So, you really didn't want me to consider your pages, ok, no problem

Reasons I stop reading before getting to your page:

(1) Your query insults as many other published books as fall into "that dreck they're publishing today."
Why I stop reading: trade publishing is not a solo endeavor. You need those "dreck" authors for blurbs, signal boosts, maybe even book store co-appearances. I know that. You apparently do not. I don't want to spend time coaching you on how to not be an asshat.

How you can avoid this: buy a clue at the Clue Emporium


(2) You hope you'll peak my interest with this wonderful novel.
Why I stop reading: If you don't catch pique/peak, I know for an ironclad fact I'll find more mistakes like this in the book and end up copy editing.

How you can avoid this: Make friends with Miss Prunella Picklepuss the Pedant Most Peculiar, or find someone with similar meticulous reading skills who can help you avoid these snafus. Yes, money will most likely be involved.


(3) Your book uses body size an indication of character.
Why I stop reading: I can't sell a book like this, and I don't want to work with someone who writes characters in shorthand stereotypes.

How you can avoid this: Back to the Clue Emporium!


(4) You managed to avoid telling me anything about the story.
If you can't get to the point in three paragraphs, I'm not confident you'll do in three pages either.

Why I stop reading: If I don't know what the story is, why would I read it?

How you can avoid this: Tell me about the story. Start with the name of the main character and what's changed or about to change for them. What's the problem with the change, and what's at stake in how s/he's going to deal with the change (that's a starting point, not a template.)



 
(5) You don't serve up a problem for your proposed prescriptive non-fiction.
Why I stop reading: if you're not solving a problem, why would anyone buy your book?

How you can avoid this: Understand what prescriptive non-fiction means. If you want to help people, you MUST describe the problem you intend to help them solve. There are no exceptions here.

If you have a book called Thin Thighs In Thirty Days, you have to be clear about the problem created by not-thin thighs.

(6) I can't tell if you're writing fiction or non-fiction
Why I stop reading: Fiction and non-fiction are assessed and acquired quite differently. If I can't tell from the outset, your query isn't effective.

How you can avoid this: Starting your query with a historical event is a clue for NF. Don't start a query for a novel that way.


(7) Word count.
Why I stop reading: it's not worth it if the book is too long or too short. If you want to be a professional writer, you need to know the parameters of the category you're writing in.

For adult trade books, excluding category romance, you really want to be 70K -100K.
For fantasy, or historicals, add another 20K and you're still ok.

These are general guidelines. No one shows up at your house with a smackeroo stick if your word count is 68,087, or if it's 122,343.

In other words, guidelines, not etched in stone but not to be ignored like they don't exist.

opening pages-set the scene or dive right in

Hi Janet,
If we're supposed to be doing things normal, then I'm picture-perfect right now. It's approaching 1 a.m., the sand timer is about half-way drained (or is it half full?), and I'm editing the opening chapter of my WIP because I've only fixed it a dozen times so far.

Which segues into my question, and you are the perfect person to answer because who sees more first chapters than a good agent? (Answer: Nobody.)

I read and hear lots of conflicting advice about all aspects of writing, but perhaps none more than a particular piece of advice about first chapters.

One school of thought says this: Ground the reader in your protagonist's ordinary world. Then, get your reader to care about your protagonist. Because if they don't care about your protagonist, then they won't care when some inciting incident occurs to upset their ordinary world. After your reader is grounded in the ordinary world, they've met and liked your protagonist ... THEN the inciting incident occurs that obliterates the ordinary world and your protagonist is given a challenge that they will either accept or refuse.

A second school of thought says: Open with action. Pull the reader in immediately. Why wait until Page 3 to deliver an inciting incident when you can do it in the first page, first paragraph, first sentence? Hit them over the head from the first word and don't let up until they can't put the book down anymore because they're invested in your character.

For me, it doesn't feel like you can do both. You either jump right in or you paint the picture of an ordinary world that will soon be shattered.

