Write That Book Already!: The Tough Love You Need To Get Published Now (8 page)

The Soup
Serves eight with leftovers

One whole chicken

Enough water to cover chicken (see below)

Salt and pepper to taste

2 onions, chopped

1 pinch of sugar

6 carrots, chopped

1 parsnip, chopped

1 to 2 leeks, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

6 stalks celery

A generous handful of parsley

1 tablespoon dill

1. Cover the chicken with water. Add salt, pepper, onions, and sugar.

2. Add carrots, parsnip, leeks, garlic, celery, and parsley to the mix.

3. Bring to a boil and simmer one and a half hours.

4. When chicken is falling off the bone, remove from the stove and strain the liquid into another pot. Add as much of the boiled chicken and other ingredients as you’d like; the rest of the veggie mush can go into the compost with the chicken bones.

Keep warm on the stove until your matzo balls are ready.

The Matzo Balls
This recipe makes approximately 16 matzo balls

4 teaspoons vegetable oil (if you don’t keep kosher, use melted butter—you won’t be sorry!)

4 large eggs, slightly beaten

1 cup matzo meal

3 tablespoons parsley, chopped

3 cloves garlic, chopped

Salt to taste

4 tablespoons of the soup

1. Mix together vegetable oil (or melted butter), eggs, matzo meal, a parsley, garlic, and salt.

2. Add the soup. Stir until loosely blended.

3. Cover the mixture and refrigerate for at least fifteen minutes— longer is fine.

4. Bring a large pot of water to a brisk boil.

5. While you are waiting for water to boil, roll matzo mix into balls approximately 1 inch in diameter.

6. Reduce flame and drop balls into the water.

7. Cover the pot and cook forty minutes.

8. Scoop matzo balls out and add them to the soup. Enjoy!

OTHER TRICKS FOR KEEPING IT FRESH

Take a musical break: Walk away from your writing for a few minutes to play, sing, or listen to a little music. Do you own a guitar, a violin, a clarinet, a zither, or a kazoo? Whatever your instrument, take it out of the case, buy an inexpensive stand (perhaps you can design your own kazoo stand), and keep it near your writing space. Play it once in a while. You can also indulge in one-minute “harmonica moments” and it just so happens that we know of a book to use to help you learn how to do this:
How to Play the Harmonica: and Other Life Lessons
by Sam Barry. We would love this book even if one of us wasn’t the author.

Take a movie break: There are so many wonderful, entertaining, and inspiring movies out there! The best thing about a movie break is that you can watch while playing the harmonica
or
eating soup. We don’t recommend both at once. Dropping your harmonica into the soup is only one of the potential pitfalls. Here is a list of some favorites that are about—or feature scenes about—books, bookstores, and/or authors:

•
Stranger than Fiction
(both the author-care and IRS stuff are far-fetched—in real life, your publisher doesn’t send Queen Latifah to help you finish your manuscript—but the story is fun)

•
Crossing Delancey
(the Amy Irving character works in a bookstore)

•
Bridget Jones’ Diary
(has a funny scene involving Salman Rushdie)

•
You’ve Got Mail
(small indie bookstore is forced to close; some wonderful pretentious-author moments)

•
Borat
(includes a scene where they kidnap Pamela Anderson from her book-signing)

•
The Shining
(a writer slips into insanity in an isolated old hotel)

•
Chasing Amy
(all about comic book writers)

•
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
(Seth Rogen’s character is writing a novel)

•
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(exposes the silly, ego-driven behavior of some authors with the Gilderoy Lockhart character)

It doesn’t have to be a movie. There’s a great episode of the TV show
Stella
(available on DVD) all about the publishing industry. The episode is called “Novel.” And in the television series
Mad Men
the characters spend a good deal of their work time trying to come up with hooks for their advertising campaigns.

Do something nice for someone else: a big thing (opening a homeless shelter or an urban tutoring center) or a little thing (washing someone else’s dishes or taking the neighbor’s dog for a walk)— it doesn’t really matter. You’ll be helping out, and you’ll end up feeling better about yourself.

Get some fresh air and exercise: Perhaps the most tried-and-true method for restoring the creative spirit is something you learned to do before you ever started reading or writing. Take a walk. See a little patch of the outside world. Walk to the store, to a café, to the library, to a museum. You’ll feel those endorphins kick in; they’re good for writing and good for your waistline, too, especially after consuming seven or eight matzo balls. Don’t forget to bring a notebook and pencil with you, just in case.

Whatever your strategies may be, it’s crucial to give yourself a break now and then. You’ll end up doing better work in the long run, we promise.

BOTTOM LINE

Your writing is more important to you than it is to anyone else. Honor the process, treat yourself and your work with respect, and take care of yourself, your sweatpants, and your creative process by making time and space to work. But—please, for Pete’s sake—don’t start acting self-important or copping an attitude. It’s obnoxious and it won’t get you any closer to your goals. The only thing that will help you get that book finished is one very simple thing: apply butt to chair, and write.

