced woe: I had an awful head cold. My ears kept squealing like a hog-calling convention, and I lost my voice for a few days.

Now, if my life were a short story written for a high school English class, this voice loss might pass for legitimate symbolism — or even irony, in a pinch. A bit heavy-handed, true, but certainly situationally appropriate: villains move to silence protagonist’s voice through censorship = protagonist’s sore throat. Both New Age the-body-is-telling-you-something types and postmodern the-body-is-a-text theorists would undoubtedly be pleased.

But the fact is, in a novel, this cause-and-effect dynamic would seem forced. Just because something happens in real life doesn’t necessarily mean that it will make convincing fiction.

My sore throat is precisely the type of symbolism that comes across as ham-handed in a novel. It’s too immediate, for one thing, too quid pro quo. Dramatically, the situation should have taken time to build — over years, perhaps — so the reader could have felt clever for figuring out why the throat problem happened. Maybe even anticipated it.

How much better would it have been, fictionally, if I weathered the storm now, not coming down with strep throat until just before the final crisis? That way, in fine melodramatic style, I would have to croak my way through testimony on the witness stand, while my doctor stood by anxiously with antibiotics.

The possibilities make my novelist’s heart swoon. Just think how long it would extend a courtroom scene if a key witness were unable to speak more than a few emotion-charged words before her voice disappeared with a mouse-like squeak. Imagine the court reporter creeping closer and closer, to catch the muttered words. Or just think of the dramatic impact of a high-stakes interpersonal battle where one of the arguers cannot speak above a whisper. Or the comic value of the persecuted protagonist’s being able to infect her tormenters with strep, so they, too, are speechless by the end of the story.

Great stuff, eh? Much, much better than protagonist feels silenced, protagonist is silenced.

Then, too, readers like to see a complex array of factors as causes for an event, and an equally complex array of effects. Perhaps if I had been not speaking about my subject for a lifetime (which, actually, is quite true: I had never shared the core information in my memoir before a couple of years ago), then I would be fictionally justified in developing speech-inhibiting throat problems now, or a childhood of chronic sore throats (also true in real life, as it happens).

But a single event’s sparking a severe head cold? Dramatically unsatisfying. Makes the protagonist seem like a wimp. Because, frankly, readers, like moviegoers, like to see protagonists take a few hits and bounce up again. Even better is when the protagonist is beaten to a bloody pulp, but comes back to win anyway.

One of the great truisms of the American novel is don’t let your protagonist feel sorry for himself for too long. We see this philosophy in movies, too. Think about any domestic film with where an accident confines the protagonist to a wheelchair. Got it? Now tell me: doesn’t the film include one or more of the following scenes: (a) some hale and hearty soul urging the mangled protagonist to stop feeling sorry for himself, (b) a vibrantly healthy physical therapist telling the protagonist that the reason he can’t move as well as he once did is not the casts on his legs/total paralysis/missing chunks of torso, but his lousy attitude, and/or (c) the protagonist’s lecturing someone else on his/her need to stop feeling sorry for himself and move on with his/her life? Don’t filmmakers — yes, and writers, too — EXPECT their characters to become better people as the result of undergoing life-shattering trauma?

Now, we all know that this is seldom true in real life, right? Generally speaking, pain does not make people better human beings; it makes them small and scared and peevish. That sudden, crisis-evoked burst of adrenaline that enables 110-pound mothers to move Volkswagens off their trapped toddlers aside, few of us are valiantly heroic in the face of more than a minute or two of living with a heart attack or third-degree burns. Heck, even the average head cold — with or without a concomitant voice loss — tends to make most of us pretty cranky.

And dramatically, we as readers accept that the little irritations of life might seem like a big deal at the time, even in fiction, because these seemingly trivial incidents may be Fraught with Significance. Which often yields the odd result, in books and movies, of protagonists who bear the loss of a limb, spouse, or job with admirable stoicism, but fly into uncontrollable spasms of self-pity at the first missed bus connection or hot dog that comes without onions WHEN I ORDERED ONIONS.

Why oh why does God let things like this happen to good people?

One of my personal favorite examples of this phenomenon comes in that silly American remake of the charming Japanese film, SHALL WE DANCE? After someone spills a sauce-laden foodstuff on the Jennifer Lopez character’s suede jacket, she not only sulks for two full scenes about it, but is seen to be crying so hard over the stain later that the protagonist feels constrained to offer her his handkerchief. Meanwhile, the death of her dancing career, the loss of her life partner, and a depression so debilitating that she barely lifts her head for the first half of the movie receive only a few seconds’ worth of exposition. Why? Because dwelling on the ruin of her dreams would be wallowing; dwelling on minor annoyances is Symbolic of Deeper Feelings.)

Edith Wharton remarked in her excellent autobiography (which details, among other things, how terribly embarrassed everybody her social circle was when she and Theodore Roosevelt achieved national recognition for their achievements, rather than for their respective standings in the NYC social register. How trying.) that the American public wants tragedies with happy endings. It still seems to be true.

I have heard many, many agents and editors complain in recent years about too-simple protagonists with too-easily-resolved problems. I have heard in conference presentation after conference presentation the advice that writers should give their protagonists more quirks — it’s an excellent way to make your characters memorable. Give ’em backstory, and if you want to make them sympathetic, a hard childhood, dead parent, or unsympathetic boss is a great tool for encouraging empathy. Provided, of course, that none of these hardships actually prevent the protagonist from achieving his or her ultimate goal.

In other words, feel free to heap your protagonist (and love interest, and villain) with knotty, real-life problems; just make sure that the protagonist fights the good fight with as much vim and resources as someone who did not have those problems.

Again, this is not the way we typically notice people with severe problems acting in real life, but we’re talking fiction here. We’re talking drama. We’re talking about moving a protagonist through a story in a compelling way, and as such, as readers and viewers, we have been trained to regard the well-meaning soul who criticizes the recently-bereaved protagonist by saying, “Gee, Erica, I don’t think you’ve gotten over your father’s death yet,” as a caring, loving friend, rather than as a callous monster incapable of reading a calendar with sufficient accuracy to note that Erica buried her beloved father only a couple of weeks before. Why SHOULD she have gotten over it already?

Let’s move the plot along, people.

I don’t think that the agents, editors, and readers who resent characters who linger in their grief are inherently unsympathetic human beings; they are just easily bored. In a short story or novel or screenplay, people who feel sorry for themselves (or who even possess the rational skills to think at length over the practical ramifications of obstacles in their paths) tend to be passive, from the reader’s POV. They don’t do much, and while they’re not doing much, the plot grinds to a screaming halt. Yawn.

Or to express it in the parlance of agents and editors: next!

This is a very, very common manuscript megaproblem, one about which agents and editors complain loudly and often: the protagonist who stops the plot in order to think things over, rather than taking swift action. Or stops to talk the problem over with another character, rehashing the background information that the reader already knows. When you see these pondering scenes in your own work, even if the project in question is the most character-driven literary fiction imaginable, pause and consider: could the piece work without the pondering scene? Often, it can, and brilliantly.

A more subtle form of this megaproblem is the protagonist who waits patiently for all of the pieces of the mystery to fall into to place before taking action. Why, the reader wonders, did the protagonist NEED to know the entire historical background of the problem before doing something about it? Because the author thought the background was interesting, that’s why.

Longtime readers of this blog, chant with me now: “because the plot requires it” should NEVER be the only reason something happens in a story. Wouldn’t it be more interesting, and substantially more active, if the protagonist acted on PARTIAL information, and then learned from the results of what she had done that she needed to learn more?

In the midst of manuscripts where 2/3rds of the book is spent hunting down every last detail before the protagonist acts, I often find myself wondering: is it really such a good thing that HAMLET is so widely taught in high schools? Yes, many of the speeches are mind-bogglingly lovely, but here is a protagonist who more or less sits around feeling sorry for himself and not acting until the final act of a very, very long play — is this really the best exemplar of how to construct a plot? Yes, it’s beautifully written, but honestly, by the middle of Act III, don’t you just want to leap onto the stage, shake Hamlet, and tell him to DO SOMETHING, already?

