Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

"The only way to amass a pile of words into a book is to shovel some every single day. No days off....If you don't—you won't make it." - Hugh Howey

"After teaching over 1000 fiction writing students at Sheridan College, I have discovered something: some students are bubbling over with ideas. Others—the ones who won't make it—have to struggle for plots." - Melodie Campbell

"I can tell you in about five minutes which writers are guaranteed to fail. The guaranteed failures among writerdom carry their amateur beliefs and attitudes and methods like a bad perfume—an ever-present cloud of Eau de Doom that rolls off of their bodies and wafts into the noses of publishers and editors who might otherwise be interested in the writer's work, sending the pros fleeing to green rooms and bathrooms to escape." - Holly Lisle

Everyone seems to have a different prescription of inborn characteristics wannabe writers must have to "make it." Even if you're a golden child with a masochistic work ethic, an infinite well of creative ideas, a pretty face, a slim body, and an IQ of 200, there's probably still something wrong with you by somebody's account.

Sorry, you don't live in New York City. You're not gonna make it.

Sorry, you have less then 10,000 Twitter followers. You're not gonna make it.

Sorry, you're under 5'4". Not gonna make it.

Seriously, we might as well erect signs at the entrance of writers' conferences that say, "You must be THIS tall to make it!" It would be just as accurate a predictor of success as anything else. For every Hugh Howey with an extensive back list and new publications every month, there's a J.R.R. Tolkein who toiled over one project for ten years. For every Melodie Campbell bursting with fabulous new ideas every week, there's a Harper Lee who only wrote one decent book in her life.

You know what all these repetitions of "you won't make it if [blank]" have in common? None of them have anything to do with writing. It's all behavioral. Procedural. Personal. Only tangentially related to anything that matters. They are, essentially, superstitions.

Many people find comfort in superstitions. They feel safe if they pet their lucky rabbit's foot. They know it will be a good day if they find a penny facing heads up on the sidewalk. These "you won't make it if" superstitions serve the same purpose. Hard-and-fast rules, no matter how useless and arbitrary, give us a cozy sense of security in this wacky and unpredictable world. People like to have faith that they'll eventually write a bestseller if they just keep pounding on the keys like Hugh Howey. They like to believe they're destined for greatness because they have "the sort of brain that constantly makes up things" like Melodie Campbell. And they like to feel superior because, unlike all those idiots too blind to see The Way, they are on The Path of the Chosen Ones laid out by Robert A. Heinlein.

A side note about Robert A. Heinlein: When he wrote those "rules" that say you must write and never rewrite, it was 1947. In 1947, rewriting was a royal pain in the rear. You couldn't reword, cut and paste, or improve at the sentence level without rewriting the whole dang thing. Heinlein and his peers could have spent weeks making simple changes that didn't improve the quality of the end product enough to justify the time sink. But today, the mechanics of rewriting are a non-issue. Those weeks of labor have been shortened to a couple of keystrokes. It's a mental effort only, and one many people are too impatient or arrogant to make. End side note.

When people—oftentimes very smart and admirable people—preach their superstitions with such certainty, it's easy to be swayed. It's easy to say, "Oh my God, I'll never get a publishing deal because I live in Milwaukee. I'll die alone and forgotten because I don't write on Sundays. Nobody will ever buy my books because I'm only 5'2"!"

It's tough, but you have to ignore these people. You can extract nuggets of advice from their sermons if you must—you can soften their words and say, "Yes, it's a good idea to experience as much as I can and to write as often as I can. Duh." But if you believe you won't make it if you don't follow their rules to the letter, if you listen to the self-satisfied know-it-alls who say you're a "guaranteed failure" if you don't do everything exactly the way they do, you can get discouraged and give up writing altogether. Worse, you can start writing safe.

When people are worried about achieving success—or avoiding failure—they tend to pull their punches. They shy away from taking risks. Like the author of Bianca Goes to NYC, they write with the brakes on. Or they start writing to template, churning out carbon copies of Twilight in the pursuit of sales and the approval of the people who sneer at the hoity toity literati with their mouths full of sour grapes. Or they go the other way, squashing their instincts for the funny and the lighthearted because their literary idols think the only books worth publishing are Important with a capital I.

If you believe you have to live somebody else's life, you're one step away from writing somebody else's books. I guarantee you that you aren't doomed to fail if you write at your own pace and take breaks when you need them. You aren't doomed to fail if you don't have an MFA and you don't live in NYC and you don't have a ginormous fan base before you've even published your first word. You're only doomed to fail if you give up.

