Which pigeonhole was yours?
a) Perhaps your novel was just plain boring?
b) Perhaps you had nothing to say.
c) Perhaps it had no structure: came to no conclusion: wandered all over the place.
d) Perhaps it was too old-fashioned: you’re out of touch with the new world.
e) Perhaps there’s no USP – unique selling proposition – and though editors loved it, Marketing didn’t think they could sell it. (These days Marketing rules the roost.)
f) Perhaps it was likely to upset too many people. Controversial.
g) Perhaps your synopsis failed to explain your novel as well as it could.
h) Perhaps it’s too good for them – too much fine writing, too little plot.
i) Perhaps they didn’t get further than page one before rejecting you as illiterate, not sufficiently educated.
Anyway, your novel’s been rejected six times, and no-one’s told you why. Let’s take these possibilities one at a time. Be brave. Do not be defeated. Learn from them. More than one pigeonhole may apply, and all too often does.
a) Too boring
Don’t take this as an insult. It doesn’t mean you are a boring person – no-one who undertakes and has the stamina and will to complete a whole novel is boring, believe me – just that you may well have failed to put into the novel the spark that makes you what you are, and why you chose to write it in the first place, and it shows.
Your novel is dull. It has been written with great care, but perhaps using the left side of the brain, the rational, sensible, censorious, red-pencil side, leaving the woozy, fuzzy, dreamy, inventive, right side out altogether.
You may well have used one of the many How to Write a Novel instruction manuals around, and followed all the rules, but it’s wooden, static, lacks any sense of imperative, of a story that has to be written and demands to be read. Whatever its genre, comedy or tragedy, romance or dystopia, light-hearted or grim, who cares? You wanted to stay anonymous, shelter behind the mechanics of your plot, divorce yourself from your characters – ignoring the fact that they must be some aspect of yourself or how could, why would, you have made them up in the first place?
You refused to lose your good opinion of yourself. Your leading character steals, lies, fornicates, cheats – ‘nothing to do with me’, you told the world. Foolish! Hiding was a mistake. One that will take a lot of rectifying, but it can be done. Though it’ll need courage.
A writer needs a fair bit of introspection to succeed. I spent five years in psychoanalysis before I was sane enough to write anything longer or more interesting than an advertisement, poor craven wretch of a copywriter that I was, though with a nifty turn of phrase, but little else until then. I could sell product pretty well, but not ideas: I exhausted myself after a couple of paragraphs and craved immediate results. In advertising it’s write today, in the paper tomorrow. All short-term stuff. In novel writing you’re in for the long haul. Take yourself seriously. Know who you are, what you are, and why you are writing. It’s the hiding from the self that makes one boring on the page. So forget any delusion that you’re a nice person, you’re as awful and evil as the worst person you ever imagined. This stuff has to come from somewhere. Abandon your good opinion of yourself before you start your rewrite.
Many fiction writers, it seems to me, are working out on the page the painful problems of their childhood and family, however disguised this is from themselves and others. Some can get it over with in their first novel and lose the desire to write thereafter; they’re the lucky ones. Some go on puzzling and niggling and suffering for the rest of their lives, as I did. (Well, not exactly suffering – those were the angry, funny, feminist novels of my youth, which mixed rage with levity, and spoke for an indignant generation.) But I still obsess as to why my puritanical mother was like she was and my darling absent father the way he was, and never paid maintenance. The war between the sexes. I’ve never got over it.
It’s not just novelists, either. See it in historians. Consider the case of Edward Gibbon, celebrated eighteenth-century historian and belle-lettrist, much of whose life was spent writing the magnificent and entertaining (for those days) six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, proving that the fall of Rome was the result of the dawn of Christianity. He described himself as ‘a puny child, neglected by my Mother, starved by my nurse’. He had five siblings, all of whom died in infancy, but still, he complained, his very Christian mother ‘treated him with disdain’. As the Duke of Gloucester remarked to him in 1781: ‘Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?’
Well, of course. Never got over it. Still puzzling and niggling away at the past, his own or the world’s. What’s the difference? To the child, the home is the world.
