A Tale of Two Agents

Hello everyone, my entire writing journey started with the completion of my novel, and I have not made that a focus of my writing journey or career for a while. Bringing everyone up to date, I spent a few years, actually, together with a developmental editor, who was hard to find, who could help me edit and strengthen the omniscient pov rather than try to "fix it" into limited third pov. And my critique partner who has been helping me with the anthology. I did successfully revise the first half of the novel, and the last section had previously been revised as well. It has been sitting on the shelf since then, but I pulled it out this year. I have been moving slowly, but confidently. I am patient, taking my time to meet people, network, and very intentional about who sees it. Rather than sending out to a lot of agents, I started immediately with the people who had already requested it based on the first draft. This list grows very slowly. I also joined a friend's program/ group which is all about mutual support for the process of having your book on the route to discovery. That's great, and huge value, to have community and guidance and touch points, instead of suffering alone. I can recommend this group to others: Byte the Book. https://bytethebook.com/ They had agents table, and when I saw that in the newsletter, I wrote to her to ask which agents would be partifcipating. I know the level of the agents who have already expressed interest, and for me I know the level I need are senior level professionals in the industry with long, in depth relationships with the right kinds of editors. In my cover letter to the agents I know, I mentioned this specifically. This requires someone with the knowledge, sophistication, and chops, to know how to recognize what this book is.

My friend said that all of her events had senior level agents, sometimes she tried to push agents at big agencies. She is a mutual friend of one of the people I sent the book to, and made a comparison that it wasn't the biggest agency. However, I also know that there can be a lot of more junior level career professionals at big agencies, and that is not necessarily the better fit from the senior level people who had already requested the book. I haven't had any agent feedback on the new version since doing the revisions, so I did not know what to expect. I was rusty as well. I met with two lovely agents at the event, and the whole experience has been a lot of something. I am not at a stage where I am asking what the book is, or seeking validation. It does not present value to me to sit in a meeting with an agent where they tell me how much they love the book, how they have never seen anything like it, and how rare and unique is its. I'm very focused on the question whose desk does this belong on, and who knows the right editor who will recognize and know what to do with this book. Regarding the pov, I have put in the work, spent hours of writing drills, to master command over the omniscient pov, because the book earns it. POV debates are not of interest to me. With each of the agents I met this week, I had some instincts on some level. Agent A had been formerly with an independent publisher, but in marketing, not editorial. Compared to the experience level of the people who already had the book, my instincts were she wouldn't have the deep long standing relationships with the kinds of editors who had more sophisticated chops. Agent B had never been at a publisher, so I followed up with each with a specific ask. Agent A did not even include on her wish list the kind of book category mine was in, so I referenced this, and said if this was not the right fit for her, then did she have someone in her network who was the right fit. Agent B was the head of an agency, so I inquired did she consider this book a fit at her agency. Simple asks, nothing complicated. Agent B answered more quickly, and reflected her experience level and maturity. The bottom line was she didn't have the editing chops for this book, but one of her examples was strange. That was fair, and I could understand what she meant. My book is literary fantasy, and she said she publishes genre fantasy. That's a common type of mismatch that is completely expected and understandable. Agent A got back to me later with a much more in depth editorial briefing, which I had not requested. Of course it is extra effort for her to put into her response, and the time and effort she invested in the event and engaging with my book were a special commitment. However, it confirmed my instincts that her experience level was less polished, and it came out in some strange ways and revealed some interesting things.