Yesterday I finished reading a book, and today I want to pick it apart. To disguise my ramblings from Google searches, I shall call this book Bianca Goes to NYC by the author Elizabeth Darcy. Because I can.

A summary of Bianca Goes to NYC: Bianca is a small-town girl from Georgia who dreams of making it big in the Big Apple. But when she gets there, she finds that her Middle-of-Nowhere College qualifications don't get her far with city slickers. Then one day some strange people recruit her to join a mysterious company named WWW Inc. She assumes it's a high-tech start-up until she arrives at a huge medieval castle in the middle of Manhattan that nobody else can see. She learns that the name stands for Witches, Wizards, and Weirdness Inc., and that they want to hire her for her special ability to see past the charms and illusions that they, as magical beings, are susceptible to. Bianca uses her immunity to curses and her old-fashioned common sense to save WWW Inc. from a rogue ex-employee who's selling evil spells on the magical market.

I was interested enough in Bianca Goes to NYC to pay for it—yes, pay for it—instead of waiting on the holds list of my local library as usual. And I liked it. I really did. But I'm disappointed because I could have loved it with a few rewrites. It was so, so close to being great, but it settled for okay.

So where did Elizabeth Darcy go wrong?

1. She detailed the mundane.

All of us have at least one friend or relative who tells anecdotes this way: "Today I was at the office, and you know that coworker I really hate? Well, I met her first thing in the morning when I went to the break room for coffee. Okay, actually, I didn't go to the break room first. I went to the bathroom first to fix my hair, because it was really windy outside. And then I stopped by my desk to put my stuff down, and then I checked my voice mail...."

And the whole time we think, "Gah, get to the point! What happened with your coworker?!" But we can't say anything because that would be rude, so we pretend to be enthralled by her adventures with voice mail until the story goes somewhere.

Bianca stops to change her shoes a dozen times. She runs hither and thither to fetch her purse and jacket from wherever she left it. She spends the afternoons shopping at the market and baking apple pies. And then, eventually, interesting things happen.

There's nothing wrong with writing about the mundane, but even the mundane has to serve a purpose. Bianca Goes to NYC is a Girl in the City novel with a magical bent. People who read Girl in the City novels want to revel in the glamor of Manhattan singledom: living in a tiny apartment with gorgeous roommates, window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, drinking lattes in Central Park, and meeting handsome stock brokers in fashionable bars after work. So the mundane details like your heroine coming home to her one-bedroom high-rise after a busy day at the office, kicking off her high-heeled shoes, and flopping onto the couch with a glass of wine are fascinating to your readers. They serve the purposes of entertainment and wish fulfillment. But your heroine going back up to reception to fetch her purse because that's where she left it at the beginning of the chapter? No purpose. It just fills up the page and drags the story down.

The mundane can also be very powerful when used sparingly. Many films, for example, use a calm-before-the-storm technique to build suspense. The music cuts, the action slows, and the little hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant walks along a flat country road in broad daylight while mysterious spies are after his life. In old Westerns, the sheriff and the outlaw just stand there, in the dirt, surrounded by dusty buildings and tumbleweeds, as the sun creeps up to high noon. The shocks in horror movies are usually preceded by someone doing something suspiciously lame. A pretty woman comes home exhausted and throws her keys on the side table. She takes off her jacket and opens the closet and Ack! A zombie! In fiction, if things suddenly get boring, you know they're about to get exciting.

Elizabeth Darcy could have had the same effect in her key scenes if she hadn't sprinkled so much mundane everywhere else. Bianca is always walking. Walking to think, thinking about walking, sometimes walking to think about walking. Nothing of interest ever happens on these walks. They just get her from Point A to Point B while she ruminates. So when her blind date runs out on her after an evening of craziness and she starts walking home, disappointed, I just thought, "Ugh, here we go again. Yes, I get it. Girls in the City walk a lot." I had no tingly neck-hairs saying that on this walk, something big would happen. Even when Bianca hears footsteps behind her and feels scared and makes a beeline for the well-lit shop across the street, I didn't feel the suspense. Then a henchman of the big bad wizard attacks her and I was like, "Oh wait, you were going somewhere with that?"

