One great thing about teaching

is that it forces you to look at what the heck you're doing, and to think about the basics. You think about what helped you to understand those basics.

I don't know how long I would have floundered without Lawrence Block's books on writing. For my money, they're still hard to beat. I wrote a letter to him when Goodnight, Irene was sold, thanking him for helping me to understand what went into writing a novel. I'm far from the only writer who read and reread his books before setting out on this adventure, nor am I the only author who goes back to them every now and then.

There are other fine books on writing — Oakley Hall's Art & Craft of Novel Writing and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird come to mind. But Block's straightforward and insightful explanations of the essentials show that this four-time Edgar-winner and MWA Grand Master also has a gift for teaching. His writing books should be in every new writer's library.

The ones that helped me to get started:
Spider, Spin Me A Web
Writing the Novel From Plot to Print
Telling Lies for Fun and Profit

A Tale of Vampires - Part 7

Sorry for the delay...commencements, visitors, and various and sundry other matters...did I mention that I write books?...conspired against blogging last week.

More on all of that another day.

Back to vampires. But first... are you amazed at all the recent TB news? See? Read this blog and you will be so ahead of the game.

Okay, back to the story of the story, "The Haunting of Carrick Hollow"...

Paul and I exchanged e-mails and met once more in person (a lunch meeting at an AAFS convention in Florida, IIRC), setting up how we would write the story from two different coasts. Paul was incredibly easy to work with.

We soon agreed that the protagonist would be in the situation Paul spoke of — of growing up in a rural area where vampire folklore existed, and being forced to participate in these rituals performed on the remains of beloved family members. This could cover a range of time and places in New England. We decided to set it in the 19th century, in Rhode Island. What more could we bring to the story?

We tossed around several ideas. Paul sent some reference materials on the vampire beliefs to me, and I looked into the history of TB as well. I was struck by how late some of these rituals were performed, given the progress being made in treating TB in the late 19th century.

Perhaps the most famous New England vampire story is that of Mercy Brown. I mentioned her case in a previous post. The exhumation of Mercy Brown, who had died from TB at the age of 19, took place in 1892. Although her father apparently did not believe in the power of these rituals, he succumbed to local pressure to allow them to be performed. Her heart was removed and burned, and the ashes were given to her brother, Edwin, to drink. (Despite this attempted remedy, he died of TB two months later.)

The rituals performed on Mercy Brown received newspaper attention, in stories which decried them as rustic superstition. The stories inspired H.P. Lovecraft (his "The Shunned House" refers to it) and a clipping of the story was found among Bram Stoker's possessions.

So a new possibility for the story occurred to us. What if a young man grew up in rural Rhode Island in the late 19th century, in a community where vampire folklore existed as an explanation for deaths from consumption (the name then given to TB), and this young man's family was pressured into performing these rituals on the bodies of beloved family members, BUT...later he is offered a chance to study medicine, and returns to the community to be of help, now knowing that TB is caused by bacteria? How might the community react? If he were believed, what effect would his new knowledge have on those who had endured the ritual?

We each took sections of the story, wrote them, pieced them together and smoothed them out. Paul's contributions to the history and science in the story were key, but I also want to say here and now that I was amazed at his writing abilities. It was hard to believe this was his first attempt at fiction. By the late spring of 1999, we had a story to submit to the Crime Through Time III anthology.

Before I wind up my series of blogs about this story, I want to make a note about a decision in telling the story. Michael Bell says that the term "vampire" was never used by these New England families. (Someday I'll have to ask him how he came to that conclusion, but I am sure he knows what he's talking about -- he did the decades of extensive research, not me!)

Bell's research now noted, I'll point out that in 1892, the term was most definitely in use in that part of the United States.

It's an old word. The word "upyr" and synonyms have been part of the Slavic languages since the middle ages and the terms "vampire" or "vampyre" had been used in English by 1688.
(For a fascinating scholarly study of history the word, see Katharina M. Wilson's article, "The History of the Word 'Vampire'," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 46, No. 4. (Oct. - Dec., 1985), pp. 577-583.)

This became the only real point of disagreement between us that I can recall, though. Paul, familiar with Bell and his work, thought we should not have the characters use the word "vampire." I thought the story worked better if they did use it, in part because the word was in use at that time in Rhode Island (and carrying a meaning that conformed with their use of it). My opinion was that in a work of fiction, it wouldn't be out of line to have the characters use the word "vampire," provided we weren't using a word that had not yet been coined, or using a word that had a different meaning at that time, or using it in one time as if it had a later meaning (such as OK, which has undergone a change in meaning since its 1840 origins). We shouldn't have people using anachronistic terms in historical short stories, but I didn't think this was anachronistic usage.

So for the public record, Paul disagreed, but graciously let me have my bratty writer way.


I'm going to leave at that for now, hoping Paul will find time to tell more about this from his perspective! I hope you'll find time to read and enjoy "The Haunting of Carrick Hollow."

A Tale of Vampires - Approximately Part 6

Paul mentioned to me that he might want to try his hand at writing fiction, perhaps a short story. So we started talking about choosing ideas for short stories.

I told him the background on my short story, "Two Bits." While researching Hocus, I read books and studies on kidnapping and hostage-taking. Almost any book that gave a historical perspective on kidnapping mentioned the story of "Little Charley Ross." If you've been reading this series of posts, you'll remember that story from this post.

The story of the Ross kidnapping is as moving today as it was over 100 years ago. And there are several aspects of it that might intrigue a fiction writer. Any of the following fictional paths might be taken from the starting point of the true crime story:

• The side of the kidnapping we don't know -- the story of what the kidnappers did after they abandoned Charley's brother.
• The story of what became of Charley if he survived.
• The story of a third person who might have either been in on the kidnapping or discovered Charley abandoned, and decided to keep him.
• The story of Mr. Ross, as this parade of fake Charleys is brought before him over the years.
• The story of the men who shot the burglars/presumed kidnappers.
• The story of the judge, whose installment of a burglar alarm had unintended consequences.
• The story of Mrs. Ross, who was away from home when the kidnapping took place.
  

These are just a few of the possibilities, of course. For me, the story that was most intriguing, though, was the story of Charley's brother.

This was in part because I had been hearing accounts about a more recent case. Some who had worked on it had noticed that the brother of the little girl who had been taken not only suffered tremendous guilt (he was present when she was taken), but was subject to a strange combination of abandonment and over-protectiveness by his parents. The over-protectiveness was understandable. Also understandably, his parents became obsessed with discovering their daughter's whereabouts. All their time and energy went into these efforts — for an extended period of time. The case received a great amount of media attention, and his parents gave endless interviews and coordinated major efforts to find her. He was withdrawn and on the sidelines.

In the Ross case, what would it be like, I wondered, to be the older brother who left his little brother with strangers? To have taken two bits and run happily into a store, oblivious to danger, only to have nearly everything about one's life change after that moment? A series of "what ifs" followed.

So I created a fictional family and subjected them to a few of the events experienced by the Ross family, and wrote "Two Bits." The story I wanted to tell came from that question, "What would it be like to be the brother?" I do not claim to know what happened emotionally or otherwise to the real-life brother, but within this fictional family, I tried to answer it for the fictional brother. And found another story within that one, one of those unexpected discoveries that often come along while writing, as one gets to know the characters.

