Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

  Generally speaking, writers gain confidence with increased experience. I made some changes at an editor’s suggestion in my own first book, the lesbian novel I discussed earlier. One of those changes was a bad idea and I disliked making it, but it didn’t really occur to me to demur. I was twenty years old, delirious at the thought of having a book published, and awestruck at the two-thousand-dollar advance they were handing me. I know now that I could have talked my way clear of the one change I really hated making, but I didn’t even try.

  That was minor. A friend of mine cut a long novel drastically some years ago at the suggestion of a respected editor. He felt at the time that the book would be weaker, both commercially and artistically, as a result of the cuts; however, he also felt the editor’s opinion was worth more than his. Perhaps it might have been in most cases but in this one it manifestly was not. He now regrets making those cuts. With the experience he now has under his belt, and with the track record he has since amassed as a successful commercial novelist, he would be far more likely to resist making similar changes.

  Experience, the very factor that supplies confidence and self-assurance, can also deepen one’s humility and enable one to recognize and admit flaws in one’s work. In my own case, I know I’ve become more open to suggestions regarding revision than I was a number of years ago, although I’m apt to be unyielding when I’m convinced my position is right.

  I’m sure I was inclined to take a stand against revision on some prior occasions because of simple laziness. I didn’t want to do the work, so my mind obligingly supplied reasons why the indicated changes were not a good idea. I still have a tendency to think this way, but I’m more inclined to see it now for what it is, and thus have trouble mistaking it for artistic integrity.

  Your own decision, then, is your own decision. You’ll have to make it yourself when the time comes. It may help you to know that almost all novels require some work after they’ve caught an editor’s eye, and a great many of them require considerable rewriting. While John O‘Hara might snarl that the only way to improve a story after you’ve written it is by telling an editor to go to hell, you probably won’t want to be quite that quick to suggest travel plans to the editor who asks you to make changes. And a look at O‘Hara’s correspondence shows that he wasn’t either—not until he was so well established that he could afford to.

  But this is all cart-before-horse stuff, isn’t it? First you have to find a publisher who’s interested enough to want changes in the first place.

  Which, conveniently enough, brings us to our next chapter.

  Chapter 14

  Getting Published

  Once you’ve written your novel, you’re probably going to want to get it published.

  It’s a curious fact about this whole business of writing that the preceding sentence almost goes without saying. The great majority of us write with the absolute intention of publishing what we have written.

  This isn’t generally true with other artistic pursuits. The man who paints as a hobby doesn’t necessarily aspire to gallery showings. The woman who plays the cello once a week in an amateur string quartet doesn’t call herself a failure because she’s not on her way to Carnegie Hall.

  The writer’s different. For him, publication is seen as part of the process that begins with an idea. His manuscript, unlike an artist’s finished canvas, is not in final form; his novel will only be in that condition when it has been set in type, printed, and bound.

  This is unfortunate. While writing is unquestionably a profession, it is also a hobby, and functions very nicely in that capacity. Of those who write, I suspect it will always be the case that a relatively small percentage will be able to produce salable, publishable work, while the greater majority will be writing essentially for their own amusement. There’s nothing wrong with this; about the same ratio obtains in all artistic occupations. What’s tragic is that the amateur writer is so likely to consider himself a failure because of his inability to publish.

  I elaborated on these thoughts a while ago in a Writer’s Digest column on Sunday writers, suggesting that we needn’t publish in order to consider ourselves successful writers. A heartening number of readers wrote to say they’d drawn encouragement from my observations. Suffice it to say now that I feel anyone who manages to complete the task of writing a novel ought to consider himself a success whatever its merits or publishability. If you’ve written a novel, you’re already a winner. Whether you try to publish it, whether you succeed or fail in your efforts, you’ve run a marathon and finished on your feet.

  Congratulations.

  That said, let’s suppose you’ve decided to make a few tries for the brass ring before stuffing your manuscript in a trunk. What are your chances of success? And what can you do to improve them?

  Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not going to be ice cream and cake all the way. Like a dime-novel hero, you’re going to need luck and pluck—and plenty of both.

  I might be tempted to offer the bromidic message that every novel will get published sooner or later if it’s good enough and if you work hard enough at the business of offering it to publishers. It’s the conventional wisdom, and it’s the sort of thing one likes to hear and would prefer to say.

  I’m beginning to doubt that it’s true.

  A case in point: In 1977 a fellow named Chuck Ross set out to establish the difficulties faced by new novelists. He submitted a novel to fourteen publishers and thirteen literary agents.

  And the novel he submitted wasn’t one of his own but a freshly-typed copy of Jersy Kosinski’s Steps, the National Book Award winner for 1969.

  No one recognized the manuscript, although one editor compared the author’s style to Kosinski. Neither did any publisher want to issue the book or any agent offer to represent it. Admittedly, Kosinski’s novel is an experimental work, and not the sort of item that has best seller written all over it when it comes in the guise of an unknown writer’s work. The experiment doesn’t prove that agents and publishers are all idiots, or that the emperor has no clothes, or anything of the sort.

