The Writer October 2016

We went to press on this issue at the end of July, seemingly one of the most violent months in recent memory. We woke each morning to a new tragedy. Some of us turned toward each other, some turned against, and still others turned away from everything, bunkering down, riding out the turmoil as the world smoldered. It was in these humid, breathless days of July that I turned up, bedraggled and weary, at ThrillerFest 2016 (profiled in our pages on page 38), a conference for thriller writers and not, I am always quick to clarify, a convention for Michael Jackson enthusiasts. There I met debut authors, struggling authors, successful authors, and best-selling mega-authors. I listened to each one talk about the industry, the struggle to get published, the brave…

We writers are clever. We take the 26 letters of the alphabet and spin them into fascinating tales that run the gamut from science fiction to romance and everything in between. If we do it well, we grab readers with such force they go without sleep, are late to work, and miss subway stops to keep turning those pages. When placing history into your fiction, that cleverness is taken to another level because you want to do it seamlessly. Research can send me down the rabbit hole, and, like Alice, I might not come up for air for hours as I wander and ponder and fill my basket with the historical jewels I want to use. However, too much bling can blind a reader or make their eyes glaze over.…

Great sentences come in many forms: short and long, feather-light or weighty, encrusted with punctuation or flowing without friction from capital letter to full stop. I am on the lookout for great sentences, and I need your help finding them. If you send them to me via The Writer magazine, I promise I will read them – and more. Writers don’t just read great sentences, we X-ray read them. We not only read for meaning, but we look beneath the surface of a text to discover how the meaning is made. In an act of reverse-engineering, we figure out which of the writer’s moves made something clear, suspenseful, poignant, or ironic. This is the stuff of my latest book, The Art of X-ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great…

The top 10 do’s and don’ts of submitting to literary agents DONTsubmit until your book is the best it can be. DOresearchtheagentthoroughly. Read their publisher’s marketplace or agency website bio. Know what they rep, what they’re looking for, and their specific submission guidelines. DOwriteaprofessionaland clear blurb of no more than one to two paragraphs maximum that sticks to the main character and main conflict. Don’t get bogged down in secondary characters, backstory, setting, or theme, and don’t give away the ending (that’s for the synopsis). DOwriteaclearand concise query letter with not a comma out of place. Address the letter to the agent and tell them why you are submitting to him or her specifically. State the title, word count, and genre of your work. DOexudeconfidencebut don’t overdo it. DONTtell the…

Down in history In 1878, 32-year-old Anna Katharine Green arrived at the door of publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York City clutching the manuscript she’d worked on for six years. It was a detective story called The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer’s Story. Green had filled the backs of envelopes, stationery, notebooks, and torn-out ledger pages with her draft, writing in secret to avoid the disapproval of her father, who had little regard for fiction. He certainly wouldn’t approve of a detective story. Graceful and quiet, Green was an unlikely crime writer. One of few women of her generation to earn a college degree, she considered herself a writer of verse, not whodunits, but she struggled to find a publisher for her poetry. Green hoped that this story would…

When you think of research for fiction, you’re probably inclined to think of historical novels. After all, if you’re writing contemporary fiction, you live in that world, so how much is there to research? Perhaps not very much if you base your fiction on your own experiences. But if you take on other identities – characters quite different from yourself – you may need to do some research – perhaps a lot. Research needs Let’s say you situate a character in a part of the country you’re not familiar with. Can you provide a good establishing shot the way filmmakers do? What are some geographical markers you should capture and describe well? Can you give a believable sense for the culture of this place? This may take some research into…