How to Meet an Agent

 I have a little news: an agent has asked to read my full manuscript.

This is a tiny step that has never occurred before. It’s still very early days because the agent may read the entire novel and decide it would be too hard to sell. I’ve accepted that. However, she has promised to give feedback, so even in that scenario, hopefully her advice will make it more attractive to other agents. She’s already given me some excellent feedback on the opening chapters that I’m working to implement before I send it back to her.

Getting a full manuscript request has always been the stumbling point, the point at which I put my novels on hold and write something new. In some ways, the last ten months have been harder than when I was submitting to agents in my teens. Back then, I received a nice piece of paper with a generic rejection after a long wait. These days, the best I have received is an email, and in most cases, nothing at all.

It turns out that submitting work to the slushpile (the inbox of an agent) isn’t the best way to approach an agent. The route into communication with this agent came from a very different avenue: my attendance at Bradford Literary Festival.

I don’t know how typical this is of literary festivals, but I should note here that Bradford Literary Festival 2023 was an amazing event for emerging writers. They had many sessions which were pitched to unpublished writers, and as well as offering encouragement, real stories and practical advice, they also had a 1:1 event to meet an agent.

I booked onto this event through luck. I had no idea it was happening until a writing buddy on Critique Circle told me that she was doing it, and then I was lucky enough that I was in the country to attend, because the day before we arrived home from a holiday in Europe. Anyway, after wrestling with my own insecurities briefly (the terrifying prospect of receiving verbal feedback), I decided to go for it, because that must be the attitude to make something happen.

I had no expectations for the event. The website description simply said it was a chance to receive feedback from an agent. I thought it would be helpful to know which elements of my pitch were off-putting, and more specifically if the novel concept itself just wasn’t saleable and I should work on something else. So, it was an amazing experience to be told by someone in the industry that my writing style is good. It’s a huge validation of all the efforts I’ve put in over the years.

A third piece of luck I should mention is the agent I originally booked to meet was unable to attend, and the agent I met replaced him. From researching her, I was already happy, because her bio expressed her interest in Young Adult, while the original agent (from a pick of three not yet booked up) seemed only partially suitable due to his interest in Adult Fantasy.

The lesson I have taken from the festival generally is that this is a much better way to get in touch with agents. Meeting them in person begins a dialogue, allows them to see your passion and understand your aims much better than a sentence or two bio in a query letter ever can. Another statistic I learned from another session at the festival is that a big agent receives 700 to 1000 submissions every week to their inbox, of which they might accept just two new clients a year. I always knew the chances were slim, but statistics like that really hammer home just how infinitesimally slim the odds are. A really good question was asked in the general agent meet, when they referred to how most of their clients are not unsolicited. Someone asked how they find new writers, then, if they don’t find them in the slushpile, and the answer was: events like this one.

If nothing else, I know to look out for future events which involve agents. And that my writing is good.

Drafts and Redrafts and Redrafts

It’s been a busy few months, especially November, which became my editing month (as opposed to NaNoWriMo, which traditionally turns November into the drafting month). Each day my target was to edit one chapter, from the feedback I received on Critique Circle. I knew that I had time to edit the entire novel if I stuck to that target, and I managed to speed up towards the end (sometimes able to edit two chapters per day), meaning that I finished the entire draft on 24^th November.

So, as a reward for ‘gaining’ time, I can now give the blog a little attention…

This is the fourth draft. When I talk to people about the process, people fall into two camps generally: those who don’t understand drafting and those who wonder how you ever stop drafting. So, this blog can be about the drafting process.

Stephen King’s memoir On Writing compares the drafting process to excavating a dinosaur skeleton. The skeleton is the fragile story concept, and each draft is about trying to reach it without destroying the entire thing. He completes a novel in four drafts, if I recall the details correctly.

My process for this novel can be more aptly compared to swinging a wrecking ball and then collecting the rubble for the basis of the new building. There was nothing fragile about the movement between the first and the second drafts, which I suppose was because the skeleton was far from exposed after the first draft, buried in a primordial sludge of misdirection and misjudgement. A necessary sludge, I should note – because without a first draft, you can never go any further.

