Rebirth
Rescued from the fall, /
sunflowers thrive in the vase. /
Summer storm rebirth.
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#rebirth #rescued #summer #storm #sunflowers #vase #haiku #poem #poetry #haiga #photo #oldnorthknoxville #davidebooker #july #monday #070824 #2024
Category Archives: Perils of writing
So, you want to be a writer? Watch and learn
Filed under agents, editor, humor, novel, Perils of writing, pitches, publishers, Random Access Thoughts, words, writing, writing tip
A flightless mind in a myopic world
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb5
January 6, 2011
Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
“All modern American literature,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “comes from one book by MarkTwain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ ”
Being an iconic classic, however, hasn’t protected “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from being banned, bowdlerized and bleeped. It hasn’t protected the novel from being cleaned up, updated and “improved.”
A new effort to sanitize “Huckleberry Finn” comes from Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University, at Montgomery, Ala., who has produced a new edition of Twain’s novel that replaces the word “nigger” with “slave.” Nigger, which appears in the book more than 200 times, was a common racial epithet in the antebellum South, used by Twain as part of his characters’ vernacular speech and as a reflection of mid-19th-century social attitudes along the Mississippi River.
Filed under Huckleberry Finn, insanity, Mark Twain, Perils of writing, publishers, Random Access Thoughts, story, words, writing
One size fits
The blathering idiot bought a ball cap at the store. It had the symbol and colors of his favorite team. He was proud of the cap and what it stood for. He felt he was part of something larger than himself.
Then he took the cap off and looked under the lip and saw a tag that read: One Size fits most.
The blathering idiot was upset. He had thought for sure that he had bought the deluxe model of this type of cap. It had cost him enough, and it even said “Limited Deluxe Edition” on another tag under the lip.
There was only one thing the blathering idiot could do: He immediately went to that store and demanded that they fix his purchase.
When ask what the problem was, the blathering idiot stammered: “The cap. It doesn’t fit all.”
The clerk, thinking the blathering idiot meant “at all,” asked him to try it on. The cap fit perfectly.
The blathering idiot immediately jumped to his feet, knocking the hat off.
“I am not in the all,” he said, and then he demanded to see the store manager.
Eventually, when the store manager came out to see him, the blathering idiot was clearly irritated. He shoved the tag up almost into the manager’s nose.
“This tag,” the blathering idiot said, “says one size fits most. It should say one size fits all.”
“But it won’t fit all,” the manager said. Then he asked, “Does it fit you?”
“That’s not the point. I paid for a one-size-fits-all hat of my favorite team, and instead I get a one-size-fit-most hat.”
After trying a few more times to convince the blathering idiot that as long as the hat fit, there shouldn’t be a problem, the manager reluctantly refunded the blathering idiot’s money.
As he left the store, the blathering idiot muttered, “How can I belong to something larger than myself when nothing is no longer one-size-fits all? What’s this world coming to?”
Filed under blathering idiot, humor, Perils of writing, the perils of writing, word play, words, writing
Pictures at an exhibition
Below are a few photos of agents and editors taken while at Killer Nashville this past August 20 – 22, 2010. Consider this visual reference for the names of people mentioned in some of my earlier posts on pitching your novel to editors or agents.
From left, agents Jill Marr, Cari Foulk, and Jeff Gerecke. Beth Terrell, author and Killer Nashville Executive Driector, leaning over behind them.
Jill Marr (seated left) and Cari Foulk listening to a question at Killer Nashville 2010.
Agents Jill Marr (left) and Cari Foulk standing for a few moments after listening to pitches.
Agent Jill Marr walking out of the Pitch Room at Killer Nashville 2010.
The pitches
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Two pieces of advice, one I have said before: Practice the pitch and make it as natural as you can. Two: Think of a pitch as a spoken version of the back-cover blurb you read on many paperback books.
The Painted Beast
Ex-cop Stephen York was once a hero. Decorated and lionized from uncovering corruption in the police department and bringing down a criminal enterprise, he now works two or three menial jobs in order to hold body and soul together, not only for himself but also his thirteen-year-old step-daughter and eight-year-old daughter. One night his ex-wife, who has escaped from prison, returns home and terrorizes him. He escapes from her and she from him, but shortly thereafter she kidnaps their daughters. In order to save them, Stephen has to kill her, which puts him under suspicion for murder and under the thumb of a police detective who has personal as well as professional reasons for wanting to grind Stephen down further. In addition, his step-daughter’s biological father steps forward to kidnap her with the intention of leading her into a life of child pornography and prostitution in order to get money to help re-establish the criminal empire that Stephen had helped take down. This time, in order to save his step-daughter, Stephen, who has not been a particularly good father, has to offer his life in order to save his step-daughter’s. In so doing, he learns another definition of hero. At its core this novel’s theme asks and answers the question: Can a fallen hero be a hero again?