I told this story of a story to Paul, and asked him if among the many possible stories he could tell, there was a similar question.

"I've always wondered," he said, "what it would have been like to have to been a member of one of those families in New England -- to have been a son who had to watch his mother's grave exhumed, her heart cut out and burned, and then to be told to eat her ashes."

We were off and running from there....

Such a deal

If you're just starting out as a writer of crime fiction, you may want to sign up for the OCC/RWA online course I'm teaching, Crime 101. This will be nuts and bolts basics. You can learn more about it here.

It's only $20 for members of OCC/RWA and $30 for non-members. Hurry -- deadline for enrollment is June 9!

Vampire, Resumed

Is it still Tuesday anywhere in the world? No? I apologize. Got back home from a trip out of town (where I got some writing done) and conked out for most of the day yesterday.

But to go back to the story of the story...

You'll recall that when Paul Sledzik and other researchers and anthropologists went to work on the recovery of the Walton Cemetery near Griswold, Connecticut, they found a coffin on the lid of which "JB-55" was spelled out in tacks, and within, remains that had clearly been altered after an exhumation -- the skull and large leg bones rearranged into a skull and crossbones configuration. They were the bones of a male who was probably 50-55 years old when he died, so it is likely that his initials were "JB" and his age at death was 55.

JB's bones showed lesions that are caused by tuberculosis. Sledzik and Bellatoni noted:

No other cases of tuberculosis were noted in the remains from the cemetery. Two burials are believed to be related to "JB." Both burials, a 45- to 55-year-old female and a 13- to 14-year-old subadult, were buried in a manner similar to "JB" and had the initials "IB-45" and "NB-13" spelled, respectively, in tacks on the coffin lid....

To date, 12 historic accounts documenting vampire beliefs and activities in 18th and 19th century New England have been located... These accounts are found in southern and western Rhode Island, central-southern Vermont, southeastern
Massachusetts, and eastern Connecticut, and range in time from the late 1700s to the late 1800s. Eleven of the 12 accounts denote consumption as the cause of death of the vampire and any deceased relatives....

[From "Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief," which appeared in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1994.]

An 1801 history of Griswold noted that in the previous 25 years, many people in the area had died of consumption (another name for tuberculosis).

Saying vampires caused consumption was a way to explain the deaths of several people in the same family from the disease. (For more on the history of the treatment of TB, see this post. To get an idea of where matters stood on germ theory, look here.) These New Englanders' beliefs about vampires were probably related in some ways to the beliefs of the European communities from which they or their ancestors immigrated, but as often happens when communities are separated, folk beliefs take on new features in new places.

Those who suffered from consumption did indeed seem to be consumed -- they grew pale and thin, and often coughed up blood, which stained their mouths and lips. Despite this, they remained active and had appetites. If their disease was blamed on a vampire, in the minds of believers, clearly the vampire was feeding from them, but leaving them alive. In New England this was a family affair, not one of caped aristocrats luring unsuspecting strangers into their castles.

As little understood as consumption were the causes of changes in a body after death and burial. A grave opened to "examine" a suspected vampire might reveal a body that had bloated (assumed to have fed), an appearance of hair and fingernail growth after death, blood draining from the mouth, and blood or fluid in the heart. These are now known to be aspects of natural decomposition, but in the New England folk belief, blood in the heart of the deceased was a sign of a vampire, who could only be "killed" by the removal and burning of the heart. (A family member might be required to eat the ashes.) If the heart had decomposed, rearrangement of the skull and bones would disrupt the vampire's ability to "walk."

If you'd like to read a few stories about these rituals, check out the book I mentioned previously, by folklorist Michael Bell. Or these sites:

The Jewett City Vampires
Rhode Island Vampires
Stories from the New Standard Times
Vampires of Rhode Island

In the late spring of 1998, four years after his study of "JB-55" had been published, I visited Washington D.C. and met with my friend Paul Sledzik. Over a late Tex-Mex lunch, we began to talk about short stories, and what might be potential short story material....

A Tale of Vampires - Part 4

Yesterday I wrote about the 1990 discovery of the 19th century grave of JB-55 and those of two other individuals buried in the same manner near Griswold, Connecticut. These were not the first known cases of evidence of belief in vampires in New England.

In Rhode Island, state folklorist Michael E Bell, who has found evidence of a least 16 such cases taking place from the mid-18th century to the late 19th century, has made extensive studies of the subject. If you want to know more about New England vampire beliefs than you'll find on this blog, read his book Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires. You should also visit his Food for the Dead and Quahog folklore sites.

Bell first took interest in New England vampire lore when he talked to Everett Peck in 1981. Peck, a lifelong resident of Exeter, Rhode Island is a descendant of family of perhaps the last person in New England exhumed as a vampire: Mercy Brown.

On March 19, 1892, the Providence Journal carried a front page story about the exhumation, written in the classic overblown style of the journalism of its day. It exclaimed over the superstitions that led to the horrors of the rituals performed on the remains of Mercy, a 19-year-old woman who had lived and died in Exeter.

The Brown family had experienced a number of deaths from consumption, as tuberculosis was known then. Her mother had died of the disease, her sister in 1888, and her brother had fallen ill with it as well. Mercy caught it and died in January 1892.

The article in the Providence Journal used the term "vampire," but Bell has said this word was not used by the families or communities that practiced these rituals.

Whatever they named those who came from the grave, the belief — especially in families where mulitiple deaths occurred in a short space of time — was that in some manner the dead were drawing their sustenance from the living. The way to "kill" the one who was feeding on the others was through these rituals.

Before going into the nature of these rituals and some of the stories associated with them, let's take a quick look at the history and current status of the real cause of those deaths, tuberculosis.

For many centuries, tuberculosis was one of the most widespread of deadly diseases. The bacteria that causes it has been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 2400 BCE. In 19th century Europe, as many as one in four deaths were caused by this disease.

Far ahead of his time, in 1720 English physician Benjamin Marten first theorized that "wonderfully minute living creatures" might be causing it.

In 1854, Hermann Brehmer, a Silesian botany student cured of the disease after following his physician's recommendation of a change of climate, went on to study medicine and presented a paper, Tuberculosis is a Curable Disease, and started a sanatorium. This became the model for other facilities for TB patients, and was a major step in efforts to fight the disease.

In 1865, Jean-Antoine Villemin of France proved that TB could be transferred from humans to cattle and cattle to rabbits. It was proof that a microorganism was causing the disease.

In 1882, Robert Koch discovered a staining technique that allowed him to see that microorganism — Mycobacterium tuberculosis— under a microscope.

The development of X-rays helped in the study of the disease, but it was not until 1944 that the first effective antibiotic for the treatment of human TB cases were developed. Further progress in developing anti-TB drugs continued to be made over the next decades. Death rates dropped in industrialized countries until the mid-1980s.

TB is still causing deaths today — although curable, it causes 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year. Experts believe that 10 million people in the U.S. are currently infected — and one in ten of those infected will develop the disease. (The remaining 90% will not get the disease or infect others.)

The American Lung Association notes:

It is not easy to become infected with tuberculosis. Usually a person has to be close to someone with TB disease for a long period of time. TB is usually spread between family members, close friends, and people who work or live together. TB is spread most easily in closed spaces over a long period of time.

