Tag: fiction

How I Got My Agent

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The novel that got me my agent is not my first written or queried novel—by far.

I am a perseverance story. A turtle story. A “go touch some grass” story. I am jaded. Realistic. Cynical, maybe. I prefer the hard truth over the sugarcoated one. I have faced a decade of rejection. I want to start with this so you know what to expect. If you’re looking for wonder and positivity in your journey towards finding your agent, then you won’t find that here. That’s not my story. And that’s okay. There are stories out there, like that, and they’re great. They’re just not my story.

I forced myself to break many personal boundaries to get to where I am now, and I’m not sure all of it was perhaps worth the cost of my anxiety and stress. Not in the end, anyway. And that’s one of the many ways that this game is rigged. You can’t know what works for you, and when it works, and so you have to try everything to optimize your chances.

I always preach self-awareness as being the best tool a writer can have, and I stand by that even now. Self-awareness of your creative process, of your weaknesses, of your strengths—that’s all gonna help you in the end. It’ll help you improve, sure, but it’ll also help you find peace and acceptance with yourself and your projects. It did for me. 80% of the time, anyway; I’m no saint.

As an international ESL-writer (English second language), my struggle was both learning the craft of writing and storytelling in English—but also learning how to navigate a foreign industry. From afar, no less. From 100% online. And with a severely limited physical support network here at home in Denmark.

For reference, Denmark doesn’t have anything that equates to a literary agent as a profession. Our market is not big enough or competitive enough for that. It’s author to publisher, always, and we have basically only 1-2 big publishers. And they all lean towards literary fiction, not towards the genre fiction that I write.

If you’re an international writer, you’ll get all that I’m saying here.

I’m not sure others necessarily will, but you will.

QUERY STATS:

2012 book: 0 requests

2016 book: 0 requests

2018 book: 1 full request

2019 book: 3 full requests, all rejected

2020 book: 0 requests

2021-22 book: 7 requests w/1 offer (7,8% request rate)

Chronological(ish) order of events:

2012:

I technically sent my first query when I was 21. I am now 32. My first query was ten years ago. It was before email queries dominated the industry as much as they do now. I sent my query and pages in an SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) from Denmark—to Neil Gaiman’s agent in the US, because I’m nothing if not self-deluded—and genuinely expected a reply. As you can imagine, I got no reply. In hindsight, that was good. Because that book sucked. Majorly. And it was also culturally insensitive. I’ve learned since then, thankfully.

2015-2018:

Until 2015, I took a break. From querying. Not from writing. I think I realized at this point that I wasn’t good enough to be querying. I had just shifted from writing primarily fanfiction to original stuff, and I think I realized my original fiction needed more work to be traditionally published. Particularly, I needed to learn story structure. I needed to strengthen my storytelling skills until they were as strong as my writing skills. I read a lot of craft books in that time. I approached it like I did my academic degree. That is, with a lot of notetaking and cross-referencing of techniques, styles, advice etc. All pertaining to story structure, naturally, because I had identified that as my weakness.

Leading up to 2018, I was also shifting from writing YA to writing Adult, so this set me back further in my querying journey since that involved studying a different age category. That meant catching up on the adult fiction market in terms of reading books and in terms of researching agents. This shift was extremely time-consuming, to be honest, but also extremely helpful.

2018-2020:

Around 2018, I was working hard on building relationships with beta readers and critique partners. Ones that I could trust, mind you, and with an emphasis on long-term. Before then, I had been ghosted by plenty of beta-readers, and I was done taking the easy way out. I began swapping material with other writers, a process that taught me so much about my own writing. Focusing on helping others was one of the best decisions I’ve ever done because I was also helping myself. In a roundabout way, you know? That’s how all creative artistry works, I’ve since realized.

Around 2020, I began to get serious about pitch events (pitmad, sffpit, moodpitch, pitdark). I began to study how to write twitter pitches (and, indeed, my agent offer came from a pitch event), and I began to experience successful ones. I was finally cracking that particular code.

I also applied for mentorship programs (pitchwars, AMM, revpit, writementor, roguementor) from 2018 and onward. I eventually got picked by roguementor in 2021, with the book that also got me my agent. It was one of two requests that I ever got from any mentorship programs, in total, with four books.

In hindsight, this is when I began to take incremental steps forward. My studying of the craft, the market, and the industry was starting to enhance my products and projects. I was also more comfortable writing Adult than YA; it allowed me to focus more on prose, which apparently is a strength of mine.

