Your First Novel Read online

  Don't limit your consideration to your local newspaper. Think about other kinds of publications, such as weekly city magazines focusing on entertainment and the arts, your bookstore's newsletter, your college's publication or

  Web site, or any publication put out by a professional organization of which you're a member. One or two overworked but dedicated and energetic people typically put together these kinds of publications, and they're always on the lookout for contributors.

  Finally, there's the Internet, with any number of chat rooms, online journals, and blogs. Bearing in mind that "publication" on most of these sites doesn't count for much in the eyes of book editors and agents, it is another way, especially if you're selective about where and what you post, to circulate your name and to practice writing. Online publications that are meaningful include Slate, Salon, About.com, and the online versions of major news publications or organizations from the New York Times to Newsweek or CNN.

  There are so many blogs on the Web nowadays that, if you are going to start one, I suggest you keep the subject very focused. Your blog doesn't have to focus exclusively on writing. It might focus on butterflies or it might focus on Houdini, but whatever direction you take, make sure you take it in a direction, without undue rambling. You'll get more attention from readers and potential publishing contacts with something that's focused. There are several group blogs on the Web, a good idea for busy people who don't have time to update posts frequently. Get to know the blogs by writers in your genre or category. Not only will you learn something about the life of a published writer and find like-minded people posting comments, you'll eventually want to network with the writers of these and similar blogs.

  READINGS AND PRESENTATIONS

  In "Ten Ways to Go From Good to Great" in chapter twelve, I recommended that you try to arrange public readings of your work. If you live in an area that has many potential places to read in front of an audience, do this as often as possible. If you travel, try to arrange something, perhaps through a friend or acquaintance in the other city, at a venue there. You can do this when you visit family or when you go back to visit your college or when you're on a business trip. If you don't read from your novel, you might want to offer some sort of informative presentation—a writing workshop, for instance—or, locally, you might approach the schools and ask if you can come in and work on writing with the students. You never know what these things will lead to, but they will certainly do two things: They'll help you get better as a writer, and they'll look really good in a query letter.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD:

  LEARNING FROM ONE OF THE GREATS

  Many of you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald became an instant literary sensation with the 1920 publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, when he was twenty-four years old. But many people don't know that more than ten years passed from the time he published his first story (a detective story in a student newspaper) to the time his novel came out, and that Charles Scribner's Sons turned his book down twice before finally accepting it for publication in late 1919.

  Well before his first book was published, it was no secret to those who knew him that Fitzgerald aspired to be a famous novelist. Early in 1918, shortly after he left Princeton University and entered the army as a lieutenant, and more than two years before This Side of Paradise was published, Fitzgerald wrote his college friend Edmund Wilson to discuss the writing of various mutual acquaintances, then went on to describe the novel he was writing. To introduce it in the letter, Fitzgerald wrote out the title page for the book, then called The Romantic Egotist, and included this notation: "Chas. Scribner's Sons (Maybe!), MCMXVIII." He went on to say: "... if Scribner takes it I know I'll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous overnight."

  SPELL OUT YOUR DREAMS

  The remarkable thing about this letter is Fitzgerald's belief in the book's future. Not only did he put in writing the name of the company that eventually published his book, he described almost exactly what happened when the book was published: It became a bestseller, and he became famous, virtually overnight.

  How did Fitzgerald set about publishing a best-selling novel? While it would be necessary to read several of the excellent biographies about Fitzgerald, as well as his published letters and diaries, to get the full picture, we can sketch out some of the things he did to pave his own road to success that might be helpful to other writers.

  He began writing when he was away at boarding school and published his first story when he was just thirteen years old. At Princeton University, where his hopes to play football were dashed shortly after he arrived, Fitzgerald met and befriended writers with whom he could "talk and talk about books." Edmund Wilson, one of those writers, later wrote that they:

  ... saw in literature a sphere of activity in which they themselves hoped to play a part. You read Shakespeare, Shelley, George Meredith, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and you wanted ... to learn their trade ... I remember Scott Fitzgerald's saying to me, not long after we got out of college: "I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don't you?" ... he always... pitted himself against the best... and I am sure that his intoxicated ardor represented the healthy way for a young man of talent to feel.

  —The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Arthur Mizener

  IF YOU GET SHOT DOWN ...

  When Fitzgerald finished The Romantic Egotist, he showed it to a friend whose own publisher was Scribner. The friend read the novel, refused to show it to his editor, and even tried to talk Fitzgerald out of publishing it. But Fitzgerald persuaded another friend to submit the novel to Scribner for him. That friend's letter to Scribner said, in part:

  Though Scott Fitzgerald is still alive it has a literary value. Of course when he is killed [in World War I] it will also have a commercial value. Before leaving for France he has committed it to me...