Limerick version:
There once was an ex-cop who did poorly
At being a father and what’s more he
Killed his ex-wife,
Then offered up his life
To save his daughter from a life in pornography.
***
A Small Resurrection
Is believing in what you see the same thing as seeing what you believe in?
Knoxville, Tennessee, is the last place T. Xavier Gabriel wants to be. But the director of the 8th highest grossing film in Hollywood has come to town to ask his ex-wife for forbearance in paying the large alimony and possibly also for a loan to help restart his fallen career. She, however, has other plans. She wants him to
Use conversational voice when talking about your novel
Limerick version:
There once was a director named Gabriel
Whose life was a broken down fable
Then along came Rod Serling
And an offer so sterling
That it could save Gabe if he was able.
Two final notes:
1) The limerick versions were not something I pitched, though I thought about it. It was my way of have a pitch that could be done in 15 seconds or less.
2) Some pitch advice says you need to have antecedents as part of your pitch. Antecedents are novels that are like yours. Something similar to your novel. This is supposed to show that you know about your novel’s market and where it might fit. While I had that prepared for The Painted Beast, it did not seem to be something those I pitched to at Killer Nashville were interested in. That could have been a mistake on my part. But I had the feeling that these agents wanted to be the ones to decide where it belongs.
Pitch aside: dealing with contradictory information
This information comes from agent Nathan Bransford, and while he is aiming the information at query letters, I think the same advice can apply for pitches, with a little modification:
1. Take a Deep Breath: As long as you’re getting the big stuff right, you’re going to be fine. You don’t need to have every single little teeny tiny thing perfect. You can get my name or gender wrong and I still might request your pages (just did this last week in fact). I’m not going to reject you because you sent me the first five pages of Chapter 1 instead of your Prologue if I like the idea and your writing. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Because really: if an agent is going to reject your query over some small niggling detail, are they someone you’d want to work with anyway?
2. Remember That Agent Blogs Are Just Trying to Help: I know how tempting it is to throw up your hands and just think that literary agents are so many Goldilocks with completely different ideas of how hot the porridge should be. Please just remember that we offer so much advice because people ask. We get e-mails and comments all the time asking about everything from paper size to fonts to anglicized spelling to serial commas. So we try to help, and we’re not always going to agree on everything. Personally, when I’m wearing my author hat I’d rather have too much information than too little, so I tend to err on the side of dispensing too much agent advice. It’s up to you to decide which advice you agree with and which you don’t. Just remember that we’re trying to help, not trying to make your life miserable.
3. Not All Publishing Advice is Created Equal: I went back and looked at some of my early blog posts, and holy cow after just four years they’re already wildly out of date. Consider the source, consider the freshness of the advice, and beware of anyone who tries to tell you that there’s one way and only one way to find successful publication. Occasionally an author out there somewhere will have a sense that the way they found success is The Way That Should Work For Everyone, whereas people who have worked across the publishing spectrum have seen the proverbial cat skinned in an impossibly vast number of ways.
4. Try As Best You Can to Meet an Agent’s Specifications, But Don’t Go Crazy Trying to Do It: If you happen to remember that Rachelle wants you to query with your pen name and I want to hear from the real you: great! Query accordingly. But don’t go creating a massive spreadsheet with every agent’s particular individual preferences. No agent expects you to do that.
5. If You Think the Contradictory Query Advice is Mind Boggling, Just Wait Until You Reach the Publication Stage: In case you haven’t noticed, this business is an art, not so much a science. There’s no one way to do things, and you’re going to face conflicting advice and opinions about your manuscript, cover art, marketing plan, you name it. There are even more opinions out there than people (sometimes people can’t even decide what they think and have multiple opinions). At the end of the day, all you can do is just take all the advice into account, and choose the route that works best for you.
