what not to do when an agent calls

This happened about two years into my five year journey to publication, three years before I got my current agent. I am spilling the full truth so that you can all laugh at me (I know that's the real reason everyone reads this blog), and perhaps so you can avoid doing the same thing yourself.

The manuscript in question was The Stepmother's Story, a retelling of Cinderella from the stepmother's point of view. It was my first attempt at a retelling, and I honestly couldn't tell if it was YA or adult. (Still can't, come to think of it. It's one of those books that is neither fish nor fowl.) I hadn't done a lot of fantasy up to that point, but I had done some.

I have always found Cinderella's stepmother to be the most frightening of all Disney villains, and she's pretty bad in the fairy tales (though, of course the worst parents ever award has to go to Hansel and Gretel's parents). The scary and interesting thing about the stepmother is that she doesn't believe in magic. She isn't scary because she has mystical power. She's scary because she has regular, everyday power. And she hates Cinderella because Cinderella is good. There's no hope of convincing her that she and Cinderella can be friends. The better Cinderella is, the more the stepmother is determined to fight her. So the manuscript was a story about a woman who is faced with magic and won't believe it, but fights it anyway. And loses. It's told in first person and it had--well, it had a few problems.

But it was good enough that an agent who is now a fairly big name but was then an assistant at a fairly big name called me on the phone to discuss it. She wanted a revision and she talked to me for about an hour about some of the problems she saw in the novel. She told me to take my time on the revisions, that she was excited to see what I would come up with, and offered to talk to me again if I felt I needed to.

I had never had someone call me on the phone before. So that was a huge thrill. It was great, really. A boost to my sagging worries about being a writer. I had quit my (admittedly horrible) teaching job at that point and wondered if I was a fool. I was, but not because of that. I was a fool because I spent the next six weeks revising the book, and then sent it in to her. A completely different novel. Well, some of the names were the same. And the general idea was the same. But not a single word remained of the original manuscript. None of the same scenes or dialogue, none of the best bits clipped out and preserved. All gone.

You can imagine what happened. Nothing. A great big nothing for a couple of months. I think I called her back eventually and she said in a rather hesitant tone that I had rewritten the entire novel in six weeks and that it just wasn't what she had hoped it would be. She recommended I go back and spend some more time on it, which was good advice. For someone else, maybe. Someone I would later become. But at the time what happened was that she and I both discovered I couldn't revise to specification like that. I could see a whole new novel, but I couldn't cut and paste and hone and refine. I didn't know how to listen that carefully or share my world that well with someone else. It actually took me a long--LONG--time to figure out how to do that. Even after I was published, I was still struggling with this one.

On the one hand, an editor doesn't want an author who caves with every suggestion and does what is demanded. On the other hand, the editor doesn't want an author who insists the manuscript is perfect as it is. But the place in between is like a magic passageway. You don't just stand between the two to get there. There's magic and a secret spell to be learned, and you have to practice a lot.

I don't spend a lot of time wishing that the past were different, and I don't particularly wish that I had done this differently. I just wasn't that person yet, so I couldn't. I suppose I would have had a different career path if I had been a different person then, but I wasn't. I was who I was and now I am who I am. I am content with what is now, and I suppose that is why I don't wish I could change the past. But it still makes me cringe, and maybe I can laugh at myself a little, too.
 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on February 08, 2011 16:15
No comments have been added yet.


Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog

Mette Ivie Harrison
Mette Ivie Harrison isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow Mette Ivie Harrison's blog with rss.