Consider family life in rural farming communities in the 18th and 19th centuries -- small homes, several siblings often sharing the same bed, the whole family working and living together. Add to this the long-held belief that drafts and fresh air were unhealthy. Put these and other factors together, and one sees why a family like Mercy Brown's fell prey to this disease.

Many of the points I've discussed here are part of the story I wrote with Paul Sledzik, "The Haunting of Carrick Hollow."

More tomorrow on how consumption, exhumations, the history of medicine, and vampires served as not only the inspiration for the story, but also its central conflict....

A Tale of Vampires - Part 3

In November of 1990, near Griswold, Connecticut, an abandoned rural farm family cemetery was discovered. The Walton Cemetery dated from the 18th-19th centuries, and those buried there were of European descent.

The initial -- and accidental -- discovery was made made by a sand and gravel company working at the site of the forgotten cemetery. Because of the instability of the sand and gravel knoll in which they were discovered, the burials could not be preserved where they were, and an archeological team had to remove them from the site.

As Paul Sledzik and Nicholas Bellantoni reported in "Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief," which appeared in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1994:

The skeletal remains of 29 individuals (15 subadults, 6 adult males, and 8 adult females) were excavated in the course of 1 year. Documentary evidence in land deeds indicated that the Walton family, who had emigrated to Griswold in 1690, had utilized the knoll as a family burial ground by the 1750s.

What no one could anticipate when the cemetery was discovered in 1990 was that a few years later, a spate of news stories about vampires in New England would result.

All most all of us get our ideas about vampires from an Irish author — Bram Stoker. Although Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris, and other writers have given us new ways to imagine vampires, Stoker's creation of Dracula has provided Hollywood with its model for the creatures, and almost everything that has followed bears at least an imprint of Stoker's creation.

But folk legends of vampires go back for centuries before the Count. And Stoker was not the first to write of them.

The first English language work of vampire fiction, "The Vampyre," was published in 1819. It was written by John William Polidori, a young man with a fascinating history of his own. He was 20 years old and traveling in Europe as Lord Byron's physician (he obtained his medical degree at 19) when he participated in the famous ghost-story-writing challenge that lead to the writing of Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. Polidori took a fragment of a story abandoned by Byron, and reworked it into The Vampyre.

But artistocratic biters were not the image of a vampire that came to mind everywhere throughout Europe before Polidori, Stoker and their successors picked up their pens. Nor were stakes through the heart, garlic, and the like the remedy.

Among the burials recovered from that abandoned, damaged graveyard in Griswold, scientists would discover three sets of remains that bore the signs of an older remedy. In a stone-lined grave, they found the first. Within it was a coffin, the lid of which bore tacks arranged to spelled out "JB-55" — presumably, the deceased's initials and age at death. But what drew special attention to JB-55 when that coffin was carefully opened was that his bones had been deliberately rearranged -- his skull and largest leg bones (his femurs) had been placed atop his ribs and spine in a classic "skull and cross-bones" orientation.

It seems someone had made sure a man believed to be a vampire would no longer trouble the living...


More about New England vampires in the next installment.

A Tale of Vampires - Part 2.5

This Part 2.5 instead of Part 3 -- I said I'd be talking about vampires in part 3, and that was before I checked my schedule.

This will be brief, because I'm getting up early to go to San Diego tomorrow, where I'll be one of the stand-ins at the Elaine Viets Tour-by-Proxy event at Mysterious Galaxy.

So a little more delay. But I think it would be good to give you a couple of quick Web site reading assignments in the meantime, warning that they will still not seem to have anything to do with vampires, or even "The Haunting of Carrick Hollow." But they do have something to do with a key conversation I had with Paul Sledzik about writing short stories, which you'll hear more about in the next post, probably on Monday.

During that conversation, I talked to him about the story "Two Bits." To read about the historical case that inspired that short story, I invite you to visit Web sites about the first (or perhaps first publicized) kidnapping for ransom case in the U.S., the most notorious kidnapping case prior to the Lindbergh case -- a case that gained national attention before there were radios or newsreels.

So click here or here or here to learn about Charley Ross, and on his name to see a portrait of this four-year-old boy on the cover of sheet music for "Bring Back Our Darling," one of the songs written about him in 1874 -- the year of his disappearance. A project that brings attention to missing children's cold cases bears his name.

A Tale of Vampires - Part 2

[See yesterday's post for the start of this tale.]

Most of us would not want our deaths to become mysteries. We would not want those we love to spend years wondering what had become of us. We would not want to be John or Jane Does lying unknown and unclaimed.

If our remains were found in some forest or desert, we would hope someone would be able to figure out who we were, and let our loved ones know what had become of us. And especially if we had the misfortune to be murdered — we would hope for immediate justice, for someone to figure out what had happened to us, and catch the killer.

Perhaps more than we hope for these things for ourselves, we want them for those we love. We want this for ourselves and our families, but we are moved by the stories of strangers as well. Most of us want to live in a society that will do its best to see that no individual within it is denied identity or justice.

The work of the forensic anthropologist often provides the last opportunity for identity and justice for the dead. I have the great privilege of counting among my friends a number of these bright, highly trained, compassionate and dedicated individuals, and I met most of them through Paul Sledzik.

Paul now works for the National Transportation Safety Board, but when I met him, he was the Curator of Anatomical Collections for the National Museum of Health and Medicine. (If you visit the Washington, D.C. area, take time to stop by this museum. Admission is free.) Through his work with DMORT, he has led or worked on teams that identified remains from mass fatality incidents — events such bombings and airplane crashes, as well as natural disasters. At the time we met, he had recently worked on the identification of remains from the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. A few years later, on September 11, 2001, as Commander of DMORT Team III, he was called to Pennsylvania help identify those who had been on United Flight 93.

In those years, he was also the director of a forensic anthropology course taught at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. I was able to take the course, and much of Bones was inspired by Paul and the other forensic anthropologists I met through the AFIP class. I was struck again and again by their compassion, their willingness to be in incredibly stressful and horrific situations, all to give names to the dead, to give a voice to victims who could no longer speak for themselves, and to aid the grieving process of the families left behind.

Paul was quoted in the National Library of Medicine's "Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body" exhibit:

What intrigues me about anthropology is how the study of all
aspects of humans—their past, culture, language, and biology—
helps solve complicated human problems....

[The exhibit will be at NLM until February, 2008 and is worth visiting -- even if the section on crime fiction is crappy.]

Paul has also written about historical military medicine and worked on a number of historic skeletal biology cases. I was to learn more about these when we started talking about writing a story.

Next: we finally get to the vampire part of this story

A Tale of Vampires - Part 1

What does a photo of a plane crash have to do with vampires?

Read on.

Someone asked me to write here about the background of "The Haunting of Carrick Hollow," which is one of the stories you can find in the collection of my stories, Eighteen. (Some places list it as 18. Yes, I've learned my lesson about numbers as titles.)

How did I end up writing a story about vampires? Or is it really about vampires? Why did I co-write it? Who is Paul Sledzik? Were there really vampires in New England? What's the forensic science side of the story? The history? How did the story end up in a collection of historical short stories?

