Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 50

How Acquisitions Editors Think

Here is an oldie but goodie from the www.storygrid.com archives.  There are many reasons the system is the way it is and you need to know just how difficult it is for acquisitions editors to balance their love of the art and the necessity of feeding the machine.

Here is how editors think about and sort projects:

Principle Number One
Don’t Even Think About Reading Unsolicited Submissions.

This means if you get something from an agent (or God forbid an un-agented writer) that you did not ask to see, or don’t know, it’s Slush.

Slush is the stuff assistants have to reject with form letters (or just throw out unanswered) in their “free” time. And assistants have no free time. Even weekends are filled with reading and, in my case when I was a baby editor, background work necessary to learn the craft.

So an “agent” who does not have a direct line to an editor is worse than useless.

They have no more clout than a writer does who sends his work over the transom.

If your agent cannot get an editor to return a phone call or email, he’s not an agent. He’s an actor. He may be a wonderful actor, but he will never bring you a deal.

Principle Number Two
You Must Break Down Legitimate Agent Submissions Into Two Piles.
The First Pile is Stuff that Excites You.  This Is What You Read First:

These are agent pitches that strike a chord with the editor. The editor likes the idea of them and the commercial potential of them. Has already started putting together an in-house pitch in his mind after the call with the agent. Is thinking this could be the book to fill that hole in Fall 2017. Don’t forget these people have to keep feeding the monster (the schedule for the next six seasons).

He may even just like the agent, having worked with her before and knowing that she’s as much of a story nerd as he is. She’ll call in favors and help when the book comes out. She gives him some security. He knows that she’s not just going to sell the thing and run away.

If you have one submission a week like this, you are a lucky editor. Usually you get maybe just one or two a month. But these are the ones that make up for all of the other stuff you put up with. These are the projects that keep you directed and sane.

The Second Pile Are Ass-covering Submissions from Big Agents and/or Buzzy Projects.  These You Read Second:

These are projects that may not be all that exciting to the editor, but they need to be read and responded to quickly so that the editor doesn’t piss off a powerful agent.  Part of what agents sell to potential clients isn’t just getting a deal.  It’s getting an answer!  Quickly! So you if take your good old time getting back to Esther Newberg, you can count on her not being so enamored with you.

Or in many cases, this kind of material will slide downhill from the editor’s publisher’s desk. (The boss who approves the editor’s salary and expenses).

Publishers always do this. They agree to personally take on a submission, especially if it’s an exclusive hush-hush one from someone like Tina Bennett’s old bosses at Janklow & Nesbit. And then they’ll pass it to the chump underneath them.

Why?

Because the publisher doesn’t want to damage his or her relationships with sources of the best material.

Better to blame the senior editor who works for them than to take responsibility for rejecting the “great opportunity to pick up a bestselling writer (who has been overpaid and is shedding readers faster than Walter Payton shed tacklers )” themselves.

Hey, I thought it was terrific, but I have to listen to my staff or I’ll have to do all of this crap myself…hey hey…you understand…how about Petrossian at 1?

What happens if the editor actually loves the project that gets passed to him and tells the publisher they should acquire the book?

Well, if the book works (it’s a commercial success), then the publisher takes the credit for “getting it in.” And if it doesn’t work, the editor gets the blame for having “poor judgment” or worse “screwing the book up with his editorial demands.”

You understand that I’m taking these scenarios to the most extreme poles, right? Some publishers are mensches who bend over backwards to be upfront with an editor (Dude, take one for the team on this one and I’ll let you buy that short story collection you’ve been pestering me about).

While others aren’t.

The publishers who throw editors under the bus don’t do it because they’re inherently evil. At least I hope not.

They do it because they’re scared.

They simply have no vision. And most likely, they’ve reached their positions through a combo of personality, luck and politicking. See my description in the last post about Story enthusiast poseurs…

They don’t trust themselves (there is no “there” there of craft that they rely on to support their opinions) so why in the Hell would they trust you?

And also remember, just to put even more seasoning into this absurd industrial stew, that literary gravitas is not a black and white thing.

Few in the business are 100% Rain Man Craftsmen or 100% Enthusiastic Bullshit Artists.

Everyone has at least a little craft to go with their dominant BS or a little BS to go with their heavy craft. There’s a spectrum of intellectual chicanery, which makes it hard to pinpoint any one member of the community in one’s own mind. You don’t really know who your peeps are. Are they in it for the craft or for the sizzle?

Truth be told, you’re not even sure where you fit on that line. Some days you feel like Maxwell Perkins, others you feel like Clifford Irving. The True Gen versus the Fraud is the bipolar mindset of the editor. To say it gets hinky is an understatement.

Which all leads to a certain base level of editorial paranoia. Trusting the funny gal down the hall, no matter her patter and “team spirit,” is often something one does at one’s own peril.

She’s your supportive friend on Monday and on Tuesday she stabs you in the back with no warning about her upcoming “sorry but I’m just being honest” desecration of the project you’ve been trying to get through the editorial board for months.

Ah the good old days…

The other submissions in this cover-your-ass category are projects being talked up by foreign and film scouts. Here’s an old Observer piece about scouts.

There are a lot of scouts who serve as the royal court for the publishing kingdom. These people are usually very nice—especially if you’re an editor who just got a big job—and they are real artists at making “connections” with powerful editors, publishers and agents.

But they are not your friends.

They are in the business of getting inside information, which production companies and foreign publishers literally pay monthly retainers to be privy to.

Don’t forget that if you are an editor or agent.

Confiding anything personal to them will prove fodder for industry gossip. Don’t talk about your attraction to the art director or how many mai tais you had at lunch or how fat you feel. Unless you’re an even better Machiavelli than they…just be cordial and respectful. They work their asses off and can squash you like a bug.

And always remember to pay your debts.

If you need information and they give it to you, you owe them. It’s a two way street. Don’t be Mr. Ethics after one of these people saves your ass. Pay up and shut up.

At one time or another, every editor and every agent will find themselves in a very tight spot where they need (you don’t really need to but you think you do) to trade on information. Don’t try and wiggle out of giving up the goodies after you’ve risen to Editor-in-Chief by eating off someone else’s dessert tray.

Getting on the wrong side of a powerful scout can really sabotage your career. These scouts have the ears of everyone in the business and if they start talking smack about you or worse still…your books!…it’s impossible to fight back.

Bad juju for a book often has a lot to do with editor as much as the writer. Don’t get a book killed (no sell-in, no reviews, no nothing) because you spilled a liter of Lowenbrau on Lauri Del Commune at the Franfurter hof and then pulled a John Riggins “Loosen up Lauri Baby!” just before you passed out underneath FSG’s goodie bag table. (My sincerest apologies again, Lauri)

So if you hear about a book in your purview from a scout (or that funny colleague down the hall who heard about it from her scout friend) that is on submission elsewhere and you don’t have it (the agent did not send it to you in her first round of submissions, GASP!)…you’ll find yourself doing that thing that no editor wants to do.

You’ll have to call the agent for the project and ask her to officially submit it to you.

