Patience

I wonder how many people can honestly claim patience as one of their virtues? I've gotten better at it over the years, but it's still something I struggle with.

For example, it's easier for me now to wait in line at the grocery store without getting impatient, even when the customer in front of me is doing something boneheaded, like trying to buy 20 items in an express lane for 12 items. Somehow I've learned to stay calm because getting annoyed just makes me uncomfortable. It doesn't speed anyone up.

But waiting to hear from agents and/or editors? That's still not something I'm terribly patient about. Since I obviously have no control over when (or if) they respond, I try to distract myself with other writing projects.

A short graphic novel has been drafted (text only so far). I'm in the early stages of drafting a realistic YA novel. I'm also researching a couple of non-fiction ideas, 2 as possible books and another as an article.

Keep working, keep my head down. That's all I can do.

Agent search part 3: A fool's errand?

So. I've been looking for an agent for a year now. For the first 8 or 9 months, I was shopping around my YA mystery. I got some requests to read partial or full manuscripts. The overall tenor of the comments was "nice writing but not for me."

The topic, I suspect, is too obscure for a debut novel. Who would buy a teen mystery novel set in farm country? No one has said this to me. It's just what I suspect. And if an agent doesn't know any editors who'd be interested, why would s/he take me on? It's too risky, especially in this economic climate.

So at the end of December and early January, after finishing another novel (MG contemporary fantasy), I stopped querying about my mystery and focused on the fantasy. I figured it would have broader appeal, and based on the significantly higher number of agents who've asked to see it, I was right about that at least.

However, that still hasn't translated into any offers of representation. Part of that may be due to my own impatience and sending the manuscript out a tad too soon, a situation I've since rectified.

And it is only March and I've been querying this novel for about 3 months. Probably I'm just being impatient, as usual.

But at what point does querying agents become a fool's errand? Just because an agent doesn't want to represent me doesn't mean my book isn't well written and saleable. It just means that particular agent wasn't taken with it and/or doesn't know how (or to whom) to sell it.

I'll reevaluate in a couple of months.

Playing with comics

I'm currently reading Drawing Words & Writing Pictures: A Definitive Course from Concept to Comic in 15 Lessons by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.

My motivation for reading this book is that I'm experimenting with a graphic novel even though I'm not an illustrator. And not that I expect working through this book to turn me into one either, but it is really fun to work in more than one medium. And comics are such an interesting blend of words and pictures.

Plus, the authors even set aside a whole page in their book for people like me with little or no drawing experience. One of the things they say on this page is this:

First of all: You're probably not nearly as bad as you think you are, and you will get better with time, no matter what your current skill level.

Ah, permission to be terrible. I can handle that.

So I've started working my way through the lessons. The major "homework" in chapter 3 is about drawing a sequence of panels. The instructions are to draw 5 wordless panels for each of 5 sections of a story the authors provide. Each panel is supposed to be drawn on a small Post-It note.

Part 1 is "An astronaut launches his rocket . . ." Here's my interpretation:







I know they're pretty faint. That's because I'm still a chicken. But it's pretty darn fun to stretch storytelling muscles in a new way.

Synopsis hell

Writing a 1-2 page synopsis of my novel is about as much fun as getting blood drawn--and I'm afraid of needles. While I did lots of painful things during my MFA program (including an outline and a synopsis), now that I've graduated, it's much easier to avoid those icky tasks.

Since I finished revising my middle grade fantasy novel last month and started shopping it around to agents, I was hoping to avoid having to write a synopsis. Lots of agents I've researched don't require it, or if they mention that word, I decide they mean a synopsis in the context of the query. In other words, a couple of paragraphs that are kind of like jacket copy. That I can do.

But a synopsis that tells the whole story? Yuckety yuck. I wasn't going to do it just for fun. The other day, though, an agent asked for a 2-page synopsis along with 50 pages of the manuscript. So I had to sit down and do it.

Luckily I didn't have to start from scratch. The novel I was synopsizing has been around in various forms for years, so I had a couple of earlier versions of synopses to jump start me.

The key is to keep the details to a minimum and not get bogged down in subplots and nuances. I think what the synopsis readers want to see is whether the writer has a grasp of plot and the overall shape of a story, including the ending. No cliffhangers allowed here.

So I looked at 3 different earlier synopses for this book, a 1-page, a 2-page, and a full-blown 5-page summary. Starting with the 2-page synopsis, I revised it to reflect the current manuscript's salient details. Luckily much of the overall story structure was the same.

Since I hadn't read this synopsis in several years, I had more objectivity about its content. It was easier for me to strip away details that weren't necessary to understand the overall story.

At first I wasn't going to include the detail about a set of family history drawings the main character uses, but then I decided they were too important to her overall journey. So back I went to the beginning to figure out how and where to introduce that odd bit of information.

I also tried to pay attention to how much room I was giving to various parts of the story. If I've only covered the first 50 pages of a 175-pg novel and have filled up 1+ pages of the 2-pg synopsis, I'm being too detailed.

I also tried to be alert to pacing. The last part of this novel is especially action packed, so I tried to make the synopsis read that way too.

But what I really hope is that the novel itself is so compelling that a synopsis won't be terribly important in determining whether an agent or editor asks for more.