Getting an Agent IV: Commandments (Part 4 of 4)

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and, the last 'Do's":

6. Do say thank you if you receive a personal reply. Any personal note from an agent—even one scribbled on the margin of your query letter—deserves a thank-you letter in response. Reading time is at a premium for agents, and writing time is an indulgence that most of them expend only with reluctance. Thank them for it—after all, you may be coming back to them some day. Thank them for it despite the fact that their comments seem off-target, wrong-headed, or even on the nasty side; in fact, you should thank them especially if their comments are on the nasty side. This puts you in a position of moral superiority. Novelist Carolyn See calls this response “emotional jiu-jitsu,” and she’s right; it gets that oppressive feeling off your chest and, with a little luck, dumps it back on its source with interest.

7. Do get involved with the literary life, such as it is. Don’t let classes, workshops, or conferences become substitutes for writing, but don’t avoid them, either. Even if you live in Elk Snout, Montana, population 9, you owe it to yourself to saddle up ol’ Bess and ride off to at least a few conferences where you can talk to people—agents, editors, and fellow writers. Meeting agents face-to-face improves the chance that they’ll bother to read your query letters; and editors sometimes invite you to submit directly to them, bypassing the entire agent system. (You may still want an agent—but it’s easier to get one if you’ve already got a publisher.) Fellow writers are an underestimated resource; they can give you leads on agents, and they can also warn you which folks to avoid. Get embedded in the writing community.

8. Do build up your fiction resume. Win awards, contests, prizes, or fellowships, if you can. Publish short stories, or, if you can’t manage that, publish magazine articles. Attend retreats, or, if you can, get into a writer’s colony. These things may or may not help your writing, but they do add to your credibility. As John Gardner observed, what people in publishing really want is to be able to claim they discovered someone, while simultaneously betting on a sure thing.

9. Do stay optimistic. This is far, far easier said than done. Rejection is to be expected—relentless, ego-crushing, soul-draining rejection. Unless you’re psychotic, it’s hard to avoid despair. Give in to it if you must, but don’t send out queries when you’re at the bottom of the pit. Few people in publishing respond to a cry for help, and everyone in the business can smell despair the way dogs smell fear, and that scent makes them back away lest they contract your disease. Wait for your brief psychotic breaks, those moments where you are nutty enough to believe there’s hope, and send your queries out then.

10. Do move on with your writing. This is what distinguishes a writer from someone who has written. There are a surprising number of people out there who finish their first novel and then spend years trying to market it, assuming they shouldn’t move ahead with their writing until they’ve successfully marketed their first book. The truth is, most ‘debut novels’ aren’t first novels, though they are often presented as such; there are usually two or three earlier works stashed away in drawers. Hemingway said the way to learn to write was to “Write a million words.” (That’s ten to twenty novels-worth.) Even Stephen King, who seemingly can sell anything up to and including his grocery list, completed four novels before he managed to get one published. “Courage,” Rollo May says, “is not the absence of despair; it is the courage to move ahead in spite of despair.” If you want to be a writer, write.

Somewhere out there, I’m sure, is someone who, in recent years, wrote a good novel and then found an agent and publisher on the basis of nothing more than a solid query letter; someone did this without awards, or a publications list, or recommendations, or contacts, or even good research on agents.

Somewhere out there, too, is the winner of the State Lottery. For most of us, it’s more complicated than that. The rules presented above will at least keep you from getting in your own way. The rest is up to your writing…and a whole lotta luck.

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