Publishing Hell Career Choice: Agent or Editor?

I’m not sure why people are attracted to work as an agent or editor. I understand even less why they’d make fiction the focus of their work. The last few years a number of critique sites have popped up on the web, giving fiction writers a chance to read and comment on each others work. I’ve been to many of them and read hundreds of submissions. (Most sites require that you critique to get critiqued) I had the opportunity(?) to dig down through the endless layers of a slush-pile. After this experience, I have a great deal more sympathy for agents and editors. Fact is, almost all of what I read sucked.

And I don’t mean sucked in a way that needed work. I don’t mean sucked such that the work was salvageable with a good editing pass. I certainly don’t mean sucked because I didn’t like the style or theme. I mean sucked like I couldn’t get past the first paragraph, or often the first line. Sentences organized like a cat parade. Word choices so bad they rank right down there with my selection of girlfriends. Subject matter ranging from trite to cliché to pathetic cry for therapy.

One of the first bits of advice given to aspiring fiction writers is to read great fiction. Lots of it. Most of us writers were doing that long before the notion that we too could write occurred to us. The idea is that the craft can, in large part, be absorbed from other good writers. I accepted this premise without question. Then I read hundreds, perhaps thousands of attempts to emulate great writers by the much less talented. I now add a codicil to that well-worn advice: a new writer can lean a great deal from reading great writers, given that the new writer has talent to begin with.

I played high school football and I have watched a lot of professional football in my time. No amount of passionate observation or attention to the details of the game at a high level made me faster. And fast is a fact of pro football. You cannot learn speed. You can improve what nature gave you a little, but slow is slow and can’t be fixed. Similarly, if you possess no native facility for the use of language, and more important, a natural feel for story, no number of great books, no amount of instruction will make you a great fiction writer. I’m not even sure it can make you serviceable.

I now see how the slightest stumble in the first few lines of a manuscript can get it round-filed by an agent or editor. After reading so many painfully bad first pages, day after day after day, like marking off the days of a long stretch in Alcatraz, an agent’s or editor’s patience has not worn thin; patience is no longer a functioning part of their personality. Patience has been replaced by a very low tolerance for pain. They can see the pain coming on page one and it is too easy to avoid it with a simple flick of the wrist. No wonder there is such a high turnover in the business. I’m not sure I could ever read again after a year of slush-pile torture.

I have stumbled across a notable new talent once or twice. I bumped into Earl Carlson’s work on Author Nation. His voice is unique and cynically humorous, his “heroes” an uncommon slice of the most common around us. He is a joy to read and I feel certain that, if he perseveres, he will be noticed by one of those unfortunate, suffering wretches who parlayed an English degree and youthful passion for literature into an underpaid and unglamorous career as a literary agent or editor.

Selling Me

I had my first reading and book signing at a friend’s bookstore Saturday night. It reminded me of asking a woman far out of my league for a date. Though the audience was made up of friends and acquaintances, I still mingled nervously, not sure what to do with my hands, fearing the moment I must speak.

The proprietor had set up the reading like a book discussion group, participants in a circle of folding chairs. More people showed up than she anticipated. The intended circle instead became an amoeba, adapting its shape to the confines of the room. Though many had read the novel and liked it, I was still unsure of their approval, still unsteady as I sat to read. I wondered if I could get used to this kind of public exposure in the name of selling something. That’s why publishing houses have marketing departments. I think most writers are like me, in that they couldn’t sell shoes to a barefoot man walking a broken glass highway.

I have always resented the easy self-promoters our society breeds, scurrying like tweeking roaches from one all-about-me marketing opportunity to the next. They can talk about themselves and what they have accomplished without compunction or, in my experience, cessation. The personality they have likely manufactured in their promotional efforts, soaks in from the outside, eventually permeating their character and seeming to expunge any attractive human qualities they may have possessed. (This is why regular people are naturally repelled by the common sales personality) Truly disheartening for me is that this works for them. They are relentless and they succeed. They become the top executives who lean on smarter underlings, the homely jerks who date supermodels, the less talented actors who become stars, the authors who sell a persona more vibrant and compelling than the book they wrote. Some compensation for the rest of us is they may also join that sorry parade of human wreckage whose perp walks, public meltdowns, DUI mug shots and serial relationship disasters becoming fodder for celebrity obsessed media.

I wrote a good novel. Not great, but good. I want people to read it and I think they would like it, some very much so. That I must pimp myself on its behalf is so out of character for me that I feel ridiculous and self absorbed telling people about the book. Some of that is my ingrained low self esteem, part of it the training from working class parents and relatives of a generation ago, people who did without demanding credit, who accomplished fine things without boasting. To draw attention to yourself was a minor sin and the worst thing you could be was a braggart.

But unless I go out and tell people I wrote a book, and act as if I believe it is a good book, no one but a tiny publisher and my editor will know. So I will go out and sell me if that what it takes to sell the book. I’m not very good at selling me, but, at least for a while, that will be my job. I only hope I don’t get too good at it.