  But it should give you an idea of what you’re up against.

  And just what am I up against? The wall? Is it safe to say that the new writer is facing impossible odds, that I’d be better off putting my book in a dresser drawer, or not writing it in the first place? Should I take up Sunday painting instead? Start taking cello lessons?

  You can do any or all of those things if you want. I told you before that nobody ever said you had to write a novel. Nobody’s saying now that you have to publish one, or try to publish one. It’s your novel, for heaven’s sake. You can circulate copies among your friends, lock it away in a safe deposit box, or use it to insulate your attic. You can submit it to fourteen publishers and thirteen agents, and then, satisfied that you’ve made the effort, you can put it in the outhouse next to the Monkey Ward catalog, so that it won’t be wasted.

  Or you can bundle it off to a fifteenth publisher or a fourteenth agent.

  If you want something badly enough, Fredric Brown pointed out in The Screaming Mimi, you’ll get it. If you don’t get it, that only goes to show you didn’t want it badly enough.

  This is no place for specific advice on marketing your novel. Market conditions change constantly. Annual editions of Writer’s Market and marketing columns in Writer’s Digest will keep you in touch with these changes as they occur. If you’re writing category fiction, your own day-by-day research at bookstores and newsstands will let you know just who’s publishing exactly what.

  A few marketing observations, however, might be useful.

  It’s been a trend of late for publishers to adopt a policy of declining to read unsolicited manuscripts. This doesn’t mean they’re all a bunch of flint-hearted old dogs. It simply means that more and more of them are finding that the cost of reading over-the-transom submissions is unaffordably high, given the infinitesimal number of such submissions that wind up getting published. By limiting their reading
to agented manuscripts and others that have come recommended, publishers can save thousands of dollars a year.

  What does this mean to you? First, let me say that it’s not as disastrous as it looks. It certainly doesn’t transform the business of novel writing into a closed shop. You don’t need a track record, or an agent, or even a membership card in Author’s League in order to have your novel considered for publication.

  What you do need is permission to submit your novel, and what I would suggest is a query letter. Let’s suppose you’ve written that gothic novel of the windswept moors of Devon and your market research has led you to believe that it would have its best chance of acceptance at any of six paperback houses. You’ve checked Writer’s Market and learned the name of the editor at each house who’s likely to be in charge of gothics. Now you sit down and write each of the six editors a letter, something like this:

  Dear Ms. Wimpole,

  I have recently completed a gothic novel with the working title of Trefillian House. Its setting is Devon, its heroine a young American widow hired to appraise antique furniture in a creaky old mansion on the lonely windswept moors.

  Would you be willing to look at a copy of the manuscript? I’m enclosing herewith a self-addressed stamped envelope for your reply, and I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

  I would suggest you write a letter of this sort whether or not the house in question reads unsolicited manuscripts. You’ll get a reply, and a much faster reply than if you submitted a complete manuscript, as it takes rather less time to read a letter than a novel. If the reply tells you thanks but no thanks, that they’re no longer an active market for gothics, that they’re overinventoried with books set in Devon, or any other sort of negative reply, you’ll have saved the cost of submitting your novel to them and the time they’d take returning it.

  If the editor agrees to consider the manuscript, you’ve cleared a hurdle. Trefillian House is no longer an over-the-transom submission, no longer pure slush. It’s instead a manuscript an editor has agreed to read.

  This doesn’t mean Ms. Wimpole’s going to buy your book. It doesn’t mean you should get your hopes up, only to be deflated when the manuscript comes winging back to you. But it does mean that you’ve improved your odds a little bit.

  Your query letter will have served another purpose. In it you’ve already described what you’re sending—not the nature of your novel, but the nature of your submission. You’ve labelled it not the manuscript but a copy of the manuscript, and that’s precisely what you’re going to submit.

  To several publishers. Simultaneously.

  Publishers, like everybody else in this imperfect world, like to have things their own way. For years they managed this by somehow getting the word out that it would be unethical for an author to submit his work to more than one publisher at a time. Never mind the fact that a manuscript could languish on a publisher’s desk for months on end. Multiple submission, one was given to understand, was underhanded and unfair.

  The hell with that noise. The only possible argument against simultaneous submission is that it’s improper to lead someone to believe he’s the only person considering a novel if this is not in fact the case. By describing what you’re sending as a copy, both in your query letter and in the covering letter that accompanies your manuscript, you eliminate this possible source of unpleasantness, and you do this without displaying an unpleasantly aggressive manner. You wouldn’t want to say, “I’m sending this novel to ten other guys at the same time, so you better hop to it if you want to get there fastest with the mostest.” That just might rub Ms. Wimpole the wrong way.

  It should go without saying that we’re talking about a clean legible copy of the manuscript, a photocopy equal in quality to the original. Not a carbon copy. Not one of those old-fashioned photocopies on smelly purplish plasticized paper. If that’s the best you can do, you’ll have to do better.

