New Year’s countdown of 2018 reader favs: day 6

In selecting highlights of 2018 from this blog, I’ve chosen posts that resonate as well in these last days of the year as they did when first written, including this information from 2018’s DFW Writers Conference, first published June 19, 2018.

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Hungry for the feast of information from this year’s DFW Writers Conference? Here’s sampling, starting with YA author Scott Westerfeld’s keynote address:

“Teenagers are the strangers among us. A couple of hundred years ago the term did not exist. In the U.S. Civil War, an 11-year-old got the Medal of Honor. A 13-year-old commanded a ship at Trafalgar.” Although the word “teen” didn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1921, and “teenager” until 1941,” during the 19^th century, partly sparked by the Industrial Revolution, “a space expanded between being a little kid and being an adult.”

Co-existent with the evolution of teendom was the emergence of novels as “the supreme methods of storytelling.” The superpower of novels is their ability to lay out “agony, limits, feelings, beliefs, fears and hatred on the page.” Humans also have a superpower – empathy.

“The novel is the outgrowth of this ability. Readers don’t just bond with our characters, they become those characters.” And the supreme time for that becoming, that trying on of different ways of thinking and being is during the teen years. “Novels exercise our empathy and strengthen it.” Is this a scary process? Yes, “and scarier for teens because they are the strangers among us. So I hope you keep making more books – and more readers!”

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image: pixabay

Or maybe you wanted to know what agents really like (or not)? Try this discussion from the "Ask An Agent Anything" panel with agents Malaga Baldi, Amy Bishop, Uwe Stender and Maximilian Ximenez.

Q. Is it OK to resubmit to an agent after a rejection?
A. Absolutely, kind of, depends.

“The agents are rejecting the book, never you,” said Uwe Stender of Triada US Literary Agency. “Feel free to offer another work.”

Maximilian Ximenez of the L. Perkins Agency noted he’s even OK with resubmitting the same work after extensive revision. 

Q. What are you looking for in a query letter?
A. That depends. . . 

“Really know your enemy,” said Malaga Baldi of the Baldi Agency. “Know what they represent. We all have our own bugaboos and our own strong points. (However, note that she hates letters addressing her as Mr. Baldi!) 

And on the “knowing the enemy” front, “Please be upfront with relevant data, genre, word counts, etc.,” Ximenez said. “I don’t want to read the whole query before realizing it’s not something I can represent.”

“Do your research, like everyone says,” was the advice of Amy Bishop of Dystel, Goderich. “Do your research, like everyone says,” was the advice of Amy Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourrett LLC. (Among the things she looks for are comparison titles.)

Q. What turns you off from a (potential) writer client?
A. Forgetting we’re in a business!

“If I get the feeling that you’re unreasonable,” Stender said. “What I want from you is someone smart and professional.”

“I really want your relationship with your agent to be a long-lasting one,” Bishop said.

“I have had to, unfortunately, drop a lot of clients because of their rejection of what I suggest. It’s like a job interview. You need to know what you’re willing to compromise about.”

Baldi agreed. “I’m not your best friend. It’s a business relationship.”

Q. What’s the current market zeitgeist?
A. Do you really want to ask?

“It’s scary,” Baldi said, claiming she loves fiction but finds it a hard sell. “My bread and butter is nonfiction.”

“The word that’s been rising lately is platform,” Ximenez said. “Generally, it’s social messages but also the bonafides of the writer, especially in YA (young adult literature), themes of social justice and deconstruction (a method of questioning and revising received ideas). There’s deconstructionist cycle in all genres about every 15 years.”

“A lot of fantasy in a non-Western setting,” Bishop noted. 

And then there was Stender’s take. “I really don’t pay any attention to the market currently. I’m fully aware of what people want, but I will not respond to that when I get the book. The U.S. is always decades behind everybody else. It’s not like I’m ignorant of (the current market). I just don’t care.”

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And if that doesn’t explain everything, agent Patricia Nelson’s workshop, “Avoid Rookie Submission Mistakes,” dealt with some definite no-nos. 

Wordcraft – Here be dragons: er, agents with gongs

Another DFW Writers Conference has come and gone, and with it, another Gong Show, a retro nod to the long-gone TV talent show whose performers had to quit the stage when judges signaled their fed-upness by striking gongs. In the writers’ conference version, contestants submit anonymous sample query letters. A panel of literary agents hits gongs to signal when they would stop reading the query if it turned up in their email inboxes. Three gongs, and a contestant is out, left to learn from the experience with the rest of us before sending actual queries. It’s one of the best attended events of the conference.

Except for perhaps two or three science fiction presses, most publishers refuse even to consider accepting a book length manuscript from a writer who is not represented by a literary agent, transforming agents willy-nilly into the dragons guarding the gates to traditional publication.

And so, let me introduce this year’s Gong Show dragons by species, name and agency: the Long-Maned Allison Devereux of Wolf Literary Services, Crimson-Crested Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary, Tawny-Leonine Michelle Johnson of Inklings Literary Agency, Palomino-Maned Alice Speilburg of Speilburg Literary Agency, the Yellow-Crested Uwe Stender of Triada US Literary Agency, and the Far-Northern Carly Watters of the P.S. Literary Agency.

Do agents have some sort of pre-conference get together each year to decide what their pet peeves will be? Because the one that occurred over and over this year was “too long,” and its variants: “sounds interesting, but it goes on and on and on”; “you have to know when to pull the joke”; “we were just revisiting the same hook”; and perhaps most horribly, but said more than once, “I lost my train of thought.”