Of course a novel shouldn’t be over-autobiographical – but needs to be written by a human, not a reporting robot, rule obsessed. It’s an act of communication between writer and reader. If you try and hide yourself too much (your personality as echoed in the enthusiasms, pains and rages of your characters – all hidden aspects of you, remember) and just report what these characters do, readers will shut off because you have failed to engage them.
It’s been a ‘not for us’ six times over, though no agent or publisher will tell you why to your face. Boring! Though they won’t say this – it sounds too crude and unkind.
If you suspect that ‘boring’ is the main reason, but the desire to write remains stubborn, and you are not open to self-inspection, then perhaps do just start afresh, taking care to also avoid the traps listed in (b) to (i).
b) Nothing to say
Another major complaint from the agents about the state of the contemporary novel is that so often it has ‘nothing to say’: all plot, no purpose, no different from any of the others that come pouring in. There’s no proper problem and so no possible resolution. It (your novel) just seems to go wandering and wondering on.
‘Nothing much against this particular novel,’ says the agent, ‘just nothing much going for it, at least that Marketing will understand. I mean, why?’ Yawn, yawn.
(And from the sound of it you wouldn’t be much fun for the agent, let alone the publisher, when it came to taking you out to lunch. This does count. They’re only human. And ‘meeting writers’ is one of the reasons they give for taking the job in the first place. So do make yourself agreeable: someone worth meeting. A little eccentricity never goes amiss.)
And so your novel went into the reject pile. In the old days such piles of yellowing paper, often handwritten and tear-stained (to prove just how desperate the writer was), were so high and all over the place you could hardly get into the publisher’s office without tripping. These days rejects are just neatly packed away into a computer file for the intern to deal with and send out the ‘not for us’s. The offices are all steel and glass, and not old oak beams. Oh, and publishers’ offices used to smell so romantically of polished mahogany, warm paper glue and printing ink. No longer. But enough of this nostalgia.
Publishing is an industry and not a ‘gentleman’s profession’ any more. Today’s novels, thanks probably to the blossoming of the creative writing class, are written to a far higher standard than they used to be. Look at a short story in any woman’s magazine circa 1960 and shrink back in horror. No-one expected them to have ‘something to say’. Those tear-stained paper piles contained far more rubbish than you’ll find in any equivalent computer files today. Courage! Onward and upward!
It’s always a bit vague – this cause for rejection, this ‘nothing to say’ business – and like ‘boring’, seldom spoken aloud to the client, let alone written. Too damning and disheartening, even more so than the ‘boring’ accusation. Of course you have something to say (80,000 words or so), but you didn’t formulate it clearly enough to yourself, let alone to a reader, when you began. You didn’t stay on track because you weren’t sure what your track was. It’ll be in there somewhere but it just needs finding. Be brave, and find it. Boil your whole novel down to one sentence – what I call your Cosmic Statement – then go for it. Look at it like this. A novel is about more than its plot. Plots are easy. They can be changed at the click or so of the mouse. The girl who’s carried out to sea by a rogue wave and you intend to drown can be carried back by another wave and live, washed up stranded on the seashore in her see-through swimsuit for the hero to admire. Plot is your servant, not the other way round. Your characters are there to make the plot plausible. Events are there to make the plot work.
So look for what you were trying to say in the first place. It’s in there somewhere, the good idea that launched the whole process; the loving phrase spoken, the hateful comment made, the telling conversation overheard, the news item read – whatever it was that impelled you to take up your pen or keyboard.
Any novel flows more easily towards an inevitable conclusion if the writer writes with their Cosmic Statement – call it the ‘mission statement’ if you will – in mind. Don’t let it fall by the way. This ‘something to say’, the hypothesis, the underpinning, of what you’re setting out to demonstrate. It can be simple, as in a romantic novel – true love always finds a way – to keep you on track, as the lover knocks down one obstacle after another on his journey towards the orgasm, the QED, the quod erat demonstrandum of the science lab. The writer provided characters and events to prove what had to be proved, and gets to the QED after a straight run through.
