Killing My “Darlings”

As many of you are aware, I have been working on writing a novel for the past quarter century or so. I started this project back in the 1990s, blithely unaware of what it took to get a book into print. I started by writing a scene or a chapter during summer vacations, or spring and Christmas breaks while still teaching. I finished my first full draft of the novel in about 2015, and tried to learn the process involved with getting that manuscript polished and onto the shelves of bookstores. Or, to be closer to the truth in the internet age, onto a digital list somewhere in Amazon-Land. I have read dozens of books and internet articles over the years, and attended many conferences in order to pick up this esoteric knowledge. Today, I thought that I would explain a little about how that process works and some recent developments.

Set in 1969, the story involves a teenaged, Native-American girl who is the sole survivor of a reclusive tribe in Northern Wisconsin. She lives alone in the forest on her reservation until she is taken into the home of a corrupt Chicago lawyer as a foster child. The lawyer discovers that her land has ancient, old-growth pine trees that are 200 feet high and worth millions of dollars. He will stop at nothing to gain control over those woods and its valuable trees. The final confrontation takes place on the reservation, where the lawyer and his thugs fight a guerrilla war against the teen, two of her teachers, and an ex-con who is modeled after my Uncle Buddy. After many years of re-writing and editing, I think the book works well as a suspenseful crime story, and there is enough humor laced throughout to keep the reader interested.

As I said, I finished the book in 2015, but, at 420 pages, it was too long for a first novel. I have edited and rewritten the entire book over a dozen times since then and managed to whittle it down to about 310 pages. I had help in this, as several people read the entire manuscript and offered valuable suggestions. Kathleen, my wife, read the entire thing as I wrote it and took great pleasure in pointing out my grammatical errors. My brother Dan read it shortly after completion, and a teaching colleague, Peter Goodwin, was the first to really see the overall story arc and suggest changes that forced me to cut out large sections. Nobel Prize writer William Faulkner once wrote, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” The phrase has been quoted so often that it has become a cliché, but it is useful advice. Faulkner meant that writers must be willing to ruthlessly eliminate any words, characters, side plots or turns of phrase that we personally love but do nothing for the story. Finally, a friend since college, Bruce Radowicz, used his experiences as a police chief to help eliminate obvious flaws that pertained to laws, criminal behavior, and weapons. He also has a keen eye for continuity errors and other writing mistakes that slipped past me during my many rewrites.

Since 2015, I have also been trying without success to get the manuscript read by someone in the publishing industry. This effort has proven to be extremely difficult. You should first understand that publishing companies don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. Instead, they rely on professional literary agents to screen books before they agree to take a look at them. Agents are sometimes called the “gatekeepers” of the industry. “So,” I thought, “I’ll just hire an agent to work on my behalf.” I soon learned, however, that agents hire you much more than you hire them. You have to find one who works in your particular genre, get them interested in your book, and contract with them to present your work to a publisher. A good agent has a working relationship with the publishing houses and only presents books that they believe will be successful. Agents usually work for a percentage of the book’s profits (about 15%, which comes out of the author’s end), so they, too, are unlikely to waste their time on a book that will sell only a few hundred copies.

This has proven to be the most difficult part of my lengthy journey. You have to first get the attention of an agent with your one-page letter of introduction (called a “Query Letter”) which explains the book, why you chose that particular agent, who you are, and your target audience. I’ve written and rewritten my query letter scores of times. If you pique their interest, they ask for a writing sample. This has also been frustrating, because they only want to see the first chapter, the first page, or, sometimes, only the first sentence. If they are not interested after reading this brief sample, you are rejected. I have an entire computer folder dedicated to my emailed rejection letters (usually just impersonal form letters). At a writers conference, I heard a successful author explain that he once received a rejection letter 7 years after he had first sent his query; in the meantime, the book in question had risen to the top of the New York Times list of best-sellers.

The final problem with getting an agent to represent you is who they are demographically. Most of the agents I have met or with whom I have been in contact are young (25 to 30) and fresh out of college or grad school with a Masters of Fine Arts degree (MFA). Over 80% are female. They are trying to work their way up the chain so that they can become editors or be the ones selecting books for the publishers. Becoming an agent is sort of an entry-level position for the profession. Most of them say they are looking for fantasy stories (“Something like Game of Thrones”) or dystopian Young Adult (YA) novels (“I want the next Hunger Games”), or LBGT stories. I don’t write any of those. And there is a disconnect here. While there are breakthrough books like those from time to time, the type of novels which consistently appear on the best-selling lists of the past twenty years are romance novels or else crime thrillers by people such as James Patterson, Michael Connolly, Mary Higgins Clark, John Sandford, and Jonathon Kellerman. Those suspenseful crime novels are what I write. Yet these younger agents seem uninterested in such books. Still, I keep trying, feeling a bit like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby when he says, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

On a more positive note, I have recently hired a professional editor so that I can give this manuscript one more shot. Searching for an editor was a bit like trying to find an agent. Again, they have to accept you and your book before they agree to take on the project of editing your book. I was delighted to find a well-known editor who agreed to work with me. She is Aja Pollock and has edited many books on the best-seller lists. She has edited auto-biographies of Bruce Springsteen, Amy Poehler, Cindy Lauper, and Dave Grohl (from Nirvana and the Foo Fighters). She has also worked with Ken Follett, Neil Gaiman, Mary Higgins Clark, James McBride, and Isabel Allende, among others. She is well-respected as a “story doctor” within the industry, and I am hoping this will help me improve the book enough to get it past the gatekeepers.

In the meantime, I have continued to work on several other books, including a historical murder mystery set in 1870s Chicago. This all keeps me busy, but I haven’t yet given up on the first novel. I’ll just keep beating on, against the current . . . Oh, wait; I already used that line.