Oh, yeah, right, as if I’m the only one who’s had THAT impulse…

One form that the passive protagonist often takes is the lead who interviews relevant players not by asking questions, but simply by showing up and waiting for the bad guys — or whoever has the necessary information — to divine psychically what the protagonist is after and spill their guts spontaneously. Amazingly enough, they always oblige. (A common corollary is the villain who casually retails background information while the protagonist is at his mercy. Villains are SUCH nice fellows; they are always more than willing to kill a little time while waiting for the protagonist’s rescuers to show up.)

So, for reasons of drama, I apologize for how slowly events have been unfolding in the saga of my memoir’s path to publication. If the saga’s a comedy, it’s moving way too slowly, and if it’s a tragedy, it should have had at least a hint of a happy ending by now. Nine months — yes, the threats against the book really have been coming in for longer than I have been writing this blog — really is far too long for the plot to have paused.

I assure you, behind the scenes, this protagonist really has been taking action. Soon, I hope, the Medusa’s head will be successfully lopped off, and everyone concerned will stop acting as though he has been turned to stone. Because this is an American drama, damn it: we need to move the plot along.

There endeth today’s attempt to derive something from my ambient reality that will help at least some of you in your writing efforts. Okay, so it wasn’t a particularly subtle connection — but hey, I still have a sore throat. Cut me some slack for a minor annoyance.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Today has been a real learning experience for me, chatting with various experts about my options for defending my memoir. (If you’re just tuning in, check out my post for March 30th for a hypothetical explanation of what’s going on.) It’s beginning to look as though the only way I can stop the people who have held my book in limbo for so many months now by threatening to sue (without ever filing any actual legal paperwork) would be to sue them. I had been hoping to avoid this, for reasons both obvious and not (I had thought for quite some time that these people were my friends, after all), but if you see me holding a bake sale on a street corner, it will be for my legal defense fund.

I wonder: how many blueberry muffins are there in a lawsuit?

I am mentioning this, not just to keep you informed about what is going on in my working life, but for the benefit all of you out there who write about reality, both as memoir and as fiction. The publishing environment has changed radically since the James Frey (A MILLION LITTLE PIECES) scandal; I hope it’s a temporary change, for the sake of writers everywhere, because it has tipped the scale even farther in favor of publishers. Basically, the mood of the industry is pretty hostile to authors right now; this is undoubtedly not the best time to be querying agents with anything based upon real events or people.

To be fair, publishers do unquestionably take risks when they publish fact-based books — after all, anybody can sue anybody for anything, and as I pointed out yesterday, many people, upon seeing their names in print, will automatically assume that they are the protagonists of the story. Few lay readers understand the law well enough to know that a mere difference of opinion about what occurred is not sufficient grounds for a lawsuit; there are many people out there who believe, incorrectly, that hurt feelings are in themselves actionable, and that any mention of oneself in a public forum that is not entirely flattering is slander.

As public relations, most of us accept this without comment. Perhaps it is because we have all grown accustomed to the pro forma protest of the celebrity accused of an affair in a tabloid: the threat to sue has become almost more automatic than the emotion the articles raise. It’s as though the protestors believe that the threat itself were inherent evidence of innocence. It’s not: all it means is that the protesting party can afford a lawyer and/or a publicist.

In the good old days — which, in this context, means anytime before the James Frey story broke — it was a truism of the industry that memoirs inherently generated pre-publication letters of protest, usually from family members. Often, the writers of these angry epistles had not read the book; they just objected to the idea of the family”s proverbial dirty linen being hung out in print. Since so few of these threatening letters ever mutated into actual legal cases, they often were simply shrugged off by publishers.

In the current publishing environment, though, a single protest can be all it takes to derail a book. While this is obviously harmful for everyone who writes, this is very, very bad for memoirists in particular, since the more truthful the author is, generally speaking, the more likely the book is to annoy somebody. With publishing houses now taking seriously threats they would have laughed off five years ago — not because of the prospect of legal expenses, but the possibility of being lambasted in the press, as Random House was over its handling of A MILLION LITTLE PIECES — there is more pressure than ever on authors to make nice.

Unfortunately, making nice and telling the truth are often incompatible. (That’s not just a truism: hypothetically, if I had agreed to an outrageous request to turn the story of my childhood into a rehash of FINDING NEVERLAND, my memoir would have been published a month ago. Hypothetically, I refused.) In the current environment, though, publishers are expecting writers of nonfiction to do both — and in some cases codifying those expectations in contracts that place the legal burdens (and costs) on the people least able to bear them, the writers.

But the fact is, it is the publishers, not the authors, who control how a book is presented to the world — and, generally speaking, it is the presentation, the overall impression the book gives, that engenders protest. Authors don’t write their own marketing copy; the marketing department does, just as the sales department determines how to pitch books to retailers. In my case, I did not even see my book’s title, cover art, or blurb until after all three were already posted on Amazon; I found them accidentally, when I was Googling my own name — in preparation for setting up this blog, in fact.

Imagine my surprise.

The internet, of course, has made reputation making and breaking a very quick thing — something that most publishing houses have been very slow to recognize. More than a century ago, Mark Twain wrote, “A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get his boots on.” Now, a lie can make it ALL the way around the world before the truth has had a chance to log on. Or, indeed, before the truth is even aware that anyone is speculating about it.

If you have even the vaguest interest in writing a memoir, or indeed, any nonfiction, within the next five years or so, I would HIGHLY urge you to check out the many, many widely divergent opinions currently expressed on the web about my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY. Now would be an interesting time to Google it, because no one outside my publishing house has actually read the final version of the book. Yet it is reviewed; it is praised; it is condemned. It was a Book People selection last month, and I am told that the main PKD fan forum has some wildly inaccurate speculation about the book’s content and my motivations in writing it. All, I should point out, without (with the exception of a single interviewer) anyone concerned asking me, the author, question one about it.

It’s all rumor, at this point. Yet it definitely affects my book’s publishing prospects.

In fact, I’m just going to go ahead and apologize right now to all of you for any negative shadows that the controversy over my book is having or will have on good writers querying my agent, editor, or publisher. I would imagine that at the moment, all of them positively cringe when they see a memoir query. I’m really, really sorry about that.

Which leads me to another piece of advice for those of you aspiring to write about true events and people: be aware that right now is, practically speaking, one of the worst times in human history to be pitching a truth-based book to a North American agent or editor. Actually, from what I hear on the writers’ grapevine, editors and publishers are so nervous that it’s not a particularly good time to be trying to pitch any book at all.

This does not mean that you should give up on submitting your work; far from it. But take any rejections you get over the next few months as temporary; you might well get an entirely opposite response from the same agents and editors a year from now.

As a fringe benefit, though, since so many authors have been getting together lately and moaning over the current distrust-the-writer sentiment, it would be a TERRIFIC time to submit a controversial memoir to a writing contest. There are a whole lot of writers-turned-judges out there who would just LOVE to reward a genuinely risk-taking manuscript right about now. Go ahead and enter bravely.

And do, for the sake of your own reputation, when you query, include some indication in your synopsis (or even in your cover letter) of how you can back up any claims you make, if at all possible. This is the time to play up your respectable credentials, if you have them; this is the time to emphasize how much time you spent on background research; this is the time to mention that you have consulted the three best-respected researchers in your field.

Yes, I know: this all seems silly, to those of us who write memoirs. After all, who could possibly be a better authority, or a more credible one, on one’s own life than oneself?

A year ago, I could have answered that question with confidence: no one. However, now that my motivations are evidently the subject of internet-based speculation by people who have never read my work… well, I guess all of us who would publish our own stories are public figures now, available for praise and censure. I suppose I can’t object to that. It just would have been nice to have told my own story my own way first.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

I’ve been trying very hard indeed to glean as much information from my memoir’s current trauma (for hypothetical details, see the post before last; it’s a serious crisis) as I can to pass on to you. Regardless of whether the book is ultimately published or not, I want to make sure that we can all learn something from the experience. Otherwise, it’s just Anne’s Little Problem, and the next nonfiction writer among us who finds herself sued will come to this situation as innocent as I did. So here are a few lessons I have learned in the past eight months:

1. Never, ever show a memoir to anyone mentioned in it.

Actually, other writers had been telling me this for years, but silly me, I didn’t listen. The people currently taking umbrage at my book were friends of mine, I thought, and they asked very pointedly to read it before I sent it to my editor. They also swore up and down that they did not want to censor my work in any way (that’s a quote from an e-mail, incidentally), and said that they were genuinely eager to hear my point of view.

