“She began her career as the assistant to the agent who represented Stephen King…”

That was in an agent bio I read yesterday.  Now, she certainly has the credentials to justify name dropping, but it made me laugh nonetheless. Because it made me think of The Office:  “I’m Dwight Schrute, Assistant Regional Manager” and Michael cutting in, “Assistant to the Regional Manager.”  Finding things to laugh about is how I cope with the stress of the agent hunt.  (Actually, it’s how I cope with most stressful things, but this post is not about other stressful things.)

A few of my readers might be writers, and so you’ll know well the process I’m about to describe — and may not have any interest in reliving it!  But for those of you who have ever wondered what happens after a writer has finished a novel and before it’s published, this is what we go through.

After months, or even years (I started my first draft in April, 2008, and finished it in August, 2009), writing, editing and polishing your novel, making it the best it can possibly be, you’ve then got to summarize the entire scope of this 100 thousand word manuscript into a measly 100 words. That’s right:  all you have to sell your novel to an agent, who then must try to sell your novel to a publisher, is 100 words.  And it’s not just your novel you’ve got to sell.  In much fewer than 100 words, you’ve also got to sell yourself as a marketable commodity even if you have zero publications to your name and little writing experience apart from a few short stories in college.  Nothing makes you feel more vulnerable than sending that off to agents whose clients include bestsellers and award winners.  You hit “send” and then are left to wonder whether your novel will sound like the stupidest, most trite bit of writing ever to appear in their inbox.  It’s enough to make you lose sleep, throw up everything you eat (if you can eat at all), chew your nails down to the quicks,or  get really drunk.  Certainly you will check your email compulsively every five minutes.

Fellow writers, this need not be! I have developed the perfect no-stress method for querying agents:

Wait until the last 2-4 weeks of your pregnancy. Querying agents is a great distraction from waiting for your water to break, and nesting the excitement of the impending birth of your child is a great distraction from awaiting replies. And then, when you do receive three rejection letters out of your first four queries, you can’t even really feel that disappointed, because you’ve got a little bundle of joy and unconditional love and acceptance on the way.  It’s an absolutely foolproof strategy, I tell you!

Okay, so it’s really only foolproof if you happen to be pregnant.  What if you don’t have the distraction of a coming baby while you’re in the querying process?  How do you cope with the inevitable rejection?  Because you will be rejected.  Maybe once. Maybe twice.  Maybe three times.  (I was, three times, in the space of 12 hours.)  Maybe more.  Almost certainly more, the more queries you send out.  (And the more agents you query, the more likely you are to find one who wants to represent you.)  How do you deal with the negative responses? Read the rest of this entry »

“Doesn’t the last third of a book feel like the bit once you’ve got to the top of the roller coaster and you’re just gathering momentum?”

A writing colleague posed me this question tonight.  We were discussing my novel, specifically, how I’ve felt like it’s careening from major plot point to major plot point at the end and I’m not sure how to pad it out around that, and consequently that’s been holding me back from finishing the last five to six chapters:  I know what is going to happen, but I don’t feel like enough is happening.

In fact I had finished a chapter before this discussion, with the caveat that I was afraid it was rather short and too much happens too abruptly.  Which had me in a bit of a tizzy about where I would pick things up tomorrow in the next chapter, and how much narrative padding I would have to come up with in order to maintain the pacing of the rest of the novel.

But suddenly my friend’s rollercoaster analogy flicked on a light bulb in the hazy attic of my mind where I’ve been living since I got to this point in the novel.  Of course when I’m reading, I don’t expect the last five to six chapters to maintain the same pace as the rest of the novel.  I expect the last chapters to go quickly because I already know the characters and I’m just reading to see what happens to them.

So why don’t I expect the same thing from stories that I’m writing?

I suppose it’s a little bit like how you ride a rollercoaster without thought because you trust that the engineers who designed it have taken all the physics into consideration that ensure you don’t go downhill so fast you go flying through the tracks.  While if you are the rollercoaster engineer, that initial test run has you mopping your brow because all your calculations might be wrong and the coaster might get to going so fast that something terrible happens.  But in the end you’ve got to trust your instincts as a creator and just design that rollercoaster, one point to the next, until it reaches the end.

At least as a writer, I have the luxury of first drafts, which trusted friends can read and give me pointers about.  I can always re-write – but only after I’ve written.

Suddenly, I feel a lot better about going to work tomorrow.  I’m not going to worry about padding: I’m only going to think in terms of what is essential to move me on to that next point in the plot.  Because my readers will be expecting things to happen to my characters now that they know who those characters are.  The reason my characters’ relationship fell apart is because nothing was happening to make them change and grow; only events facilitate change and growth – and happily ever after.

