Tag Archives: getting published

October 17, 2012 · 8:25 pm

Being Trolled

Why agents go to conferences is not a mystery. They think, perhaps with good reason, they’re going to discover the next John Grisham, a prolific but hitherto undiscovered writer who has struck a vein without noticing that what is flowing out is lifeblood. I wonder, if one could ever know, what the stats are. How many eventual bestselling authors are discovered at conferences versus those who are “discovered” through steadfast efforts at publication in small magazines or through driven submissions to slush piles? No one seems to calculate such odds.

I do think that one stands a better chance of being “discovered” by new, hungry agents who hope to find and promote the next John Grisham than by those who already have quasi-John-Grishams in their “stables” (sorry to offend any agents happening by with my barnyard metaphor). That is what happened to me. J and L had both been editors at major publishing houses. They had decided their future lay in agenting rather than editing, and from the little I really know of what editors even at major houses get paid and what they go through, I suspect they were right. So they came to the conference I had recently begun attending, and there they “discovered” me and my seven-hundred-page manuscript.

L told me later, “When I saw you, I thought, ‘This girl has something to do with horses.'” I do not reveal this as a very good strategem to getting published: looking like you have something to do with horses. Or maybe it is. I have lost the ability to tell what might be the deciding factor. Oddly, I remember the dress I was wearing. It was powder blue and flowing, a bit longer than the dresses and “hot pants” I wore a decade earlier when I was writing the novel. I was a blonde then. I looked like I had something to do with horses. This sold. They asked me to send them the ms.

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Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Writers' conferences

Tagged as agents, getting published, publishing, writers' conferences, writing, writing novels

October 10, 2012 · 8:36 pm

I conference

A lot of the chronology has blurred. This was all so long ago that “far, far away” refers to next door in comparison.

But.

I did undergraduate work at a Florida university. Because all I wanted to do in life at that point was ride horses, I didn’t finish: stopped 31 hours short of an English degree. But I had contacts there, whom I bugged with my deathless prose. The first professor I asked to read my opus was gentle and generous but not much help. I don’t recall what he said about my book. I do recall he had kept a test of mine on the metaphysical poets. “You’re the girl who writes really, really small.” (I may be allowed to brag that he’d kept the test because my answers were really, really good, not because he liked small handwriting. I have always been a good taker of every kind of test.)

I knew of, but had not taken courses from, a genial older professor who ran a yearly writers’ conference. I begged him to read one of my best chapters. He told me, “If the rest of it is as exciting as this, I don’t see why you can’t get published.”

Of course, the whole point is you can’t tell whether it’s all that exciting. Only readers can tell you that.

Anyway, it must have been that very spring I went to his conference. It was one of those that early on saw the benefit to inviting actual agents and actual editors to come and troll for new authors.

I have these things to say about my eligibility for getting trolled for: I was young. I was pretty. I had what might be called a “fresh innocence.” I smelled like the outdoors. I had a complete manuscript about the Kentucky Derby. I was trollable.

I was trolled.

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Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Writers' conferences

Tagged as agents, getting published, publishing, readers, writing, writing novels

October 1, 2012 · 9:22 pm

Let me tell you my publication story

I’ll just get it started here.

I’m just one of those people who always wrote. Long narrative poems full of excitable adjectives and labored rhymes when I was ten. Whole novels in pencil about wild horses when I was eight. A rather strange novel a friend said was full of homoerotic subtexts (she didn’t use either of those words but that’s what she meant) when I was sixteen. A lyric prose/poem about my equally strange infatuation when I was twenty-five.

You’re not really going to hear about any of those, so stop salivating.

I had a labor of love. I won’t go into the details (I said don’t salivate). I wrote and wrote on it, version after version, convinced it was a story worth telling, for at least ten years. At one point, I went away for a month to do nothing but write. Wrong. I produced drivel. Of my beloved character, whose voice I had so carefully echoed in a hundred typed pages, a friend and sweetly masochistic reader said, “I got sick of hearing him whine.” Back to wondering what this story was about and why no one loved him like I did. My best reader turned out to be my sister, who said of a later and less annoying draft, “This is a character sketch, not a novel.” Back to drafting. Make some things happen. Let people get killed. Joy.

It came out to 700 pages. It had a wonderful beginning. I knew the day I wrote that first paragraph I had nailed it. It had an existentially tragic and profound ending. I had a feeling I hadn’t nailed that, but I was stubborn. My character’s glorious adventure had to end in an abyss of ironies. Only then could I be writing a great novel.

(Truth #1–or have I already listed some truths?): Endings are HARD.

So I began the Sisyphean task of sending bits of it out to the editors listed in Writers’ Markets. I don’t think in those days one wrote query letters; in any case, I didn’t know I should. You know how that effort ended. You’ve been there.

I don’t begin to remember any of the rejections I got.

Then I discovered writers’ conferences. The next chapter begins.

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Filed under Myths and Truths for writers

Tagged as getting published, learning to write, publishing, readers, writing novels

January 29, 2012 · 8:05 pm

There’s something gained. . . .

It’s not that I didn’t gain anything from this experience. Now, when I teach creative writing (which I do less often than I might, because so many people in my program want to do it), I know what to tell my students not to do.

Here’s Rule Not To Do #1: Don’t write for yourself.

I can hear the shrieks of protest now.

I suppose I do need to qualify. If you hate what you feel you have to write, why do it?–unless somehow you discover that you can make a million dollars by forcing yourself to do it. But yes, above all, if you’re to keep doing it without becoming rich, you have to enjoy it yourself; you have to take some pleasure from what you’re doing. I’ve read plenty of testimonials from people who say that they succeeded as commercial writers by writing the kinds of books they’d like to read.

But in the process of doing that, they’re putting themselves at least somewhat in the minds of readers. That’s the key.

Because the easiest way to write a failed novel is to do what I did: Write what you love to hear yourself saying. Write what sounds just lovely every time you read it aloud. Admire your metaphors, your sentence rhythms, your choices of such idiosyncratic, tantalizing words. Write what you like to hear.

I tell my students, whether they’re writing fiction or research papers or magazine articles, that once they leave college, nobody ever again has to read a word they write. They have to give people a reason to commit even five minutes to hearing what they have to say. In college, your teacher has to read it, your classmates have to read it–but once you’re out, you have to compete with reality shows on TV (at this historical moment, I use American Idol as my example–or Dancing with the Stars). When readers give you their time, they’re giving you something precious. You better earn it. If you’re one of those lucky folks for whom what sings in your ear sings in everyone else’s, more power to you. That wasn’t the case for me.

So remember that writing is communication.

I have to admit I still have trouble finding the exact line between what I want to write and what I want to communicate. But when I wrote my failed novel, I think I was just too far my side of that line.