As it turns out, they weren’t.

The lesson to learn from this: people’s stated reasons for wanting to read your book may not be their actual reasons. I was naïve. You are never under any legal obligation to show a draft of your work to anyone mentioned in it; in fact, most publishers would actively prefer that you did not.

2. A mentioned person’s perception of how important a character she is in the book is very seldom accurate. Even a barely-visible character may see herself as the protagonist.

This is particularly stark in the case of my memoir, as it is legally impossible to either slander or libel a dead person, and most of the major characters in my book are no longer living. Therefore, any objection must be based solely upon my representation of those still above ground.

The funny thing is, the objectors hardly appear in the book at all. The people who are suing me’s names appeared in a grand total of 3 chapters in a 14-chapter draft; nevertheless, they perceive themselves, apparently, to be central to the book. When one of them objected, I took her out of the book entirely (and told her so), but judging from her subsequent response, she still feels that her spirit pervades the book. I minimized the presence of the sisters who are suing as thoroughly as I could without actually misrepresenting occasions when they were present. I present it all as my point of view, and point that fact out repeatedly. Heck, I even tell my readers not to trust ANY single account of Philip K. Dick’s life.

And yet this was not enough.

The lesson to be learned here: everyone is the protagonist in her own life; not everyone has sufficient perspective to realize that her personal point of view is not the only possible one. Be careful to show your version of the truth as one man’s opinion, rather than Truth Everlasting.

3. Telling the truth will not necessarily protect you.

This is completely counterintuitive, I know, because truth is an absolute defense against slander and libel. However, as I pointed out yesterday, in human interactions, almost everything is subject to differing opinions.

Once a lawsuit gets to court, of course, both sides can provide evidence, and actually, I have so much documentary evidence to support my contentions that I would be rather pleased if this suit DID go to court. (Hypothetically, I have e-mails from one of the suing parties that confirm the truth of many of the book’s assertions that are now being challenged.) However, while many, if not most, memoirs are subject to howling protests from someone affiliated with the book, it is quite rare that any of them actually make it to court. The burden of proof is upon the complainer, you see, and while most of us are pretty sure that our own points of view are correct, few of us have thought over the years to rack up documentation to prove it.

Think about it: let’s say two people you know very well are having a conversation about a situation that affects all three of you. You are in another time zone when the conversation takes place. If you were not present, how do you know what was said?

The lesson to glean from this: obviously, the vast majority of most people’s lives are undocumented, so it is vitally important when you write about living people to document wherever you can. If you interview them, tape-record it (and it’s prudent to use two tape recorders, in case one of them malfunctions. If you have verbal conversations, write down what was said. If you want to be ultra-careful, ask follow-up questions in writing. E-mail is terrific for this, as long as you keep copies of positively EVERYTHING.

Fortunately for me and my publishers, I am a pack rat. I never throw an e-mail away; I even categorize them by sender. This is a situation where it really helps to be just a touch compulsive.

I shall keep posting new rules of thumb as they occur to me. Even though I walked into this experience with a decade’s worth of publishing background, I am still learning more every day. Rules change, and so do norms. I’ll keep you posted.

Yesterday, I was discussing Point-of-View Nazis (POVNs). It is important that you know about them, regardless of your own POV preferences, because they turn up in agencies, as contest judges, as editors, and as critics. When your work is attacked with phrases like, “well, it’s more or less impossible to pull off an omniscient narrator,” resist the temptation to throw the entire Great Books fiction shelf at the speaker. Recognize that you are dealing with a POVN, and take everything he says with a massive grain of salt.

You can’t convince a true believer; you’ll only wear yourself out with trying. Cut your losses and move on.

As I mentioned yesterday, personally, I don’t believe that a single POV does most characters or situations justice, so I tend toward a broader narrative view, particularly for comedy. As a reader, I like to hear the thoughts of multiple players in a scene, to capture the various subtleties of interpretation. If I want to hear a single POV, I reach for a first-person narrative. Call me wacky.

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

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

It won’t protect you from a POVN’s rage, of course, but it will make your scene easier for your reader to follow.

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

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

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

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

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

And Darcy’s POV: :Darcy had never been so bewitched by a woman as he was by her…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Well, I’m a bit calmer today, after the hypothetical furor of last week. (See my last post, if this statement seems cryptic to you; I’m really too tired to go through it all again today. Suffice it to say: lawyers are having brisk conversations about my memoir even as I write this.) Many thanks to all of you who sent greetings and support; I appreciate it. Thanks, too, to those who took the time to check out the controversy about my book on the fan forums and post comments.

In a battle of opinions, especially one where the right to tell one’s own life story is at stake, every raised voice helps. I am told that the conversation on the fansite and other chatrooms has been pretty pointed over the last few days, which is both exciting and maddening: I am not allowed to visit the site to see for myself. (Since postings on that fan forum, matters that only the Dick estate could have known or had any interest in mentioning in public, may be evidence in an eventual slander suit, the lawyers want to keep me far, far away from it.) Thus, my information on the subject is courtesy of Dame Rumor, but it is comforting to know that people out there care if my work is censored.

Enough about my problems. Back to work.

A few weeks back, intelligent and curious reader Bob wrote in to report that he’d been having problems tracking down an earlier post of mine, on the dreaded Point-of-View Nazis. There was a good reason for this: my posts for October, November, December, and part of January disappeared into the ether when the PNWA switched servers early this year. Our fabulous webmaster tells me that these backlogs will indeed be available for perusal soon.

In the meantime, however, I would like to revisit the topic of Point-of-View Nazis, for the benefit of Bob and other intrepid backlog-searchers like him.

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

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of narration, inherently: it combines the advantages of a dispassionate narrator with the plotting and pacing plusses of a single perspective. It permits the author to sink deeply (or not) into the consciousness of a chosen character without losing the emotional distance of an omniscient narrator. Since no one else’s POV is depicted, it renders the later actions of other characters more surprising to the reader.

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

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

He would like multiple-consciousness narratives to be wiped from the face of the earth, if you please. He has been known to tell his students — or members of his writing group, or his clients, or the writers whom he edits or represents — that multiple POV narration in the third person is, to put it politely, bad writing. It should be stamped out, by statute, if necessary.

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

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

I should stop here and make a distinction between the POVN and a good reader or editor who objects when a narrative that HAS been sticking to a single POV suddenly wanders into another character’s head. That can be genuinely confusing to any reader, regardless of preexisting belief systems. If a book has been looking out of the protagonist’s eyes, so to speak, for 147 pages, it is a little jarring for the reader to be abruptly introduced to another character’s thoughts. The implication is that the protagonist has magically become psychic, and should be benefiting, along with the reader, from hearing the thoughts of others.

A POVN, however, is not merely the kind of well-meaning soul who will point out this type of slip to authors. No, a POVN will jump upon ANY instance of multiple perspective, castigating it as inherently terrible writing — and will rather smugly inform the author that she has broken an ironclad writing rule by doing it. They believe it, too. Many of today’s more adamant POVNs are merely transmitting the lessons they were taught in their first good writing classes: for years, many English professors set it down as a general rule that multiple POVs were inherently distracting in a third-person narrative.

Now, I have to admit something: I am not a big fan of this species of sweeping rule. I like to read an author’s work and consider whether her individual writing choices serve her story well, rather than rejecting it outright because of a preconceived notion of what is possible. Call me nutty, but I believe that — apart from the rigors of standard format, which actually are inflexible — very little is forbidden in the hands of a truly talented writer.

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

And so on. I love to discover a writer so skilled at her craft that she can afford to bend a rule or two. Heaven forfend that every writer’s voice should start to sound alike — or that writing should all start to sound as though it dropped from a single pen.

