Without Reaganomics, the world would have never had this classic. So maybe everything really does happen for a reason.
There are a thousand websites, seminars, books and blogs about how to get published. How to identify the best agents to represent your work. How to write a great query letter. How to find a great editor. How to self-publish. How to do your own promotions. Frankly, it’s a little overwhelming.
The arduous journey to publication typically starts with finding an agent. You do this by identifying those agents who are seeking new clients and also represent your genre. Your agent should be 1) experienced and well connected, 2) really passionate about your book. This I know from reading numerous articles and writing blogs.
Another thing I’ve learned from articles and blogs is the basic structure of a query letter. The query is essentially a cover letter. In this one-page marketing piece, you endeavor to hook the agent with a 2 or 3-paragraph description (think book jacket but with spoilers) of your story, the reason why you think your work may be a good fit for him or her, and a brief bio. Easy peasy, right?
Nope. I’ve been struggling to write my query letter for over a month now.
The irony is that this essentially what I do for a living. In my marketing job, I write a lot of cover letters summarizing precisely why my company is best suited to work with that client. Last Spring, I gave a presentation on how to write winning cover letters to over 100 of my fellow marketers.
The difference? A) While I believe in my company and the work they do, it’s not personal. Selling someone else is always easier. B) I spent four years writing a 95,000-word novel and now I have to sum it up in fewer than 500? C) It’s hard to write a letter that essentially says Please love my book! I poured my heart and soul into it for years! without feeling a little pathetic.
But I will keep at it. And in the meantime, perhaps I just need to read more book jackets for inspiration.
Ten weeks after I submitted the entire fourth draft of my novel to my writers’ group, my big night finally came: the group critique.
In the weeks leading up to it, one member of my group kept asking me if I was “ready for my Big Night”. The truth was that I hadn’t given it much thought. Most of the group has already read an earlier draft (albeit piecemeal over the span of more than a year), and I’ve incorporated much of their feedback into this latest version, so I was feeling pretty confident in its marked improvement. But Gary’s repeated questioning made me wonder if I shouldn’t worry. After all, he’s been through the group critique before. Maybe he knew something I didn’t.
I approached the meeting with some trepidation but resisted the urge to have a stiff drink beforehand. The booze would calm my nerves, but it would also dull my senses and I wanted to make sure I recorded down each and every even slightly relevant comment.
I needn’t have worried. While each member had a number of recommended tweaks and clarifications, overall the group feedback was very positive. As one member, Jeremy, put it: “Aside from all of my little comments and suggestions, I think you should start sending this manuscript out to agents starting tomorrow.”
This is a major milestone in the lifespan of all novels: it’s ready for the query process. This is also one of the most terrifying milestones in the lifespan of a novel. Now I must leave the safety of my writers’ group and my beta readers to subject myself to a whole new level of rejection. No longer can I waffle on about “family and relationships and stuff” when someone asks me what my book is about. I no longer have an excuse to avoid the dreaded query letter – the longest one page masterpiece a writer will ever write.
Next Time: The Query Quandary
The epic romantic or confessional letters of novels past were replaced by telephone calls in the early 20th century, emails in the 1990s, and texting in the 2000s. These days, pretty much every novel that takes place in modern day Western civilization includes a series of text conversations, and I’ve been crafting a few of these exchanges for a brand new writing project.
Text exchanges, both fictional and real, are rife with complications. Sarcasm doesn’t always translate well even with the aid of an winky emoji, and the most heartfelt declaration can come across as mean-spirited or dismissive. Often times, we are forced to read between the lines, to (mis)interpret at will and hope we understand the other person’s true intentions.
I had a questionable text exchange of my own about two weeks ago. I was hiking with my dog in one of my favorite spots, Redwood Regional Park, when my phone buzzed four times in about thirty seconds. I generally avoid technology when I’m trying to enjoy the woods, but the rapid fire texts made me wonder if there was an emergency.
The first two texts were from two different friends, coincidentally checking in at the same time. The next two texts were from a phone number I didn’t recognize. I will refrain from comment and simply share the transcript as is:
And once again, he disappeared into the ether. Sorta makes you nostalgic for the days of the handwritten letter. I’m pretty sure that letter would have never made it to the post office.
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This past weekend, I was driving on a two-lane stretch of Route 41, surrounded by vast empty fields and punctuated by the occasional warehouse or farm. It was around 7 o’clock. The light of the day was starting to wane and most drivers were on their way home, either near or far. I noticed that a few of the cars in front of me swerved to avoid something in the road, something black and curved. A blown out tire perhaps. But as I got closer, I saw that it was moving. That is was in fact a black dog. It had been hit. It was dying.
