Some Thoughts on Receiving "suggested edits" from an Agent

1) My novel needs to go to fat camp. Kurt Vonnegut once told an actual fisherman the "Old Man and the Sea" story (which I now realize I have never read*). The old man in question catches a giant marlin, lashes it to his boat and heads home. But since the fish is so big and bloody it attracts sharks who eat away at it. When he gets back to port he has only a skeleton left. Vonnegut's fisherman replied "Why didn't he just hack off the big parts and leave the rest out there?"

That's where I am with this 409 page project. The meat of the novel I want to sell is in there, but I will never get it to market if I can't carry it.**

There are dozens of scenes that I will have to feed to the sharks. So it goes.

2) Writing novels is still like dating. Right now I would love to call up one of these agents and find out what they're actually thinking. But I can't. It would scare them away.

On the night that I got my first good news in the agent world I threw myself a party. Literally. I emailed everyone I knew and I got very, very intoxicated at the bar where I DJ. But I didn't say anything to the agent. I haven't even told her that I like what she has to say. Here's my reply:

Thank you for your email. I don't have the time it deserves right now, but I will tell you what I have been thinking about for the past few weeks:

On the night I went all over trying to steal the goddam bible, I went into the Parker Meridian, which is a hotel that tries to be too "New York." The signs on the doorknobs don't say, "Do Not Disturb" they say "Fuggetaboutit."

I winced, because I know they are trying to say a word that sounds like that. It sound exactly like that. But it comes off sounding so fake.

Thank you for reading.
-B

Annie really disagrees with me here. She thinks that you have to be more up front with people. We met while I was at waiting on her table. I was a loser in Chicago with a dude apartment, no dress pants and a novel that looked like a creative writing project***. But I couldn't let her know that.

I didn't ask for her number. I didn't ask her out because I really, really liked her and I wanted her to like me. How was she supposed to be able to remember me from all the other slobbering guys who talked to her for three minutes and then ask for her number? I knew that then, as now, that my desperation would stink like a rotting marlin.

Fishing is a sport now that it's on ESPN. And I hate sports metaphors. However: Hemingway's old man caught the giant fish but it pulled him out to sea. He knew that if he tied the line to the boat that the taught string would snap. So he had to hold on--give a little--reel it in--let it out, wait.

I'm not very good at playing it cool, so instead I just have to wait for the fish to get tired.

3) The Agent Who Gets Me also missed a giant part of the story. It may be that she gets me so much that by the third chapter she already knew that she wanted to be a part of this project. The notes I'm reading may be born of exuberance after being snagged by one of the tasty lures I've left out there****.

The Agent Who Gets Me may be under the impression that this is a novel about upper-middle-class vs. lower-middle-class. But really it is more about what Freud calls "the narcissism of minor difference." The upper characters are weary of the lowers, of course. But the real tension in here is in between. Liam's girlfriend's parents don't hate him because they own too many diamonds. They hate him because they were once young and poor like him and they don't want that for their daughter.

It's my fault that this didnt' come across. But I worry--slightly--that if I tell this to The Agent Who Gets Me that she will spit out the bait and lose interest.

DISCLOSURES
*"TOMATS" is Saddam Husein's favorite story. No joke.
**Hemingway's fishing boat/office is on display in a giant rods and lures store in Florida. You can tour it and then buy a mug in the shape of a fish head. His writing desk and typewriter are below decks. I went there once but I was too afraid and superstitious to sit in his chair. I feared that if I sat down I would never be able to finish a novel and I would spend the rest of my life towing rotting marlins. I know this is silly. But just in case I asked my nemesis to sit in the chair so I could take her picture. She also dreamed of writing novels and I sincerely hope she gets eaten by actual sharks in the near future. This is what I mean when I say I'm not such a nice guy anymore.
***With good and obvious reasons.
****It may be that the real reason I hate dating and sports metaphors is just because I'm really, really bad at both.