That hopefully explains why drafting is necessary. From the second draft, I received feedback from people on Critique Circle. Feedback comes in all forms, but the best feedback allows me to reconsider elements, and key world building elements came to light in this draft, which again significantly altered the novel.

Perhaps it’s better to think about redrafting as a series of earthquakes. Draft one to two was perhaps an 8 on the Richter scale, whereas two into three was more of a 7. From the feedback on draft three, the impact of the seismic shifts has significantly decreased. There was one major character decision that altered things, but overall, it was probably more a magnitude 5 shake up.

It's too soon to know what it’s like while the dust is settling. At the end of every draft, I inevitably think ‘yes, this is it!’ and then realise later (through reading myself or letting others read) that there are still major problems. However, I feel confident from the diminishing damage reports that it is moving towards its final draft.

My plan going forward is to submit to CC what is known in the industry as a ‘betaread’. The purpose of this is to receive overall feedback, which is different from CC’s usual week-by-week, chapter-by-chapter process. It should help me to know how well the novel as a whole is working. CC only brought this function in part way through this year; it may have been helpful, probably, at an earlier stage in the drafting process – something I will consider for future novels.

January 2023 will be the beta month, and from that feedback I’m hoping to be finished with this novel by the end of February. I feel like there are no more substantial changes to be done, though I’m happy to be proven wrong. However, if the Richter scale continues to diminish, I think the February draft (number five) will be the final one.

I’ve also been putting my ‘gained’ time to use to research short story competitions (the plan for 2023), but I’ll say more about that in another blog.

Submission Time

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but I’m now at a stage where I am ready to submit my novel to agents.

An amusing digression that highlights the passage of time: back when I submitted a novel in 2011, the convention for indicating italics in a manuscript was to underline. Naturally, I imitated this with the current novel submission, and then thought to myself, when preparing the emails, this is a hangover from the typewriter era that probably no longer exists now that everything is digital. A little research proved my speculation to be correct.

Nothing much else has changed. I wish I were in a stronger position with my ‘Writer’s CV’ but perhaps next year, I might be able to do something about that (more on that in a future blog).

Anyway, the current novel has been through three redrafts to get to this stage and is now entering its fourth draft. The feedback I have received so far from Critique Circle has confirmed that the fourth draft is more a refinement of the third, rather than a complete rewrite. This gives me the confidence to feel I can submit the first three chapters to agents to see if they are interested.

The wait time for a response from an agent varies, though the shortest promises a 6–8-week turnaround. At this stage, they will either reject you or ask to look at the full manuscript. I’ve never been beyond the stage of a simple rejection, so that’s currently what ‘success’ will look like for me.

I plan to use the interim period to keep working on the refinement of draft four. I’m in the process of digesting the feedback, although I won’t have the full picture until the beginning of November. However, the feedback so far has given me plenty to work on, week by week.

Another thing I plan to do is continue reading current Young Adult Fantasy to find new agents to query. I have compiled a list so far of about eleven agents, which is relatively small still (ideally, I’d like to submit to twenty agencies). My usual process is to let the book guide me to the agent, so it does take time to widen the net. However, the pleasure of this is being able to discover new authors.

What chance, realistically, do I have? All I know is that my current novel is my strongest to date. Should I receive twenty rejections over the next six months, I have various alternative options to consider, so it won’t be the end of the story.

How NOT to be a writer

It has been a long time since my last post.  Seven years, to be exact.  Much has changed in my life since the previous post, such as a stable teaching job and home ownership with associating interests like cooking.  One thing has not changed: I'm still no closer to achieving my dream to be a published author.

The progress over the silent years can be summarised through a series of snippets from letters of introduction that I write for new school groups each year:

September 2014: "I was busy writing a new story in the summer, and managed to reach 19,000 words. That might sound like a lot but it’s barely a quarter of the novel!"

September 2015: "This summer, I managed to write about 18,000 words of a children’s fantasy novel, taking it to about 37,000 words."