Agency websites usually list guidelines for query letters, and there are also plenty of websites with more general suggestions, such as limiting the query itself to a single page, including a “hook” or “logline”; title, genre and word count; and a 2-3 sentence long synopsis. A brief mention of the writer’s credentials and his/her reason for sending a letter to this particular agent (“enjoyed meeting you at the DFW Writers Conference” or “I’m a fan of such and such a client of yours”) are also typically included.

But writers of the 22 queries chosen for reading obviously saw the Gong Show as their only chance to get their novels on stage. Agents repeatedly had to say, “keep it simple,” in response to queries that over-anxious writers had turned into almost blow-by-blow synopses of their novels.

That said, the use of clichés were among the issues that have appeared in previous Gong Shows. This year a poison pill was “magic necklace” whose mention in a query immediately elicited a gong; when the writer added that the protagonist received it from her grandmother in a dream, the gongs went wild. And agents still felt that vampires and other supernatural/paranormal beings were clogging the publishing pipeline.

A problem I don’t recall hearing before regarded inappropriateness for genre or age of readership. One manuscript described by the author as having a 12-year-old protagonist used several explicitly sexual terms and was gonged out, as was a query that “sounds like women’s fiction but turns out to be an urban fantasy.”

Another was a manuscript of the wrong length. Confronted with 134,000 words, the unanimous decision was, too long. Agents wanted to see something closer to 100,000 words (although one agent was willing to consider 120,000.) There was also a 55,000 word manuscript deemed too short for an adult novel.

And finally, what you’re dying to know: did any queries survive the gongs? Yes, actually, there were two. One was for a mythic card game (although it received one gone from an agent who thought, again, “too long”. The second was for a YA science fiction novel, which, less illustriously, simply “had nothing glaring about it.” (Or maybe the agents were just tired by then.)

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I’ll post more next Tuesday about the 2015 conference, but in the meantime, consider the 2016 version in Fort Worth, April 23-24. Tickets are available at the super early bird rate of $190 through August 18 (or until sold out), at www.dfwcon2016.eventbrite.com.

Wordcraft -- Beating the gong

It was an historic moment at the closing of this weekend’s DFW Writers’ Conference, in Hurst, Texas. The finale was the loved and dreaded gong show -- a panel of agents and editors hitting gongs to signal the moment they’d stop reading anonymous query letters from writers. It was three gongs and they’re out for every query, except one. For the first time in the contest’s history, official reader George “The Voice” Goldthwaite got all the way to the end of a letter without being gonged into silence.

Winning writer Seth Skorkowsky of Denton doffed his anonymity to accept the audience's applause for the query about his novel, Damoren.  (There's an umlaut over the "a" in the title, but I haven't figured out how to get my laptop to write umlauts yet.) 

And whether from second thoughts or the charm of reading the query read in Goldthwaite’s mellow baritone, an agent who had previously rejected the writer announced his willingness to reconsider.

The show’s grim discipline may be paying off. None of the other twenty-two chosen queries beat the gong test, but after hearing them panelists asked even losing authors to send them material for consideration.

Panel members were Lou Anders, editorial director of Prometheus imprint Pyr; Uwe Stender of TriadaUS Literary Agency; Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Agency; Katelyn Detweiler of Jill Grindberg Literary Management; and Alice Spielburg, representing her own agency. Agents in the audience also were allowed to gong as they wished.

Reader Goldthwaite and moderator Russell Connor were members of the DFW Writers Workshop (DFWWW) which sponsored the conference.

Query letters are written inquiries from writers trying to gain representation from literary agents. The letters typically include information about a story’s genre and word count and a brief synopsis to demonstrate the writer’s style and degree of craft. Even a successful query doesn’t guarantee an agent will represent a writer, only that she’s willing to look at extended samples of his work.

Query faults that repeated turned agents and editors off was vagueness -- the lack of specific information about the plot, its protagonist or conflict; as well as failure to pinpoint the story’s genre, that is, which shelf it would occupy in a bookstore. “A book marketed toward everyone is an automatic gong,” one agent said. Others gonged a story that claimed multiple genres -- mystery, young adult, and science fiction.

Panelists also disliked overwriting -- “fifty adjectives in ten lines,” one agent said. Anders added, “one hyphen plenty, two hyphens too many, three hyphens left the building.

They also gonged queries felt to be “gimmicky,” such as the metafictional concept of a story about a writer writing a story; implied threats (“it‘s childish -- if you want to threaten me, do it in person”, Stender said); clichés; and stories that simply didn’t grab them.

“People read to be transported out of the ordinary,” Anders said, “and so many pitches are telling me how bored (the characters) are.”

On the other hand, “it’s possible to be a good writer but a bad query writer,” a panelist said, noting that she’d heard a particular query directly from the author and found it much better than it came off in the letter.

Moderator Connor also said he’d heard the novel behind one of the queries and it was much better than the query implied (and no, he said, it wasn’t his own).

For those of us who may be better at writing stories than at summarizing them in query letters, one hope for finding an agent is to meet more of them in person. And DFWWW has a deal for us -- discounted registration for its 2014 conference next May, available through May 31. For details, see
www.dfwcon.org/.

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Favorite incentive one author gives herself for writing regularly: “I tell myself, if this sells, I can get another tattoo.”