Access to agents

A good friend of mine has polished off his novella and wants to locate an agent for his book. A few published guides will give him a copious list of the modern literary world's gatekeepers and salespeople. (That is what the agent does these days for their pay, after they advise you on how to edit your book into a salable product.) Other online guides can help the writer, searching for a publishing contract producer, weed out the less worthy representatives.

To begin with, the published guides. Writer's Digest, ever-vigilant to overlook no opportunity to school the writer, publishes a WD Guide to Agents. But the tome most often consulted among the writers I know is Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors and Literary Agents. Either of these books will cost less than the time you'd spend searching online — although you're likely to be doing that, too, once you track down some prospects.

After being the person who sells work much like yours, the second hurdle an agent must cross: integrity. One way to check is to search out an agent's name in the AAR directory. This Association of Authors' Representatives requires an agent to have actually sold some manuscripts before it will accept the agent as a member:

To qualify for membership, the applicant for membership in the literary branch of the AAR must have been the agent principally responsible for executed agreements concerning the grant of publication, translation or performance rights in 10 different literary properties during the 18-month period preceding application.

You can tell by these requirements that an AAR agent is going to be busy. Better a busy agent than one who will just hold your book for months, unable to sell it. But just because an agent isn't an AAR member doesn't mean you should skip them. One bit of advice I gathered suggested otherwise. "If an agent isn't listed there, think twice about the agent. There are very strict rules for getting in AAR."

Maybe too strict. It seems lots of agents at the Writer's League of Texas Agents Conference have no listing in AAR. A quick check of the first one-third of those agents, alphabetically, brought only one AAR listing, for Betsy Amster. Maybe not the definitive way to seek out a representative, unless you're hunting for big game on that novella contract.

A better agent-checking resource, by my reckoning, is Preditors and Editors. It explains that it's possible agents who aren't in their rating system "don't want to be listed with P&E, even though it's free, because P&E dares to give negative recommendations."

The P&E Web site is a good one, with one of the clearest explanations of the need for an agent and how they work. It's frank, too. " Many writers believe they need an agent to sell their book manuscript. Nothing could be farther from the truth." An agent charging a fee before selling your book is a non-starter, according to the service:

Any charge made to the author that is payable prior to the sale of the manuscript to a publisher, however characterized by the agent, is a "fee" and represents inappropriate conduct not in the author's best interest. This clarification is in response to several attempts to evade criticism through semantic changes by questionable agents that do not actually represent any improvement in practices--only in the labels on the bills sent to authors.

At this point, the effort and search is all about business, and offering a product with a platform: potential readers interested in buying the book. Not to be confused with the writing, or being a writer.

Reflections on a dark Sun

The literary magazine The Sun is just beyond 30 years old, but it hasn't swerved a bit from its singular course through the dark side of human nature. Sy Safransky has been the editor throughout the mag's lifespan, nurturing an editorial outlook that shines its spotlight on our deepest, darkest moments.

I spent an hour in bed after I woke up this morning reading the July issue. This is the work of the writer, too, I rationalized. We need to read where we hope to be published. Yes, even this celebration of life's train wrecks stands on my list of hopes, because The Sun is uniformly well-written.

The centerpiece of the magazine, which constantly clocks in at 48 pages, is Readers Write. This deep well of human experience, related in first-person prose, recounts things that really have happened. Non-fiction only, explain the submission guidelines. The magazine's staff reports these peeled off skins of truth are "edited, often quite heavily, but contributors often have the opportunity to approve or disapprove of editorial changes prior to publication." Readers Write follows themes, simple as "Nothing to Lose."

As I lay in bed reading this month's 8-page collection of stories on "Waking Up," I began to wonder if the staff was editing the pieces to darken them. After all, this 15 percent of the magazine included reports from a 10-by-10 prison cell; nightmares in the days leading to breast cancer surgery; a family pet tortured by young boys; an abusive alcoholic husband blaming his wife for their divorce; a suicide attempt survived without explanation; a shotgun-wielding parent who frightens his teenager into a fatal crash; Bosnian children returning to an occupied home where soldiers had left a live bomb; a sex offender failing to hold a job...

There are moments of joy and hope in The Sun — one reader wrote of wishing good things for his kids if he woke at 2:22 or 3:33 in the morning, and another recounted the joyous morning she woke up to JFK's election. But for a magazine so named, The Sun howls in a dark tone much of the time. Its subjects, however, are the thing we are drawn to in stories: trouble, tragedy, conflict and complications. But like the short fiction of Annie Proulx, (stagger through her Heart Songs collection, if you dare) The Sun doesn't feel compelled to lift its troubled people out of their woes. Maybe its prose, poetry and black and white photos aim to make the rest of us feel lucky.