2. She killed the momentum in the crucial scenes.

Darcy is a brilliant writer on the micro level. Many of her sentences pop out of the page, like BAM, here's a nugget of genius for you. But she sucked the energy out of many thrilling scenes in Bianca Goes to NYC not by writing badly, but by writing the wrong thing.

Imagine this: Bianca notices a man behaving suspiciously at WWW Inc. He's tiptoeing along with shifty eyes and a bulge under his jacket. She realizes he's a thief. She yells, "Stop! Intruder!" He runs. She runs faster and grabs him. He's too strong for her. He shoves her and her head bashes into the wall. She wavers in and out of consciousness. A powerful wizard dashes out of his office to save her. And then...

I turned to see Gary standing in the corridor, his face flushed and his hair mussed, like he'd run the moment he heard my shout. Good old superhero friend Gary. But he wasn't the sweet, shy guy I'd come to know in the past week. He looked like someone I wouldn't want to mess with. If I'd thought the hint of restrained danger he'd shown earlier was sexy, now he was downright hot. I understood why heroines in superhero movies were always swooning into their unitard-wearing heartthrobs' arms after being rescued. It wasn't that they were shrinking violets or weak girly-girls. It was just that seeing a man do something so extraordinary and supernatural to save you has a way of making your knees go weak in a very pleasant way. I'd always heard power was an aphrodisiac, but I hadn't considered the possible implications of that when working for a magical company.

Here's what you should not do when spells are flying and heads are cracking: pause to reflect on the superhero-damsel dynamic. There's plenty of time for that after the hero defeats the villain and rushes to cradle the injured heroine in his arms. Blasé internal monologues at the climax of the scene distract from the action and kill the audience's emotional investment. Especially very wordy monologues. The following could have said the same thing without killing the vibe.

I turned to see Gary standing in the corridor, his face flushed and his hair mussed. He looked powerful. Dangerous. My knees went weak in a very pleasant way.

You know what you should also not do? Describe a high-action scene in terms of what is not happening. Here's a snippet from the big showdown between the magical forces of good and evil.

The magical battle wasn't anywhere near as spectacular as you'd think from the movies. It wouldn't take much in the way of special effects to depict it. It was more of a silent battle of wills. I waited for someone to conjure up a dragon or at least a snake, but it didn't seem to work that way. They weren't even using wands that had sparks flying from the ends. Once Larry and his cronies righted themselves, the fight seemed to be all about them throwing spells and Gary and Harry deflecting them. The strategy was apparently to just let the bad guys wear themselves out against Gary's presumably greater resources.

Darcy wanted to emphasize that her wizard duel was not a Hollywood wizard duel. I get it. But instead of describing the exciting things that were not happening, making the scene very boring, she could have described the exciting things that were happening. Obviously, if the wizards are fighting an invisible battle of wills, they're not conjuring up dragons. They're also not eating ice cream or sunning at the beach. There are infinite things people are not doing when they're doing something else.

Even without dragons, the fight could have been exciting. Darcy put this duel in the middle of a boardwalk amusement park, and she didn't do anything with it. They're just throwing magical energy at each other? Nothing's happening? Then make something happen. The villain brings a carousel horse to life and it charges at the good guys. Gary turns it back into wood a split second before it tramples Bianca to death. Then Gary catches a henchman cursing skee balls to attack him. He dodges the balls and throws the henchman off the boardwalk into the sea. The villain destroys the pillars of a Ferris wheel and it crashes to the ground, sending everyone scrambling for their lives, etc.

Or she could have made the drama psychological. Darcy had hinted throughout the book that, as one of the most powerful wizards of his generation, Gary was one thin line away from world domination. So use that. The good hero tries to fight honorably, but he gets tired, angry. He's torn between the hope that he can save Larry, who used to be his friend, and the urge to kill him and save the world. When Larry almost kills Bianca, Gary has to hold his massive power in check and stop himself from ripping the guy limb from limb. But the temptation is too strong. Now his allies have to stop him before he goes full Anakin Skywalker.

Instead, there was little action at all, internal or external. The wizards just wave their hands a bit and eventually get tired. Oh, and Bianca throws a rock. About that rock...

3. She lost sight of her central conflict.

At the big showdown, how does Bianca step in to save the day? Does she use her rare magical immunity to weather devastating curses and bravely fend off the underhanded villains?

Nope. She throws a rock.

