Artifacts tend to be ancient, at least in the common use of the word. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. The Antikythera mechanism. Paleolithic Venus figurines. In a more general sense, artifacts are made things, products of human craft. Merriam-Webster adds: “something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual.” Science and engineering love to appropriate common terms for their specialized use. On the science-y end, artifacts are a type of error that arises from the instruments used to gather and analyze data. In the computer science arena, artifacts are errors that creep into data as a result of how we sample and transform said data.
In this picture the apparent arc of the skyway lines is an artifact of the algorithm that combined a series of pictures into one panoramic shot. If you zoom in to the picture, you can see more artifacts.
The blockiness is an artifact of breaking the image into little pixel boxes. The blurry haze around the tower and the skycar are compression artifacts resulting from the camera using JPEG compression to squeeze a bunch of pixels into less space on its storage card. High resolution screens and better compression algorithms insulate us from these sorts of errors, but they’re in there none the less.
What on earth does all this have to with agency or storytelling? You know: the things the post and the blog purport to be about, respectively?
Fair question. Bear with me a moment longer. Pixelation artifacts are intrinsic to the raster displays we use to work with our computers. Come and see the errors inherent in the system! The blurry edge artifacts in JPEG pictures represent a trade-off between quality and image size. What’s more important? The fidelity of the picture, or how many pictures you can store on your phone/camera?
My earlier post discussed how traditional publishers relied of a wall of literary agencies to filter out unsuitable manuscripts and direct viable works to the right editors. In an ideal world, the agency would read would read every manuscript and form a holistic appraisal. In the real world, agents receive queries from multiple authors every day. It’s just not practical to read all those manuscripts. The agent must rely on her own rules (algorithms and heuristics) to manage the river of dreams flooding her inbox. This is unavoidable and not unjust. It also introduces artifacts into the traditional publishing system that distort the population of new stories and voices that reach the bookstore shelves.
The Query
The query is typically the first thing the agent sees. It is a sales pitch by the author. In the course one page, the author must sell the agent on quality of the story’s core and the desirability of establishing a long-term working relationship with the author. A clumsy query can doom a wonderful story. This is sad, but there are a great many authors with stories to tell and an agent needs some evidence that a given author/story are worth pursuing. An artifact of the agent’s query filter is that authors who can’t sell their story and themselves within the constraints of the query letter won’t move on to the next stages of consideration.
The Synopsis
Some agents will ask to see a synopsis before they commit to looking at the complete manuscript. By its nature, a synopsis is a form of lossy compression. Chapters get pixelated into paragraphs. Memorable characters are squeeze out. Tense is flattened into a brisk present. An author has to be deft or very lucky to preserve the qualities of the story such that a synopsis does it justice. An artifact of the agent’s synopsis filter is that authors who lack this specific skill won’t move on to the next stages of consideration.
The Hook
Agents themselves emphasize the importance of “hooking the reader” in the opening sentence or page of the book. This requirement is echoed throughout the para-publishing industry. An intriguing question must be raised, or a dramatic event unfold, right out of the gate. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Any reader could enjoy it, but the general reader doesn’t demand to be hooked. A review, a friend’s recommendation, the jacket copy, or even the cover art, has already got them past the initial commitment to explore the story. The hook is as much for the agent as it is the end reader, perhaps more so. It frontloads the story. The agent doesn’t have to dig far at all. An artifact of the agent’s need to quickly divine the intrigue and/or excitement of the story is that authors seeking agents’ approval must begin with a particular class of beats.
This can be made to work in service of the story. It can be made to work well. The first of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books opens with, “I was arrested in Eno’s diner.” Boom! Our narrator is in trouble! Who is he and why is he being arrested? A dramatic event and an intriguing question rolled into one sentence. Cormac McCarthy spreads it out over the first paragraph in All the Pretty Horses. Who died? What did the dead man mean to the man standing over his body? The convention meets the needs of the agents and can serve the interests of the reader. But it is, in part, an artifact of how agents judge manuscripts. It encourages gratuitous in medias res, which isn’t necessary for good storytelling. Huckleberry Finn opens with a brief recap and some exposition where you catch up with Huck after Tom Sawyer. You get some time to adjust to Huck’s voice and learn about his character. Moby Dick does not open with a harpooning. The artifacts of modern literary agency shape the stories we read.
That warm analog sound
As I hinted at above, while artifacts are technically errors, the distortions they introduce result from trade-offs that are part of how the traditional publishing system works. It is even possible to stop worrying and love the artifacts. Ask an audiophile. There can be a deep affinity for the “warm” quality imparted by the artifacts of an analog amplifier. To some ears, vinyl recordings are more alive than the best digital music. Many of your favorite books are infused with artifacts of agency.