Craft and Inspiration – Second Installment

Dispatches from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, January 2017, Part 2

In the first installment of notes from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, which I attended the weekend of January 14th and 15th, and which carried the theme Inspiration, we talked about poems on skyscrapers and lycans in the basement. We also passed on a few notes of poetic inspiration and some practical advice to help you enrich and intensify your fiction.

This time, we’ll pass along advice from literary agents, and in a brief, final installment, we’ll share some thoughts from poet and activist Ishmael Reed.

Danielle Svetcov

Danielle Svetcov – Want the Agent? Be the Agent | The Perfect Pitch (Panel)

The millions of us with books in the can who are trying like hell to get them read, we love sessions like this, where insiders—agents in this case; sometimes editors and publishers, too—give us the inside scoop. Because the fact is, almost every published writer will tell of a path to publication that includes a session just like this one, where the connection is made with the gatekeeper face-to-face, and that few minutes of the gatekeeper’s time leads to an hour, and that hour leads to interest, passion, and the sale of a manuscript.

Jennifer March Soloway

The thrust of these two PW Live sessions, a breakout with Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary and a general session with Svetcov, Jennifer March Soloway of Andrea Brown Literary and Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary, was the pitch—the query letter the author painstakingly crafts to sell the project. The formats of both sessions were innovative: Svetcov took identifying information off of three successful query letters and had the breakout attendees rank them, leading to a fruitful discussion of what was good and what wasn’t, and ultimately a list of do’s and don’ts for all us struggling query letter authors in attendance. For the general session, the conference planners at Poets & Writers solicited query letters from early registrants, then chose three that were shown and read to the audience by their authors, then discussed by the three agents on the panel. As always, some of the guidance that came out was old news for me, given that I’ve been to a number of these industry insider sessions before. But much of it was new and illuminating, so here are the highlights, in those two categories:

Heard a million times before:

• A good query has three essential elements, which can be thought of as answers to three questions the recipient will certainly want answered:
  
1. Why this particular agent? The agent (or editor) will want to know why you’re contacting them instead of the many hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of others out there in the industry. And if your answer is Because you are next in my painstakingly assembled alphabetical list, you’ve got some homework to do (see below).
2. What is the book about? Agents and editors are human beings just like you, with specific interests and disinterests that govern the finite real estate in their brains. They will therefore want to know the essence of your story and/or the themes of your book, because they’ll want to know if they should allow it space alongside cars, kids, mortgages, and Donald Trump.
3. Who are you? Theoretically, you’ve done something in your life that uniquely qualifies you to write the book you have written. Maybe it’s just writing—MFAs, publication credits, literary prizes, etc.—or maybe it’s other professional accomplishments specific to your book—a decades-long career as a master spy, for instance. Whatever it is, your recipient will want to know about it—and you should want to brag about it, too, so, win-win!
   



Anna Ghosh

• Pursuant to No. 1 above, the first guideline that each and every agency, publisher, and litmag places prominently on its website is Do your research and know who we are before contacting us. This means researching authors and stories and books you admire, and works that are similar to your own, finding out who the agents were who sold them, who the editors were who bought them, and who the publishers were who published them, and directing your queries accordingly. While doing this is no guarantee that most of your queries won’t still disappear into the stone-cold silence for which the literary world is infamous (most of them will), my operating assumption is, there is very good reason that agents and editors the world over are blue in the face from repeating this advice—as the agents at Poets & Writers Live did once again.

• Advice that is sort of a logical extension to doing your research is, Don't go in cold. Wherever possible, take the time beforehand to establish or discover some sort of connection between you and the recipient of your query. My thesis advisor when I got my MFA, for instance, is a Pulitzer-Prize–winning author whose work has greatly influenced mine, meaning her agent could well be a natural fit for me. But before I contacted the agent, I first wangled an entrée from the prize-winning author. And while this didn’t end up leading to a gold strike, it did mean the agent took much more time reading and considering my work—and giving me valuable advice—than she otherwise would have. Your connection might be an author you took a workshop with, a fellow student in writing school, or, dare I say, a face-to-face meeting with the agent at a Poets & Writers Live event.

