Tyler Hayes Guest Post–"Rescued From the Trunk"
locusmag.com – Thursday October 31, 2019
The week before I got an offer on my debut novel, I made the decision to give up on it.
The Imaginary Corpse was a labor of love: a noir-flavored fantasy cobbled together from childhood memories, my experiences in therapy, and a million literary and ludological ancestors. Writing it felt right in a way that no other manuscript had before. I built this world in a matter of hours, the outline in a matter of days. Rarely did I have to stop and think during the drafting process (editing, of course, was another story). It’s the book of my heart. Writing it required years of working on myself, finding my real voice under all the received wisdom about writing, and trying very, very hard not to be afraid.
I also couldn’t seem to sell it for the longest time.
Out of all the books I’ve written, the queries and pitches for The Imaginary Corpse were by far the best-received, but all that means is that I finally got partial manuscript requests. I also got partial manuscript rejections, and all of them said essentially the same thing as the rejections of my initial query packet, just in more detail: This is good. But I, a literary agent, have no idea where I’d sell it.
How to write the perfect approach email
artshub.co.uk – Monday October 28, 2019
No matter what kind of art you produce, you’ll definitely have to try and get someone interested in it at some point. This might mean getting in touch with a gallery owner if you’re a painter, a producer if you’re in the performing arts or film, or a publisher if you write books. And odds are, you’re going to do so via email.
With that in mind, I caught up with Kathryn Burnett to talk about how to write (and how not to write) an approach email. Kathryn runs The Writing Room (an Auckland space for writers to work, hang out and connect with other writers) and has been a screenwriter for 25 years and a playwright and writing coach for eight years. Early in her career, she used to send approach emails and query letters. Now, she does less of that, but gets lots of approach emails herself. Here’s what she’s learned about contacting someone you’ve never met before and asking them for help.
When the pope offers writing advice, should you listen?
theguardian.com – Friday October 25, 2019
Pope Francis offered the staff of the Vatican some writing advice in September: “Give up using adjectives” – and also adverbs, as in phrases such as “authentically Christian”, to which he declared himself allergic. I suppose if there’s anyone you can’t condemn for pontificating like this, it’s the pontiff. Yet his advice annoyed me, as did some newly published tips aimed at scientists from the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who turns out to have been giving behind-the-scenes editorial advice to leading researchers for years. “Remove extra words or commas whenever you can,” reads McCarthy’s advice (as paraphrased by two of his academic collaborators). Also: “Don’t overelaborate.” Though he’s less of a stickler than Francis when it comes to adjectives: “Only use an adjective if it’s relevant.” In short, we’re back to William Strunk and EB White’s famous advice in The Elements Of Style: “Omit needless words.”
Literary agent Emily Hickman: ‘First and foremost, we are passionate advocates for our clients’
thestage.co.uk – Monday October 21, 2019
Representing writers and directors for stage and screen, Emily Hickman also manages the dramatic rights of authors at The Agency. Having most recently worked with Marina Carr on Blood Wedding, she tells Ruth Comerford what it takes to manage clients…
How did you become an agent?
I was always really passionate about theatre; I did a lot of student drama at university. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do specifically so I wrote to lots of theatres and was lucky to get an internship at the Donmar Warehouse, which was amazing and led to a role working in its casting and development department. I started doing a bit of script reading and realised that what I’d really like to do is work with writers in some capacity. I assisted another agent and his clients for several years before I started taking on my own clients alongside his, and built my own list. It took many years.
One Neat Trick to Writing Great Mystery Plots
vulture.com – Thursday October 17, 2019
I spend a lot of time thinking about a Raymond Chandler quote I once read. “The perfect detective story cannot be written,” he said. “The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.”
Well — shoot. It has the ring of truth to it, unfortunately. Almost every writer seems to start out interested either in narrative or talking, story or language, before filling in the rest later. This is why it’s funny when literary novelists who couldn’t write a competent John Wick novelization (I put this challenge squarely to A.S. Byatt) call J.K. Rowling a bad writer. She’s an indifferent stylist, sure, but in most of the other ways a writer can be “good” — character, plot, imagination — she’s brilliant. Past brilliant. Meanwhile Chandler, whom many of the same people (rightly) revere, could never, as he freely admitted, explain who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep.
