Why Authors Need Agents

Yesterday I highlighted a blog talking about why an author needs and editor, and today I happened across this delightful post/paeon to an agent by a fairly new talent Seanan McGuire, author of the upcoming urban fantasy Rosemary and Rue.

Almost two years ago, a friend of mine sent me a letter introducing me to another friend of hers, one who happened to be a literary agent. The Agent and I started chatting via email, taking it slowly, navigating the wilds of acquaintance and understanding long before we reached the point where representation would become an option. It was a courtship, rather than a barroom hookup, and I am incredibly grateful for that, because anybody who’s met me knows that my full attention can be an exhausting thing. She gets my full attention a lot.

A year ago today, we stopped courting.

The past year has been an amazing ride of wonderful, dizzying, confusing things, and The Agent has been there every step along the way to explain, encourage, and assist. I call her my personal superhero for a reason — that’s exactly what she is. Books on writing will tell you that the best thing a working writer can have is a good agent, and they’re right, but what they won’t tell you is that it’s even better to have a good agent who understand you, understands the way you work, and is willing to see what you can do together.

And if you haven’t read it yet, be sure and check out Lisa and Laura’s agent-finding story too, which happened just days ago.

The Hearts of Men Centuries Dead

“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”

–Clarence Day, Jr.

(I snatched this quote from an agent’s site, The Literary Group and the photo is by Dagny Willis, featuring ruins of a house in Alaska.)

Why Authors Need Editors

There’s a fascinating discussion over on Elizabeth Bear’s blog about whether an editor hones a writer’s vision or crushes her unique genius into cookie cut dough. (And I literally mean vision because one of the issues is whether to include more visual description.) I was quite struck by something E Bear said in the comments:

A good editor is a professional whose skill involves bringing out the writer’s truest voice. And the skill of a writer is not self-expression: that’s a very high-school interpretation of art. Self-expression is the egotist’s excuse.

Art is about communication; it’s about evoking a response in the reader. Oftentimes, a writer is too close to her intention to see the real effect on someone else, because she can see what she intended.

If we were talking about the visual arts, it’s the difference between a child’s drawing and the landscape of a trained artist. A writer who has not learned to judge the effect of her words on an audience is making the equivalent of kid scribbles.

It’s the difference between home movies and Citizen Kane.

Nobody cares about your vision if you don’t have the chops to make the other guy see it. And that’s a skill, a learned one. And one which a good editor helps a writer exercise, by showing her where she’s failed to make the connection.

My editor for this book is a very good editor. She’s up for a Hugo this year, for a reason: she’s one of the best in the business.

I have a peculiarly wired brain: it interprets the world in manners somewhat different from most people’s. Most of my work in becoming an artist has been the work of learning to translate between what I know about a story and what I need a reader to know about it. It’s a crude and stopgap form of telepathy, but it’s all we’ve got.

None of this, of course, makes it any more fun to hear that a book one has been working on since 2002 still needs significant revision, because it’s not very good yet. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say it’s heartbreaking, and ten years ago I would have been totally on board with the idea that My Native Genius Is Going Unrecognized.

But the fact of the matter is that that’s self-indulgence, ego defense, and denial, and good art is not created by prima donna fits. It’s created by sweat and failure and trying again and again to get it right.

But at least now I have somebody else helping me see ways to make it better.

You must not think that I take all of any editor’s suggestions as gospel: I assess them all, using my own hard-earned critical skills, and I decide which ones will improve the book. And I have no qualms about saying no if I think an idea is dumb.

You decide what hills you’re going to die on. And I’ve refused offers on books because I didn’t agree with the editor’s vision of what the book should be.

This is a potent reminder. Just because you become a multi-book selling author, it doesn’t make writing come easily or automatically. It doesn’t mean you no longer have to keep asking yourself the hard questions, like how much do you write to please others and how much do you trust your own vision? It doesn’t mean you get a free pass from painful revisions.

There are published authors whose first book is fabulous, but who let their later books slide into stale formula. Other writers just seem to keep growing with each book. I know which kind of writer I aspire to be.

UPDATE:

Thank you to Mossy Creek Designs (ban) for this poster!

www.myspace.com/mossycreekdesigns
www.mossycreekdesigns.etsy.com
www.mossycreekdesigns.blogspot.com

Literary Acclaim or Big Money?

Nathan Bransford asked this question on his blog a while back (Nov.19, 2008).

Would you rather have Omar Khayyam.

“Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!”

Take the Cash and let the Credit go. 😉

Warning: You May Dream of This Video

“What you need to know is…that you are going to watch this video more times than you can imagine. You may dream of this video, but the dream won’t be as good because it won’t be this video.”

