Agents & Editors Recommend

You don’t need to wait for an idea to be perfect to start playing around with it. Books come through in many guises: Some ideas arrive masked as other concepts; some come with a companion or a twin, the road not taken; others need outside input, research, or further development. But if you catch the scent of an idea, don’t hesitate to see where it leads you. 

In Jesse May’s cult classic Shut Up and Deal, the narrator offers an insight that’s been quoted by everyone from the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt to James McManus. It goes like this: “Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That’s philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren’t ever gonna fade it. That’s what sets poker apart.

I find serious strength in my morning ministry. I’ll play a single song or album on repeat every morning for several days, or even months. For several years I listened to Prince’s “Purple Rain,” both the song and the album. I’ve also turned to Aretha Franklin’s “Spanish Harlem.” The soundtrack to Sparkle. Kamasi Washington. Many days, Sun Ra. This spring Kaytranada’s “2 The Music” served as the single song, the last fifty seconds a portal into new thoughts and visions and dreams.

The most important part of a book—be it a memoir, novel, or something else entirely—is the ending. It’s your last opportunity to show the reader what you’re truly capable of as a writer. There’s the well-worn instruction that declares endings should be surprising, yet inevitable, and I’ve always found that the best endings adhere to it. My favorite kind of endings are the ones that misdirect, or seem to; they pivot from the established narrative in some meaningful way. Mary Gaitskill does this in Veronica.