Mind you, you don’t do this if you can get the book “slipped” to you unofficially…which means a scout does you a favor. She has a copy of it, makes one for you and sends it over under the radar. You prostrate yourself to the scout to get the book because you don’t want to call and ask the agent for the submission if it’s not something you’d want to acquire.

So you read it without the agent knowing before you actually ask to see it…

Why all the subterfuge?

When an agent doesn’t include you in her first round of submissions, it means one of two things, 1) she’s mad at you for rejecting something in the past or 2) she doesn’t think you have the “weight” to get enough support to acquire it.

Number one is bad enough, but it’s fixable. You just kiss ass until you hate yourself and the agent will usually fold and send it to you. The last thing you want to do, though, is beg for her to send it to you and then reject it…so you worm around and find a way to read it before you make that call. If you love it, then no harm no foul. You make the call asking the agent to submit it to you because you know already that you love the manuscript.  You’re going to make her happy by supporting the book and bring her an offer, so making the call isn’t that hard.

You wait for it to come in officially, and then the next day you call back and tell the agent you love it and want to get some other reads in-house and move it on down the acquisitions line.

That smooths things over good.

But if it’s number two (the agent thinks you’re a light weight), your heart literally stops for a few beats.

Especially if the agent actually tells you…I just don’t think you have the support over there to get this kind of deal done, so I sent it to Eve Harrington!

Guess who Eve Harrington is? …that funny gal down the hall who used to be your friend who then sabotaged you in the editorial meeting by “just being honest” and then chatted up your best agent contact in a way to get her to send her the book everyone is talking about.  Then she told you about the book that you didn’t get in without telling you she had it in.  You panic and scramble to read the thing under the radar…and then call the agent who then tells you that she sent it to the very person who freaked you out in the first place…

See how this can get really painful?  And petty?  And how the writer of the very book everyone is fighting over becomes like the least important element in the entire drama?

If an editor ever hears that an agent doesn’t think he has the weight to get seven figures to buy her projects, and thank God I got out of the big houses before I heard that, he better start planning for the worst. A hard rain is gonna fall and he better start hunting for a big umbrella.

What’s the umbrella?  It’s craft.  Learn the craft and all of this drama reveals itself for what it really is…Bullshit.

So that’s how editors sort submissions. Lots of fun huh?

Good information to know if you’re an agent, though.

So what do you do with that knowledge? Like practically?

That’s next.

The Artist’s Journey, #11

Welcome to the continuation of our serialization of The Artist’s Journey. To revisit any of the previous chapters, click on these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.

 

47. EACH TRIP FROM LEVEL #1 TO LEVEL #2 IS A HERO’S JOURNEY 

We said a few chapters ago that the artist’s skill is to shuttle from the material sphere to the sphere of potentiality and back again.

Each one of those trips is a hero’s journey.

Jay-Z in his studio may complete ten thousand hero’s journeys a day.

You do it too.

Ordinary world to Call to Refusal of Call to Threshold to Extraordinary World and back again.

Watch yourself today as you bang out your five hundred words. You’ll see the hero’s journey over and over.

 

48.THE HERO’S JOURNEY IS REHEARSAL FOR THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY

Our real-life hero’s journey—the passage we’ve undergone in the material universe that has carried us to our “return home”—is practice for the next stage in our maturation, the artist’s journey.

Write your first novel. Produce your first movie. Yeah, it’s true that you’ve never done it before. But you’ve had practice. You’ve already endured all the trials and passed through all the stages.

You did it on your hero’s journey.

You crossed the threshold, you encountered allies and enemies, you entered the inmost cave, you’ve died and been reborn. And you’ve made your return safely to the place from which you set forth.

The stages of the artist’s journey are the same stages you’ve rehearsed (even though you had no idea that that was what you were doing) on your hero’s journey.

What, then, are the stages of the artist’s journey?

What is their nature?

How are they different from the stages of the hero’s journey?

 

B   O   O   K     F   I   V  E
S T A G E S  O F  T H E  A R T I S T’ S  J O U R N E Y

 

49. THE MYSTICAL AND THE MATTER OF FACT

The artist’s journey is enacted on two opposite but linked planes: the mystical and the matter of fact.

(Or, if you prefer, left brain/right brain, Dionysian/Apollonian.)

The artist’s journey is an alchemical admixture of the airy-fairy and the workshop-practical. On the one hand we’re teaching ourselves to surrender to the moment, to inspiration, to intuition, to imagination. On the other, a huge part of our day is about discovering and mastering the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how to reproduce in the real world the stuff we have encountered in the sphere of the imagination.

Monet spent years figuring out how to affix blobs of paint to canvas in such a way as to produce the illusion of sunlight reflecting off the surface of water. This was blue-collar labor. Trial and error. Seen from the outside, it was the most tedious, excruciating activity imaginable.

Yet at the same time the process was absolutely mystical. What went on in Monet’s mind as he wrestled month after month, year after year with a problem that had bewitched and confounded painters for centuries?

Monet, like every artist, was working simultaneously on both planes.

On the Dionysian he could see in his mind’s eye exactly how sunlight bounced off the curvilinear perimeter of a lily pad. On the Apollonian he was thinking, “If I apply a double-thick blob of gentian violet with a medium pallet knife and twist it left-handed so that the weightiest section of the blob accretes on the right side, then studio daylight reflecting off that, in juxtaposition to the 40/60 mixture of puce and fuchsia of the adjacent blob, should create the exact illusion I’m seeking.”

Like an alchemist laboring to turn lead into gold, the artist operates simultaneously on the planes of the ethereal and the elemental.

50. THE MATTER OF FACT PLANE OF THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY

In the sphere we call the artist’s journey, we “get down to business.” Crazy-time is over. We have wasted enough years avoiding our calling.

Our aim now is to discover our gift, our voice, our subject. We know now that we have one—and we are driven passionately to identify it and to bring it forth in the real world with optimum wallop.

Here’s Rosanne Cash in her extraordinary memoir Composed.

From that moment I changed the way I approached songwriting, I changed how I sang, I changed my work ethic, and I changed my life. The strong desire to become a better songwriter dovetailed perfectly with my budding friendship with John Stewart, who had written “Runaway Train” for [my album] King’s Record Shop. John encouraged me to expand the subject matter in my songs, as well as my choice of language and my mind. I played new songs for him and if he thought it was too “perfect,” which was anathema to him, he would say, over and over, “but where the MADNESS, Rose?” I started looking for the madness. I sought out Marge Rivingston in New York to work on my voice and I started training, as if I were a runner, in both technique and stamina. Oddly, it turned out that Marge also worked with Linda [Ronstadt], which I didn’t know when I sought her out. I started paying attention to everything, both in the studio and out. If I found myself drifting off into daydreams—an old, entrenched habit—I pulled myself awake and back into the present moment. Instead of toying with ideas, I examined them, and I tested the authenticity of my instincts musically. I stretched my attention span consciously. I read books on writing by Natalie Goldberg and Carolyn Heilbrun and began to self-edit and refine more, and went deeper into every process involved with writing and musicianship. I realized I had earlier been working only within my known range—never pushing far outside the comfort zone to take any real risks … I started painting, so I could learn about the absence of words and sound, and why I needed them. I took painting lessons from Sharon Orr, who had a series of classes at a studio called Art and Soul.

