Budding authors would do well to check out the very interesting piece from an anonymous agent below. It tells you the truth that agents normally only speak about among themselves, in quiet rooms, with friends, and with authors they know very well too. Agents everywhere are drowning in unsolicited manuscripts from hopeful writers that are so bad they make you want to cry.
Not bad in the sense that they’re poor. Bad in the sense that they are utter dross, efforts that can only have come from the minds of people who have never read a book properly themselves.
Huh? Yes, honest. Here’s a somewhat disguised conversation that took place recently, one in which I took part in a way.
Agent to budding writer pushing an idea: So who do you read?
Budding writer: Read?
Agent: What others authors? Who do you think you might be compared to?
(Pinter pause)
Budding writer: I read a Stephen King book a while back.
Agent: Which one?
Budding writer: The movie one with Jack Nicklaus.
Agent (sighing): I think you mean Jack Nicholson. The Shining.
Budding writer: Yeah. The Shining.
Agent: Book or movie?
Budding writer (hesitantly): Both I think.
Agent: So that was, what, thirty years ago? Anything since?
Budding writer: To be honest I don’t read fiction a lot.
(Long Pinter pause)
Agent: Don’t you think that would be a good idea? I mean if you want to write fiction…
Budding writer: They’re all the same really, aren’t they? So to get back to my story. There’s this secret research facility, see. And some aliens. And a vampire. A really hot vampire…
OK. I exaggerate. But only a little. Honest. If you’re about to submit a manuscript yourself do bear in mind an agent will want to know what you read, why, and what you think of it. If the answer’s nothing you deserve to be where you’ll stay. At the bottom of the slushpile.
[See A Good Author Is Hard to Find - Books - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper]
PS. Before you ask. I am currently reading Ruskin’s Venice, The Stones Revisited by Sarah Quill.
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Thanks, this is a great blog post. Very reasuring.
Made me cringe reading that, worse than watching Alan Partridge…
(I'm currently reading Bentley Little's “The Vanishing”. Lovecraft meets Louis L'Amour)
Wonderful article, thank you! Sometimes I worry that the utter dross that I sucked up as a kid is going to ruin my writing voice now…but then, maybe a good dose of Flannery O'Connor in my 30s will save me
Just started Hardball by Sara Paretsky, because I haven't read her in such a long time, and half a dozen non-fiction books on casino and corporate fraud. It's sometimes disheartening, reading for research, because many of these books are rather badly written, and my sense of cadence and rhythm doesn't need any more pummelling after 18 years of tech writing
Bad fiction I can set down after a few chapters. But homework…sigh…
I don't think aspiring writers can be told this often enough. I remember an eminent poet once cutting off a question from a beginning poet who could not identify what poets he read.
Uh, yeah. House Rules by Mike Lawson for fiction. And: In Search Of the Old Ones by David Roberts for nonfiction.
And then in terms of magazines: Archaeology, Smithsonian, Acoustic Guitar, and Time. Plus a bunch of newsletters related to the clinical lab industry, which is about 90% of my freelance writing business.
That's a lot of reading, Mark. I really find I'm a one book at a time man these days. Back when I was a national newspaper reporter I was expected to have read every daily newspaper before I turned up for work. Don't know how I did it.
Yeah, it's ridiculous. I only used to read one book at a time, but I wanted to read more NF, but I'm never very good at just reading a nonfiction book, I crave fiction. So I started reading them more or less simultaneously, because NF you can usually read a few pages of here and there until I get tired of reading the book and decide to just blow through the rest of it in a couple days.
As for the magazines, yeah, that's nuts, but I guess I'm naturally curious.
Weeell, the 'no read' approach might make for some very original dross. Fine line between 'dross' and 'cult'. I kid. With you on this. There is a point of 'no read' or 'less read', though you have to read to get there in the first place.
Thank you for the article. Sounds like there is plenty of bulk but a decline in real competition. I guess if we are going to chunk one over the transom we need to hope we catch The Rejectionist at a moment when reading is still on her mental agenda.
Thanks to a seminary prof. I read ” across the field” as he put it. His words. ” It will save you from sounding like the last book you read.”
Just discovered The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Amazing considering when it was written. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The things men will ponder. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Baum. There is still hope. Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich. How I learned to have fun and forgive an author for some pretty goofy ploys to save her plot because I like her attitude. Christ & Culture Revisited by D.A. Carson. Well, I need to read something specific to what I am supposed to be doing.