Which is precisely what hard-and-fast rules of narrative tend to produce, across a writing population. One effect of the reign of the POVNs — whose views go through periods of being very popular indeed, then fall into disuse, only to rise anew — has been the production of vast quantities of stories and novels where the protagonist’s POV and the narrator’s are astonishingly similar. Why write in the third person at all, if there is no authorial voice over and above the protagonist’s?

The POVNs have also given us a whole slew of books where the other characters are exactly as they appear to the protagonist: no more, no less. (The rise of television and movies, where the camera is usually an impersonal narrator of the visibly obvious, has also contributed to this kind of “What you see is what you get” characterization, if you’ll forgive my quoting the late great Flip Wilson in this context.) Often, I find myself asking, “Why wasn’t this book just written in the first person, if we’re not going to gain any significant insight into the other characters?”

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

Philosophically, I find this troubling. In my experience, there are very few real-life situations where everyone in the room absolutely agrees upon what occurred, and even fewer conversations where all parties would report identically upon every nuance. (Watch a few randomly-chosen days’ worth of Court TV, if you doubt this.) I think that interpretive disagreement is the norm amongst human beings, not the exception.

I also believe that there are very, very few people who appear to be exactly the same from the POV of everyone who knows them. Most people act, speak, and even think rather differently around their children than around their adult friends, just as they often have slightly (or even wildly) different personalities at home and at work. If anyone can find me a real, live person who acts exactly the same in front of his three-year-old daughter, his boss’ boss, the President of the United States, and a stripper at a bachelor party, I would be quite surprised.

I would also suggest that either the person in question has serious social adjustment problems (on the order of Forrest Gump’s), or that perhaps the person who THINKS this guy is always the same in every context is lacking in imagination. Or simply doesn’t know the guy very well. My point is, almost nobody can be completely portrayed from only a single point of view — which is why sometimes narratives that permit the protagonist to be seen from the POV of other characters can be most illuminating.

Oops — once again, I have strayed back to my own dilemma. Hypothetically, I am being accused of committing the cardinal sin of suggesting that a rather well-known neurotic might have acted differently around his long-term friends than he did around, say, his own seldom-seen children or interviewers he barely knew. Why, the next thing you know, the POVNs huff, writers like me might start implying that people act differently when they’re on drugs than when they’re sober! Or that perhaps celebrities and their press agents do not always tell the absolute truth when promoting their work!

I can only refer you to your own experience interacting with other human beings for the most probable answers to these troubling questions. I only ask — and it’s a little request; it won’t hurt anybody — that those who believe that there is only a single way of looking at any person, situation, or institution occasionally admit the possibility that the whole complex, wonderful world is not reducible to a single point of view. Or at least, that they would not try to silence those who do not see the world as merely a reflection of their own minds.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

One of the great luxuries of being a writer, as opposed to any other kind of artist, is that a competitive market doesn’t mean that it pays to be nasty to others. We have our readers to thank for that, to a very great extent: bless their warm and fuzzy hearts, few of them walk into a bookstore so determined to buy only ONE book that they won’t at least LOOK at the rest. (Unlike, say, an art gallery, where the patrons tend to zero in on just one piece.) If another writer is super-successful, why, we should be grateful — s/he is pulling potential buyers for our books into the bookstore.

I, personally, am hugely grateful to Anchee Min, Lydia Minatoya, and Susan Minot, the authors whose books would most closely border mine on the average, alphabetically-arranged bookstore fiction shelf. These fine writers have already trained aficionados of good fiction to keep checking the mid-range Ms every time they wander into a bookstore. Thank you very much!

If you have not already taken up the delightfully furtive habit of checking where your future books will fall on bookstore shelves, I highly encourage you to start indulging in it as soon as possible. As daydreaming exercises go, it’s rather practical: after a few dozen bookstores, you will start to get a sense of the specialized problems of your part of the shelf and your section of the bookstore.

Authors whose last names begin with Z, for example, often find their books on floor-level shelves, due to the tyranny of the alphabet, whereas in a big bookstore, the A authors might well discover that their books are shelved above the average reader’s eye level.

Ideally, you would like to have your books displayed at eye level or just below. Flat on a prominently-placed table or face-out on a shelf is even better, of course, but in major bookstore chains, that display space is bought by the major presses, to display their current offerings. (Disillusioning, isn’t it?) In a smaller bookstore, or in a bookstore with well-read staff, good display space goes to the books they like, as well as the bestsellers.

Remember my mentioning yesterday how easy it is for a writer to get a poor reputation by being rude to readers and/or people who work in bookstores? One of the tangible ways in which dislike manifests is through misshelved books. This may seem on its face like a trivial gesture, but people who spend a lot of time in bookstores know better: even if a book is a bestseller, if it isn’t where it’s supposed to be on the shelf, readers aren’t going to be able to buy it.

The flip side of this is the relative ease of moving books that deserve greater visibility into more prominent locations. Bookstore employees read a lot, and most of them are glad to promote the work of authors whose work they like — or are particularly nice to them at readings. (Hint: bring cookies.) Even the lowest-rung employee has the power to, say, slip an underrated book onto the bestseller table for an afternoon.

Store this nugget for when you’ve got a book out: buying a copy of your own book in a bookstore, signing it, and handing it to the clerk as a present is a stylish and effective method of enlisting unofficial behind-the-counter help. Even if the clerk doesn’t instantly fall in love with your writing, everyone in the store will be talking about the incident for weeks.

Bookstore employees are not the only ones who can perform subtle marketing for a book. Why, any private citizen can help make a book more appealing to buyers, although you didn’t hear that from me. Turning a volume face out on the shelf rather than spine out, for instance. Or moving a Z book up a few shelves, perhaps into the middle of a shelf crammed with the bestseller of the day, such as THE DA VINCI CODE. One could even conceivably pick up a book, walk around with it for awhile, then set it down on one of those display tables near the front of the store while you’re leafing through something there.

If you forgot the first book on the table, who could blame you?

This form of guerilla marketing takes practice, and you will want to be really good at it by the time you have a book out. Pick a couple of favorite authors and appoint yourself publicity agent for their books now, to get a head start. Don’t get yourself in trouble by moving armfuls of volumes; one or two per bookstore will do. Just enough to make a small but palpable difference in what bookstore patrons see first when they scan the shelves.

Don’t just confine yourself to minor rearrangement of bookstore shelves, either: get into the habit of logging onto Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com and writing glowing reviews of books you like. Set up a list on Amazon. Gush in a chat room. Start a book club and introduce people to your favorite underappreciated authors’ work. These small efforts really do add up in the long run — and just think of all of the good writerly karma you’ll be racking up on the cosmic registers!

Yes, turning a book face out on the shelf is a little thing, but every book sale counts. The writer who first tipped me off about how much better face-out books sell than their spine-out counterparts is now a major international bestselling author. For whom kith and kin still turn volumes face out every time they walk into a bookstore. Heck, I do, too.

This is another reason to cultivate other writers as friends: we make great salespeople for one another’s work. Who loves good writing more than we do? Well, okay, librarians, but who else?

I’m a notoriously shameless promoter of writing I admire; the staffs of my local bookstores stopped bothering to follow me around to replace books on the shelves years back, once they figured out that I had good taste. I’m always chatting with other browsing patrons, soliciting recommendations and pushing mine. (While I’m at it: Bharti Kirchner’s incomparable PASTRIES has one of the best-written endings I have ever read — and I’ve read MADAME BOVARY in the original French.)

Why expend so much energy in promoting other people’s work? Because it’s an economical and effective way to fight back against a publishing industry that is emotionally hard on writers. If you can tip the scales just a tiny bit, even for a moment, in our direction, you are not powerless. Your opinion is not going unheard today. And in a writing life, feeling empowered is one of the best ways of staving off battle fatigue.

Quoth Alice Walker: resistance is the secret of joy.

Seem a trifle silly? Don’t underestimate how important it is to blow off steam, if you want to stay in the writing biz for the long haul. We writers spend so much time being obedient — adhering to the rigors of standard format, sending agents exactly what they have asked to see and no more, enclosing SASEs, so we may pay the postage on the rejection letters we receive — that the occasional act of resistance is healthy, perhaps even necessary, to maintaining one’s equilibrium.