I remained completely humbled by the dream [that had been the epiphanal moment at the end of my hero’s journey], and it stayed with me through every waking hour of completing King’s Record Shop… I vowed the next record would reflect my new commitment. Rodney [Crowell, my then-husband] was at the top of his game as a record producer, but I had come to feel curiously like a neophyte in the studio after the dream. Everything seemed new, frightening, and tremendously exciting.

Here’s James Rhodes, the English concert pianist:

Admittedly I went a little extreme—no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35 lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninoff at Carnegie Hall.

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be “good enough.”

On the matter-of-fact plane we set ourselves the task, not just of learning our craft, but also of mastering those professional capacities that are even more basic. In the succeeding chapters we’ll attempt an index of these fundamental skills.

Secrets of the Creative Brain

In this week’s “Writing Wednesdays” post (“The Artist’s Journey, #10“), Steve discussed the two worlds in which artists reside, and how artists break through from one world to the other to access ideas and inspiration. But . . .

How does that happen?

Why does it happen?

AND, why can’t we make it happen on demand?

When I’m sitting in front of my computer, desperately trying to deep six Writer’s Block, why can’t I flip a mental switch to obliterate the bastard?

Why, instead, do ideas emerge when I’m teetering between the moon and the sun, when I’m taking a long shower, or driving along a stretch of highway, generally just zoning out?

Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D, has some answers. In her work as a neuroscientist and psychiatrist she has spent decades researching creativity and working with leading artists and scientists, to include Kurt Vonnegut, George Lucas, Jane Smiley, and William Thurston.

In an article she wrote for The Atlantic a few years ago, titled “Secrets of the Creative Brain,” you’ll find:

“When eureka moments occur, they tend to be precipitated by long periods of preparation and incubation, and to strike when the mind is relaxed.”

This would be an argument for studying and practicing—for “preparation and incubation.”

For example, Steve was reading the Bhagavad Gita when The Legend of Bagger Vance came to him, but in order for him to have the idea of using “the structure of the Gita to write a story about golf” he had to know the Gita and golf. If you’ve read The Authentic Swing, you know Steve used to read the Bhagavad Gita on airplanes and that he started caddying when he was 11. By the time the idea for The Legend of Bagger Vance hit him, he had a few decades of “preparation and incubation” under his belt.

You’ll find the same with other writers.

Ray Bradbury wrote of his experiences with ideas:

“My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg—I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go, and runs off.”

Ray started writing when he was 12. Decades of prep and incubation followed—as did Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and hundreds of other stories.

Nancy includes similar commentary in her article:

?This narrative is appealing—for example, “Newton developed the concept of gravity around 1666, when an apple fell on his head while he was meditating under an apple tree.” The truth is that by 1666, Newton had already spent many years teaching himself the mathematics of his time (Euclidean geometry, algebra, Cartesian coordinates) and inventing calculus so that he could measure planetary orbits and the area under a curve. He continued to work on his theory of gravity over the subsequent years, completing the effort only in 1687, when he published Philosophiœ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In other words, Newton’s formulation of the concept of gravity took more than 20 years and included multiple components: preparation, incubation, inspiration—a version of the eureka experience—and production. Many forms of creativity, from writing a novel to discovering the structure of DNA, require this kind of ongoing, iterative process.?

Her comments are also an argument for resting the mind. As anyone reading this knows, Creativity has her own hours. She does not work on demand.

What Nancy found in her work is that the association regions of the brain are “wildly active” during the state of rest.

So when you’re frazzled and on deadline, and facing the Ivan Drago of Writer’s Block? The best route might be a drive, a long walk, a shower, or a few minutes reading your favorite book.

I hope you read Nancy’s full article yourself. When you do, you’ll find that much of it is actually about the connection between creativity and mental illness. This piece from Nancy was familiar to me and I’m betting it is familiar to many of you:

“One possible contributory factor is a personality style shared by many of my creative subjects. These subjects are adventuresome and exploratory. They take risks. Particularly in science, the best work tends to occur in new frontiers. (As a popular saying among scientists goes: “When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.”) They have to confront doubt and rejection. And yet they have to persist in spite of that, because they believe strongly in the value of what they do. This can lead to psychic pain, which may manifest itself as depression or anxiety, or lead people to attempt to reduce their discomfort by turning to pain relievers such as alcohol.”

When you’re working in a field that those around your don’t understand—or running down a dream that no one supports—it can be painful. Anxiety can be found driving the train instead of lounging in the dining car.

While we can’t speed dial Creativity, if we do our work and rest our minds there’s a chance that Creativity might just show up uninvited more often than not.

Will you be ready when she arrives?

The Artist’s Journey, #10

We’re now a little short of halfway through this serialization of The Artist’s Journey. (I may break it up with the odd rogue post from time to time). If you’re just joining, click on any of these links to track backward in time through prior posts:Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. Part 9.

42. WHO R U?

I’ve read a dozen different versions of Stanislavsky’s famous Three Questions, i.e. the questions an actor must ask him- or herself before playing any scene. Here’s my version:

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What do I want?

The second two are pretty easy. It’s the first that’s the killer.

Who am I?

An actor can answer that question like this: “I’m Ophelia. I’m Hamlet’s sweetheart and potential bride, etc.”

What about you and me?

We have to answer that question not on the stage, but in our own lives and in our own art.

“Tell me who you are, Junah. Who, in your deepest parts, when all that is unauthentic has been stripped away. Are you your name, Rannulph Junah? Will that hit this shot for you? Are you your illustrious forebears? Will they hit it?

“Are you your roles, Junah? Scion, soldier, Southerner? Husband, father, lover? Slayer of the foe in battle, comforter of the friend at home? Are you your virtues, Junah, or your sins? Your deeds, your feats? Are you your dreams or your nightmares? Tell me Junah. Can you hit the ball with any of these?”

We said earlier that a writer or an artist has no idea what she’s doing when she is initially seized by an idea.

I certainly had no clue when this passage of dialogue appeared on the page in The Legend of Bagger Vance. I didn’t plan it. It wasn’t in any outline.

How did it get there?

What happened?

What happened was the “me” that wasn’t me, knowing that this issue was central to my evolution as a writer and as a human being, broke through like a dream and pushed those sentences onto the page.

 

43. THE WORLD THE ARTIST LIVES IN

Here’s my model of the universe in a nutshell:

The universe exists on at least two levels. (It may exist on an infinite number, but certainly it manifests itself on two.)

The first is the material world, the visible physical sphere in which you and I dwell.

Then there’s the second level.

The higher level.

The second level exists “above” the first but permeates the first at all times and in all instances. This second level is the invisible world, the plane of the as-yet-unmanifested, the sphere of pure potentiality.

