Standing Before The Firing Squad

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how these days it is very likely that a writer’s first page is as far as an agent or editor will go when determining if the story is one that piques his or her interest. To illustrate this point, please allow me to direct your attention to Anne Mini’s blog post from Halloween 2006. She was attending the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, where they had one panel discussion that would send chills down just about any aspiring writer’s spine.

As Anne describes it:

Well, picture this, my friends: brave souls submit (anonymously) the first page of their novels, which are read out loud by a perfectly wonderful reader (the excellent Jack Whyte, who could make the telephone book sound gripping). During the readings, as the uncredited writers quake in their chairs, the three agents on the panel shout out “STOP!” at the point where they would cease reading the submission.

How tough were these agents? Over the course of two hours, only a half-dozen times would they have gone on to read the second page.

Anne compiled a list of the reasons the agents gave as to why they would stop reading a given submission, as well as a list of why they would go on to page two. The striking thing is that the list of reasons they would stop is 74 items long; the list of reasons they’d continue, eight. From the list of reasons they would stop:

6. Took too long for anything to happen (a critique, incidentally, leveled several times at a submission after only the first paragraph had been read); the story taking time to warm up.

41. The stakes are not high enough for the characters.

68. “It’s not atmospheric.”

Keep in mind that these are the opinions of three agents, it’s not like every agent / editor / screener has this list in front of them and they reject a submission as soon as something from the list appears in it. It does, however, afford some insight into how little tolerance there is for the common shortcomings of the typical submission, and just how quickly professional readers reach a decision.

From the list of why they would continue reading:

1. A non-average character in a situation you wouldn’t expect.

I’d say that’s something that every writer of fiction should strive for.

Novel Update: For those of you waiting with bated breath to hear about how the book is coming along, I’m on the last piece that I wanted to revise. I removed two scenes (8 pages) that didn’t add as much to the story as I thought. I’m rewriting them as one scene that hopefully will be more streamlined.

Word Count – Part Two

To follow up on my previous post, I posed the question of how to calculate word count to Colleen Lindsay over at The Swivet. I was not the only person with such a question, so she (being such a kind person) talked to one of her industry contacts about it. You can read about it here, but this is the important part:

Colleen asked this:

I have writers who’ve been asking me about how to estimate word counts. Most new authors go by their MS Word counter. Some writers are using the old pages x 250, based on 12-inch Courier text with 1″ margins. Are new writers simply over-thinking this?

Betsy Mitchell, VP & Editor-in-Chief of Del Rey Books replied:

Yes, they’re over-thinking. Using the MS Word counter and putting “approximately xx,xxx words” is good enough on a submission.

While that didn’t technically answer the question, it makes it fairly clear that word count isn’t something to get hung up on (at least until further down the road.) I’ll keep an eye out for verification of how to properly estimate word count. When I come across something useful, I’ll certainly post about it.

How Many Words Did I Type?

Writing fiction is a lot of work. There are a million things to consider while writing a novel: character development, pacing, story arc, word choice, etc. Every page contains hundreds of decisions for the writer to make. Sometimes the decisions are easy and the pages flow like the Colorado River after the spring thaw. Other times a single word or a mark of punctuation can cause hours of consternation. That’s just how it goes.

There’s one thing, though, that should be straight forward, a no-brainer, a thing that makes you go, “duh.” That thing is word count. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Word count. Count the words; put the total on the cover page. No problem, right?

Not quite. Word count depends on one thing: how the piece is formatted. You thought it was going to be the number of words in the manuscript, didn’t you? I did, but I was wrong. In the world of publishing, what matters is how much space those words will fill. A novel that has a lot of dialog will require more pages than another novel with the same number of words but very little dialog. For that reason, when submitting to an agent (or other industry professional) the approximate word count is used.

How is this number arrived at? Simple: multiply the number of pages by 250 words per page. That number (250) is contingent upon how the pages are formatted. Using 12-point Times New Roman font (or Times, if you have it,) and with 1-inch margins on all four sides, 250 words per page is assumed. If, however, you use 12-point Courier New or another monospaced font (a font where each character takes up the same space, no matter how wide or narrow it is) the words per page is assumed to be 200.