Sometimes a novelist gets their mission statement into their first line (very clever) and tells the world. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (Jane Austen), or ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ (Charles Dickens), or ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there’ (L.P. Hartley).
Sometimes you only discover it when you’re a third of the way through your novel, and have to go back and do a lot of re-writing. Having discovered it, stick to the point. Don’t be so in love with your own writing that you go wandering off and lose sight of your initial story. You can only deal properly with one human problem at a time in your novel. One novel, one mission statement. Don’t try to save the world in one go. With any luck you have a lifetime of novels waiting to be written ahead of you – there’s so much in life to be said – so spread your material thin. It’s precious.
And then no mere agent, no mere publisher, can say you have nothing to say.
c) Structure
Your novel had no structure, wandered around all over the place, came to no obvious conclusion?
Structure is not easy. ‘Lack of structure’ is the most frequent comment made by the rejecting authorities, and ‘I can’t DO structure’ is the most frequent complaint I’ve come across, usually, alas, from the most talented and lyrical of writers. They’re so in love with their own writing they forget there’s anything else to worry about. Such as the plot.
But there is a really simple way of producing a structurally fail-safe novel which I will pass on to you, though it feels rather like cheating.
Try approaching your novel as you would a scientific experiment: the kind you did in the school chemistry lab. To get to the QED of a novel, the ‘which was to be proved’, all you need is a hypothesis, some ingredients, a set of methods and the QED is all yours. You may still be accused of (a) boring, and anything up to (g), but (c) will never get you.
Forming your hypothesis is the only difficult part in something that looks so easy. It’s the cosmic sentence, the mission statement I’ve been talking about in (b). It’s the sentence that sums up the thought that started you off, the idea that caught you all of a sudden, the emotion you were trying to validate, the point you were trying to prove. It’s what your novel is ‘about’: why you wanted to write it in the first place (often rather vague and fuzzy and right-brainy), boiled down to just a couple of lines; one, even. It’s what you wanted ‘to say’.
Your hypothesis (defined as a ‘proposed supposition for the purpose of investigation’) will go something like this:
♦Dickens’ Tale of two Cities: Good can come out of bad, the same as bad out of good.
♦Flynn’s Gone Girl: We all lie about our perfect marriages – the better a marriage looks on the surface, the worse the secrets it holds!
♦Weldon’s Stepmother’s Diary: We all know stepmothers are wicked – but what about stepdaughters? They can be a whole lot worse!
I am including this last not out of vanity, but because once it was written and I was talking about it at some festival, I realised The Stepmother’s Diary followed all my rules for a classic lab-created novel. More, it had been surprisingly easy to write: I’d known exactly what I was doing and so where I was going.
I wrote the novel after listening to a group of Danish stepmothers bewailing the sheer cruelty of their stepdaughters: how the second or third or even fourth (this was, after all, Scandinavia) marriages had not survived because of the machinations of the stepdaughters. It seemed to me to apply in the UK too – anywhere blended families are plentiful, and in the West that’s nearly everywhere.
Thus:
1. Hypothesis: We all know stepmothers are wicked – but what about stepdaughters? They can be a whole lot worse!
2. Ingredients: A computer, a printer, a brain, access to your unconscious (more of which later).
3. Method:
a) Choose characters that are going to prove your point and not wander off on their own. In this case a stepdaughter, a father, a stepmother, a grandmother as credible witness, being a Freudian analyst having an affair with her Jungian lodger. Don’t be seduced by some fascinating character you once met in real life; he or she is useless to you – start them off as suitable stereotypes and bring them to life little by little through the novel as you discover their idiosyncrasies. They’ll end up ‘rounded’ enough.
b) Choose events that are going to demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis – in this case by the stepdaughter turning her father against the new wife, undermining the stepmother’s self-esteem, ensuring her public disgrace, spending all father’s credit cards up to the hilt, making sure stepmother’s struggles to prove otherwise are to no avail, inspiring stepdaughter’s friends to behave likewise and so on.
c)Stir all ingredients together, working all inexorably towards an inevitable end (chronological order’s usually best – not too much back story).
