My critique group and I put together a list of query tips to help people write successful query letters. Share as you see fit. Thank you to everyone who contributed help!

 

Behold the rabbit-chewed, decapitated tulip of my persistence.

I’m sure there are writers who write their first book, get an agent, and publish in short order. Their first novel is a market-friendly blockbuster and they make all the money. They’re probably lovely people with glowing reviews. This post is not for them. This post is for the writers who struggle, who get rejected and keep writing. While I’m sure that dreamy, gifted, lucky writer exists, for most of us, it’s a hell of a lot of work, and a longer road, than we’d like.

Gardening is also work, but it’s not my passion. I have some passion for it. I inherited it from my grandmother, whose legendary green thumb would have made her tsk at the current state of my yard. My grandmother grew every color of flower you can imagine, and I suspect it was quite hard, the work she set herself to. You never really saw that. You saw the colorful blooms she brought to her dining room table, the wood polished to a waxy thickness that a cup of hot coffee would sink into. My grandmother was something of a domestic perfectionist. She weeded clutter with the same focus she used on her plots. She wrote poetry in her youth, but writing was not her passion.

When I first bought my little house, I planted everything. I wanted to remember my grandmother. I bought bulbs and trees. I weeded. I hoped for fruit, for berries, for fresh vegetables. I wanted to recapture some aspect of an idyllic rural childhood that let’s face it, wasn’t so great when I look back. I realized that horses are assholes (another post), and that gardening isn’t just a lot of work, it’s also a major time sink, and so it had to go.
The Tulip of Persistence is a relic of that time. Tulips are pretty easy. Even I, with too little free time and less inclination, shouldn’t be able to screw up tulips. Step one: plant the bulb (right end down, not the pointy end). Step two: apply water with some degree of regular frequency. Step three: wait for it to naturalize. Step four: rabbits eat the damn thing.

Every freaking year. I don’t even remember what color that tulip is supposed to be. I planted it four years ago. Each spring it makes a valiant, tulipy effort. It sprouts, tries to bloom, gets really close, and then, just when the head is forming, and the bloom is near open, the rabbits decapitate it. I don’t even think they find tulips appetizing. They’re just toying with my little writer mind.

I’ve tried several solutions to this issue. I’ve applied pepper and cayenne, cat pee, human pee – all things that should tell the rabbits this tulip is not their friend. Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s the squirrels. Squirrels do not give a shit.

Yet, about six feet away, tulips are blooming. See here’s the thing, I want the Tulip of Persistence to make it. It’s sort of my first love, the first bulb I planted in my little urban wasteland. And maybe some year it will happen. It keeps trying. It sends up leaves. It forms its bloom. It gets its head taken off. But maybe it’s taking one for the team, because while it lives and dies its rabbity death, around it, my other bulbs are blooming.
Which brings this ham-handed analogy back to writing.

Step one: Plant more than one bulb. Have more than one book. Don’t write one book, try to publish it, and put your efforts aside. The lovely, prolific, and amazing author Cecy Robson told me to always be thinking two books ahead, and that advice has made a huge difference in my perspective. As soon as your book leaves your hands, get to work on the next one. Be so consumed with focus and love for the next work that the rejections don’t hurt so hard.

Step two: Nourish your work. Strive to improve your craft. The best way to improve your writing is through practice, and make that practice focused. Add a little bio-diversity. Try other genres, try other points of view. Keep striving to improve your prose, your plotting, your writing – all of it. Use new techniques, new tropes. Stretch yourself.

Step three: Naturalize through practice. The more you write, the better you’ll write, but also, the faster you’ll write. I used to think 2,000 words a day would never be my thing. I am easily at that pace now and still picking up speed. I’m getting faster, and better, at it.

Step four: Keep writing. You can’t control the rabbits or squirrels. Rejection is often going to be beyond your control. I know I talk about this a lot, and that’s because there’s just no other way. Writing one book, submitting, then laying down to die if it doesn’t publish isn’t going to get you there. Even if that first book is perfect and beautiful and awesome, which it probably isn’t, it may not make it. This industry takes a lot of right timing and luck. Every book you get to market, get on submission, is one more ticket to the lottery. You can’t win if you don’t keep playing.