The story of the short story is sort of a long story, at least the way I've decided to tell it, which will be over more than one post. This will give those of you who haven't read it yet a chance to look it over (if you want to do) so before I get into spoiler territory. I'll try to avoid that as much as possible, and warn about it, but some elements of "Carrick Hollow" relate to the research and story behind it, so I can't completely separate them.

I thought it might be fun to really trace back the threads that led to the writing of "Carrick Hollow," long before the story itself first appeared in print.

So back we go...let's start with how I met my co-author, Paul Sledzik.

Before my second book was published, I realized I needed to know more about forensic science. Okay, I wanted to know more about it, too. I had enjoyed what I learned researching Goodnight, Irene. But where did a new writer learn such things?

This was long before CSI was on television, and in retrospect, I'm grateful for that, because I didn't learn about forensic science from a television drama. An author friend (and fellow CSULB alumna), Wendy Hornsby , mentioned that she had taken a good class from Larry Ragle at UC Irvine. I saw that the UCI Extension was offering it again, and signed up for it. The class met in the fall of 1992.

Larry was the Director of Forensic Sciences for Orange County, California. (Those of you who like to read about forensic science will enjoy his book Crime Scene.) The class was a perfect introduction to forensic science.

Among the many fascinating speakers he invited into the class was a forensic odontologist who talked about working with Larry Ragle and with Dr. Judy Suchey, a forensic anthropologist then on the faculty of California State University, Fullerton. He included a presentation on the recovery of remains from what was probably Orange County's biggest air disaster -- something most of the locals refer to as the Cerritos plane crash -- after the town where the planes mowed the swath of destruction you see above.

The midair collision of Aeromexico Flight 498 (a DC-9 with 56 passengers and crew of 6 aboard) and a Piper Archer (with a pilot and two passengers aboard) on August 31, 1986, caused the planes to fall into a suburb on the LA/OC border, where it killed 15 people on the ground, wounded 8 others, and destroyed or damaged a dozen houses. (Contrary to popular belief, the pilot of the Piper did not have a heart attack. You can read a full analysis of the crash from the AOPA here.) Identifying the dead was a complex and (given the chemical and other hazards from the crash) dangerous task.

I later learned that Judy Suchey was teaching classes in forensic anthropology for lay people. I found her course equally fascinating. I asked her for information on textbooks and bought a few and did my best to work my way through them. Again, although her course was packed, forensic anthropology really wasn't a hot topic, and wasn't on television dramas yet. In addition to other work as an anthropologist and teacher, Judy Suchey worked on the Charles Manson case, the Hillside Strangler case, and many others in the more than 35 years she has devoted to her field. She is also noted as an author of important studies and a developer of a number techniques in use in the field of anthropology.

Those of you who have read my novels may recall that Larry Ragle had been mentioned in my acknowledgements, and that one of the people to whom Bones is dedicated is Judy Suchey. And a presentation Judy Suchey gave was one of the sparks that led to the short story, "Two Bits." So these courses in the early and mid 1990s had an impact on both my writing and my interest in forensic science.

Later (I believe it was 1995, but I'll have to look up old program books to be sure) I was at a Malice Domestic Convention, and assigned to a panel on research. In the green room before our session, the five panelists gathered for the first time. Soon, two of the other panelists were in close conversation with the moderator. A gentleman I hadn't met sat quietly by himself. I introduced myself to him — he was Paul Sledzik. He told me he was a forensic anthropologist. I asked him if he knew Judy Suchey. He did — and soon we were talking to each other about forensic anthropology, and research, and reading. A friendship began...one I number among those most important to me.


[photographer of Cerritos air crash photo, above, is unknown]

Finding an Agent - Authors Tell You Their Own Stories

At the end of March, I posted some suggestions for those who are trying to find an agent — so if you're looking for representation, you may want to read that before you dive into this post.

You may remember that the March post was inspired by someone who believed that you needed an author recommendation to get anywhere in the agent hunt. I disagreed. Whole books have been written on this topic, and I don't intend to replace them with this blog. I only hope these comments from other writers about their experiences will encourage some of you who are looking for agents. Especially if you've been feeling that your chances of getting published are nil just because you

• never saved an author from drowning,
• don't hang out in bars with leading literary lights, and
• haven't located a copy of the Harry Potter book of spells to help you ensorcel a writer by e-mail into being your champion.

Maybe one day the AAR will publish a scientific study whereby agents list their clients who were "discovered" by them — their first-time authors only — and specify how those clients came to work with them. This might provide something more than guesswork on the number of unknown authors who were referred by other clients, were brought to their attention by writing instructors, made the connection through queries, were met through conferences, etc. (To the best of my knowledge, this isn't available now.)

I will readily admit that what I'm posting here is anecdotal. My intention is to show that writers find agents in lots of different ways, and to dispel the myth that the world of publishing is closed and "members only."

Please understand that I am not saying that it is easy to get an agent. Many agents get over a thousand queries a week, and of course they don't take all of those folks on. But here are a few stories from some people who didn't have any special insider help:


From Denise Swanson, national bestselling author of Murder of A Botoxed Blonde and eight other novels:

I found my first agent using a query letter, although I did have the permission of [the late, renowned Mysterious Press editor] Sara Ann Freed to use a quote from the critique she did of my manuscript at the Harriette Austin Writers Conference.

The book I used to come up with the list of agents I eventually queried was the Insider's Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents by Jeff Herman.



From Meg Chittenden, bestselling author of over 100 short stories and articles, a book on writing, three children's books, and 33 novels that include romance, suspense, mystery, and mainstream — her latest suspense novel is Snap Shot:

Way back in 1971 — would you believe it, I must have been in kindergarten — I received a manila envelope back in the mail — one of my SASE that I was sending out with all the submissions I was making. Disheartened, I let it sit on my desk a while. Luckily I opened it before going to the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference. Inside was a contract from Follett for my first children's book. I took it to the conference, talked to an agent who was there, who agreed to represent me (hey, they'd already mentioned money!) and actually got me more money than they had offered. She then repped me through my GH short story days, another children's book and my first novel, which she suggested I write....

[Unfortunately, her first agent died. Meg tells how she found her next agent:]

I wrote to Emilie Jacobson at Curtis Brown, who took me on right away and is still my agent. I wrote her because she was Willo Davis Roberts agent and Willo was doing pretty good, seemed to me. Note that I did not ask Willo to recommend me. I did not tell Emilie I was a friend of Willo.

Because, and this is what I tell people who want me to recommend them to my agent — I believe a writer needs an agent who is enthusiastic about his or her work. I didn't want an agent to take me on because so-and-so asked her to and she maybe felt she owed so-and-so something.



From Toni L.P. Kelner, award-winning author of nine novels, including the forthcoming Without Mercy, as well as numerous short stories:

When I was going to events, trying to figure out how this business works (thinking that I could figure it out), I used to ask writers, "How do you get an agent?"
The usual answer was, "Consult one of the books that list agents and their needs, and query them."
Then I'd say, "Is that how you got your agent?"
And they would almost always say, "No, I knew somebody."

Well, I did NOT know anybody. I actually got my agent via one of those guide books. She was the sixteenth I queried, as a matter of fact, and we didn't meet in person until a few years after we started working together.

So if anybody asks, those guidebooks work!