September 2016: "This summer, I managed to write about 24,000 words of a children’s fantasy novel, taking it to about 61,000 words."

September 2017: "This summer, I managed to write about 28,000 words of a children’s fantasy novel, taking it to about 89,000 words."

At this point, I should note, I am starting to worry about the length, as shown in a follow-up clause: "...but it's only about three-quarters complete!"

September 2018: "This summer, I managed to write 37,000 words, in order to complete a children’s fantasy novel that I’ve been working on for five years. The entire book is a bit too long right now (126,000 words), which is longer than the third Harry Potter book, so now I need to edit it to make it shorter!"

September 2019: "This summer, I have been editing one of my books, because I need to make it shorter before I send it to publishers. It’s a fantasy story called Spirit Bound and the first draft was longer than the third Harry Potter book. So far, I’ve edited the first fifth of the novel and have cut 4,500 words, so there’s still a lot of work to do!

This final letter doesn't truly reflect the level of despair I felt at the beginning of that summer when I realised, on reading the entire novel, how much significant structural work needed to be done in order to make the book more akin to its "true" conception.  A decision was made in 2014 to introduce an antagonist, which resurrected this novel and allowed me to keep working on it to the end of the completed draft.  In that sense, it was a good decision.  But even as I wrote it, I knew the antagonist came across as superficial and would need to be removed.  The bloating of the word count simply solidified this conviction (for those of you not familiar with the YA market, the upper word count for first time writers is 90K).

It was incredibly demoralising to reach the end of the summer holidays in 2019 and to know that I was only a fifth of the way.  To know that it was likely to take me, if I continued at that rate, another four years before I had a draft I might feel happy to present for micro-editing.

I tried to commit more time to my novel.  In the autumn term, I determined to free up at least one day a week to my writing.  I succeeded, to a certain extent, and managed to rewrite another 20,000 words.  However, as the spring term arrived, the precarious balancing act started to tip.  I dedicated too much time to writing in the Christmas holiday and, as a result, struggled to keep on top of the neglected planning for the spring term.  I abandoned the Sunday of writing but even this didn't free up enough time to feel 'on top' of things again.  I began to grow sick, from stress and insomnia.

Then something strange happened.

Coronavirus.

In a matter of weeks, as death tolls around the world began to creep up, the UK government took the decision to close schools and ask teachers to work remotely.  Overnight, my work load more than halved.  To explain, you should understand how the work can be divided into three main areas: planning lessons, delivering lessons and marking work.  With delivery gone and marking (sadly) dramatically reduced (as few students were submitting work for feedback), I could actually finish the school day at the normal time, rather than working into the evening and all weekend on planning, which for me, has always taken almost as long as delivery.

Suddenly, I could rewrite about 1000 words a day.  By the end of that first week of lockdown, the rewrite had reached 51,000 words.  I believed the final count would be somewhere between 90-100,000, and so, unlike most people, who anxiously watched the news wondering when the lockdown might ease, I watched for the opposite reason, knowing that if it could just last for about seven weeks, I would have enough time to finish the rewrite.

The associated guilt, I should add, was huge (and still is), to know that I was benefiting from something so terrible, which was (and still is) causing so much loss and grief to so many people, whereas I was feeling more well than I had for this entire year, simply because I could breathe.

This brings us to the present moment.  We are now at the end of the sixth week of the lockdown and I have completed the novel rewrite at 101,000 words.  It is still too long, but I feel the new version fixes the structural problems of the first draft.  I also believe there is room to cut 10% when the prose is sharpened, which will hopefully take it to nearer the upper YA limit.

Steven King wrote in his memoir about how he abandoned his teaching career because it was incompatible with his writing needs.  I can understand this.

All I ever need is time.  The last six weeks (in spite of the guilt) have been idyllic: long periods of creative energy punctuated with walks into the countryside (around our surprisingly rural home).

Moving into the next phase might be more manageable, even when the lockdown does ease.  Editing is a less intensive process, and easier to compartmentalise.  As the restrictions start to lift, I might be able to manage to dedicate an hour a day to the editing process (which involves renewing my membership at the online writing circle Critique Circle).

