In praise of agents

Originally posted: December 27, 2017.

Soon after I'd signed with my agent Stephanie, an acquaintance said (appalled): "but why would you want to work with an agent? they take 25%!" Well, first off, my agent is not taking a quarter of my royalties. Secondly, there would be no royalties without her.

Look, I think it's like real estate agents. Sure you could buy direct from the owner and negotiate a three per cent price reduction or whatever the realtor going rate is these days. But a good agent will save you from a lemon, point out the water damage, the cracks in the foundation, have advance knowledge of a gem before it hits the market. Of course a useless agent will do squat all and give the entire profession a bad name. So in all things the advice is: find a good professional.

Agents have knowledge of, and relationships with, editors. They don't just send your manuscript to a house, they target specific editors who would be a good fit for you and your book. Second, they know how to play the game. I only have the murkiest sense of what this game is to be honest but it involves a clever balance of hype and reticence, careful timing, and the intervention of benevolent deities called scouts. Stephanie has tried to explain it all to me but it's like when my husband Tom starts talking about string theory (or whatever it is that he does). My eyes gloss over and all I hear are cats. 

International sales are a completely different beast. Agents go to the big book fairs where they champion your book. They have contacts with overseas editors and subagents. They know how to time submissions. In short, agents get you the best deal possible and as many deals as possible.

And then once a deal is made, they negotiate the finer points of the contract. Even after you're working with a publishing house, the agent stays close, to make sure you're getting good editorial support, the right sales and marketing treatment. If things go pear shaped, they intervene. It's not just the business side of things either. Agents can help with interview prep and presentation skills. They check in to make sure you're not hiding under the bed hyperventilating into a paper bag. Sometimes Stephanie really feels like my personal cheerleader, therapist, and coach, all rolled into one. But most importantly, she takes care of a whole ton of stuff behind the scenes (and there is A LOT going on back there) leaving me free to WRITE.

The spreadsheet

Originally posted: July 26, 2016

It's rejection season! Seven rejections so far this month. My friend Sonam asked me how I handle it - so many "no"s. I've written about rejection before but not about my spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is key to the whole "brush it off" process. (It's also key to staying sane and organized.)

The format doesn't matter too much. Submitted. Rejected. Accepted. That's all you need. Create the spreadsheet as soon as you start sending your work out. That way, when the replies come in, you'll have a place to tally them up and something concrete to do.

The act of filling in the boxes can be analgesic. You read the rejection. You fill in the spreadsheet. Decide if you need to revise the story. If not, because you can see at a glance which publications haven't seen the story yet, you can re-submit right away. The goal is to have as few stories in the rejected section as possible.

Recently, I began jotting down alternative publications beside each submitted story. I highly recommend this approach. It makes re-submitting even more automatic and leaves zero time for brooding.

Writers, if I can give you one piece of advice: stop feeling sorry for yourself. That is precious time when you could be writing, editing, submitting, reading or binge watching Orange is the New Black.

Eventually something will stick. A story will be accepted and then you can move it to the "published" section of the spreadsheet (keep it visible, close to the rejected list). This is important because you can see over time how stories graduate from rejected to accepted. And keeping track of which publications rejected the stories will also help you see the truth: that taste is subjective. Just because a story is rejected doesn't mean it's worthless. Sometimes, yes, the story needs work. And if a rejection comes with feedback, consider it a gift. But often a rejection from one publication is only that: a rejection from one publication.

The spreadsheet speaks the truth. Look at all those acceptances! Look at all those rejections! Being a writer means being rejected. So go send your work out, go court rejection.

This post was written in 2016 but this spreadsheet is from 2020.

On rejection

Originally posted: December 22, 2015

In the late summer of 2011, I did something that, in retrospect, was a gamble. I left a full time job to write. Yes, there would be freelance work (read: paid gigs) but it was a conscious decision to check out of one career and make a running leap at another.

And almost immediately, I began sending my work into the world. I had taken a class with Jessica Grant a few months earlier and had a few stories stock piled away. I sent them to contests and journals. Anyone who has been through this maze knows it is a tedious, time consuming, soul destroying process that usually ends with a self addressed stamped envelope bearing a form letter rejection. If you’re lucky, someone will have scrawled the name of your story in pencil so you’ll know which one got the thumbs down.

Fast forward three and a half years. 2014 came and went and yes, I’d had a bit of success. A couple of short stories won awards. One made a long list. I’d done a couple of public readings and won a grant. But mostly what I had was a whole lot of rejection. Rejection and lost competitions.

Everyone has their own way of dealing with the words "no, thanks." My strategy has been to keep my work in circulation (five stories go out in a batch, rejections roll in more or less together, I re-shuffle the deck and send them all out again). The rule is: don’t wallow; write.

