Roy Miller's Blog, page 224
April 7, 2017
Week of April 10, 2017
This content was originally published by on 7 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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From the Newsletters
Olivia Sudjic, author of the novel Sympathy, picks eight books about obsession and love, Lolita and The Virgin Suicides among them.
Whether or not you made it to the Bologna Book Fair, you owe it to yourself to see our collection of photos from the show.
Check out our latest indie scouting report: self-published titles we’ve flagged as especially promising.
Sign up for PW Daily and get the latest publishing news delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.
Sign up for these and other great, free newsletters.
The most-read review on publishersweekly.com last week was What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah.
Podcasts
PW senior writer Andrew Albanese talks about a bombshell report and why it could derail a new bill to change the U.S. Copyright Office.
The More to Come crew discusses controversial comments on diversity and comics sales by a Marvel executive, the shutdown of the ComicsAlliance news blog, and what’s happening on PW’s monthly graphic novel bestseller list.
Taran Matharu talks about the third book in his Summoners series, The Battlemage, about an orphan boy who discovers an ability to summon demons.
Blogs
On the benefits of getting kids into the habit of reading for at least 20 minutes a day.
Psychiatrist Jody Foster talks about her new book, The Schmuck in My Office. And PW news director Rachel Deahl discusses whether publishing has gotten too political.
A version of this article appeared in the 04/10/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Online and On Air
The post Week of April 10, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Visions of Snowflakes Dance in Bill O’Reilly’s Head in ‘Old School’
This content was originally published by JANET MASLIN on 7 April 2017 | 10:13 pm.
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O’Reilly’s recent series of steroidal history books written with Martin Dugard, starting with “Killing Lincoln” in 2011, is popular for much better reasons. Those books are compressed, not padded in the way “Old School” is. They boil big stories down to the good parts, treating accuracy as no obstacle. And they don’t play off the toxic atmosphere that has prevailed since the start of the 2016 election cycle. It’s astounding that “Old School,” a book built on divisive name-calling, can complain about late-night TV comics’ alienating half of the viewing population by being politically slanted.
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O’Reilly tells a few stories from his childhood that are meant to explain where his own old-school values come from. He grew up in Levittown, on Long Island, in a household where the kids were taught to be decent and to work hard if they wanted money.
These stories can be strange, like the one when a young Bill used his father’s new mower on a neighbor’s lawn. Bill got angry when the neighbor complained that Bill hadn’t cut the grass under the shrubbery. It couldn’t have been done without damaging the lawn mower, so the neighbor handed Bill a pair of shears.
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Bill cut the grass angrily, took his pay and went home. He told his father the story. His father called the guy an imbecile. The lesson of Work Hard No Matter What somehow morphed into a connection between earning money and calling people imbeciles — or pinheads, the O’Reilly term of art.
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Bruce Feirstein
Credit
Elizabeth Feirstein
O’Reilly and Feirstein are old friends who met at Boston University in 1974. Their meet-cute story is one of the best anecdotes here. Feirstein was writing a column for the college paper, using it to lampoon the school’s rich kids and their self-indulgent antics. (He would later move on to Spy and Vanity Fair.) One day, he found a big guy looming over him “with something between a scowl and a smile on his face,” shaking his head. “You’re not looking out for the folks,” O’Reilly scolded, telling Feirstein to give more serious focus to hard-working graduate and commuting students than to the well-heeled “hippy-dippy types” O’Reilly already scorned.
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O’Reilly makes a visible effort to be fair when it comes time to create an honor roll of old-school individuals. Most controversially for his readership, he comes very, very close to putting Barack Obama on the A-list. He writes admiringly of Obama’s character, values and behavior as a parent. His grievance is that Obama failed to stage a rock concert that O’Reilly had put together to benefit My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative to help mentor inner-city kids. O’Reilly thinks the former president torpedoed it for political reasons. “By the way, when was the last time you heard anything about My Brother’s Keeper?” he asks. He could easily have looked that up. A month after the election, Obama spoke about continuing to support it.
