Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 67

It's All Material

A couple of posts back, nct2 asked what Other Helpful Stuff a writer could do - besides writing, taking classes, or learning new skills - to improve their work. I blinked at that a couple of times, because my very first reaction was "Learn to touch-type," and I wasn't at all sure that would be helpful (since for all I know, nct2 and all the rest of you can touch-type faster than I can, and have been doing so for years).

But that got me thinking about why that was my first reaction, and I realized that it's because I get this question a lot from middle-school kids, and "learn to touch-type" is one of the first things I tell them. Which got me thinking some more about what I tell people and why.

See, the very first and absolutely most important thing one needs to do in order to improve one's writing is the obvious one: to write. Writing is a skill that gets better with practice. nct2 already had that first on the list, and anyway I've said that enough, at enough length, that right now I'll leave it at that.

But there are other things that help, and they can be divided into two basic categories: practical skills (like touch-typing) that make one's writing life easier, and what I'll call non-specific research.

Practical skills are the things most people really don't want to hear about. They're work to acquire, and most of them don't obviously and directly affect the quality of one's work. But in my experience, the lack of them generally has a subtle but profoundly negative effect, at the very least. At worst, not having these skills can become an insurmountable obstacle to one's career progress, the more insurmountable because it's frequently unnoticed.

In this category, I'd put things like touch-typing and the fundamentals of English (spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, vocabulary). Also things like the correct use of often-confused words like "affect" and "effect" (see paragraph above for example). Karen Elizabeth Gordon's books, starting with The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, are an excellent, non-boring, humorous place to start; Strunk and White's The Elements of Style has been a perennial necessity (I don't think I've ever met a writer who wasn't familiar with it; the vast majority of professionals I know own one or more copies, some of which are falling apart from having been re-read so often); and Lynne Truss's Eats Shoots & Leaves is a nice cranky, humorous, and informative rant on the uses (and modern misuses) of punctuation in general.

I'd also include things like techniques for organizing and filing (piles of research material don't help if you can't lay hands on the one bit of it you want, and spending three hours trying to dig up the contract for a book you wrote twenty years ago to see if you still have electronic subrights is just silly. It generally takes me all of thirty seconds to find that sort of paperwork, and that's because I have to walk across the room to the file cabinet for seldom-used papers. Several of my friends tease me that my house is a mad clutter of papers and books, but my file cabinets are perfectly organized. They're right.) Basic business knowledge comes in here, too - getting familiar with the kinds of clauses you're likely to see in a book or short story contract, and what's reasonable and what's not. Exercising. Budgeting. All the boring life-maintenance skills.

I put a lot of emphasis on these things because, as I said, most people don't want to hear it, let alone do any of it, and I have a slim but optimistic hope that if I say it enough times in enough different ways, somebody will listen.

What most people want to know about is the "other stuff." The stuff that sounds like more fun, the stuff I call "non-specific research." At the very top of that list is reading.

I have never met a professional writer who wasn't a voracious, omnivorous reader. Gordy Dickson once spent ten minutes on a panel trying to find a type of book that none of the other writers had read/liked; he finally ended up at "Men's Boxing Novels," which he got by with because most of the other writers on the panel hadn't been alive and reading when that was an actual category of fiction, so we hadn't even known such things existed. Writers read.

But writers read in two different ways: for fun, and as writers. We'll read and enjoy a great new book, then go back over it and tear it apart page by page, looking at the techniques the other writer used, the turns of phrase, the structure. Some of us read things we know we're not going to like, simply because they're getting a lot of praise or sales and we want to find out why and whether we can use whatever that other writer did right. We read so-called bad books, because a) it's frequently easier to learn what not to do by studying someone else's blatant errors than to learn advanced techniques from a brilliant piece of prose, and b) those books are doing something well enough to attract readers (or at least, to make a publisher think they'll attract readers), and again it's often easier to spot the one right thing amongst all the wrong ones.

The other big thing one can do is to have a life. If one never does anything but read and write, it's hard to make the stuff on the page sound real and interesting. Pay attention to your life, whether that means close observation and no more, writing things down in a journal, or taking up photography or painting. Find something you love besides writing, whether that's playing the flute, water-skiing, or knitting. Do it with other people and get to know them. Go to the religious service of your choice or get involved in local politics or Habitat for Humanity.

Because doing things, especially things involving other people, has a double benefit: you learn about whatever-it-is you're doing (and that will inevitably creep back into your books, whether you're doing gourmet cooking or climbing mountains), and you meet different kinds of people, who agree and disagree with you in areas that are not what you're used to. Which will, if you're paying attention, stretch your brain in all sorts of ways that are good for writers, especially writers who don't want to write the exact same types of characters over and over.

Travel can be good, but you can get just as much mental mileage out of approaching your own city as if you were an out-of-town tourist. Go to museums and water parks and concerts and shopping malls and plays and baseball games, even - or especially - if you've never gone before and/or dislike (or think you will dislike) whatever-it-is. Take a free class at a local park. Shop the farmer's market. Learn to fence or knit or rollerblade or folk dance.

Be awake for your life. Pay attention. Do things.

Doing things and keeping a journal about them really helps for some people, but the journal part has never worked well for me, so don't feel obligated. The important part is the doing things part.

Musing on Ebooks

OK, I had a whole long blog post ready to go about non-traditional publishing, and then I looked at it and realized that I was just saying the same thing again: there are scams, it is a ton of work, you have to educate yourself, check Writer Beware and Editors and Preditors before you commit yourself if you're going this route, it's right for some people/books but not for others, etc. If people are really interested, I can put that post up some other time; in the meantime, I'm going to talk a bit about the electronic scene.