The thing about publications and prizes is that they don’t tell the whole story. The whole story, at the end of 2014, was that I had a disciplined (more or less, let’s be honest...no one is perfect!) writing practice. I was in the habit of submitting my work. I had the first draft of a novel and a collection of short stories I was proud to send out. Hundreds of thousands of beautiful words. It ain’t nothing!

Writing is a leap of faith. Submission is a gamble. And rejection is a knife in the heart. But what is to be gained by indulging the knife? Pull it out, throw it away. Get. Back. To. Work.

Cheryl Strayed tackled rejection and professional jealousy in an old Dear Sugar column. And her words, as always, ring with truth and wisdom. She’s speaking here about jealousy but it could just as easily be applied to rejection:

“You do not let yourself think about it. There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.”

Hype cycle (aka the process)

Originally posted: January 23, 2019

Recently I was listening to an episode of the podcast Zig Zag. It’s about The Hype Cycle which is a graph created by tech analyst Jackie Fenn a quarter century ago. This graph was meant to describe new technology (ie. bitcoin, Twitter, push notifications) but it’s been borrowed by other fields and its basics are a helpful way to think of the writing process.

The Hype Cycle has five phases:

Image via Gartner

1. initial spark of innovation
2. peak of expectation
3. trough of disillusionment
4. slope of enlightenment
5. plateau of productivity

Every story begins with the first idea. It might not even be a very big idea but that match gets lit and it sets off a bonfire and you get so jazzed about writing this amazing thing.

That sets off phase two which is when you’re deep in the writing zone, churning out pages and pages and completely engaged with your project. It’s such a happy time, possibly the happiest time! At some point though you tumble into phase three, the pit of hell and despair. I have been thinking about the trough of disillusionment a lot because I know it is looming on my horizon but also because I’ve been evaluating manuscripts for other writers this month and I am always conscious of the need to balance critique and praise. My job is to question areas where I feel the draft is weak and offer suggestions for possible improvements. The risk is - especially with writers who I don’t know well or at all - that my comments will throw them into the trough and they won’t try to climb out.

Here’s the thing: the trough is a necessary part of the process. It’s like driving through the isthmus between St. John’s and Terra Nova National Park. Sometimes that damn isthmus is a death trap and the fog is low and there’s a horrible blizzard and you’re driving with zero visibility. But there’s literally no other way to get to the Park. You just have to white knuckle through it. The trough is the same. There’s no way to get to a better draft without seeing the flaws and feeling bad about them.

The trick is to keep calm and carry on. Don’t give up. And don’t deceive yourself into thinking the flaws aren’t there. Accept the flaws. Start trying to fix them. That’s phase four, the gradual work of revision and correction. And onward to the plateau of productivity. That initial hopeful burst doesn’t really come back. For one thing, after some time, the idea is no longer novel. But what you get instead in these last two stages is gradual improvement. Little by little. Until the end.

Sometimes you have to cycle through phases two and three several times while working on a single project. Dr. Math and I have this running joke in our house. He comes home from a day of research and I ask: “How was it?” If it’s been a good day he says: “I solved this lemma. I’m a genius!” But inevitably, the following day he’ll come home with a hang dog, downtrodden expression and tell me the breakthrough he made yesterday ended up only being a partial solution. Or he’s now discovered some other loose thread. Scientific research and fiction writing, if plotted on graphs would look much like the same rollercoaster. See the ride through to the end. That’s what I’m saying.

Sense of an ending

In my writing group we have a running joke that no matter what or whose piece I'm critiquing, my advice will always be to chop the last paragraph/ scene/ chapter/ sentence.

There is a tendency, often, to wax on for too long. Or, worse, to be anxious that the reader will not get it, will fail to properly understand the story. And then the writer, in a moment of weakness, crams a horrible summary at the end to explain the whole thing. No. Just erase all that stuff. The real ending is three sentences up. British author Tessa Hadley agrees: "If ever you can take off the last paragraph and it still works then you didn't need that last paragraph.”

It’s instructive to hear authors speak about endings which, in my experience, are either instinctive and automatic or impossible roadblocks that stall everything.

A while back, Hadley was interviewed by BBC Radio 4's James Naughtie about three stories in her collection Married Love. What interested me most - but wasn't discussed much - were her thoughts on endings. To summarize, she says: stories must take a turn and that you should leave something left over, a note of yearning at the end.

To me this means you begin with the characters at a certain point, then in the course of the story their circumstances change, and there is a turn so that they are left somewhere else. Or the reader begins at a point - perhaps with an assumption - and by the end the turn takes place in the reader's mind. The reader comes to a realization or their assumptions are proven wrong.