4. Result: Loving marriage collapses as a result of interference from stepchild. A child is forever. A spouse is only temporary.
5. Conclusion: Stepmothers can be wicked – but what about stepdaughters? They’re a whole lot worse!
6. QED: Which was to be proved.
Now there is a structure. Everyone is satisfied. Writer, reader, publisher. Your story feels like the truth, though everything has been invented – just carried to extremes.
d) Perhaps it was too old-fashioned, too previous century
The writer is writing the same old thing, complains Marketing: he or she hasn’t seemed to notice that society is moving on, changing; is vegan as well as carnivore. That women are no longer the passive, uncritical creatures they used to be, who ask men questions because men know best and then wait for the answers. Feisty is in, dependent is out.
It’s not so much that characters have changed since you were a child but writing styles have as well. Since the advent of the computer, sentences are shorter, verbs are quieter, adjectives and adverbs, especially the latter, are used sparsely, and with more elaboration; today’s agents and publishers like informative detail, not just the writer telling the reader what characters do, but understanding how and why they do it.
Thus a simple ‘he grinned’ is out. (Sloppy. There are so many different ways of grinning – be more precise.) ‘He smiled a mirthless/joyous/bitter grin’ is in.
‘She sipped her wine’ is out. (Boring, not needed: ‘sipping wine’ like ‘drinking tea’ just holds the action up – unless it is the action, and the reader already knows that the wine or tea is poisoned and the sipping will result in death.) ‘Delete or expand’ is the golden rule. If the scene survives perfectly without a particular word, do without it. If it’s important or interesting, tell us more. Try instead ‘She sipped her 1998 Dom Perignon and marvelled at his wealth / revelled in its expensive bubbles / found it too acid on her palate’. This would be worth saying, so say it.
‘“I hate you”, she yelled’ is out. (Yes, but how exactly did she yell? And surely heroines, however provoked, never do yell? It’s so unattractive.) Try ‘The words “I hate you!” burst from her battered lips, summing up years of pent-up fury’, or some such. Heroines can hate, but not yell. Odd, but there it is.
Hand-me-down verbs (like grinned, sipped, yelled, chuckled) just on their own are best suited to screenplays as brief instructions to an actor, too crude for the written page, where they need qualification.
The accusation ‘old-fashioned’ is difficult to refute, since it is often the sign of a writer who hasn’t read a novel since childhood and ‘doesn’t keep up’.
The same goes for present participles (often called hanging participles) – crossing rooms, sitting down, standing up, walking towards – if you find yourself using them to start a sentence, just don’t.
‘Looking to the East, the sun was rising,’ or ‘Crossing the road, she said hello to John.’ Ouch! It’s so easy to go wrong when describing simultaneous actions – they so seldom are. ‘She looked to the East and saw that the sun was rising’ or ‘She crossed the road and said hello to John’ is what you mean, and feels younger and more immediate, less out of an older literary tradition. The contemporary novel favours keeping things clear and simple and abhors the participle form of the verb even when it is used correctly. And then, and then, and then: one thing at a time, please, and keep it short, avoid those complicated and confusing sentences.
Or perhaps you’ve noticeably avoided the lovely little neutral word ‘said’, as you were told to by some old-fashioned writing teacher in the past. So instead of just ‘saying’ in a section of dialogue so we know who’s speaking, your characters will opine, argue, refute, expostulate, apologise, interrupt, squeal, snort, beg, chatter, amend, enthuse, gush, moan, comment, allude, criticise, appreciate and so on – anything, anything to avoid the word ‘said’ – to such a degree your sophisticated reader jeers. If you need to explain how someone says something by all means do so, but don’t try to do it by elaborating on ‘said’. It’s a word so simple and innocent no-one even notices it in reading-and-noting tests, other than by its absence, as readers puzzle over who’s saying what to whom, and get annoyed. Be more interested in the reader’s reaction than in your own ingenuity.
The contemporary writer uses the word ‘said’, and then, if it’s important, and having taken time (well, a second or two) to think about it, tells the reader exactly how it was said.