Labels: Chicago

A Few Neurotic Things I Do Periodically
In Order to Make Myself Feel Better About My Future

1) Check Amazon.com for authors named "Brendan Sullivan." I sure as hell am not going to become Brendan J. Sullivan, Brendan John Hastings Sullivan, B.H. Sullivan, etc. I read enough book reviews to know that people with pretentious initials only get compared to other people with pretentious initials.

2) Check to see if the vanity press that published a murder mystery entitled Breakfast Anytime has gone under yet. And in doing my research for this post I discovered that it has. Books aren't like derby horses. You can just keep naming them the same thing. Do you have any idea how many autobiographies are called My Life? One time I was looking for a work of fine literature, however, that was written by an author who had previously only written a title called Lose Weight Thru Great Sex with Celebrities. That was an akward day at the bookstore in deleware. God forbid that out of five people who read my novel someday, one of them runs home to blog about the shitty hundred-page murder mystery they read on their half hour commute.

3) Call up Francis Ford Coppola, pretending to be his financier, and tell him we're having trouble getting the money for his forthcoming adaptation of On The Road. People who read my novel compare it to Huck Finn and The Catcher in the Rye*. People who hear about it assume that since part of it takes place inside of an automobile, then it must be like Road. They're both wrong. However, if Frank Coppola comes out with his adaptation in time, I'm going to have to hear about it all the time.** It is tiresome to contend with, but every book that has ever been written about a change in the life of a young person (Huck, Catcher in the Rye, A Portrait of the Artist) has to do with that young person leaving someplace.***

Catcher is just about the worst thing to ever happen to American literature.**** It's also probably the finest volume ever written. The whole point of the story (to me) is that all the books before it talk about kids who leave home into a strange world, but Holden's home is in the strange world and it's only when he tries to run back home (to NY) that he gets in trouble, yet the problem is that every blue-blazer bread jackass who tragically had to go to the finest schools in the nation reads the book and decides that since s/he wore a uniform, then s/he must have stirring and important thoughts on the nature of the world.*****/******

Yet they are pretty much the only people who buy books anyway. So it goes.

DISCLOSURES:
*Because I ask them to.
**In sincerely hope I do, at least.
***To Kill A Mockingbird's very existence ruins anything I have to say about this topic.
****Kurt Cobain's journal is full of him practicing things to say in interviews.
*****James Joyce often wrote run-on sentences.
******The disenfranchisement I felt at fifteen while reading about Holden--but wishing that the whole world loved a book about a lower-middle class misfit--may be the whole reason I threw my entire adult life away on writing a novel.*******
*******The key to understanding characters and people, at least in the novels I read and write, is by watching the way they make fun of themselves and others. Everyone hates in others what they fear in themselves (see above re: Kerouac, see also any post discussing hipsters) and they are especially prideful of their minor faults--which they often innoculate out loud, in jest, before anyone else can.

The last time I was this happy was March. I had just finished the final draft of this project. I typed out the last sentence and I walked around Williamsburg, hoping I didn't run into anyone I know, lest they spoil my perfect mood. I'm going to do the same thing today. Except not in Williamsburg.

It's sad in a way, but it's impossible to share joy. There's just no enough to go around. My parents have a tile in our house that quotes Yeats: "Being irish he a deep sense of tragedy to sustain him through the periods of joy."

From the Agent Who Buys Me Drinks and who is interested in working with me:

There’s almost a beat to your writing – a hook that kept me with you and your characters. And I absolutely love the idea of these kids growing up in a munitions town – it’s dripping with opportunity, class consciousness, self-evaluation. More to the point, it’s the kind of novel I want to read.



Language … It’s a bit overwritten at present, easy enough to fix with some strategic cuts. Beyond that, I think it should be less colloquial and more fluid. I get what you’re trying to accomplish by having them use prolly and outta and dreaMizz, but I think they end up being somewhat distracting elements that take the reader out of the story – the last, last thing that you want.