From Jerrilyn Farmer, award-winning author of seven novels in the Madeline Bean series and short stories, and member of the faculty of the UCLA Extension Writers Program:

The best advice I read was to research which agents rep which authors (by checking the Acknowledgments pages of their books), and to send query letters to agents whose authors are similar in style/genre to yours. In addition, I found the Writers Market and other guides to Literary Agents helpful for their listings of agents who specialize in particular kinds of books. This is how I found my agent.

Sometimes it feels like you need a special introduction to get noticed, but I agree with Meg who said that an agent shouldn't be doing anyone a favor to take you on, but be completely enthusiastic about your books.



From Robin Burcell, Anthony Award winner and author crime fiction novels, including Cold Case:

I went about the whole agent hunting thing backwards.

I sold my first book on my own (a process I do not recommend) and acquired my first agent after being introduced via phone by another writer represented by the same agency. Right around the time I switched genres, my agent left the agency. I sent my first mystery to the same publisher, who was very interested in it.

In the meantime, I was introduced to a second agent at the same agency, who said she was
interested in seeing the mystery. Sent it off to her, then got a call from the publisher saying they wanted to buy it. Second agent negotiated this book. And then my editor said she wanted to buy the second mystery in the series, which she'd read, but needed to wait until
her return from medical leave. During this medical leave, my second agent left the agency, and I took that as my cue to find a new agency myself.

After several queries, I wasn't able to find an agent before my editor returned, and I finally called her, asking if she was still interested in the book, because I was now agentless. She was, asked me what I was looking for, and I gave her my wish list. She gave me a list of agents to query based on that list. I interviewed several while at Bouchercon, then made a decision.

We've been happy ever since.



Paul Guyot brings a slightly different perspective, from the world of television writing — considered by most to be nearly impossible to break into. Shows he has written for include Felicity and Judging Amy.

I found my agent the old fashion way - query letters. I had ZERO connections in Hollywood. None. So I sent a dozen queries out and was rejected or ignored across the board. So then I began to query managers - in Hollywood a manager is someone who acts just like an agent, but isn't accredited. They can get your stuff to maybe 75% of the places an agent can, but 75% of something is better than 100% of nothing. For a complete newbie like myself, managers - especially newer just-starting-out managers - were more willing to read a new writer. Of the approximately four or five queries to managers, only one was interested, so I figured we were a match made in heaven, and I signed with him.

Well, he was able to get my material in front of studio and network executives who put me on their "approved" lists - executives love lists - and from there I was able to very quickly secure an agent, then my first job, and have never been unemployed since. I subsequently fired the manager within my first year of employment. It was perhaps a bit mercenary of me (though there were other issues), but once I had the accredited agent and employment, the manager became superfluous.

I agree with what Stephen King, Elmore Leonard and several other major writers believe - good writing always finds a home. If you write well, you eliminate a huge variable, and thus reduce the importance or need for connections and recommendations. Unfortunately, many aspiring writers (screen and prose) put more effort into getting an agent or getting published than they do the actual writing.



From Sharan Newman, author of the fabulous Catherine LeVendeur historical mystery novels, nonfiction including The Real History Behind the DaVinci Code and (forthcoming in July) The Real History Behind the Templars, as well as short stories and other works:

I published my first three books without an agent, something I don't recommend. I didn't know any other writers. I got mine by going to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, listening to and talking with the agents there. One of them liked me. That was 1984 and we've been together ever since.

I might also add that, although I have suggested other writers to my agency none of them have been a match.

Sorry, I still think the best way to get an agent is to write a good book, then go to a couple of the conferences or start writing query letters. Knowing another author is not really that useful.


So there are just a few examples of published writers who found agents without recommendations from other writers. My thanks to all of them!


I hope you'll take note of something several of those above have said — having an author recommend you isn't as important as finding an agent who is genuinely enthusiastic about your work. And I strongly agree that your focus must be on creating a work of quality. A recommendation from the hottest author on the NYT list will not help you if your manuscript is weak. If you've written an original and engaging story with a fresh voice, your manuscript will provide what you need most in your quest for an agent.

Luck and Timing

Lots of great comments recently. I'm going to take a few days to reply to some of them, but I also want to give my non-writing readers a break here and there from these topics. Which means yes, I've discovered some new weird sites, good ideas, infuriating news, and so on. But I'll quickly tackle a couple of comments.

MF Makichen asked:

...Do you think a lot of the business of writing comes down to luck and timing. Or do you believe that ultimately great writing and perseverance are what will keep a career going long-term.

Just to be clear I admire anyone who can finish a book, find an agent, and get published, whethter the writing is my cup of tea or not. But so much of the "business" of writing seems to come down to luck and in some cases who you know....

MF, thanks for this, because I think a lot of new writers have these questions about luck and timing and connections. So I'm going to respond not just to what you've written here, but on this topic as it concerns new writers.

Luck and timing come into play in all of our lives -- from the moment we are conceived until the day we die. And in some cases, after that. If you are lucky enough to be literate, you are ahead of a great many people on this planet. Trying to understand luck and timing can get us into some questions that are concerned with the workings of the cosmos (and chaos) if not philosophy and theology, which I don't propose to explore here.

So I'll just say that I don't think it makes a lot of sense to magnify whatever amount of luck and timing are involved in a writing career out of proportion. Especially not as an excuse.

I can understand the temptation. If a person is a new writer, and it's a lack of luck or bad timing that causes him not to be published, why then, the universe is against him, and there's not much he can do about that, is there? (This is assuming he wasn't done in by the evil, anti-creative publishing cabal I mentioned a few days ago.) It isn't a matter of anything lacking his imagination or his skill in telling a story, it isn't because he hasn't found his voice, that his style is overly ornate one moment and ridiculously spare the next, that his pacing is all shot to hell, that his grammar is MIA, that every character sounds exactly like every other character, that the opening induces yawns, that the plot is implausible or unoriginal.

Or any of the thousands of other things that can go wrong in a manuscript. No, he just wasn't lucky.

Nonsense.

I've also seen this "luck and timing" stuff used by the envious. I don't know how many times I've heard horror stories from people who were in writing groups and who happened to be the first (if not only) person in the group to be published. Whoooweee. Ever want to see the green-eyed monster of jealousy rear its ugly head, that's where you should set up your cameras. Be sure the sound is on after the newly published person leaves the room: Of course talent had nothing to do with her success. Otherwise, it would have been me and not her! What luck! What timing!

What's the idea here, that publishers are actually using a big lottery system? Superstition is alive and well.

I don't claim that luck and timing are never part of the equation -- they are. I just believe that they don't play anything close to the largest role. And let's face it -- you can't make a career out of luck and timing. If you're going to write more than one book, you need to be able to deliver to your readers again and again. Publishers are looking for someone who shows that kind of promise.

Getting published isn't one, uniform experience. Some people sell a first book without ever getting a rejection. Some people take fifteen or more years to make a sale. Why? I think the reasons must be as varied as the authors and their works, and the people who buy them. And yes, luck and timing play a role, but I don't believe there are publishers making out contracts on nothing more than the basis of the author's luck.

Do I believe that some writers have bad luck? Yes, but I believe one can often recover from it. Do I believe that all talented writers get published? No, but I believe there may be obstacles other than luck involved, so that luck isn't always much of a factor, and to the extent it is, perseverance may increase their odds in the future. I've seen it work.