What makes a good pitch? The thou shalt nots
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1) Thou shalt not consider me an expert. I believe it was the author W. Somerset Maugham who said, “There are three rules for writing a good novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.” While I took most of my ideas for a good pitch from Michael Hauge’s book, even he admits there are other ways of constructing a pitch. You can certainly find suggestions by simply searching on the Internet, and some of them are very good. But all of them, in the end, revolve around the principle of “Be brief, be sincere, and be seated.” Or get out of your seat to make way for the next person who is going to pitch.
I know, I know. It is a pain, a real pain to take this 70,000-, 80,000-, 90,000-, or 100,000-word-or-more creation and squeeze the essence out of it. After all, if you could have said it less than 500 words, you would have. Right?
I empathize. I do. After all, I have a novel or two or three, and I went kicking and screaming into this idea of pitching. That’s part of the reason I say don’t consider me an expert. I’m not. And certainly, if you have a better way of doing it, stick with it. Maybe even let me know. In the meantime, I have to go kicking and screaming into this reality, much as I would rather spend time creating another one filled with people much more interesting than I am.
I will say in defense of pitches, I did get to meet some interesting agents, such as Cari Foulk, Jill Marr, and Amy Burckhart. And meeting them was a way to begin to get to know somebody who might wind up being my agent. After all (and this is a side note), I heard several times that having the wrong agent is worse than having no agent at all, and who might be the right agent for you might not be the right agent for me. But that is another subject.
2) Thou shalt not mention more than one character name in your pitch. Tablet with writingsAnd that should probably be your protagonist. You might be able to work in two names. But absolutely no more than that. 
I know, I know, you probably agonized and researched, tried and retried names for your characters until you found the ones that were the best and no others would do. I am not disputing that the naming of characters is not important, and again, another subject for another time. But remember, you only have 5 minutes, and you are not the only person the agent or editor is going to be listening to. The agent or editor is not likely to remember more than one name anyway, and in all honesty, you probably want her or him to remember yours.
If the editor or agent wants to see some or all of your novel, that’s when he or she will get a chance to remember the character’s names, and that is when your skill in naming them can shine. In short, it’s okay to say “Jim Summer’s enemy…” or even say “his antagonist….”
3) Thou shalt not recount every plot and sub-plot, nor every plot point in your pitch. You may be the next Jeffrey Deaver, with the ability to handle a major plot and several strong sub-plots, and have them all have reversals or other surprise twists. But like having too many names, having too many plots and sub-plots in your pitch will only lead you into a thicket of inability. Stick to one plot, the main one, and stick to the two or three main features of that plot. If the agent or editor wants to know more, she or he will ask, and by her or his asking, you know they are at least mildly interested. Maybe more than mildly.
4) Thou shalt not say you are the next Jeffery Deaver or that your book is better than Jeffery Deaver’s latest. Even if either one or both of those statements is true, you gain nothing by it. Belittling somebody else to make yourself look more important was childish when you did it at ten and it hasn’t gotten any better since then. I will admit, I have read several accounts of accomplished writers who started writing after they read something so bad they threw the magazines or books across the rooms and proclaimed they could do better. Then they proceeded to do so, though most will admit they weren’t immediately or instantly better. It’s okay if something like that was your catalyst toward becoming a writer. But if you are truly better than X author, let your editor or agent find that out on his or her own. After all, there is no greater professional joy for an editor or agent than finding somebody he or she believes is the next Jeffery Deaver (or pick an author).
5) Thou shalt not say your novel is a sure best seller. It may be. I certainly hope so, but there are too many variables that go into making a best seller.
Being confident your novel and in yourself are good things. Often, late at night or early in morning, when you are struggling with the blank page, than confidence In your book or yourself may be the thing that pushes you through the retaining wall of doubt into a world that only you can imagine. But good writing is collaboration between you, the author, and the reader, where what you do ignites a passion in those who read your words and want to share in your world, and that includes agents and editors. Leave them a little room to discover your magnificence.
Next up: my pitches.
Filed under agents, editor, Killer Nashville, novel, Perils of writing, pitches, publishers, words, writing, writing conference, writing tip
Pitch aside: some resources
Some pitch reference sites to consider
This blog entry from agent Nathan Bransford is one of many of Nathan Bransford’s blog entries. He is interesting and you can certainly sign up to receive his blog entries yourself: One sentence pitch.
Another blog entry about pitching, this time called the One-Sentence Hook.
Some information from another agent, Rachelle Gardner. This blog entry focuses on longer pitches. Notices that she says she wants a little information about the author up front, which is something that Michael Hauge says should be at the last, if at all. He even says it is not necessary to start with the title.
