Creative Writing Corner

Getting an Agent: Advice

I recently attended a very helpful seminar my university set up about the process of getting an agent. Agents have become more and more important to writers these days, especially as the model of the publishing-house editor has faded in presence. Publishing houses used to develop strong relationships between their writers and editors, having editors work closely with writers on their manuscripts; to a large extent, that responsibility has fallen to the agent. Now, publishing houses want more polished works, and it's up to the agent to work with the writer and polish that piece. It also means that a little more responsibility is with the writer; more polished works are expected. Here are a few lessons I learned about how to go forth on your agent quest.

Put your best foot forward.

That was lesson number one: show your absolute best work. If you're showing one story you like and one story that needs work and one story that you know is weak but you need a third story, you're not ready to submit. Agents see hundreds of pieces a week, and they need to know that you have more than one good story behind you. So edit, polish, and edit again. Show your absolute best work; don't hold anything in abeyance, because if you do, you'll never get the chance to show that piece that you've been saving that you think is your best.

Be creative! Be exciting!

Agents need to feel excited about the work they are representing. That means they will choose work that has something original in it, something they've never seen before, and that has a lot of life and vigor in it. A few pretty sentences aren't enough; they want to feel engaged and moved by the characters you create and the ideas and words on the page. When you've polished a few stories to death, spend some time thinking about whether these stories are just good copies of what you've read, or have something new to bring to the literary world.

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5 Stories NOT to Send to Magazines

Now that I've worked in the offices of two different prestigious literary magazines, I've learned a thing or two about what comes in the slush pile most often. It's astonishing how many stories arrive that run through nearly identical storylines or patterns. While there is an exception to every rule, and any one of these stories could be written beautifully and prove me wrong, I've heard editors at both magazines declare they will never publish some of the below storylines because they're so ubiquitous and interchangeable.

So if you're on the publishing trail, be warned and avoid these five plotlines!

The break-up

Yes, break-up stories are the NUMBER ONE story we get in the slush pile. They are everywhere, and every last one of them hashes over the same details, the same gradual growing apart, the same pattern of fights and touching reunions. Avoid this most common of storylines.

Diary of the madman

This is another one that I've seen many many times in workshops as student work, but never successfully in print. It's because it was done almost two hundred years ago (Gogol's Diary of a Madman) and few works since have added much to the genre. A story with gleefully over-the-top prose, cliche phrasings, and quivering narcissism is so not new.

Dead child

This may sound callous, but I went to a panel discussion of several editors of literary magazines lately, and they all agreed this was the most common plot choice of all. Need a crisis for your characters to slowly and poignantly recover from? No problem -- just kill off a kid! Seriously, there's no describing how tragic this event is in real life, but in story world, this plotline has been done and done.

After the jump: two more plotlines to avoid.

5 Reasons to Get Your MFA

Are you considering an M.F.A., but not sure if it's worth it? Now that I'm a semester into my M.F.A. program, I can tell you some of the most compelling reasons for taking the plunge. While an M.F.A. is not for everyone, and it's not worth plunging into enormous debt, it really has proven to be an invaluable experience for me, and not just in terms of improving my writing. Here are five good reasons to get your M.F.A.:

You will meet other writers!

In college, I had only a few literary-minded friends. I made good friends, but I didn't realize how great it is to be surrounded by fellow-writer friends until I came to my grad program. It's wonderful to meet people who are struggling with the same things you are, and are ready to support you in your writerly quest. You can compare notes and have great conversations about your shared craft.

You will be exposed to great writers.

In addition to surrounding you with fellow student writers whose work you will find inspiring, M.F.A. programs do a great job of giving you opportunities to meet established and legendary writers. There are readings, talks, Q&A's, and panel discussions every week. My resolution for the new semester is to attend more of them: every one I've gone to has been helpful and interesting.

After the jump: three more reasons to get an M.F.A.

Tips about Getting Published, From the Experts

I recently attended a panel discussion by the editors of several very prestigious, top-tier literary magazines. These editors were at the panel purely to discuss the ins and outs of getting published, so I'm going to boil down their very helpful comments to the three points that seemed to keep coming back again and again. Hopefully you'll find them helpful too in your publishing quest!

Read the magazine

With the ease of internet submissions, famous literary magazines are getting swamped by stories. The frustrating thing for editors is that while it enables them to see more good work, it often means a flood of work that clearly doesn't fit the ton or needs of the magazine. So before you indiscriminately do a mass-submission to all the big names, make sure your story actually fits the needs of the magazine. Does it seem to cohere with past stories? Does the subject matter and writing style match the magazine's? If not, you're just wasting your time and everyone else's. So be sure to do your research -- pick up a copy of the magazine and actually read it! If money is tight, many of the lit mags have selections from their journals online. Read a sample story or two at the very least before you send.