The contemporary novelist who comes closest to real parity between story and art may be Tana French. Her most striking gift is for voice, but if her plots aren’t flawless, you can see nonetheless how hard she works to make them very, very good, with just an occasional faint seam showing, nothing more. But that’s almost certainly a product of tenacity and intelligence, not instinct. I would bet French has spent more time thinking about structure than Agatha Christie — who hatched her perfect plots in the bathtub, serenely eating apples — ever did.
Removing the Mystery From Mystery Writing: 13 Tricks Used by Acclaimed Novelists
vulture.com – Tuesday October 15, 2019
What makes reading a good mystery so satisfying? A writer’s hard work. A complex story à la Gone Girl doesn’t just pop out of a writer’s brain fully formed on a random Tuesday. Giving readers what they crave is about structure and pacing and, ultimately, originality. In 2019, it’s also about writing characters with more depth than your archetypal male dick motivated by some dead girl who maybe, if she’s lucky, gets to have a name.
To learn more about the elements of great mystery architecture, Vulture asked eight masters of the form to anatomize their thinking, from the most conceptual level down to the technical details. None of their tips or habits are compulsory, and some even contradict one another, but together they represent craft perfected to the level of art. (Spoiler: Literal crafts are sometimes involved.)
Experts reveal their top tips for how to write a book
goodhousekeeping.com – Tuesday October 15, 2019
If you want to know how to write a book, we've got the answer. While it's a daunting task, it's not impossible and here, experts share their top tips to help you get published.
November marks National Novel Writing Month, a global initiative which aims to inspire and encourage writers across the world.
The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month – which sounds daunting but in fact is just over 1000 a day. So if you’ve always wanted to know how to write a book, now is the perfect time.
10 Tips for Writing (Both About Yourself and in General)
juneauempire.com – Sunday October 13, 2019
One of my favorite (and simultaneously most hated) qualities of children is their tendency to be unintentionally blunt.
Over the past year, my daughter, son and their little parliament of friends have called me out on hiding my baldness with a Yankees cap, wearing the same clothes every day and “having claws” (read: grossly unclipped toenails). I don’t even want to tell you the comments I hear at the pool. Suffice to say I need to cut back on the midnight Nutella spoons.
Earlier this week, the apples of my eye point-blankedly asked me why I didn’t have a job. I told them that wasn’t true, that I was a writer, to which they both responded: “no, a real job.” So I printed a copy of my curriculum vitae. I still don’t think they were impressed — even after they checked my references.
There Is No Such Thing as 'Too Similar' When Publishers All Want the Same Book
jezebel.com – Wednesday October 9, 2019
A few years ago, when I was shopping my now-shelved first novel, an industry insider told me to put the word “girls” in the title. “Girl” novels were big at the moment: Gone Girl, Girl on the Train, The Girls. But a few months later, I was told I had to change the title. There were too many novels about girls.
That is pretty much the way the publishing industry works. Once a title becomes wildly popular, rival imprints rush to get their hands on books that are slight variants on the same conceit until they have too many books on the same topic—say, a woman with a substance abuse problem who witnesses a crime—and once that topic is oversaturated, they move on to something else. In a recent Buzzfeed article, historical fiction novelist Kim Michele Richardson said that details in bestselling author of MeBeforeYou Jojo Moyes’s new novel are too close for comfort to those included in her own work. However, in an industry that frequently gets stuck on the same idea, the similarities in their work look more like byproducts of how well both women know which details are required of their genre, and the fact that many books are becoming difficult to distinguish from one another.
Find a room of your own: top 10 tips for women who want to write
theguardian.com – Saturday October 5, 2019
How does a woman write? This woman is writing on her laptop in bed wearing her lipstick. She looks quite ridiculous. She is wishing the teenagers downstairs would make less noise and will go down periodically to shout at them and to get some biscuits, maybe some cheese, a small snack that she needs to sustain herself every other paragraph or so.
This woman wishes she was like the young people she sees writing in cafés or on the bus, who seem to be able to write anywhere. She wishes she wasn’t so precious about peace and quiet and remembers she didn’t used to be. In fact, she used to sit next to a man in a newspaper office who was covered in nicotine patches, chewing nicotine gum and drinking double espressos until he vibrated. Still, she always met the deadline. He didn’t, so was in a constant state of torture.
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