‘“Oh, well done!” Marlene said. Her enthusiasm was intoxicating.’
And talking of exclamation marks, the ‘screamers’ of old-fashioned yellow-press journalism: do too many of them spoil the clean crisp appearance of your text on the screen? Look inside any Angela Brazil (1868–1947) book on Amazon to see what I mean by old-fashioned. In ten lines of dialogue twelve exclamation marks. Mind you, that was the ‘young adult book’ of her time and you could tell a young girl by her breathlessness. But Brazil didn’t half sell – a great strong verb advocate: she too living in apparent fear of ‘said’. In The Nicest Girl in the School (1909), she manages twenty-eight lines of verbal exchanges with not a single ‘she said’, but instead a yelled, suggested, volunteered, listened, sighed, puzzled, continued, marvelled, complained, shouted and corrected, all accompanied by an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence.
Do be prudent with your adjectives: use them sparingly, realising that every one you use deprives the next one of power. ‘Sara’s lovely, lustrous, chestnut hair tumbled longingly round her perfect heart-shaped face, reaching down tenderly in riotous curls to meet the enchanting curve of her pale, tip-tilted bosom’ is not likely to warm the cockles of today’s cold and critical agent heart, no matter how proud of it you may be. (Suspiciously male-egocentric anyway.) Adjectival and adverbial clauses should take their place, saying the same thing but taking longer. More detailed. A simile might come in handy, or a metaphor. And forget the name Sara – a staple girlfriend’s name in the old dick-lit – try Syrah instead. ‘Syrah’s red hair, glossy as an over-ripe chestnut, fell to the sculptural perfection of her naked breasts.’
Anyway, go through your manuscript to check any surplus of adjectives and adverbs, stray participle phrases, too few ‘saids’, and old-school names, only then re-submit. If to an agent you’ve tried before then perhaps change the title, the name and the synopsis just in case it’s the same intern who gets it.
And if you’re over fifty, do remember that so many of your readers are going to be Millennials, leaping and bounding, preferring not to see or think about anyone who lives in sight or thought of their own mortality. I don’t blame them. Just try not to teach them better. Be a little less sententious when dealing with them as characters. If sentimentality replaces sentiment, if ‘now’ is all that matters, if they ignore the past in order not to fear the future, if they believe they have arrived at the perfect present, well, let them. They’ll learn, poor things. Don’t let it show that you favour the old against the young: there is quite a battle going on.
I really want you to get your book published. I want you to make sense of your own self-created universe. For me it’s almost a sacred mission: I’m a born proselytiser. As the evangelist hopes others will be saved and go to heaven, or sink back into the darkness of hell, so I hope others will hear and get published, not sink back into the outer darkness of rejection.
e) There’s no USP – unique selling proposition
Your novel has got through the first barriers, been accepted by a literary agency, and is now coming up on the screens of the acquisitions team of a big publisher. Oh, well done you!
Let’s call it Whence Aramintha? for the sake of argument.
‘Terrible title, but it’s a literary novel – and so beautifully written.’ Blanche, newly promoted Commissioning Editor, is doing the pitching. She really likes Aramintha and has rung up the agency to say so. But now ‘First Novels, New Authors’ has come up on the agenda she’s nervous. She knows Aramintha will be a hard sell and the author won’t change the title. Literary Novels Under Threat, shrieks this week’s Bookseller, the publishing trade journal. Sales are atrocious. Genre novels are doing just fine – well, fine-ish, reading the small print. ‘I know nothing much happens but it’s magical,’ Blanche goes on.
‘Worse and worse,’ grumbles Jared from Marketing. ‘Nothing happens! Where’s it set – Hampstead?’
‘A bit further out of London, as it happens, but does that matter? The writer has a real gift for words. It’s like a Wide Sargasso Sea but set in a suburb. Such a gift with metaphor it thrills. One really feels for the characters and their quandary.’ Blanche is doing her best with the material she’s got.
‘What’s their quandary?’
