Category Archives: writing

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Severe writer’s apathy

For the past couple of months, I’ve taken a few tentative dips into the boiling acid oceans of literary agent querying. If I’m being honest though, it’s really more the equivalent of French-kissing a dementor and may very well be the reason boxed wine was invented in the first place. Unfortunately for me and my enormous hydrogen-filled ego, I haven’t even gotten into the meat of it yet, querying agents is just the first bit. Apparently, it gets a hell of a lot harder – the book still has to be picked up by a publisher! In any case, even from this point, I’ve still managed to collect a few observations.

First off, over the past couple of months I’ve spent all of what would normally be my writing time on rewriting synopsis, query letters, and researching agents. The ‘best’ advice I’ve received on this process is keep at it, someone will eventually be interested. In the mean time, keep writing. – What? Keep writing? With what time am I going to do this?!

Second, don’t ever tell a writer this: ‘Even J.K. Rowling was rejected 3.75 million times before finally getting published.’ THIS is supposed to make me feel better? The one thing I know for a fact about my book is that it’s not the next Harry Potter. If it practically took an act of god to get Harry Potter into print, there really isn’t any hope for me.

When I started this process, I loved Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. I enjoyed the characters, the writing of it didn’t take much time at all (comparatively), and I was chomping at the bit to start a sequel. It’s literally been a couple months and I’m starting to really hate the book. Not because I suddenly think it sucks (which it probably does by the way. See fig A.). No, it’s more like having been savagely attacked and left for dead by a beloved pet. The reason for this is that for each hand-crafted form rejection that comes through within minutes of having sent out the query, I am forced to face the real possibility that what I’ve written falls into one of a few categories:

  • This work is brilliant and nobody can see it
  • This book sucks
  • Nobody will ever buy this book
  • There is not, nor will there ever be a market for this story
  • I’m a terrible writer and should spend more time playing video games and programming

On the whole, the last category might be the easiest for me to take because I like programming and playing video games. Perhaps not as much as writing, but I will never be querying an agent for how well I cleared that dungeon.

BookFigure

Yet another observation is that many agents ask for a bio and past writing accomplishments. I don’t have any previous writing accomplishments. Loads of past writing, but nothing that could be called an accomplishment. As for the bio, someone very kindly informed me that the bio is more about you as a person, rather than your writing-specific experience. I tend to think this is, at best overly optimistic thinking, and at worst the equivalent of telling me that even J.K. Rowling was rejected so many times she had to be reincarnated before she could get published. Publishing is a business. What they want to know is: Will this book sell? and are you the sort of person to participate? My lovely bio is excellent for research or might be an asset if I were writing books about Alaska. I can not, however, bring myself to believe that it is helpful to point out that I have more hobbies than a craft-store and once seriously investigated cooperage as a hobby because it sounded interesting. As a hiring manager for a number of years, I didn’t care that much about someone’s history unless it told me something specific about how they were going to do the job. I’m (obviously) not an expert at publishing, but when it comes to business and making money, irrelevant skills are actually a huge distraction that tend to gloss over the fact that the applicant has no relevant skills. On the whole, I think my distinct lack of writing accomplishments seem to cover that ground pretty well. So, with all of that non-accomplishment burning a hole in my back pocket staring at an agent profile requesting a query letter, the first 7 ½ pages, a bio, and all past accomplishments along with the advisement that she only takes best-sellers, I’m really not super-motivated to continue.

So now, where does this leave me? We all know there’s a fine line between stupidity and stubbornness, though really it’s less of a line and more the phrase “well that didn’t go as expected” written in blood. As I haven’t discovered that point just yet (I think) and I haven’t yet spent half the life-age of the universe querying, I suppose I need to keep on it. Some folks say they get advice from agents, I have yet to get more than silence & form letters, but hey, even J.K. Rowling got published right?

achance

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Revisiting older work

With Wine Bottles and Broomsticks entering the long and epic end-game of writing a book, my extreme sense of procrastination is starting to kick in. Aside from mocking up fake magic cards and poking about with a program I’ve been working on, I’ve started thinking seriously about other stories. While I want to, want to work on the sequel to Wine Bottles and Broomsticks, I just can’t seem to stay focused. Part of that probably has to do with a healthy dose of self-doubt about Wine Bottles. I mean, just because I think it’s a good book and that everyone should read it doesn’t mean anyone ever will. One of those avenues of procrastination happens to be my last attempt at a novel.