One last suggestion on how to keep your spirits up: keep moving. Don’t get so wrapped up in marketing your completed work that you stall on the next. Yes, you need to keep sending your work out, but don’t let that endeavor suck up all of your creative energy. Get to work on your next writing project right away.

And don’t send out only one query letter at a time, unless an agency actually specifies that it will not accept simultaneous queries. One by one, it may take years to go through your top choices; the vast majority of agents understand that, so you do not need to fear their yelling at you down the line if several are interested in it. (Actually, agents’ ears tend to prick up when they learn that they have competition — it can speed up the decision-making process quite a bit.)

Try keep 5-10 queries circulating at any given time (maintaining impeccable records of who has what, of course). Yes, it may mean receiving a couple of rejections on the same day, but it will also mean that your work is being seen by a whole lot of potentially impress-able eyes. Trust me, if you get started on a new query the moment the most recent rejection letter hits the recycling bin, you will feel better than if the rejection letter sits on your desk for a week or two.

Above all, don’t be too hard on yourself for getting depressed occasionally. It’s genuinely hard to find an agent and/or publisher, and rejection really does hurt. Talk about it with people who understand, and keep moving forward.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Yesterday, I wrote a rather long and impassioned piece on the vital importance of making friends with other aspiring writers. It’s a great way to help keep you from feeling isolated during the long, slow writing process, the often as long and even slower revision process, and the can-I stand-another-day-of-this querying process. When each of us is barricaded in her own studio, revising like mad and mailing out queries, it feels as though each of us is fighting a singular battle. We’re not — there are literally millions of aspiring writers out there, and getting to know a few dozen of them will help you sort out what is genuinely unique to your experience and what is just a trend in the way agents are reading queries this month.

Today, I would like to talk about other means of keeping your spirits up, but most of them will tend toward the same message of yesterday: become part of a community of writers in some manner. Not everyone is an organization-joiner, writers perhaps less than most. We’re a cussedly independent breed, and there’s a certain satisfaction, isn’t there, in starting from a blank page and running all the way to publication alone?

All right, go ahead and finish that chorus of “I Did It My Way” that’s floating in your mind right now. Be my guest. I’ll wait.

Alone is appealing as a concept, but to paraphrase Laurence J. Peter, author of THE PETER PRINCIPLE, push is usually not as effective as pull. Most of us have had the fantasy of meeting a famous author or hotshot editor, being quietly impressive, and having our work lauded by this influential individual. A sort of literary Horatio Alger story — John Irving drops his briefcase in an airport, you pick it up for him, and the rest is literary history, right?

In real life, the writers who are probably going to help you most are not the super-famous ones (they’re too busy, and besides, there are probably throngs of aspiring writers lunging after Mssr. Irving’s every dropped crumb these days), but the ones slightly more experienced than you are at querying. These are the people who can take a quick look at your query letter and point out that you left out your most impressive credential altogether. These are the people who have already gone to the conferences you are thinking about attending, and can tell you which speakers suck and which speakers sing. These are the people who know from experience which agent only speaks to authors under 40, which tends to use conferences primarily as singles bars (yes, it happens), and which will be happy to refer you to other agents, if they are not interested in your work themselves.

I like to think of this blog as providing such an experienced friend’s voice to my readers, but the more friends, the merrier, I always say.

Don’t make the mistake, though, of finding the most important person in the room at a conference and latching onto him as though you are his long-lost dog. For one thing, there are always a lot of people suing for the attention of a conference bigwig, and for another, over-eagerness can make it appear to said bigwig that you are offering something you are not in exchange for a little professional advice, if you catch my drift.

I once made the tactical error of striking up a conversation (about Charles Dickens, as I recall) with the book review editor of a major East Coast newspaper, only to spend the rest of the conference dodging his suggestions that we visit his room for a little in-depth editing. All I did was express an opinion on A TALE OF TWO CITIES, for heaven’s sake! Once I made more experienced friends at that conference, I was able to learn that this well-respected journalist habitually dons his black leather jacket and trolls writing conferences for Sweet Young Things, promising fame and fortune to those too inexperienced to know better. Now, whenever I spot him on the speaker’s list for a conference I’m attending, I make a beeline for the nearest Sweet Young Thing and mention his, um, editorial preferences.

That is what being a good community member means.

Most writers, even well-established ones, are genuinely nice people, interested in others and happy to help those whom they like. I once had a tremendous conversation with Jean Auel (of CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR fame) about guerilla marketing, full of tips I cherish to this day. If you’re polite, there’s no reason not to walk up to a famous writer at a reading and strike up a conversation. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

RIGHT: Hello, I’ve read several of your books, and I love the way you handle dialogue. How did you train your ear so well?

WRONG: Hello, I would like to be as successful as you. Give me tips.

The first is a compliment; the second is a demand, and it’s important to remember which is which. Being specific in your questions helps:

RIGHT: Hello. I’m delighted to meet you, as I am a big fan of your work. (Insert conversation here about why.) I write work similar to yours. If you had to do it over again, would you pick the same agent? Are there other agents specializing in our area whom you would recommend to a writer just starting out?

WRONG: Hello, I’ve written a book, but I can’t seem to find an agent for it. Will you recommend me to yours?

Or, the granddaddy of all wrong approaches:

WRONG: (Pulling 500-page manuscript out of backpack.) Here, I wrote this. Read it and tell me what I should do with it.

Writers tend to err more on the side of shyness than of boldness, in my experience, which is why it is a great idea to get in the habit of going to public readings (which are usually free; check your favorite bookstore or library for calendars), so you can learn how to walk up to an author you admire, stick out your ink-stained hand, and say proudly, “Hi, I’m a great fan of yours. I’m a writer, too.”

I just felt a great shudder go through some of you, but trust me, the average author is flattered when people recognize her (yes, even at a book reading, where she will be pretty clearly marked). Every established author I know has a cocktail party story about some wonderful encounter with a fan at a signing, a real tear-jeaker about how some total stranger walked up and said exactly the piece of praise the author had been waiting since the age of 8 to hear.

Go for it. Don’t start out with your favorite authors, if it makes you too nervous — head on down to Elliott Bay Books or Powell’s and listen to a reading by an author whose work you don’t know. Ask an intelligent question about the reading. Heck, if even that seems too threatening, turn out for one of the PNWA’s The Word Is Out events, where members read their work, and get some practice talking to authors after readings that way. Work your way up to when you will really need to be charming; really charming takes practice.

If this sounds too public for you, take Carolyn See’s advice (if you haven’t read her marvelous MAKING A LITERARY LIFE, run, don’t walk to your nearest bookstore or library and nab a copy) and write letters to your favorite authors. Compliment them; tell them a little bit about your work. If you’re nice, they’ll be thrilled — trust me, the vast majority of letters a well-known author receives are a trifle creepy, so a sane, polite missive from an aspiring writer might well make the author’s day, too. A surprisingly high percentage of them will write back — and believe me, the day you find a handwritten postcard from someone you’ve admired for years in your mailbox is sure to be a red-letter day.

If all of this seems a bit pushy to you, well, we’re in a business that rewards  polite pushiness. It’s also a business where established authors are expected to be nice to their fans. When’s the last time you heard about a writer punching a photographer in the face? We almost never even overhear them saying to the last person in line at the bookstore, “I’m sorry, but I’m pooped. Sign your own damned book.” (Hemingway and Mailer don’t count; I have always suspected that they got into barroom brawls with critics primarily as a means of boosting their reputations as he-men.)

In fact, a habitually stand-offish writer will garner a negative reputation at bookstores and conferences with a speed that the Pony Express would have envied. Moral: never, ever be snappish with anyone who works behind the counter at a bookstore where you’re reading. That person might well be a writer — either of books that will one day be successful, or of blistering e-mails sent all around the country. Legends are made this way.

Be kind, be respectful, be polite, and you might just meet a friend with some real pull. However, don’t assume that a nice conversation at a conference or a bookstore means you’re suddenly the best of friends; don’t push for favors unless you actually establish a relationship. And, of course, be sensitive to hints to back off.