  —Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, with Susan Walker

  No pressure, right? Nevertheless, Scribner turned the book down in a letter of four long paragraphs signed "Charles Scribner's Sons" (thought to be written by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary Scribner editor) that delineated the novel's problems while remarking on its originality. The letter concluded by suggesting the author revise the novel and show it to Scribner again. Fitzgerald swiftly made some revisions and resubmitted the book to Scribner, who just as swiftly turned it down flat.

  ... FIND YOUR ZELDA

  In the meantime, according to Mizener's biography, Scott had met his future wife, Zelda, and, wanting to impress her, set about "the serious busi-ness of making a fortune," working for an advertising agency while writing short stories. Finally selling a story, he quit his job and "settled down to rewrite The Romantic Egotist according to a schedule which he had pinned to the curtain before his desk." When he finally bundled the completely rewritten manuscript off to Perkins, Scribner accepted the novel in two weeks and published it six months later to great success.

  I tell this story to show you how Fitzgerald geared his life from a young age to the pursuit of books and writing. He may have aspired to be a football player and a playwright and even an actor, he may have worked for an advertising agency, he may have served in the Army, but at every turn he knew other writers and fervently made writing—his own and others'—a priority in his daily schedule, his thoughts, and his social life.

  In the particulars of his story I find an example any aspiring writer can follow, because I don't know a published writer of fiction who doesn't regularly see other writers, discuss literature with other writers, or read the work of other good published writers, classic or contemporary. Even if you did not start writing at "a young age," you can use Fitzgerald's story for inspiration—the only difference is the age you'll be ten years after your first story is published. In other words, you can't be a great writer faster just because you're older. But you can get to a better writing place with time and an immersion in the
work.

  Here are some things you can do if you'd like to trace the path Fitzgerald followed as he set about forging his writing career:

  • Write constantly.

  • Know other writers wherever you are.

  • Share and discuss your work with other writers.

  • Read and discuss the work of others.

  • Read contemporary and classic works of fiction and discuss and argue about them with other writers.

  • Make your aspirations concrete by writing them down—"Chas. Scrib-ner's Sons (Maybe!)"—and saying them aloud to others—"I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don't you?"

  Not only did all these actions undoubtedly improve Fitzgerald's writing and help him develop his craft to a very high degree, they worked to widen his reputation as a writer before his first novel was ever published. The letters and conversations he shared with other writers also undoubtedly yielded the names of book and magazine editors and publishers—as well as those of literary agents—that Fitzgerald could note for future use. But above all, everything he did served to bolster his idea of himself as a writer, and that kept him going, even in the face of despair and rejection, until his first novel was published.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  The New York Times Book Review. Published weekly and available nationally, the NYTBR is essential reading for anyone who's interested in contemporary writing.

  The life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald has inspired and touched countless writers. In addition to his novels, most famously The Great Gatsby, there are books about him that include his marvelous letters and other fascinating details about his life. Here is a sampling:

  • A Life in Letters: F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited and annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli

  • The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Arthur Mizener

  • Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan with the assistance of Susan Walker

  • The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Andrew Turnbull

  RECOMMENDED WEB SITES

  Salon (http://www.salori.com/). Although it's not exactly free anymore (you can get day passes if you watch an ad), Salon has some of the best book coverage on the Web, from reviews and profiles to essays and commentary.

  Backstory (http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/backstory). If you haven't yet found your own community of writers, here's a virtual community that will entertain and sustain you.

  Zoetrope: All-Story (http://www.all-story.com/). Online home of the short-fiction magazine founded by Francis Ford Coppola, Zoetrope offers three online fiction workshops: basic, advanced, and master class. In the ten-week courses, you'll workshop stories, discuss craft, complete exercises and assignments, and read the work of others.

  Gotham Writers' Workshop (http://www.writingclasses.com/). Offers too-many-to-count online writing classes and workshops. Having taught one once, I can confirm that they're well run and in-depth and that they attract writers who are serious about their work.

  BookBitch (http://www.bookbitch.com/). Long one of my favorite sites, Book-Bitch has lists of favorite book group books, reviews, links to every kind of book site under the Web, and a page called "Virgins" that's devoted to new authors.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  query letter babylon

  Like many independent literary agencies, mine is small, with only two full-time people and one part-time person and no more than fifty active clients at any given time. Yet even we receive at least fifty query letters every week. Potentially, we could replace our entire client list—which has been nearly twenty years in the making—every week of the year. And at the end of every year, we've read, processed, answered, thrown away, cried over, winced at, yawned over, or gotten excited about nearly three thousand letters about as-yet-unpublished books. And that number doesn't include the e-mail queries that we officially don't accept but that nevertheless come in at the rate of twenty or more a week.

  Out of those three thousand pleas, nearly 75 percent are about novels. And out of those, at least 90 percent are about first novels. That brings the number of queries about first novels to about two thousand every year. And in 2003, I accepted as a client one new novelist out of those two thousand. That's not 2 percent, or 1 percent, or even one-half of a percent. That's one-tenth of one-half of a percent.

