Archive for the 'Getting Published' Category

As part of my series on Getting Published, I spoke to UK Literary Agent Lucy Luck about the process of submitting your manuscript for publication. She gives her advice and answers questions emailed by Fusion View readers and listeners about how a literary agent can help an author, what to put in your covering letter, what’s hot in the publishing world right now and much more.

Listen to our conversation using the embedded player below.

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If you would like to submit your manuscript to Lucy, go to her webpage at www.lucyluck.com - please mention Fusion View in your covering letter.

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To enable as many of my readers and listeners to benefit from Lucy’s advice, this post will headline Fusion View until Thursday 24 August 2006 8.30am (GMT+1) when the next post will be uploaded.

This is the counterpart to my post on Receiving Feedback. You’ve been asked - either as part of a writing group or by a writer friend - to give feedback on their piece of writing. Giving feedback to writers is fraught with dangers. “Be honest,” they say. But writers are notoriously sensitive - how honest should you be?

I think the key is all in how you give your feedback. Depending on how you put it, you can be pretty honest. (Unless, you sense that, honestly, your friend really just wants praise and you would rather not give them the truth for the sake of your friendship. And that’s a judgement call I have to leave to you.)

All things being equal, the “Sandwich” technique usually works well. You sandwich the more challenging apsect of the feedback between two good bits.

1. The first good bit. What did you enjoy? Which aspects were well-written? What phrasing did you like? Be specific. It gives the writer a specific reference they can go back to to see where their strengths are.

2. The challenging bit. What could be improved? What were you not clear about? Which sentence could read better? Again, be specific so the writer can compare specific weaker passages with the stronger passages you pointed out in the first good bit.

If there are a number of points you might make, choose the one that needs the most improvement. Leave the others for now. It can be better for the writer to work on one concrete thing sensibly than to try to fix too many things at once, especially if they are new at this game. You can always help them with the other issues in the next feedback session.

Try to use neutral or objective phrasing. Compare “That really sucked” with “Perhaps you could give us more of a sense of Jim’s reasons for acting in that way” …

Ask: what was the writer trying to achieve in that passage/ chapter/ book? Sometimes what we intend to portray doesn’t quite come out and it can be useful to be told that by an objective voice - at least, I find it useful.

3. The second good bit. Overall, what were the strengths? What resonated with you? Which passages will stay with you?

Sum up in a positive light.

But, at the end of the day, be warned. The writer is likely to obsess over the challenging bit and find it difficult to absorb and retain the two good bits. (Or is that just me?!)

What are your experiences of giving or receiving feedback? Are you part of a writing circle? Do you and your writer friends help each other out by reading each other’s work? Do you have a different technique from the Sandwich? I’d love to hear from you - and I’m sure the other writers reading Fusion View would, too - so please do add a comment.

Photo: Writing Group - from flickr.com, by nadar

It can be difficult for writers to handle feedback on their work. After all, we’ve slogged long and hard to produce our short story or chapter or novel. One paragraph may have taken us days. We’ve dug deep into our pysche and soul and bared all of ourselves in this piece of text.

We offer our work to someone to read and they have the audacity and heartlessness and cruelty to tell us that there’s something not quite perfect about our baby, our pride and joy - about us!!!!! Our world crumbles, our sense of our own worth crumbles, our very self crumbles!!!

Okay, that’s a wild exaggeration of what it can feel like to ask for and to get feedback on our writing. But I think under the humourous example, we can all recognise an element of truth in the description. The question is: if we want our writing to be published, we must face the fact that our hard work enters the public arena and anyone has the right to critique it.

As a lawyer, I might draft a badly phrased legal document and no-one will know about it unless something goes horribly wrong between the parties to the contract and they dig it out and go through it with a fine toothcomb. My humiliation at that point would be confined to those parties and my workplace. Professional indemnity insurance would help to cover the financial cost of the boob-up and I would live to draft another day.

No-one is going to critique my legal document the moment it is finished and signed up. The best that can happen is that it goes in a filing cabinet and is never seen again because the parties to it are working swimmingly together. The world will not have to read a scathing review of it: “Ooi’s writing at clause 251 subclause (e) is weak and lacks panache. Her phrasing is inelegant and entirely lacking in characterisation. We just don’t care whether the Second Party hereto gets the compensation or not. There’s no tension or drama. The tone is completely flat.”