Upon this level dwells that which will be, but is not yet.

Call this level the Unconscious, the Soul, the Self, the Superconscious.

 

44. THE ARTIST’S SKILL

What exactly does an artist do?

The writer, the dancer, the filmmaker … what, precisely, does their work consist of?

They shuttle from Level #1 to Level #2 and back again.

That’s it.

That’s their skill.

Twyla Tharp in her dance studio, Quentin Tarantino at his keyboard, Bob Dylan when he picks up a guitar or sits down at a piano. They perform this simple but miraculous act a thousand, ten thousand times a day.

They enter the Second World and come back to the First

with something that had never existed in the First World before.

A machine can’t do that.

A supercomputer packed with the most powerful A.I. system can’t do that.

In all of Creation, only two creatures can do that.

Gods.

And you and I.

 

45. THE CONTOUR OF THE ARTIST’S LIFE

From the epiphanal moment at the end of her hero’s journey, the artist’s life is about the works she will produce. These taken in sum will comprise her body of work. They’re her “oeuvre.”

They’re also her destiny.

If she does it right, they will constitute upon completion a pretty fair expression of why she was put on Earth. They’ll define who she is. They will be her “gift for the people.”

But here’s the interesting part.

Each work (or, more exactly, the artist’s inner odyssey as she labors to produce each work) will be a hero’s journey in its own right.

 

46. EACH INCREMENT OF THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS A HERO’S JOURNEY

We experience our life as dull and ordinary. But beneath the surface, something powerful and transformative is brewing …

Suddenly the light bulb goes off. We’ve got a new idea! An idea for a novel, a movie, a startup …

Except immediately we perceive the downside. We become daunted. Our idea is risky. We’re afraid we can’t pull it off. We hesitate, until …

We’re having drinks with a friend. We tell her our idea. “I love it,” she says. “You’ve gotta do it.”

Fortified, we rally.

We commit.

We begin.

This is the pattern for the genesis of any creative work. It’s also, in Joseph Campbell terms, “the Ordinary World,” “The Call,” “Refusal of the Call,” “Meeting with the Mentor,” and “Crossing the Threshold.”

In other words, the first five stages of the hero’s journey.

Keep going. As you progress on your project, you’ll hit every other Campbellian beat, right down to the finish and release/publication, i.e., “The Return,” bearing a “Gift for the People.”

This pattern will hold true for the rest of your life, through every novel, movie, dance, drama, work of architecture, etc. you produce.

Every work is its own hero’s journey.

Art + Commerce = Better Art

Here’s another post from www.storygrid.com about the relationship between an agent and her client.  And another reminder…Malcolm Gladwell has a course available from Masterclass.  I’m hearing great stuff about it!

We’re deconstructing the invisible work behind media headlines like UNKNOWN WRITER GETS A MILLION DOLLARS.

Specifically the work that Tina Bennett, as just a new pup in the book world trying to earn her keep as an agent at the Janklow & Nesbit Literary Agency in 1996, did before she negotiated a seven-figure guaranteed advance for Malcolm Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point.

This was a book Gladwell hadn’t yet written. Nor had he completely figured out how it would be structured or even what it was really all about. And he’d never even written a book before. Left to his own devices, he could still be pondering what to do. Think about how many books you have stuck in your head that you just can’t seem to “crack.”

Someone had to purposefully direct Gladwell.

Someone had to tell him what book publisher’s would expect of him.

Someone had to tell him how to convince extremely skeptical and experienced people that he’d deliver a bestseller.

We’ve already explored Gladwell’s decade plus professional journey incubating the idea and of how he masterfully first presented his findings in his June 3, 1996 four thousand word piece in The New Yorker.

What we’re looking at now is the business behind how an agent can help a writer discover and tap fresh reserves underneath a seemingly tapped out idea. By focusing on the realities of book publishing—how to best present potential work to the banks that fund creativity (the Big Five publishing conglomerates in New York)—a creative literary agent sharpens the writer’s bits so that he can drill even deeper to find the magma beneath the crust of his Big Idea. Through such collaboration does a writer discover the mother lode underneath his seemingly dry well.

I am not surprised in the least that Tina Bennett also represents Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit and Unbroken) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Atul Gawande (Being Mortal) a slew of other talents. And that when she left Janklow & Nesbit to join William Morris Endeavor, it was front page industry news.

The fact that she is a star agent is not a coincidence. It’s the end result of hard work.

Her clients will be the first ones to tell you—not that anyone asks—that they owe Tina far more than what they pay her.

A friend of mine who is a big bestselling writer said this about his agent—“if it weren’t for her, I’d be living under an overpass on I-95.”

An exaggeration? Of course it is.

But would he not have to worry about making his mortgage payment without his agent? Or worry that he’d not sucked the life out of every idea he decided to explore in his work?

Without his agent he would not be who he is today—a guy purely focused on beating Resistance…and winning more battles than losing. What more can the artist ask for?

Together a hard working writer with a unique vision plus an editorially driven agent with a comprehensive understanding of the marketplace equals magic. The end result of that magic can end up as a seven-figure guarantee from Mongo Publishing Worldwide or a self-published underground cult classic must-read for an itty bitty niche audience. Both are goosebump inducing.

So how does Art + Commerce = Even Better Art?

This is the question we’re wrestling with now and the best place to begin answering it is to understand the commercial arena. God knows we have somewhat of a handle on the vagaries of the artistic arena—all that Story Grid stuff plus the metaphysical battle detailed in The War of Art, Turning Pro, and Do The Work.  First and foremost, Literary Agents (the sellers) need to know how editors at the big publishing houses (the buyers) think.

When you want a group of people to buy something from you, you want to solve a specific problem for them, right?

So you need to know what your potential buyers’ problems are and how they think about/solve them.

So a good literary agent will want to know what problems editors have and how they deal with them before she starts pitching.

The very first problem big book editors must deal with is the dilemma of submissions.

First off, how do editors think about submissions? How do they “sort” them in terms of priority?

Wait a minute. Why exactly is it necessary to sort submissions? Just read them in the order they are received. Doesn’t everyone deserve a “fair” read?

No. They don’t.

Most of the material that comes to an editor is absolute crap…written by amateurs with no understanding of the most fundamental principles of writing or the craft of telling a good story.

Sorry but that’s just true.

And here’s the worst part…these lousy projects are agented.

That’s right, most agents are amateurs too who have no understanding of the most fundamental principles of writing or the craft of telling a good story.

You wanna know something even worse than the fact that most agents don’t know the most fundamental principles of writing or the craft of telling a good story?

There are a substantial number of editors…the choosers/gatekeepers whatever you want to call them…who don’t know the fundamental principles of writing or the craft of telling a good story.

Guess what too?

This stew of literary amateurs and literary pros is the way the book publishing bouillabaisse has always simmered…and the way it always will be.

[I’d bet that the same can be said for any industry…banking, real estate, construction, design, academia, fishing, plumbing, you name it. Ever see Broadcast News? Some people rely on craft (the Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter characters), some rely on vacuous but “sincere” Bullshit (the William Hurt character).]