Share your experiences with Writer's Digest

Writer's Digest is looking for stories from writers about their experiences in getting trained, getting an agent, getting hope for the future. Until Sept. 30, 2006:

Joanna Masterson, editor of Guide to Literary Agents, wants to gather some first-hand feedback on writers’ conferences for an article in the 2008 Guide. Here are some of the scenarios she’s especially interested in:

1. A writer who successfully pitched a book idea at a one-on-one agent meeting. How did you prepare? What was the result of the meeting? Did the agent offer to represent you after seeing more materials? Did the agent refer you to another agent or give other helpful advice?

2. A writer who attended a “technical” session on writing (e.g., character development, dialogue, query letters, conflict, etc). What was the session and how did it impact you? How did you apply the information to your own writing?

3. A writer who attended a particularly inspiring keynote address. Who was the speaker? What was the message? How did you apply it to your own writing life?

4. A writer who socialized with other attendees and in doing so joined a writing/critique group, found someone to co-author a book, got inside information on an agent, etc. How did you meet? What was the result of the meeting?

5. A writer who is brand new to publishing and attended a conference with the hopes of learning about the publishing industry. What did you learn? What resources/sessions were most helpful? Did the conference help jumpstart your career?

If you’d like to participate, please send an e-mail to literaryagent@fwpubs.com with your name, the name of the conference you attended, when you attended the conference (the more recent, the better), and a short description of your conference experience.

If this sounds like Chicken Soup for the Soul kind of material, where you share and then someone else gets the material for their book or article, well, it is. But you might find that recounting your experience — especially for items 2 and 3 — is good for your own writing enlightenment.

As for me, here's the answer to No. 2. I just came back from the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, where Lon Otto took us through five days of Setting, Point of View, Characterization, Dialogue and Structure. Each with a 150-300 word assignment. I told my son Nick it was the best five days of writing training I've ever had.

How am I applying this? I am now looking for serious flaws to apply to my favorite characters in Viral Times. Not just "he's rude to bigots." More like, "he's a moral coward when threatened with telling the truth about his friends." Many writers protect the characters who are most like the writer. Then you share your writing, and it turns out the readers could care less about your favorites. They like your villains instead -- because they're seriously flawed.

Notes on dialogue, Iowa-style

One week ago today I enjoyed a long, fun day at the Summer Writing Festival. I read a short bit in an open mike session, reveled in an Elevenses lecture on metaphor. I also learned a good deal about dialogue that can improve my own novel, Viral Times.

Here's just a few quick notes:

1. Dialogue should sound organic. Answers don't necessarily follow questions, not directly, anyway. The answer can change the subject. The answer sometimes doesn't reflect the question. This is one way to make dialogue surprising.

2. Dialogue doesn't indicate emotion. It shows emotion. No "he exclaimed" or "he whimpered" to indicate. Search your imagination for dialogue whose words show exclamation or whimpering. Or use gestures that might match these feelings.

3. Dialogue should be motivated by both character and situation. Rent Pulp Fiction. Eaarly in the movie, you'll notice how there's very little of the explanation of the hit mens' plans in their dialogue. Jules and Vincent (Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta) say:

"We should have shotguns for this kind of deal."
"How many up there?"
"Three or four."
"Counting our guy?"
"I'm not sure."
"So there could be up to five guys in there."
"It's possible."
"We should have fuckin' shotguns."

These fellows stand in front of a car trunk while they talk this over, loading .45s. Their plan must to be kill someone, several people. Nary a word is said about the plan directly.

In dialogue, the central thing is not named, so it can gain power during the scene.

Oh, and the shorter the dialogue per character (total number of sentences), the better. People don't speak in long sentences (most people, anyway). Too many sentences and you have a speech. Leave that for the sequel, the narrative writing that follows the scene.

Small mags make a large difference

For a writer just starting out on the publishing trail, small magazines can be the best first step. While I included these smaller pubs in my submission efforts a few years back, I also had the temerity to send stories to The Atlantic Monthly. (Back in the days when the magazine published a short story each month, and the fiction editor allegedly read anything that was addressed directly to him.)

I thought of a submission to The Atlantic as a lottery entry which cost only the postage and envelope. The effort would've been better spent on magazines which want new voices.