This can create quite a discrepancy in the word count of a piece. For example, the book I’m editing right now is 377 pages when using Times New Roman. That calculates out to 94,250 words. If I re-format the manuscript with Courier New, it fills 551 pages, which calculates to 110,200 words. That’s quite a difference! To someone who works in publishing, those two numbers mean the same thing: how many pages the finished product will be.

A Great First Impression Or None At All

I’ve modified the opening paragraph of my first novel a few dozen times. It’s safe to say that it has received the most attention, by far, of any section of the book. In fact, I made a couple of changes to it earlier today. While some may argue that I’ve let my obsessive personality get the better of me, this post over at Redlines and Deadlines makes me think I may not have spent enough time on it yet.

Some [editors] faithfully read three chapters all the way through before making a decision. Some read only until the first typo. Some read the first page.

And, of course, there are some editors who will only give you that first, vital paragraph. That leaves it up to you to impress them, interest them, immediately. That leaves it up to you to come up with a truly great beginning.

The window of opportunity can be very small, indeed.

My job as a writer, though, is not just to make that first paragraph shine. As the post goes on to explain, the opening has to contain a compelling hook, but can’t be over the top. Going too far with the opening is as certain to fail as not going far enough. And of course, the opening can’t outshine the rest of the work. If an editor or agent is suitably impressed by the hook and continues reading, the following pages must meet the standard established at the outset. Set the bar too high and the rest of the novel will disappoint; set it too low and the rest won’t even get read.

It’s ironic, in a way, that a career based on bodies of work that average maybe 90- or 100-thousand words each should hinge upon a few documents that are only one or two or three pages long–the query or cover letter, the synopsis and the opening paragraph.

But that’s the game, and I like a challenge.

Learning From The Experts

My new hobby is reading literary agent blogs. I’ve found that they are a veritable treasure trove of information and advice about the publishing world, the life of an agent, and writing in general. An agent’s blog is a great place to find out what they look for in a pitch and how to submit a query so it doesn’t prompt the immediate mashing of the Delete key.

In the short time that I’ve been reading them, I’ve been impressed with the number of agents and writers (published and not) who leave comments. While I appreciate the Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents as a reference source, the blogs are like reading the Oxford English Dictionary as opposed to Webster’s.

If you google “literary agent blog” you’ll see there are tons of them out there. My favorite right now is The Swivet, featuring Colleen Lindsay; she’s funny and smart and has tons of great links. I also like The Rejector because she makes no bones about the fact that her job is to reject 95% of the queries sent to her (and she gives advice on how to be in that magic 5%.)

I had already been checking out agent web sites, but it never occurred to me to search for their blogs. I’m so glad that I happened upon one. The most useful thing that I’ve learned so far is that agents want writers to do well. They provide advice in the hopes that more writers will be able to write compelling queries, which would mean more writers will get their manuscripts read, which would lead to more writers being published. Everyone wins.

Ctrl-x Is My New Best Friend

Over the past few days, I have mangled the outline I created for book one, repeatedly, mercilessly, and with extreme prejudice. I determined which scenes could be cut, then went to the manuscript and started deleting. (Ctrl-x! Ctrl-x!) I then adjusted the scene before and/or after the freshly cut one, to smooth things over, and went back to the outline to start the process again. Chapters were merged and split and merged again as scenes were flipped and mixed and shuffled, until the continuity and pacing finally seemed right.

All told, I’ve reduced the number of scenes by 14, and the number of words (as the processor counts them) by 8800, or 8.6%. I haven’t lost any of the important stuff that developed characters, motive and conflict. A lot of the unnecessary action, though, and a couple ancillary characters, have fallen by the wayside.

From here on out, the story is pretty tight. There are a couple minor details that need to be ironed out, as well as the occasional spelling error or kludgy sentence, but overall I feel pretty good about it. Hopefully I can get this thing finished and put to rest this weekend so I can finally get cracking on the outline/revision of book two. (And maybe, you know, get book one published. )

I don’t know why so many writers dread the editing process. This is kinda fun.