But once your novel is finished and polished and you start sending it out to agents and publishers, you are likely to face a lot of rejections before it finally gets accepted - if at all. Once accepted, you will get feedback from professionals on how to maximise it for publication - at that point, you don’t want to throw a big drama queen scene about how your editor can’t mess with your art. Unless you truly are a genius that the publishers will do anything to keep on their books, the result is likely to be: “The door is over there”. And then, when your novel comes out across several continents… Gulp, there are likely to be the bad reviews to deal with.

So, how can we thicken our sensitive skins and even turn criticism to our advantage?

In this post, I offer some tips on giving and receiving feedback among friends, before you get to the stage where you are talking to agents and publishers. I will talk in later posts about dealing with professional feedback from your agent and/ or editor and also about what it’s like to get bad reviews!

You’ve finished and polished your novel as I’ve described in the last two posts in the Getting Published series. Now you are ready to show it to others for get their feedback on it before sending it out to agents.

1. If you want complete unconditional love for your work, show it to your mum. “It’s lovely, dear” is lovely to hear but not very helpful if you want to be a professional writer.

2. The best place to start is to show your writing to people who love to read or other writers. Ask for honest feedback - and mean it. Prepare yourself for the worst.

3. When you get the feedback, don’t answer back. Don’t justify. Don’t get defensive. Don’t try to explain how the point they make is answered in Chapter 50. Listen.

4. Listen.

5. Listen.

6. Ask for clarification. Can they be more specific? Can they give an example of what they mean?

7. Now you have a list of the different points. You may also have a list of different points of view from different people. You may agree with some and disagree with others. Resolve to make amendments based on the points you agree with.

8. As for the points you disagree with, consider: of the friends you asked for feedback, whose opinion do you trust and respect the most? What are the points they’ve made that you disagree with? What if you tried what they suggest, even if you disagree with it - would that work? In other words, be open to suggestions, even if you do not agree with them. If you think the amendments might work, try them out. You always have your original draft to go back to if you change your mind.

9. But at the end of the day, it’s your novel. If you don’t want to make amendments based on any of the feedback you get from friends, whether you agree with it or not, have the confidence in your own judgement. Don’t make any changes.

10. Thank your friends who have taken the time to read your manuscript. It will have taken them a lot of energy also to think about how best to tell you their views without upsetting you or jeapordising your friendship. If they are other writers themselves, they will have spent time reading your manuscript which they would otherwise have spent on working on their own writing. Return the favour when they come to you for help.

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Next time in the Getting Published series, we look at the converse of receiving feedback. If you are asked by a friend or someone in your creative writing circle to read their writing and give feedback, how can you do this in the most helpful and constructive way?

Last week in Getting Published - 1. Finish your Novel, I suggested that the first thing you need to do as a writer is finish your manuscript.

So now you’ve finished. You can send it off to an agent, right?

Wrong.

First, you take a few days holiday from writing after you type "The End" -  a week ideally. Do something completely different - go out with your friends, take a trip, go shopping. For that week or few days, have fun and do anything except think or talk about your book. You’ve got a lot more work to do and you need to come back to the manuscript with fresh eyes and renewed energy.

When the week is over, you are a new person, rested, relaxed and tanned from your days outdoors away from your computer. Now, you need to go over the text again and make sure that it is the best that you can get it to be.

To you, the manuscript is your baby. It’s unique and perfect. You’ve lived it day and night. You’ve sweated blood over it. To you, your baby is brilliant - who would not love it?

To an agent or an editor or a professional reader that they employ to sift through unsolicited manuscripts (the "slush pile"), it’s just another one out of the many hundreds, even thousands, of would-be books that they see every year.

Here’s the challenge for this part of the journey to getting your book published. Imagine you are this professional reader. You’ve been doing this for years, reading through "slush piles" of hopeful manuscripts. You come into the office and you’ve just done a huge pile of no-good ones. And you have another pile to go. And another. And another. The writing is mediocre and cliched. Or its over-written and turgid and difficult to understand. The typescripts are messy and they give you a headache to read. There are lots of spelling mistakes and typos and grammatical errors and that just drives you crazy. You’re fed up and tired and jaded. Wouldn’t it be nice, you think, to come across one manuscript that I could read for more than the first few pages, that would really excite me, that could actually be worth taking through the long publication process?

With this picture in mind, your mission now is to go through that manuscript and make it THE one that is going to give that professional reader their "Oh my God!" moment.