Remember that whenever you are around writers, established or aspiring, you are walking through a community. Be a charming addition to the community, not a liability, and other writers will always be glad to see you. Behave yourself, because your reputation now may come back to haunt you later on — or perhaps even sooner. As my good friend Philip K. Dick used to say, never be gratuitously nasty to a living writer. You might end up reincarnated as the villain in the insulted party’s next book. Or as the corpse in her next murder mystery.

Actually, come to think of it, that book critic would make a pretty good character in my current novel…

And, again, try not to become so focused on the famous person at the front of the room that you forget to introduce yourself to the people seated to your left and your right. If one of them is another writer, you may make another useful friend.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Pardon me if I am a trifle giddy today — my good friend Jordan Rosenfeld (whose excellent blog on writing is well worth checking out)has just sold a book on scene writing to Writer’s Digest Books. It’s due out in January, 2007, and I’ll try to blandish her into sharing some of her insights here between now and then. This is definitely a book that deserves to be read, by a writer who genuinely knows her way around a scene.

Hooray for virtue rewarded!

There’s nothing like having writing buddies for mutual support, is there? This is such an isolating craft, and heavy competition makes it feel even more so: for me, keeping in close touch with friends who write has been essential for keeping my chin up for the long haul. Not just as first readers (although I do rely upon my sterling writing friends for that), but as mirrors of my own experience, to help remind me that the path of good writing to publication is seldom smooth. My hopes are multiplied many times over, following my friends’ manuscripts on their travels.

In other words, they help me remember that it’s not just me; the publishing world really is wacky. Talent and luck must go hand-in-hand in order to bring success, along with a healthy dollop of persistence. A sense of humor helps, too.

The more writers you know, the easier it is to keep the process in perspective. Since conference season is coming up, I can’t urge you strongly enough to consider conferences as possibilities not just for meeting agents and editors and taking classes, but also for making friends with other writers. Heck, you could even walk in with the intention of meeting enough new friends to start a critique group.

There will be rooms and rooms of people who share your passion to create — this is no time to sit in a corner and keep to yourself. Seriously, no matter how shy you are, you will already be armed with the best possible opening line for starting a conversation with a stranger: “So, what do you write?”

In addition to building a support group, these conference meetings can lead to a wealth of mutual aid. A few minutes of social effort can bring a lifetime of glowing back jacket blurbs and Amazon reader reviews. In a crowd of eager aspirants to publishing fame, all clamoring for the attention of a few agents and editors, it’s easy to forget that some of your now-unknown writer peers are going to make it, but some undoubtedly will.

You never know who might end up as, say, the resident writer on a major writing association’s website. Talk to the person sitting next to you at the conference.

I am harping on connections today, because I received a wonderful e-mail from talented and insightful reader Janet, asking for my thoughts on how to maintain hope during the long wait for recognition even the best writers face. I say talented not only because she wrote me a lovely missive, but because she mentioned that she has been receiving encouraging feedback from agents, what we in the biz call Rave Rejections. These days, when most agencies use form letter rejections for literally every query they reject (which did not used to be true), the fact that someone at an agency took the time to make an individualized comment is actually a very strong sign that Janet’s work is impressing people.

I know — it’s perverse. But since writers get so little feedback from agents and editors in the query process now, we have to take our comfort and encouragement wherever we can find it.

Rave rejections are a double-edged sword. They are flattering, of course, because they are so rare, but by the same token, they are in fact rejections, and thus depressing.

For many years, I was the queen of the rave rejection: I’ve had agents hand-write, “Hey, this is one of the best query letters I have ever read, but I’ll have to pass!” in the margins of form letter rejections; editorial assistants would praise my work to the skies in long letters of regret. I once had a novel make it all the way to an editorial meeting at a good small publishing house; apparently, there was quite an argument about it. The subsequent rave rejection letter gave the details of that argument, along with a review of my book that was so glowing that it shouldn’t merely have been on the back jacket of the book — it should have been on my tombstone. I’ve heard less glowing eulogies.

And yet it was rejected. Maddening. The editor even sent me a present, another book from the publishing house, as sort of a consolation prize.

It is at times like these that a writer needs her writing buddies. Who but another writer would really be able to sympathize with a near miss — or, indeed, with the quotidian difficulties of keeping one’s chin up throughout the querying process?

Yes, other kith and kin can be helpful, even wonderful, but it may not always be apparent to those unfamiliar with the vagaries of the publishing industry that the book itself may not be at fault. Although, to be fair, my sense of this problem may well be heightened at the moment, as I have just returned from having dinner with my brother-in-law, who is famous for bouncing up to me like a golden retriever on speed every time he sees me and barking, “So — when is your book coming out? What’s going on? Why isn’t it published yet?”

I appreciate his concern, of course, and I certainly understand his confusion — my memoir has now been available for presale on Amazon and B & N for more than 7 months, so I suppose it is only natural for a layperson to expect that the book itself might appear in print sometime in the near future. What he can’t seem to understand, what most of my non-writing friends can’t seem to understand, is that the publication date is, like so much else in the publication process, utterly outside the author’s control, and barking at me about it only makes me feel worse about that.

Other writers, bless them, do understand that salient fact.

Because I am lucky enough know so many writers at all levels of success — and honestly, some of the best writers I know have not yet been able to find the right agent — I know that the problem of the well-meaning but ignorant friend’s badgering is in fact endemic to the writing life. As anyone who has ever sold a book can tell you, starting from the moment you sign with an agent, eager non-writer friends will badger the author about the book’s progress, as though any delays or problems must be the author’s fault. Or as if the only possible reason that a book has not yet been delightedly scooped up and championed by the publishing world is that it isn’t very good.

Poppycock.

As anyone who has spent much time around a group of good writers knows, there are plenty of great books out there that have trouble finding agents and/or editors. And as writers with querying experience, we know that. Other people don’t, and on our bad days, their kindly-meant questions can feel like deliberate cruelty.

Down, boy!

Often, too, our non-writing kith and kin do not understand the publishing world well enough to support us in our triumphs, either. It is far from uncommon — I tremble to report this, but it’s true — for authors over the moon about being signed by a great agent to be deflated by the following exchange with non-writing friends:

Writer: My dream agent just signed me!

Friend: That’s great! When’s your book coming out?

Writer (a little uncomfortable): Well, it doesn’t really work like that. The agent markets the book to editors, you see, and the editors are the ones who actually buy the book.

Friend (disappointed): Oh. So you really aren’t any closer to the book’s being published.

Writer (now sorry that he brought it up at all): No, it’s a necessary step toward being published.

Friend (now utterly confused): Well, let me know when the book comes out.

As someone who has both won a major literary contest AND has a book contract in hand, I can tell you with absolute assurance that well-meaning non-writers will take ANY announcement of a significant step forward in a writer’s career as identical to a book contract. The working writer spends a LOT of time explaining the process to these people, just as the agent-querying writer does. In fact, other than when my work has actually appeared printed on paper (or here in this blog), I’m not sure that my non-writing friends have any idea why my work does not instantly appear on bookshelves across the nation the moment it falls off my fingertips.

In my dark days, before I was getting much recognition, I even had good-hearted friends sit me down, with all of the seriousness of an intervention, and beg me to stop wasting my life in the pursuit of a constantly disappointed dream. They meant well, so I did not throw things at them.

They all mean well; I know that. I fully realize that to someone who has not felt the birth pangs of a manuscript first-hand, or known what it is to rush to the mailbox every day, searching for a positive response to a query, what we writers do can look suspiciously like masochism. Or self-delusion. Or pursuit of a very time-consuming, very demanding hobby.

To quote the very talented, very persistent Louisa May Alcott, who had been working in the writing trenches for a decade and a half before LITTLE WOMEN hit the big time: “I shall make a battering-ram of my head, and make my way through this rough-and-tumble world.”

To a writer, that sounds like a brave and realistic approach to a life entertaining the muse and courting the publishing world. To a non-writer… well, see my earlier remark about masochism.

This is why I highly recommend to anyone who is in the writing business for the long haul to make as many good writing friends as possible. People who speak the same language you do, peers who can sympathize with your trials and cheer your triumphs with clear understanding. Join a writers’ group; go to conferences. Participate in an online forum. Share what you’ve learned, and hear what others have to say.