I am a little reluctant to do this, which is why I had that other post all set to go. And the reason I'm reluctant is that I don't actually have a ton of experience with ebooks. Then I looked into some statistics and realized that nobody has a ton of experience with ebooks - at least, not with the current ebook market. Because the current market is less than two years old. If my rough calculations are correct, two years ago, ebooks were less than 1% of the total US book market; last year, estimates were running 15-20% of the total market. And nobody seems to know whether this means people are buying ebooks instead of hardcopy books, or whether they're buying ebooks in addition to hardcopy books.

Personally, I suspect it's a bit of both. I adore my iPad, which I've had all of six months, but I only have two kinds of books on it: 1) books I already own in hardcopy, but that I want the convenience of being able to read on the road (that would be things like Pride and Prejudice for fun, and The Journals of Lewis and Clark for research), and 2) books that were only ever published electronically, so I couldn't get them in hardcopy.

This may change at some point. I can foresee a day when I'll only want my most favorite books in hardcopy, and I'll get everything else in electronic format. (If I start seriously running out of bookshelf room, that day may come sooner rather than later…a four gigabyte flash drive would hold most of my collection, could I get them all in e-format, and it takes up a lot less space and is only about $10 if I catch the sale at Target with a coupon.) I have no idea whether this is the usual way to use ebook readers, or whether most ebook users went fully electronic as soon as they could and never looked back.

As a professional writer, I'm deeply interested in this cool new method of publishing stuff. For one thing, it represents a possible end run around the traditional publishing system for all sorts of things. Novellas and short story collections have both been hard to sell to traditional publishers; a lot of writers seem to be putting together their own ebook-only versions and taking them direct to Amazon. Similarly, gigantic 300,000-word novels are too fat for traditional publishing; they have to be split into two volumes in order for the binding machinery to be able to handle them, and then they seldom do as well as all-in-one-volume books. For ebooks, length doesn't matter so much - at least, it doesn't affect the cost of publication.

I also know a couple of professional U.S. writers who've been unable to get British publishers interested in their work; Amazon.uk is perfectly happy to take their ebooks and make them available direct, for a much larger royalty cut than they'd get from a traditional publisher.

I am much less sure how well all this would work for an unknown new writer. There seems to be at least some indication that the book-buying public is skeptical of novels that haven't been through some sort of publication process involving gatekeeping, editing, and proofreading. A writer who has a following may be able to get people to buy his/her original ebook publications; I suspect it's a lot harder for unknown newcomers to bypass the usual publication process and make a go of it.

My opinion in this regard was unfortunately confirmed by a quick run through some of the direct-to-Amazon ebooks that are available. A lot of them read like the bottom half of the slush pile - incorrect punctuation, sloppy syntax, incoherent prose, mixed-up word choices. Some of them obviously didn't even run the spelling checker before they made their deathless prose available to all comers.

There are gems in the pile, but it's not worth my time to hunt them down - not when I can spend that time browsing more e-editions of traditionally published books than I'll ever have time to read, all of which have passed some minimum editorial standard, as well as having been professionally edited and proofed. I suspect I am not the only reader to feel this way.

On the other hand, I find myself a lot more willing to take a chance on an electronic freebie or 99-cent publication by an author I don't know than I am on a $7 paperback that's going to take up shelf space and be a lot more nuisance to get rid of if I don't like it. I still want someone to pre-screen things for quality, though, and for now, that means traditional publishers.

What does this mean for writers trying to break into publication? More choices, and not enough information. Nobody really knows how all this is going to affect traditional book publishing, and it's all changing so fast that today's predictions may be totally out of date by next Wednesday. So once again, we're back to figuring out what it is you want, how much and what kind of work you're willing to do, etc.

If you really want to get in on the ground floor of exciting new technology (and are willing to take the risks that go with that sort of thing), then I'd say now is the time. Ground-floor time doesn't tend to last very long. Do bear in mind, though, that e-publishing is so new that even the e-publishers don't necessarily know the best way to publicize and sell original e-books, so you'll likely be spending a fair amount of time and effort doing publicity even if you get accepted by one of them. If you decide to self-e-publish, the work load will be even greater - you have design and layout, editing and proofing considerations as well as marketing…and your marketing efforts will have that extra resistance to overcome in readers like me who still want the kind of gatekeeping that publishers do.

If, however, you're interested in doing your own e-book simply because you're so frustrated with the traditional publishing system…well, it's not going to be any less work, or any less frustrating, really. The work and the frustration will be coming in different places, that's all - and if you are the sort of person who can tolerate those frustrations and do that work, but who can't tolerate the stuff that goes along with traditional publishing, it's a possible alternative. I wouldn't, but I'm not a risk-taker and I would purely hate doing all the promotion and marketing stuff. But that's me. Different strokes, mileage varies, etc.

Selling the first one

The book business has been changing radically every couple of years for the entire time I've been in it, but one thing does seem to remain constant: lots of people still want to break in and sell their novels, and a sizeable number of these folks either haven't got a clue where to start, or don't believe what the people in the business have been telling them.

For those of you who haven't got a clue, the basic process of selling a novel is simple but frustrating: you make a list of potential editors/publishers; you check it over, collect names and addresses, and look up each publisher's submission requirements; you send the first one whatever version of the novel they want to see (portion-and-outline, query letter, or full ms.; hard copy or electronic); and when your manuscript gets rejected, you send it to the next publisher on your list. Over and over and over, until the thing sells.

That's it. There are no short cuts. There is no trick or secret handshake. There is no password that only someone in the business can tell you. You send it out, and you keep sending it out until it sells.

So why are there a bazillion articles, discussion groups, blog entries, etc. on How To Sell Your First Novel?