Within the Big Five publishing operations, there are Story craftsmen and there are, let’s say, charismatic and verbally facile enthusiasts of Story. The thing is, though, that an enthusiast is just as likely to sponsor a hit book as a craftsman… Some would argue more likely.

So what can a poor agent do knowing this reality?

Easy answer.

Forget about it.

Like any other thing in life, book publishing is a mulligatawny of absurdity. You will never be able to control it and things are going to knock you down you don’t even see coming. But other things will push you back up too. The longer you are in the game, the more you understand that principle. So you just stop fretting and get on with it.

You do the work…the real work…the Story work. And hold on tight to it. It’s hard sledding, but so is anything else worthwhile. And when the climate shifts and you can’t see a foot in front of you, the work will ground you. It will give you the GPS coordinates and the courage to keep pressing forward.

When you find yourself confounded…Huh…wonder why I couldn’t sell that? You head to the work to puzzle it out for the next time…the Story is where you’ll find the answer, not anywhere inside “because I suck.”

And to compliment the dedication to craft, learn why the Big Five editorial Story grinders and Story poseurs behave the way they do. Have empathy for the poor bastards. It’s a tough job. It can be mean too.

The thing is that both kinds of editor—the craftsman and the enthusiast—behave in exactly the same way during the acquisition process.

We’ll get into that next.

The Artist’s Journey, #9

Continuing our serialization of The Artist’s Journey. If you’re just plugging into the series for the first time, click on the following links to access any of the first eight parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.

38. AN ARTIST IS IN TOUCH WITH HER TIME

By “time,” I mean era or generation. Picasso’s Cubism and Hemingway’s equally multi-planed prose both evolved out of the mass-mechanical, herky-jerky style and rhythm of the era before and after World War I (a period that also produced the machine gun and the self-amortizing mortgage.) So did Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Robert Johnson’s Love In Vain and, a little later, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn.

All were responses to the times these artists lived in.

If we want to get mysto on this subject (and I always do) we could say that the souls of these writers, painters, and musicians chose the epoch they wished to be born into, for reasons that the artists themselves possibly never knew or even inquired about.

Even artists whose works seem to be out of their own time—flashing backward, Gore Vidal with Burr or Lincoln or, forward, anything by Philip K. Dick—are, if you look closely enough, burrowed deeply into the zeitgeist, only from a different temporal angle.

The artist in her journey speaks to and of her time.

39. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY AND THE HERO’S JOURNEY, PART THREE

We said that the artist has a subject, a voice, a point of view, a medium of expression, and a style.

But where do these come from?

How do we find our own?

In my experience the process is neither rational nor logical. It can’t be commanded. It can’t be rushed. It is not subject to the will or the ego.

We are born, I believe, with everything we are seeking—a subject, a voice, a point of view, a medium of expression, and a style.

But these reside in an area of the psyche outside the range of conventional consciousness.

The artist’s journey is like the hero’s journey in that you and I, the artist-in-embryo, must leave our zone of comfort (the conscious mind) and cross to alien shores (the unconscious) to find and acquire our golden fleece (the knowledge of, and access to, our gift.)

The process, like the hero’s journey, involves time.

It involves suffering.

It involves folly.

Its crisis takes the form of an All Is Lost moment.

Once you have given up the ghost [wrote Henry Miller], everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.

The ghost that we give up is the ego. The illusion of control.

The “everything” that follows is our artist’s power—our subject, our voice, our point of view, our medium of expression, and our style.

 

B  O  O  K    F   O  U  R
A    B  O  D  Y    O  F     W  O  R  K  

 

40. A BODY OF WORK

This is my twentieth book.

Looking back, here’s the Big Takeaway:

I never had any idea, before I wrote a book, that I was going to write it. Or, perhaps more accurately, that I was going to write that specific book. The book always came out of nowhere and always took me by surprise.

Let me express this a different way.

No matter what a writer or artist may tell you, they have no clue what they’re doing before they do it—and, for the most part, while they’re doing it.

Or another way:

Everything we produce as artists comes from a source beyond our conscious awareness.

Jackson Browne once said that he writes to find out what he thinks. (Wait, it was Joan Didion who said that … no, Stephen King said it too.)

I do the same, and you do too, whether you realize it or not.

The key pronoun here is you.

Who is this “you?”

The second and third theses of this book are:

1. “You,” meaning the writer of your books, is not you. Not the “you” you think of as yourself.

2. This “second you” is smarter than you are. A lot smarter.

41. WHERE DO BOOKS/SONGS/MOVIES COME FROM?

My long-held belief is that an artist’s identity is revealed by the work she or he produces.

Writers write to discover themselves. (Again, whether they realize it or not.)

But who is this self they seek to discover?

It is none other than that “second you”—that wiser “you,” that true, pure, waterproof, self-propelled, self-contained “you.”

Every work we produce as artists comes from this second “you.”

This “you” is the real you.

 

 

How to Pitch

[This post first ran March 11, 2016. Bringing it back for a re-run today.]

You have a new book or film or album you want to promote — and you’re waging a letter/e-mail writing campaign to garner support.

The following is what you need to know before you get started.

The Pitch

Bottom line: You want something.

You want to recommend someone or something, or you want someone to recommend you.

You want an endorsement, an interview, a keynote speaker, a job, something for free, someone to make a decision for you.

Start with a thank you:

Thank you for your work.

Thank you for your article “X.”

Thank you for finding a happiness pill.

Thank you for being the only ethical elected official in office.

State your purpose:

I’m writing to request a review copy of your book.

I’m contacting you to ask for your endorsement of my product.

I’m reaching out to you to obtain a bulk discount.

State why you think the recipient of your pitch might be interested:

I read your article titled “X” and thought my book on the same topic would resonate with you.

I’ve read about your service with the Marine Corps and hoped you’d have time to speak with some of the younger men and women of the Corps.

My book is a history of lying politicians, which might add perspective to your coverage of the presidential campaign.

State who you are:

I received the Pulitzer Prize for my coverage of the presidential scandal X.

I’m an 18 year-old student at Y High School. My dad has been sharing your books with me since I was a kid.

Like you, I spent my summers as a caddie. Similar experiences, but I went into business and didn’t commit to writing as early as you did.

State the time, date, address, etc.:

The workshop takes place December 14, 2016, in Hawaii.

I’m available for interviews throughout the campaign cycle.

My address is XXXX

End with a thank you:

Thanks again for your article — and for your time and consideration of my request.

Thanks for your work.

Thanks for _______

Start with a thank you. State your purpose. State why you think “it” would be of interest. State who your are and date/time/address information. Thank the recipient. *Include smooth transitions between each of these. One should run into and relate to the other.

Before you start your letter:

1) Research the individual you’re pitching.

If a health reporter just wrote an article about a 92-year-old, barbell-lifting grandma, he’s not likely to do a follow-up feature on the 92 year-old barbell-lifting grandma you represent, but he might do a piece on what programs work best for specific age groups. You can target something that the reporter showed an interest in, and then suggest an extended conversation.