Don't bug.

Editors' time is valuable, just like yours. The editors at this panel told horror stories of writers who started emailing every day for status updates a week after they had sent their story out. Understand that these magazines have an enormous backlog, and there's no quicker way to send your story to the rejection pile than to irritate someone with excessive queries. This also means not sending another story until you have heard back about the first. You can generally send the story to other mags while waiting, since the response time is so slow, but don't send to that particularly magazine again -- or pester with emailed questions -- until at least a couple of months have passed. Slow, I know, but that's the magazine biz.

Develop a relationship

The editors at the panel agreed that one rejection from their magazine did not mean death there forever. Instead, they all mentioned stories of developing a dialogue with a writer who was on the cusp but not quite there yet. They wrote encouraging notes to writers with good stories, and the writers sent more stories back with the recommended improvements. This went on for several stories, all rejected, and then finally a story was accepted. It's a great idea to send your best work and get your name known that way. Even if you are rejected, an encouraging note shows that the editor would be willing to see more of your work and enter in a relationship with you (as long as you don't overstep the boundaries by breaking the rules mentioned above). It's these stepping-stones that lead to your first big publication at a nationally-renowned magazine.

Are You Using Twitter to Help Your Career Yet?

Twitter is the new "it" tool for online communication, especially between specialized communities. It's a great way for the avid woodworkers of the world to talk shop, so to speak, or for fellow plumbers to get links about cool plumbing websites. Of course, this extends to the writerly community as well. More and more, writers are using Twitter as a way of sharing information about writerly sites, advice, or thoughts on their own writing process. I'm no exception; I've been Tweeting for some time now and I invite you to follow me and see what I'm up to. I post daily thoughts about writing, or writing-related links. But it leaves me with the question: are you taking advantage of Twitter yet?

I'm curious to see how many of my readers are on twitter, and I invite to let us know and post your twitter screenname in the comments. I'm always on the lookout for writers to follow. And I'm curious what you use your twitter account for. Do you use it to promote your own posts? Tell people what you've had for breakfast? Connect with other writers?

If you're interested in getting more out of twitter, I urge you to think about why you choose to follow other accounts. I know I'll click that "follow" button if someone's twitter page consistently has funny observations about writing, consistently gives interesting links, or raises thought-provoking questions that I feel compelled to respond to. If you want more people to follow you, try offering some of these resources.

What else is twitter good for? Eventually, it might provide a record of what people were thinking about at a certain time. We could search the word "writing" and see what is being thought about writing at any one time. That, to me, is a fascinating idea. So while many people have come out strongly against twitter and how it's wrecking our attention spans, I don't mind it as long as its recognized for what it is - a useful tool for the sharing of information. It's not an art form, it's not going to replace the novel, and that's fine by me.

A Quick Guide to Plagiarism

With the rise of internet has come a lot of marvelous things, from.blogs like this (isn't it marvelous!) to the spread of easily accessible news and information. That great sharing of networking that makes the internet great, however, has also enabled a tremendous increase in plagiarism. As a writer, I can assure you that copying someone else's work is serious business, and it's incredibly hurtful to find something you sweated over somewhere else, under someone else's name. It's just plain disrespectful to the real work that went into creating the piece. So I'd like to clear up where I stand on a few gray areas of plagiarism, and give you a few tips on protecting yourself from plagiarism.

Lifting someone else's posts is plagiarism.
A common practice in the blog world these days, which I believe is called "scraping", is when someone will lift another blogger's rss feed and plunk it right down on his/her site without permission, attribution or even a link back to the original site. Let me be clear here: you're profiting from someone else's content and essentially pretending that this content is yours, even if you're not explicitly writing out, "I wrote this." Consider what this would be in the non-digital world: you copy and paste the entire text of Lorrie Moore's new novel and sell it. Yes, that would be illegal. So you can see how the same practice is wrong on the internet, right?

A blog post made up entirely of other's work, even with attribution, is plagiarism.
So you put the author's name at the bottom of the text you scraped. Whoop-de-doo for you. You're profiting from another author's content without his or her permission, basically claiming ownership for the text by having it as your content on your blog. Really, it's just laziness in this case; you want to have a blog, but you don't want to expend the effort to keep it up.

After the jump: ways to stay one jump ahead of the cheaters!

How to Give a Good Presentation for Contests

Every now and then I like to remind my readers about the nitty gritty details of the writing profession. If you're interested in getting published or in winning contests, then you need to know the basics of giving your work the best presentation it can get. You don't want a sloppy cover letter or a bad font to distract from your work. So let's go over a few tips on giving your piece a strong presentation.

