The Agent, the Author, and their Passion

I previously wrote about how I am submitting Eugenica to literary agents and so it should come as no surprise to discover that I have had my first rejection; well a few of them actually. Rejection is to be expected in the literary world, it happens to practically everyone including the most successful of writers. Armed with this knowledge and previous experience of submitting by books The War Wolf and For Rapture of Ravens I feel reasonably armoured against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune.

Actually of the very few rejections that I have received for Eugenica most have been concise and in the form a ‘thanks but no thanks’ and a couple have encouraged me to keep on trying. One I received very recently struck me quite forcibly however. I was thanked for making my submission but as the agent had to feel passionate about their work they did not feel that they could take my book on.

Passionate?!

A literary agent has to feel passionate about a book before they take it on? Right. Okay, I understand that feeling passionate about your work generally means that you are in the right job for you. People who feel passionate about what they do generally work harder and longer and go that extra mile. That is a good thing. In fact to have such a literary agent would probably increase the chances of an author’s success – and here comes the inevitable but!

But!

What about the author? What about the passion felt by the writer for their work? In my case it is my passion that drove me to spend over a year researching a contentious subject, dredging up my own experiences of being a subject of medical science, of writing and re-writing and editing and compiling and all the other aspects of writing that most readers do not even know goes on. I feel passionate about the story that is encompassed in Eugenica, that passion is one of the driving forces that has gotten me to the end of the project. It is the same passion that is going to drive me beyond the actual writing when the manuscript is finished, polished and submitted for publishing – probably on Kindle – and I need to start the publicizing of the book. There is still a lot work to be done and then, because I am passionate about what I do, I will start of my next novel.

You may be thinking at this point that I am just having a whinge, just a sorry little complaint about how unfair life is but actually I am not. The literary agent is, to all intents and purposes, a facilitator. They represent the writer to publishers and if they have a reputation then they can secure a publishing contract in most instances. They are necessary because publishers rarely go looking for new authors themselves. They exist to make money by getting authors published with hopefully the same success as enjoyed by J. K. Rowling, who also experienced several rejections in her time. If a literary agent feels passionate about what they are doing then that is good but it is a different kind of passion to that which inspires a writer.

Writing is difficult and good writing even more so. There are hacks and there are authors. The hack writes for money and does not care about what they produce. The author, and here I am dependent upon my own motivations, writes because they have a story to tell. The quality of the end product is important. The response of the reader is important. The feeling of having created something worthwhile is very important. A good author weaves their passion into their story. Many readers can perceive within the text the author’s commitment to what they have written.

When it comes to submitting a manuscript to a literary agent the author’s passion for his work is not required to be demonstrated. What they want is a covering letter giving a brief portrait of the author, a synopsis of the book of varying length between 1 to 2 pages depending on the agent’s whim, and the first 3 chapters.

Now I said that a good author weaves their passion into their story so it might be considered reasonably to expect that it would surface somewhere in the submission material would it not? Well, to a degree. A novel is a big work, on average 70,000 words; Eugenica is approximately 160,000 words. Irrespective of the length a story is not linear, that is, it does not flow at the same pace throughout its telling. There are emotional highs and lows, tension is developed, twists are introduced, characters develop, themes arise, conflicts resolved, ideas explored, and the various strands of the plot woven together for the climactic conclusion. If all this happened in the first 3 chapters then it would be a very short book!

As people we do not express our passion for something in one continuous gushing outpouring of emotion and activity; it would leave us drained very quickly. Similarly an author’s passion for their work is not maintained at a single level throughout the story that they are telling. This is because the book as a finished article cannot possibly contain all of the passion that went into its creation. There is passion also in the more mundane aspects of writing, in the stylesheet, the back-stories of the key characters, the research, the copious notes, the illustrations (something that I do), the workbook that contains key dates, observations, notes, the timeline, the first draft, and so much more flotsam and jetsam, the long hours spent alone, the missed meals and drinks because you are working on a key point or simply so lost in the world that you have created that you do not notice the day passing by. None of this is seen by the literary agent who passionately turns up for work in office hours and then goes home again.