Several reasons. For starters, while there is no trick, password, or big secret method, there are mistakes one can make that will likely get a manuscript bounced within nanoseconds, and a fair amount of the wordage is just reminding people not to make them. Most are common sense: don't fax the publisher your manuscript; don't send a sweet Romance novel to a publisher that only does hardboiled detective novels; don't badger editors at conventions or workshops; don't turn a page upside down somewhere in the middle; don't bring your manuscript to your brother's wedding because you heard that one of the bride's relatives was an editor and you thought you'd get him to read your novel during the reception. (Yes, that is a true story. No, the editor didn't buy it.)

Then there are the specifics of How You Make Your List of Editors, which are pretty much the same as the ones I just laid out a couple of posts ago for How To Make A List of Agents (look at who publishes the books you like; get addresses and editor names from Literary Marketplace or Writer's Market; google for their submission requirements; check them at Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors; do not pay an agent, publisher, or editor to look at your book). That can pretty much fill up a post right there, but I'm assuming that all my readers are smart enough to look at what I said about finding an agent and figure out how to apply it to finding an editor/publisher.

Those two things - trying to prevent basic mistakes and walking people through the process of making their initial list of publishers-to-send-the-manuscript-to - make up about 98% of the posts and articles by the actual published authors, actual editors, and actual agents who give advice to beginners. Unfortunately, the other 2% get most of the attention. These are the how-I-beat-the-system posts by people who used some non-standard submission technique and got lucky, and who mostly haven't been around long enough to realize that they succeeded in spite of, not because of, whatever they tried.

Because while there is no secret method, password, trick, or short cut to selling, there is such a thing as luck. The trouble is, you can't control luck. It happens when it happens. Also, it comes in two varieties, and there's never any saying whether you'll get the good sort or the bad. Luck is not something you want to depend on.

Most people know that intellectually. But it's really, really hard to keep believing that it's true when the ms. keeps going out and coming back, over and over. And all the stories about how Gone With the Wind was rejected forty times before it sold, or how Madeleine L'Engle was about to give up on writing completely when A Wrinkle In Time came back from the very last publisher (except it didn't come back, that last time) - those stories don't help much with the discouragement and frustration.

So people look for a second opinion. And they get it from those last 2% of published authors…and from all the rest of the on-line posts and articles and especially forums and discussions by people just like them who haven't sold anything yet, and who therefore don't actually know anything first-hand.

This is where you find the folks who claim that "it's all about who you know," that you must do certain things (sell short stories first, have an agent, attend conventions, go to workshops, hire an editor/book doctor, etc.), that you're better off doing something else (self-publishing; starting with the small presses; e-publishing; putting it on your web site; doing a lot of social networking and/or other pre-sale publicity, etc.), that analyzing form rejection letters will tell you something useful, that gaming the system works.

Reading this stuff will make you crazy. Because people argue very plausibly, and there is the niggling feeling that getting published can't possibly be a matter of make list, send it out, send it out again, repeat over and over til sold. There has to be something more you can do to improve your chances. Doesn't there?

Well, no, there doesn't. Because what it all boils down to is, whether your manuscript sells or not depends on somebody else's decision. Somebody you can't influence, because you probably don't know them, and even if you did, it's their job to not be influenced. Breaking your brains trying to figure out something else to do is like breaking them trying to figure out a way to guarantee you'll have good weather for Saturday's picnic. It really doesn't matter what you come up with; the weather will do whatever it does, and you'll just have wasted a bunch of time.

There are, admittedly, alternatives to traditional publishing. But that gets back to what you actually want…and anyway, it's another post.

The Great Wall of Publishing

I hadn't planned on doing more about agents, but all this talk got me thinking.

See, there's a big difference between how the publishing industry (or anything, really, but I'm talking about publishing today) looks from the outside, compared to what it looks like from the inside. Most people know that, at least intellectually, but too often, nobody stops to really consider what it means.

From the outside, it looks as if there's this big wall around the Promised Land of Getting Published, and every so often there's a door in the wall labeled "Editor at work!" In front of the doors, there's a long row of agents, and in front of them is a vast crowd of eager would-be writers, waving manuscripts and query letters. Every so often, one of the agents takes one of the manuscripts, reads a bit, and then looks up with a discerning nod. She/he waves the Chosen Author forward and escorts him/her to one of the doors, which immediately opens to let the author and agent in. A few minutes later, the agent emerges to start the process all over again.

Obviously, from this perspective, the absolute most important thing is…to get inside the wall. It's next to impossible to catch even one agent's attention, and since all of them seem to be doing pretty much the same thing, it doesn't seem to matter who the writers choose. Heck, it doesn't seem as if the writers have much of a choice; it's the agents who are doing the picking and choosing.

The view from the other side of that wall is a little different. For starters, it isn't a green and pleasant field; no, it's more like a maze of twisty little passages, all different, all interconnecting, all ending up in slightly different places. When the agent and the author walk through the door and start down a passage, what happens next can be very, very different, depending on things like how much experience the agent has, what sorts of choices the agent makes about navigating the maze, and which place the agent figures they're going to end up (which may or may not be the same place the writer was envisioning).

And the agent doesn't just walk the author through the maze to the editor(s) and then bow out. On the contrary, for a first novel, the agent/author pair may make many stops before they find an editor who's interested. Then the contract negotiations begin, and after that, keeping an eye on payments and production…all with an eye to how this is going to affect the writer's second book, and third, and so on. And then comes selling the next manuscript, and negotiating, and so on.

Publishing being the slow, lengthy process it is, the agent doesn't hover at the writer's elbow every minute. There are weeks and months when she's busy negotiating and selling and collecting things for other clients, while her new client is writing. But it's a long-term relationship…and even if you figure you'll move on to someone else after a few books, you will still be dealing with your original agent on every book that agent represented for you, probably for years, if not forever. (It depends on the contract.)