Keep writing. Persist. Thrive.

It’s a heavy editing day, which has me thinking about process. A friend just got an edit letter and wanted advice on how to work with one. My process, whether it comes from my independent editor or my agent is the same:

1. Read the letter several times and check any defensiveness at the door. I want to make sure I understand everything in the letter. If I don’t, I call or email the editor/agent to get clarity on those items. (I do not call or email to defend the book or say I won’t make changes).
2. Copy the letter into a new document. Take out the introductory and concluding praise paragraphs (most of us are taught to deliver critique in this way so the author doesn’t think it’s all bad.) Frankly, I do this to isolate the meat of the critique, the stuff that needs changing.
3. Break each change into a numbered line, creating a task list.
4. Check all of the changes and make sure I agree with them all. I usually do. My agent and I have great communication and I trust him. The independent editor I use, Sara J. Henry, is also someone I highly trust, so I usually don’t need to defend anything. If I do however find a change I disagree with, I write a few sentences for that task why I reject the change. (Again, I check any defensiveness). I’ll revisit this a few times before I say no to a change. I often find the change isn’t what’s needed: it’s there to solve a particular problem and I can generally find a solution that doesn’t require that specific solution/change.
5. For the remaining tasks, I sort them into quick changes (character renaming, small tweaks, etc.), and larger tasks. For example, in my last letter, there was an item related to a character’s description. That’s an easy change. There was also a larger change to really intensify the emotional impact of a relationship. That’s a big change. The larger changes usually are going to require a dead tree edit (print and line by line), so if I do the small ones first I can print with the new changes in.
6. I take out the little stuff first. This is a trick I learned in software development: solving small problems sometimes helps shake loose the larger problems. In my case, it gives my subconscious time to find solutions to the big problems.
7. Before I do the big stuff, I print the book. Always I do this double space, in a new font.
8. Then I read. From the beginning. I may not need to make changes until later, but I want to make sure I’m tuned to the book’s tone and voice before I start making alterations to deeper structure. This also helps me find any typos, missing words, punctuation, etc. I’m always surprised how clean a text can be and still I find something. If I’m tracking something like a relationship, I’ll put a post-it on every page that deals with that item, using different colors for different items. I’ll also leave notes for myself post-its.* This process looks like a lot my usual draft editing process.
9. Then I make the big changes, on paper. If a lot of writing or rewriting is required I switch back to the computer, but I’m mostly still killing trees at this point.
10. Then I put the changes into the electronic version.**

*I keep a backlog of other issues I spot that I’ll tackle later. I always try to do one task at a time.

**I use Word, yeah, yeah, I know about Scrivener. I just prefer Word for track changes.

Warning, this is going to have some Television spoilers for Shadowhunters, and a bit for Buffy, but let’s face it, you should have watched Buffy by now.


Shadowhunters aired their twelfth episode this week, and it brought conclusion to the almost season long plot of whether or not Alec and Magnus would get together. The scene was perfectly executed: Alec, at the altar, walks away from his bride, Lydia (whose method of handling it was so genuine and amazing I almost teared up over that). He finally acts on his attraction to Magnus, something he’s been resisting from the moment they met.

I’ve been re-watching the scene and trying to isolate why it works so well. The best answer I’ve come up with is emotion. Alex is a repressed character, unable to admit his attraction to Magnus or deal with his feelings for Jace. When he finally breaks, it resonates. Magnus is much easier to identify: he’s a scene-stealing character in the Mortal Instruments books and the television series. The writers seem to have wisely realized this and found more ways to put him on screen.