And, perhaps most importantly for your own sanity and well-being, learn to derive joy from the progress of others. Help them where you can; allow them the pleasure of helping you. It will help sustain you as you push forward.

The more writing friends you have, the higher the probability that on the day when you are feeling most discouraged, you will open your e-mail to find the glad news that a friend has landed a great agent. Or sold a book. Or finished a novel. Or really nailed that short story. Because you are a writer, and one of the many special skills you possess is the ability to understand better than the rest of the population why these interim achievements — the ones the golden retrievers of the world have trouble seeing as anything but delays on the road to success — are in fact very, very worth celebrating.

So here’s to Jordan for putting in all of the years of hard work that lead to this book contract — well done! Here’s to Janet, too, for garnering that hard-to-get encouraging feedback — great job! And here’s to all of you out there who have the courage, tenacity, and faith in your own talent to keep sending out queries, using your words as a battering ram against the slow-opening doors of the industry — good for you!

Let’s help one another keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the role that tone can play in a Presentation category score. In reading it over, I realized that I might have been a trifle harsh on contest judges. I’m sure that there are many who don’t transmogrify into fire-breathing dragons after intensive screening of entries. Many do, however, and my underlying point is that as a contest entrant, you can never be sure which will end up judging your manuscript. Best to be on the safe side.

As they tell children in England, manners cost nothing.

The Presentation category is also where questions of continuity and coherence are rated. Continuity covers two major issues, consistency (on all levels, from tone to what the protagonist’s sister is called by intimates) and flow. Does the argument unfold in the manner it should, or does it stop cold from time to time? Here again, a pair of outside eyes screening your entry for continuity problems can be extremely helpful.

Coherence is an easy one to double-check before submitting an entry: just have a third party who knows nothing about the story you are telling read through the entry. Then have this generous friend tell the story back to you. If any of the essentials come back to you garbled (or worse, missing), there are probably some coherence problems.

95% of the time, coherence issues stem from the enthusiasm of the writer. The writer so longs to convey the story or the argument to the reader that he rushes on, willy-nilly, all caught up in the momentum of communication. Tight pacing is great, but all too often, explanation — and yes, even meaning — can fall along the wayside. Judges feel bad subtracting points from such entries, because the writer’s passion for the material comes through so clearly, but subtract they must.

Pieces stuffed with jargon almost invariably end up with low Presentation scores. Here, the writer walks a fine line: yes, it is wonderful when you can present people in a field as they really talk, but as the author, it’s your job to make sure they are comprehensible to the lay reader. If not, the reader has to spend additional time on each jargon-ridden sentence, trying to figure out from context what those bizarre phrases could possibly mean. Within the context of a contest entry, every extra second spent in translation will be costly to your Presentation score.

Define your terms. Provide subtitles, if you must. Think about it: Anthony Burgess’ A CLOCKWORK ORANGE would have been well-nigh incomprehensible without the glossary in the back, wouldn’t it?

And please don’t make the mistake of thinking that using lots of jargon makes the book come across as smarter. Judges — yes, and most agents and editors, too — are generally quite aware that it is significantly harder to describe a complex process in simple terms than in obscure ones. The appeal of Stephen Hawking’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME was not merely the platform of the writer, which is undoubtedly impressive, but the fact that he was able to describe theoretical physics in layman’s language.

In a nonfiction piece, you need to make sure that every plank of your argument is sound and comprehensible to someone who knows NOTHING about your subject matter. Literally nothing, as in perhaps never even suspected that such a topic might exist. This assumption may seem like an invitation to talk down to the reader, but actually, it’s just realistic. While you may be writing for a target market crammed to the brim with specialists in your area (or people who think they are, always a prime market for books), a new writer can NEVER assume preexisting expertise on the part of a judge, agent, or editor.

This is true, amazingly enough, even if you are writing on a subject that has already been well-traveled in the popular press. You may be writing about the single most common social phenomenon in the country, but that does not mean that NYC-based publishing types will have heard of it. Publishing is a rarefied world, in a sense quite provincial, insofar as its denizens tend to be very much absorbed in their own culture, often to the exclusion of others. It’s a complex and extraordinarily diverse culture, yes, but still, an inward-looking one.

If statistics would be helpful to conveying how large the market for your book is, or how common a phenomenon is, go ahead and include them in the synopsis. Trust me on this one — I’ve seen books about conditions that affect 20% of the population of the United States dismissed by publishing professionals as appealing to only a tiny niche market.

Coherence problems are not always a matter of unduly presuming familiarity with the subject matter and not explaining enough, however. Unanswered questions can cause coherence difficulties as well, particularly if those questions arise fairly naturally from the action of the piece: why, for instance, does a character in a horror story wander, alone and unarmed, into a house she knows to be haunted? Why didn’t the family in THE AMITYVILLE HORROR just invoke the state’s lemon law and cancel its contract to buy the house? And why oh why doesn’t the local bored housewife in a thriller take up crochet or gardening, instead of lusting after the town’s newest stubble-encrusted drifter?

Remember, “because the plot requires it” is never a valid answer. Give the reader some sense of your characters’ motivations.

Yes, I know — in a contest, where you might be allowed to show only a single chapter of a 400-page novel, you may not have room to establish motivations for every major character. You can in the synopsis, though, and you certainly can show off your ability to convey motivation in the actions the protagonist takes in that first chapter. Don’t underestimate how much handling small events well will demonstrate your acumen in handling the bigger ones later on in the book.

A quick aside about entering the first chapter of a novel in a contest: this is an arena where following that shopworn advice about taking your protagonist through the steps of a Jungian hero’s journey can really cost you.

You’ve heard of this plotting device, right? Screenwriters have inundated us with it since the success of the original STAR WARS; in recent years, many advice-givers on the writers’ conference circuit have been advocating it as well. The hero starts out in his (almost never her), normal life, hears the call of a challenge, gets drawn into a challenge, meets friends and advisors along the way… and so forth, for three distinct acts. It’s not a bad structure, although it has gotten a bit common for my taste.

The problem is, this structure more or less requires that the opening of the book (or, more commonly, movie) open with the protagonist’s mundane life, before the excitement of the drama begins. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that — but it does tend to lead to a first chapter heavy on background and light on action. And the problem with THAT in a contest is that the first chapter is usually all the judges see.

I’ve written about this before, and recently, so I won’t expend energy now retracing the many, many reasons to start your contest entries and agency submissions with a bang. Suffice it to say that in this instance, sticking too rigidly to a predetermined structural formula may leave you with little action for which to provide motivation.

Okay, back to unmotivated actions. As you may see from the examples above, the problem of unexplained motivation is another area where I think many writers — and readers, too — have had their senses of proportion semi-permanently twisted by television and movies, so much so that they sometimes forget that characters NEED motivations in order to take action.

One of the surest signs that a story has fallen into a cliché is when the story gives the impression that there is no need to provide a motivation: in a cliché, the motivation is just assumed. Few of us actually have a thing for real-life drifters, for instance, at least not so much that we instantly fling ourselves into torrid affairs with them a few days after they first slouch into sight, yet we’re evidently willing to believe that characters in film will.

And not just in film noir, either: this scenario described is essentially what happens in SIDEWAYS. These two wine-tasters drifted into town, and the local bored women took up with them without knowing anything, really, about their backgrounds… having grown up in California wine country, I can assure you that the fine folks who pour sips at the local wineries are not prone to flinging themselves at every drifter who asks for a refill. Unless a lot has changed since I left town.

The constant barrage of this kind of story has indelibly stained most people’s sense of the plausible, but you’re better than that, aren’t you? You’re not going to be seduced by this charming willingness on the part of the audience to suspend disbelief into believing that they don’t need to establish realistic motivations for your characters, will you?

The judges of literary contests are hoping that you will resist the siren songs of cliché and unmotivated action with all of your might. To put it another way, in print and to professional eyes, unmotivated action comes across as literary laziness. Scads of points lost this way.