An agent who is very good at getting a writer through the publishing door, but who is lousy at everything else, is worse than no agent at all. He can do everything that Eager-Would-Be-Writer wanted, back when EWBW was outside the wall - and if that is all that he is good at, EWBW is going to be desperately unhappy, at the very least. At worst, the so-called agent can make it much, much more difficult for the newbie writer to get a career off the ground - not out of malice, maybe not even out of incompetence, but just by automatically steering the newbie writer in a direction that said writer isn't happy with.

From inside the Great Wall of Publishing, the agent isn't just a gatekeeper; in fact, being a gatekeeper is probably the smallest and least important thing he does. From inside the Great Wall, agents aren't all doing the same thing; different agents have different approaches and are good at different things. From inside, an author-agent relationship is something you're going to be stuck with for years. From inside, it pays to do your homework and be a little choosy, even if it seems to be to your disadvantage in the short run.

Because from inside, it's all about the long run.

The difficulty is always, always in communicating all this to the Eager Would-Be-Writers on the outside. Because from the outside, all that stuff sounds impossibly far away. The immediate, important problem is still Getting Inside, and it seems like the folks inside just don't understand. Meanwhile, the folks inside are equally frustrated, because all the EWBWs Just Don't Listen. (Well, obviously not - they're being told all this stuff about problems they don't even have yet; why should they care?)

I don't know that there's a solution to this (and if I knew the solution, I could probably make mega-bucks as a successful international mediator). It's part of how people are wired: getting across the river to the grove of juicy fruit trees is a lot more important right now than worrying about the snakes and scorpions and tigers that won't be a problem until we're over on the other side where they are, especially when one can see the river and the fruit, but the snakes and scorpions and tigers are all hiding. But really, planning ahead so that one brings along the insect repellent and the snakebite kit and the elephant gun is a really good thing to do beforehand. Wishing for them after one has been bitten or stung or pounced on is too little, too late.

On agents, part the second

So you have your FINISHED novel-length manuscript, and you've done some thinking about what you'd like your agent to do for you in addition to submissions, negotiations, and collecting from your publishers. Now it's time to actually start looking for an agent.

And the first thing you do is, you check around and make a list. If you have writer friends, ask who their agents are, whether they'd recommend their agents, what their agents do for them, and whether they've heard of any agents who're looking for new clients. Check Literary Marketplace to find out who is agenting your favorite authors. Make friends with your local indie bookstore owner (especially if it's a specialty store specializing in your field) - they often hear a lot of industry gossip, including stuff about agents.

If there's a writer's organization in your field, check their web site for information (the Science Fiction Writers of America have a number of excellent articles on the subject of agents and the etiquette of agenting, for instance; some other sites have lists of reputable agents). Some writer's organizations accept serious-but-as-yet-unpublished writers as affiliates (the RWA and the SCBWI, for instance); the memberships can seem pricey to a cash-strapped beginner, but if you're in this for the long haul, you'll probably be joining something eventually anyway, and they can be an invaluable source of inside information. If there's an active local chapter, you'll have a place to meet other folks who are actively working in your field, many of them professionals. (Do remember that they are not there just to give you advice and answer questions for you, though. People are a lot more willing to talk to folks who've shown up at a few meetings and offered to help with organizing the refreshments than to someone who shows up out of nowhere with a list of fifty important questions that they need answered right now, and never mind that discussion about ebook contracts you were trying to have with someone else.)

The Association of Authors Representatives is another place to check; not only do they have a nice, informative FAQ, but their members are required to subscribe to a code of ethics that they have published on their web site.

Once you have your list of named agents, check them out on Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors to eliminate scam agents and as many other problem types as you can. Google the remaining names.  Agents who are taking new clients often mention this on their web sites; also, in this day and market, you want an agent who is web-savvy enough to at least have their own web site (you'll want to decide for yourself whether a particular agent is or isn't putting enough/too much time into maintaining a web presence). You also want to check whether the agents on your list are familiar with the field(s) you're writing in; if you are trying to write hard action-adventure SF, for instance, you probably don't want an agent who sells mostly children's fantasy and paranormal romance. If you can, find out one or two of the agent's current clients and talk to them; if you can find one of the agent's ex-clients, talk to them, too. In both cases, try to consider what you're told objectively, bearing in mind that current clients are likely to be happy and ex-clients are likely to be unhappy and sometimes it's about personalities and not actually about service.

Yes, this is a lot of work. Yes, this will take a lot of time. Yes, you do all this before you ever write or email an agent. Why? Take another look at #3 under "what you can expect a legitimate agent to do" in the previous post. Your agent is going to be collecting your pay. ALL of your pay, and then sending your share along to you. Do you really want to put that kind of trust in someone you haven't thoroughly checked out?

So you have a short list of possible agents. Now what?

Ideally, you've been sending that novel-length ms. around (or at least querying) while you've been doing all this research. Ideally, some editor will have offered to buy your book while you've been busy making up your list. Ideally, you had the sense to tell said editor "That sounds really great, but give me a day or two to think" and then immediately called the first agent on your short list to ask if she/he will negotiate this contract with a view to taking you on as a client.

If your life is that ideal, it is very likely that you'll get an agent to bite within two or three tries. Having an offer on the table is not a guarantee that you will get your first-choice agent; an ethical agent with a completely full client list won't take on another client even if she really, really would like to, because she doesn't have the time - and trying to make the time will mean shortchanging not only you, but all her existing clients. But if you've done your homework as outlined above, you have several possible agencies to try.

If your life is not ideal…well, the process is pretty much identical to getting an editor: you query the agent, submit the manuscript, and wait; repeat as necessary. The only difference is that the cover letter says "…and I hope you will consider taking me on as a client" instead of "…I hope you will consider publishing my book."

