Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: literary agent

The Gray God’s Editing Odyssey

April 11, 2022 /
Witch's Jelly/Butter.

Absolutely not from outer space.

Almost three years ago, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete milestone.  I had a story with kids, cults, and monsters. It was okay, but very much an early draft. I put it on the back burner while I prepared Raether’s Enzyme for submission to literary agents and then self-publishing. My mushroom monsters simmered all the while, getting varying amounts of editorial love, evolving into something that you might want to read. This is the story of that evolution.

Reader Zero

A good friend volunteered to read the Narrative Complete draft. This was a generous offer given that he has negative interest in stories featuring young people making bad decisions. He returned with numerous useful notes and keen observations, the most important of which was that my main character was playing hard-to-like too well. I had intended Pete to be rough-edged. You don’t get into his sort of troubles by being a shining beacon of humanity. Nonetheless, the reader wants to either feel for the character, look forward to his downfall, or secretly revel in his transgressions. Fixing Pete to Reader Zero’s satisfaction wasn’t in the cards, but I resolved to smooth and soften some of the kid’s rougher edges.

The Real First Draft

The Gray God sim-sim-simmered. I reread it and studied the distribution of word counts across its chapters and acts. Some of the chapters ran long. I identified new chapter breaks, which gave scenes more room to breathe. When I look at the chapter breakdown now, it seems like it’s the way it always should have been.

The ending was too short. It wasn’t strange or horrible enough. I had teased monsters, alien horrors, and certain conflicts, but the pay-off was perfunctory. I split the final chapter in two and did my best to deliver blood, gore, madness, and cosmic horror.

As I made these changes, I kept an eye on the growing word count. The sages of the internet recommend that horror novels weigh in at 80,000 words or less to have the best chance of acceptance by agents and publishers.

My second courageous early reader took The Gray God home and returned with helpful notes and positive feedback. The characters worked as I’d hoped, as did a plot twist I was particularly happy with, in an evil way.

Wise of the Machines

Bad writing is noise that obscures the signal of the story. Computers can’t identify plot holes, weak characterization, wooden dialog, or a host of other story flaws, but they’re pretty good at spotting typos, misspellings, some grammatical errors, and overuse of words. Playing to the strengths of the machines, I enlisted Word, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and AutoCrit to filter out some of the bad writing noise than was fuzzing my story. None of these tools plug into Scrivener, so the process included exporting (compiling) the Scrivener project into a Word document for analysis. Errors and improvements then had to be made in the Scrivener project.

At the end of the process, I had a reasonably clean 80,000-word manuscript. I was ready for the next step in my insidious plan.

The Voice of the Outer World

Reducing the noise to expose the story was important for the next step: Developmental Editing. In a developmental edit, the editor is looking at how well the story works and provides feedback on the plot, characters, tones, themes, and general story quality of the manuscript. Any editor you’d want to hire for this service should have industry experience. That means they’ll have a keen eye for writing errors. It will probably be difficult for them to silence their inner copyeditors. To make it easier for them to focus on the story, it behooves one to deliver as clean a manuscript as practicable.

Developmental editing was a step I skipped for Raether’s Enzyme. It was important to me that Raether be my story—sink or swim—from beginning to end. I’m not as protective of The Gray God. It’s a more conventional—and possibly commercial—story. I went into the developmental edit intent on improving it in the direction of salability.

I returned to Reedsy to find a freelance developmental editor who worked with horror.

Ambitious amateur tip: Line up your developmental editor well in advance.

Of the three best matches for my project, one couldn’t take on a new project and the other two were booked months out. After toying with the idea of enlisting the other two, I settled on one and arranged for The Gray God to pass under her red pen later in the summer.

Once the ball was rolling, I soon had an editorial assessment, matching developmental notes for the manuscript, and some quality copy edits (she said she couldn’t help but fix errors when she saw them).

Her assessment highlighted what worked in the story and outlined areas for improvement with specific examples drawn from the text. It was well-written and full of actionable insights that I’ll apply to future projects.

Her manuscript edit was thorough and clear. I know what scenes and passages worked well for her. She flagged each point where the plot, setting, or character motivation was unclear. All the issues summarized in the assessment were noted in the Word comments with precision and the encouragement and coaching I need to make the story better for readers.

There was much to think about and to do. Specific issues called for delicate surgery in situ. The editorial assessment called out general patterns of weakness. I was light on character and scene descriptions. The longer dialog scenes drifted out into voids, unanchored by place or motion. It was a fair cop. I needed to fortify the descriptions and break up the dialog with meaningful actions. My inner screenwriter had delegated those details to the set and costume designers, and the actors, respectively. It was a problem I needed to fix.

Plot complication: The manuscript was already at the upper end of the word count for my genre. I consulted the editor and she said I could cheat it up to 85,000 words if I did it well. Doing it well (I hope!) and under budget required finesse. And removing a whole scene. Five hundred words mattered. The final total was just under 85,000 words. I won’t lie. I kept tinkering until I hit the limit.

The Chicago Way

The winner of a Clash of Copyeditors had an opening in her schedule and I jumped right in. She worked her diligent, painstaking magic to cleanse my manuscript of error and bring it into the light of The Chicago Manual of Style. She noted where things were unclear and offered improved word choices. The Gray God is mightier for her efforts.