One day I will resolve this tension between earning money and writing.  For now, this is definitely not how to be a writer.

Tales from Stocksbridge

Hello, hello, hello!

It has been a long while since I updated this blog, which as usual, means that I haven't done much writing.

I have been doing something rather exciting, however, in the last couple of months: leading a short story writing competition at school, and then sorting out the publication of all the stories in an ebook!

This is what the finished product looks like:

How exciting!

You can now download the ebook from Amazon, by just clicking: HERE!

Please do download it! It's a great ebook, which really shows off the budding talents of young writers at Stocksbridge High School (and hidden talents of staff and parents!). And I suppose it's the first school ebook of its kind, which is really rather exciting. :D I am a pioneer of sorts, hehe.

Another Year

Any silence on this blog is a clear indication of how little writing I have done in that time, and I cringe to see that I last updated the blog in April 2013... but I have started again a bit lately. I'm rewriting Zack to take it into a completely new direction, because the last version didn't really work. It's around 12,000 words at the moment...

Though I haven't been writing much, I have been reading a lot. I'm currently reading a book called My Name is Mina, which seems to have been written to be used in a classroom. It's a bit polemical but it's full of creative writing ideas and would make a brilliant scheme of work for Y7 or Y8. I might have to develop it to teach next year when I go back to the PGCE... I still need to get to the end, of course, but I'm really liking it so far.

On that vein, I was looking into David Almond and I stumbled across this video. I haven't listened to it all, but a couple of minutes in, there is a wonderful quote from the man, which I have to repeat here:

“People say to writers: when did you start writing? But the question should be, for people who aren't writers: when did you stop writing?”

(David Almond)

He's making a point that all children have to write when they are at school. I may have huge gaps in my productivity, but I could never 'stop' writing! Perhaps the education system fails if it puts children off writing. So, if you are not a writer, when did you stop and why?

Easter Update

It's been a stressful sort of holiday, for one reason or another...

It started off pretty well, with a trip to Buckingham and beyond (!) to see a friend who has moved down there to work *sob*. My boyfriend and I turned it into a mini-road trip and we visited Thorpe Park, Warwick Castle (really recommend!), Legoland. In that order. No, you're right, the order doesn't make sense for travelling. But we had our reasons... Then, when I returned up North, I made the most delightful chocolatey goodies with another friend.

Unfortunately, I came down with tonsillitis in the second week of the holiday! It's been pretty rough. I could handle the sore, pus-infected, swollen tonsils but the constant headache and fever were awful. It was hard to do very much for several days, which was frustrating, since there was (as always) a lot to get done. Fortunately, I still had some of the mindless tasks left, so I was doing filing for most of my illness.

I'm still not fully recovered, but I'm feeling a lot better. I can almost swallow properly now!

Another stress has been the threat of moving internet providers. It still hasn't quite happened but THE BOX is in the living room (it has the new wireless router in it). Dad is saving money. He doesn't realise that our current company has been hosting my website for free for the last five years and that my hit count has been oh so steadily creeping up. That's why I've been so frustrated.

Fortunately, a kind benefactor offered to give me some of his webspace, which is ever so generous. Ordinarily, it seems that you have to pay per month! I've had to buy a domain, but now the site is fully transferred over: www.allinfo.org.uk. Please click and help me establish it, the poor thing.

Because I've acted in time, I've put some redirects from my old site to the new site. I'm hoping this will help the new site to establish itself... It's not going to be anywhere near as popular, but maybe just maybe if I'm lucky I won't have to go RIGHT back to one hit a day. Maybe.

Ah well. That's my life at the moment. I'm back to school on Monday, which I am looking forward to. I have various new ideas to try out with my classes. I'm doing Creative Writing with Y7, which should be a nice scheme of work. Which reminds me of my own writing. For some reason Shadow Lords is in my mind at the moment: it wants me to redraft it again. Or to write the prequel. o_O Not sure I have time for either of those things...unless I resurrect my Paragraph-a-Day on Critique Circle.