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Unrelated, though still on the topic of Songs for Piano and Voice, I realized a few weeks ago that this book, though set in 21st Century Waco, Texas, has something in common with my first book, The Collapse of Camelot.  Like Gareth, my lead in this novel is a man whose relationships are primarily with women.  His love interest, of course, but also with a circle of older women who are mother and sister figures to him.  I didn’t plan this; it just happened.  What does this say about my subconscious view of men?

Since it took me 80,000 words to have my star-crossed lovers meet, fall in love, and break up, I was figuring on it to take me anywhere from 40,000-80,000 more words to put them back together again.  (I called the king to ask for all his horses and all his men, but they were busy with this egg chap…)

However, now that I’m a few chapters into the getting-back-together phase of the story, my characters are quickly showing me that they dislike being apart every bit as much as I dislike writing them apart.  (Actually, I enjoy writing lovers’ quarrels, it’s just that it’s a lot easier to write flirtation.  But if writing novels was easy, more people would do it, and it wouldn’t be a job, would it?)   My characters still have lots of issues to work through and even more pain to deal with, but they surprised me today by doing things that indicate they want to get back together sooner rather than later.

Now, I understand that as Author, I wield phenomenal cosmic power over the characters I make up.  In the life of a fictional character, there is no concept of free will.  Yet as you write characters, a strange thing happens.  You’re not simply making up everything about them and everything they do.  They take on lives of their own.  It’s almost as if the act of writing is like chiseling away at a block of stone in which a human form already resides.  You’re not making so much as finding — finding out enough about these characters that you know what direction their stories should take even if it deviates from your original plan.

That’s why, even though I swear by planning what you’re going to write before you write it, I also swear that you have to be flexible to be a writer.   Where you might have planned for a character to retain the emotional control and distance of a Vulcan until the very end, she might tell you instead that she needs to be vulnerable.  After all, even though your characters aren’t real people, you want your characters to be like real people.  And real people aren’t (usually) Vulcans.  (Unless you’re writing, you know, Star Trek novels.  Which I’m not.  Although I am, clearly, a geek for making the reference at all.)  Real people are vulnerable.  And said character is going through a situation that would definitely leave a real person vulnerable and lowering her emotional guards.  So I think the new direction I took today was, though completely unexpected, the right one.

Speaking of real people and characters…

I don’t know if this is a common problem, but I’m never able to picture clear faces or features of characters when I’m writing or reading.   They’re just faceless blurs to me.  Yet whenever I see a film adaptation of a book I’ve read, I know whether the actor in a particular role fills in the (enormous) gaps in my imagination.  For instance, when Eric Bana was cast as Henry in the upcoming movie The Time Traveler’s Wife, I said a resounding oh yes. On the flip side, any number of actors in the Harry Potter movies make me scratch my head ask whether the casting directors read the same books as I did. (One of my many complaints about the Harry Potter film franchise, though that’s an entire blog post in itself…)

None of which is to say that I sit around thinking about who I’d like to play my leading characters if I not only get lucky enough to see my book in print, but also to have it adapted into a movie.  (Well, not very often, anyway…)  For one thing, it’s hard to cast characters who you can’t even picture yourself.  (I’ve had vague characteristics in mind for the leading lady, Laura — tall, naturally curly dark hair which she sometimes straightens, dark eyes, wide grin, toothpaste commercial teeth — but since the leading man, John, is the point of view character, I’ve managed to get by without describing him except as having thinning light brown hair.)  For another, I don’t want to base my characters off actors, lest parts of actors bleed into my characterization.  Unless, of course, that’s what I’m going for.  In this case, it’s not.

Recently I came across some reference or other to Anne Hathaway.  I hadn’t even really thought about Songs for Piano and Voiceyet that day, but immediately my thoughts went to it because it suddenly hit me that she looked exactly like the Laura I didn’t quite see in my head.  (Also, as I recalled a recent episode of SNL, she can sing, quite well, so if my book ever does become a movie…) Even more jaw-dropping was when I clicked on Anne’s IMDB profile and saw a still from one of her recent films featuring her in the arms of an actor who looked exactly like I hadn’t clearly imagined John.  (Patrick Wilson, if you’ve seen Watchmen, The Phantom of the Opera, or The Alamo.  Who also happens to be musical…Hmm…)  And again, it’s not like I need actors as reference points for my descriptions or characterizations.  I just think it’s kind of nice, after a year’s work on this book, to see more than blurs when I’m crafting scenes for John and Laura.  So now you can see them, too.