Covid also helped a lot, honestly, because it moved a lot of resources online. As an international writer, I benefited majorly from this. I began to challenge myself at this point, thinking I needed to take advantage of all the online opportunities that used to be offline, and which probably would go offline again soon enough.

2020-2022:

This is when Covid hit. A lot of industry resources were suddenly made available and accessible to me as an international writer. Specifically, conferences were suddenly all online. I began to attend conferences that offered live pitching to agents. This prospect terrified me. Agents in general terrified me.

But I hate fearing something.

And I hate being desperate.

I do my best to channel my fear and desperation into sheer pigheaded stubbornness.

This means I attended several online live pitching events in 2020-21, despite my fear of them. As a recurring and accessible event that didn’t demand too much time or effort, Writing Workshops was a solid choice. I also had the luxury of being able to spend money on this. I’m not rich—in fact, I’m often unemployed—but I live in a welfare state, and I am never without some form of paycheck. That’s why it’s worth paying higher taxes, folks.

Around this time, I hired my first professional editor to help me with the opening chapters of my manuscript alongside my trustworthy beta-readers. I learned so much from this process, even if it didn’t land me an agent.

Later, in early 2022, I hired my first professional editor to help me with a developmental edit of my full manuscript. This is the book that eventually landed me my agent. My Snow Queen retelling. I learned even more this time around. Particularly, that I didn’t even need a developmental edit, which was a huge boost in my confidence.

In early 2022, I got picked/paid for the Futurescapes 2022 Workshop with this same book. This was a more selective and time-consuming event than any other online event I had attended. It had both a workshop element that consisted of Zoom feedback from several well-established agents, and it also had a ton of masterclasses on writing by well-established authors in the SFF genre. I learned so much from this entire event. This was the point when I finally realized that agents are just people who love books—like me.

In 2022, I actually stopped writing novels to focus on short fiction. I had identified my next weakness. I wanted to get better on a scene-level. I wanted to get better at pacing my scenes. At maintaining tension on a micro-level. And I decided that short fiction, given its limited scope, would help me get better at that so that my novels would also get better. And it did help me, in fact, to the point that I now have several short stories published in magazine and anthologies.

I was still doing pitch events for my novels around this time, and I had never stopped doing them. All throughout 2022, I could sense that something was shifting. The agent interest was higher than ever whenever I pitched my Snow Queen retelling. SFFpit was the event that eventually landed me my agent, in the fall of 2022, and I will forever be grateful for that.

Ending Note

I got lucky.

Sometimes that luck is fast, and sometimes that luck is slow, but it’s always there.

I optimized my chances and opportunities to the best of my ability. I broke personal boundaries (live pitching is terrifying). I self-studied craft. I beta-ed books for my friends. I hired professional help. I prepared myself as much as I could—and when luck hit me, I was ready for it.

Because it’s not just about skill.

It’s not just about working hard.

The final stretch is about luck.

My Foray Into Short Fiction…

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In January of this year, after several years of struggling in the query trenches with several novels, I decided that 2022 would be the year that I learned how to write short stories. I didn’t even want to master them; I just wanted to learn how to write them. Hopefully, the publishing industry would be back on its feet by the time that I did so, giving my novels a better chance in the trenches. That was my logic. Give myself a breather from the trenches by entering another, slightly different, trench (I’m sure that’s logical, somehow, if you squint really hard).

At that point—back in January, I mean—the last short story that I wrote was probably in high school. I’m 31 years old, for reference. And it was probably in Danish, not in English.

As of this date, six months after I first began, I’ve written 17 short stories.

So far, four of them have been accepted into literary magazines/anthologies, three of them have made it to penultimate rounds, and over half of the places I have submitted to have requested that I send them more stories in the future.

I didn’t expect this response—at all—after my absolute failure in the query trenches for so many years with so many books. More to the point, this response has been an absolute life-saver this year, reminding me with tangible evidence that my writing is worth publication, reinforcing my belief that I’ve chosen the right career path (even if the industry still needs to get on board with that).

So, how did I approach this short story stint that basically saved my ass this year?

First, I had to realize that it was never really a question of my craft.

Not on the storytelling side, and not on the writing side.

It was a question of my brain’s creative habits.

It was a question of how I’ve conditioned my brain and its creative process for years on end. Ten years, to be exact. For ten years, I’ve roughly written one novel a year. To write short fiction, I had to deconstruct the way my brain had worked with narratives for a decade. I had to stop thinking about beginnings, middles, and ends. I had to stop thinking about character developmental arcs. I had to stop thinking about subplots. About side-characters. Instead, I had to use entry points to my stories that felt unnatural. Unnatural, because they were foreign to me as entry points.