My stomach clenched up as the heat of shock rushed over my skin. A million thoughts raced through my mind: Should I turn around? There were a lot of cars on the road, and no safe place to turn around. But how could I leave the dog back there alone and suffering? And once I got back to the dog, how would I even get to it without getting hit myself? And even if I did miraculously get the dog out of the road, what could I do for it? I wasn’t equipped to put it out of it’s misery. I didn’t have a gun or a syringe of cyanide. We were hours away from any emergency vet clinic. There was nothing I could do.
I kept driving.
Over the next twenty minutes, I saw both a dead striped cat and a dead gray dog on the side of the road. I was grateful when it got too dark to see anything except the other cars.
I was a wreck for the rest of my three hour drive home, looping through a series of crying jags as I tried to shake the vision of that dog from my mind, and assuring my own black dog curled up in the backseat that I will always look after her. That I will keep her safe.
My sixteen year old cat is in slow decline. My fourteen year old dog recently had a health scare that smacked me across the face with the reminder that she is getting old. The father of someone very dear to me is losing his battle with numerous ailments to the point where he must be spoon-fed most of his meals — that is, when they can get him to eat.
And then I saw that dog in the road. Several days later, in quiet moments, I keep catching myself thinking I should have done something.
It is difficult not to be affected by this sense of death lurking around the corner, and I’ve been in a bit of a funk. A friend suggested that I find a way to celebrate life. Start a new creative project. Adopt a kitten. Foster a puppy. While the two animals I already have certainly will not allow the addition of a third, my friend was on to something. This is why people have children. Make art. Write novels. To celebrate life. To create something that will live beyond death.
So. Perhaps it’s time to start my next novel.
You know that melancholy feeling when you come to the end of a beloved book, one that has made you laugh and cry and stay up way too late contemplating the very nature of humanity? You know that feeling when you want to tear through the last few chapters to find out what happens, but you never want the story to end, never want to leave the people and world you’ve come to care so much about?
And then there’s that feeling that comes when you invest your time, your heart and your head into a great book that abruptly jumps the shark in the eleventh hour, leaving you frustrated and disappointed. This can come in the form of the classic Hollywood ending, where everything falls unnaturally into place. Not to pick on Wally Lamb again, but (**SPOILER ALERT**) I poured through the nearly 800 pages of mental health issues, suicide, professional failure, break ups, and family mysteries in I Know This Much Is True, only to come to an ending where the hero reunites with his estranged barren wife, adopts the miraculously HIV-free baby from his dying AIDS-infected ex-girlfriend, and then finds out he is in fact just Native American enough to share in a large financial settlement between the government and a local tribe. Ka-pow!
And then there are those torturous novels that offer no resolution at all (I’m looking at you, The Little Friend).
I hate those books for making me love them until they reveal their true nature. They are teases, players.
I never want to read those books. I never want to write them either.
Having said all of this, crafting a completely satisfying ending to your own beloved book is damn hard.
I have struggled with the ending of my novel, or at least the pacing for it. The overall feedback from my writers’ group and beta readers is that while the end felt satisfying and appropriate, things are resolved a tad too quickly. So I decided to add a brief flash forward to give the reader a peek view of the story that hypothetically continues on long after the book ends. Generally speaking, I am not a fan of epilogues and avoided the device here, but wanted to show just enough of the future for readers to draw their own conclusions. Because one of the best things about reading a novel is that you get to speculate over what comes after the novel ends.
I submitted Draft #4 of my novel in its entirety to my writers’ group three days ago. We will hold a special meeting to discuss the manuscript in two months’ time. Breath held and fingers crossed, I will bide my time attempting to write something, anything else. Wish me luck.
One of the first rules of the Internet is Never Read the Comments, especially when it comes to something you have written. As most of us have witnessed first hand, there’s something about the relative anonymity of the comments section that transforms people into hate-spewing cretins. People routinely misinterpret – often willfully it seems – each others’ words and then clamber up onto their virtual soapboxes to preach their version of the gospel. Or call you a goddamn stupid motherf*cking a$$hole licker. Or, you know, whatever.
But sometimes it’s impossible to resist reading the comments.
Pretty sure they’re telling me to kiss their respective asses.
A few months ago, I wrote a story for xojane.com* about the time I spotted an old flame making balloon animals at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. This guy had 1) broken my delicate eighteen-year-old heart, and 2) once been a moody and pretentious aspiring filmmaker, so there was some satisfaction in seeing him surrounded by sugar high children. My story received hundreds of comments, ranging from amusement to solidarity to irritation. Some accused me of pettiness and insensitivity. One commenter was outraged that I was picking on balloon artists.