2) Know the outlet.

Confirm that your project falls into the interest area of the outlet and/or individual you’re approaching. Just because the outlet ran a feature last year, which relates to your subject area today, doesn’t mean they’ll be interested. Same with reporters, which might cover one beat for ten years and then switch to another. Look for current coverage trends to gauge their interest.

3) Consider the placement.

Around the 2000 period, I started pitching military books I repped to features and op-ed sections instead of to book review sections. Military books didn’t receive play in book review sections — and the death of book review sections was on the horizon anyway… Instead of pitching the book, I pitched the person — an expert, who could speak to X, Y and Z, who also happened to be the author of XYZ book. Around the 2004 period, The Atlantic Monthly featured the book The Sling and The Stone in all but one issue within a 12-month period. The book never hit the review section. Instead, the author was interviewed as an expert source for numerous articles, and his book was mentioned every time. Rather than one shot coverage, the author and the book received year-around coverage.

4) Be Ready In Advance.

Watch any of the broadcast news programs and you’ll notice that the experts being interviewed are often authors. This doesn’t make the expert the best person to answer questions about the headline du jour. It makes the expert the one with the fastest publicist and/or the author with materials ready in advance.

For example, there are always more stories related to veterans around November 11th, weight-loss features always hit heavy around January 1st and historical anniversary stories often receive play depending if it is a 50th anniversary vs a 14th anniversary. Then there are the other predictable stories: a politician will be caught with his pants down or his hands in someone’s wallet. A teacher in one location will make a positive breakthrough with students, while a teacher in another area will face jailtime. There will be a blizzard or a drought or a flood, and there will be a recall on one product or another.

Know the news cycles and be ready.

This is harder for fiction, but in some cases it still works. In 2006, around the release of The Afghan Campaign, we placed Steve’s first op-ed. The book was fiction, but the history on which the book was based related to current events.

5) Watch your word count.

If you can’t make your pitch in 300 words, go back to the cutting board.

6) Don’t hide your purpose.

Steve often receives requests that are hidden within blocks of text. The letter below should have started with the interview request and why Steve was being contacted. Instead, it ran on and on about the host.

Dear Mr. Pressfield,

I am reaching out to you on behalf of XXX XXX. XXX is the vice president of XXX as well as a bestselling author and business owner. He has written numerous books with XXX, chairman of the board and co-founder of XXX. Their most recent book, XXX, reached #1 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and has been featured on more than 235 bestseller lists including The New York Times and USA Today.

XXX is the host of a monthly webinar which is marketed to our existing database including more than 130,000 XXX associates. XXX itself was recently named the #1 XXX organization in the world across all industries by XXX magazine. In addition, XXX is often invited to speak to corporations and associations around the world regarding XXX. As result, our database/audience is expanding outside of the XXX industry and resonating with the business community.

Given XXX is such a big fan of your book, XXX, and the content aligns with many of the concepts in XXX, he would like to extend an invitation to be his guest on one of our webinars. This would also be a great opportunity for you to promote your work to a large audience. I have included the link to our Website below, which will provide you with access to our webinars if you would like to listen to a sample.

We would be honored to have you as a guest, and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Side note: Do not infer that someone will benefit if they work with you unless you can prove it — and guarantee it — in advance. And DON’T tell them what a great opportunity it will be for them. That’s an old — and often brimming-with-bullshit — line. (more on “opportunities” via Jon Acuff).

7) Avoid making demands and trying to make an emergency on your end an emergency on someone else’s end. The following is a recent example:

Hi,

I’m emailing on behalf of Prof. XXX XXX of English at XXX College.

She wants a desk copy of “War of Art” by Steven Pressfield, as she has already adopted the book for an English XXX course, and she needs the book quickly.

Is there more information needed about the course, in order for her to get a desk copy?

Thank you

The writer wants a free book. No, “May I have a copy?” or “Do you provide desk copies?” No please. And: No address.

As a side: Schools tend to place orders late and seem the least in-tune to saving money. The person placing the order will stick to the 7-copy order the professor requested, even though she’d save money if she placed a 10-copy (or more) order, which is when Black Irish Books’ bulk discount kicks in. Seven copies of THE WAR OF ART go for $90.65 at the $12.95 per book cover price. Ten copies go for $58.30 at the $5.83 per book bulk rate.

Here’s another that falls under throwing your looming deadline on someone else:

Should you decide to provide an endorsement, I would be pleased to offer you a gratis copy of the book as a token of our appreciation. If at all possible, we would like to receive the endorsement by November 25th.

The request arrived a month before the deadline, which hit during the holiday season, during which many of us are busy with personal obligations, in addition to our work. Bad timing.

Also: Don’t tell someone you’ll offer a gratis copy in exchange for an endorsement. That’s something that should be a given, an unsaid that’s understood because it is the right thing to do. When the book is released, it should be sent to endorsers with a thank you. And, the manuscript should be sent MONTHS in advance if you’d like someone to consider endorsing it. No one is waiting around for your book to pop up and fill in their time.

8) Don’t go for pity.

This one arrived after we offered the Mega Bundle for Writers last year. The bundle included about $200 worth of books for $35. The package weighed eight pounds, with a $12 shipping charge via FedEx Ground (a charge Black Irish does not mark up).

Dear Black Irish,

Yesterday, used up $47.00 of $47.17 in account with 17 cents remaining, the shipping was a surprise.

Thus If you can throw in the WARRIOR ETHOS with today’s order, that would be extremely appreciated by this starving artist.

Thank you.

If you are a starving artist and have $47.17 left in your account, please use it for food. While books are important, food would be a better choice.

Along these lines, if you’re going to ask for something related to your work, don’t play the pity card. There are millions in this world in need of help. Trying to guilt someone into sharing your product won’t work. You might guilt someone into helping to raise money for a child’s medical bills, or to help rebuild a burnt-down school, but guilt that will result in your personal gain is a long-shot.

9) Don’t misspell names.

We still receive requests for Stephen instead of Steven — and for Pressman instead of Pressfield.

10) Don’t play word games.

In the past year, it seems like everyone contacting Steve about a speaking event is hosting a “summit” or “telesummit.” If you’re holding a meeting or workshop, just call it what it is. Unless a state head is there, summit sounds like the popular term to use, rather than the correct word to use. (As I write this, my daughter is holding a summit in her room with her stuffed animals.)

Your Response to the Response

Whether you receive a yes or a no from someone, write a thank you letter in response. It is one more opportunity to put your name in front of them and forge a connection — and something most of us appreciate.

Two examples:

If you’ve been a long-time reader of this blog, you know that Steve doesn’t do speaking events and he rarely does interviews.

The reality is, if he’s speaking or interviewing, he’s not writing. And, if he’s not writing, he’s not doing the work he was meant to do.

This means we end up sending out a few “no” letters almost every day. Depending on where he is in the world, or at what stage he is with a project, Steve will handle some and I’ll handle the others.