Getting into the specific examples will also allow me to share some of the details of my novel, which might be the most interesting part for everyone. Agent A, a mature, experienced agent who bowed out after recognizing an obvious mismatch, gave one example of the direction she would want to steer the book: “I wish it was more overt about wearing its heart on its sleeve about women leadership.” I really got into the weeds with this. First, I wanted to understand what exactly she imagined was missing from the novel. What would this actually look like in practice? One suggestion was "maybe she wants the main character to make a thesis statement on the first page about what's different about her leadership, and then have the novel proove why it works." Ok, that's a possible suggestion, but my brain was going in circles about what a bizarre judgement it was to make without reading the whole book. I asked one friend who has read the whole book what she thought this statement meant. She said "it's a shame she didn't read the whole book, because there are so many diverse types of women leadership." The issue here is that the whole book is a thesis on women's leadership being normalized. The protagonist is not written as a stand in to represent all women leaders everywhere. The thesis of the book is not for this one women to proove the existence of women leadership. The book is about a world where women have access to power. Many women are leaders in this world, and they have different styles of leadership and make mistakes and do things differently. They have conversations with one another that present data that challenge their assumptions, and there are extensive conversations between women leaders. None of those conversations once ever prove why women should be leaders. Moreover, when I had to return to an examine the opening scene both agents had expressed frustration over appearing to stat slowly, the opening scene is very specifically engineered to do some literary things. One of the things the first page does is introduce the most powerful ruler in the world, without a gender. It is written in omniscient pov, so that the only way the reader learns the gender of the ruler is by someone intimate with her calling her by her name. Someone not intimate with her would just refer to her by her title, so you only learn the most powerful ruler in the world is a woman when someone speaks to her and not before. This is intentional, and this is the first premise of the thesis on women leadership. The first experience the reader has is to face their own assumptions that they thought the ruler was a man until told otherwise. The early drafts continued this ambiguity for pages, and my editor said it was a bad idea to piss the readers off by laughing at them and trying too hard to pull a "gotcha" moment, and that would not accomplish with engaging the reader. That is why we arrived at the reveal through someone speaking to her as a solution to break this ambiguity more naturally. The irony is that the agent who had complained about this opening, missed this first premise of this entire book thesis on women leadership, and then complained that it wasn't loud enough about women leadership? That was certainly puzzling. Then agent B sent a detailed briefing that she spent effort on, though not requested, and it introduced some more puzzling elements. The first mistake she made, which is such a common problem, was telling me to write a different book. The underlying issue is that she had misread a lot of things, including the query letter, and because the misread of the query letter was so obvious it was easy to see there might be other issues with her reading. In contrast to the first agent who recognized she did not have the editorial chops for this book, which is the seasoned approach. I mentioned that the first scene is engineered to do some sophisticated literary things. The first line is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Compared to a flashback scene, it's much more indispensable. There is a flashback scene that does a lot of of heavy lifting, but changing the opening scene would remove the gender reveal solution that it provides. The first line of the book is very specifically engineered to do multiple things at once. It is four words, and is chosen to be one of the most iconic first lines in literature, fashioned after many others. "Empires rise. Empires fall." It simultaneously delivers the promise of the novel, and provides the psychology of the protagonist. The second line makes it clear this is what the character is contemplating, this is the stress and pressure the character is under, and the fragility she accepts that what she has built could crumble in an instant. The strange part of B's set of feedback was that she needed more interiority of the character to be able to relate to her. Needed to see insecurity or doubt, which would be entirely inconsistent characterization. We meet a ruler who was born into and prepared for the role, only thrust into it slightly prematurely and without transition, nine years into her established reign, that she dooes not question whether she is capable of doing or has the authority to hold. She's aware of the constant threat of rivals because she is a realist. As I said the similarities between the inability to read the very interiority that the first line of the entire novel provides, and then complain there's not more, was very similar to the read on the query letter. I listed career experience and how it applied to writing the novel, very explicitly. Her read on what I wrote was "reads like credentials without explaining how that experience influenced the novel." When I receive these bizarre notes, I really get in the weeds and ask "what does what they think they expect actually look like?" In this instance, I came up with a kind of forumula. I did X. Through experience Y, I learned Z, that influenced W in the book. When I went to the paragraph in the letter, it had provided exactly that kind of logical causality. Both instances cued me into "aha, this is a person who doesn't know how to read concise descriptions." And I was able to resolve the conflicting logic internally. Overall this feedback was most baffling because of all of the conflicting internal logic. Not that one agent provided feedback that was conflicting with the others, but that within the notes, the logic conflicted with itself. The one consistent note was this frustration with an opening scene, that one missed the glaring statement about women's leadership and the assumptions the readers brought to the book, and the other missed the whole interiority of the very first line, and then they both complained that the things they missed were lacking. The one woman who ventured into "you need to turn this into a different type of book" wanted me to start at the end of the book. I thought to myself any person who does not understand how the opening is engineered and would propose