Over the last two years, I have written and recorded a number of short pieces for the Perspectives segment of my local public radio station. This experience has taught me that even public radio listeners can be over-reactive, albeit while using more polite language. My tribute to my former-hunter-now-elderly cat inspired a heated exchange between an angry bird lover and a defensive cat supporter. When KQED aired my analogy on the nature of prejudice and race relations, let’s just say I was grateful not to get any death threats. Two weeks ago, I was at the station to record my latest piece about staving off a panic attack at 13,000 ft, and the segment editor joked, “I’m sure the commenters will come up with something. Perhaps self-indulgent?” We laughed and I prepared myself for whatever would come.
In this day and age when it seems that everyone has a righteous opinion on just about everything, what does it say that my piece did not receive a single comment, good or bad? To most creative types, the worst reaction to our work is indifference. While I have received positive feedback from friends and acquaintances, I admit that I am somewhat distressed that my writing failed to inspire even one listener to indignation.
I really ought to stop checking the comments section. Seeing that “0 Comments” is breaking my heart.
*For the record, the bordering-on-cheesy heading and subhead were not mine.
When I was a preteen, I consumed music fan magazines like a hungry dog: Teen Beat, Tiger Beat, Smash Hits, Star Hits, and my favorite, Bop. I absorbed every detail about the men of my dreams (first and foremost Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran), memorized their birth dates and favorite colors, their parents’ and siblings’ names, and childhood pets. I read every interview I could get my hands on, desperate to know these guys inside and out. To truly understand them.*
As a teenager, I grew out of these school girl crushes and learned that the more I knew about my favorite musicians, often the less appealing they were and in turn, the less appealing their work. This was reinforced several years ago when I saw Jack White of the White Stripes at the Nashville airport baggage claim. I watched from across the carousel as an enthusiastic fan approached him, CD and pen in hand. I couldn’t hear their exchange but the body language was clear: the fan was asking for an autograph and Jack White was totally blowing him off. Sure, it must get tiring to have people come up to you all the time, and Jack White was probably not in the mood to chat. But if he had just signed the damn CD, the whole exchange could have been over in about thirty seconds. Instead, he spent several minutes rebuffing the fan, who ultimately gave up and walked away, clearly dejected. And I thought, You arrogant bastard, Jack White. Without your fans, you wouldn’t even be Jack White.
When it comes to literature, learning more about an author’s life can shed light on his or her work, open you up to a whole new understanding and appreciation. For instance, this past weekend I watched the documentary Salinger, and it was eye opening to learn how much Salinger had been affected by the atrocities he witnessed in World War II. A bell went off in my head when one of the interviewees spoke of how he had channeled this trauma into the character of Seymour Glass, who first appears in the short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”. Spoiler alert: After spending what appears to be a pleasant afternoon at the beach, Seymour quite suddenly commits suicide, an event that both intrigued and confused my teenage mind when I first read the story. But of course it makes sense now—Seymour was suffering from PTSD.
The Salinger documentary also revealed some less than wholesome facts about the famous literary recluse. He liked his women (err, girls really) young. At the age of thirty, he befriended a fourteen year old girl on a beach and for reasons completely beyond my comprehension, her parents allowed them not only to correspond but to actually travel together. The girl in question (now a woman in her seventies) avows that he never laid a hand on her, but come on. That’s creepy, right? Apparently Salinger stuck to eighteen-year-olds from then on. In fact, there was a series of eighteen-year-olds, whom he dated and unceremoniously dumped, until he was in his sixties. Um, ew.
Salinger was also purportedly a moody, self-absorbed narcissist. Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly rare when it comes to artists. But how many artists lock themselves in their writing bunkers and forbid their spouses and children from disturbing them no matter the reason, for days on end?
As scores of former friends and lovers recounted his temperamental nature, antisocial behavior, and neglect and sometimes abuse of the people who loved him, I was starting to wish that I hadn’t hit play on the documentary. As a teenager, The Catcher in the Rye was my favorite book. I related to Holden Caufield’s jaded view of the world, his inability to fit in, and his yearning for something genuine. Holden was flawed, but there was innocence in him, loneliness. Salinger is said to have channeled a lot of his own nature into Holden, so maybe he too struggled to fit in with society, to live a genuine life. But I don’t like to think that Holden—or his creator—grew up to be a talented yet temperamental jerk.
* I cringe at the memory of my idealistic/delusional youth.