The letters always start with a thank you to the writer, because it was nice that the writer considered Steve as someone to interview, someone to blurb her book, or someone to speak at his event. If the person has said something nice about Steve’s work, I’ll thank the individual for his kind words, or for her thoughts on Steve’s work.

The next line is short and to the point.

Steve is not scheduling speaking events or interviews.

This is followed with a “however.”

However, if you’re interested, Steve would be pleased to donate books for giveaway at your event. While I know this isn’t the same as speaking with him in person, much of what he’d say in person can be found within the pages of his books and/or on his site.

The “however” is an offer to help, though not in the manner requested.

Years ago, I tried to make each of these “no” letters unique. In the interest of time (and having exhausted the options for changing up the letters), they’re all the same, with the exception of the opening thank you addressing the individual’s original letter.

The getting personal part comes during part two, if the letter writer responds.

If the letter writer replies with a thank you, it’s often the start of a long-term connection. I keep track of books sent to them, correspondence and so on. These notes help jump-start my memory when it fails. I’ll remember a name, but not a conversation. After checking my notes I’m on my way again. And if they stay in touch, I respond. Often, I’m still saying no to interviews and speaking events, but if Steve, Shawn or I can help in other ways, we will.

And if you do choose to respond, avoid the actions of a guy Steve wrote about a few years back, in his piece “An Ask Too Far,” which he ended with a retelling of a “No” he gave to someone to whom he’d already given a ton of “Yeses.”

“One guy wrote me out of the blue; I did a long interview for him, wrote a foreword for his book, and even gave him an intro to my agent. Finally he started asking for favors for his friends. This was an ask too far. When I said no, he wrote back: “I always knew you were a Hollywood a*#hole.”

“Dude! I don’t live anywhere near Hollywood.”

Imagine if the guy had responded with a thank you instead — or if he had considered what “no” actually means. Might still be in contact.

In 2013, Seth Godin posted an article titled “What No Means.”

What “no” means

I’m too busy

I don’t trust you

This isn’t on my list

My boss won’t let me

I’m afraid of moving this forward

I’m not the person you think I am

I don’t have the resources you think I do

I’m not the kind of person that does things like this

I don’t want to open the door to a long-term engagement

Thinking about this will cause me to think about other things I just don’t want to deal with

What it doesn’t mean:

I see the world the way you do, I’ve carefully considered every element of this proposal and understand it as well as you do and I hate it and I hate you.

Don’t get offended.

In a spin I did on Seth’s post, I wrote about a post I’d read, from someone I’d told “no.” He made a comment on his site, along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing here):

“Pressfield’s booking person declined an interview with me a while back and, at the time, I bet that if Oprah called, he wouldn’t say no to her. Well . . Guess who did an interview with Oprah?” Then he went on to say he receives books from other authors every day who are interested in working with him and he’ll support them instead . . . (again, paraphrasing, based on my interpretation and memory . . . )

It was painful to read because I understood where he was coming from.

No feels like a personal rejection. He made the no about him. And then he made Steve’s yes to Oprah about him, too. Those answers weren’t about him. They were about Steve, his time and his work.

The Wrap Up

I can’t promise you a “yes” to your pitch, but I can promise you that everything mentioned above has worked the past 20ish years. It hasn’t worked with everyone, but it has worked. Timing often plays the largest role — as have the shifting roles within the media industry. But, you’ve got to start somewhere.

Keep it short.

Keep it to the point.

Keep at it.

The Artist’s Journey, #8

Continuing our serialization of The Artist’s Journey, we’re picking up from last week, where the subject had become “What exactly is an artist?” We were delineating in that post the qualities that an artist possesses in her or his work.

If you’re plugging into the series for the first time, click on the following links to access the first seven parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

32. MY SUBJECT

The Legend of Bagger Vance

Gates of Fire

Tides of War

Last of the Amazons

The Virtues of War

The War of Art

The Afghan Campaign

Killing Rommel

The Profession

Turning Pro

The Warrior Ethos

The Lion’s Gate

An American Jew

The Knowledge

Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t

36 Righteous Men

Even if you haven’t read any of these books, you can tell just from the titles that they possess a unified subject.

And yet …

My own artist’s journey, as I said, started twenty years before the first book on this page was written. Through those two decades, not a single book or screenplay I wrote was “on subject.”

Then, all of a sudden, the list above started.

A subject appeared.

From then on, every book was unerringly on-subject.

I have no idea how to explain it.

There was no plan. No decision. No moment of inflection.

It just happened.

33. AN ARTIST HAS A VOICE

The Deer Hunter

Sophie’s Choice

Kramer vs. Kramer

Silkwood

Julia

Out of Africa

Ironweed

Heartburn

The Bridges of Madison County

Doubt

A Cry in the Dark

Postcards From The Edge

Adaptation

The Devil Wears Prada

The Iron Lady

Into the Woods

Ricki and the Flash

The Post

A Meryl Streep performance is as recognizably Streepian as a song by Jackson Browne is Browneian or a dance program by Twyla Tharp is Tharpian.

Did these artists get lucky? Were they born with voices? Or did they find and acquire them on their artists’ journeys?

34. AN ARTIST HAS A MEDIUM OF EXPRESSION 

For Stephen King, it was fantasy/horror, which evolved over time into more ambitious and literary forms. For Bob Dylan, it was folk music, which likewise developed into higher and more innovative idioms.

A critical part of the artist’s journey is answering the question, “What is my medium of expression.

35. AN ARTIST HAS A POINT OF VIEW

When I first started working on movie sets, I used to marvel at how the director could answer so many questions from so many people so quickly and with such authority. “Where do you want the camera?” “What mark should the actress hit?” “How long till lunch?”

“There.”

“There.”

“Forty minutes.”

How did the director do it? How did he always know?

One day I asked.

“Because,” the director answered, “I have a point of view.”

In other words, the director knew what movie he was making.

He knew what it was about (subject.)

He knew what he wanted it to look and sound like (voice, medium of expression, and style).

36. PICASSO HAD A POINT OF VIEW

When Georges Braque and the early Cubists first painted portraits that had two eyes on one side of a woman’s face, critics were outraged. Art lovers were appalled. Intellectuals were brawling with each other in bistros in Montmarte and Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

But Braque knew. Picasso knew. Leger knew.

They had a point of view.

The Cubists could draw a representational face. But that wasn’t what they wanted. That wasn’t their point of view.

Caesar had a point of view.

Gandhi had a point of view.

Donald Trump has a point of view.

The artist can answer any question (including those posed by herself) when she has a point of view.

37. AN ARTIST HAS A STYLE

Picasso didn’t paint those crazy Cubist faces because it was the only way he knew how to draw. Nor did Hemingway employ short words because he couldn’t spell antidisestablishmentarianism.

Style is inseparable from voice. It evolves out of subject and point of view and blends seamlessly with medium of expression.

The artist on her journey may try out a number of styles before finding her own.

Each one of these—subject, voice, point of view, medium of expression, and style—is an aspect of the single question, “What is my gift?” which is itself another way of asking, “Who am I?”