You see chapter 1's and page 1's ALL THE TIME. Which version do you prefer based on the knowledge of which version editors and publishers prefer?

Thank you, as always, for your wisdom. I'm still recovering from previous fin slaps, so if this question is too obvious, I'm asking for a friend ... who doesn't swim.

The answer is of course: it depends.

And what do you call grounding?

Take a look at this:

When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them. It became a permanent character of their clothes, the beds they slept in, the vinyl backs of their car seats. Sean's kitchen smelled like a fudgsicle, his bathroom like a Coleman Chew-Chew bar. By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert.

or this

One lonesome winter, many years ago, I went hunting in the mountains with Gene Kavanaugh, a grandmaster hitman emeritus. Sinister constellations blazed over our camp on the edge of a plateau scaled with ice. The stars are always cold and jagged as smashed glass in the winter in Alaska. Thin air seared my lungs if I inhaled too deeply. Nearby a herd of caribou rested under the mist of its collected breath.

We weren't there for them.

or this

The last camel collapsed at noon.

It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little.

They climbed the leeward side of a small hill, man and camel planting big clumsy feet in the inconstant sand, and at the top they stopped. They looked ahead, seeing nothing but another hillock to climb, and after that a thousand more, and it was as if the camel despaired at the thought. Its forelegs folded, then its rear went down and it couched on top of the hill like a monument, staring across the empty desert with the indifference of the dying.

The man hauled on its nose rope. Its head came forward and its neck stretched out, but it would not get up. The man went behind and kicked its hindquarters as hard as he could, three or four times. Finally he took out a razor-sharp curved Bedouin knife with a narrow point and stabbed the camel's rump. Blood flowed from the wound but the camel did not even look around.

The first, from Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, is pure background or grounding. The fathers don't figure in the story after the first section. But it gives us a sense of where these boys came from, and that's the blood of the novel.

In the second example from Blood Mountain by Laird Barron we know a lot about the main character from the start. Background yes, but also very very quickly the start of the story ("we weren't there for them.")

In the third example, The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett, we don't know anything about background or the character, or what's going on other than what's on the page. But that's enough to hold our interest.

Which is what you want: engage and hold their interest. If it's background (Mystic River) or start of the story (Black Mountain), great, use that.

But if you can, you write something so utterly compelling that I don't stop to wonder about anything. I just keep turning pages (Key to Rebecca.)

It's a whole lot harder than it sounds, of course.

It's one of the reasons you want to read widely: see what the other guys are doing, and assessing if it works (or not!) and more important, is it a technique you can utilize in your story.

If you haven't read Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan, maybe this will persuade you:

Doug MacRay stood inside the rear door of the bank, breathing deeply through his mask. Yawning, that was a good sign. Getting oxygen. He was trying to get amped up. Breaking in overnight had left them with plenty of downtime to sit and eat their sandwiches and goof on each other and get comfortable, and that wasn't good for the job. Dough had lost his buzz--the action, fear, and momentum that was the cocktail of banditry. Get in, get the money, get out. His father talking, but fuck it, on this subject the old crook was right. Doug was ready for this thing to fall.

You know something about Doug MacRay, and you get a solid hint of what's about to unfold.

In other words, the answer to your question is do what works best for your story.
Which may mean writing and rewriting, and starting over.
Who am I kidding, may?
Of course it means writing and rewriting and starting over.

That's not failure.
That's process.

And be very careful about anyone who tells you there's one right way to start a book. Either they haven't read enough to understand they're wrong, or they're so intent on being right they ignore when things don't work.

Trust your own artistic vision and voice. If something isn't working, change it.

April 30

I spent most of yesterday proof reading a contract and my eyeballs are rolling around in my head...backwards.

Contracts require a particular kind of cohesion, and that requires concentration, and concentration is in short supply here.

which explains the abrupt shift now to a new topic, right?


