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.

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.

If Honesty is the Best Policy What About the Stinker?

I like writing reviews. I write them about movies that I have seen, hotels that I have stayed at, restaurants that I have eaten in and books that I have read. Now I studied English Literature at college and as a result I learnt the art of constructive criticism, so when I write a review I employ the tools that I acquired from that course.

The approach to review depends on what the subject matter is. People want to know what the ambience of a restaurant is as well as what fare is on the menu or how what kind of movie is it for example. With a book I think that most prospective readers want to know if it is well written. It is a curious thing but many readers seem to hate giving up on a book; I know I do. The review really has to consider this requirement and to be honest in most cases I probably would say that even with certain limitations the majority of books can be completed without too much arduous work on the part of the reader.

I wrote a review of Nick Smith’s ‘Gentleman of Fortune’, a book about pirates based in Whitby, North Yorkshire. It had an interesting tale with some great accounts of sea battles, better even than those of Patrick O’Brian of ‘master and Commander’ fame. It also had its problems in that the central character was supposed to be something of a loveable rogue but actually he possessed very few redeeming qualities. I saw this as something of a failing on the author’s part simply because after Jacob Hollum commits a rather reprehensible crime it was difficult to care about what happened to him. I actually started to dislike him but he was supposed to be the central protagonist.

Honesty has to be a part of writing such a review. The story was quite good, certainly enjoyable, and I made that point clear but balanced it with the failing of the main character. It was, I think, a fair point.

There is another write that I came across on the internet and they quite impressed me with the fact that they had written a short novel when they were younger and it had won a prize. I eventually bought a Kindle version and looked forward to writing a review about it.

The book was what Stephen Fry refers to as a ‘stinker’!

Now Stephen Fry is a man whom I much admire. He did a spell as a literary critic amongst his many other employments and he said that he quite enjoyed it until some publisher or agent forwarded him a copy of a book that he simply could not write a constructive criticism about; it was that bad! He did think about simply putting out a complete diatribe against the author but then stopped. It occurred to him that the writer was another human being and did he really have the right to attack them over a piece of work that might well be forgotten in a day or two? Besides that, where was the input from the editor, the agent, and the publisher? Shouldn’t these ‘professionals’ have interceded at some point before the book was submitted to a critic. Finally he decided not to write anything at all and gave up being a critic.

I understand this point of view. We authors invest a lot of time and energy in writing a book, whether it is good or not. Hopefully someone along the way has the courage to say that it is good enough to continue working on along the way, certainly before it gets into the hands of a critic. At least that is how it should be if you are going down the traditional publishing route but it is slightly different for independent authors.

We independent authors have to be out own worse critics. We really have to possess enough honesty and integrity that we can stand back and look at our own work and give a brutally honest appraisal. We have to do this because in many instances there is no one else to take on this role because we are independent and most of us do not know a skilled editor or cannot afford their services.

Now I could take a harsher stance on this and say that people who put out sub-standard material get all that they deserve but then I do not believe that. I do not agree with the ‘X-Factor’ show type approach to humiliating people and destroying their dreams. Being cruel is an act of weakness. The fact is that when someone writes a bad book, a stinker for example, the worse they have done is just that; presented something that is not up scratch. They have not killed anyone, swindled pensioners, lied in public office, or hurt anyone else in any way imaginable. They wrote a poor book. It is not a crime.

That then is my position but I now face the same ethical problem that dissuaded Stephen Fry from pursuing a career in literary criticism; what do you do about the stinker? After all, the book is being put out there for people to buy and invest a small portion of their lives in reading it; doesn’t it deserve some kind of response? Yes it does but the problem is balancing the integrity of constructive criticism with a consideration of the author’s genuine intent.

I have not found the answer yet. The book is still there in my Kindle library, the memory is still in my mind, and there’s this annoying itch that I cannot quite scratch. I should do something, I know, but it just seems beyond me at the moment. A part of me wants to believe that it is just not worth the effort because it was after all only a book, but the author in me wants to make a stance because I do not want prospective readers to think that the ‘stinker’ is representative of the quality of work put out by independent authors.

When I make a decision I’ll let you know!