What Good Agents Know

Let’s get back to my series about Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point from www.storygrid.com.  Once the magazine piece debuted in The New Yorker, it was smooth sailing from there on in, right?  Not exactly. 

So a longform piece like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in the June 3, 1996 edition of The New Yorker is a slam dunk easy sell as a book project, right? It went from four thousand words in a magazine to seven figures worth of guaranteed book advance just based on its level of professionalism and readability.

Gladwell’s literary agent Tina Bennett probably just called up Random House and Doubleday and Little Brown and HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press and Houghton Mifflin and Viking etc. and asked their big nonfiction book editors to read Gladwell’s article and then call back with offers, right?

The hard part for her was over at that point.

Signing Gladwell was the big win for her. There were probably a score or more of book agents pounding on his door to get him on their client list since his first piece, Blowup, appeared in The New Yorker, right?

Once Bennett beat out the hoards of other hungry young agents wining and dining Gladwell the rest of her work was autopilot city.

I mean there’s a hard and fast process in place for agents to convert great Story ideas into guaranteed book advances, right?

Once you have the sponsorship of a big literary agency, like Bennett did working at Janklow & Nesbit, then all you have to do is plug into the system—that old boys and girls network. If the stuff you represent is fantastic (and who wouldn’t immediately recognize that The Tipping Point was masterful work) you’re set. You just field offers, funnel off 15% of the proceeds and pound the streets for more clients. In time, that Hamptons or Berkshire country home is yours.

Right? That’s the way it works, right?

No. That’s not how it works at all.

Here is what I know for sure.

Selling a magazine article as a book is extremely difficult. Most in the business would tell you it’s more difficult than selling original material.
If you have nothing “on the page” explaining specifically how a magazine article could become a book, you have no business calling an editor and asking them to make an offer.  Even asking them to read the thing in the first place takes Chutzpah.
I’d wager that Gladwell had very few agents pursuing him. I’d even make a confident guess that Tina Bennett was the only one. I’d even guess that she didn’t “pursue” him. She met him through a friend and over time the two of them thought maybe working together could be fun.
There is no ironclad 100% reliable process for converting an idea for a book into a commissioning contract from a publishing house. Working for a big agency can get your phone call returned, but it will not get an editor to take you seriously.  If you blow the pitch, your Ivy League suit or your close ties to Hollywood or the fact that your mother plays bridge with the publisher mean absolutely nothing—actually worse than nothing. Subconsciously, the editor will enjoy rejecting your project because he hates the Ivy League, thinks Hollywood is filled with idiots, and can’t really stand his publisher or bridge.

Here’s how I know.

I’ve made a living on both sides of the buy/sell transaction.

And if you as an agent do not know how editors think you will not get them to raise the remarkable amount of courage it takes them to walk into their publisher’s office—interrupting his or her afternoon cocktail or cup of tea—and ask that the company back their hunch that a bunch of words they’ve read will contribute to the company’s corporately mandated 10% net return on dollars invested.

Okay that’s a sufficiently dramatic and longwinded answer.

Good agents know how editors think.

So how do editors think?  That’s up next.

The Artist’s Journey, #7

Continuing our serialization of The Artist’s Journey … to refresh our memory, the primary thesis of this book is that our evolution as writers and artists hits an inflection point on that day when we realize that our Searching Years are over, our questing dues have been paid (in other words, our “hero’s journey” has reached its completion), and we must now advance into a second journey, in which for the first time we with full awareness and seriousness embrace our calling as artists. At that point, we “turn pro” and start asking the questions all artists must ask of themselves on their creative journeys: “Who am I? What is my gift? What work was I put on the planet to do?” 

If you’re just plugging into the series for the first time, click on the following links to access the first six parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

26. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS ABOUT ACCESSING THE UNCONSCIOUS

You can attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, get a degree in Literature from Harvard, hang on your wall a framed MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. You can serve in the Navy SEALs in Afghanistan, survive heroin addiction in East St. Louis. You can break your back at hard labor, break your heart in love, break your balls in the school of hard knocks.

None of it will do a damn bit of good if you can’t sit down and open the pipeline to your muse.

The artist’s journey is about that.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing else counts.

27. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY LASTS THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

There is no other journey in this lifetime after the artist’s journey (other than, perhaps, the transition to the next life).

Once you board this train, you’re on it to the end of the line.

 

B  O  O  K    T  H  R  E  E
P O R T R A I T   O F   T H E   A R T I S T

 

28. WHAT IS AN ARTIST?

Before we dig deeper into the nature of the artist’s journey let’s pause for a moment and ask ourselves, “What exactly is an artist?

What qualities can we attribute to this peculiar subspecies of the human race?

29. AN ARTIST HAS A SUBJECT

Mean Streets

Taxi Driver

The Last Waltz

Raging Bull

Goodfellas

Cape Fear

Casino

Gangs of New York

The Aviator

The Departed

Hugo

Shutter Island

The Wolf of Wall Street

Silence

Did Martin Scorsese sit down as a young filmmaker and ask himself, “What’s my subject?” I doubt it very much.

But a subject arose just the same. (Actually probably two: Outlaw Life and Love of Cinema, with a couple of outliers thrown in.)

You have a subject too.

You were born with it.

You will discover it on your artist’s journey.

30. WHAT IS “SUBJECT?”

Subject does not mean “the Civil War” or “feminism.”

Consider Bruce Springsteen’s subject. It isn’t just dudes and babes in cars in New Jersey.

It’s thematic. The Boss’s theme, to which he returns over and over, is the worth of passion and the integrity of what we might call “the common man” (and woman).

His subject is red-white-and-blue, fucked-over, fucked-up, but still shining and worthy and unbreakable.

Subject is deeper than topic. It’s not “what it’s about,” it’s what it’s really about.

31. HOW SUBJECT ARISES

It sounds facile to say, “We don’t pick our subject, our subject picks us.” But I’m convinced that that statement is true.

It’s not your subject. It’s your Self’s, your Muse’s, your Superconscious’s.

You were born with that subject but you never knew it.

Have you ever met someone who says, “I have no passion for anything. I wish I could feel it, but I can’t. The only thing I feel is boredom.”

Bullshit.

I know this is a lie because I’ve lived it myself for years.

Show me someone who claims he doesn’t give a shit and I’ll show you a born artist who’s scared out of his wits to become that artist.

Our subject is sitting right in front of us but we can’t see it because we’re terrified.

We’re terrified that, if we recognize and acknowledge our subject (which is our calling as an artist), then we’ll have to act on it.

We’ll have to make a decision.

We’ll have to put ourselves on the line.

We’ll have to take a risk.

I can say truthfully of every book I’ve written that, before I saw it as a subject, I had no idea I was even interested in it. In fact I wasn’t interested in it. Or if I was, I dismissed that interest as purely idiosyncratic, a feeling that applied to me only but would never apply to anyone else.

The books picked me, I didn’t pick them.

It’s a mystery, this art racket.