As for the "whom you know" -- I have asked a few of my friends how they found their agents and editors, and I'll be posting their answers. I hope it will help at least some of you to believe that not everyone had an inside connection.

****

I want to thank my friend John for catching a one of my typos in an earlier post. He's an editor. We all need them. We need friends like John, too.


And finally -- Kathy, so glad to hear from another fan of Thornton's!

The Economics

New writers usually want to become published authors in part because they feel compelled to write, and if you're going to have a compulsion that strong, why not earn a living at it?

Usually, they also love books and reading, and spend a lot of time in bookstores.

For all that, they seldom know how the book business works. This isn't so odd. I don't really have more than a vague idea of how electricity works, but I use it every day. Still, if I decided I wanted to earn my living as an electrician, I'd study more, and try to apprentice myself to someone who knew what he or she was doing. If I decided I wanted to generate electricity and supply it to others, I'd study a lot, and talk to experienced experts.

So if you're a writer, and you're thinking about being your own publisher, you need to know how your new business works -- not the writing business, but the book business.

Here's a starter lesson on the economics.

The availability of a thing -- including a thing such as book -- does not mean it will be sold.
Simply making a book available (such as by self-publishing) doesn't put it into a store.
Likewise, simply listing it among hundreds of thousands of other books offered at an online store does not sell it and place it in a reader's hands.

But wait! Don't independent stores and even some big stores hand-sell books to their customers?
Yes, but...believe it or not, there is no law requiring booksellers to carry a book just because you think it's pretty darned good! Or even because you're insistent. A shame, isn't it?

Bookselling is not likely to make an independent bookseller rich. Large or small, bookstores are not intended to become literary charities, kissing money goodbye in noble sacrifice just because so many books -- yours, for example! -- are so darned good. They prefer to make at least some profit. The independent's resources are not those of a giant, so they must be careful with those resources.

The space in a bookseller's store is like retail space anywhere — valuable to the merchant. Choosing what goes into that space may (or may not) have more to do with love than it does at a big box store, but at the end of the day, both types of stores must make wise business decisions and believe they can sell what they stock.

And there are other considerations.

For traditionally published books, about 40% of the sales price goes to the bookseller.

The bookseller is also able to return unsold books to the publisher. (A few conditions apply.)

Additionally, the bookseller knows that the traditional publisher is making other efforts to try to help the book to be sold. Sending out copies to reviewers, seeking endorsements, paying for cover art, perhaps creating special displays, advertising, press releases, author tours, and other marketing efforts. In some cases, the publisher may be offering special incentives if the store will host an author appearance.

The bookseller also knows that the publisher is risking money on the book, has invested in this author, and to an extent is staking the publishing house's reputation on the quality of the book. The book was chosen through an editorial process -- an agent brought a likely manuscript to the house, an editor considered it carefully, a committee looked hard at the editor's choice, and decided if the house's resources should be spent -- and in most houses, the manuscript received several kinds of editorial attention before publication.

Now let's look at self-published works. Guess who decided the book should be published? Who did that person have to convince that it was worthy of resources? Guess who will be paying the discount to the bookseller, one way or another? The fact is, as JB Dickey pointed out in the post I mentioned last week, from the Seattle Mystery Bookstore's blog:

In general, POD books are more expensive than regular trade paperbacks from the major publisher. That’s not odd as they’re a different system, scales of economy, etc. But they’re larger, thinner and end up not feeling as if they’re a good value. They also have been available at a lower discount, meaning that the bookseller has to pay more for the book and makes less profit on the sale of the book. (The industry standard is 40%, so out of the 40¢ out of every $1 we make on the sale, we pay the rent, the employees, the various costs of being in business.) It is impossible to stay in business when the discount for a POD is 15% or so. Can’t work. Ties up too much cash flow in stock and doesn’t bring in enough money to pay for the effort. The last thing about PODs is that, since they’re printed to fill the demand/order, they are non-returnable. Normally, unsold books can be returned to the publisher or wholesaler for credit. POD cannot.

Now, some small presses use POD technology and go out of their way to remedy some of these problems and do allow returns, but that's not likely to be the case for a self-published work. This means that it is seldom as profitable to the bookseller to stock self-published works as it is those of legitimate small presses and major publishing houses. I haven't even started talking about what happens when we bring a distributor into the picture.

I'm not saying you'll never see a self-published book in a brick-and-mortar store. But you don't have to be an economics professor to understand the obstacles the author of a self-published book faces in placing a book in stores. A bookseller can't afford to give up much space to books that bring in less than half the profit.

If your dream of being an author included dealing with this kind stuff as the publisher, then it was different than mine.

What you put on the page is — first, last, and always — what will have the strongest influence over your career as a writer. Not many people have so much control over what they do during their working hours. That's where your focus must remain: on the page.

Focus on your craft. Use the power you have over the page wisely. It will take you farther than you may expect.

Is there a time for everything, including self-publishing?

Are there times when it makes sense to self-publish?

If what you have in hand is a work of fiction, I'd say the answer is no 99% of the time. You should read yesterday's post for my complete answer about self-publishing a work of fiction.

Still, there are a few cases when I think it might make sense to self-publish non-fiction, with a whole bunch of caveats attached, the first and foremost being that you must understand that this will probably cost you money, should be researched thoroughly (ie, do more than Google "self- publishing"), and is highly unlikely to lead to either fame or fortune. Add to that list: you are sure you haven't written something that could result in a lawsuit.

Self-publishing is a maybe when:

1) You teach seminars and want attendees to purchase your workbooks or self-created texts.
You have an audience, a means of distribution, and probably know what you are getting into.
Keep in mind that in most states, you will need to have a business license, resale permit, etc. and deal with sales taxes and so on. Make sure your self-published materials are completely your own -- you don't want to get hit with violation of copyright, etc. And be sure that you aren't missing out on an opportunity for wider distribution and sales by selling your book to a publishing house.

2) You have made a study of local history that will have limited interest anywhere outside of your community, and there is no small press willing to take it on. Again, be sure interest would be so limited.

3) You are an expert in an obscure field who knows that your subject matter will not be of interest to a university press or textbook publisher, but you believe there is a need and at least a tiny market for your work.

4) You want to reprint, perhaps with a scholarly foreword of your own, a work that is in the public domain and out of print. You are sure there is no other reasonable means to preserve a print edition of this work.

5) You are a war veteran, and want to write about your military experiences. You are creating a memoir that will likely be special to your friends, family, and possibly to other people in your unit, and perhaps even a few military history buffs. You are not working on something that is literature -- not Master and Commander, Catch-22 or All's Quiet on the Western Front. You don't aspire to be W.E.B. Griffin. You just want to tell your own story.

6) You have written a history of your family. You are not a descendant of Thomas Jefferson or anyone else you heard about in grade school.

I think by now, most of you get the picture. You'll notice that this is not on the list: "You are the author of a series that has gone out of print, and you want to make it available to new readers."