Plausibility is a coherence problem, at base; memoirs and fact-based novels are particularly susceptible to plausibility problems. Yet another writing truism: just because something really happened doesn’t necessarily mean it is plausible. It is the writer’s job to make it SEEM plausible.

Once, in college, my roommate and I managed to adopt a wandering Irish theatre company accidentally. A long story, and not a very plausible one: believe it or not, we just came home one day to find that the college officials had given the traveling thespians the keys to our dorm suite. Not very plausible, is it? Yet true. Being sensitive to issues of plausibility, I have never written about it, because it’s rather difficult to explain why we didn’t just throw them out — or why I suddenly felt compelled to cook Thanksgiving dinner (my first time as cook) for 16 total strangers. (As I recall, it had something to do with the fact that none of them had ever before experienced the bliss that is lemon meringue pie.)

To a contest judge, it doesn’t matter whether a depicted event really happened (can you hear James Frey breathing a sigh of relief?), but whether the author has made it feel real to the reader. If not, off with the Presentation points.

Tomorrow, I shall talk about one of the most effective Presentation point boosters in the writer’s tool bag: humor. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hello, readers —

Today, I am going to begin to talk about the final formal category of contest scoring, Presentation. The Presentation category is where, for instance, a judge might evaluate whether a fiction entry engages in too much flashback, or whether a nonfiction essay speaks too much in generalities rather than concrete examples. It is where the judge will ask herself: “What is the central problem of this piece? Is it well drawn? If this is a first chapter, do I have any idea where the novel is taking us in order to solve the problem?”

Put another way, in order to evaluate a manuscript for this category, the judge must ask herself how well she thinks the entry says what the author wants it to say.

As in other categories, while how well a problem is presented or an argument laid out is very much in the eye of the beholder, there are technical criteria that judges consult. In general, though, they concentrate on a single question — is it coherent? — and work outward from there. The harder it is for a judge to figure out what is going on in an entry, the lower its presentation score will be.

This is the single biggest reason not to enter an excerpt from the middle of a book, or splice together an entry from non-consecutive chapters. Even if the contest’s rules say you may do this, the mere fact of beginning anywhere but the beginning signals the judges that (a) the book is probably not finished and (b) that the author may have some personal doubts about the coherence of the opening. It invites speculation about motivation — which almost never ends well for the entrant.

Beyond the coherence issue, there are the small matters of how evidence and details are, well, presented — which is why a lot of writers confuse Presentation with Mechanics, or even Technique. The fault for this confusion lies not entirely with the writers, but in those who give advice to writers: outside the contest milieu, the issues of the Mechanics category — such as typeface, margins, proofreading, even paper choice — are often described as presentation problems. Within the context of a contest, however, Presentation is more about structure, argumentation, and detail than getting your margins in the right place.

The single place where entries are most likely to lose presentation points is the synopsis. Mostly, as I pointed out back in January, contest synopses simply SCREAM at the judges that the writer considers having to summarize the plot or argument of his book an intolerable and unreasonable burden. Resentment shouts from practically every line, which certainly does not make the book sound as though it would be enjoyable to read. Sometimes, this resentment is carried to such an extreme that an entry omits to include a synopsis at all, or merely provides a single-page one plus a table of contents. Instant loss of almost all presentation points.

It is also astonishingly common for the included synopsis to be nothing but a marketing blurb, a phantom jacket blurb for an as-yet-to-be-published book. While it is indeed useful for judges, agents, and editors to have some idea of who the target market is for a proposed book, the synopsis is not generally considered the proper place to talk about it, at least for fiction. (In a contest that asks you to specify target market, put the information on the title page.)

I have written at length in this forum before about how to write a synopsis, and I shall probably write about it again, so I shall not go into the nitty-gritty here. Suffice it to say, the MINIMUM requirements for a successful synopsis include, for fiction, telling the story of the plot in such a way as to indicate that the author has some skill as a storyteller; a nonfiction synopsis should give a brief, coherent indication of the argument to be made in the book and how the author proposes to prove it, also in a style that indicates the book will be a good read.

The operative concepts here are SUMMARY and BOOK THAT A READER MIGHT CONCEIVABLY ENJOY READING. The puff-piece method of synopsis generally omits the summary entirely, preferring instead to tell the reader (in this case, the judge) that there are 47 million Gen Xers, many of whom will feel resonance with the book’s argument; it’s great if you can work that information in to a NF synopsis ALONG with an overview of the case you are making in the book, but it is never a substitute.

Nor is an outline (or, worse still, a bulleted list — and yes, Virginia, I HAVE seen this done in many contest entries) ever an adequate substitute for a well-argued synopsis, because this method gives absolutely no indication of whether the author can WRITE or not.

I know I told you last time that if you take nothing else away from my blog, you should take away the importance of not editing your own work on a computer screen, but today, I am going to add a second commandment (drum roll, please):

Thou shalt regard EVERY line of EVERYTHING you submit to a contest, agency, or publishing house as a writing sample.

No exceptions. Your goal in a contest, as well as in a submission to an agent or editor, is to convince the judges that you can write well. Exceptionally well, in fact, well enough to render it a pleasure as well as a duty to recognize your talent with a place in the finalist category. So when you provide outlines instead of straightforward English prose, or a table of contents instead of a thoughtful exposition of your ideas, you are taking pages and pages of opportunity to prove your writing acumen and simply setting fire to them.

Using the synopsis and/or introduction as marketing copy does give you an opportunity to show you can write, true, but let’s face it, ad copy is not generally considered the highest form of mortal self-expression. Think about it — did your high school English teacher hold up “Coke adds life” to you as an example of prose to emulate? Did your first screenwriting instructor sigh over the persuasive magic of Ricardo Montalban’s poetic musings over the fine Corinthian leather of the Chrysler Cordova, pensively noting that we would never see the like of THAT kind of Shakespearean passion again in our lifetimes?

What ad copy does teach writers to do, alas, is exaggerate. To speak in gross overgeneralizations for a moment, it is HUGELY common for synopses (and first chapters) in nonfiction books to boast about the vital importance of the book the reader holds in her trembling hand. (Do my aged eyes see before me yet another book on the differences between men and women that proposes to solve the battle of the sexes in 250 pages — and that without once addressing the problem of pay differentials?) This, in fact, is the book that the world has been waiting for since the beginning of time. Every incident in my life led directly and inevitably to my writing this book. Honest. Every North American between the ages of 10 and 72 needs to read it within the next year, or I can’t be responsible for the consequences.

In nonfiction, a correlated tendency is to present the book’s argument as if it were the missing link, the single set of logic that will end world hunger, reconcile those who hate one another, and render such minor inconveniences as civil wars and border disputes things of the past. I wish I had a quarter for every first page that told me my life would be changed by this book — because, then, my life would have been changed by all of those books.

I would send you all a postcard from Tahiti, I promise.

The trick here is to avoid hyperbole, particularly in describing your intended audience. Frankly, there is NO book that appeals to everyone — and yes, entrants do actually make that claim fairly regularly in contest submissions. Even if you have identified your target demographic with praiseworthy precision, no reasonable contest judge, agent, or editor is seriously going to believe that everyone in the demographic is going to buy your book, no matter how apt it is. So don’t claim that they will.

Why should such claims harm you in the Presentation category? Because they betray, just as incorrect book categories do, a certain lack of familiarity with the lingua franca of the publishing world. No one in the publishing world would seriously argue that everyone in a demographic would buy a book, even about books that large percentage of a given demographic actually did buy. Remember, contest judges want to reward authors whom they believe can take the win and parlay it into publishing gold, not those who do not yet know the ropes.

When in Rome, speak as the Romans do.

And take my word for it, if you use language to describe your target market that reads like marketing copy, it will cost you many points in the Presentation category. A great big red flag: a demographic statement that includes the phrase “anybody who” or “everybody that,” as in, “anybody who knows and loves a cancer victim will want to buy this book,” or (heaven help us), “everybody that votes in presidential elections needs to have this information.” It doesn’t matter if you think it is true: it will come across as ill-informed boasting (yes, even if it’s true; sorry about that), and will be graded down accordingly.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into more of the nitty-gritty of the Presentation category. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini