Space

What I crave more than anything is space. Not just a room or a desk, but mental and emotional space that I can claim as my own, so that my imagination, which has been squeezed into a corner to make room for teaching, socializing, and chores, can expand, and I can write. My partner Jeff Herrity, who Marisha mentioned in “Help from Home," understands this about me, almost intuitively.

From the beginning, I wasn’t a convenient child, and my family let me know it. I didn’t like the things the other boys liked. I wanted to dream and make believe and run as fast as I could from anything that resembled a football or basketball. My mother and my two older brothers struggled with me for a while, hoping I would straighten out and want what they all wanted for me—business school, a six-figure income, a house in the burbs—but then, either exhausted with me or distracted by their own lives, they left me alone, which was the wisest thing they could've done.

Unlike my family, as well meaning as they were, Jeff doesn’t make me struggle to find space. He grants it freely. We both have been in relationships which such freedom wasn’t easy to come by, so we understand each other's need for it.

Jeff has supported me in other ways as well. Drawing on his fifteen years of Internet marketing experience, he has urged me out of my comfort zone and has inspired me to increase my visibility as a writer. As a result, I’ve met new people; I blog as often as I can (not often enough, according to Jeff); and with his good design sense, we created a website affordably—a feat that even impressed my family!

Of course, we have our moments. Sometimes, Jeff pushes me to post on my blog or do marketing homework when I feel my energy would be best spent on my manuscript. If he didn’t nudge me, though, I would use my writing as an excuse to avoid the discomfort of viewing my work as a commodity.

But he tolerates this resistance, because he’s patient and has the wisdom to know when to push me and make me grow, and when to give me the space I need to write.

Help from Home

My late father, the Shakespeare professor, aspired to be a fiction writer but never got the work done, busy as he was getting after my mother about us, his six lively children, whom he saw as insufficiently respectful and otherwise being poorly raised by slothful her. In my high school years, he had his own writing studio, separate from the house, and even then, he called my mother down there to be talked to, sometimes for hours. He did this rather than writing.

As a model for writer-in-the-family, this was one I never wanted to replicate. I was, by God, going to get the writing done. And I was never going to play the artiste to the captive audience at home.

But a writing life is hard to hide from people you live with. I write at home and I need solitude to get anything done. Interruptions, for instance, every ten minutes from a young fellow home sick from school and bored out of his mind, means no writing that day. Also, readings, book signings and campus visits mean I'm not at home cooking dinner that night.

My kid worries about the exposure. When he was ten and my novel had just sold, he worried that I was setting myself up for a fall. He advised me that, even though my novel was coming out, no one would buy it because I'm not J. K. Rowling. He didn't want me to embarrass myself. At twelve, it's safe to say he now worries about how I could embarrass him.

This is only a partial portrait of writer-in-the-family at my house. Since my novel came out, my boy has been vocally proud of me, and he's handled the cash box at more than one book signing. My friends, also, have been hugely supportive.

But imagine how it is for fiction writer, John Copenhaver, whose life partner, Jeff Herrity, is a marketing whiz-turned artist, and has big ideas about John's writing career. Jeff was the one who got John blogging this past summer, and encouraged him to post every day. I've asked John to guest blog about what it's like to have that sort of synergy at home. Stay tuned for his post on the subject.

Ditching the Script

I was all ready for my award speech at the Midwest Bookseller's annual conference. I'd even written it out! A nice straightforward Thanks, carefully worded, that incorporated one of my favorite poems from the award-winning book. 

And then the worst possible thing happened. Michael Perry took the stage.

Michael Perry (Truck: A Love Story, and most recently Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting) was this year's award-winner in the nonfiction category, and he was, to my horror, drop-the-baby funny. He spent his allotted five minutes setting us up, then mopped the floor with his audience through ten more illicit minutes of rib-rocking humor and a one-of-a-kind reading that left the bells in nearby Saint Paul Cathedral reverberating with our applause.

I was next.

Perfect. My arrow-straight speech was aimed to sail right past the outhouse and into the alfalfa.

I had realized ten minutes ago while Perry was still getting warmed up: I would have a choice. I could read my canned green beans label, die a quiet death, and be carried away without ceremony. Or I could tell my only Mike Perry story, in honor of the very man whose big splash had me all wet.

And then I realized I had no choice.

I told the story of how my editor, W. W. Norton's legendary Carol Houck Smith, had insisted for a year: "You must meet Mike Perry." I'd never heard of him, but a Google search revealed that he had recently moved to my hometown of Fall Creek, Wisconsin.

Carol died just two weeks after my debut book hit stores, but not before she'd sent Perry a note, in a galley of my book, urging him to connect with me. Mike read one poem from the galley, and set it aside for later.

Not long after that, I had the opportunity to read a poem on Wisconsin Public Radio. Mike didn't hear the broadcast, but his mother did, and called him immediately to ask him if she knew how she could find get hold of it; she hadn't caught the poet's name, but she described the poem to Mike, and he knew it instantly. In it, Mike told me in an e-mail later, I had described Mike's father to a tee.

Onstage, I told that story, read the poem, and relayed my gratitude for the warm generosity of people like Mike and my editor.

And I learned that what any audience wants—even the most formal, even the most uproariously entertained—is to share a connection.

Making Connections, Making a List

In several months, I’ll be taking the good advice Marisha offered in “Find an Agent: Part Three—Construct Your World." Even though I’m still revising my manuscript, Dodging and Burning, which I’ve been writing about in my blog, I’ve assembled a list of ten agents and set a deadline for myself—the end of the year.

Although I’ve fleshed out my list using helpful online resources, such as LitMatch, and Publishers Marketplace, as well as the Herman Guide, which Marisha mentioned, my greatest resource this far has been other people.

In 2005, I worked as an intern at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the literature department. During that summer, I observed several panels of established writers and editors as they discussed anonymous grant applications. It was fascinating and educational to listen to experienced hands discuss other writers’ manuscripts.

One of the editors, Sally Kim, now an executive editor at HarperCollins, reached out to the interns and offered to read excerpts from our manuscripts. I was just finishing my first novel, so I jumped at the chance. Sally read a chapter of my novel, and I met with her one weekend while visiting New York City. She suggested several agents that she thought might be interested in the manuscript.

Although I didn’t find an agent with that novel, most of the agents I sent it to read the entire manuscript and wrote me thoughtful responses. Jeff Kleinman, who I mentioned in my blog “Revising to Land an Agent," called me and gave me advice on how to revise it. This summer, I sought out Sally again, and she recommended several potential agents for Dodging and Burning.

To get my three month internship at the NEA, I had to apply for it. And so much has come of it. I learned that in settings like the NEA, and similarly literature programs or book festivals in your city or community, you can meet kind, open people who are willing to help you with your writing career.

Find an Agent: Part 3 – Construct Your World

"The world is never a given," the late John O'Donohue told us. "Everyone is at all times constructing the world."

If this was true for O'Donohue, a poet, could it be true of the prose writer in search of an agent? Could what happens with an agent search be a world that the writer, in part, creates?

I don't mean to promote wishful thinking, here. There is no Secret. In my long, and eventually successful agent search I anticipated discouragement. I also imagined what it would be like to be the agent on the receiving end of a never-ending cascade of envelopes, and pictured the misery I'd feel having to say no to most queries. This helped me bring more gratitude and less paranoia to every interaction with a prospective agent. It also freed me to think in categories other than rejection or acceptance.

For instance, I allowed myself to imagine I might land, not just any old agent, but an agent I liked and admired. (See "Can Beggars Be Choosers? - Find an Agent, Part 2".) I also started thinking of the agent search partly as a numbers game: the more frogs I kissed, the more likely I was to find a prince.

Certain information was crucial. Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors and Agents was amazingly helpful. The agents in the Herman Guide are carefully vetted: no crooks, no fly-by-nights. The Guide includes interviews: each agent stating what they are looking for, and how they prefer to be approached.

Todd James Pierce's idiosyncratic Fiction Writers' Resource Page also helped me with info about the search. Thanks to Pierce, I decided to send the first 50 pages of my novel manuscript (now published: The Rose Variations, Soho Press, 2009) to prospective agents, even if they asked for fewer pages. A tip from an agent who turned me down, led me to decide never again to send a synopsis—synopses being, by their nature, so much flatter and less interesting to read than sample pages. It was pick and choose, when it came to advice. I constructed the search my way.

I knew that my biggest obstacle would be my own response to rejection, and I didn't intend to stall out. I chose twenty-five agents. I put my very short query letter through umpty-ump drafts, until I felt it would be a pleasure to read. I made up packets (query letter, first fifty pages, self-addressed stamped envelope) for the first ten agents on my list and out they went. I vowed that, when I got a definite "no", I would send out a query packet to the next agent on my list, so that the search would go forward until I found an agent. This, I admit, took years.