Revealing, Like An X-ray

I decided to create an outline of book one. Sooner or later, I’ll need to work up a detailed synopsis and I figured that having an outline would make the process smoother. I made the simplest outline I could — a spreadsheet where each scene is on a line with the scene number (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.), the point of view character, and a brief summary. The outline revealed a couple of interesting things.

First, there are 168 scenes in the book. I don’t know if that’s significant, but I had never counted them before.

Second, and more useful, looking at the outline, I can see that some of the scenes are unnecessary. The protagonist’s story arc leading up to the main crisis point drags in a couple spots. Now, I can see pretty well where those spots are, just from the summaries. I’m going to go through and trim some of the fat (improve the pacing, I think, might be the proper way to put it.) My goal is to turn 4 of the chapters into 3.

I’ve never been a fan of outlines. I can see now that they provide a useful view of the work in progress. Once I finish trimming the fat from book one, I’ll definitely be making an outline of book two. Hopefully doing so will make the revision(s) go a lot quicker.

Writers In White Hats

One of the Great Truths of life is that there will always be people who prey upon the desperate. Some are legal: sub-prime mortgage lenders, ticket brokers (aka scalpers), payday advance loans. Some are illegal: drug dealers, loan sharks, smugglers. It should come as no surprise that the writing community has its fair share of nefarious individuals ready to separate hopeful writers from their money, offering nothing but empty promises and shattered dreams in return.

Fortunately, there are still people who care enough about doing what’s right. One such group runs the Writer Beware blog (and corresponding web site.) They are sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, And their mission is to “shine a light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls.” They offer a lot of useful information about scams, contests, agents and a host of other topics. Well worth checking out.

I made the Writers Beware blog the inaugural link in my Writing Resources section, to the right. As I come across more useful links, I’ll post them there.

I’ve Gotta Learn To Trust Myself

My manuscript is no good. It’s not finished. It needs work. This is the feeling that has been dogging me lately. As I come closer to sending out the first query letter, closer to possibly sending the manuscript itself out, the voices of self-doubt have grown steadily louder.

I was paging absently through the book last night, counting the number of words in a few random lines, so I could get an average words-per-line and multiply it by lines-per-page and then by the number of pages to get a decent estimate of the word count. Once that was finished I started reading the page that was up. It happened to be right before one of the scenes that was bugging me. There was one sequence of events that felt forced, as I recalled, and it has been on my mind. As I read through the scene, I discovered something unexpected.

It was fixed. There was a break, the start of a new section, a shift in the point of view, and an introduction of one of the main characters that not only felt natural, but also revealed an important character trait of hers.

Damn. I totally didn’t remember fixing that. Once I read it last night, it all came back to me. So I can laugh now at how wound up I’ve been getting. The manuscript is done. I’ve revised it enough that I just need to trust myself to have fixed anything that needed fixing. I’ll probably go through it once more to weed out any remaining typos, but I’m going to relax; I hear it will help me live longer.

It’s Giving Me A Headache, But That Might Just Be From Staring At The Screen For Hours

The query letter is almost done. There’s one sentence that needs a little tweaking, and I have to tabulate an appropriate word count (can’t use the word processor’s number, of course.) I’ve even found one particular agent that I would like to work with. Of course, it’s difficult to tell whether you can work with someone just from studying their accomplishments and the positive things people say about them. I plan on mailing the letter this week. I’m sending it snail-mail because the agent’s web site makes it pretty clear that they prefer that over the e-mail variety. Though they do provide email addresses to send queries to. Perhaps they just want to see who’s really paying attention.

On an unrelated topic, yesterday while browsing the Fantasy / Sci-Fi aisles at B&N, I noticed that there are quite a few books (and series) about vampires and vampire hunters. I thought it was interesting because while leafing through the Writer’s Digest Novel & Short Story Market, it seems the most common note under the now accepting this stuff section is “no vampires.” I would have thought that given the apparent popularity of the genre of novels, that the short form would be similarly in-demand.