And just as with editors and publishers, there aren't any reliable short cuts. If you have a friend who is a published writer, they may be willing to recommend you to their agent, which will probably get you put on top of the agent's slush pile. It will NOT get you an automatic acceptance; in some cases, it may not even get you to the top of the slush, depending on what the agent thinks of that particular author's judgment. And if you don't know the author (and I mean know them really well, not just as a casual acquaintance), don't ask for a recommendation. I personally find it annoying to have someone I've seen twice in the hall at a convention come up and demand a recommendation right now for a book I haven't even read (and probably don't have time to read right now even if that sort of approach didn't automatically make me disinclined to even look at the first page, which it does). I've been known to recommend people to my agent, and she's taken a few of them on, but in most cases I was the one who offered, based on what I'd seen of someone's work. The one time I recall being asked, it was a) someone I'd known for several years, b) whose work I loved (and she knew it), and c) a general letter of recommendation, not a specific referral to my agent (who, sadly, wasn't taking clients at the time).

A few last points: even in this day of Internets, most agents live within a short driving distance from New York/Boston (if they're book agents) or Los Angeles (if they're screenplay agents). This doesn't mean you should ignore the perfect person who lives in backwoods Montana, but it does mean you should be a little more careful to ask around before you sign on with such a person, to make sure they are legit and have the experience they need to run an literary agency at a distance from their primary customers. If you can arrange to meet with a prospective agent at a convention or some other place you're going to be, by all means do so; if not, a phone call once you're at the negotiation stage is definitely indicated. A lot of writer/agent agreements fall apart because of personality clashes that might have been dodged if the two people involved had actually talked to one another for a few minutes before entering an agreement.

On agents, Part the first

So Julie D. asked: Could I put in a request for a post about finding the right agent as a first time author, and/or whether self-publishing electronically is a bad idea?

It's actually two questions, but I'm going to start with the question about agents. Actually, let's start before agents: Do you have a novel-length manuscript to market? If not, don't bother trying to attract an agent. Skip reading this post and go finish your book.

If you have nothing to sell, an agent can do nothing for you, and they aren't going to use up a spot on their client list on the off chance that you'll someday produce something worth their time. Also, if you are writing short stories, you won't be able to get an agent to handle them. Period, the end. Even when I was starting off back in the early 1980s, the only writers I knew whose agents handled their short stories were people who'd were still with the same agent they'd had since the 1960s or early 70s…and that was only because they were grandfathered in.

So you have a novel-length manuscript to market and you want, not just an agent, but the right agent. What do you do next?

Well, the very first thing you have to do is decide what you want in an agent and why. This means a) finding out a little about what agents normally do and don't do for their clients, and b) thinking about why you write, what you want out of your writing, and which of the things you found out about under a) are things you want/need.

B) is something you have to do for yourself; nobody's list is going to be quite like anyone else's. (More on that in a minute.) So we begin with a) - what agents normally do.

There are three main things that you can expect a legitimate, reliable agent to do: 1) submit novel-length manuscripts to markets, 2) negotiate contracts on your behalf, and 3) collect your payments from your publisher(s) and send them to you, less the agent's cut. Your primary agent (or their office) will handle these three things him/herself for the domestic market; for subrights (foreign language translations, movies, merchandising, etc.) the primary agent often uses subagents specializing in those areas.

To the best of my knowledge, current rates as of this writing are 15% for first rights, 25+% for subrights (varying depending on why kind of subrights and what the subagent's percentage is). In other words, the primary agent takes 15% of whatever the publisher pays you, when the publisher pays you. Under no circumstances do legitimate agents charge a reading fee or ask for an up-front payment (though some agents do ask for expense reimbursement for things like overseas postage, phone calls, and photocopying. These expenses should be minimal - even before email and Skype, I don't recall ever paying more than about $50 for that in any given year - and they should be clearly itemized). This stuff should all be laid out in the agency contract.

In addition to the three basics (submission, negotiation, collection), agents can and do perform a variety of other functions, depending on their temperament and inclination. Some provide various levels of editing for their clients, ranging from a quick wash-and-brush copyedit to agents who act almost as co-authors or packagers starting from the first glimmer of the developing idea. Some provide in-depth career advice. Some are well-known in the business for their foreign contacts, or for their ties in Hollywood. Some are really good at hand-holding nervous writers (and most of us get nervous at some point in the process). There are also different approaches to managing an author's career: some agents make it a policy to ask publishers for big advances; others, for retaining the maximum number of subrights; still others, for publicity packages or author promotion opportunities.

Everything mentioned above, beyond the three basics, is optional at the discretion of the agent. I'm emphasizing this because a lot of folks go into their agent-hunt with really unrealistic expectations, which can end up with bad feelings on all sides. Know what you must have, what would be nice to have, and what you absolutely don't want an agent to do for you, ever.

Finally, there's the question of ethics. I'm not talking here about the problem of scam agents who are out to soak authors for all they are worth; if you do Part II of the agent hunt right, you'll discard most of the scammers right off. I'm talking here about the author/agent relationship with publishers. This is, in my opinion, an area where it is vital to have a match between author and agent. Whether it's the agent who's willing to push the envelope and the author who's determined to be a goody-two-shoes, or vice versa, the fact remains:  if you aren't in agreement with your agent about which moves are ethical and which ones aren't, you're probably going to be very unhappy, very quickly.