  I would suggest that you have between four and six copies of your novel in circulation. More than that gets confusing. When you submit the novel, describe it again as a copy and make it clear that the editor has encouraged you to send it. Don’t take it for granted that she’ll recall your name or anything else about you. It may be hard for you to grasp this, but at this stage of the game Ms. Wimpole plays rather more of a role in your life than you do in hers.

  You might write something like this:

  Dear Ms. Wimpole,

  Thanks very much for your letter of February 19th. As you suggested, I’m enclosing herewith a copy of my gothic novel, Trefillian House. I hope you like it and that it will fit your publishing requirements.

  SASE enclosed.

  It’s virtually impossible, when submitting to more than one publisher at a time, not to project a fantasy in which two or more of them accept the book the same day. There are three things to keep in mind when this fantasy strikes:

  (1) It won’t happen.

  (2) It should be your biggest problem.

  (3) Your agent will handle it.

  Speaking of agents, do you need one? And, if you do, how do you get one?

  It’s possible, certainly, to represent yourself, just as it’s possible for you to act as your own attorney or remove your own appendix. And there’s less potential hazard than you’d face in the courtroom or the hospital.

  Some very successful authors act as their own agents, making their own deals and doing quite well at it. They let their publishers act as their representatives in the foreign market (usually at a higher commission than most agents charge) and generally remain with one publisher for many years.

  Personally, I think they cost themselves money, but it’s hard to prove it to them. They see the 10 percent commission they’re saving and they don’t see the money they’re not earning by going it alone. They don’t see the clauses in their contracts that a decent agent would insist be changed. They don’t see the higher advances and better rates they might be receiving. But that’s their business. My business is writing, and I’m pleased to leave the dollars-and-cents side of it to my agent.

  For a novice writer, it would seem that an agent would be all the more desirable. He’s in daily contact with the market, knows what editor is looking for what sort of material, and can pick up a phone and set wheels in motion. What he can’t do—and this is worth stressing—is get an editor to buy a book he wouldn’t want in the first place. He can lead the horse to water or carry water to the horse, but that’s as far as it goes.

  How do you get such a person? The same way you bring your manuscript to the attention of an editor. By writing a query letter of the sort you wrote to Ms. Wimpole, explaining a little about your book, detailing whatever previous writing experience you’ve had, and asking if the agent would be willing to have a look at what you’ve got. And, let me remind you, enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope.

  The agent may already have a full house. He may not have any interest in representing the type of material you’ve written. If he’s willing to look at the script, send him a copy. If he reads it and expresses a willingness to represent your work, you’ve got an agent.

  Let’s suppose you’ve managed to connect with an editor all by yourself. You’ve submitted a novel to Ms. Wimpole and she writes back that she’d like to publish it. Perhaps she presents terms. Perhaps she encloses a contract. Perhaps she asks for revisions without saying anything about terms or a contract. Perhaps….

  Perhaps you need an agent now.

  You may feel it goes against the grain to seek representation now that you’ve already done the hard part of finding a publisher. But it’s at this stage of the game that not having an agent can really screw you up. Before you sign anything, before you do any further work on speculation, in short before you make any conclusive move, you should have professional counsel. The commission you’ll pay is a small price.

  Sounds like a good idea. But won’t Ms. Wimpole get steamed if I tell her I don’t want to do anything without an agent?

  She
shouldn’t. If she’s a competent editor working for a respectable publisher, she’ll probably welcome the news; she knows it’s easier to deal with a professional agent than with an unknowledgeable and perhaps scatterbrained amateur writer. She may even suggest of her accord that you avail yourself of an agent.

  Even if she doesn’t, she’d be a good person to ask advice from on the subject. I know any number of writers who selected agents largely on the basis of their publishers’ recommendations.

  It’s true, though, that some publishers are more reputable than others. While all the major houses play it straight, you might wind up breaking into the business writing for some graduate of the Ring Around The Collar School of Business Ethics. You may be assured that you don’t need an agent, that the publisher’s more comfortable not dealing through agents, and you may be given the impression that insisting on an agent may blow the whole deal.

  If that costs you the deal, you’re better off without it.

  Where do I find an agent—assuming 1 don’t have an editor to recommend one?

  There’s a list of them in Writer’s Market. That’s one sensible place to start.

  If you know anybody who knows an agent, so much the better. The agents I’ve known have always gotten a large number of new clients through referrals from other clients. Any third party whose name you can conveniently use can make it easier for you to get a positive reply to your query—and that’s all connections can ever do for you. After that, the book has to sell itself.

  What about reading fees?

  Forget about reading fees.

  Some agents charge prospective clients a fee to cover the cost of reading and evaluating their work. The rationale here is that the agent has to be compensated for his time, but more often than not the tail winds up wagging the dog. The great majority of agents who solicit reading fees barely have a professional client list worthy of the name; without reading fees, they’d have trouble swinging the monthly light bill.