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We were taking a break on a rocky outcropping at 13,400 ft when I was hit by a terrible headache. My temples throbbed as my heart pounded in my head. The pressure was sudden and acute. I felt as if my blood vessels might burst.
“Vamos,” our guide said. “Time to go.”
We were on day two of a three-day trek across the Andes that would take us across twenty miles and up to 15,600 ft. We had already ascended about 1000 ft that morning, but had twice as far to go until we hit the summit of Sicllaccasa Mountain, before we could begin the sharp descent to our camp for the night.
I’d spent months preparing for this trek, hiking seven or eight hilly miles every weekend day. But I soon realized that no amount of exercise at sea level was going to help me breathe freely at that altitude, and all of my “training” seemed naïve, absurd. I got winded after walking only short distances, my heart hammering in my chest. I just couldn’t catch my breath.
All around me, other members of my group were taking swigs from their water bottles and zipping up their backpacks, ready to get back on the trail. I remained where I was with my head in my hands, trying not to panic. I couldn’t stand up, let alone resume our breathless hike up the mountain. My fingers and toes prickled with sharp pins and needles as anxiety washed over me. What if I physically couldn’t go on? What would happen to me? Certainly they couldn’t leave me behind. But was it too late to turn back? Could I even make the trek back down the mountain? And how mortified would I be to give up? To FAIL? What would everyone think of me?
As my panic increased, so did my heart rate and the pain in my head. I had to do something.
I fished through my backpack for some ibuprofen, and then managed to get to my feet and seek out our guide, Gerson.
“Do you have anymore magic potion?” I asked, referring to the golden liquid that acted essentially as herbal smelling salts, calming both the mind and the belly. He had passed it around on the bumpy ride to the trailhead.
Gerson eyed me carefully. “How are you feeling?”
“My head hurts,” I whispered, grateful that my sunglasses disguised the tears welling up in my eyes.
He nodded. “Ah, okay. You’ll be okay. Just take your time and keep breathing.”
I would have laughed if I wasn’t on the verge of tears. Keep breathing? I could barely think of anything else.
But I closed my eyes and tried to marshal all of my yoga Zen to calm my breathing, to slow down my heart. To stop the pounding in my head. And after a moment, it started to work.
“Ready to go?” Gerson asked a couple minutes later. And to my surprise, I was.
In less than five minutes, I had gone from a state of total panic to an unexpected but welcome sense of peace.
You got this, I told myself.
I continued my yoga breathing, repeating “slow and steady” over and over again in my head, until I found my rhythm. Until I found my breath.
We made it to the summit about three hours later, exhausted but exhilarated and a little delirious from the lack of oxygen. The wind whipped through my hair and clothes, and my eyes filled with tears due to the cold, a powerful sense of triumph, and the beauty of the snow-capped peaks and the valley far below. I was so damn happy to be there.
(Note to self: Whatever happens, DON’T PANIC. Just take your time and keep breathing.)
While Morrissey’s lyrics have never been what I would consider cheerful or optimistic, his songs about heartache and longing still resonate with the lost teenager inside of me. Judging by his song title “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful”, it appears that his more than 30-year career and loyal fan base has inspired resentment and jealousy among his fellows.* Yet I wonder how anyone could possibly begrudge a friend’s success, that is if he or she really cares about that friend.
Which begs the question: Are these people really your friends?
A very dear friend of mine—someone I have known since way back when I was still a lost teenager listening to Smiths cassette tapes on my Walkman—just published her third book, a graphic memoir about trying to connect with the Japanese half of her family. Last week, I attended her standing-room-only reading at a popular Haight Street bookstore before she headed out for her multi-city book tour.
I have never been published. I do not have an agent. I have spent the last three years writing a novel that may never make it into print. So, am I envious of my friend’s success?
Yes and no.
Sure, I would love to have my book published. I would love to have a second and third book published. I would be both thrilled and terrified to read from my work in front of an eager audience.
Couldn’t resist this one.
But I do not feel even a drop of resentment toward my friend for achieving these things. I witnessed first hand the many years that my friend has practiced her craft: her drawing, her writing, and her storytelling. I have watched her quick pencil sketches and stripped down text transform into this beautiful book that I can now pull off of the shelf and hold in my hands. I saw how hard she worked to get her first book deal, and know well that she worked just at hard to get her second and third.
In short, I have seen my friend work her ass off to achieve her success.
As I watched her read from her new book in front of the packed room, I felt a swell of pride and privilege to know such an amazing person. Congratulations on all of your success, Mari!
*Or perhaps he just got rich and bitchy.
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Writer's Rant 