I know that there are practical obstacles to literary agents finding good authors as they are, apparently, swamped by submissions, however, if passion is to be a criteria for the agent taking on a book then should it not also be one for considering the author? Being a reader as well as a writer I know when a book has been written by someone who has a feel for their subject matter. There is a depth to a book that is written by someone who is motivated to inspire a reaction from their reader and a shallowness to a text that was written just for the sake of writing something. Perhaps if a literary agent wants to be passionate about a book before they take it on to sell to publishers they should take the time to discover just how passionate the author is about their work, something that I think cannot be captured in a brief covering letter, an even briefer synopsis and rarely in the first 3 chapters.

Why on Earth Would You Want to Write about Eugenics?

“So what is your next book about?”

“Eugenics.”

“Eugenics, what’s that?”

“Put simply the idea that if you breed good with good you get better.”

“Why on earth would you want to write about that?”

“Good question!”

Eugenics Congress Logo

That is a brief account of a conversation that I had very recently. The person I was talking to repeated a question that several others have already asked me so I thought I might expand upon my reasoning a little. It might be a topic that is going to keep on coming up.

I came across Eugenics as a subject at a young age, I don’t remember exactly when or where but I do remember it being on my mind while I was still at school. Those who follow my blog will know that I was born disabled, that is, I have two congenital conditions. For a eugenicists this situation would be abhorrent, proof that the human species was slipping into an abyss of deformed, weak and deplorable life forms. The great white race of the western world was being brought low by racial impurity and the intercession of compassion that allowed the unfit to survive.

Curiously that is not how Sir Francis Galton, the man who established Eugenics as a ‘science’ in the early 20^th Century saw it. He believed that humanity could be raised to higher level of perfection by a system of controlled human breeding. The logic was very simple, take a man and woman who are both physically fit and intelligent, let them make a baby and the resultant offspring would, in all probability, be superior to the parents.

In support of this principle Galton could turn to Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution and how nature operated to ensure only the survival of the fittest. Gardeners and stock breeders had also known for a long time that there was an irrefutable logic to this principle of ‘good + good = better’, they had been enacting it for millennia to produce better crops and better cattle.

Although the logic of the eugenic principle seemed self-evident the science behind the transmission of human traits from one generation to the next was not. DNA would was confirmed 1956 by Watson and Crick although its existence was first promulgated in 1869. This presented a problem to the ardent eugenicist, they simply did not know how to proceed with their vision of creating a superior human race.

One of the themes of my new book Eugenica is the corruption of a simple idea into something more reprehensible. As Eugenics began to grow as an academic subject, spreading from Britain to America, Germany, and Scandinavia amongst other places, it did so against a social backdrop of a growing awareness of the population of existing disabled people. During World War One it was revealed that 2/5ths of the population that were eligible for conscription were found to be unfit for military service. It was estimated that there were some 16 million citizens of the United Kingdom who could be classes as disabled.

A Royal Commission into condition of the feeble minded reported in 1910 in an alarmist fashion suggesting a growing population such people that was in danger of swamping the healthier people of Britain. The commission’s report was taken seriously by politicians like Winston Churchill and Parliament enacted the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 that put into British Law the terms idiots and imbeciles.

Facing an impasse with the practical problem of implementing a eugenics based breeding plan for the human race, a problem identified by the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the author H. G. Wells as stemming from the social convention of marriage, eugenicists looked instead at what was seen as the menace of those feeble in mind and body.

Eugenics began to advocate for segregation and enforced sterilisation of the disabled. In the state of Indiana in America, and also in Sweden, they got their way. Very quickly the question of breeding a superior human race became one of dealing with the several million inferiors that already existed. This branch of Eugenics is termed ‘Dysgenics’. It is the version that most people today are familiar with because it is the one enacted by the Third Reich in Germany.

It is known but not always mentioned that the early Nazi government actively pursued dysgenic policies against the disabled in Germany. Adolf Hitler himself signed an order for a program called ‘Action T4’ that saw enforced euthanasia used to kill over 100,000 disabled German citizens. Many of the techniques used later at places like Auschwitz were originated and refined in the Action T4 program.