Gordon van Gelder, publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, said in an online interview that small press magazines are very important in bringing fresh voices to the front:

Every writer needs to learn the craft, and there has to be a place for that learning to occur. Nowadays the pulp market is gone, but the small press remains strong. I think the first story from William Gibson [author of seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer] appeared in a small-press magazine called Unearth.

Many resources can help a writer with a story find these small press magazines. One that I recently subscribed to: SPECFICME, "a bi-monthly, PDF market newsletter for science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers. Every issue features well over 200 hundred markets, from e-zines to print magazines. Along with news about new publications, anthologies, contests, dead markets and a lot more."

You need writing in your workshop

On the very first night at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, our professor Lon Otto explained why we were going to be writing, rather than reading, through our class "The Novelist's Tools."

"I don't much believe in the worship of literature," he said, but added, "Reading has been the way writers have learned to write since before there were classes in writing. When I started out in the Festival, I just did manuscript review."

The drill, in case you haven't endured it, is to read 15-20 pages per workshopper — as many as 11 other souls — then comment on the page and in class on the manuscript. You can do the math and see that's at least 165 pages of stories, or something on the order of 40,000 words to comprehend and comment on.

All that critique just doesn't teach a writer the way that writing does, Otto said. "Unless new writing is happening, you don't learn in the same way."

This is why we stress generative writing exercises in the Writer's Workshops I lead. Doing teaches more than watching. It's not like we've got dangerous power tools to wield that require safety training and observation, either. Otto was all about release, being "Blake-ian" and giving things a try.

Regular synopsis keeps your story focused

For our final assignment in Lon Otto's Iowa Summer Writing Festival class, we had to summarize our books in three sentences. Okay, they could be wooly, complex sentences. But three was all we'd get.

He let us warm up on this overnight task (pretty tough to do in-class) with a summary of the book that we'd brought to Iowa to admire. A novel we liked because we'd read it and found it masterful in some aspect of the craft. Mine was Empire Falls.

Our summary had to include one sentence each: Initial Conflict, Subsequent Complications, and a Conclusion. For Empire Falls, I gave it this summary:

1. Softhearted Empire Falls Diner manager Miles Roby returns from vacation to his hometown where he’s always lived with hard questions: how will his teenaged daughter Tick handle his soon-to-divorced wife’s remarriage, and what will Miles do to buy the diner — and his independence — from the richest woman in the small, failed mill town Empire Falls?

2. While Tick befriends a mysterious new boy in art class with a troubled past and a threatening future, Miles must restart his stagnant dreams and face down his conniving father’s meddling, an unwanted crush from the rich woman’s crippled daughter, and a sinister interest from the town’s rogue policeman in Miles’ family.

3. These threats lead to murder, Miles’ new ability to embrace a risky future, and a new reliance on family to bring hope to his prospects of happiness.

Okay, easy enough. A prize-winning novel from a master craftsman ought to be simpler to sum up than a first novel from me, still learning the finer points of the craft. But here goes, for Viral Times:

1. Prize-winning journalist Dayton Winstead, first widowed, then disgraced and fired when a story gets labeled a hoax, scuffles for survival in a near-future America where the terror of a viral pandemic has made intimate touch more deadly than AIDS.

2. When a frightened, frustrated populace retreats into sexual contact by embracing new full-body, simulated-sex suits linked via networks to make love — or just lust — fundamentalist scientist Jennifer Nation develops a death threat to end the rampant promiscuity.

3. She creates a fatal virus to enter and attack the sim-suits on a network of millions of users — a threat Dayton must track down, while he risks restarting his faith in love and health with naturopath Angie Consoli, before Nation’s seven-day deadline runs out to release the virus.

This is an exercise a novel writer, or anybody crafting a story, should perform once a month. (It's hard enough that this can be motivation to finish the book, play, or story). From month to month the synopsis will change, as the story develops.

Quick assignments at Iowa

The briefest of assignments can be instructive, too. They need a few elements to teach you, like surprise, and a very close deadline. Here at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, I'm learning from the short stuff at the end of the week.

Yesterday we had about 3 minutes to compose a poem. Short poem, sure. It was the quick that challenged us. Douglas Goetsch, a fine poet whose work I've shared with my writing groups (his latest is The Job of Being Everybody), had us write a poem from a construction worker.

The set-up: There's been construction in front of the Iowa House hotel (where I'm staying, right on the bank of the Iowa River), ripping up the sidewalk all through the Festival. Early morning construction, waking up guests. So one worker decides to post a sign, apologizing for the inconvenience. He's not a fan of the work schedule himself. Nobody's yelled at him about it, but he's seen people complaining to the foreman.