The biggest and easiest target for “Old School” is school itself. Colleges and universities have provided abundant fodder for a book like this to roll out stories that will shock some portions of the general population. Those who haven’t kept up on the state of pronouns and gender politics have surprises in store. Anyone who remembers when the main issue surrounding college cafeteria food was edibility may be surprised at how much controversy cultural appropriation (e.g. the making of inauthentic ethnic foods) can generate.
In a satirical letter from “Snowflake U (formerly known as Thomas Jefferson University),” somebody (probably Feirstein) crams wall-to-wall real examples of the extreme cosseting and cultural warfare that goes on in academia, where high tuition empowers students in ways the real world may not after graduation. Heavily footnoted (the examples check out), the letter presents a hellish vision of this warfare gone amok. And it’s worth anyone’s taking seriously, because O’Reilly’s core readership will take it as gospel.
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One more note about the degree of effort that went into “Old School”: O’Reilly has let himself become the one billionth person to write the line, “As Dylan sang, the times they were a-changin.’”
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 7
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 7 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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It doesn’t feel like it, but we’re already a week into this year’s challenge. Poem on.
For today’s prompt, write a discovery poem. This poem could be about making a discovery; it could be about something discovered (by someone or something else); or something you’d like to discover. I can’t wait to discover what new poems poets will create.
*****
Order the New Poet’s Market!
The 2017 Poet’s Market, edited by Robert Lee Brewer, includes hundreds of poetry markets, including listings for poetry publications, publishers, contests, and more! With names, contact information, and submission tips, poets can find the right markets for their poetry and achieve more publication success than ever before.
In addition to the listings, there are articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–so that poets can learn the ins and outs of writing poetry and seeking publication. Plus, it includes a one-year subscription to the poetry-related information on WritersMarket.com. All in all, it’s the best resource for poets looking to secure publication.
*****
Here’s my attempt at a Discovery Poem:
“when i find one cookie”
when i find one cookie
i want another
& another like the
other that started
the whole escalating
cookie fiasco
because one cookie is
never the only
cookie but the start of
something much larger
especially if i
discover some milk
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He likes cookies and milk. Obviously.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
*****
Find more poetic posts here:
You might also like:
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April 6, 2017
Promise You a Rose Garden: Ex-White House Florist Tells All
This content was originally published by KATHERINE ROSMAN on 6 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The former White House florist Laura Dowling, in New York City’s flower district.
Credit
Tawni Bannister for The New York Times
President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, held their first official black-tie event at the White House in late February. They used gold-rimmed china commissioned by the former first lady Laura Bush, and centerpieces of white flowers and grapes. “I thought it was refined and elegant,” said Laura Dowling, who until her tenure ended abruptly in 2015 was the White House chief floral designer. “I was surprised to see such a pared-back aesthetic from them.”
Ms. Dowling, 57, was walking around the flower district in New York on the first day of spring, discussing her new book, “Floral Diplomacy at the White House,” which contains a number of juicy details about decorating drama at her former place of employment, along with anecdotes about flower arrangements and craft projects.
Like the time the juxtaposition of cotton-candy machines and burlap linen tablecloths at a South Lawn picnic for members of Congress and their families led to the guests getting shocked. (Ms. Dowling got a roll of dryer sheets from the housekeeping staff and used them to cut through the static electricity.)
Or when the White House honeybees broke free at President Barack Obama’s 50th birthday barbecue in the Rose Garden.
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The White House florist Laura Dowling prepares the floral arrangements for a state dinner in 2010.Credit
Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
“My image of it is the bees chasing the guests back and forth while the butlers removed the arrangements,” Ms. Dowling said.
She won the job through a competition in the fall of 2009 not unlike those on “The Apprentice” (little did they know).
