You’d have thought for an habitual egotist it would be easy.
I have to tell someone I’ve never met, and most certainly never will if I don’t get it right, not only why I’m so great but also why I’ve done what I’ve done, why no one else could have done it as well as I have, and who I think should want to know it.
I am of course talking about application letters to Literary Agents.
Having worked for two in my time, I’d been up until now coasting on a conceit that I knew the right path to take. I knew not to be overly familiar (having encountered several agents putting applications in the NO pile simply for greeting them by their first name), whilst not blur into the background through formality, sinking ever more under big words and bland paragraphs. I knew you had, on average, no more than about five seconds to grab someone’s attention. In short, I knew what not to do.
As you might have anticipated, this left the opportunity open yet again in my life for missing the bleeding obvious. Having collected between five and ten points on what not to do, I had entirely neglected finding out what to do.
An example – genre. Every self-help guide out there to getting published tells you to inform your prospective agent immediately in your preliminary letter in what genre your tale takes place. “If you don’t know what your genre is,” one particular guide says, “then you probably shouldn’t be writing full stop.”
Pardon?
Does life really work like this? Can every human lifetime – all its experiences, its pains, its joys, its profound moments of lucid clarity be conveniently shoved into one easily labeled box? Where does this assumption that you can succinctly define what “genre” your novel fits into come from? Any explanation that begins with “Well it’s a little bit of…” earns your letter a star place in the wastepaper bin. Maybe I’m naive, but if fiction doesn’t follow the formula of a detective novel or plod of a Mills & Boon romance then I really don’t think it’s that easy to just pluck onto it whatever badge the industry will want it to wear. How would Virginia Woolf have defined Mrs Dalloway? Or George Orwell 1984? Is there a one word / one bracket genre for novels like that? Art imitating life has just as many shades if it’s well crafted. Surely?
Another example – audience. “Tell the agent who your book is aimed at.” I find this suggestion a fantastic example of how much an industry, and not an art, writing is now. It’s insane. It’s the kind of thing asked by someone who would also ask “what do you write about?” when you tell them what you do. There’s a waspish urge to respond to this point with a comment somewhere between “I would aim this book at anyone with eyes (or just one) capable of reading (or being read to) and not too fussed about the absence of pictures,” and “This book is aimed at middle-aged divorcee paraplegic black Jewish lesbians who can only read between Yoga lessons and whilst whistling the theme tune to Strike It Lucky.” Any such comment is of course another one way ticket to Binville. Never be humourous. God, don’t be humourous.
You only get the one chance to irritate an agent.
So this is me, right now – terrified of putting so much as a cadence in the wrong place and desperately trying to powder my little creation into a lusty looking whore that my masters could not refuse (not that I’m saying agents all sleep with prostitutes… oh no,
And boy does it look odd.
In fact it looks totally and utterly loopy.
I know anything reduced to its base often does, but I’ll be lucky if they’re not phoning nut houses rather than publishers when they read my proposal.
If they read my proposal.
Oh, sweet Muses, please let them read my proposal…