“...the ending of a short story spins and looks back over the short story and so it’s more retrospective in a way.”
— Lorrie Moore

As for the yearning….there is always that unfinished note at the end of Hadley's stories. The characters feel like they are left longing or the reader is. This is one of those characteristics that I love about her stories, that I want to emulate but can't because I can't even really articulate what it is that she does or how she does it.

And then here’s American short story queen Lorrie Moore talking about the difference between short stories and novels. The former ends with a backward glance while the latter looks forward.

Finally, some wisdom from author Ethan Canin who believes our job, as writers, through the course of the story, is to engage the reader so fully and deeply that emotion overwhelms intellect and the reader is carried along: "At the end of a story or novel, you do not want the reader thinking. Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion's enemy."

Short story endings

The other day, I ran into Eva Crocker and Susie Taylor and we got to talking about short story endings. They’re so tricky to write, I complained. To which Susie said: Yeah, there are only so many times you can end a story with someone dying or getting on a plane.

Ending a novel is infinitely easier than ending a short story. Actually, almost everything about the craft of writing is easier in long vs. short form. Regardless, here are four ways to end a short story:

“There are only so many times you can end a story with someone dying or getting on a plane.” — Susie Taylor, author and astute person

First off, BACKSPACE. If you’ve already written all the way to the end you might want to reconsider the last sentence, the last word, or the last paragraph. Is it really needed? Many writers, myself included, make the mistake of summarizing things for the reader, just in case they didn’t get the point. Originally, the final sentence of “Butter Tea at Starbucks” was something like: Everything feels miraculous. And my writing group said: you’ve nailed the final scene but knock it off with this dumb line, already. They were right so I did.

Sometimes the ending is lurking somewhere else in the story and the trick is to go back and find it, then cut and paste so that the ending is a flashback. I struggled with “Happy Adventure” for years before finally moving the second last scene to the very end.

Other times, the ending is a flash forward. Check out Tessa Hadley’s story “An Abduction” which ends with a big leap into the future. It’s disorienting in the best possible way.

One way to conclude a story is to take some previously innocuous image from earlier in the story and reproduce in the form of an epiphany at the end. I learned this trick after binge reading a bunch of stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Have a look at Souvankham’s O. Henry-prize winning story “Slingshot.” In the third last scene a character talks about a tornado. It’s a bit obscure, what he says, and for a moment the reader is left thinking: “what’s this guy on about?” but it’s also so fleeting that it’s almost forgettable. Except then at the very end, the tornado returns in an unexpected way, gloriously described so this time we are left with a crisp image. (Read the story and you’ll understand what I’m saying)

Why does this particular sleight of hand work so well? Because a reliable way to end a story well is to surprise the reader WHILE making them feel that in hindsight the ending makes sense. And readers also like foreshadowing. Good murder mysteries do both these things well - surprise ending that also feels authentic because in hindsight you realize the gut punch was lying in wait all along.

I don’t mean to give the impression that a neat little trick is going to be satisfying to a reader without substance in place. Fundamentally, stories are about transformation. Something has to change by the end: either the character or the reader’s perception of the situation/ character or both.

Talent is over-rated

Sometimes we talk about stories like this: the story is an entity with its own consciousness. The story arrives, via a muse. The story reveals itself as it is being written. Writers are mere scribes.

In my experience, this airy-fairy, woo-woo, magical thinking is a whole lot of nonsense. Writing isn't magic. It's good old-fashioned hard work. It is sitting your butt in the chair every single day and forcing yourself to do the work. Because trust me about this, if you don’t keep the pump primed, it will not yield a drop.

Sure, there are moments that feel sublime but the movie montage of how a book is made would look really mundane. Writing is a nose stuck in a refugee law text book. It is hours trawling the internet for photos of jail cells and then more hours trying to find the correct combination of words to evoke said jail cells. It is reading over something you thought was insightful and poetic the day before only to discover it has morphed into toxic waste. It is revising a chapter for the tenth time. It is writing the same sentence five different ways and then reading each option out loud. It is chucking months of work and going back to square one. It is persistence and effort with a healthy dose of self-hatred. And most of the time it is also working despite deep uncertainty. Not knowing if the story is any good. Or else, knowing it is not good but hoping it might eventually get better.

Sometimes, because we are often asked and it is difficult to properly describe how stories are invented, we writers revert to supernatural explanations. Harry Potter famously appeared to JK Rowling in a train car. I believe this anecdote because that is how many of my characters have rocked up too. I’ll be tossing and turning with insomnia when a little girl appears out of thin air.

This is called inspiration (1%). Then comes the perspiration (99%). Now I have to make decisions. What’s this little girl’s name, age, and future vocation? Is she introverted or extroverted, a pessimist or optimist? Decisions mean constraints and constraints are important because good writing is precise. You can’t be specific when you are writing about a character if you haven’t nailed down the details. But then the real questions are: What does this character want more than anything? Who far will she go to get it? And for that, I free write pages and pages and pages, most of which will never leave my notebook. From all this random riffing emerges a picture of who the character is and from there the plot evolves.