An agent or an acquiring editor must read and evaluate manuscript after manuscript, looking for the gems that they believe they can sell. Because they are pros, they recognize their views as subjective—that what they like is not the only measure of what is good or worthy, and that their personal likes and dislikes are not shared by everyone. In other words, no individual is going to appreciate every book, however good or bad the writing.

On the other hand, a successful agent must have a pretty sharp eye—that’s why they are in the business—and agents will be more enthusiastic and do a better job selling and supporting quality work that suits each agency’s particular skills and contacts. Literary agents have specialties. If you’ve written a good manuscript that doesn’t play to a particular agent’s taste, there are agents out there whose talents will be more appropriate. An agent who turns you down may even offer the name of another agent who specializes in representing your kind of book.

PUT YOURSELF IN THE AGENT’S SHOES

Let’s say you are a successful literary agent and have just returned from the Maui Writers Conference where you were “working hard” sitting on panels (the beach) and making connections (drinking mai tais). You sit down to catch up on a backlog of work, which includes looking at several manuscripts on your desk. One is from a successful writer you already represent. Another is from a published writer you met at the conference who is between agents. You expressed interest in seeing the proposal for her next book. A couple of others are from people who sent you query letters per the guidelines on your website. You were interested enough to request the manuscripts, and here they are. And another pile consists of manuscripts that were sent to you unsolicited.

You check your voice mail, where you encounter a number of important and less important messages, ranging from editors at publishing houses getting back to you to your elderly mother calling to see if you will be visiting soon. Your e-mail inbox is full and there is a pile of snail mail on your desk.

Feeling overwhelmed, you settle into your favorite reading chair, pen and notepad in hand, and prepare to read the manuscripts. First you look at the submission from the author who is already in your stable. This person is a talented journalist who has one
New York Times
bestseller under his belt. However, his last two books have had disappointing sales. This new book is about the growing influence of Latino culture in America’s public education system. The book summary is too general and the chapter outlines are a little perfunctory, but that can all be worked out. You already represent this author, so your perspective is that of partner. You look at the sample chapter and are quickly drawn into the narrative, which is no surprise, because this guy can write.

But you are worried. Why is this material best presented as a book, rather than a piece on public radio, or a magazine article? Why will a publisher plunk down a big chunk of cash up front for this proposal, when the public can get the same information elsewhere and the author has a declining sales track (meaning each successive title has sold less than the bestseller that got him all this attention)? You make a note to call him—an e-mail won’t do.

Next you turn your attention to the author you met in Maui. She is a talented writer whose work straddles genres, landing somewhere between literary fiction and thriller. This can be a problem for publishers, who want their customers to know where to locate a book in bookstores. Her last book garnered critical acclaim and sold well, and you think she is a star on the rise. But then you aren’t the only one who thinks this, which makes you wonder why she is shopping for a new agent. You worry that there may be some problem and make a note to do some quiet checking around, but in the meantime you are excited to look at her manuscript.

The beginning is superb, telling the tale of a woman driving up the coast in Northern California pursued by mysterious men in a van, and an hour goes by without your even noticing. But then the story begins to bog down in a second subplot about an eight-year-old runaway with a lame puppy. This second part of the book involves a lot of beautiful but aimless atmospheric writing and doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the woman pursued by mysterious men. You wish you had a closer relationship with the author—you would tell her to make this subplot tie in more clearly with the primary story or cut it altogether. You wonder, also, if this is part of the unknown problem—that the author is not happy in the thriller genre, where sales tend to be larger, and is writing in a way that lends itself more to the literary work.

Tough Love from the Author Enablers

When sending query letters or manuscripts to agents or publishers, follow the submission guidelines or we’ll come over and kick your butt (metaphorically speaking)! ‹«

Next you turn to the two manuscripts from unpublished authors who are seeking representation. The first manuscript is a nonfiction work about space exploration and its effect on our belief in the afterlife. The idea and author sounded intriguing in the query letter, but it is immediately apparent that you will not be interested in representing this author. There is no short synopsis of the book, no author bio, no table of contents, no chapter summaries. You are immediately thrown into reading a manuscript that screams “academic.” The first sentence is so long you can’t remember where it began when you get to the end. But you could, maybe, overlook this if you were fascinated by what you are reading. The real issue for you is that the manuscript doesn’t deliver on the promise of the initial query letter. It is not a tightly constructed argument from someone you immediately trust, nor is it a brilliant if tangential look inside a great mind. Rather it is just the boring thoughts of one more person, albeit a college professor, who has a lot to say on a subject with which he is clearly obsessed. But why should you care? Why should the world care? Why should a publisher risk a lot of money and many hours of employees’ work on this professor’s ideas? And ultimately the author should be thinking about the potential reader—someone who will be expected to shell out twenty dollars or more in a bookstore. There is nothing in the manuscript to convince you to go for it, and plenty to convince you otherwise. You make a note to decline.