We wrote, then a few of us got to read aloud in the auditorium. (My favorite, of course). Here's mine:

That growl and beep, it wakes me too
We'd like to sleep as long as you
So please forgive our sounds of labor
This work, once done, gives the river fresh flavor

Goetsch made it easy for us, in a way, while we were working quick with a surprising exercise. "If it winds up sucking, make it suck exquisitely — make it utterly bad," he said. Freedom to risk failure. It feels familiar, a part of what we do in the Writer's Workshop.

Good thing that failure is an option on the way to creation. The final assignment in the Novelist's Tools class is to summarize our novel in three sentences. Hmmm, 80,000 words to a handful of sentences. Short stuff, tall order.

Words spoken from an Iowa Wheelhouse

I've been at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for three days, so that means tonight the Festival hosted its Open Mike evening. Down in the basement of the Iowa Memorial Union — a building busy with newly-minted freshmen in orientatation — some 30 of us stood up to read our writing in a common room-coffee house called the Wheelhouse. Reading writing aloud. Yeah, a lot like the practices of the Amherst Writers & Artists, and my Writer's Workshop.

We read without response, except to hear polite and sincere applause (and get thumbs up from our classmates in the audience). The readers were essayists, memoir writers, poets and novelists, as well as short story writers. Fun language and colorful images rolled by, even through nobody was given more than three minutes to read:

"You can't be sure you're happy until you're dead." (A poem)

A story of ending a love affair on Valentine's Day

In a memoir, about an aging father helped by his daughter to renew his driver's license: "His arms, where muscles used to live like huge wads of gum."

A love letter to wine, from a student in Doug Goestch's poetry class.

A love letter to breast cancer, from an 18-year survivor of same.

"She considered which lingerie she should wear, what would fit their mood."

"Gas flames were humming from the fireplace."

"Hunger evens out a lot of things."

We had to sign up to read. I went first this year, because in any other slot I squirm, waiting for my chance to perform. My three minute bit was a revision of an exercise from my workshop group: Choosing a shoe description, at random, and writing for 15 minutes about it. It begins:

Square toed purple slides, stacked heel — high enough to give her calf that come-hither arch. Estrella knew what to wear to turn the boys’ heads.

I said it was from my novel Viral Times, or at least backstory I hoped to squeeze into the book. You can read it as a small PDF file. I was happy to "publish" it for the second time; the first was in that writing group, when I read it aloud.

Low res, but not low cost

Tonight at the Helen Thomas speech, Q&A, and book signing sponsored by the Writer's League of Texas (more on that tomorrow) I met a student of the Pacific Lutheran University MFA program. The writing MFA is low-residency at PLU, meaning that four times over the three years of study the students are in residence for a couple weeks in Washington state — in "the shadow of Mount Rainier," as the Web site says, in Tacoma. The remainder of the three years students spend at home, communicating via e-mail and phone with their faculty and fellow students.

Aside from the residency relief — you don't have to put your life on hiatus to live in a place like San Marcos or Iowa City with lo-res — there's not a lot of difference between the PLU program and a full residency MFA. It still requires 60 hours of credits.

Oh, the PLU program doesn't demand a GRE test, something that can stymie writers when they get to the math part of that brain-buster. (Toughest three hours I've spent in study or testing, ever. But it had been 30 years since I'd muscled through a standardized test when I mastered my GRE in 2004).

The PLU program is on the low side of the cost curve for MFA programs, but that doesn't qualify as inexpensive. The student estimated fees of about $18,000 for her degree, including the residency fees. "Or less than the cost of a new car," her friend added. Good analogy, if you believe that an MFA can carry your writing further than any portable, hand-crafted MFA. (See The Portable MFA for "the core essentials taught to MFA students.") Current prices are more like $22,000 for the program.

But I found it interesting that the lead quote on the PLU MFA page celebrates teaching one another in groups — something at the heart of the Amherst Writers & Artists method we practice at the Writer's Workshop. At PLU, "What happens in groups is that we learn from each other. And in the end, what really happens is that we teach ourselves."

Make a mission, find a theme

Skills in composing and revising prose will not be enough to create a memorable, salable story. In addition to crafting sentences carefully, you must draw the map for your book, story or play. Why are you writing this work of art? What is your mission that brings you to the notebook or keyboard every day?

You are searching for a theme. This is a element of writing as important as knowing your characters cold, casting captivating conflict, or painting a setting vivid enough for a reader to live in. One way to begin this essential process is to create a mission statement for your story.