The War of Shadows was the first book I’d actually completed. I even proudly sent it out to beta readers. As these things tend to go with first books, my friends mostly finished it and had encouraging things to say. However, the truth of the matter is that the book sucked, something my wife tried to say in constructive terms. The idea that it was broken finally started sinking in last summer. I don’t know that it’s broken beyond repair, but it was pretty clearly beyond my skill to correct. The core (not the entire) problem was the two main characters and especially the main character. They were bland, weak, and had no chemistry. Some of the other characters are a bit better, but in general they’re bad. My conclusion? I’m awful with characters and character arcs.

With that failure solidly under my belt back in August, I decided to take a short break from revising my broken book and work on a concept that came to me after a flippant remark. The phrase ‘The problem with witch hunts is that sometimes you find one’ actually comes from something I told someone. I’m not sure how a sentence can become a book, but there it is. This story quickly became my main writing focus, almost to the exclusion of everything else in life. What’s the main strength of Wine Bottles? Ironically, it’s the characters. This has made me revisit the conclusion that I can’t write good characters. In fact I can do it, furthermore, I knew what was necessary to fix it, but I couldn’t seem to make it work. This was, of course, because much of the action surrounding the main character was built according to his reactions, which meant a full and complete re-write of the book, something I didn’t want to do. Now I’ve finished a second book, I actually WANT to to rewrite it. I want to make that character the way he should be. Having concluded a character arc, I can see how it’s supposed to work and I’m ready to tackle it again.

In fact, I’ve already started. On Thursday night I crawled into bed, exhausted and ready for the day to be over only to be drawn to my iPad, where I clacked out the new start to the book. I only made it five-hundred words in before calling it a night, but the gauntlets were off. I’m going to completely gut and re-write the book. So far, I can say that this is much, much easier than the first time. I’m about half-way through the new first chapter and while it’s still rough (it is a draft), it’s a million times better and the characters are already more interesting and likable.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I didn’t stop writing or take a ton of classes, and I didn’t pick up dozens of books to carefully study them for techniques on how to bring out a strong character. No, I kept writing. I wrote something different, something that was supposed to be a throw-away, not a serious effort. You know what? I learned something. Not only did I learn more about how to put a story together, but I also learned about my own writing style. Just playing to my strengths has made the process of writing much more enjoyable and move along much faster. I may still have a lot to learn, but I’m now much, much further along than I was last year at this time.

Now I’m off to work on that first chapter again. Hopefully, it’ll make for a readable book this time.

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Thoughts on finding an agent

I finished another (not the final) read-though and revision of Wine Bottles and Broomsticks yesterday, so naturally, I’ve started the process of researching agents and agencies who might be interested in what I’ve got. My first reaction of this process is that it’s a soul-crushing experience.

I’ve only gotten as far as starting a list of agents to query once I’m ready. The best thing I can say about it thus far is that every agent is pretty clear about the stuff they’re interested in. The less awesome part is that I don’t see how my particular book is going to fit in. Not only that, I anticipate being involved in the process of research, querying, not hearing back (standard procedure), and fretting for a good long while.

The query letter also has me worried. As a hiring manager for a number of years, I know that the cover letter makes all the difference in hiring and even a well-written one can suck. Furthermore, I also know that a generic cover-letter doesn’t do anyone any favors. I expect query letters more or less work the same. After all, the query letter is only an application to have your work looked at. Writing an individualized query to speak to the specific stated interests of various agents could take two or three days each. To put a cherry on that sundae, I’ve got no more than a handful of sentences to sell the idea of the book, so they go on to read the sample (assuming they’ve requested one), and then hope that all of those things get mefrom ‘nope, boring’ to ‘go on…’

The bottom line is that even though I’ve got quite enough work left to on the manuscript, there’s a lot more work to be done in trying to get the thing sold. A lot of work. I don’t mind work, but I have no idea what to expect or how best to approach this, so the mountain looks a lot higher. On the bright side, I’ve got a day-job, so yay for that.