September 29, 2004

"Please Write More Garbage," Said the Agent: And Other Adventures Toward Publishing a First Novel

My goal, on this blog stop, is to explode a few myths for writers. Some of these myths involve the publishing industry and what it “takes” to become a published novelist or the published author of a short-story collection. All of the events are viewed through my own intensely personal filter, which is to your benefit, I hope, because this is a process, frankly, that most writers won’t talk about. One of the myths is that you learn how to write, you become “good,” you find an agent, and you publish your first novel or short-story collection.

Another is that an agent will embrace your work because she sees something beautiful in it and wants to celebrate you as an artist by taking you on. Or, similarly, that an editor or publisher at, say, Knopf, will become enthusiastic (and maybe even temporarily speechless) over your work because it’s warm and gorgeous and poetic and she can’t wait to unleash you--the author--upon the world.

Another is that to acquire an agent is almost the same thing as to place a book, and that an agent who believes fervently in your work will be relentlessly tenacious in attempting to sell it.

All of these are not lies force-fed to aspiring writers so much as Romantic myths that writers embrace, I believe, to a certain extent because these myths elevate their spirits...and all of us need that, right?

And the truth is that these stories are inspiring.

One of my personal favorites involves how Stephen King was a poor, struggling high-school teacher with kids, working nights after grading papers to place his short stories in the slicks. He was so poor in those days that his shoes “smiled”; the soles had to be rebound with string because he was too damned poor to afford new loafers. Then, one day, his wife discovered a novella he’d tossed in the wastebasket, a novella entitled Carrie.

King had tossed the half-finished manuscript in the trash because he didn’t believe he had a good “feel” for writing from a high-school girl’s point of view.

His wife persuaded him to finish the manuscript, and--when King got the call at school that his agent had placed the book for a considerable sum--King was so delirious with joy that he nearly fainted.

I love this story. Really, it feeds my soul. And I imagine that it feeds yours, too.

But King’s story is lightning captured in a bottle. The lottery winner claiming his 10.2 million bucks.

I want to explore how the system really works for most writers most of the time.

My “First” Novel

My first novel, Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight was just released, on September 25th, by a small press in California, Lit Pot Press, that releases beautiful, elegant, and thought-provoking books. The editor/publisher there, an amazing woman named Beverly Jackson, released my first book of poetry, The Carrington Monologues, through Lit Pot Press, and has become, for me, one of those dream contacts for a writer...a publisher who genuinely loves and supports my work (I say this, of course, with every expectation that all of you will find your own “dream contacts,” too). I call her “the Pound to my Eliot,” and she’s very simpatico with my individual vision as a writer, which makes it a thrilling experience for me to work with her.

And when I think about this event, i.e., the publication of my first novel, I grow quiet inside. Not only because I’m ecstatic--because I am--but also because it’s impossible to think of that publication without reflecting on the arduousness of the journey itself. Although I’d already racked up a large number of journal publications when I began to think about publishing a book of fiction, frankly, I was unprepared.

I was Dante descending into the underworld without any Virgil to guide me.

This book has been issued as a “first novel.” What this means, actually, is that it’s my first novel published. Actually, I wrote five full-length novels before this one. All were my own creation; one, however, was inspired by an agent herself and the agent’s thinking, when I was still young enough to be susceptible to the various flights of egomania--and power trips--agents routinely take us on.

This agent loved one of my novels but deemed it too “dark” to be able to place with a mainstream publisher (she was right; unless you’re A.M. Homes or Mary Gaitskill, dark work is fiendishly difficult to place, and I am a dark writer); she convinced me that I had a “crossover book” inside of me, a litfic work bursting with optimism and joie de vivre.

The “optimistic” novel I produced was about a blind painter who’s kidnapped! But the agent was undeterred. She sent out pitch letters to agents trumpeting the book’s “triumphant vision of life,” to which the editors responded, “Excuse me...but this book scares me.”

I had an idea for another novel at this point. I wrote 1050 pages of it, decided it was no good, and abandoned it. In the meantime, another idea had begun to obsess me...and a backwards-unfolding plot that I didn’t know if I could handle; the details and trajectory struck me as formidable, and forward momentum--with the plot chronology working backwards--could prove a problem. It was a novel that would be about an infanticide, and this would be the novel that I’d eventually have accepted. In the meantime, I’d signed on with agents and fired them with small but routine pangs of anguish when they seemed untenacious--and most of them did. But, undoubtedly, the most valuable lesson I’d learned along the way was to not necessarily believe agents who promised that they were “unstoppable” but seemed to be slacking off. If I suspected there was a dead fish in the room, I learned to throw that fish away.

So much for the myth about agents’ tenacity. My last agent vowed that she’d struggle to place my book forever.

“Forever,” for the famous agent, can equal 1.5 attempts--or fewer--to place a novel.