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After an eight-month process of applications and interviews, three florist-finalists were sequestered separately on the ground floor of the Executive Mansion for four hours. During that time, they had to fully deck out a table for a State Department dinner, and create an arrangement for the Blue Room and another for the soon-to-be-beige-ified Oval Office for which, Ms. Dowling said, she used “orange and amber, and a modern cube vase.” She added: “When Mrs. Obama came in and talked about this piece, I noted that if I added blue it would be a Chicago Bears theme. She said, ‘The president would like that.’”
Ms. Dowling was hired. For six years, she oversaw the large number of floral arrangements in the private and public spaces of the presidential residence, in addition to the “tablescapes” of private Obama family parties and official galas (including state dinners, for which she was sometimes allotted a $7,000 budget for flowers alone).
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She was first attracted to the trade in 2000, while working for the Nature Conservancy in Washington, after being wowed by the displays in a flower market in Paris. She eventually enrolled in L’École des Fleurs there and began moonlighting as a florist.
She began to think of flowers as tools of diplomacy after she accepted an assignment from the Chinese embassy in Washington. “They gave me a list of requirements, dos and don’ts, colors that should be used and shouldn’t,” she said.
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For one event, Ms. Dowling needed to fill a space on a table so large that she used a children’s wading pool, covered it with moss and leaves, and filled it with several hundred flowers. The table still looked bare, so she made seven satellite arrangements to surround the pool. An official told her after she assembled it that seven Chinese moons circling the sun had symbolic meaning (thankfully positive). “It was something of an accident,” she said.
In her years working at the White House, Ms. Dowling tried to tailor flowers to occasions. When the German chancellor Angela Merkel, who holds a doctoral degree in chemistry, visited, Ms. Dowling made topiaries resembling molecules. She generally avoided white blooms, which are considered funereal in many cultures.
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She did not avoid all the pitfalls though. In 2015, under somewhat unexplained circumstances, Ms. Dowling’s employment at the White House ended.
“I brought in a change of aesthetic and a change of system, and if you look at the level of changes, you can see it would be disruptive to a lot of people,” she said.
She did not smell the disruption yet to come.
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A Great Indian Novel Reaches American Shores
This content was originally published by PARUL SEHGAL on 6 April 2017 | 3:08 pm.
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Anita is repulsed by her new husband’s passivity and the family’s brutal, bullying tactics. “She would need to have lived through those earlier days with us,” the narrator laments. “When the whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances. Without that reality behind her, it’s all a matter of empty principle.”
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Shanbhag is excellent on the inner logic of families, and of language, how even the most innocent phrases come freighted with history. In the book’s funniest set piece, the narrator’s mother tells him she’s cooking him a special breakfast. He recognizes her announcement for what it is — a declaration of war — and flees the house. His mother has chosen to make this particular dish because the smell of it nauseates Anita. Anita takes the bait, the narrator’s sister is drawn into the quarrel, then his father. The powder keg explodes.
“Ghachar Ghochar” is one of the first books written in Kannada — a language with around 40 million speakers — to be published in America. And much about its provenance and its passage into English is distinct — it’s the product of a true collaboration between Shanbhag and Perur, a first-time translator whose interest in this kind of work came not from his closeness to the language but his distance. He felt divorced from his mother tongue, he told me, and hoped translation would help him find his way back. For 18 months, author and translator worked on the 119-page book, taking it apart in Kannada and putting it back together in English — lightly editing it here and there, even adding a scene or two.
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The actual translation wasn’t the tricky part, even though Kannada is a very different language — looser, more permissive about repetition. In fact, the translation brought certain elements into sharper focus. To establish the past tense in Kannada requires some elaborate grammatical framing. But English is efficient and allows the action of the book to move as a mind moves, to leap between present and past. If anything, translating the book from Kannada into Indian English (for a version published in India last year) proved less complicated than the subsequent jump from Indian to American English; small turns of phrase evocative to the Indian reader — “washing vessels” for washing dishes, “iron box” for iron — had to be tweaked. Perur did retain one lovely local detail. The family is accused of using umbrellas to shelter them from moonlight. In the village, where no one can afford umbrellas or knows what they are, the nouveau riche put them to absurd uses.