That's because I have strong misgivings about whether or not POD self-publishing is a good idea for writers in this situation. I've heard from some writers who were very glad to have the ability to do this, and others who deeply regretted signing on to reprint programs. The downside? Rights can be tied up forever. You may make the book less attractive to potential new publishers. You may not be pleased by the end product, which may not look or feel like a trade paperback from a major house. You have to ask if, aside from any expense to you, this will be worth your time and effort. Will your readers want to fork over $25 for a trade paperback that may appear to be cheaply printed and bound?

You may want to read what Lee Goldberg has to say about the "big bucks" you can make by going this route. Lee and Keith Snyder have a long history of posting warnings about scammers in the self-publishing industry, and about some of the companies that will swear they aren't vanity presses, but do not at all behave like legitimate publishers. Worthwhile reading before you decide to abandon hope of finding an agent.

After reviewing some of Lee's posts on self-publishing, I find I have an additional item to add to the list above:

7) You are incredibly famous -- and this requires more than a lot of "friends" on myspace. According to Lee Goldberg's blog, in 2005 Jack Klugman self-published a memoir of his years working with Tony Randall, and spent half a million dollars to publish it well. If you haven't had a highly successful acting career that spans several decades, you may not be famous enough to try this.

Next time I'll talk about some of the problems with self-publishing, ones that most new writers do not expect — the difficulties that lead to the low sales numbers — and other pitfalls.

A Few Things to Think About If You Are Thinking About Self-Publishing

Just keep this in mind, and you don't need to read the rest of the post:

Never pay anyone to publish your work of fiction.

Not all that long ago, a person could be self-published in hardcover by what was commonly known as a vanity press, and pay thousands of dollars to insulate a garage with unsold copies of their books. Then in the 1990s, a new technology known as "print on demand" started coming into its own, and suddenly you didn't need thousands of dollars (although some have lost that much to POD self-publishing outfits) and you didn't have to own a garage. Books could be printed and bound one at a time. The technology is used widely and not just for self-publishing, but it has had a greater influence on self-publishing than just about anything since the invention of movable type.

POD technology has also proven to be a fabulous windfall to a set of people who have been in a lucrative industry for decades — not the publishing industry, but the industry of making money off of those who dream of being published. This is a set of people who understand how widespread and tenacious the dream of being able to say "I am an author" is in our society. They know that the impulse to tell stories is strong within many of us. They don't care much about writing or writers. They care about parting dreamers from their money.

I am not completely opposed to self-publishing, but I think there are only a few — a very few — circumstances when an author should go this route. I'll go into some of those at some point, but right now I'm going to focus on the publication of one's first work of fiction. Usually, a new writer of fiction should choose self-publishing only when he or she really doesn't care at all about book sales. I mean that — you don't want to make money and you don't care if you are the only person who owns a copy of your book.

Self-published new authors often dream that their books will light fires of enthusiasm in readers, build huge sales by word of mouth, and start to sell like discounted tickets to the Superbowl. The statistics say otherwise, and I'll get to the reasons they do at some point in this series of posts.

Maybe you really don't care if your book only sells 12 copies. That number isn't one I pulled out of the air. I did a study for a major writers' organization a couple of years ago, and the vast majority of participants in its self-publishing program — a relatively deluxe program that also included experienced, known authors reselling out-of-print titles from their series — sold 12 or fewer copies. (For a number of reasons, the organization dropped the program.)

Publishers Weekly, the major trade magazine for the publishing industry, ran an article in 2005 on iUniverse and included some numbers from 2004 — after the company was well-established — that should give any fiction writer considering self-publishing pause. Of the 18,104 titles — fiction, non-fiction, you name it — published by the company, only 83 sold more than 500 copies. Let me tell you right now that in the world of publishing, setting the bar at 500 copies is setting it low, and only 83 titles jumped over it. Do the math and you can figure out the odds of making that little leap.

I know a handful of people will read these cold hard facts and ignore them. They will want to tell me about someone who got famous by self-publishing. See the sentence about the two-headed calf in yesterday's post. (And for God's sakes, do not give me that old crap about Poe being self-published. He apparently self-medicated, too. Let's not even talk about his marriage to his 13-year-old first cousin. All of that aside, like other industries, publishing has changed since the 1830s, and so has the world of selling books. Even back then, by no means were all of his works self-published.)

So when should you self-publish a first novel?

If you are terminally ill — I am not saying this facetiously — and you all you want is for your family to have copies of your story in trade paperback book form (and simply making a photocopy of a clean manuscript to pass down to your grandchildren won't satisfy you), and you have the money needed to self-publish, by all means do so. The commercial publishing process usually requires at least eighteen months between the signing of a contract and the release a first book. The process before that point, of getting an agent and the agent making a sale, may take even longer. If you don't have that kind of time left, then don't wait for an agent to take you on.

If you aren't dying, you probably don't have a worthwhile excuse for your impatience.

Unless, of course, you have written something that you are certain will never appeal to more than 80 or so readers and has no commercial value, and you have no fear of embarrassing yourself, and you really don't care if you have to hand sell every single copy of your book yourself. If that's the case, go ahead and self-publish.

Here's one of the basic problems. If you self-publish, you aren't just the author. And you aren't just the person who pays to have your manuscript physically made into books. You take the place of everyone in the process of publishing, except those who physically produce the book.

You must either find and pay an experienced editor (assuming you would even know how to recognize someone who could do this extremely important job in publishing — a job that is almost never understood or appreciated by new writers) or become your own editor. The latter case is very unlikely to produce a well-edited book.

You must find or pay a copy-editor. Being your own copy-editor will likely doom your book to being a storehouse of unprofessional if not laughable errors.

You must also be your own advertising, legal, art, sales, publicity, and distribution management departments. To name a few.

All of that takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. Energy that most writers need for a different challenge — to grow as writers.

Where do you want to put your time and energy?

The Business Side of Writing: the Agent Hunt

I've been talking to Heidi Mack, my Website Manager Extraordinaire, about putting some pdfs full of my take-it-or-leave-it advice for new writers on the sidebar of this blog. If I can get the technical side worked out, I'll create a little library for those of you who come here looking for information about the business side of writing.

I am going to pursue, as mentioned, the topics that the story in yesterday's post bring to mind, and that will be included in the library. However, I got an e-mail today that made me decide to postpone those posts a day or so in order to write about the agent hunt.

I won't repeat the whole e-mail message here or identify the sender, because even though I frankly found a lot of it ludicrous, I believe it was sent with the best of intentions and I don't want to expose the sender to ridicule.

The e-mailer wanted help for a friend who writes. He wants me to introduce the friend to my agent. (Both the e-mailer and his friend are complete strangers to me, by the way.) He is by no means the only person who has written such an e-mail to me. If this is something you've been thinking of doing, please don't.

Within this message, he made a statement that I suspect is believed by a great many people who don't know much about publishing:

As you know, you can only meet with a literary agent if you have a recommendation from another author.

This simply isn't true.

In fact, when I found my first agent, I didn't know any published writers.

There's a trap in the kind of thinking that's often behind statements like those of the e-mailer, a trap that I believe leads more new writers astray than almost any other. It's a trap that passes itself off as a balm for the hurt feelings of the rejected. It says publishing is an insider's game, a cabal of evil greedy bastards who delight in crushing the dreams of the artist before its golden altars of crass commercialism. The aspiring writer is told that only someone anointed by an insider will be allowed to be published.

What utter crap.