‘Well, it is a bit vague.’ Blanche hasn’t had much help from your synopsis and the agent didn’t get round to tidying it up. ‘Four characters trapped in their marriages, trying to arrive at a definition of love.’
‘Don’t tell me. Set in a nameless outer suburb in North London with characters called Crispin and Jasper, Aramintha and Adelaide (or Addie for short), and the “nothing much” that happens is a long argument about recycling the vegetables. It’s a burgeoning field. Are they vegans?’
Blanche nods, numbly.
‘Flash in the pan. We had three like it published last year, everything white, white, middle, middle, and politically correct. All of them vegan. Writers love them, readers hate them. None of them sold. No-one gets married any more anyway. For pity’s sake, Blanche, give me something I can sell!’ And Blanche shrinks back into her literary shell and it’s a ‘no, not for us’, and back to the agent. Blanche is young and new to the game; she didn’t prepare her defences properly, and you were too fancy a writer to have provided useful statistics about novel-reading vegans which might have helped Blanche.
What Jared craves is something which will make a splash in the Mail (historical abuse is always a winner), or the Guardian (anything set in Afghanistan or the Yemen, but the Bardo Thodol is creeping up behind). Writer tells the truth about the Twin Towers conspiracy; author writes novel while kidnapped by Brazilian pygmies in the rain forest: anything which will attract an actual headline. At the very least something set in a five-star hotel in a hot and steamy holiday resort popular with the Royals. That’s for the magazine market. It’s all niche marketing nowadays. Don’t neglect the elderly. Seventy-year-old grandfather accused of abuse writes novel in prison, daughter commits suicide as a result: that one’s been serialised on Radio 4. Can we have more like that? Simple romance is always fail-safe but not too steamy. Propriety is in, Erotica is out. Fifty Shades of Grey somehow exhausted that market. Middle-aged women make up most of the book market but prefer their heroines young enough to be sexy because they like to identify. Dystopias are all the rage but not if it’s too clever. No-one wants satire, there’s no market for it. Readers have gone off smartness: wise to leave comedy for stand-up comics, it can go so wrong. Ghost stories: iffy. Paranormal – too niche-market for comfort.
I oversimplify, I know I do: on the whole good books get published and bad books don’t. But it’s really hard to sell books, so give Marketing a chance. If you’re the one who wrote the North London book, you might have got a better reception if you’d actually mentioned that Jasper is a deaf mute and/or Aramintha an asylum seeker, and cited that and not your elegant metaphors to the editor as being at the heart of the novel. Marketing have been known to boast that they’ve never actually read a novel – they don’t have the time. They rely on readers’ reports and editors who pitch verbally.
Don’t worry too much about your USP: no-one ever gets it right. Even Marketing. Especially Marketing, who often get it wrong. They know well enough what happened in the past but have no idea what will happen in the future. A few, mind you, and some publishers too, are just better than others at sniffing out what will happen next.
All the same, you can always try surprising yourself after six rejections: open by sending your characters off to North Korea on holiday, or writing the same novel from the man’s point of view not the woman’s – the abandoned man not the abandoning woman – or the villain’s viewpoint not the victim’s. Everything may suddenly leap to life. You’re the writer: it’s your universe, you can do anything.
Back in 1933 someone once wrote a whole novel without using the letter ‘e’ and got away with it. It was in the present tense. You could get rid of the ‘ed’s that way. He had to self-publish, mind you, but it made quite a stir.
f) It’s too controversial
It’s easy enough for this to happen. Novels take a long time to write. The novel you started five years ago might seem rather unfashionable today. Perhaps you’re writing a thriller and have made all the baddies Muslim, when these days it seems mandatory to make them ‘far-right’. You may have culturally appropriated a black rape victim when you might just as well have made her white; or made an unseemly joke about gender fluidity; or been too forgiving of a paedophile. The patterns of social disapproval change furiously and fast and having to point it out to the writer can be embarrassing for all concerned. Easier for them to just say ‘no, not for us’. It’s as much awkwardness as deliberate censorship.
If you suspect you’re too controversial, you have various options:
1) You can seek out a brave publisher and approach them directly, bypassing the agent.
