Writers’s Market has published an online interview with an all-star line-up of literary agents: Elaine English, Donald Maass, Evan Marshall, and Ann Rittenberg.
I found out about the article when Wendy Tokunaga posted the link on the the Yahoo ChickLit forum.
Not to be confused with moron plots. We’ll leave that topic for another day.
This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Monkey Love, Brenda Scott Royce, Feb. 2006, Penguin, given the face-up treatment royale on the “new releases” table at my local bookstore chain.
So I’m reading it (because why not have four or five books going at once?) and as I’ve been thinking about plotting, I notice that in the first chapter (19 pages) no less than four major plotlines are introduced: a girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy; another girlfriend’s professional shennanigans; the protagonist’s preparation for an upcoming stand-up comedy gig; and the protagonist’s first encounter with he-who-will-emerge-as-the-love-interest.
Advantages:
1. Fast pacing? You betcha. You can’t have that much going on in under 20 pages without having . . . a lot going on.
2. Major interest grabation. Take your pick, there’s so much happening here, you’re bound to want to know how at least some of it works out.
3. Comedic effect. A caught-in-the-headlights straight man is a comedy staple. Plot breaking out right and left is a useful device for propelling a hapless protagonist toward that lite, happy ending nirvana we’re all rooting for-o.*
Disadvantages:
1. There’s a thin line between “madcap” and frenetic.
2. Pacing isn’t pacing unless it’s modulated from time to time. When the balance tips too far toward “hard plot” and too far away from the protagonists interior life, things start to feel downright speedy after awhile.
So what’s the answer. Dunno. But if the pendulum has swung toward “plot ’til you’re punch-drunk” (and I’m by no means sure it has btw — I have exactly one data point upon which to base this) I hereby Predict it will Swing Back.
*The “o” is so that I won’t be using a preposition to end that sentence with-o
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?
Here’s a Bookforum panel discussion on the implications of Google’s book scanning initiative. The participants are Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild; Allan R. Adler, AAP vice president for legal and governmental affairs; and Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor and public domain advocate.
I haven’t formed a clear opinion on this issue, save for one thing: I think Google should make it an opt-in process for copyright holders. IOW, don’t touch my book(s) until I tell you it’s okay to scan them. Needless to say, that would make the process much more cumbersome and expensive.
OTOH, Google is the one with the deep pockets. As one of the panelists says in this piece:
Everyone knows most authors don’t make a living as authors. They have some other job or jobs that allow them the luxury of writing. And to be denied a potential source of revenue, whether the purpose is altruistic or not, is both galling and disappointing.
The topic of making a living writing books — or, more precisely, how rare that is — was the topic of a couple of literary agent blog posts this week. So the question is, would Google’s book scanning scheme further reduce writers’ already meager returns?
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.
And I’m done, I’ve got everything together for the new book, 101 Dog Training Tips. Captions, even. Although Windows says my CD has only 48 objects. I guess I’ll have to re-check what I’ve done before I overnight everything to my editor on Tuesday.
I’m using the photo of my dog with her nose squashed up against the window. Most of the other photos I’m using are pretty utilitarian (luring a dog into a sit etc.) but there are a couple I like just as pics that I’ll post here sometime.
Now I’m kicking back, drinking a glass of wine (Chateau Lavagnac, mmmmmmm) doing a de-lurking surf, heh heh heh, finding some great blogs. You know who you are :-)
Update: Well, I take it all back. Now Windows has decided it can’t read my CD!!! :-(
Update 2: I composed a rant earlier tonight, then went back & deleted it after I’d cooled down, because I don’t really intend for my blog to be a space for tantrums. Sigh. But this hasn’t been pleasant. It’s now 1:20 am and I’m emailing my photos to myself so that I can burn a new CD, using my laptop instead of my desktop . . . what a pain.
My mom read a piece about this guy in her local paper and clipped it to show me when we gathered at my folks’ for Christmas.
He’s discovered, lo and behold, that if he doesn’t beat himself up about what he eats, he doesn’t gain weight.
If you don’t believe that I was the first one to have that idea, just ask Mom, she’ll tell you. It was in the 80s btw, predating this book by Evelyn Tribole: “Intuitive Eating”” by a decade, at least.
I’ve got it documented in any case. I wrote an essay about it that was published in this Chicken Soup for the Soul book about weight loss.
Only my version has a dog angle too, heh heh heh. I had a lively mixed breed at the time, named Brett, and I’d been coming to the realization that, with dogs, it’s better to reinforce what they’re doing right than play Obedience Commandante, chasing after them yelling no no no no no all the time.
It’s less stressful and, wonder of wonders, also makes for a better-behaved dog.
Next it occurred to me that if focusing on the positive worked for my dog, why not try it on myself? So I stopped punishing myself for eating “junk” and started noticing how nice it was to eat nutritious food that tastes good.
I’d “dieted” myself up to about 25 pounds over my ideal weight but it came off, slowly but surely, as soon as I committed to my new attitude.
I’m not necessarily in favor of the label “intuitive eating,” however. I know the concept of intuition is very trendy, but if you’re emotionally sensitive and even worse kinesthetically oriented, you end up with a lot of inner data to sort through, and I’ve never been able to isolate “intuition” from everything else.
In any case, you don’t need it. If you are worried about your weight, you need to de-charge the whole issue. Do that, and the rest will fall into place. Don’t do it, and you’ll keep proving your self-identity as “person with a weight problem.”
Or put another way, behavior follows intent — just like a dog’s behavior follows its trainer’s.
Yesterday’s Publisher’s Lunch reported on a bit of gotcha journalism by the London Times, “one of those periodic ambush articles”
in which the reporters make themselves feel wonderfully superior by submitting two Booker-winning novels from the 70s anonymously to 20 publishers and agents. (One is VS Naipaul’s IN A FREE STATE; the other is Stanley Middleton’s A FREE STATE.)
Surprise, surprise, none of the publishers offered the anonymous submitters a $1 million advance.
Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile.
What would be really interesting, though, would be to resubmit a couple of novels that didn’t quite make the Booker Prize grade and see if they could land a deal.
Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth had a nice run in the late 1800’s. How about submitting For Women’s Love?
Rothsay left the talkative hackman and passed on. [ed. No, Mrs. S. didn’t mean to suggest he died.]
A hand touched him on the arm.
He turned and saw old Scythia, clothed in a long, black coat of some thin stuff, with its hood drawn over her head.
Rothsay stared.
“Come, Rule! You have tested woman’s love to-day, and found it fail you; even as I tested man’s faith in the long ago, and found it wrong me! Come, Rule! You and I have had enough of falsehood and treachery! Let us shake the dust of civilization off our shoes! Come, Rule!”