If you hear this kind of talk, walk away. Walk away from the embittered and impatient folks who offer supposedly easier paths, who love to strike poses as leaders of the rebellion for the downtrodden and rejected. What's often oppressing these folks isn't the publishing industry -- it's their own sense of entitlement and self-importance.

It's easy to be angry if someone turns you down, and to be lured by this kind of talk into making huge career mistakes.

So what's the deal with finding agents? Do you need a published writer to open the door for you?

Few of the writers I know got the help of published authors when looking for agents. Most writers I've talked to did a lot of homework, queried agents, and persisted like hell. They found someone who took an interest in their work and went on from there.

For the ones who had an author introduction to an agent, I know of no one who e-mailed a request to an author they barely knew (or never met) and got help that way. I'm sure someone out there will now post a comment about someone they heard about who did just that. I could probably find a stuffed two-headed calf in a taxidermy collection somewhere, but that doesn't mean I believe there are barns full of living ones all over the U.S..

So how did the new writers who got help from published authors manage to do that without begging for help from strangers by e-mail?

A few got involved in writers' organizations, got to know published writers well, and got advice from them on agents who might represent that type of manuscript -- although not necessarily a hand-carried introduction to an agent. Others took courses from authors at places like the UCLA Extension's Writers Program, and if they met an instructor who was willing to pass their work on to an agent, found one that way. A few were in writers' groups that included published authors, and got help that way. (I have mixed -- okay, mostly negative -- feelings about writers' groups, but that's for another post.)

So what else can you do if you have a polished manuscript ready to go? (Oh, you're worrying about this without having finished a manuscript? Stop reading now and get back to writing.)

You can also meet agents at the San Diego Writers Conference, the Book Passage Mystery Conference and other major, legitimate writing conferences.

These are important features that lead me to recommend these conferences, and you should look for similar features in other conferences you consider:

• Well-established (the SDSU was founded in 1984, the Book Passage Conference is in its 14th year)
• Connected with a reputable institution or organization
• Offers an opportunity to meet with editors who are from major publishing houses and agents with established client lists
• Offers an opportunity to have pages of your work read
• Emphasizes teaching and has nuts-and-bolts workshops

What else should you do to find an agent?

Before you begin the hunt for an agent, you should carefully read the advice here:
Writer Beware
Writer Beware is must reading for all new writers -- and I wish more established writers, especially those who teach writing, would take a look at. If you're a new writer, you should read the pages of this site again and again, until you are sure you have grasped the warnings and advice there. Especially important -- read the Writer Beware List of the 20 Worst Agents.

Look for agents to send queries to here:
Association of Authors Representatives

Remember that there is no licensing requirement or other standard that must be met before a person can refer to himself or herself as an agent, so at the very least, protect yourself to some degree by going with agents who are in this professional organization. It’s important to read the Frequently Asked Questions section of the AAR site.

You can also get agents' names and information from a book available at most public libraries:
Literary Marketplace.

I recommend looking at these blogs:
The Writer Beware Blog

Miss Snark

Jennifer Jackson, especially this recent post.

Why do I recommend them? Writer Beware will help you to see why you don't need an agent, you need the right agent. I think the other two will help you to get a sense of the reality of the worklife of agents, and why some things new writers do to try to become their clients work well and others backfire big time. You'll get information from people in the business about the business. You may find agents who operate quite differently from these two, who disagree with them. But I think you'll learn something from reading their blogs. For example, Jennifer Jackson's statement that she gets 100 queries a week might help you to see why it might take a little time to get a response to your query. Miss Snark explains how it is that even those who meet her at conferences must query. (By the way, she's about to run the crapometer again, so you might take time to figure out what that is and how it may help you.)


I'll talk more about this at some point in the future, but I hope this has given some of you something to think about. I sincerely wish you all the best -- all writers benefit when talented new writers join our ranks. I also wish you the courage you'll need to remain persistent.

Photo above courtesy Mike Conners, from morguefile.com.

On Detectives Not Detecting

I promised Mary-Frances I'd say more about this, so here goes ...

A couple of years ago, I interviewed editors and agents for a column I used to write for a mystery writers publication. Almost all of them said that one of the biggest problems they find in manuscripts by new mystery writers is that the detective does little or no detecting. "Detective" is used here in an informal sense -- the protagonist of the mystery, whether or not he or she is with law enforcement or is a private eye.

Now, to readers, this might seem like a problem that should be obvious to a writer, but it is easy to let it creep up on you when you are the person creating the work word by word, line by line, page by page.

It's especially easy to turn your detective into what I call the Serial Interviewer — the Serial Interviewer is nearly as common in crime fiction as the serial killer, and to my mind, just as deadly when it comes to reader interest. This is a detective who never really solves anything or puts two and two together. Throughout the book, he spends most of his time visiting other characters and talking to them. Bit by bit, they tell him everything. Eventually, someone tells him who committed the murder. Quite often, it's the murderer himself, confessing — holding a gun on the hero, no doubt. He'll be foiled at the last moment, but not before he supplies all the answers for the idiot in his gun sights.

You should try to come up with something a little better than the Serial Interviewer.

By no means am I suggesting that your detective shouldn't question witnesses and others. She can meet intriguing (and possibly guilty) characters, and you can increase tension in the book through these encounters. We can see her act as an observer of persons and their habits.

There's a fine old tradition of this sort of thing in the mystery novel, and some of the best humor in them has come from such encounters. Alas, it often seems as if the people who love the witty observations and repartee of Chandler's Marlowe and Hammett's Continental Op have failed to notice that both characters also solve crimes. They do talk to lots of folks, skewer some, and snap out comebacks -- but they also do some real thinking.

A detective needs to notice things other characters aren't seeing — and at the end of the day, we shouldn't be wondering if all the other characters have missed clues because they are walking while comatose. A detective has to draw conclusions others might reasonably fail to make. He or she should be actively involved in solving the crime -- not passively collecting solutions. Even an armchair detective like Nero Wolfe is more active than passive -- he uses his mind, has the ability to sift through information to arrive at a logical conclusion. Ideally, the reader has also had the opportunity to observe and gather information at the detective's side, but hasn't necessarily recognized the significance of important clues.

(If you're writing a book of suspense or a thriller, some of your tasks may be different than those of writers of detective fiction. That doesn't mean your hero should be passive, though.)

This business of the detecting detective is also one of several reasons why learning about forensic science is a starting point rather than an ending point for writing a mystery novel. Simply having an unusual idea about how someone might be killed or having an idea for a single clue or piece of evidence is nowhere near what you need to write a novel. Among many other obligations to your reader, you have to figure out how the detective will find the key to the meaning of the evidence. You also have to make it clear how the detective arrived at an answer when others didn't.

So look through that manuscript before you send it off, and ask yourself if your detective is carrying the story forward, or simply being swept along on a tide of readily available information. If you work to make the hero more active, you'll increase the possibility of selling your book.

Just my opinion on the matter — in the end, you get to try it your way.


Photo above courtesy of Clarita, who kindly made it available on morguefile.com.

Getting lost for the sheer pleasure of it

You may have noticed that there isn't a hell of a lot of writing advice on this blog.

That's not because I lack ideas about How It Should Be Done. However, I want to be careful about what I say to new writers, each of whom needs to discover h