• My old teacher Fred Leebron—who is actually a year younger than I am—used to say “writing is a game of attrition…don’t attrit.” This is the final longstanding advice one hears from agents and editors, which is, Persist. Understand that, if you get a response of any kind—even a polite rejection with a few words of encouragement tacked on—to any of your first 20 queries, you 1. Are one of the lucky ones, and 2. Have probably written something very, very good. So hang in there, go out into the world and encourage and seek encouragement from fellow writers, and figure out a way to find contentment in the process.

Never heard or expected to hear:

• Okay, so a query has three essential elements, but which is the most important? Which should I put first? Before Poets & Writers Live, the conventional wisdom I’d heard was, lead with the story you’re selling (No. 2 in my list above) because that’s what the agent cares about the most. However, in Svetcov’s breakout, I heard different (and confirmed it with her in a follow-up e-mail): she responds more to what she called the opening gambit, the connection you have with her (essentially No. 1 above). It’s one of the many matters of personal preference you’ll be up against when querying an agent, but yet another to be aware of.
  
• The highlight of the Svetcov breakout was the phrase “Nancy Drew meets Dirty Harry,” which came from the author Lisa Lutz’s pitch letter for what became The Spellman Files, the first in Lutz’s highly successful Spellman series. The surprising and eye-catching phrase described Lutz’s Spellman protagonist, Isabel, and pointed up a piece of advice from Svetcov that was roundly seconded by Ghosh and Soloway in the Pitch Panel: Illuminate your work with the glow of something familiar. It could be contrasting protagonists, Lutz’s choice, or perhaps two works with styles, stories, or plots that reflect your own, or it could just be a successful author whose style you emulate. The obvious caution, of course, is to avoid putting yourself on the same plane with a bestselling prizewinner. Best to avoid arrogance if you can manage it.
  
• If you land an agent, that agent will seize the commercial possibilities of your work, find a home for it, do everything in their power to make sure it sells and sells big. But in your pitch, you’ve got to help her along, give her whatever kernel you can to get her started. In fact, you’ve got to convince the agent that your work has commercial possibilities. This, of course, is intuitive to most writers, who obviously want people to read their books, which of course requires that people buy their books. It’s also advice that feels like it runs in direct opposition to advice almost every agent will give you, which is don’t think about whether it will sell or not, just write the book you want to write. But, in fact, it’s not in opposition at all. While you’re writing, don’t think about selling; once you’re finished, start thinking about it. Do what Svetcov called “putting a tight circle around what you're doing.” Encapsulate it in words, phrases, and comparisons that will 1. spark the agent’s interest, and 2. give her something she can build on when she falls in love with your work. This is why my old teacher Fred Leebron will always tell the writer to create a logline, that one-sentence jewel you can spit into the face of an agent or producer in ten seconds in a coffee shop. This is nearly impossible to do very well, but there’s no question, it’s worth the effort.
  
• And finally, a few rules of thumb that were a surprise to me but probably won’t be to many of you out there:
  
• I write literary fiction, and I say that in my query letters, but I struggled with how, exactly, to say it, and I still get a little queasy feeling when I reread that line in the letters. Well, queasy no more, because there was strong advice from all the agents present to announce your genre if you have one, and do it prominently in your pitch. Is it romance, mystery, crime, horror, or literary? Say so. (And you cross-genre people, well, I just don’t know what to say to you people.)
  
• We all come from somewhere, and invariably, where you’ve come from has both informed your work and inspired you to write. Agents, in turns out, want to know it, too. It not only gives them confidence in what you’ve written and your ability to write it, it also gives them yet another kernel they can use to sell you and your work to publishers. So if you have experience in writing or editing, or any experience whatsoever relevant to the content of your work, say it in your pitch.
  
• And last but not least, there is the simple rule of thumb that a reasonable length for a first novel or nonfiction book is 80,000 words. (And you can imagine how I took that, being that I’ve been pitching a 160,000-word manuscript for the better part of two years now. Ugh. But of course, all that tells me is…Revise! Revise! Revise!)

Okay, enough with the practical stuff. In the next installment, we move back to inspiration with some thoughts from the second-day appearance of poet, songwriter, author, and activist Ishmael Reed.