Here is additional information on the Guide to Literary Agents blog. Note the information about such things as practicing and attire.
I’m sure there are other blog entries and web sites with information as well as books and articles in magazines. After all, writers write, and sometimes writers write about writing.
Pen up.
Filed under agents, conference, editor, humor, Killer Nashville, Perils of writing, pitches, publishers, words, writing, writing tip
What makes for a good pitch? The thou shalts.
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By now you may (or maybe not) be wondering what makes for a good pitch to agents or editors when you approach them at conferences such as Killer Nashville.
1) Sincerity. Even with your nervousness, if you don’t believe in what you’ve written, don’t expect the agent or editor to. I once had a published author answer the question of how do you know when you’ve finished writing and editing a novel by saying, when you’re tired of looking at it. You may have reached that stage with the mechanics of your novel, but if you’ve also edited out the sincerity, then you’ve probably gone too far and it will show in your pitch.
Believe in what you've written
How do you overcome that? A friend of mine who was also pitching at Killer Nashville said he was going to add passion to his pitches by being sure to move his arms. Physical gestures can be effective in loosening you up to allow some of the passion to come through. After all, many passionate people are often moving their arms for emphasis. Another thing you can do is remember to breath and realize that while you don’t have a lot of time, you do have enough time if you’re prepared, if you’ve practiced your pitch. You may also want to practice varying the delivery pace of your sentences. Pause a little longer between some sentences than others. Think of what you’re doing more as a conversation.
3) Be prepared. That means having written out or in some other way constructed your pitch and have practiced it. A few of us who were going to Killer Nashville practiced our pitches. I facilitate a writing group. We meet once a month to review each others’ works. During part of a couple of those sessions, a few of us practiced pitches for the novels we had written, and we let the other members of the group offer their comments. Even after that, I practiced a few more times, often going through my pitch as I was driving to work. (I’m sure people the cars around me wondered what crazy song I was singing to or what medication I had failed to take that morning.)
I even practiced once with my wife, and once with the friend I rode over with to Killer Nashville. He did his pitch and I listened and offered comments. And I did mine. (Actually, I did two, because I had one for a second novel I have written.) Both my wife and my friend said I needed to convey a little more passion in my pitch. That’s when I asked my friend, “How are you going to convey passion in yours?”
“I’m going to wave my arms,” he said.
I did do some hand gestures with my pitches (all three of them), and I hoped it helped. Since there is no copyright on arm waving or hand gestures, I don’t think I owe him more than a thank you. As I said in an earlier post, I also admitted to my nervousness up front with the first agent. Sometimes it helps to make things a little easier to do that. And somehow our conversation lead to my getting to do a partial version of the pitch for my other novel as well as the one I had sat down to pitch.
4) Be prepared to be interrupted. The person on the other side of the table will probably have questions for you, particularly if she or he is interested. So be prepared for that. The questions may come at the end. If so, then you’ll have little or no interruptions. Or the questions may come during your pitch. I experienced both. If interrupted, you’ll have to do your best to remember where you were in your pitch and get back to it as naturally as possible.
5) The best pitches are not the longest ones. I had the times for my second and third pitches eaten into because the persons before me when a longer than the ten minutes allotted. If your pitch session is scheduled for 10 minutes, don’t have a pitch over five minutes in length. And if you can have one even shorter, probably better. Remember point number 4, be prepared to be interrupted. That interruption might even occur before you get to sit down.
The agents and editors are hearing these pitches back to back to back. Filling your presentation with wall to wall sound won’t necessarily make your book more memorable. If you’re done before your ten minutes is up, great. Even if the editor or agent doesn’t bite and want to see all or part of your manuscript, you could still leave a favorable impression by being polite and precise in your presentation. The editor or agent might not be interested in this novel, but who knows about the next one. Besides, if he or she didn’t want to read a sample of the novel, there is no need to waste your time or the agent’s or the editor’s. There could be a multitude of reasons why the editor or agent isn’t interested. For example, one agent my friend pitched to told him she wasn’t interest because her agency was already representing a book with a similar structure to it. Literary agencies and publishers generally don’t want to handle books that they believe are similar to ones they already have in hand. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do about that, other than move on.
I have written enough for now. Next time, a few “Thou Shalt Nots” in terms of pitches.
Filed under agents, conference, editor, humor, Killer Nashville, Perils of writing, publishers, Random Access Thoughts, story, writing, writing tip
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