It’s strange to me how you can recognize someone you didn’t even know to look for — how the brain can supply you with only the vaguest of mental images, and yet you can feel very strongly about whether a depiction of someone or something is spot on or not.  I wonder if it’s at all connected to how you can forget the face of someone you know extremely well if you haven’t seen them in a while (sometimes a very little while, some people have told me).

Imagine that last April, almost exactly a year ago from today, you began your current novel project, Songs for Piano and Voice.  A departure from your first novel, it’s a contemporary romantic dramedy about a pianist and a singer who just can’t quite get their relationship in tempo thanks to an ex, a nosy pastor’s wife, a smothering older sister, a drug addict, and romantic rivals.  It’s set at a fictional Methodist church in Waco, Texas, and in the very real Baylor University School of Music, where you yourself spent a semester studying vocal performance — though the story’s not based on personal acquaintances or experiences.  Much.   (Though who knows?   Maybe if you hadn’t changed your major to English literature, it would be autobiographical.  Ah, the endless drama of musicians!)

In a year, you’ve written sixteen chapters, totaling upwards of 80,000 words.  You’re either two-thirds or half of the way finished with your first draft.  You’re not really sure which.  All you know is that you’ve finished the first of two “movements” and at this point  have no way of gauging how long the second will be.  You know the end of the novel — the end was actually the starting point of the whole thing — and you know the major plot points between the first movement and the end.  But only the actual writing will tell just how long it will take to get from here to there. Or how to get from here to there.  Which scares you a little, because writing blind is the surest way to write yourself into a corner, though you did manage to avoid that with the first 80,000 words, which you also wrote blindly till you got to the end.

80,000 words sounds like a lot to a non-writer.  Or even to a writer.  Until you break it down into the number of days you work per year and get something like an average of 450 words per day.  And then you think about the other writers you know, who have written entire 100,000 word novels in 100 days, and then you start to wonder what the heck you’re doing wrong.  (Or maybe they’re doing something wrong?)  So it’s best not to think about other writers or break it down into numbers and averages, and instead just revel in the fact that this year you’ve written 80,000 words that a couple of other writer friends really like, and, even more importantly, that you like (or at least don’t think are utter crap), and oh thank God that terrible eighteen month dry spell that followed your first novel is long gone!

For now, you can spend seven nights and eight days at Walt Disney World, and worry about increasing your average daily word count when you get back.

The other day I was musing on the fact that this blog is titled “Inkblots in the Life of an Author,” yet I make very few posts about the authorial part of my life.  Probably most of you think I don’t actually do any authoring.  Rest assured, I do write, every day, from about 10 AM to 4 or 5 PM.  Respectable working hours, almost as if I had a real job!  (And I do generally take my meals at my desk while I work, so I think it’s okay that I don’t start at 8 or 9 like most working people.)

Anyway, all that to say, I actually have something from my writing to blog about today.

When you are a writer, you learn many fascinating things.  Usually these are nuggets of trivia gleaned from researching, but occasionally, they come from your own head.  For example, today I was tweaking the end of chapter thirteen, which I finished last week, and skimmed through to discover that Cupid doesn’t just stick to his day job.  Apparently, he also moonlights as a composer of piano music.

(Consider yourselves very fortunate to get the first ever sneak-peek of Songs for Piano and Voice, hopefully coming to a bookstore near you sometime this decade.)

“Have you ever considered that maybe I’m with a woman who’s so stunningly beautiful that I can’t think about what any other woman looks like?”

Laura blinked, twice.  “Good line,” she said, breathily.  Possibly experiencing the same fluttering sensations as John was, as if someone were using his organs as a keyboard to play Cupid’s “Minute Waltz.”

Eleven years of piano lessons, and I had no idea that anyone but Frédéric Chopin had written a Minute Waltz.  But lo, there is another one — and by Cupid, no less!

Okay, the jig’s up.  That was supposed to say Chopin’s Minute Waltz, but somehow my fingers took leave of my brain and typed Cupid’s.  This is so much worse than the time I was editing my work and found a completely made-up word.  Where did that come from?!

Really, I worry about myself sometimes, and about my future publication endeavors.  How will anyone ever be able to edit my work if they don’t know what the heck I’m trying to say?!

Does it count for anything that I know the above punctuation (?!) is properly called an interrobang?    No?  Okay then.  Back to work.  I’ve got to torture a pianist, recently struck by Cupid’s arrow, with the return of his ex-wife.