She hides under a bench, watching the men go at it, and she throws a rock. While she's throwing the rock, she thinks about how grateful she is that her brother had taught her to pitch because he'd wanted her to go for the softball team in high school. Momentum successfully killed. In fact, reading this whole book was like watching someone ride a bike with the brakes squeezed lightly at all times, just in case they start to gain speed.

As soon as the whole magical set-up was in place, Bianca Goes to NYC stopped being about a small-town girl from Georgia with valuable non-powers that could save the wizarding world. It, instead, became about a small-town girl from Georgia eying potential boyfriends. In the first half of the novel, Bianca only thought about romance in passing, as girlish flavor for the stuff that was really going on. But by the second half, the bulk of her thoughts were occupied by whether she'd have a chance with Guy A or if she should settle for Guy B.

Darcy seems to have forgotten, halfway through the book, that the central conflict of Bianca Goes to NYC is not whether Bianca ended up with the cute wizard, or the less-cute wizard, or the cute lawyer, or the cute guy her roommate set her up with, or the other cute guy who was enchanted to think he was a frog. The central conflicts are:

• Ordinary fish-out-of-water Bianca has to hold her own in the cold, superficial business culture of Manhattan.
• Bianca has to come to terms with the existence of wizards, fairies, elves, and talking gargoyles without losing her mind.
• Bianca has to hide her magical job from her friends and family.
• Bianca has to stop an evil wizard who's selling curses to the magical community.

And then, very low on the list, you can add, "Bianca has to overcome her insecurities to win the warlock of her dreams."

The loss of focus demolished the last quarter of the book. It has no juice, no forward motion. Here's a summary of the tension-building events that lead up to the climax: Bianca spends a lot of time talking about intellectual property suits with a cute lawyer, while thinking that the cute wizard is probably out of her league. Then she spends the night before the big duel baking cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rolls. And she doesn't do it to cling to the last broken illusions of stability while the fate of the world hangs in the balance. No, her primary concern is that she has to get up early and won't have time for breakfast. And dang it, she should have brought a pillow for the long drive to the amusement park, because there's nothing to do in a dark car but sleep.

There are two approaches Darcy could have taken. She could have made the action serious and exciting for emotional impact, or she could have made it deliberately boring for humor—play up the modern corporate trappings, the ancient wizards using smartphones, the wet-blanket lawyers turning exciting duels into paper parties.

The evil wizards emerge from the mists of New Jersey. They're dressed for magical battle, but they look like pimply geeks at a ComicCon. The villain calls the hero's name and issues the challenge with a taunting sneer. The hero narrows his eyes and raises his wand, his sexy aura pulsing with power.

Then the lawyer runs between them, adjusting his glasses. "Hold on! Before you start, I need everyone to sign this waiver. It specifies that WWW Inc. is in no way liable for any injuries, damages, or deaths, magical or otherwise, that may result from this duel. As you'll see in Article 1, Section 5..."

The wizards from both sides huddle around the lawyer, squinting at the fine print. Bianca waits on her bench, munching a cinnamon roll and thinking, "I woke up at 4 am and drove three hours to Jersey for this?"

But no, the last part of the book wasn't so boring that it was funny. It was just plain boring. The central conflicts became an afterthought, and the book ran on baked goods and boyfriend-hunting.

Bianca Goes to NYC was not a bad book. It was quite a good book. But it could have been a great book if Darcy had deleted the pointless details and let go of the brakes.

Of course at the time I didn't think it was that terrible, and my mom seemed to like it, so I bandied about the idea of getting it published. I read up on literary agents, wrote a query letter based on templates I'd seen on the Internet, and sent it out to the most reputable names I could find.

One was interested in seeing sample chapters. I printed them out in the library and sent them along. About a week later, I received my self-addressed, stamped envelope with a personalized response from the agent. The letter is long gone, but I still remember the opening line.

"I thought this book was going to be better than it is."

Ouch. Then followed a paragraph about how terrible my novel was and how disappointed she was. Now, terrible book or not, there are a hundred ways to say "Sorry, not interested" without being a jerk. A sample:

• "This book doesn't fit our needs at this time."
• "This book would be difficult to sell."
• "We receive thousands of inquiries every month, and regretfully we can pursue only a few."
• "Our office exploded in flames yesterday, so I'm afraid we're all too busy clinging to the tenuous thread of life to represent you."

And so on.