It does everyone a disservice to suggest there’s a fairy who selectively whispers sweet nothings into the ears of a chosen few. Talent is real and it sure is helpful but it’s highly overrated and not the key ingredient. If you want to be a writer, write. Do the work. I repeat: talent is not necessary. Work is necessary. That’s the 99%.

All the work while crying

Originally published October 22, 2019

If procrastination was a sport, writers would medal. Going to the gym, cleaning the toilet, de-frosting the freezer, in-box zero, baking, scrolling instagram …these are novice moves. A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon search engine optimizing this website. A new low or levelling up?

But there’s another, more insidious, way we procrastinate. We avoid the difficult scenes.

Write the difficult scenes

You know the ones I’m talking about. You’ve brought characters together to have a knock-em-down-drag-em-out fight but just as the tension rises, you panic and fade to black. Or: something horrible happens off stage and the reader is informed of it after the fact.

As a reader, nothing is more disappointing than being cheated of the juice. But as a writer, I’ve been guilty of wimping out.

There were several scenes in The Boat People that were not written until late in the game (read: until my editors forced my hand). The scene where Sellian is born, the one where the UN leaves Mahindan’s hometown, the one where Priya and Charlie take Sellian somewhere he doesn’t want to go (I won’t spoiler the book and say where). Consistently, readers tell me these were the most gutting scenes, the ones that made them cry, the ones they won’t forget. I’m proudest of those scenes. They were hard work but that’s not why I love them. I love them because they are the scenes where stakes were high and characters were in peril and therefore, they contained the most emotion. Emotion is a story’s heart beat. If the emotions are dialled down, if you let the characters off easy and nothing they do is fraught, your story will flatline.

Unconscious procrastination

The odd thing about those scenes was that I always knew they took place in the timeline of the story, I just didn’t think they were necessary to show. Unconscious procrastination is insidious: we don’t even realize we are avoiding the hard work.

We create characters we love and then we can’t stomach making their lives hard. So we don’t write those difficult scenes. Instead, we write a whole bunch of unnecessary material. We add side stories and secondary plots, create minor characters and let the big, bad stuff happen to them. Deep down we know the story is flatlining and we try to breathe life into it by padding it with all this extra stuff. We procrastinate by writing.

How to write faster

Here’s the foolproof way to write your story faster: identify the scenes you are avoiding and get them over with. No excuses. March that character down the gangplank and push her into the shark-circled waters. Now, the climactic scenes need not be ones of injury and death. The big scene could be a character telling his parents something they don’t want to hear. Or a character having tea with the Queen of England and dropping the cup. Or kicking the corgi under the table by accident.

Figuring out the scenes you’re avoiding isn’t always easy. It helps to have another writer or a blunt friend read your work. Even better: hire a professional to help you with your manuscript. If neither of these are options, here are some signs to watch for on your own:

1. Is a minor character getting more action than the protagonist?

2. By the end of the story, who has experienced the most change and transformation? If it’s not the protagonist that’s a problem.

3. Are confrontations/ fights avoided or resolved too quickly?

4. Is life a little too easy for the protagonist? Do they bounce back too quickly and/or un-harmed from every set back?

5. In a tense scene, where were the characters physically in relation to each other? Long distance fights don’t have the same punch as two characters having it out face to face.

6. What action happens off stage?

7. What scenes made you squirm/ want to walk away? Did you wimp out? Did you end them too soon? Be honest.

Remember: stakes + peril = emotion. What is at stake for the protagonist? Have you put them in peril? Are the stakes and the peril present on the page? Count the words. Make sure you’ve devoted sufficient time to your protagonist’s discomfort. Don’t procrastinate on your own discomfort. Sweating, the shakes - these are solid signs you’re doing the hard work. Bonus points for tears.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

via Toothpaste for Dinner

Red herring

Originally posted: February 24, 2016

The novelist Anne Simpson once gave me some good editing advice. Often the beginning (the first sentence, paragraph, chapter) is not really the beginning.

When we sit down to tell a story, it takes a while to warm up, to ease in. So then, in the edits, we must wade through and find the true beginning, the place where the story really starts, and lop off the rest.

I remember having this experience with an early draft of A Drawer Full of Guggums. Originally the story had an extra 500 words at the top. My main character got on a plane, flew half way around the world. Jet-lagged, she listened to her uncle snore in the next room. Bumbling around London, she struggled to find housing. And that was all great fun to write. It was quality time she and I spent together. But all along, I knew the story was about the main character and her quirky landlady. Which meant everything before their first meeting - all those hundreds of words - had to go.

Preludes and prologues, sometimes they are a red herring. Be brave.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.