Here are the biggest revelations I’ve had while deconstructing my brain’s creative habits:

  • “Ditch your primary genre and try a new one”

I can’t write a good fantasy short story to save my life. The second that I try, I instantly begin to worldbuild, and to character develop, and to create side-characters, and it just doesn’t work for me. My brain is too used to write fantasy novels. Instead, I’ve taken to writing horror, sci-fi, and historical short fiction. In fact, these are the genres I’ve had acceptances in. My few attempts in fantasy have been rejected from left to right.

  • “Identify the theme/concept”

I focused solely on themed submission calls in the beginning, unable to easily think of themes and concepts on my own, and feeling roadblocked by my own ineptitude and frustration over this. Theme/concepts are things that I normally dig out from a first draft of a novel, after all, so you can see why I might’ve struggled with this here.

And, no, it’s not cheating. You’re not a poorer writer for relying on themed submissions (yes, I had to explicitly tell myself this, over and over again).

Theme is a bastard to pin down in general. You can somewhat get away with not doing it for novels, but you absolutely can’t get away with not doing it for short fiction. That’s been my experience, at least. And if you’re looking for a good book on how to develop theme in fiction, then I recommend K. M. Weiland’s “Writing Your Story’s Theme.”

  • “It’s an emotional SHIFT, not an emotional JOURNEY” (alternately: The Twist)

This was a big one for me. I’m an extremely character-driven writer, meaning I have my character arcs down pat before I even have my plot. Always. Without fail. Without even trying, honestly. The thing is, though, there isn’t really room for an emotional arc in a short story, with ups and downs, and some more ups and downs, and some more ups and downs, and—you get my drift.

There is, however, room for emotional shifts. In particular, there is room for one big emotional shift that is the center of the story.

In “Write Your Novel from the Middle”, James Scott Bell talks about Mirror Moments. These are moments when the characters stop to look at themselves in the mirror, considers what have happened so far, and then decides what to do now based on that. Bell talks about these mirror moments as the middle of books, but I’ve also found that it works well as a framework for my short fiction. If I place the emotional center of my short fiction on these mirror moments, then I stop myself from writing a character arc that relies on the plot of an entire novel. I focus on an emotional shift, and not an emotional journey.

I also sometimes think of this as The Twist.

Not A Twist, but The Twist.

  • “Aim to provoke one emotion from the reader, not ten.”

This runs in the same vein as what I mentioned above, but I’ve found it extremely helpful to decide on the emotional tone of my story before I start writing it. On the emotion that I want my reader to experience from my story, that is. This counts for your characters just as much as your readers, really. There’s just not time/room to go on emotional journeys, and so it’s better to focus on a concentrated emotional shift within that journey. Like a snapshot.

Neil Gaiman once said that the only advice that worked for him was to write a short story as if it was the ending of a novel. This reminds me a little bit of that, but without the conclusive element/nature that I find strangely restrictive myself.

  • “There’s no room to pants this, sorry.”

I’ve found that I spend longer on brainstorming a short story than I do on writing it—and I’ve found that my success rate of finishing the story is much higher if I do this. My best guess is that more brainstorming stops me from pantsing and going off on tangents that lead to overwriting (or, in this case, writing novellas/novels rather than short fiction). Paradoxically, you’d think the opposite would happen (i.e. that more brainstorming leads to more writing), but if I center my focus on the emotional shift that I mentioned above here, then somehow it doesn’t lead to more writing. Not for me, anyway.

And that’s it (for now, anyway)!

Lastly, I’m not a master of short fiction. Far from it. I’m a rookie who’s only starting to learn the ropes, and this is me accounting for how I have approached this learning so far. I’ve had moderate success, leading me to believe that my approach might be helpful to others.

To you, perhaps.

The Thing About Character Agency…

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You don’t get very far into publishing before you start hearing about character agency.

You’ll often meet it as a roadblock in some form of way. A shut door. A rejection. An R&R.

Character agency is really just a fancy word for the relationship between action and reaction when it comes to your main character’s behavior as it influences the plot of your story. It’s about how reactive and how proactive your character is. About the balance between the two.

Often, you’ll see character agency equated with (pro)activity.

In my opinion, this is a slippery slope to go down.

The “active over passive” advice is like the “show, don’t tell” advice. Or the “prologues are bad” advice. It comes from a place of merit and value, yes, but the understanding of it remains too narrow and exclusionary in scope. We, as an industry, need to do better at understanding that passivity is a way of life for many people, for many reasons, and these people relate to passive protagonists. Passivity can sell.