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute sets out his process for a story's mission statement.

1. To tell who will tell the story
2. To describe the challenges in language, and how you might overcome them
3. To name the most important, essential content of the story
4. To describe the story's form
5. To name your ambitions and goals for telling the story

Clark says in his Writer's Toolbox

Most writers aspire to some invisible next step — for a story or for a body of work. For some, this aspiration remains unfilled and metastasizes. Writing down your mission turns your vague hopes for for a story into language. By writing about your writing, you learn what you want to learn.

It's no coincidence that Clark used that last sentence. Earlier in Clark's Writing Tools, he passes on a maxim from Donald Murray, the Pulitzer-winning writer of journalism, novels and textbooks like Write to Learn. Murray says that good writers turn stories into workshops, intense moments of learning where they advance their craft.

Murray talks about a daybook in his textbook, a place to write about the goals of your writing, as well as examining language. It's a concept also visited by the fine "So, Is It Done Yet?" DVD on revision. Get out a notebook and start a daybook on your story. Make a mission statement the first thing you accomplish.

Adverbs yea, adverbs nay: another rule to be broken

It's a fundamental of writing: beware of adverbs. They work at their best when they spice up adjectives. But too often they're at their worst, expressing a meaning already inside a sentence.

They can entertain if you don't have to rely on them. You can have fun with the pun game Tom Swiftie, where the adverb amplifies the meaning of the sentence. "I need some pizza now," he said crustily. (Feel free to contribute your own Swifties in the comments section below.)

The repair to sentences choked by adverbs? Find a way to convert the verb/adverb combinations to a strong verb alone. "She went quickly down the stairs" could become "She bolted down the stairs."

Still, the adverb advisory is an overworked maxim in writing. In the new book The Portable MFA in Creative Writing, Tim Tomlinson lists the "cut out adverbs" directive as useless, but often promoted in creative writing instruction:

The [MFA from Columbia] education I received for over $30,000 can be condensed into eight easy to forget points, and I offer them all for the price of this book:

1. Write what you know; don't write what you don't know.
2. Flashy style of language without a story to tell is "all dressed up with nowhere to go."
3. Writing can't be taught.
4. Cut out adverbs
5. Never use the word "always"
6. "You will never be fictionists."
7. Don't write screenplays; they will destroy your ability to write prose fiction.
8. There are kinds of stories.

None of these are wrong, he says ("except for the vapid number three and the asinine number six'), but Tomlinson says they're all useless. "Tear them out and cumple them up, find a wastebasket and practice your sky hook — because with these eight MFA rules as your guidelines, you have a better chance of making it in the NBA."

Sure, watch the adverbs in your writing. Keep a closer eye on more essential matters such as theme, the guideline to assembling your adverb-free writing into a compelling narrative structure. More on that tomorrow, along with a quick exercise that I'll be using to get underway with a rewritten synopsis.

It took an editor to be entertaining

The Writer's League of Texas Agents & Editors Conference had its moments of inspiration and brilliance. More than 30 minutes of them coursed over the crowd at the luncheon speech of Saturday, the only full day of the event. Lew Wasserman, who founded the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and was book editor for the LA Times and the New Republic, reminded us all why we're writing and pushing that big rock up the hill to get it published.

"Ideas matter," Wasserman said to begin, pointing at the book and the printed word as still the best way to transmit an idea to mankind. But he used a speech to spark us, one that he obviously wrote but seemed to deliver with little reference to any notes. Wasserman believed in what he jested was "a declarative polemic."

"Yes, books do have a future," he said. We have all these alternative devices" to tell a story — the Internet, TV, movies, video games — "but more trees are being cut down than ever. 75,000 book titles were printed in 1996. Last year 180,000 were published. "The good news is that books will continue to flourish," he said. The bad news: there are fewer readers than ever.

"Books still retain the patina of authority," he said, "yet to be rivalled by any electronic device." Wasserman noted that the king of the electronic message, Bill Gates, still turned to a publishing house to create his "book-like object," a phrase Wasserman used to describe anything printed, whether by print-on-demand, self-published or produced from a traditional press.

It's up to the writers of books to keep the arts of solitude and reflection from being overwhelmed in our current society, he said. Reading, Wasserman said, "is almost an anti-social act, because it lets us enter the zone of encouraged independent critical thinking."

Whew. And you thought you were just writing a funny mystery with some quirky characters, an item the agents at the conference said they were seeking. No, you're keeping a type of thinking alive and contributing to us all. Keep writing.