These extra questions are where b), above, comes in. For instance, speaking for myself, I don't want my agent editing my work. I don't expect a lot of career advice, either, certainly not of the "XYZ is hot now; you should drop everything and write that" variety. I do welcome input when I'm trying to decide what to write next (of the "which of these six ideas do you think you can sell right now?" sort). I don't expect financial advice. I do like a certain amount of reassurance when I'm worried, and especially when I'm late on a deadline. I do want to have the occasional in-depth discussion about what the best next move would be - hold the rights for the backlist and try to resell them, or start marketing them as e-books on our own? Concentrate on increasing foreign translation sales, or put more effort into publicity for initial publication and hope the foreign rights sales follow? And I'm not interested in pushing the boundaries of what I consider fair and reasonable in my business dealings.

Other writers have different lists; you likely will, too. The point is to know what, if anything, you need/want, over and above someone to submit, negotiate, and collect for you. Once you have that, you're finally ready to start agent-hunting.

At which point I realized that this post is WAY too long for one thing, so part the second will come on Wednesday. I had a lot more to say about this than I thought I did.

Now what?

So the first draft of The Far West is done at last, turned in a bit over two weeks ago, and I'm past the first walking-around-in-a-daze bit where I spend all my time feeling as if I ought to be finishing the book and then remembering that no, I'm actually done until the editorial revision requests arrive. I already know two fairly important things that need fixing (the current climax is a bit of bait-and-switch, and also not nearly as dramatic as it would be if I can rearrange it a bit so as to have my two different Solutions To Big Problems happen in one giant emergency, instead of two; also, the final chapter sort of dribbles off into "…and then we got home," instead of, you know, actually ending), but those can wait until I've recovered a bit, run the draft through my new crit group, and have the editorial requests in hand.

Which means I am now looking at my huge list of Possible Things To Write and contemplating which idea(s) to start poking at. My agent has weighed in, and so have several of my friends; they're all pretty much in agreement, so unless my publisher gets really demanding about some other possibility (and does so pretty soon, before I'm totally committed to this project), I probably have settled on The Next Thing.

And what it started with was this:

No shit, there I was –

What, you don't like the opening?  Listen, it's fairy tales that start "once upon a time."  War stories are supposed to start "No shit, there I was."

So, no shit, there I was, thread in one hand, needle in the other, and a silk bolt worth four thousand isiri spread over my lap, when -

Now what?  Oh, you think this doesn't sound much like a war story?

In the last few weeks of thinking about this rather minimal story-seed, I added a McGuffin (although I have no idea yet why it's significant), a notion of what happens in the first half of the opening scene, and the barest hint of a plot thread. Oh, and two, count them, two secondary characters, one of whom probably won't be around for more than two chapters, tops.

This is not much to start writing a novel with.

I could just take what I have and keep writing for a while, to see what happens and what I come up with. I already know, however, that this seldom works well for me, so I'm not going to start by trying that. I need to develop what I have a bit more, until it gets past the Critical Mass point and really starts rolling, and that means poking at what I have until new things show up and start to gel.

The question always is, where and how to poke. Up until last weekend, the obvious point to poke at this story was the characters. The story needs more of them, and I need to know more about the few that I already have (well, about two of them, anyway. I don't think I really need to know much more about the one who's disappearing within two or three chapters). And characters and what they want or need (but can't have…yet) are the heart of most stories.

So I've been thinking about these people off and on: who they are, where they come from, what they're each trying to do and why. I was thinking about the second character, the one who's not the protagonist but who will be a major player, and why that was happening…and I figured out something about the McGuffin. And suddenly, I had a structure for my plot.

As soon as this happened, where I need to poke at this idea changed. See, structure is fundamental for me. It's what goes under the plot, to hold it up. What I need to know next, for me to be able to finish that first scene, is what I'm going to build on that structure and why. Once I know that, I'll know who the rest of the characters have to be and what they'll have to do. Undoubtedly, that will change the plot - once I have characters and they start acting and interacting, they always end up changing the plot details. That's what makes it all work, for me.

But the characters and incidents won't change the structure. That's solid. I know how many incidents I need, and the effect they have on the McGuffin; now I need to figure out what they are and why the villain set things up this way and how they're going to affect my characters. (I'm not too worried about how my heroine is going to mess up the villain's plans; after that opening, I have no doubt she'll think of something.) Oh, and I need a villain…the structure requires one.

If this were going to be a different book, or if it had started with a different set of bits - say, a well-developed setting and a bunch of characters, but no plot or structure - I'd probably have started by poking at the characters. The point isn't how I'm doing this, or that anyone else ought to work the same way. The point here is: 1) The basic idea needs a lot more development before I can make much forward progress; 2) The development doesn't just happen; it requires poking; 3) Where I poke keeps changing, depending on how much I've already figured out.

Changing where I poke at ideas is part of the process of developing them. I don't make up a list of characters, then figure out everything about their backgrounds and personalities and desires before I ever start thinking about plot or setting. I think about a character for a bit, then about the McGuffin for a bit, then about a different character, then maybe about the setting/history/culture.

This morning, in conversation with Beth-my-walking-buddy, I got a handle on the villain, and the whole plot changed. So did one of my two supposedly-known secondary characters. The structure's still the same, though, and so's the McGuffin; a little more background, and I'll be ready to start writing my first totally-wrong outline.

(Julie D, I'll put up the post on agents on Sunday, when I've had a chance to think about it a bit more.)

Support systems

One of the things 4th Street Fantasy Con did this year was a workshop on writers' support systems, which I participated in. I did a lot of thinking about the topic, and it occurred to me that most of my blog readers probably weren't there and could use the information (and besides, it means I have another three days before I have to come up with another blog topic). So here's the quick summary version of what I had to say.

Everybody needs support systems. There's simply too much to do for any one person to be able to take care of all of it, all the time. Most of the writers I know think of their support systems in terms of their friends and families, and pretty much take whatever comes, but I think there are more effective ways of looking at it.

First off, there are multiple levels of support systems, and they exist on both professional and non-professional, formal and informal areas. Too many people don't look at their whole support system, or they look at various pieces of it in isolation; as a result, they don't get maximum benefit from whatever they've put together.