I didn't scrutinize the details of a rejection, though I did note egregious details (the agent who, after asking for my entire manuscript, scrawled a "sorry, not for me" on the back of my original query letter and dropped it the mail to me. She might have lavished a piece of stationery on me, since I'd paid for all that postage, to and fro.)

If this sounds like more trouble than it's worth, take a look at "Find an Agent, Part 1", in which I address the why of agents. For me, this necessary search was endlessly interesting and informative, even though at times I wanted to pound my head on the floor. And I did find an agent. You can, too.

Revising to Land an Agent

I’m all about the who these days. Marisha, in her post, “Can Beggars Be Choosers?—Find an Agent, Part 2”, makes the remark that as writers we need to be picky about the agents we choose. I think this is good, if not essential, advice . . . but boy, if you’re in the process of querying agents, it can be hard advice to follow.

I’m in the midst of this process, and recently, it’s taken me to an interesting place. Three years ago when I was submitting my first manuscript to agents, one agent, Jeff Kleinman now of Folio Literary Management, took time to speak with me about the first fifty pages of that manuscript. He requested some major revisions before he read the entire manuscript. I did this, but still, he decided the novel wasn’t for him. This was hard news to hear, but I felt warmly toward him, because I appreciated his candor and the time he took with me, and deep down, I knew my manuscript wasn’t ready.

So, once I finished my second novel, Dodging and Burning, I sent it to Jeff Kleinman and decided to wait for his response before submitting it to anyone else on my list of agents, and within a matter of days (seriously, like three days!), I received a page of comments on the first half of my manuscript, beginning with the remark: “[the novel is] a unique story that offers a fascinating glimpse into the past while addressing themes of war and love that are still particularly relevant today.” Yay, what a writer wants to hear! Then came the criticism.

My novel is told from the perspectives of two narrators, and Jeff Kleinman felt that the voices of these two characters needed to be revised for greater contrast before he would finish reading the manuscript and consider representing me. This is no small undertaking. I had to consider whether or not Dodging and Burning was ready, and whether I would be revising my novel for him, or because I felt that a revision would make it a better book. After several soul searching days, I decided that such a revision would be an improvement.

So, even if I spend several months revising and Jeff Kleinman doesn’t go for it, the time revising will be well-spent, and I can go on, with even greater confidence, to submit Dodging and Burning to other agents I’ve planned to query: my Plan B.

Can Beggars Be Choosers – Find an Agent, Part 2

Thanks to John Copenhaver, who's guest blogging this month with the Squad and engaged in an agent search, I'm pondering what I know about landing an agent—why, who and how. For my answer to why, see Find an Agent, Part 1.

Now to who. What sort of agent would be a good fit for you, the writer? Or is that an arrogant question? Finding any agent at all can be difficult. Can beggars be choosers?

I think you have to be. An agent will represent you in the marketplace. You need to trust that person, and not to cringe at the thought of that person speaking for you. In my playwriting years, I landed a prominent theatrical agent, who turned out to be high-handed and combative. I dreaded speaking to her, and if she was a drag to deal with for me, she had to be even worse for the theater managers who were negotiating with her for the rights to my plays. Fortunately, she took on a terrific assistant, and when he left to head up another agency, I went with him. 20 years later, I'm still with him.

Theater and literary marketplaces are quite separate, but when I began to search for a literary agent to find a publisher for my novel, The Rose Variations (Soho Press, 2009), I was alert to everything about the agents I approached. Once I had queries out, whenever an interested agent phoned me, I listened with all antennae up to discover who the person was. And when I got an offer, I flew to New York on my own dime, to meet face-to-face with the excellent Stephany Evans, before I signed.

In truth, this was the first real offer I got, in more than two years of persistent querying. So maybe I'm kidding myself that I wouldn't have signed if Stephany had proved to be less than stellar in person. Maybe I was a beggar pretending to be a chooser. But as I undertook my due diligence, asking Stephany my questions, and phoning the references she gave me, I learned what I needed to know, and when I signed, I felt certain.

Peace of mind is a great thing. You'll need to rely on your agent, not only to represent you in a way that fits with your sense of self, but to negotiate contracts and to help you understand the issues that arise (book jacket design, blurbs, etc.) Your search will set the tone for building a relationship into something fine and mutually rewarding. If you find an agent you trust, it saves you grief and worry and brings on the joy.

I'll share exactly how I did my agent search—the mechanics, and how I planned for setbacks in Find an Agent, Part 3, to be posted next week.