Agent Interview: Suzy Jenvey (Part One)

So a few days ago I made my first blog post and it may have seemed a little disparaging towards agents, but that certainly wasn't the intention. It was more about the frustrations of trying to find an agent.

Some time ago, while working as a slush pile reader, I had the opportunity to interview Suzy Jenvey while she was head of Children's at PFD. Though she's since left to run her own writing consultancy firm I think she gave some very useful insights into the life of a literary agent.

So I present here the first part.

Enjoy...

Damian
It’s great to finally get the chance to interview my first agent. There’s so many questions I want to ask you, but to start off, it would be interesting to know how you got into this line of work in the first place.

Suzy
I was working in publishing for 29 years. I started out as a publicity officer and moved my way up to publicity director, then marketing director – working on adult lists, both fiction and non-fiction. Then a boss of mine thought I could be more creative and moved me over to editorial, so I did an editorial director job there. Then I moved into children’s fiction, full time, and was editorial director of children’s at Faber & Faber for 14 years. At that time I felt I needed to see a wider sweep of the industry. It’s always a job that I’ve loved – I’ve always loved books, loved publishing. If you work for one list you become very channelled into what that list wants. And I’ve always liked the idea of working with a whole sweep of publishers. Fortunately, and ex boss of mine asked me to come and work as an agent for the new PFD, and it’s great; as an agent I get to deal with 30 lists at once, and a whole range of writing..

Damian
And why children’s writing?

Suzy
Well, I’d like to say I’ve always wanted to work with children’s books, but as it happens it was a bit of an accident – a bigger job offer came along at the time working with children’s – so it was ambition that took me there in the first place. But I found since then that it’s a much more interesting and challenging job. You’re dealing with images as well as words. You’re dealing different age groups; what people want for young adult is completely different from what they want from picture books. It’s less snobbish and much more down to earth. And usually, much more commercial, because a big children’s book can really break through in a way that a literary novel probably won’t.

Damian
To me, there does seem to be a large difference between adult and children’s fiction. Maybe I’m stating the obvious, but it seems like with adult literature, there’s a certain amount to which the writer can ignore their reader – that seems to be an impossibility with writing for children.

Suzy
Yeah, there’s a different between being overtly commercial – which most people seem to think means it has to be easy reading – but it doesn’t have to be really. Very commercial things are just very original with a fantastic story. I think that part of the problem with the unsolicited manuscripts that I read is that people write down to children. They seem to think that because they’re not a child, they’ll need to make it simpler. I think people underestimate how sophisticated children are. If you write down, the story will suffer – it’s not good. Whereas, people who make a great success, particularly with picture books, (and picture books have only got 800 words; not along time to set up plot, character action and all the rest) people who really got for it and use their 800 words in the way that you’d write an action novel – they just doing it in a much more spare way and come up with some fantastic stories. One of my clients has just done a detective story in preschool form, which works brilliantly.

Damian
I’ve just been trying my hand at writing a 6-9 novel, and obviously, I did a fair bit of reading as research, building up to the writing itself. What amazed me was exactly that – the conservation of language in use in that genre.

Suzy
The best way to start off writing in that way is to imagine you’re telling an adult friend that story, just as you would any other story, but you’ve only got 800 words to play with. The minute you start thinking – it’s for children, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, it starts to become so watered down it makes it not even worth reading. Of course, you do have to be careful about putting certain things in – but, on the whole, they’re pretty obvious; you wouldn’t want to include something which encouraged children to play on a railway line. Other than that, there’s very little that you can’t do in the right way. I think the majority of those ones that fail are written by people who don’t have daily contact with children. They probably think that children’s is shorter, thus quicker and easier to have a go at. A little story about my niece will do – we get a lot of those, and of course, it won’t do, it won’t do at all.

Damian
In doing some reading for you I’ve seen a few of those.

Suzy
Yeah, we send you all the good ones.

One of the problems with this job is that you often find yourself drawn into people’s lives in a way that you don’t really want to be. The most upsetting are grandparents who are writing stories for grandchildren who clearly never visit them. They’ll say in the covering letter – This is for my four-year-old grandson who I haven’t seen. And on top of that I’m going to have to reject it. That’s the other point, you have to be careful with those covering letters and, above all, why you’re doing it. You must want to write it because you want to be published and are interested in your work. If you’re doing it because of the fact you’ve lost your children or your grandchildren, or want to talk about death because you’re still not over somebody’s death, that’s fine – but writing at this level isn’t therapy. Write a diary and put that in.

Damian
This makes me think about Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, which does deal with some of those things. You’d have to be that kind of genius to make it work.

Suzy
Michael is probably one of the few people who could pull that off.

Damian
But I can only imagine how tiring it gets reading people who can’t manage it.

Suzy
It can do. Bear in mind, everything that you’ve thought of has probably been thought of by someone else before you – many many times. The amount of time I’ve read Wouldn’t it be good to write a book about how people who are a little bit different are often bullied, but under the skin we’re all worth the same. You’re not the first one to think of that. You’re not that first person to write that story. I think I’d much prefer someone who says they want to write a thriller, spy novel or detective novel for four-year-olds. Well, actually, that really is original.