Follow instructions!
I know this is a no-brainer, but it really is the crucial step number one of any publishing attempt. If an editor tells you not to put your name on the manuscripts, any appearance of your name on it will cause the editors to throw it in the trash unread. You're just wasting the cost of postage if you don't read the submission guidelines on the magazine or contest's website.

Use standard everything in your document.
Generally, editors aren't impressed by flashy fonts, and they request double spacing for a reason - readability. In order to make your story as readable as possible, don't use anything but a standard font such as Times New Roman, Helvetica, Verdana, or Arial. Double-space your document so the readers can move easily through your pages. Number your pages.

After the jump: more tips for polishing your presentation.

Is Web Publishing Gaining Legitimacy?

In the past, literary magazines had to exist in print in order to have any sense of prestige. The honor of having your work reproduced in print was incomparable to seeing your work on a computer screen. But these days, economic woes and a desire to be environmentally friendly are turning the world of literary magazines on its head. Here are a few reasons to consider why online magazines are becoming the new source of prestige for your writing.

Well-established mags are going digital.
The current state of the economy, plus the increasing concern with global warming and the environment, have made print publications less viable. For many respected, well-established magazines, the only option for cutting costs and paper is to go digital, which means that more of the digital offerings will be respectable. I was reluctant to see this trend at first, but when slow-moving but venerable publications such as The New Yorker make most of their writings available online, you can be sure going digital has become mainstream.

Standards of quality are emerging in digital markets.
The internet has been growing in our public consciousness as a ferocious rate. In the space of just a few years, it has come to dominate our lives as a medium for writing. This breakneck pace meant that a flood of extremely low-quality writing stormed the net, but as time goes on, increasing standards of quality are emerging as online magazines find their voices. In my searches through online markets, I've found an increasing level of writing quality and professionalism.

Esteemed writers are turning to the internet more.
There was a time when it would be unthinkable to see the work of truly famous and great writers in online-only publications. More and more, however, writers are catching on to the respectability of certain digital markets and the potential for reaching a far wider audience.

If you find yourself accepted to an online journal, do your research: there are still just as many poor online journals as there once were. But take heart: while getting published online was once a stepping stone to nowhere, it can now be an important first breakthrough into the world of publications.

Why Your Story Isn't Getting Published

It's time to shine the cold light of day on you and your writing. Today I'm writing about a few possible reasons why your story is falling flat and isn't finding publication or winning critical acclaim the way you'd like. Sometimes we're just too close to our own writing to figure out what's wrong with it, so take this post as the perspective of an outsider, someone who can tell it like it is. As an editorial intern at two of the biggest literary magazines in the country, I saw everything that came through the slush pile and I learned a ton about what gets a second reading and what doesn't. If your story isn't meeting with the success you'd like it to have, run it past this post and see if anything fits.

1. Not Enough Happens!

You'd be amazed how often this throws up an obstacle to publication. Literary magazines are not pulps that require a murder every three pages, but a lot of stories that come in are weak because they simply don't have any action at all. Hundreds (and I do mean hundreds - I read 60 stories a day, three days a week, for three months) of the stories I read had competent writing, but absolutely no action at all. Instead, the reader followed a character's pottering around his kitchen thinking about how he hates his job for five pages, or a guy went to work and performed his job while daydreaming, then went home. And that was it.

After five or more pages of this kind of story, I was ready to put it in the reject pile without even finishing it. It's important to remember that stories are about change and development, not just about giving a snapshot of an ordinary day in an ordinary person's life.

After the jump: more reasons why your story is getting rejected.

Who Calls the Shots: Editor or Writer?

Writing, along with filmmaking and a few other media, is a very funny art form because it has an element of collaboration. It seems impossible for any legitimate work of art to be formed by committee, and yet writers really need to work closely with their editors in order to make their work reach its full potential. But what is an editor's real role in pushing a novel or story to fruition? Who's in control? Is it really a fifty-fifty relationship of equal power, or is the writer a lofty monarch with a devoted advisor?

From what I've read of some of the most compelling editor-writer relationships in history, and from what little I've experienced for literary magazines, editors aren't merely devoted word-crunchers for the writer. They have their own agendas, and in fact, to be great editors they've got to have an independent vision and artistic sensibility. A creative writing professor of mine spoke to my class about how editing was itself an art, and that some people were born to be great editors just as some were born to be great writers.

At first I found it hard to believe -- can an art ever be refining and honing someone else's creation rather than creating something yourself? But the more I thought about it, the more I started to believe it. After all, many visual artists create art by using ordinary objects or scenes and making us see them in new ways by bringing them into a different focus.

After the jump: so who's in charge?