We also need a better sense of place, of history, of Liam (and his cronies) as products of this munitions town that seems to have no middle class – that seems to jump between the lower-middle class and the upper-middle class with no buffer in between. And we really need to see the town. More on the make-up of the town, the landscape, the scenery of Liam’s past and present. I’d like to have a very clear sense of exactly where it is. What state. What city. What is it about this town that turns out such interesting characters? Similarly, we need to have a better sense of the characters, of each boy on his own, so that we can separate them later – and so that each contributes something to Liam and the story at large. We need more on Trout and his influence, given that he’s the de facto villain here. And you should keep the kind of marker characters that serve as examples of the community at large … Sherry’s parents as examples of the upper-middle class mentality, et al.



I’m not asking you to strip this to some sort of obvious, bare bones, heavy handed tale. I don’t need the moral lesson and I don’t want it to lose its subtlety. I’m merely suggesting that it have a more definitive narrative arc. You have a lot of really gorgeous lines and many keen insights, but we need a chance to catch and see them – as is, they do tend to get lost.



What I’d like to do is edit a few sample chapters to give you a clear sense of what I’m talking about – page by page, line by line – ideas that you can apply to the ms as a whole. I’ll get it into the mail to you this week.

In case anyone wonders if agents and publishers actually read their mail, I would just like to mention that this is the second rejection I've received from this one person. For the same sample chapter.

Brendan,

Many thanks for thinking of us for BREAKFAST -- I've had a chance to
read through this sample, and though it's quite impressive, I'm afraid
it's not striking hard enough magic here... With all good wishes, we'll
step aside.

Best,
The Agent I wrote Twice

I Always Though Books Worked Like This

This intro really requires Terry Gross' voice speaking to closely to the microphoneSomehow--please don't ask--I did not bring Hemingway's A Moveable Feast with me to start my new life in Chicago. And thus it was never stolen along with the others. I found it at my parents house last week. When I opened it last night, I experienced a forgotten joy of being a book-whore.

In the title page I had scrawled, "Seattle Barnes and Noble 7-11-2000." I had bought it while on an aimless, cross country road trip for the summer before I went off to college. In those days it took me a really, really long time to read an entire book. I was in San Diego, sitting on a beach, hungry out of my mind, almost broke, and sad about having to go back home when I did finish.

When I opened the pages last night, a receipt fluttered out from a Taco Bell in Coos Bay, OR. (In those days I considered a full meal to be "7LAYER---NO SOUR-NO CHZ.") When I reached the end, the hidden sand of San Diego had fallen out of its hiding places in the pages and collected in my sheets.

All I really remembered was the chapter where Hemingway tells F. Scott Fitzgeral that if Zelda thinks he has a small penis, then he should check out the statue at Louvre. I thought that someday maybe I would go to Paris and have something to write a novel about. Hemingway's story about giving up the lucrative and promising field of journalism to try writing fiction meant nothing to me. Nor did I shutter--or even remember it--when he talked about how his wife wanted to surpise him on vacation by bringing every copy of his short stories with her in a suitcase that was later stolen.

Instead I became haunted by the thoughts of an seventeen year old boy who takes a trip cross-country in the summer before he goes off to college only to find himself in San Diego hungry and almost out of money.

Labels: Chicago

"The book asks why lost people sometimes develop greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives." -Nelson Algren

Do you think Algren's corpse would mind if I pretended that he read my first manuscript?

My brother is in the lawn irrigation business. And so every year they get laid off for the winter, but just before they do they work for several weeks straight blowing the water out of everyone's sprinklers.

"Sorry I can't come see you this weekend," he said into my voicemail in a way that never gets old. "I'll be doing blow jobs for two weeks straight."

The first thing on my to do list today would be "Get Pens." But I can't make the list until I do.

The first agent to reject me was a coffee table book guy with no credibility. I put him on my list for the same reason that you invite your awkward, antisocial friend to your party. You know that at least you can count on one person.

I also have this rather common disease involving alcohol and email where I come home at night and ingeniously type important emails with one eye open. Kurt Vonnegut suffers from a similar disorder where his wife throws him out of bed for smelling like "mustard gas and roses." And the other night I figured it would be a great time to send out query letters to agents.

"Dear Mizz Green..." I wrote to a man who is not named Green.