any change that would throw out one of the strongest opening lines to a book in history, is, bluntly, fucking the book over, with that proposed change. It was a bit crazy to me to fixate on the opening. The more experienced of the two made a non offensive statement that "agents and editors get concerned when the opening seems slow." Which is fair, and my attitude is that if an editor makes me an offer, and has specific opinions about the solutions to tweak this opening scene, then I'm happy to engage with that conversation at the appropriate time, but I am not going to make a bunch of ad hoc changes that are not driven by the specific concept of an editor who is putting their money where their mouth is. In that scenario, then the job of that publisher is to demonstrate to me why they are the right fit for this book, anyway, so how they approach those suggestions will be demonstrative if they are the right kind of partner or not. My response on the opening scene is that opening scenes need to do two things: answer the question why the story starts here, and immerse the reader immediately in this world to engage with the story. My opening does those things, and the second could perhaps be strengthened through intentional editing or tightening of the execution of the omniscient pov techniques. My opening actually introduces two things happening. The main conflict structure of the book is shift in status quo. The ruler has created a stable family structure, and it is about to be shaken up by the introduction of a new person, and a lot of crazy things are going to happen before there's any return to a new status quo. In addition, there's a sudden and urgent crisis on the border that's going to trigger the need for a war. These are the two "inciting incidents," that introduce the threads that converge, as the marriage itself as well as the political alliances brokered during the wedding, move the pieces into place for the war. Without a full read to understand that the book works, I have a hard time hearing any ad hoc suggestions in completely new architectural structure rebuild. The right partner in this collaboration will be the type of editor with that level of sophisticated understanding, and I have every reason to believe that those people exist among industry professionals somewhere, and my job is to try to get them to emerge and to identify who they are. It is like searching for a needle in a haystack. That is why my takeaway from this week's event was, people who engage with this book and it caues them to lean in and recognize that they've never seen another book like it, to help me flush those people out. On the question of the opening, I thought how crazy and bizarre their selective memories were. They want to tell me that my opening is slow and they dont understand it, when Piranasi has a bizarre opening I find hard to connect with. Then, sadly, do not get me started on Samantha Shannon. I thought how easy this is objectively. Hold my opening up against hers side by side, and run an analysis on the writing, and objectively the answer should be clear as day. I've written cicles around Samantha Shannon. Her writing is tortured and overwritten from the first line. She accumulates disconnected imagery with badly done metaphors and similies, and then she stops the narrative to explain the world with big chunks of expository. The whole critique of my editing sessions were not to tell people about the world through expository, but to show it through immersion. So my opening has no explaining the world, but constant flow of characters and plot. The idea that agents would put in writing that in my current form my writing that outshines a book she loves to brag "has sold 1 million copies" was not competitive in the market. I literally feel mirth and humor and want to laugh at that joke it feels so funny. And if my writing is that much better than a book that has sold1 million copies, and delivers the supposed promise that book made with more sophistication and better execution, why would I ever restructure the opening? One issue is that I wrote this book at the start of the pandemic. I always knew what the book was, and I started from a place of confidence, but that was also a time of depleted mental health. Now I am in a space of surprising mental clarity, with my new pup as one of the biggest stabilizing factors in my life, and that original confidence has only grown stronger. I know what I have. I know what this book is. The standard advice—“revise it” or “write another, easier-to-place novel”—doesn't provide what this book needs. What it needs are the right partners and collaborators, people capable of recognizing the book for what it is and bringing something meaningful to it. The frustrating part is that there may be real editorial weaknesses in the current version that could have been identified and helped me strengthen future submissions. Those useful observations were torpedoed when the advice expanded into blowing up the existing architecture. Then there is the suggestion that I should conform to other books “in order to compete.” Notice the irony there. Competition implicitly requires difference. Differences like stronger, more sophisticated architecture built entirely on its own internal logic, rather than relying on the crutches of familiar genre tropes. Differences like power structures informed by an inhabited understanding of how power actually operates, rather than trying to imagine a fantasy version of what women rulers might look like. Those differences are competitive advantages. This book was so incredible because they've never seen anyone write a book like this before, but suddenly they want to make it like all the other books which are nothing like it? So the logic becomes almost backwards: to compete, I should become more like the books I'm competing against? I should dismantle the very things that make my book stronger and more distinctive in order to make it more competitive? If the goal is to find something unlike anything else they've seen before, why would the solution be to make it more like everything they've already seen? That is where this week's experience ultimately left me. I started this process already knowing what my book was. After putting it back into the world and having its fundamental choices challenged, I know that more clearly than ever. I don't need to make it easier to categorize by dismantling what makes it distinctive. I need to keep moving deliberately until I find the people who see the same possibilities in it that I do, and who have the knowledge, confidence, and vision to bring something genuinely additive to realizing them. I need the person who can look at it and say, “I know what this is. I know why these choices are here. I know which editors will understand it. And I know how to make them want it at the same time.” Better still, I want the person who can then point to something I haven't seen and make me say, “Holy shit. You're right.”