The real work of translation is always in carrying over the unsaid — never more important than in a book like “Ghachar Ghochar,” where the characters are impelled by forces within themselves, their families and their communities that feel so furtive, even unspeakable. For Perur it was a matter of establishing a voice that could be convincingly savvy and blind. He wrote and rewrote the early pages until he settled on a tone he believed could carry the novel.
The book in our hands is elegant, lean, balletic — but how can we know if the essence of the original has been communicated? When this question has been put to Vivek Shanbhag, who has himself also worked as a translator, he has recalled one particular passage from the novel. It is, notably, one of the scenes he added specifically for the translation. The narrator’s wife has gone out of town and he is idly rifling through her closet, touching her clothes, her jewelry. He catches scent of her suddenly. He presses his face into her saris to smell more, but the closer he gets, the more the smell retreats. “Whatever fragrance the whole wardrobe had was missing in the individual clothes it held. The more keenly I sought it, the further it receded. A strange mixture of feelings I could not quite grasp — love, fear, entitlement, desire, frustration — flooded through me until it seemed like I would break.”
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The essence of a novel, Shanbhag seems to imply, floats like fragrance through the book. It is the emanation of the sum of its parts and cannot be isolated. And perhaps any attempt to single it out is beside the point. Translation isn’t merely an act of transportation, after all, of carrying something over. It’s asymptotic (“the more keenly I sought it, the further it receded”), a kind of contented yearning and act of ardor every bit as mysterious as the narrator’s efforts to find his beloved among her belongings.
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UNC Press to Crash Tar Heel Victory Book
This content was originally published by on 6 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The University of North Carolina Press is touting the home team in a new book commemorating the victory of the UNC Tar Heels in the 2017 NCAA championship over Gonzaga University.
Redemption: Carolina Basketball's 2017 Journey from Heartbreak to History by Adam Lucas, Steve Kirschner, and Matt Bowers, will be published in hardcover in September. According to the publisher, the book will offer "a behind-the-scenes look at the Tar Heels’ ride to the 2017 national title." Tar Heels head coach Roy Williams is writing the book's foreword.
“The opportunity to help tell one of the great stories in Carolina Basketball history—or in sports history—is truly a privilege," Lucas said. "The emotional investment put into the 2016-17 season by the players and coaches involved will make for a very special book.”
That a university press is releasing a glossy commemorative book is unusual, as these titles are often released by larger houses. Underscoring the importance of the title for the publisher, UNC Press will distribute the book worldwide through its distributor, Longleaf Services.
UNC Press director of publicity Gina Mahalek said the press's decision to handle its own global distribution was a strategic one. She explained that the press will "act as a distributor for some projects and institutions to increase particular titles’ availability and visibility to the trade."
The UNC Tar Heels lost last year's NCAA championship game in dramatic fashion as the Villanova Wildcats scored a three-pointer in the waning seconds of the game to take home the trophy. This year's victory in the tournament gave UNC its sixth national title.
"I will always remember how much sweat and hard work the players put into having a championship season," Williams said. "Last year, the feeling I had after the game was the most inadequate I’ve ever had as a head coach. This year, my feeling is one of appreciation for the effort they gave and the commitment they made to be national champions.”
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Bookshelf: Books of Verse for Children Range from Playful to Soaring
This content was originally published by MARIA RUSSO on 6 April 2017 | 4:46 pm.
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From “Animal Ark”
Animal Ark
By Kwame Alexander, with Mary Rand Hess and Deanna Nikaido. Photos by Joel Sartore.
In their brevity and directness, poems and photographs have much in common, Alexander points out in a note in this striking collaborative book. Sartore’s up-close photographs of animals in need of protection, each elegantly set against a pure white or black background, are a plea for respect — and help. So is the spare poetry that wends through them, written in a loose haiku style and emphasizing all we humans share with animals. The words cut deep: “Remember, we are part of forever.”