The other thing to remember is that no one piece of any support system is absolutely necessary in all cases. For instance, most authors consider an agent essential, but there are still some who handle their own contracts and negotiations. Nobody I know of does it all, but everyone I know has a different subset of the possible support network. In other words, you have to build your support system according to what you, personally, need other people to help you do.

The most obvious component of a writing support system is the professional one. By this I mean the group of paid professionals who handle various aspects of the writer's business; editor, agent, accountant, publicist, lawyer, webmaster/tech support, and personal assistant being the obvious possibilities. Some, like the editor, are usually paid by the publisher and can change without notice; others, like the writer's agent and accountant, are people the writer has to hire for him/herself. Hardly anyone I know has all these people working for them, though nearly all have the first three. One or two have substituted "lawyer + personal expertise" for "agent." There are noticeably more writers who've hired a personal publicist these days than there were when I was starting out, but I don't think it's to the point yet where a majority of lead writers have them, let alone the folks who're still in the midlist.

A key consideration for paid professional support is, of course, how much a writer can afford. Another is what the writer's personal skills and interests are like. I know several writers who love doing self-promotion (and who are very good at it), but who would never even consider doing their own contract negotiations; I also know writers who would far rather pay a publicist than an agent. It depends on what one is good at.

Paid professionals are obviously part of a writer's formal support system, but writers often have a lot of unpaid support that I'd call formal but not professional (at least, not professional in quite the same sense). I'd put critique groups in this class; they come in varying degrees of formality, but it is rare (in my experience) for a group to be composed of professional critics, or even teachers. Writers' organizations like SFWA and the Author's Guild also go here (yes, they're made up of professional writers, largely, but the members don't join in order to write; they join to find out what's going on in publishing and maybe do some lobbying or put pressure on publishers to give writers a better deal…and most members aren't professional lobbyists or lawyers), and maybe things like workshops or writer's retreats.

Then there's the informal support system, which is what most people think of first when I bring up this subject. These are the friends who volunteer to help figure out what's wrong with the computer software, who willingly provide in-depth knowledge of Russian sleigh construction or Babylonian history or the development of hieroglyphics, who cat-sit, who drag the writer out on sanity breaks, who offer rides when the writer's car breaks down, and who listen patiently to endless complaints about insensitive editors and unperceptive readers. These are the family members who take an extra turn making dinner or doing laundry or running household errands when the writer is working against deadline.

But there is also an informal support system composed of one's fellow writers. This is the classic "networking" beloved of big corporations and career counselors. Among professional writers, it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish from gossip. These are the people you call when you are faced with some professional task you have never done before, like giving a speech or putting on a writing workshop, and you are desperate for someone to tell you what to expect. They're the people you ask when you get an out-of-the-blue proposal from a publisher or other company you've never heard of before, for something your agent won't handle, and you want to know whether it's legitimate and/or a good idea. They're the folks you take out to dinner when you're having trouble with first-person viewpoint or with the plot twist in Chapter 13, and you need a new-but-well-informed alternate perspective.

The informal support systems, professional or not, generally work on a reciprocal basis: you feed my cats when I'm out of town, and I'll mow your lawn when you go on vacation next month. You listen to me whinge about viewpoint, and I'll listen to your complaints about plot. You give me advice about hiring an agent or running a panel at a convention, and I'll tell you about the nifty new service the library just started or give you a referral to the tax accountant I just found. It isn't quite that tit-for-tat, of course; sometimes I'll have to rely very heavily on my informal support without giving much back, while other times I'll be the one helping everyone else out without much in the way of return. Over the years, it averages out…and if it doesn't, the folks who take, demand, or expect support without ever giving anything back eventually discover that their informal support system has withered away.

Obstacles

One of the supposed truisms of writing is that a good plot must have conflict. And while this is, in fact, true, I've seen it misinterpreted so many times that I thought I'd talk about it a little.

The problem always seems to come in the definition of "conflict." We hear that word so often on the news that in many people's minds it seems to have become irretrievably associated with violent physical conflict between two or more people. And since there are a good many folks who don't want to write about violence or physical conflict, the near-universal insistence on conflict as a part of story can become an insurmountable obstacle.

But as I've said before, there are more kinds of conflict than the straightforward physical I-punch/stab/shoot-you, you-punch/stab/shoot-me sort. Emotional conflict is frequently far more powerful, story-wise, than physical conflict; social/political conflict can be just as gripping (and can also be far easier for a reader to identify with, as it's far more common in most people's daily lives than being punched, stabbed, or shot at).

More and more, though, I've come to believe that the thing some folks can't wrap their brains around isn't the definition or the possible types of conflict; it's the word itself. It just carries too much emotional freight. Also, it is inaccurate.

Stories do not require conflict in order to be effective. What they do require is struggle - steadily increasing effort on the part of the protagonist to overcome one or more obstacles, whether internal or external.

A two-block walk to the grocery store isn't a struggle for most people, and therefore doesn't make for a terribly interesting story. Put some obstacles in the way - serious ones that the protagonist is going to have considerable trouble overcoming - and it becomes a lot more interesting.

And that's where the trouble begins. The first obstacle that occurs to most writers is usually another person - a gang of bullies after the protagonist's lunch money; a mugger in an alley; a kidnapper; a robber holding the store clerk at gunpoint. If the author is really going for something big, they'll set the scene in a war zone somewhere, so that the two block walk becomes a matter of dodging bullets, mines, or bombs.

But that two-block walk can be just as dramatic (and perhaps even more powerful) if the obstacle the protagonist faces is not another person. You can make a perfectly good story out of an agoraphobe taking his first trip outside his home in ten years, or from the first post-accident walk by someone trying out her new artificial leg, or even from someone dreading they'll screw up on their first day at a desperately needed job working at the grocery store.

