Love which alters when it alteration finds

Shakespeare reckoned that love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. But, honestly, what did he know? And more than that, what did he know about writing?

There are, or can be, four great phases of writing a book.

The first is when you get the idea, when you shape it, when you start to sketch out some plans or some notes. When you dream the damn thing into being.

Here’s where I think you need to have a relentless focus on elevator pitch. What is it, really, that makes this novel irresistible? Right at the outset is when you most need to work at that question.

Then, you have to write the damn thing. Word after word, chapter after chapter, watching that word count tick up until you have a full, fat first draft. For most people, that’s the toughest stretch of the whole thing. It can be for me, but isn’t always. Some books flow. Some need a pair of forceps and two burly surgeons to yank the thing out.

This second phase mostly calls for endurance and self-belief. Honestly, if you want to go through this phase with a totally unrealistic sense of your own wonderfulness, then go for it. Just get the thing written.

Next, you have to edit your draft. Not just once, but again and again. Here’s where craft matters more than anything. Characters, point of view, settings, pacing, deleting the bad stuff, increasing the energy of every page. Craft matters and also just sticking at it. I tend to enjoy editing; I find it slightly addictive. It’s where an unsaleable book starts to come alive. You feel its buoyancy, its spring, its urge to move.

And, mostly, that’s where people stop. They get that book out to agents. They bring it to us for review. They do a course. They scratch at the manuscript, doing another edit or two, taking it to more agents.

All those are good things. Nothing on that list is a bad thing to do.

But there is – or can be – a further step too.

Sometimes, not always, when you bring the book to market – usually an agent, or one of our editors – you hear something that twists your original conception.

Almost always, we have the impulse to deny the thing that we’ve just heard: to pretend we haven’t really heard it at all.

So, let’s say your book is a murder story in some speculative world – where, let’s say, African nations had colonised Europe, not vice versa. That’s a nice idea, and maybe you’re utterly attached to it, but an agent tells you that there’s something awry somewhere. Maybe your murder takes place in London when it needed to take place in Kinshasa. Or you haven’t nailed something key about the investigating officer. Or you’ve hurtled into the action when you needed to take it slowly.

We tend to repel those ideas for, I think, two reasons. The first is that we love our original idea. We have a parental sense of protectiveness around it. The second is that we just can’t bear the work of dismantling and remantling what we’ve done.

And – I hear you. It’s hard. I’ve been there myself.

Truth is though, you need to mourn, think, then get on with it.

If you hear something which your inner self knows to be true (however much you don’t want it to be), you have to go with it. You’ll find, almost certainly:

1. The work involved is less than you thought it would be;
2. The book gets better, and again more than you originally thought.

I’ve experienced this process a gazillion times in the past. Once, with my Little Britain history book, I went from a manuscript that probably would have sold to no one at all to one that sold for a lot of money in a contested auction. It was the input from my agent that produced that outcome: my work, his feel for the market

And yet, lots of people will be reading that last paragraph thinking, yeah, mate, it’s all right for you, you have an agent and most of us don’t.

Which is true.

And that whole stage IV process, which may be critical to your book, relies on getting accurate word back from the market.

Even without an agent, though, you do have options. They are:

1. Send your stuff out to agents and hope that you hear something back, other than silence / rejection. Lots of people won’t get any sort of personalised rejection, but if you do, what an agent says can be meaningful. The emphasis here is on ‘can be.’ A personalised rejection note probably took the agent two or three minutes to write and they have no ongoing obligation to you. And notes of that sort can be wrong. Don’t do something just because an agent suggests it. Do it because they’ve suggested it and it feels right.
   
   
2. Come to us for a manuscript assessment. If your book is genuinely late-stage – that is, close to marketable – you should ask for an editor who has been an agent or commissioning editor. Those are the people who’ll have the best feel for what is and isn’t saleable. (If your book is earlier stage, you’ll probably get more help from an author, who will know a lot more about craft and practical technique. If in doubt, your book is earlier stage: people always overrate their manuscript’s excellence.)
   
   
3. Join us as a Premium Member. We hold regular monthly Q&As with literary agents. Those sessions are an opportunity just to ask, directly, what’s on your mind. Use those opportunities! They can honestly make the difference between success and failure in this game.
   
   
4. Or, simple-bimples, you can just come to us for an Agent One to One. The advantage of that is that you are ensuring that an agent actually reads your work (if you come via the slushpile, your work may be set aside after a page or two.) Also, you are paying for feedback. That feedback may be a little sketchy in comparison to a full manuscript assessment, but the purpose is different. You’re not asking for detailed editorial notes. You’re asking for a sense of where the book does or does not meet the market.

All these options are good, and you may want to use them all. But what I would caution against is relying only on (a). I mean: if you send your stuff out to agents, and someone takes you on, then you’re good to go. Get that contract and see you on next year’s bestseller lists.

But if you try 10-12 sensibly chosen agents and they all say no, I wouldn’t just go to another 10. That’s like throwing handfuls of sand against a closed window and hoping that somehow the sheer number of collisions will force the window open.

If the market says no, understand the reason why. That means doing the research (options b, c or d above) then reconsidering your strategy in the light of that new information.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Freedom

We haven’t done elevator pitches for a while, so let’s give that a go.

What is the elevator pitch for your book?

Keep it short and tight. We’re looking for the kind of pitch that will instantly grab an agent’s attention. Simple in theory, crucial in practice – and hard to get right. When it’s ready post in the Townhouse Forum.

Til soon.

Harry