I had come into a new pattern of error, which I will blame on Word. Word had been encouraging me to omit commas before conjunctions where the clauses were short. This may be what’s hip for business writing these days, but it is not the Chicago way. And given the alternative of sticking with Word’s suggestion or the corrections of a professional editor, I had to go with my editor. I spent a good long time porting commas back into the Scrivener project.

Another place where Chicago and my manuscript differed was on capitalization. Chicago has deprecated the capitalization of Marine, Army, Navy, and Air Force as stand-alone terms. That doesn’t strike me as right. And it would likely…disappoint…friends of mine who are veterans of those services. As used in the story, these words are short for United States Marine, United States Army, United States Navy, and United States Air Force. Those are capitalized.

Chicago has also chosen to not capitalize God’s pronouns and epithets. I get the idea of not capitalizing these words as a matter of secular style. When they occur in dialog from religious characters, I think capitalization should apply.

If I wind up self-publishing The Gray God, I’ll have the last word on these controversies, at least within the scope of my book.

My editor also informed me that in the interest of inclusivity, words from other languages are no longer set off in italics. There are always trade-offs.

The Package

A clean, polished manuscript is a fine thing to have, but delivering it to an agent or publisher comes after you pitch the book via a query letter. The Gray God needed a short, punchy query letter to intrigue the industry folks, or at least let us all know that the book isn’t what they can risk their time championing before gatekeepers further down the line. Some agents also want to see a short synopsis that lays out the main beats and ending of the story. Spoilers be damned! The manuscript, query letter, synopsis, and author biography form the package of documents you need to have ready before you submit your first query.

The Gray God’s package is complete. It is time.

Artifacts of Agency

September 5, 2018 /

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.

Perfect Pitch

September 1, 2018 /

Short version

There’s no such thing.

Long version

Let’s stipulate the following:

  • You have written a novel-length manuscript.
  • You love the story, its characters, and its theme(s).
  • Your beta readers enjoyed reading the early drafts.
  • Your manuscript has benefitted from their feedback.
  • Editing and proofreading have refined it to the point where you’re ready to share it with the world.
  • You are willing to share the fruits of your labor with a publisher in exchange for access to their considerable talents and resources.

That last point means you’re not done writing. For myriad reasons, publishers won’t invest their talents and resources in just any story. It is up to you to convince them that investing time, sweat, and tears in your story will help keep their lights on and put their kids through college. This expectation is absolutely fair. In a world of infinite bandwidth, every publisher would read every manuscript and judge the stories holistically. Ours is not a world of infinite bandwidth. Far from it. Publishers have a very finite amount of time to choose which stories to they want to add to the catalog that they will offer to the millions of potential readers. The 21st Century publishing ecology is inhabited by an astounding number of writers. So many that the publishers have retreated behind a layer of literary agents. The agents filter out the noise of unready, unreadable, and unmarketable manuscripts. They use their industry knowledge to route promising stories to receptive publishing house editors. Before your manuscript is seen by an editor, you must convince an agent to represent it. In our world of finite bandwidth, an agent will not judge your story by reading your manuscript from start to finish. That’s where the additional writing comes in.

In Hollywood, they call it a pitch, as in sales pitch. The pitch may take one of many forms. It may summarize the story. It may highlight the emotional journey. For a character-driven story, the pitch may focus on the fascinating people rather than the plot. It might try to sell the story by comparing to hit movies. “It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!” A key feature of a movie pitch is that it’s much shorter than the actual movie.

The literary world sees itself as more dignified than Hollywood. You don’t pitch a book. That would be vulgar. You ever-so-politely submit a query.

“Would you be interested in representing this story?”

The thing is, the query is essentially a pitch. You have one page to sell the agent on your story and yourself. This may seem brutally arbitrary and capricious, but it is also a rather elegant solution to several problems. The fixed length enables the agent to budget her query reading time reliably. The brevity provides a quick test of the author’s writing skill, not unlike a whiteboard coding problem in a software job interview. Abiding by constraints of the query hints at the writer’s ability and willingness to function within the commercial literary system. The query letter is a lossy compression scheme that folds information beyond “what’s the story about?” into the agent’s input in a digestible format.

There are innumerable books, magazine articles, blog posts, online communities, and services that offer recipes and coaching to help your write a great query letter. By studying the common features of several prominent such sources, I produced what I thought was a worthy query letter. A couple of rounds of revision with an industry professional produced a better take on my original and an alternate query that the pro recommended. I had two viable query letters. At the very least, I could deploy both in a form of A/B testing. Over time, I might learn which, if either, got better results. That was something. Right?

Yes, that was something. Something, but not enough. I researched literary agencies and discovered that that even within a given agency, individual agents might be looking for different things in a query. The query gurus counsel that to be appealing, your query should be seasoned to the taste of the given agent. The actual requirements amount to distinct recipes. In some cases, the recipes are prescriptive enough to cross the threshold from cooking into baking. My two polished queries were a good start, but they are ultimately just raw ingredients.

In Seanworld, queries would be XML documents whose schema encompasses the full range of the publishing industry’s requirements. Authors would populate the document with word count, a short biography, contact information, back cover text, synopses of various lengths, agent-specific text, the manuscript, and whatever other metadata the industry might be interested in. Software on the agent’s end would display only what the agent needed to see to make her decision.

In the real world no such schema exists. Agents operate from personal experience and taste. They set their requirements accordingly. The first step pleasing an audience of readers with your story is pleasing an agent with a bespoke query. Such is the path of traditional publishing that I have set out to explore.

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