After two days of reading loads of literary agent blogs, my head is spinning.
I’m not one of those who writes with the goal of publication. I write because I can’t help myself. Just ask my friend Sabrina, who could probably show you whole boxes of letters I’ve written her over the years—letters about nothing, letters about everything.* All those years I was avoiding novel-writing, I was not not writing. I love to write, so I find a way to do it regardless of what’s going on in my life.
(*Sabrina, don’t you dare show anyone those letters!)
Still, I’m fascinated by the world of book-publishing. Sometimes, I think I missed my calling as an editor, so it’s interesting to me to see what’s going on in the industry—what’s “hot,” what publishers are looking for and not looking for, how the Web has changed submission guidelines, and so forth. There’s a ton of advice out there for aspiring writers, and one doesn’t have to look very hard to find it.
The “thing” these days is to finish your novel and then query an agent. “Query” means you send an e-mail telling them, in approximately four succinct paragraphs, what your book is about, what genre it falls under, how many words it is, and what qualifies you to write it. (”I won a Hopwood award at the University of Michigan!” No, not me; that’s just an example.) Really, they don’t want to know anything personal about you unless you’ve won a fiction-writing award of some kind. In other words, no need to mention being a stay-at-home mother of however-many-kids living in whichever state—that sort of thing. [Edited to add: A query letter is usually accompanied by the first five pages of the novel, or maybe a 5-page synopsis, depending on which agent you're after.]
Reading web sites like Query Shark and blogs like (the now-defunct) Miss Snark is super educational. You really get a feel for what these insanely busy agent people are looking for in the 60 seconds each day they set aside for going through the tons of queries in their e-mail inboxes.
So last night, just for fun, I made myself do this little exercise: If I had to write my query letter right now, what would it say? I wrote it. And actually, it wasn’t half bad. In fact, if I ever do decide to query an agent about this project, I will probably go back to what I wrote last night, tighten it up, and use it; I really do think it captures my story in a nutshell, and hopefully in a way that provokes the reader to want to read the book.
Writing that “pretend query” was a great little exercise in helping me get to the heart of my story and seeing: What is this really about? That’s what agents want: to know what the book is about—not what its themes or moral lessons are or what emotions it will evoke in the reader. They just want to know what it’s about. So I’m glad I did the exercise. I learned a few things.
Here’s what I’ve realized, though, after writing a potential query and after having spent two days reading one agent blog after the next:
1) Apart from my mom and a few close friends, nobody is going to want to read my book. Even if I spend years on it and turn it into something truly incredible, no one will want to look at it in publishing. The subject is too controversial, but maybe, at the same time, too trite. Probably agents get tons of queries for books just like mine, and they go “Ew!” and send form rejections before they even get past the first paragraph of the letter. Seriously. (I think of Query Shark. Maybe I’m wrong, but I bet she would totally do this.)
2) In spite of that sad state of affairs, I still must write this book. For some bizarre reason, I am compelled to write it, and have even felt that God Himself wants me to write it (crazy as that may sound to some). Perhaps the purpose is so that I will learn what it takes to write a novel, so that I will be prepared to write some other novel that He has in mind for me to write somewhere down the road, and maybe that will be the one that is meant to see the light of day in bookstores around the country. Who can say? I just know that I have to write this book. I can’t put it away and forget it. I’ve tried that before, dozens of times, and I know this for sure: IT DOESN’T WORK. The book will not leave me alone. It insists upon having life, and no one but me can give it.
In Chapter After Chapter, Heather Sellers writes. . .
When you write, you believe in something no one else can see. You spend lots of time committed to a project for which there are no assurances, no guarantees. . .Writing is communing with the the unseen; not everyone will understand why a normal, intelligent, educated, seemingly balanced person would devote her energy to something that can’t be proven: your writing success. A novel-in-progress may not exist for a long, long time. But you believe in it anyway. And even if you forget to believe in it, even if you doubt it, it’s still there.
In other words: We write by faith and not by sight.
So I guess I’ll just keep going, making a big mess with this draft and trying to clean it up in the second, third, fourth, and subsequent drafts.
When I went off to college, my dad gave me this little business card on flashy gold cardstock—I think I still have it somewhere. On it were three words: Discipline And Endurance. I’ve never had much discipline, and I’ve never really endured much before (other than drug-free childbirth!). But this novel-writing project is really teaching me about those two things.
Maybe that’s what writing this book is really all about. I still have so much to learn.
