Agents & Editors Recommend

Be able to say, in a sentence, what your book is about. By that I don’t mean the elevator pitch (giant man-eating shark attacks beach town) but rather the soul of the story. Then make sure this beating heart is on every page of your manuscript, whether it’s a twist-revealing moment or simple dialogue between two characters passing a shaker of salt back and forth.

We are always—by our friends, our teachers, parents, the media—encouraged to “think big.” Frankly, I worry that there’s so much big thinking going on that we forget to think small. I mean small in a number of ways: 

There are many voices across the publishing industry and the wider culture telling writers to prepare themselves to be rejected. It is more important and more useful to tell writers to prepare themselves to be accepted. Understandably, there is a great deal of focus on just getting through the eye of the needle, but it is true that on the other side there awaits the real work of publishing the book. Two essential components of that work that can sometimes take writers by surprise are, first, how a publisher talks about and presents the book, and second, how an editor goes about editing it.

Follow the rules, but know when to break them. When you enter the world of studying, teaching, or editing and publishing creative writing, you quickly see patterns, and these patterns suggest rules. We’ve all read prologues that feel unnecessary to the story that follows, like throat-clearing: Prologues should be cut! Many successful novels have short chapters: Let’s make all chapters short! And so on. But the truth is there is nothing more exhilarating than reading a submission that defies a rule of thumb in a way that truly earns the dispensation.