Tag Archives: amwriting

Stitching a contemporary plot

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I now have three partials out to agents, which puts me at a crossroads as far as my completed novel goes. I could continue to query additional agents, but my gut says to hold off. See how this goes.

Which means that now, I wait. For quite awhile, probably. Months, probably.

So, the next question becomes: what do I do in the meantime, in my “for me” writing time, while I wait?

I’ve got two other novels outlined that feature the same protagonist as my finished ms, but I am inclined to go off, right now, in a completely different direction. This is partly by choice. I want to add another basket for my eggs. But also, a new character introduced herself to me over the weekend, and tonight, I met one of her companions.

I’m going back to them in a minute. But in the meantime, I am actually feeling a bit nervous, because I don’t know where these two are going to take me.

Contemporary literary fiction, being post modernist, is often stitched together by absurdity; absurdity serves as a kind of surrogate plot. I don’t aspire to be a literary novelist, however. I want something much simpler (ah, yes, “lower,” lol): to tell stories. I want to tell stories and get out of the way in the telling.

So I have this woman. She’s divorced, I can see where she’s landed, I can hear her voice. But I don’t know her story. That’s what makes me nervous. It would be easy to fall back on absurdity, and it’s funny to find how tempting that is, at my age, this distant from my twenties & from college. I’m having to make myself not write, as I hunt about for the story, lest I begin filling up pages with absurdity, which will pass the time, but what good is passing time when the end of it all is a select all/delete?

What genre am I?

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To sell a novel, you’re usually best off getting an agent. To get an agent, the first step is the “query letter.”

A query letter is your mountainous labor of love distilled down into a couple of paragraphs. But not just any “couple of paragraphs.” It has to be a couple of paragraphs that grab an agent’s interest, raise the possibility that you’re a good writer, and plant the idea that your book may have a market.

Also, it can’t set off any danger bells. You can’t come across as desperate (“if this novel doesn’t sell, it’s all over, and I’m taking at least 46 people with me, right after I eat the last saltine in my cupboard”) or hopelessly amateurish (“you’ll notice a lot of spelling errors in my manuscript, but I promise I’ll clean them up in draft #2”).

Alas, some of those danger bells can’t be taught, because nobody knows what they are except the agents themselves, and although they will happily share their information with you there’s no way of ensuring you’ll stumble over it in time.

This is experience talking. About two weeks ago, after I’d sent off some eight e-queries that described my novel as “chick lit,” I came across this blog entry by agent Kristin Nelson. Turns out there’s a shake-down going down in chick lit right now. Chick lit was hot. Now it’s not. And none of those queries resulted in so much as a nibble.

Fortunately I hadn’t broadcast that query to every agent in the known universe. So I revised it to describe my novel as “commercial women’s fiction.” Also fortunately, that description isn’t a stretch. My novel has a chick litty voice, but doesn’t fit into the genre 1:1. No mentions of clothing by brand name, it’s not set in NYC or London, and my protagonist is an animal control officer, not an office employee. Oh, and her best friend isn’t a gay male. ( “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” lol)

Since I made that revision, I’ve queried another five agents, and of those, I’ve received two requests for partials (first 40-50 pages and a synopsis). I can live with those odds :-)

That said, lest I tempt fate, let me quickly add: I’m still a long, long way away from getting an agent at all, let alone seeing this novel in print. But based on my experience, I’d say that with a query letter, you need to walk a fine line between giving specific information about your project and pigeon-holing it in a way that may work against you. If your novel fits neatly into a particular genre, by all means, say so. You don’t want to bother agents who aren’t interested in selling that type of book. But if you can stick to more general categories, you may increase the odds that you’ll at least get a few pages of your ms into the door. Which is what a query letter is supposed to do.

Test your title

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This website, Lulu Titlescorer, lets you analyze a book title and tell you how likely it is to be a best seller. My novel’s title came in at 69 percent. Too bad the manuscript has fallen down some agent’s rabbit hole, and to get it back, apparently I have to play a game of croquet with a flamingo for a mallet. Wish me luck, I’m going in. As soon as I finish this cup of coffee with the “drink me” printed on the side.

The peril of abstract spaces

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In the Toronto Star, Nicholas Hune-Brown surveys the way the ‘burbs have been depicted in literature and film, then veers off into his own, equally peculiar gloss.

He begins, reasonably enough, with this observation:

The North American suburbs of 2006 are a world away from the imagined suburbs of Cheever or Lewis. Traditional suburbs have grown and aged. Many of the once identical houses of Levittown and other subdivisions have now been customized and renovated. As developments on the urban fringe have become increasingly independent from their urban centres, the very existence of “suburbia” in the traditional sense has been questioned.

Fair enough. But Hune-Brown’s most earnest complaint is not that writers fall back on cliche when setting their narratives in the ‘burbs. It’s that they “ignore the real problems of suburban development,” that is, the “hideous” esthetic of the modern subdivision, segregation, and “sprawl.”

So. Hune-Brown would have writers jettison one set of the over-exposed abstractions, only to pick up another.

But that’s the wrong fix. I mean, think about it, a movie on the evils of sprawl? Characters adrift in emotional malaise because they they burn too much gas to get to work? And not only that, they have to drive past ugly 7-Elevens all the time, and don’t have ethnically-mixed neighbors?

“No ideas but in things.” William Carlos Williams. Anyone looking for artistic inspiration needs to start there. Not with abstractions, because beginning with an abstraction makes for lousy art, even if your abstraction is the political cause du jour.