There
are guidelines as to what I, and agents like me who handle a lot of
commercial novels, want to find.
When
I receive sample material from a potential new author, I look for
evidence that I am dealing with a writer - someone who
believes in their material and writes with a sense of conviction.
An obvious point, you might think - but too many writers write with
tongue in cheek, or think that a gimmicky plot is all that matters.
Also, I want to represent writers who are planning a career in
writing. I never take on one-off clients.
I
look for the writer's ability to involve me quickly in the characters,
the atmosphere and the storyline. Good storytelling encourages the
reader to relax into it.
In
the first few pages, I look for the ability to handle material in a
way that suggests the writer could carry off a whole novel and is in
charge of the characters and the backcloth. I want to find evidence
that the writer has confidence and can handle emotion and pace. I need
to see that the characters develop realistically within the course of
the story. Characters who suddenly change direction and attitude are
seldom believable. The storyline has to be set up in a way that makes
their actions wholly credible.
I
look for the ability to develop the plot in a way that doesn't raise
question marks every few scenes.
For example, alarm bells are
always set off for me by coincidence. Coincidence at an important
point in the story always feels like laziness on the part of the
writer. The writer risks that the reader will feel cheated. It's
obviously more difficult to construct a plot that twists and turns in
ways that reflect the characterization and the world that the writer
has already set up, but it's much more satisfying in the long-term. No
good plot should rely on coincidence. Small ones can sometimes be
justified. Big ones, never, even though I accept that coincidence
happens often in real life. Fiction has to be better than real
life. In life one thing happens after another; in drama one thing
happens because of another.
Getting
readers emotionally involved in your characters is perhaps the most
important single aspect of writing commercial fiction today.
Creating a tight structure, finding a subject or theme that is
relevant: these are vital.
I
have a mental checklist when looking at potential new clients. It is
concerned with broader issues than just to have strong convictions but
also criticism.
I
want my clients to be commercially minded: writing only for
yourself and your favourite aunt is all very well, but I need my
authors to be read by large audiences. I don't want to work with
people who are too precious. I look for authors who are talented but
also have a businesslike and professional attitude to the business in
which they - and I - ply their talents.
Novelists
must be able to control and manipulate that magical triangle: the
relationship between writer and character, writer and reader, and
reader and character. Of the three, the most important is the last:
the relationship between reader and character. If you forget any part
of that triangle you will have an unsuccessful novel on your hands.
Manage the triangle well and you may
be
able to produce a novel that will be successful.
Like
most professions, the craft can be learned. And it must
be
learned. Some are born with talent. If you have it then you can
succeed
if you are willing to apply yourself to the craft. It is possible for
writers with a little talent to get published if they apply themselves
to learning their craft, but this will usually only work for strict
genres with fans who are voracious readers. Genres such as romance and
police procedural can produce examples of mediocre books with a
limited shelf life, which find an audience because that genre itself
has such a large and enthusiastic audience.
Careful
reading of an author's work sometimes leads me to the conclusion that
they can write but are perhaps writing the wrong kind of book. One
of my clients spent nine months working with me on three drafts of
some early chapters of her first book. With each draft it got better,
technically, but I liked it less. Eventually I told her I thought she
was writing the wrong book because, as I said earlier, she didn't like
her characters enough to make me, the reader, like them. It became a
heated discussion and I thought our relationship was over before it
had properly begun. Some months later she delivered to me a short -
and stunning - outline for a novel that got me excited the moment I
read it. It became the international bestseller Having
It All by
Maeve Haran. The first novel wasn't working because Maeve was trying
to write something that she thought the market wanted but which her
heart wasn't in. When she wrote about a subject that she was
personally passionate about (babies and the boardroom - the uneven
playing field that mothers in business have to contend with) then the
characters and the story came alive. This is how that novel, which is
now translated into more than twenty languages, had its gestation.
Don't
despair. Although we reject most of the 5,000
unsolicited
submissions we receive a year - many because they show little or no
talent, many because they pay no attention to the market at all - we
have also had first novels high in the bestseller lists that I found
in our 'slush pile'. This term, by the way, is widely used in
publishing circles to mean the piles and piles of unsolicited,
unasked-for manuscripts that arrive in the offices of agents and
publishers every working day of the year. It wasn't coined by me, it
has been in use for at least fifty years and it isn't intended to be
derogatory, merely descriptive!
Your
preparation for publication should start as soon as you decide you are
going to write fiction.
The advice in this chapter is intended to
help you identify those ingredients that could help your novel to
sell, and those that would definitely hinder its potential
publication. Time spent thinking about the subjects covered here
will be time well spent.