2) You can wait for society to see it your way and your views to be welcomed (could take twenty years).
3) You play safe, act Vicar of Bray (Google him) when you rewrite, adjust to contemporary requirements, and re-submit. It may be easier than you think. Find a white church-goer amongst the rapist gang, make the terrorist a mental health victim, the alleged molester falsely accused, and that may be all you need to achieve balance. Don’t blame me if you get bored or furious doing so; you do want to get your book published, don’t you? And you don’t want a troll storm raging around your poor creative head.
g) Your synopsis failed to explain your novel
A modern-day synopsis isn’t just a convoluted, hard to follow and ultimately boring account of the plot. Martha did this and William did that, and then this, that and the other happened. Not enough. Your synopsis, together with your letter of introduction, needs to give an overview of your novel – the genre, why you wrote it, what you see as your potential market, and any other special thing you want to say in your novel’s favour. Keep it brief, professional and business-like. Keep it to a page. Agents will use it when they pitch it to publishers; publishers when they sell it internally, as these days they have to do. Be positive about what you’ve written but avoid boasting. (Agents and publishers are no different from you; they can tell blarney when they see it.) By all means tell them you hope your book will be a favourite amongst cat lovers, not that it’s the most brilliant novel about cats ever written. They like to be the judge of that.
Surprisingly few people will read all your novel. The first six pages of actual text is usually enough for an accomplished literary agent to see a novel with potential and put it aside for a ‘proper read’. If they’re a new young ‘rights agency’ – there are more and more of these about – and think your novel sufficiently plot-rich to have a future on TV or film, they will say ‘well perhaps, but first just alter it to meet our specifications’. Be very careful because sometimes they are right but sometimes they are wrong. I have known writers take a year or more doing as an agent suggests and at the end of it they still say ‘no, not for us’. Because what they think ‘worked’ just didn’t when it came to selling it to anyone, least of all a ‘serious’ publisher with properly trained, experienced and responsible staff.
You were so grateful to have been singled out you didn’t notice the warning signs that this particular agent was new at the game, inept and irresponsible, all three. Writers should never be too grateful. Also, people change. I have been at this game for fifty years: I have known beloved and trusted agents run off to South America with the money, turn to drink, to cocaine, to die. I have known accountants be struck off, lawyers hang themselves. We’re all only human, and don’t go on forever.
h) Too much fine writing, too little plot?
This too can happen. You’ve been a natural writer since you took up a pen. Teachers have marvelled at your skill with words, the beauty of your prose, your astonishing gift for metaphor and so on. It’s not just your mother who thinks you are wonderful, but colleagues and established writers who wish they could write as well as you. But the fact is you’re not a novelist, you’re more of a poet, though since you write to the end of the line you haven’t realised it.
Structure, plot, doesn’t come naturally to you. After a page or so of admiring your fine writing readers may well feel ‘that’s enough of that for now’, put the book down thinking ‘but I wanted a story’, and somehow not go back to it.
If this applies to you, don’t trust your novel to develop naturally, to grow by itself – it won’t. Construct a plot before you begin – get help if required – and stick to it resolutely. Don’t let yourself wander off, however tempted, however intoxicated by your own words.
i) What do they mean ‘illiterate’? How dare they!
‘Poncy bastards! Sheer elitism. I’m of the people, speak like the people, spell like the people. I have a story to tell and haven’t I told it? Grammar and spelling? Who cares! Someone up at the publishers can attend to all that, they have the computers! (How am I expected to pay for one, I’m on benefits?) Bet they did all the corrections for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.’
Well, yes, probably. But that book had other merits. And any errors were intentional anyway. Perhaps yours were too? If so, tone them down. If not, and you suspect this is the reason for rejection, then learn the ways of the over-educated, if only because they are the ones who buy the books. Not everyone who succeeds has been to creative writing classes. Start by reading novels, the more the better. Consult the FAQ section in Part Four of this how-not-to handbook. And consider film making, where the use of words can become an irrelevancy and you can get your story out and stop it driving you mad.