To find out what it takes to get your manuscript considered, you could try reading the latest debut pieces. After all, if this is what's being published, what better guide might there be?
The first two books with flap copy indicating a debut work made the cut. No matter the plot, I only wanted to see what was on the opening pages that made a literary agent sit up and say, "This is brilliant and I must share it with the world."
Maybe I didn't make the best choices.
Stephen Lovely and Joyce Hinnefeld are both writing teachers. It's assumed that, since they teach it, they would know how to construct a novel. Not much editing required of a professional, the manuscripts are ready to go. They have an advantage there over the rest of us.
Mr. Lovely's novel, Irreplaceable, is set in Iowa where he lives, and there's all kinds of action in a hospital, where he once worked.
Write what you know, he's probably telling his students.
There's plenty of tension in the chapters, with a grieving widower and the heart transplant recipient who wants to meet him, the cartoonish bad guy who killed the guy's wife in a traffic accident, not to mention bad marriages and the stress of illness. Except for the parts where the author goes into detail about the heart transplant process (Dear Reader, I did my research and I will share every gory moment with you) and the narrative drags, it's a good example of how to tell a story. Not too surprising that Lisa Bankoff of ICM took Mr. Lovely into her stable.
As for Ms. Hinnefeld's In Hovering Flight, it's a mystery. What did Liv Blumer find in the opening pages that made her read on?
The book opens with a narrator talking about Audubon, painter of birds. There's a bird painter in the novel, according to the flap copy, but there's also supposed to a be tale of mothers and daughters, about the mother dying and the daughter coming to understand the woman and all that. I forced my eyes to cover the first fifty pages and didn't find any tension, anything that reflected the promise of the flap copy, or anything to keep me reading.
The author, however, won a prestigious award for her short fiction. Is that the key that opened Liv Blumer's door?
I should be more selective when I choose these novels for study. Or is there no chance of a debut author arising from the ranks of the civilian population?
4 comments:
You're not allowing for the probability that the agent loved the ORIGINAL opening - that page that grabbed her - but then along came an editor...
My agent on the original version of my novel, Strachan, insisted that the first page (thankfully now back at the beginning) be moved to the second chapter (along with many other revisions).
Puppy-like in my adoration of my first agent, I did it, even as I acknowledged that it had been the first page that grabbed her in the first place!
We did part company. Her version never did win over a publisher. I think mine would have. So I'm revising and querying it again, MY way.
The agent probably sees what could be, and the authors try to conform. When the publishers don't agree with that particular vision, we're left to patch things back together and start again.
Maybe it's a matter of finding a literary agent who "gets" the writing, rather than one who asks for an overhaul.
It's a complete mystery to me--obviously--how these so called debut novels happen. The ones you cited--the very subject sounds boring and pedestrian. May be it's just my taste, I'm looking at it from the point of view of a reader, but still.
On the other hand, my attempts at not being pedestrian it's getting me nowhere (to say nothing about sloppy editing...) so, I'm obviously wrong about the tastes out there and I'm obviously an outlier (or outlayer?) Ha!
The first pages of my notorious ABNA submittal seemed to have grabbed by the throat; then the rest belly flopped; or so said the reviewer.
I was at the library and I checked author bios on a bunch of new books. All of them penned by people who have MFAs and teach writing.
It might mean you have to have a degree to get published, but I suspect it means that all the other books, written by non-trained writers, are out circulating while no one wants the other stuff.
Editing is miserable, isn't it. You get the excitement going in the opening, but how do you keep tension throughout every chapter?
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