48 pp. National Geographic/Photo Ark. $15.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)
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From “A Song About Myself”A Song About Myself
Poem by John Keats. Illustrated by Chris Raschka.
“There was a naughty Boy, / A naughty Boy was he.” So begins a charming trifle the Romantic poet Keats included in a letter to his younger sister. With the Caldecott medalist Raschka’s always enjoyable watercolor art, the puckish little poem makes an effervescent picture book. The boy has run “away to Scotland / The people for to see.” Recounting the adventurous trip, he also catalogs his own wicked ways: “For nothing would he do / But scribble poetry.” Be still my beating heart!
40 pp. Candlewick. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 6 to 9)
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From Bravo!: Poems AboutAmazing HispanicsBravo!: Poems About Amazing Hispanics
By Margarita Engle. Illustrated by Rafael López.
López’s bright portraits of notable Hispanics have the large scale and graphic discipline of poster art, while Engle manages to compress the sweep of a biography into a sharp, compact free-verse poem about each life, from childhood on. Some are famous, like César Chávez and Roberto Clemente. All faced challenges — many gut-wrenching, like Julia de Burgos’s near starvation in childhood — and made lasting contributions.
48 pp. Godwin/Holt. $18.99. (Picture book; ages 8 to 12)
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From “One Last Word: Wisdom From the Harlem Renaissance,” illustration by Frank Morrison.One Last Word: Wisdom From the Harlem Renaissance
Written and illustrated by Nikki Grimes and others.
Using the playful “golden shovel” form — a chunk of an older poem anchors a new poem, with one word from the old ending each line of the new — Grimes pays tribute to Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Bennett. Her haunting poems echo and update the earlier poets’ themes of struggle, resistance and pride in the face of prejudice. Gorgeous works by 15 black artists, including Javaka Steptoe, the 2017 Caldecott medalist, add to the book’s dazzle.
119 pp. Bloomsbury. $18.99. (Ages 8 and up)
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From “Out of Wonder”Out of Wonder
By Kwame Alexander, with Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth. Illustrated by Ekua Holmes.
Any young poet will be heartened by Alexander’s reminder that “sometimes our poems sound like they were written by our favorite poets, and that is O.K.” The three authors take turns emulating their idols, who include Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins and Terrance Hayes (“Make a paint box out of letters,” that poem begins). Complementing the infectious mood of tribute is the spirited mixed-media artwork by Holmes (“Voice of Freedom”), a harmonious riot of color, texture and pattern.
32 pp. Candlewick. $16.99. (Middle grade; 8 and up)
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Illuminating the Beats From Their Shadow
This content was originally published by DWIGHT GARNER on 6 April 2017 | 9:21 pm.
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He was broke, hungry, distraught. She bought him a plate of frankfurters. He followed her back to her small apartment. A door had swung open in her life.
Thus began an off-and-on relationship that lasted nearly two years, years that witnessed the publication of “On the Road” and life-altering fame — not only Kerouac’s but also that of many of his closest friends, other Beat Generation writers.
Johnson captures this period with deep clarity and moving insight in her memoir “Minor Characters” (1983). It’s hardly an unknown book. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and it has remained in print since it was issued.
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Joyce Johnson in 2009. More than a memoir of her time with the Beats, “Minor Characters” is a riveting portrait of an era.
Credit
Schiffer-Fuchs/ullstein bild, via Getty Images
I’m including it in this series of columns about neglected American books because I so rarely hear it mentioned, and because I continue to think it is hideously undervalued and under-read. “Minor Characters” is, in its quiet but deliberate way, among the great American literary memoirs of the past century.
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Johnson’s book takes its title from her realization that — as was so common in every sphere of cultural life in the 1950s and beyond — the Beats were a boy gang. She would always be, at best, on its periphery. Her memoir braids and unbraids, at length, the meanings of this fact.