Behold! This video of fantasy cliches put to music looks like it escaped from 1986. The Taste Police from the future sent robots back in time to kill it before it was born but it stole their time travel guitar and came forward to 2009.

The review is as a funny as the video itself.

What if Your Story Were a Fairy-tail?

Scott Bailey asked on his blog today, “What is a story?”

Why do stories have a beginning, middle and end? Obviously, they start somewhere and end somewhere physically, textually or orally, but is that alone what gives us the urge to give a story form?

I have a talkative relative (let’s call her a great aunt, like my MC’s Great Aunt Sullana) who is always telling me about incidents, people, and events in her life. Never, however, does she arrange these into stories with clear beginnings, middles and ends. Instead, her chatter strings along a seemingly random assortment of sentences about a friend’s gall bladder operation, a sock she lost, what she’s reading, the weather on her drive to my house and instructions to her dog. You will wait in vain to hear about whether the operation went smoothly or where the sock was found or how any of these things relate to one another.

On the other hand, I knew a fisherman who, under the guise of chit-chat, would tell the most hilarious and fantastic stories, with a complete cast of characters, plot tension and twist ending. Though he never announced, “I’m going to tell a story,” his stories had a clear beginning, “So this one time…”, problem, bigger problem, even bigger problem, climax and conclusion. “…and I swore I’d never go fishing with him again. Nah, I did, but can you believe his balls?” Sometimes even a moral: “Man, if you’re that drunk, vomit before you try to talk to the Coast Guard.”

The structure of a story can be boiled down, like a fairy-tail, a joke or an SAT essay, to five paragraphs.

1. Once Upon a Time (Introduces Main Character and Setting)
2. The Problem (First Time is Coincidence)
3. The Bigger Problem (The Second Time is a Pattern)
4. The Biggest Problem (The Third Time’s the Charm Which Breaks the Pattern)
5. Happily Ever After (Reward for the Good Character Or Moral Explaining Failure of the Wicked Character)

* * *

This is simple; I’m sure you’ve all seen something like this before. Why, however, do we crave fisherman stories with this explicit structure, above and beyond random great aunt tongue-wagging? In a sense, great aunt stories better reflect real life. Her words are verbalized stream of consciousness.

Indeed, one of the experiments of modern fiction (and I don’t use Modern as a technical term, though I’m sure there is one; forgive my ignorance of lit crit) is to create fiction disguised as stream of consciousness. Fairy-tales make no bones about where they start, “Once upon a time…” Nineteenth Century novelists often felt obligated to start with plenty of backstory, “I was born…” or sometimes even, “My grandfather was born…” but this is frowned upon now. Contemporary novelists can’t get away with three chapters of backstory.

Modern novelists like to pretend our stories start in the middle of things and end in the middle of things, as if we simply happened along somewhere, witnessed some random transactions, and then departed. In some genres, this impulse is stronger than others. Scott mentions he prefers “indeterminate endings.” Literary fiction, which is most concerned, I believe, with mirroring “real life”, is also most likely to disguise beginnings and endings as “unprivileged” moments in a long series of moments. A literary telling of St. George besting the dragon would not necessarily begin with George seeking out the dragon, or end with the dragon being slain. It might instead, start with a middle aged George drinking at the tavern with his buddies, talking about his exploit, trying to decide if he will go back home to his dingy hovel, wife and seven kids, or take off down the road to look for more dragons.

Of course, this is just frosted glass over the naked fairy tale, shattered as soon a you have to tell an agent, editor or consumer in a pitch why does this story matter? In my example, the point of the ending is George’s uncertainty, the moral is about how aging action heroes may find nostalgia for action a constant strain on settling for a “normal” life. There is still a story, still a beginning, middle and end. So it is not really that ending is undetermined, but that indeterminacy is the ending. The moral at the end is that things never end easily wrapped up in bows.

A modern story may introduce a character already beset by problem, and show the world through the eyes of the character, but like a fairy-tale, must still introduce character and setting. The story may meander through the middle, but must, like a fairy-tale, still have conflict. The elements it introduces must not be lost socks. They must have a purpose.

In an earlier post, I looked at bad endings. LIsted #3 was “no actual resolution.” A well-crafted story must resolve the questions raised in a plot, but it doesn’t have to answeranswer them.

* * *

Here’s a fun thing to try.

Suppose you were to re-write your story as a fairy-tale. What would it be? Who are the crucial characters, what are the crucial conflicts? Could you boil it down to five paragraphs? At least under two pages? It’s kind of like trying to write a synopsis, except fun. I dare say, it’s the more fun the further removed from being fairy-tail like your story is. My novel is based on a fairy-tail, so distilling it back to that form is interesting (I can see what I’ve changed more clearly) but probably not as amusing as if I tried to tell Gone With the Wind beginning, “Once upon a time…”