Trying to decide why the scene is so successful, I’ve compared it to another television scene that has stuck with me: the episode in Buffy season five when Willow takes revenge on Glory for hurting Tara. This is a Dark Phoenix scene, when a character’s pain and anger takes their power to a new level. Willow mounts up and unleashes a magical assault on Glory, but unfortunately fails (though she comes closer than any other attack thus far). The scene starts with a declaration of “I owe you pain,” and sets the tone for Willow’s attack.

Both of these scenes evoke emotion in the viewer, and they both involve love. In Alec’s case, it’s the payoff to a long simmering tension. In Willow’s scene, it’s the realization of her growing power. She finally comes into her own as a witch. They work so well, compel the viewer so much, because the emotion matches the intensity of the payoff. If Alec didn’t kiss or punch Magnus when he reached the end of the aisle, the tension would have dried up and left the viewer feeling let down. If Willow hadn’t shown the ability to challenge Glory, and shown herself to be ineffectual against her, the result would have left the viewer feeling cheated.

When we write scenes, we need to make certain the pivotal scenes carry the right weight, have the right pay off. Not every scene can be that bombastic, that’s where pacing comes in. If every scene is that large, you threaten the reader with exhaustion.

The only friend I kept from high school died today. She was an inspiration, someone who dedicated her career to the fight against domestic abuse. She lived doing what she was meant to, what mattered. It breaks my heart that she’s gone.

I was thinking today how annoying I found it for people to talk about Alan Rickman not being in a movie until he was 42, about how he should never have succeeded because he started that career so late—that your life is supposedly over at middle age. And as annoying as that is, they have a point. Jennifer was 42. My age.

What does this have to do with writing? It’s a wakeup call. People often tell me they’d like to write a book, to do that work. Worse, I know gifted writers who don’t write. They feel called to, but they’re distracted by life, something we can all relate to.

While I disagree completely that you can ever be too old to write, our lives are limited. I finished two books last year, got 30,000 words into another, and got an agent. Still I feel that sense of a ticking clock. Having reached what Arundhati Roy called “a viable, die-able age,” in the God of Small Things, I find I have less and less time for pointless conflicts or fear. There are days when I look at the news, at the political landscape, and wonder if the world holds anything else before I remember that I can’t do very much about that. What I can control is my writing. I can work every day, and it is work, to achieve what I want in my craft and career.

Writing takes an immense amount of time: hours of plotting, brute force hammering, and gentle wordsmithing. It takes pushing yourself to learn two completely disparate skillsets: the craft itself and the networking/publishing side. You have to develop dragon thick skin to deal with rejection, get knocked down by disappointment, and get your ass back on your feet to push on. So why do it? Because when it works, it feels like nothing else. For me, it feels like I’m doing the thing I’m meant to, the work I rise to, the first and foremost point of why I’m here.

Maybe writing is not your purpose, your driving passion, but whatever that thing is that you’ve been putting off, the book you want to write or the life you feel you’re meant to live, the good you want to do, or the change you’ve been needing to make? Go do that now.

“You have your whole life to do something, and that’s not very long.” – Ani diFranco

Productions of Shakespeare’s histories rely strongly on the casting and staging, far more I think than the comedies. The source material is denser, drier, and often requires that the actors convey a wealth of information to the audience about past or off screen events. While the casts are often small, each actor usually portrays several characters, so it requires much more focus on the part of the audience to keep track of events. I’m sure someone, somewhere tried Game of Thrones style sexposition – putting graphic acts on stage to distract from the dull but necessary context, but it’s not the usual option. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has just concluded the Henriad: the plays concerning the reign of Henry IV and the rise of Henry V. They pulled it off with a strong style that shows an increasing dedication to production values, especially in stage combat and cultivating talent.

While Shakespeare worked to convey history (and as a historian it’s incredibly fun to compare his version to what we know or think from our point in time), he knew his audience would not stand for a dry recitation of kings and their accomplishments. As with much of his work, the histories come alive in the secondary characters, the side stories and counter stories.