I doubt very much that Sir Francis Galton would have approved of dysgenics. He was not at heart an evil man, although some social commentators have since presented him as such. In fact Galton was a polymath, a genius, who made significant contributions in the fields of statistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography, meteorology; he even devised a method of classifying finger-pints. Galton was a Victorian visionary who wanted to improve the world and his early theories on Eugenics were very much in that mould. The science of the time, however, fell very much short of that required to either support or refute his theory of Eugenics.

There is something appealing in the notion of a man and woman combining to produce a child who would be both physically and mentally superior to their parents. The notion that such a child would be free of illness of any kind is one that a parent can readily identify but we know now that genetics does not work that way. The capacity for genetic mutation is at the heart of evolution and adaptability. Every generation contains within it a countless number of mutations of the inherited DNA code. The vast majority of these mutations prove ineffective; they do not do anything. Some prove detrimental, giving rise to physical deformity and mental impairment. A few more prove very useful giving us singers, artists, geniuses. This is what early eugenicists did not know and lacking this information they could not defend their simple principle against the rise of the dysgenic interpretation.

Eugenics began with the best intentions but, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and so it was proved.

Writing About Disability isn’t Pretty is it?

Having just started submitting my manuscript for Eugenica to literary agents I received a comment that made me ponder the wisdom of having four main characters all of whom are disabled; disability is not attractive!

I agree, it is not. And the fact is that some people have a problem in dealing with disabled people. In fact I used to work with someone who told me that they had a problem with disabled people, I informed them that they were right; they did have a problem! I do not have such a problem but then I am a disabled person myself so that would be pretty counterproductive anyway.

Long John Silver

Curiously literature is not bereft of characters that have some form of disability; in fact there are legions of them. Captain Long John Silver was a rogue who never let having only one leg get in his way. He is the sort of character that I like, a bit of a good guy and a bit of a rascal. He is objectionable in many ways but he has his redeeming features, unlike Shakespeare’s Richard the Third who is just all bitter and twisted, his bile being occasioned by the fictional hump and limp the Bard inflicted upon him.

Of course Richard is not alone, there is Captain Ahab also. Here is a man so bitter about being left disabled by a creature that he was trying to kill, the temerity of the whale to fight back, that he committed everything to gaining his revenge on Moby Dick. I was quite glad that the white whale won that encounter actually.

Capt Ahab

Then there are the Tiny Tim type characters. I really do not like them. Simpering, pitiable and pathetic. They are no more convincing than Shakespeare’s King Richard. I know, there are such people in the real world but I do not find them interesting. Besides, the truth is that even disabled people are more complex than that.

Disability is not the issue it is just the first impression. Inevitably when a reader begins to read Eugenica they are going to come upon my characters as disabled young people. This is inevitable because that is what they are but it is not the sum total of everything that they are. As the story progresses more and more of the characters is revealed, their hopes, fears, outlooks on life, abilities and also how they cope with being what they are; both able and disabled.

Antony Sher as Richard III

Let me illustrate them for you briefly. Grace has a missing left hand and right leg due to suffering a form of limb reduction whilst developing as a foetus. She has lived largely in isolation and is self-reliant as a result. Thomas is blind and black, a double burden for living in 1930’s Britain. He is also kind, brave and a gifted musician. Mary has Turner Syndrome but colours every day with a love of life expressed through singing, dancing and acting. Hector is losing the use of his legs but is a voracious consumer of knowledge. Neither of them has an ability that balances out their disability, all of them have abilities, just like everyone else, and a pronounced disability as well, unlike most other people.

It is somewhat saddening to learn that there will be those people who will look at the synopsis of Eugenica and discount it immediately because it has disabled people in it. Yes, disappointing, but not surprising. People do not limit their prejudices just to their choice of reading material after all. I have been on the receiving end of such prejudice many times in my life and I accept that it is part of the human condition. It is not an enviable trait and it can be challenged but it is there all the same.

Tiny Tim

If I have been successful in writing Eugenica then the reader should finish it thinking of Grace, Tom, Mary and Hector not as disabled people first but rather as admirable people who have disabilities. That is definitely one of my objectives in writing the book. How successful I have been will only be known later and that will depend upon how many people get to the end of Chapter One and choose to keep on reading.