The key words are obstacle and struggle. An obstacle is something that the protagonist is going to have serious trouble getting past. Again, people are the most common, but there are plenty of others. An animal, a memory, an emotion, extreme weather (such as a hurricane or tornado or blizzard), difficult terrain, physical incapacity…there are plenty of things to choose from.

The second point is that getting past the obstacle has to be difficult for the protagonist. Years ago, my then-husband and I went on vacation to the Canadian Rockies. Our second morning, we were hiking in the backwoods when we reached a rock face of maybe ten feet. My husband climbed it easily; I got stuck halfway and could not make further progress. My husband was five inches taller than I was; the handhold that he could reach to get past that point was a good four inches beyond my absolute farthest ability to stretch. What was barely an obstacle at all for him was an insurmountable block for me.

Which brings me to the next point: the reader has to understand just how difficult the obstacle is for the protagonist, and why. This is, I think, one of the main reasons most people opt for physical violence/conflict as their struggle-of-choice - they don't have to worry about explaining why it's hard or dangerous for their protagonist. If I'd left out the next-to-last sentence in the paragraph above, everyone would have gone "Huh?" Because without knowing about the five-inch height differential, there seems to be no reason why I should have gotten stuck when he didn't. Unless the reader knows that the protagonist is an agoraphobe or a desperate new hire, the walk to the grocery store won't seem particularly tense to the reader even if the protagonist is flinching at every bush. The story might work anyway - giving people a mystery ("Why is this guy acting so scared?") can be as good as giving the protagonist an obstacle, if the payoff is right - but the chances are a lot lower.

Multitasking mansucripts

In the two years and a bit that I've been producing this blog, I've developed a rule of thumb that goes "Any time three people ask me more or less the same question in the same week, it's probably time to do a post on the topic." Last weekend, as I said, I was at a convention, so I got lots of material, but this post's topic came up first and most often.

More specifically, I had a number of people ask "Should I work on one story at a time, or should I work on a bunch of them at once? What do you do?"

Anybody who's read this blog for more than about a post can probably figure out that my short answer is "You should do what works for you. What works for me is irrelevant." But the fact that people kept coming up and asking makes me think that more discussion is warranted. (That, or I'm just not convincing when I say "Do what works for you.")

The longer answer requires consideration of two things: why the writer wants to work on more than one story at a time (or only one), and what the writer needs in order to improve his/her writing. In other words, there still isn't a one-size-fits-all answer (and is anyone really surprised to hear me say that?), but there are some ways of looking at oneself and one's work that can aid one in making the initial decision.

First, there's what the writer wants to do and why. Generally, I meet three kinds of writers who really, really want to be told "Sure, go ahead, start as many projects as you want." The first kind of writer loves doing the beginning. That's the fun part; it's where they get to make up all sorts of cool new stuff, and they don't have to worry about tying it together. These are the writers who get six to ten chapters in, hit the first big wall, and immediately start a new book. After all, they reason, at least they're writing something.

The trouble is, these folks clearly know in their hearts that this isn't working; that's why they're asking me this question in the first place. They have seventeen different first-six-chapters scattered around their hard drives…and they've never once gotten any further, let alone actually finished something. Why they think I'm going to say "Sure, keep doing that" is beyond me, but that's evidently what they expect, because they get kind of perturbed when I ask "And is that working for you? No? Then cut it out!"

The second kind of writer who comes to me with this question is the one who is spinning off ideas faster than she/he can keep up with. They want to work on eight projects at once because they're afraid they'll lose a brilliant idea if they don't write it down immediately. They're all about the "Oooo, shiney!"

This group is a bit harder to sort out, because for some of them, working on multiple projects at once does work. (The definition of "it works" in this context is: these people finish stories on a regular basis, even if they don't finish absolutely everything they start, and the number of projects they finish keeps growing compared to the number of projects they don't.) If that sounds like you…then go to your word processor or your "completed works" file and count up how many things you have finished, how many are abandoned, and how many you're working on right now. If the number of abandoned works is two or more times as many as the number of finished works, you should seriously consider cutting back on your number of projects, because this system may not actually be working quite as well as you think it is.

Those for whom the multiple-project system works well cite the lack of down time as a plus - when they get stuck on one project, they can move on to another while that one is cooking, instead of having to waste days or weeks while they wait for the first project to get un-stuck. This can work well…or it can be distracting. Mileage varies; in this case, one has to be honest with oneself about what is working and what isn't.

The third group that comes up and asks about this are the ones looking for a second opinion. Somebody told them "You should work on multiple projects! It works great for me!" and they don't really want to, or else they've been told that they shouldn't ever be working on more than one thing at a time, and they really want to. So first I have to give the "There are no rules except that you have to write and what you write has to work" speech, and then we have to sort out why they don't want to follow whichever bit of advice they've been getting and whether it is or is not a good thing to do for them.

Because the second piece of the decision depends on what the particular, individual writer needs in order to write publishable stuff…and this may very well not be what that writer wants to be doing. As should be obvious from the above discussion, there are quite a few writers who would really like to work on multiple projects, but for whom this is not going to be a particularly fruitful way of proceeding. Also, even writers for whom multiple projects have worked for years and years occasionally find themselves with a book or story that absolutely requires them to focus on it, and only on it. Again, if the hard drive is littered with abandoned starts-of-stories, whatever you're doing probably isn't working. Try something else.

And trust your instincts; if you know in your heart that you aren't being as productive as you'd like, but you keep working the same old way because it's more fun, then admit it to yourself. You don't have to do anything about it if you really don't want to. Honestly, nobody's making you do any of this.