Most of the histories hold more than a little darkness: rebellion, regret, murder, or loss. Shakespeare must always walk a line between irreverence and displaying the rulers’ humanity. Take King John, who contemplates killing the young prince who may one day supplant him, only to change his mind. The boy falls to his death during an escape attempt. Was this history or a fabrication to protect the notion of kings as divine and noble? The line of pure evil is skirted but rarely passed (Richard III being the most notable exception). The Henriad has its own sways between good and darkness. Rebels and villains rail, fight, lose and keep fighting. Treachery abounds. More than one noble hero, or prince, falls.

The Henriad focuses its side stories on Falstaff and his cronies, strengthening the story and making it more human since we’re given the regal side of the war beside the common. Falstaff and his clowns reflect the larger story in microcosm but in a funhouse mirror way that helps to understand the weight of the events through a comical and base reflection. The impact of their slackened duty has a real effect, helping to show the weight of Prince Hal’s own wasted time.

Henry V, portrayed throughout the cycle in the Colorado festival the last two years by the same actor (as Falstaff was in 2014), is a complex man. Torn between duty and the desire to enjoy his youth, Shakespeare made a great effort to show Henry’s complexity as he moves from Prince Hal to king. Bit by bit he rejects youthful folly, sometimes with two steps forward and then one step back, to become a conquering king whose rousing speeches (in Henry V) are some of the most quoted in Shakespeare.

I’ve been attending plays in Boulder for some time and lately the company seems to have taken a strong step forward in quality. The players are talented and the direction strong. I’m anxious to finish out the canon in the next few years and see where Boulder goes with the remaining plays on my list.

 

Shakespeare is one of those traditions I struggle with. As a Literature major, I see the inherit value in the plays, in their study, and I can always return to the themes he worked in. At the same time, those themes are problematic when you consider the mores of the characters against modern sensibility.

The romances are my favorites as they walk the line between tragedy and comedy. By design, they’re more complicated. I never tire of a Midsummer’s Night Dream or the Tempest, but this weekend I got the chance to see Pericles at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and it bore the same level of consideration as the others.

First, let me say that I’ve never read Pericles. My professors were just obsessed with Hamlet and King Lear. I think I wrote ten papers on each of those before I graduated. They’re also clear masterworks, there’s no denying that. My relationship to the comedies is also clear: they lend themselves to modern interpretation. The romances though deal with heavy themes.

The OSF playbill gave me some context: that Pericles was immensely popular in Shakespeare’s time, so much so that it was chosen to be the play they reopened with when the Puritans lost their sway. Pericles becomes difficult when you look at it through the modern lens: a daughter is bargained, a woman turns to villainy for petty jealousy, and a near rapist is forgiven without punishment and even rewarded for this “honorable” turn. In this, and in the deus ex machine turn at the end, Pericles is an immensely Greek play and Shakespeare shows his classical leanings.

Yet the story remains compelling, and it does prove less male centric when the focus turns from Pericles himself to his daughter, Marina. In both heroes, there’s an emphasis on their virtue, that by the nature of their natural goodness, they can overcome the terrors the gods have allowed to occur.

The relationship of the gods to the play is one I could ponder for hours: though oft invoked, their intervention is scant and delayed, almost as though they mean to say “Sorry about those twenty years. We were busy.” In this there is also some of what you find in Much Ado about Nothing’s emphasis on the purity of women in that it’s Diana, virgin goddess, who intervenes (and perhaps Her intervention might have differed had Marina now remained chaste).

Regarding the production itself, Ashland always excels. The stage work in Pericles was simple and yet incredible, especially a scene where a pull stage of silk is whisked away to leave the hero shipwrecked. A swaying platform, used to mimic a ship’s pitch and yaw was utilized to great effect, particularly when used to demonstrate Diana’s temple statue, requiring the actress to balance, unmoving for the entire scene.

Pericles itself is a balancing act. It could be played for tragedy or comedy and it would be very easy for the production to sway every way. Ashland did right by it, though as with any of the romances, I’ll need several more viewings to feel like I’ve truly understand it which for me, is what makes it timeless.