The Big Event is here, and now the Big Day in the Big Event is here.
One of the reasons I did YWW was to give my writing a formal transition point. I’ve been writing for quite some time. The first novel I wrote was started without the intention of publishing it; like Colleen Hoover, I just wrote a story I thought was fun for me and the wife to read. I managed to finish it in a month, and it weighed in at just over 84,000 words.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
—Kurt Vonnegut
A lot had changed over those 80k, though. What was supposed to be a one-off fun project had turned into something as embarrassing as any first draft would be (with the added bonus of this first draft being a first first draft), but something I wanted to do again, even though the initial idea of two guys and a dog on bikes started to lose steam a bit over 30,000 words in. It was at that point that a woman walked in from the side of the stage, waved, and said, “Hi guys! I’m here. You have to make me so amazing that Richard will spend the entire rest of the book brokenhearted when I leave even though we’re only together for two days. Let’s get to it.”
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Okay, so Vonnegut was right, and this was dangerous territory. An idea of how dangerous it was was that the next 50,000 words came easily. By the time it was over, the three characters who I’d found amusing enough to write only one story about had turned into a much-deeper cast of four people (well, three people and a dog) I wanted to leave on the pool table to bounce around for another book. (Which became four more so far.)
But the important thing is that the book found what it wanted to say through her addition. It was always supposed to be a meditation on the loss of the past, both personal loss and the loss of history; how time weathers all things, sometimes for the better, but often not. Karl was rich enough not to need to find treasure, but he was searching for something in the hopes of healing from a loss he’ll never recover, hiding it under a thick layer of humor. But we never actually feel that loss until Richard meets Eileen, immediately knows that she’s what he’s been searching for his entire life, and then loses her.
I write because I have something to say. Sure, the “doing” part of the writing was something I was doing for fun, but the “needing to” part of writing is because I need to say something. A third of the way through, I was beginning to think that the book would never end up having said it, but by the time I was done, it said it better than I thought it could.
But what’s even more important is that it did something that it absolutely had to do before I would even consider thinking of looking to get it published:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I’ve done twelve major revisions since I actually felt that I wouldn’t be wasting a stranger’s time. Ironically, that meant asking for more of the hypothetical stranger’s time, because the final version, the one I thought was as good as I was ever going to be able to make it, doubled in size, weighing a final 165,358 words.
It’s been easy to put off looking for an agent: anytime I really feel serious about doing it, I just start writing another book. But the last couple of years, it’s been getting more and more obvious that I need to stop actively avoiding it and throw the first one out into the world to say what it has to say. YWW was that deadline.
The organizers had three agents you could ask to meet if you had a completed manuscript. You ranked your preferences and you got slotted to talk to two of them. The slots were pretty standard for workshop mass pitch sessions: 7 minutes long. I got my #1 and #2 picks, both of which I liked equally.
I’ve been reading about the process, pitches, and so on for the past few years, so I wasn’t totally unprepared. I’ve even written some pitches and tried one out at one of my monthly local writer’s gatherings instead of my usual live read. But this workshop forced me to focus on making it as good as possible, because unlike the experimental, “one day I’ll do this” efforts, this one counted. This one was going to be heard by people that would make a decision. One of the resources posted in the YWW resources folder was from the Algonkian Writers Conferences, and was an extremely-useful analysis of what makes a good and a bad logline.
I used this and came up with something I thought did a good job of summing up why it’s worth reading. For every hour of my life I give to something, I want an hour in return, and if someone is going to read a novel, they’re giving up hours of their life to live in a book, and in only a few sentences, I had to show why mine was a great place to live for those hours.
I went in feeling as prepared as I could be. The agents had a panel for an hour beforehand so we could see what they’re like, how they operate, and see that they’re humans that read books, too. So when my turn to give my pitch came, a whole 24 minutes after the panel was over, I was ready.
It went about as well as anything goes the first time you do it. Seven minutes is a blink of an eye when you’re trying to describe something you spent four years working on, and I spent too much time talking about everything except the pitch. Since I’d had the pitch focused, I was able to squeeze it into the last two minutes, and I did end up managing to get an invitation to submit the full query. That was encouraging.
The second one was only 14 minutes later, so I had just enough time to take a deep breath, get a glass of water, and give the dogs a treat to celebrate being 1-for-1 so far. I took what I learned from the first one and only spent the first minute breaking the ice, then launched into the pitch. This gave us much more time to actually talk about the book and, oddly enough, made it feel like this one was much longer. I got the strongly-hoped-for invitation to send in the full query.
I was extremely happy, even though this doesn’t mean I have an agent. It only means that I have the opportunity to get my first rejection. The important thing is that when I do send the query, I can start with being able to say that we’ve had a chance to meet and talk about this, so this isn’t a random, unsolicited query. It’s no guarantee of anything, but if I hadn’t done it, I’d be guaranteed nothing anyway, so as Bill Murray’s character in Caddyshack said, I’ve got that going for me.
Since both of the agents I talked to were from the same agency (the third seemed nice, too, but when I researched that one, it seemed like what I write isn’t a perfect match for what they look for), I can’t send queries to both. This agency uses an in-house submission system that only lets you submit to one, and if you send a query to one, you’re blocked from submitting to another one. This makes sense to me: if I ran a literary agency, I wouldn’t want random people spamming every agent in the place either.
Both of them have their strengths. What I write fits into the sort of thing the first one represents, and when they were speaking during the panel before, I really like the way they do business. The second one looked quite proud and happy to show off a recent work by one of their authors during that panel, and the description of what they look for that they have on their page is almost uncannily like what I’d describe the kind of things I write.
It’s a hard choice because both are good, but I’m going to be querying the second one because not only did I get to have a good conversation with that one, but I got the impression that this is someone I could do business with for a long time. A good literary agent isn’t just someone you throw a manuscript at and say, “Here you go. Go get it sold.” It needs to be someone who will advocate for you as much as you would. It’s a business relationship, but writing is also one of the most personal things a human can do, so that business relationship needs to be with someone you can feel comfortable with. At the same time, you’re asking them to read something that they’re willing to stake their reputation on if they were to try to sell it (and preferably more to come), so it needs to be someone you’d want to be working with for a long time. While I got that impression from both of them, the second one seems to target my niche just a little bit better.
I’ll be submitting that query very soon, once I’ve got the full one as perfect as I can ever get it. In the meantime, there’s always a lucky thirteenth revision to work on.
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
—Kurt Vonnegut
I'd love to hear from you!