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She recalls how the women at the San Remo and other bars, hangouts for writers and artists, “are all beautiful and have such remarkable cool that they never, never say a word; they are presences merely.” Johnson and her friends wanted to be among the yakkers, the all-night arguers.
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“Minor Characters” is not just about the Beats. It’s about many different subjects that bleed together. In part it’s a portrait of Johnson’s cloistered middle-class childhood on the Upper West Side. Her parents wanted her to be a composer.
She longed for escape and began sneaking down to Washington Square Park to be among the musicians and poets. She was round-faced, well-dressed, virginal. She’d never tasted coffee. It was “my curse,” she writes, that “my outside doesn’t reflect my inside, so no one knows who I really am.”
Her book is a riveting portrait of an era. It contains a description of a back-room abortion that’s as harrowing and strange as any I’ve read. Johnson had the abortion because she didn’t love the boy and wasn’t ready for a child.
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“Sometimes you went to bed with people almost by mistake, at the end of late, shapeless nights when you’d stayed up so long it almost didn’t matter,” she writes. “The thing was, not to go home.”
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Credit
Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
“Minor Characters” is a glowing introduction to the Beats. There are shrewd portraits of not just Kerouac and Ginsberg but people like Robert Frank and Hettie Jones.
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Johnson has a knack for summing up a character in a blazing line or two. Here’s how she describes the Beat-era figure Lucien Carr, for example, at the moment he first met Kerouac: “This rich, dangerous St. Louis boy with the wicked mouth who’s already been kicked out of Bowdoin and the University of Chicago, who’s amassed a whole dissipated history by the age of 19.”
Best of all, perhaps, this book charts Johnson’s own career as a budding writer. She worked in publishing when she was young; she was secretary to John Farrar of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy (later Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He wanted to promote her; she left instead to visit Kerouac in Mexico and write. She published her first novel, “Come and Join the Dance,” when she was 26.
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By then, she and Kerouac had separated for good. There was a final scene on a sidewalk. “You’re nothing but a big bag of wind!” she shouted at him. Kerouac, constitutionally unable to remain with one woman, shouted back, “Unrequited love’s a bore!”
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Johnson looks back on the young woman she was, while with Kerouac, and realizes she was “not in mourning for her life. How could she have been, with her seat at the table in the exact center of the universe, that midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in America that’s alive?”
I remember tracking down a first edition of “Minor Characters” — this was harder in the late 1980s than it is today — to give to my college girlfriend as a graduation present. She looked at its title, wrinkled her brow and asked, “Why this book?” Why a book, in other words, about women who are minor characters?
I fumbled my answer. I knew only that I loved the book and wanted to share it. What I wish I had said is this: “Minor Characters” is better than all but a handful of books the boy-Beats themselves wrote. It’s a book about a so-called minor character who, in the process of writing her life, became a major one.
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New CEO for Parragon
This content was originally published by on 6 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Mike Symons has joined Parragon Books as CEO.
Symons, who was most recently group sales director for Penguin Random House U.K., replaces Paul Taylor, who becomes CEO of gift, toy, and accessories company Wild and Wolf. Both Parragon and Wild and Wolf are based in Bath, England, and are part of the DC Thomson family.
Symons has experience in the U.K., European, North American, and Australian publishing markets, all of which are served by Parragon and its 350 employees globally. The company is known for its books and gifts, produced under license with Disney, Nickelodeon, Eric Carle Studios, and other major brands.
Parragon also has proprietary brands including Little Learners, Start Little Learn Big, Gold Stars, and Factivity. Formats range from board books, novelty titles, and coloring books, to picture books, annuals, and gift tins.