  Reading statistics like those must be thoroughly discouraging. Statistics often are discouraging: The number of people who apply to certain schools

  vs. the number who get in is always a discouraging number. Our chances of winning a million-dollar-plus lottery is another discouraging number, but many of us still buy tickets. So let's look at those numbers another way:

  Eighty percent of those query letters about first novels should never have been sent.

  That's right—a full 80 percent of the letters I read about first novels never should have been sent to me, or to any agent or editor. Either the writers were not ready to be published and their books were not ready to be agented, or they misdirected the query letter by writing me about the kind of book I don't represent.

  So, if we subtract 80 percent from the two thousand first-novel query letters I and many of my colleagues see every year, we come up with a grand total of four hundred. Four hundred letters a year is only about eight letters per week. I would happily read to their end eight letters a week about first novels. Yet if I still only take on one writer of those four hundred, I have taken on one-quarter of a percent of the writers who write to me about their first novels. It's still a small percentage, but 1/400th is considerably better than 1/2000th. (Try reading that sentence out loud and you'll see one reason why.)

  WHO'S YOUR AUDIENCE?_

  Before we even get to the query letter, you're going to need to do some thinking. You've done a lot of work. In the first place, you've written an entire novel, no small feat by itself. You've suffered through the pain of having people read it, and bitten your nails to the quick waiting to hear what they think. Then you've gone through every emotion from frustration at the positive but inarticulate reader's response—"I liked it. It was good"—to pain at the critical person's response, to anger at the person who didn't understand it, to ecstasy at finding someone who did. You've formed a writing group, and you've rewritten the thing. You've gone to workshops, and you've had strangers read it and either help or hinder you. And then you've rewritten the thing again. You've set up readings and read parts out loud at cafes where the audience sat in a stony silence, and then you've gone home and rewritten the thing yet again. But you haven't asked yourself one tough question:

  Who in the world will want to read this novel?

  How can you, the author of the work, answer that question? Don't worry, you don't really need to answer it completely. You don't need enough information to fill a spreadsheet with demographic data. You don't need names and telephone numbers of potential readers. But you need some sense of who your audience might be beyond "everyone who reads fiction."

  If you don't try to get at least a rough idea of your specific audience, you're not going to be able to figure out who will be the right agent to represent the kind of book you've written, and you're going to end up in the 99.95 percent of first novelists who get form rejection letters to every query they send out. What you want to do is target your efforts so your query letter falls into the small percentage of letters that are actually directed at the right person.

  IN THEIR OWN WORDS: C.J. BOX

  When C.J. Box, whose debut mystery novel, Open Season, kicked off a popular series featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, was first writing, he had doubts about who his audience would be.

  I thought Open Season, which was then called, unimaginatively, Joe Pickett, might have a regional audience and it was that imagined regional audience I was writing if for. The themes of the novel were so close to home, i.e., the effects of the Endangered Species Act, the protagonist a Wyoming game warden, the hunting cul
ture, Wyoming, the setting a small rural town at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains. Because of the "smallness" of the world it portrayed, I assumed if might attract readers who either lived in the Rocky Mountains or were interested in them. I imagined selling copies of it out of the trunk of my car, like every local author I'd ever encountered. I never thought in terms of writing a mystery novel (I thought mystery novels were written by Agatha Christie) or writing the first book in a series. I thought about accuracy; portraying this world as I saw if from the inside out. It scared me to death that someone might read it and say it wasn't "real." So I shot small. Imagine my surprise.

  DECIDING WHERE YOU FIT_

  If you are writing within a specific genre, like young adult, science fiction, mystery, romance, or Westerns, you have a better idea of whom your audience might be than someone who's writing a coming-of-age novel or any other kind of non-category fiction. Yet each of the established genres has gotten to be incredibly elastic and wide-ranging, so even you will have to figure out which segment of your category's audience is most likely to want to read your novel.

  REVIEW YOUR "REVIEWS"

  Go back and think about the other people who read your manuscript, and their reactions. Recall the reactions of audience members at any readings you may have given. Be honest with yourself as you contemplate the various reactions, separating kindness and sympathy from true galvanizing enthusiasm (if indeed any of them expressed that). Discard the kind and sympathetic—or, if you were unlucky enough to receive them, the cruel and indifferent—responses. In fact, go over the following checklist and write the names of your readers next to the word that most closely describes their responses. When you're done, discard all but the names next to all the words and phrases in the last two rows.

  Now meditate on those people who showed up on the bottom part of the list. What are they like? Who are their favorite authors? What are their favorite movies? Do they like to travel? Where do they like to go? Do they prefer malls to museums, club-hopping to opera-going, mud-biking to bird-watching?