The Journey of One Novel

I began drafting Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight (the title’s from Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) while my comp students at the university where I taught were working on an exam (I was so excited to begin the book that I actually couldn’t wait until I got home that afternoon). As the pages started to mount, I realized that the practice I’d achieved through working on five other novels was starting to pay off. This was a novel that I felt capable of writing, that I was excited about. The subject matter was dark--typical for me--but that didn’t dissuade me.

I was excited, too, by the agent I selected to rep the novel. She was smart, literate, and really “got” what I was doing. She was a nonfiction person, really, but her partner was a litfic expert, and I felt confident with both of them handling the novel. The agent talked up the book. Her partner did, too.

I felt a little cautious, though. Neither of them liked the beginning of the book. They asked me to revise it. They suggested a specific revision, which alarmed me. None of my revisions pleased them. I ended up spending six weeks on the first sixty-five pages of the book before I simply decided to drop the first ten chapters...mostly out of despair, but it worked, and it was a timely event: agents aren’t patient people, usually. The agent and her partner were growing rancorous, but my solution proved to be the correct one.

Finally, we had a version of the manuscript everybody was satisfied with.

Then, things started to fall apart.

The litfic person dissolved the partnership and left the agency. Suddenly I found myself “explaining” the book to the new litfic person hired to replace her. I also found myself explaining the whole concept of “litfic” to the new litfic person, who, frankly, struck me as slightly underlit. A little panicky, I attempted to withdraw the book, made an oral commitment to a new agent. But my agent was a piranha--which I admit had attracted me initially. But now her aggression turned toward me. She wanted the book back, dammit! Somewhat meekly (I was a little afraid of her, it’s true), I complied.

Eventually, though, I ended up grabbing the novel and running away with it anyway. Too many odd events were transpiring, too many peculiar conversations were taking place. At the advice of the new litfic partner, I had a phone conversation with a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, in which my goal was, apparently, to “explain the plot of the book.” She didn’t get it, and I was sweating when I got off the phone. “I like really simple stories,” she kept telling me. “I like a good plot. Can’t you write more like Robert James Waller?”

Apparently, I couldn’t.

I fled.

I Attend Agent “Boot Camp”

I decided to sign next with a large, glossy agency in New York that handled a lot of celebrities and playwrights. I wondered, without a hint of thrill, if I’d end up meeting William Shatner someday since the agency repped him. It all struck me as highly improbable, minimally glamorous. One of the agents there had seen a draft of the novel and wanted to take me on. One of her playwrights had won the Pulitzer, and I was unabashedly enthusiastic in that starry-eyed way of the writer. She offered me a three-year contract handling all of my work, in which she assumed “rights throughout the universe.” Joyfully, I signed. There was one tiny detail the agent hadn’t disclosed to me, though: she’d never repped or sold fiction before.

She thought the book needed changes. Because I’d worked with other agents, I expected this. Still, because this agent was (unbeknownst to me) very, very nervous about handling fiction, she sent me ten pages’ worth of character and structural changes. I read them over and decided that I could improve the book.

Ten weeks later, I had a newly revamped manuscript. I sent it to ten of my writer friends. They loved it. I sent it to the agent. She loved it. “Beautiful!” she exclaimed. She sent it off to what I assumed would be the first editor we’d approach.

I was wrong.

It turns out that the agent wanted to sell the book to only one editor...the one who’d bought her Pulitzer-Prize winning play.

But the editor didn’t actually like dark fiction. “Why are you sending me this?” she demanded, after she’d read it. My agent, I’m sure, felt chagrinned.

I respectfully suggested that we submit the book to other editors, other publishers. “No,” replied the agent. “I really want to sell the book to this one editor.” I was halfway through chapter one (and feeling vaguely nauseated) before I asked myself what I was doing. And then, I asked the agent what she was doing. “You don’t understand!” she said. “Nobody cares if you’re good. I need crap that I can sell. Can’t you write me a really awful book that I could place? You could write bad stuff first, save the good stuff for later. Give me something simple! Not so deep! Nobody cares about art! We want to make money! Don’t you get it? So give me some crap, please! Instead of...this caviar-in-a-mass-market world stuff!”

I fled.

What It All Means

All of this--harrowing though it may seem--is valuable information for you to have, I believe. Because my own journey to publish my first book-length work of fiction was, actually, typical. I was luckier than some struggling friends of mine who waited four-five years to acquire their first agents...I had the luxury of making a few mistakes along the way. In addition, these agents, whatever their particular goals might have been, offered me some valuable editorial advice on my manuscript, advice which I believe—in the end—resulted in a better book, even though I placed the manuscript with a publisher myself.

And, along the way, I learned that no matter what uninformed directives I might receive from an agent or editor or a publisher, I share something very valuable in common with all of you. I’m not a marketing person but, I hope, an artist. And--when I think about that first novel being published--it’s the excitement of creating that prose I return to, the beauty of crafting those characters: and, that, finally, makes the entire journey worthwhile.

My book

Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits

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De l’espoir et autres quêtes dangereuses

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La speranza e altri sogni pericolosi

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A Esperança È Uma Travessia

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De l’espoir et autres quêtes dangereuses

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Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens

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Esperanza y Otros Sueños

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