Publishing Monday: Why literary agents reject

These past few weeks have been very intense for me. I injured my knee running four weeks ago seriously enough that I had extremely limited mobility. Think hobbling with a cane, being unable to sleep because of discomfort. This is a test for anyone, but especially for a New Yorker — we rely on our feet and mass transit to get everywhere. For the first time in my life living here, I had to rely on a car to get places. Even walking a block was problematic at best. And I have a six-year-old child who needs to be walked to school, picked up, and so on. Not easy. Or fun.

As emotionally frustrating and physically painful as the experience has been — I’m an extremely self-sufficient person and I hate pain — there have been some blessings. I’ve been very touched by the concern everyone has shown me in my community. I swear I couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking how my knee was or offering to help me in some way. My husband truly rocked in taking care of the all the things I couldn’t, such as dropping off our daughter at school. And last but not least, being so immobilized forced me to concentrate deeply on revising THE LILY MAID (aka The Novel) in time for various writing workshops and conferences: Backspace Writers, Sackett Street Writers, and the Historical Fiction Society, where I’m planning to workshop my first chapter.

This past weekend was the Backspace Writer’s conference here in NYC. (Some readers might recall that I was awarded a scholarship for THE LILY MAID based on my query synopsis and first pages — a real honor and a thrill.) The short version: The conference was deeply transformative to me as a novelist. What I like about Backspace is that they offer both creative development as well as professional advice about the publishing industry. I left the conference buzzing with ideas for how to apply everything I learned to THE LILY MAID. I know my novel will be so much stronger now.

In the spirit of the Backspace motto of “writers helping writers”, I’ll share some of the lessons learned at their conference. There was so much that I’ll be splitting it into several posts.

First off, the conference was split into three days with the first devoted to workshopping our novel queries and first pages with literary agents. Though I’m fortunate to have a wonderful agent (I’ve been with Theresa for the past decade), it was extremely enlightening to get other agents’ feedback on my work. In addition, I’ve gained a new appreciation for everything that literary agents do. Not that I didn’t have it before, but it was still eye-opening. The second day offered panels about various aspects of publishing — from novel genres to self-publishing and beyond. The final day was a very intense nine hour writing workshop with novel-writing guru and literary agent Donald Maass.

My post today is about what literary agents look for when they’re reading unsolicited submissions. This lesson was brought home during the first day’s workshops which paired groups of fifteen writers with two literary agents according to genre. For example, I was placed in the commercial and historical fiction workshop, but other groups included young adult, fantasy, science fiction, and literary fiction. In the morning session, we read our query letters out loud to our group; each agent critiqued and commented on them individually. While this session was informative, the afternoon session was where things got extremely lively. That’s where we workshopped the first two pages of our novels with two new agents; in my case, Jeff Kleinman and Nicholas Croce, who were brutally honest while managing to be witty, insightful, and entertaining. A difficult task.

My favorite Jeff Kleinman quote: “I’m a lazy agent. I’m looking for any excuse to stop reading your submission to make life easier for me.” Which may sound harsh until you consider that most literary agents receives several hundred unsolicited book submissions a week! This “slush pile” reading is in addition to all of the work a literary agent does on behalf of their current clients who are relying on them to keep their careers growing. Puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it?

The first pages workshops were set up so that another writer read our pages out loud; we all had hard copies to read along. An agent would halt the reading once they’d decided to reject the novel  – a novelist’s version of the Gong Show meets American Idol but with two Simon Cowells, no Paula Abdul. Some people got less than a paragraph, others half-way through. Only three got the full read.

The experience was hair-raising as well as edifying. As the workshop progressed, my heart thumped in my chest in anticipation for when an agent would call out, “Stop here.” The good news: once the call was made, each agent would spend time explaining their reasons for rejection — an opportunity to learn and revise.

The three main reasons for rejection were a lack of narrative urgency, an underdeveloped narrative voice, or a weak command of the English language — grammar or spelling issues. Here are others:

1. Passive writing. (She could see the green light in the distance. Suddenly a car appeared in front of her out of nowhere.)

2. Misuse of dialogue tags, especially over-the-top ones accompanied by modifiers. (“Wait for me!” she blurted out dramatically in a searing voice.)

3. Inappropriate use of analogy that didn’t reflect the protagonist’s experiences or relate to the story. This connoted an underdeveloped voice.

4. Oh, here’s a good one: Both agents brought up certain novel openings which they consider red flags. For example, dream openings because they see so many of them. They also distrust shock value openings where people are killed or commit suicide — usually they’re not well handled so they don’t feel emotionally involved — or openings where someone shouts things connoting action without cause. They also dislike static openings where people think over their situation as they drink coffee or tea. Passive exposition at its worst.

So, you might be wondering how I fared. Well, very well! I was one of the three writers who got a full read.

On Friday, I plan to post about Donald Maass’s workshop, which was based on his book WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL. I hope you’ll check back!

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