Last night I went out with Julia, although I spent the greater part of my evening getting sound financial advice from a 42 year old millionaire who was in a bar alone on a monday night. When I came home I smelled of mustard gas and muddle mint mojitos. There was an email in my inbox from the Awkward, Antisocial agent that I invited to read my manuscript.

Though Steven doesn't usually go by "Mizz Green" we'll be glad to take a look at your work. You can send 30 pages, synopsis and SASE, marked "Requested Material" to my attention - Awkard, antisocial friend / assistant to the agent you'd rather have- and we'll be in touch soon.

Since this is the least professional way to do this, I am almost positive this man and I will someday work together.

Coming attractions to my various agent hopefuls:

"War Prophets" (or "The Second Comings")is about a man who comes back from the war and
remembers that he is the second coming. (In the war hospital, the man
who pulled him out of the desert finds him reading a bible: "I see you
found Jesus after the bomb went off." "No," He says. "You did,
remember?") Chris will be a modern Jesus. He will befriend
pornographers instead of prostitutes, he will work at home depot
("times being what they are in the field of carpentry.")

No one has yet heard from their platoonmate Mo until he is discovered
wandering the desert 40 days later. Mo(hammed) has also remembered
that he is the second coming, yet he has a far different
interpretation (While giving a speech later he interrupts himself,
screaming "Awghh! Ahh! I sense some act of sodomy being committed!"
Mo doubles over in pain, "And I said last time, what you do to the
least of my brethren, you also do to me--awghh!")

("Humans have never created universes, so they have no sense of
progress. And the way they like to create progress is by having
meetings. One time Moses invited me to be the keynote at one of these
meetings and he copied it all down. Very boring stuff--who begat who,
how long it rained, etc. And for some reason you can always find a
copy of The Report in your hotel room.")

It took me over an hour to find a free bible in this disgusting city. I went to three hotels and this scene happened three boring times in a row:

"Do you have a spare bible?" (for years, many many glorious years, I have been fruitful and happy by walking into hotels, going up their elevators and down their stairs and getting whatever I ask for.)

"There is on in your room."

"No, I think someone must have taken the bible."

"We can have housekeeping send one up." I need a bible so that I can accurate blaspheme in my next novel, which I have been planning for almost a week now. I think that bible is a fantastic book if only because it is a best seller with the most egregious syntax ever. It also has a very unhappy ending and it gets all preachy like a Kevin Spacey movie.

On stealing a bible: my only concern is that which aligns with my views on prostitution: how can it be wrong to take something that someone is giving away?

On the final attempt, I turned to the old couple next to me in the elevator. "Can I ask you a weird question?" These people were absolutely from either central Iowa or post-rural Connecticut. I can only assume they think I want to blow them. I pause just in case they need a minute to come up with this. "My room does not have a bible in it. Do you think I could borrow yours?"

I should mention that this hotel was in a sixty story building. Once I secured the concept of getting their bible, we still had fifty awkward floors to go. "So..." the old man said. "...what book're you reading tonight?"

"I don't know," I said. "Which chapter has the sermon on the mount?"

"Matthew," he said. "That's a good book." I wish people wouldn't lie to me. I also wish someone would fix the bible. It's a book that everyone has full of adultery, gambling, the destruction of civilizations, death, bear-baiting, inter-celestial wrestling, necroamblia, and prostitution. And it's written like the minutes of a PTA meeting.

Have you been to Florence/ Tuscany/ Rome before? Annie and I are planning a totally romantic, out-of-wedlock trip in the middle of November. I have never been to Italy. In fact, until this year I didn't even like Italians. Any suggestions?

They were not able to salvage any of the data on my hard drive. It now sits in a cheap plastic bag, like a goldfish waiting to be flushed. Between losing all of my college books and all of my college photos, I'm not even sure I graduated high school.

According to my computer, I never went through a phase where I only listened to The Shins. I never remixed "Pass the Dutch" and "The Real Slim Shady." I also never wrote the twenty short stories that I considered, capitally, My Next Move.