Still, the “active over passive” advice does have some merit. The idea that a character is engaging because they have an external goal that drives them forward in their story (aka makes them active) is valid enough…

…but I still maintain that we tend to think of goals in a narrow way that excludes neurodiversity, cultural storytelling differences, stories of trauma/survivorship, and much more.

Character agency isn’t a way of praising the best stories, to be perfectly frank, but a way of praising the stories that sell in an instant-gratification, mass-consumer, hustle culture. And I’m gonna make some people angry by saying this, I think, but I’m gonna say it, anyway.

Now, yes, the market is important. We all need the market to exist and for that market to be somewhat predictable—but it’s also our job to challenge the market. It’s our job to make sure that the market doesn’t only own us, but that we also own the market in return. We can influence the market. We should influence the market, being its main suppliers.

I don’t think that character agency is inherently bad or good. Rather, I think it’s important for every writer to understand how character agency is viewed by the industry and the market. In that way, we can figure out our own preferences for character agency and make the right choices for our careers and optimize our chances for a successful and sustainable future.

Adding Activity to Passive Characters:

I personally think of characters as passively inclined and actively inclined.

For me, it’s about how the main character approaches the action they take. A more passively inclined main character would weigh the pros and cons differently than an actively inclined one. They might try to manipulate the action from afar rather than entering the direct crossfire. They might deflect attention away from what they’re doing, while an actively inclined main character might carry more of the attention themselves. A passively inclined character works in the shadows, and an actively inclined one works in the limelight—but they’re both working, mind you.

When I teach my students how to write active characters, I give them what I call the Soup Advice. Or the Balcony Advice, in case they don’t like soup (soup is awesome; I love soup).

Basically, if you have a dialogue scene, then have your character make soup while they talk. Have them cut vegetables. Have them find a pot and stub their toe. Or have them struggle to scratch an itch on their back that they can’t reach. Don’t just have them stand and do nothing except for talking. It’s the same with the balcony advice. If you have an opening scene where the main character stands on a balcony, then don’t start the scene there. Start the scene five seconds earlier, when the character actively steps out onto the balcony.

Basically, the trick is to give the character a smaller external goal for the scene. Eventually, if every scene has a goal like that, they will add up to an overall feeling of activity.

If your goal is to write more active characters, then this is a solid practice as a starting point.

An Advocacy for Passive Characters:

I believe that character agency is flawed in that it can be exclusionary to specific types of narratives. Often, it’s the marginalized ones. Such as stories of trauma, stories of survivorship, stories of disability, stories of neurodiversity, stories of abuse, and non-western storytelling traditions on the whole.

First off, we need to accept that surviving (trauma and otherwise) is a decision. It’s a choice. It’s an action.

If we keep using my passively/actively inclined framework, then these characters are passively inclined in that they are working on overcoming trauma that has affected their mobility to act and make choices on a base level. They can’t make any active choices yet, because they first have to regain that ability. That is their active choice: regaining the ability to make choices. And someone who tries to survive will likely work in the shadows, unlike their limelight counterparts.

Additionally, character agency is built around a neurotypical framework that delegitimizes neurodiversity in that choices must “make sense”. Well, yes, they must “make sense”, but what’s “sensible” to a neurotypical character isn’t necessarily “sensible” to a neurodiverse one.

Lastly, not all storytelling is traditionally conflict-driven and linear like the western three-act structure. There are so many other story traditions around the world. We have stories-within-stories, braided storytelling, kishoutenketsu storytelling, daisy-chain storytelling, robleto storytelling, and much more. In an increasingly global world, with English as a lingua franca, it only makes sense that cultural storytelling traditions will cross over into foreign languages and that we should make room for that to happen.

To wrap this up, I want to talk about horror as a genre.

More specifically, horror as an example of a genre that relies on passive characters.

To be even more precise: horror as an example of a genre where the audience has no problem with passivity.

Horror relies on passive characters to a certain extent. It relies on getting reactions from the reader, via the lens of the character, and so a lot of horror stories have passive characters. They have reactive characters struggling to survive through their circumstances. Take King’s MISERY, for example. The main character doesn’t leave his bed for most of the book. Or take Moreno-Garcia’s MEXICAN GOTHIC. Or any other haunted house story, for that matter. Khaw’s NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH, for instance. Or take Solomon’s SORROWLAND. The characters in these books are largely reactive—and it works just fine for the audience. The audience expects it, really, and they love it.

Passive/reactive characters can work just fine for all genres and stories, as long as the passivity is purposeful and representative of all lived realities, for all people, for all cultures.