Commodity

I’ve been tormenting myself by watching agents’ advice videos on YouTube. One video says a book cannot be sold without a one-or-two-sentence “hook.” But another by the same agency says that the emerging and big-selling category of “Upmarket Fiction” is a book that doesn’t have a hook. In the video about formatting cover letters, the two agents from the same agency disagree. Utter nonsense that we’re supposed to take seriously.

After watching these videos, I can say in general that we can understand what agents are looking for by thinking of books the same way we might think of any other product: hardware, groceries, sporting goods, whatever.

• Where is it in the store?
• Where is it on that aisle?
• What’s the difference between yours and the ones around it?

An example:

• Where is it in the store? It’s a condiment.
• Good. What kind of condiment? It’s ketchup.
• Good. What makes it different than the other ketchup? It’s chunky.

That’s literally all the agent wants from you. What is it? Fiction. What kind of fiction? Cozy Mystery. Why is yours different than other cozy mysteries? The dog sends messages about the crimes through letters she spells out in kibble.

And there you have it. Whether it’s chunky ketchup or Jessica Fletcher’s dog, an agent will read that and know whether or not to ask for more. It’s a discouraging way to think about books, but it’s the native language of the industry. Ignore it at your peril.

Speaking of the industry, I wrote a few days ago that I made $181.02 last year as a writer. In my professional life, I bill that much per hour. Any agent worth their cash drawer would tell me to give up the fiction nonsense and follow the known income. The fact that I don’t is the immeasurable gulf between the two cultures.

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Here’s the first installment of the skns mooc.

Books are long. But sentences aren’t, and books are made of sentences. I’d like to share a story by writing coach Joni B. Cole, of White River Junction, amended from her book Good Naked: Write More, Write Better, & Be Happier (2017, University Press of New England).

Once upon a time my friend Alison was an acrobatic pilot who wanted to build her own plane. So she ordered a kit, and a tractor-trailer arrived at her house with a giant crate filled with all kinds of tubing, cables, an engine, fuel tanks, tires, a propeller, bags full of nuts and bolts, and a thick assembly manual.

Alison worked nights and weekends on her plane, making slow progress. Still, so much remained to be done. Would she ever fulfill her dream of doing barrel rolls and hammerheads in a machine of her own making? Across the country sat thousands of half-completed planes covered by tarps, abandoned by owners who had felt overwhelmed, just like Alison was starting to feel now.

Like most people who attempt to make their own planes, Alison belonged to an organization called the Experimental Aircraft Association. After she had been working on her project for about a year, one of the organization’s volunteer advisors paid her a visit. She shared with him that she was worried that the job was too big, and that she was going to fail. Her advisor looked at all the parts of her unfinished plane scattered around her garage, her basement.

“Don’t think about all the things you have left to do,” he said. “Just touch the airplane three times a week.”

Just touch the airplane. I think there is something so compelling, so right about this gentle advice. When I am feeling particularly resistant to quotas and accountability, I call on those words to beckon me to my own workbench, with the only expectation to visit the page, to get a feel for my story. Who knows? Maybe some ideas or scenes will fit together.

I would like to second this idea. The more time you spend in the world of your story, the more time you spend listening to your characters and the places they live and the work they do, the more you’ll be able to be honest and accurate about them… the more you’ll be able to be generous toward them. If you’ve got absolutely nothing in the tank on a given day, go back and re-read a section of your book—not to edit it, but to listen to it. As Fay Weldon once wrote: Nothing happens. And nothing happens. And then everything happens.