We're at the end of April.
It's 10 days AFTER 4/20, the first date we got for how long everything would be closed.
Now it looks like May 15.

And no back to normal.

Only one thing is going to save us: art.

That's you!
I hope you're working hard!

'Solar System' quilt by Ellen Harding Baker of Cedar County, Iowa, US in 1876, used as a teaching aid for her lectures on astronomy in the small towns of her state---spotted on the Twitter feed of @WomensArt (which is saving my sanity day by day)

Include or exclude reference to this damn pandemic

Hi Janet!
I hope you're well and keeping your spirits pieced together during this very weird time. On the phone with my son this morning:


Me: So, since this is Friday --
Sam: Thursday. Today is Thursday.
Me: Wait, are you sure?

Sam: Positive.
Me:
Sam: I'm sure.
Me: I'll just google it.


I have been wondering if you are getting questions from writers about incorporating the pandemic in stories set in the present time.


I am on the new novel now, and can go in a few directions. But I wondered what your thoughts are about including/excluding such a massively influential time in life.


Stay safe, and keep your sense of humor where you grab it easily.

P.S. I checked and it's definitely Thursday.

Don't alter your book to include the pandemic. We're too close to current events right now to have any kind of perspective.

Given the glacial nature of publishing, you'll have a chance to revise later if your editor thinks it's a good idea.

But look back at books set in the early 60s. Not all of them mention Sputnik, and that was a real game-changer (1957).

Not all books set in the 80s mention AIDS. And that was cataclysmic beyond measure, particularly in the arts.

On the other hand, am I the only one who thinks we're due for a resurgence of country house murders in the coming months? Locked in, no where to go! 

MSWL but closed to queries

I follow MS Wish List, which aggregates agents' (and editors') tweets about what manuscripts they would like to see.  Could you explain why an agent closed to queries would be actively updating their wish list and saying "send me your ____"?  Is it just a pipeline issue?  I find this practice very confusing.

You're supposed to be confused.
We do that on purpose.
It's a great way to torture writers, and you know we live for that.

**clattering noise as telex machine coughs up urgent missive to shark**

Oh!
I guess *I* am the only one who likes to torture writers.

OTHER nicer agents don't. *telex catches fire like it was message to Mr. Phelps*

So driving you nuts is collateral damage to Lots of Available Information!

Because there is no central clearing house of info about agents not every update makes it to every site.

When I closed to queries a couple times I tried to update all the sites, my website and my blog.
I STILL got queries. Lots of them.

I still get queries addressed to me at FPLM, a place I haven't worked since 2016.

When I closed the office of a literary agent, I answered queries to an agent who'd been retired for two years and dead for another.

In other words, the amount of time I'm willing to devote to keeping my details current is shrinking because it doesn't seem to actually make any difference.

But, if you're a careful, organized writer (my favorite kind by the way) what you need to know is what to pay attention to FIRST.

The highest priority is what the agent herself says. If "Felix Buttonweezer is closed to queries" is the  Twitter name, well, that means Felix ain't reading. Query accordingly.

The #MSWL list is often assembled by people NOT the agent. When I searched it just now, there are agents listed who've been out of the industry for more than a year.


To answer your question: the reason this happens is that there is no single data base of information, and information on the many data bases is only as good as the people updating it.

As always give higher priority to the information found at the source.

And of course the first rule of querying is me first.

Hello Monday

Yes we are in the middle of a terrible crisis, and many many people are at risk of death, and serious financial woes.

In the midst of this though, is a moment of quiet beauty. My favorite part of the week is early Sunday morning when NYC is very empty.

But it's never this empty.
And I think I have lost my taste for that now.

I stole this from Twitter

Tip of the Day
As you build your novel, assess expositon by asking yourself what your reader will already know.
Leave out everything you don't need on the page.

It's Sunday!

From a friend Down Under:

These are quokkas native to Western Australia. They wear a perpetual smile and are wishing you a happy day.

I think one would have to have a happy day after seeing these fine fellows!