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How to Pitch Your Book Fearlessly
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 5 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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I’ve been to a lot of writers conferences, and though some were small and some were large, and some focused on genre fiction and others on literary fiction, they all had one thing in common. I noticed this similarity at the first conference I attended, though I couldn’t name it. I was too distracted, you see. I was going to be pitching a novel to an agent for the first time, and though I had practiced my pitch a dozen times with my wife, I found the whole concept of pitching nauseating. The relationship between that agent and me in the ten minutes we’d spend together seemed unnatural. The agent simply had too much power. I worried that with one word she could slay my writing dreams.
This guest post is by William Kenower. Kenower is the author of Fearless Writing: How to Let Go of the Things That Keep You from Creating Your Best Work. He is also the editor in chief of Author magazine, a sought-after speaker and teacher, and the author of Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion. He’s been published in The New York Times and Edible Seattle, and was a featured blogger on the Huffington Post. His video interviews with hundreds of writers, from Nora Ephron to Amy Tan to William Gibson, are widely considered the best of their kind on the Internet. He also hosts the online radio program Author2Author, where every week he and a different guest discuss the books we write and the lives we lead.
And then I actually met her, and I realized that she was not an executioner—she was just a person. I sat down and started talking about the book, and there was nothing unnatural about our conversation. Talking to her, I remembered how cool I thought the book was, and now we were just two people having a lively chat. When our time was up, I thanked her and drifted out into the conference. There was that certain something I’d felt earlier, something crackling between all the other writers.
Oh, I know what that is, I thought. That’s fear.
Though we all tell different kinds of stories, writers usually share a common psychology that allows us to be quite happy alone in a room with ideas that interest us. Most of us do not enjoy sitting down with a stranger and asking them what they think of that idea. In fact, it often induces a kind of vertigo. The good news is that pitching need not be a writer’s worst nightmare. The trick to pitching fearlessly is knowing where to look, so to speak, when you pitch.
First, of course, you must hone your pitch, and memorize your pitch, and practice your pitch. That will be helpful. But then the moment of truth arrives. Now you are sitting in front of an actual person who is waiting to hear about your story. They’ve probably already heard two dozen pitches, and they’re going to hear two dozen more. You know this, and you may find this reality uninspiring. No matter. Now is when you must forget about that agent or editor. Forget about how many pitches they’ve heard. Forget about their tastes and about the crowded world of writers. None of it is of any use to you. Now you must bring all your attention back to the one thing in this equation you actually know: how much you love your book.
And you do. You love it. You know you love it. You wouldn’t have spent six months or a year or ten years writing that book if you didn’t love it. You don’t know if anyone else loves it, but you know you do. That’s enough. That’s all you actually need to know to pitch as well as you can possibly pitch. I have learned, having done it many times, that the best thing I can do when pitching is to get excited all over again about my story.
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The fear I’ve sensed in others and experienced myself at writers conferences grows from the insidious idea that somehow we must know more than we possibly can know. Somehow, now that we want to sell this story, we must magically know what other people want. Moreover, somehow other people can tell us whether that story really is cool or funny or sexy or exciting. It’s an unnerving thought. If I can’t trust that what I think is exciting or profound or inspiring in the privacy of my workroom will be exciting or profound or inspiring to someone else, then I simply don’t know how to do this writing thing. It becomes literally impossible because I am always the only one in that room. What interests me alone has to be enough.
And by the way, that first agent wanted to see the book, but she didn’t end up representing it. Yes, that was a little disappointing, but I still consider our meeting a rousing success. In that moment the publishing world, which until then had been comprised of names of publishing houses or agencies, became real to me. Now it was made up of actual people, people more or less like me. Sometimes we get along, and sometimes we don’t, and sometimes we agree and sometimes we don’t. This is true whether I’m pitching or meeting a stranger on a bus. Regardless of where I am, I am never better than when I trust that to which I listen when I write, that loyal and friendly companion who consistently guides me to the stories I most want to tell and the life I most want to lead.
This all-in-one guide shows authors exactly what they need in order to find and secure an agent for their work of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and more. From basics like where to look for agents to in-depth instruction on how to pitch your idea, this book covers every aspect of how to find representation and become a successful writer.
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