A couple of agent blogs have come to my attention in the last few days, and since I had commentary on both, I thought I’d mention them here.
The first is by outstanding agent Nathan Bransford. This post was brought to my attention by our own Jeff Kirvin. It’s entitled ‘The One Question Authors Should Never Ask Themselves When Reading’. Go and read it. No, go ahead. I’ll wait.
Don’t forget to bookmark his blog. I highly recommend it for writers at any stage.
I really like the points he made in that article, and agree. But I don’t think ‘do I like this’ is a useless question to ask yourself – as long as you don’t stop there. Consider WHY you like what you’re reading, or don’t like it. Once you’ve read it, pick it apart and see what bits you most enjoyed. Where did you skip past paragraphs, or get bumped out of the story’s grip on you, and how could the author have prevented that?
Reading with an eye to how you would do the same thing is an occupational hazard of being an author. You should still get lost in fiction – we’re readers first, after all – but there’s nothing wrong with admiring cool things as they go by, tucking them away in your head for later. And nothing wrong with reading bad fiction and seeing how you could do better.
The second article was brought to you by the magic of Twitter. This is from top agent Rachelle Gardener, entitled Managing Expectations. Go forth… read, bookmark, return.
The next to last paragraph resonated most strongly with me. As authors in a rapidly changing publishing environment, it’s really required of us to keep our expectations under control.
It’s always a wrench for a new author to realize what ‘getting published’ really means to them – usually a far cry from what they thought. Certainly the beginning of a journey, not the end.
But nowadays, with things changing so fast the word ‘book’ doesn’t even mean what it did when you were a child, it’s even more strange. We would be shooting ourselves in the foot to hold any unrealistic expectation. Ambition and optimism are good – expectation must be fluid. Discover the difference between what you desire and what you expect. The world may give you the former, if you work for it… the latter can cripple you.
To Kathleen Dale: I entered Denver Fiction Writers for the first time tonight and just read a few of your articles on this site. I would like to know more about DFW and intend to drop into the Riverpoint Panera Bread facility tomorrow night to get acquainted.
I am retired and have taken most of Arapahoe Community College’s writing courses under instructors, Chris Ransick, Kathy Winograd, and Josie Mills. I am also a member of Lighthouse Writers and took Doug Kurtz’s Intermediate Novel Writing workshop this spring.
I have created my own poetry chap book and self-published it. Now I am working on short stories and a personal narrative or, I guess it could be called a memoir, a slice of my life in the 70s. I have a very large project, a novel set in ancient Christianity which presently is like a large boat anchor chained to my ankle.
So there it is. That is some of what I do.
Hope to meet you and thanks for the interesting discussions on the money one should not spend for paid critiques and consultants “with connections.” I have a friend that spent $10,000 on a screenplay he wrote to get it to the “right” people.
Later,
Dave Stover