Here are some pointers:

• Check for typos, inconsistencies and spelling mistakes. A simple enough way not to irritate that professional reader. And it shows that you are a professional yourself.
• Does your manuscript look good? Is it clear and easy to read? Or does it give the reader a headache and blurred vision? The standard requirement is that the text should be double-spaced and on one side of the page only. And the font should be easy to read. I find that 1.5 spacing works just as well. I use Times New Roman font at 12 point. You can use any other preferred font but it’s best to avoid Comic Sans Serif and any of the more fancy, decorated ones.
• Ruthlessly purge your text of cliches and lazy writing. For example: "Her heart skipped a beat." Is there a fresher way of describing her shock or fear at that moment? Or You’ve called the butler Alfred because that’s the butler’s name in Batman - can you think of another name?
• Ruthlessly purge your text of purple prose. Does that sentence there really have to be so beautiful and lyrical? Does it have to be sooooo long? Do you have to have so many adjectives and adverbs? Does that word have to have so many syllables - will a simpler one do the job just as well?
• What is the point of a particular scene? What are you trying to say in it? Are you successful in getting that point across? Can you get it across a lot sooner than 4 pages into the scene? Is there stuff getting in the way of the point - can you simplify?
• "Don’t tell, Show." ie don’t tell your reader something, show it to them. For example, "He was nervous before the interview" versus "He paced the corridor outside the interview room and lit his second cigarette. His first still lay smoking in the ashtray. His hands felt cold and clammy." Are you doing too much explaining/ telling and not enough showing? 

The last four bullet points creep into creative writing class territory and there are probably other ways that you can tighten, hone and perfect your manuscript. For me, these are the guidelines I use whenever I re-read something I’ve written in my novels. You may have other techniques that work for your writing - if you do, it would be great if you could share them with me and the other writer-readers of this blog, so please do add a comment or email me.

I know by now you are chaffing at the bit to put that manuscript into its envelope and send it off to an agent. But not yet. The take-home message of this post is: You’ve only got one chance at getting this manuscript noticed and you want every submission you make to count - whether you work with the tips I’ve mentioned or use your own strategies to make your manuscript the best it can be.

But It can be difficult to edit your own work. One way to get help with this is to join a writing group or go to a creative
writing class or form a writers circle with other writers you know. Others can read your work with new eyes and through pooling writing experience, you can get feedback on how to solve a plot or style problem you’re not happy with or improve the way that you’ve written a scene.

So, next week - 3. Giving and Receiving Feedback: how to make the most out of a creative writing class/ writing group.

pic from flickr by penumbra; non-commercial use only; no derivations

A reader from Malaysia who is working on a novel has asked me how one gets published in the UK. This is a regular question I am asked by many people in the UK as well.  I thought it would be useful to share what I know* here on the blog for
all my writer-readers - and my readers who are non-writers, you may enjoy a look behind-the-scenes of writing and publishing.

So, this is the first in a series of weekly posts on Getting Published.

First things first. Write your novel. Finish it. Don’t even think about trying to get it published before you have typed out "The End". This is particularly important if you are a first-timer.

Why?

• Without a finished book,it’s like opening up a stall with only half-finished products for sale and saying to your customers, "Oh yeah, I’ll finish it if you want to buy it."
• What are you going to do when the agent you sent your first three chapters to says, "Yes, I love what you’ve written so far. Give me the rest of it tomorrow"?
• If you thought for too long about how convoluted and tough the process is from your first submission to seeing the book in the bookshops, how many hoops you’re going to have to jump through and how many hoops other people like your agent and editor and the whole publishing house team are going to jump through to get your novel published and on the bookshelves, you would never ever even think "Oh yes, I’d like to write a novel and see my name in print."
• Because of that process, your editor will want to know that you have the commitment and stamina it takes to finish a book. And then do several re-writes. And read through the manuscript again and again checking for typos and errors.
• If you start thinking about being published before you finish writing your novel, you’ll start thinking about what other people think about your work and, is it any good and, is it publishable and, will it sell and what will you say when you’re interviewed by Oprah and.. and.. And everything else apart from the story, the words, the characters, the book. So focus. If you don’t love your story and characters etc for long enough to stick with them to the end, then who else is going to love your book and buy it and read it?

I adapted the old Chinese saying to keep me going while I wrote The Flame Tree: the longest novel begins with a single word. And you just keep putting one word in front of the other until you have, in my case, 180,000 words. And when you get to write The End it is very very satisfying.

So keep going, word by word. Just do it. Keep writing and finish the thing.

Next week: What to do once you’ve finished the manuscript.

*PS. These tips are based on my own personal experience and research that I have done for these posts. If you are a writer or publishing industry professional and would like to share your views or add your tips, I would love to hear from you. Please add a comment or email me.