Most agents are perfectly professional people, but after this experience with a nasty one, I didn't attempt to query again for five or six years. It's kind of like how I still can't fully trust ham after that one miserable Christmas.

But recently I've opened up to the idea of signing with an agent. Some will tell you the publishers are lying, you don't need an agent, you just need ingenuity and tenacity to cut straight to the editors. But during my efforts to go it alone, the idea of getting help from an agent has become increasingly appealing.

1. There are so gosh darn many publishers out there. The "Big Five" each have many imprints, and then there are countless smaller houses. I can spend many months sorting through them, tailoring my queries to appeal to them, cold-calling their interns and stalking their editors...or I can hire someone who knows the territory to find the best match for me.

2. Agents have connections. I don't. From my painful two-year experience searching for full-time employment, I learned that connections trump qualifications every time. It's just how humans work. Say you're looking to buy a second-hand couch. Who do you trust more: some guy who contacts you out of the blue, saying he heard you were on the market for a couch and he has a great one; or your friend, who says his cousin has a couch he's looking to sell? Even if the first guy has an objectively better couch, you'll probably go with your friend's cousin. Editors, being human, are more likely to buy books from their friendly neighborhood agents than they are from random people who throw manuscripts at them.

3. Aggressive as I can be sometimes, I'm not a hard-nosed negotiator. If a publisher offers me a contract, and I don't like some parts of it, an agency is more likely to have the heft and savvy to change the terms than I am.

4. There's no reason not to try. If it doesn't work out, I can just take my book back and return to self-publishing. No harm, no foul.

5. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to tolerate people who use the word "gatekeeper" in any context other than a discussion of the movie Ghostbusters.

Right now I'm still in the exploration stage. I don't even have a book to sell yet, though I'm inching ever closer. But from my explorations, I've already learned a few things about literary agencies that fly in the face of what people have told me about them.

My old friends in the dark recesses of the Internet painted a portrait of agents as bottom-feeding corporate goons who don't give a damn about originality or creativity; they just want shallow commercial fare to make a quick buck. But searching through the listings at AgentQuery, Preditors & Editors, and Publishers Marketplace, the exact opposite is true.

Think about what kind of people go into publishing. They are not business majors who say, "Hey, I think I'm going to go into this uncertain and panic-addled industry that makes high-risk products consumers are less and less interested in buying. That's where the money is!" No, they're English majors. Humanities types. People who love Fitzgerald and Faulkner and are drawn to the idea of getting paid to read all day, every day.

So why did my old friends get the impression that literary agents only care about sales, sales, sales? Well, for one thing, it's an agent's job to sell books. Often, even if agents love a project, they have to turn it away because they can't sell it. But when they tell a writer that their book isn't sellable, what does it really mean?

1. Your book simply isn't well written. As I said, there are a hundred ways to say a book is terrible without being a jerk, and this is one of them.

2. Your book isn't sexy. Agents have to snag the interest of publishers, and publishers have to snag the interest of customers. If you come to them with a pitch like, "My Great American Novel is about a girl who takes a walk and reflects on nature for 400 pages," they'll say, "Sorry, no." It may be a perfectly fine piece of work, but who would want to read it?

3. Your book doesn't fit anywhere on the shelf. It's maddening, but people need genres and demographics. Agents need to be able to describe your project to potential editors succinctly and convince them that people will want to buy it. They need to be able to say, "This is a second-chance-at-love contemporary romance that will be popular with middle-aged women who read Nora Roberts," or "This is an accessible literary period piece that will be popular with book clubs."

This doesn't mean that you have to write to genre. It doesn't mean agents will be interested only if you pump out cookie-cutter novels in which the good girl falls for the bad boy and they live happily ever after. It means you have to write something that people other than your mother will pay good money to read, and you have to be able to predict who those people will be. Those people could be English majors who adore Fitzgerald and Faulkner, or they could be teenagers looking for a fun afternoon of feeling miserable, or they could be stay-at-home moms seeking affirmation of universal justice through stories about a granny who owns a bakery and solves murders on the side.

If a story is good, there is a genre and an audience for it somewhere. Even if a story is lousy, there's probably an audience for it. The trick is finding that audience and appealing to it. Is My Great American Novel really about a girl taking a walk for 400 pages? Really? Probably not, or you would have fallen asleep ten pages into writing it. If your book is truly original, creative, and brilliant, but nobody wants to buy it, the problem is probably in the way you're presenting it, not in the agents who are rejecting it.