"Writing Is Hard for Everyone"

There is no magic formula, no secret, no trick that'll have you finish a book in the blink of an eye. There will be days when the words will come easily and there will be days when it'll be like pulling teeth. It doesn't change once you are agented or published. Enjoy writing. Finish stuff. Get feedback. You can be an amazing writer. You can get published. It takes a lot of hard work, there will be sacrifices, the struggle won't end with you signing a contract. But if it's what you want and you're motivated enough you can do it. Really. I wouldn't fib about this. - from Steph Bowe's blog

Who Do You Think Reads Your Query Letter or Manuscript?

Most people, I think, assume that the agent they've sent their query letter or requested manuscript pages to is the person who reads them. Maybe they suppose someone screens query letters to winnow out the obvious losers and ones in the wrong genre (or that are completely incoherent), or that an assistant funnels the most promising ones to the top of the pile.

Because, to be honest, many of the queries I've seen are eye-poppingly bad, and it seems logical for a valued assistant to help weed those out.

But - and maybe I am being completely naive here - I was surprised to learn that the person reviewing your material may be a unpaid, part-time intern. In some cases it's a teenaged high school student who does multiple unpaid long-distance email internships sandwiched between honors classes, extracurricular activities, blogging, and novel-writing.

This particular student is well-read and bright and hard-working, and a talented writer herself. I'm certainly not dissing her for having the gumption and ambition to apply for and get these positions while juggling all her other obligations. She interns for two agents, reading query letters for one and critiquing manuscripts for the other. But she's an unpaid high school student - who is judging your query letter and your manuscripts. She recently tweeted about intending to read between 150 and 200 queries before moving on to homework. [Note: I've edited this to remove the actual tweet, as any dedicated Googler could have presumably tracked her down through it, which was not my intent.]

So the query letter you've slaved over gets read in batches with 149 or 199 others - by a high school student, before homework. Or that same high schooler reads your manuscript, and you get her editorial suggestions without the agent ever reading your manuscript.

This makes me uneasy in several ways.

One is that a relatively inexperienced (and, okay, very young) person is making decisions on query letters and manuscripts, working many miles away from the agents involved - and the writer has no idea this is what's happening. The second is that this person is working for free, which somehow doesn't seem right.

The perhaps overworked agent gets free, dedicated help, albeit from someone they have never actually met. And it's possible that this particular high school senior is as well-read and discerning as any paid assistant with a college education and more life experience might be (or more) and quite probably more considerate of your query and your pages.

Am I missing something? Maybe I'm all wrong here and and an enormous amount of ongoing behind-the-scenes training goes on. Or maybe only the obvious "fails" (wrong genre, incoherence, lack of basic writing skills) are rejected by the intern.

But still.

And just when does an internship leap over the line and become labor that should be paid? Some of the six federal legal criteria that determine whether a position qualifies as an unpaid internship:

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction.
2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees.
3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation.
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded.

Yes, I let eager high school students write articles when I was an editor on a small Ontario weekly paper. I edited them and ran them and didn't pay the kids a dime, and they were more than happy about it. (Weren't you, Stephanie, Bobbi-Jean and Richard?)

Maybe I'm fooling myself and it wasn't much different, but those kids sat beside me as I edited their stuff. They ended up with clippings with their byline and they went off to journalism school with some experience. And they didn't replace a paid employee. It was good for them; it was good for the tiny-budget newspaper, and left me with the feeling that maybe I was doing something good as well.

And no striving authors who wrote their heart out on a query letter and a novel got turned down or had their potential career affected by them.

Am I being absurd here? I have no problem with an inexperienced intern being trained by and working directly with an agent or editor, when the work is supervised and reviewed, and they're perhaps getting school credit. And some agents make it clear on their websites that their assistants are the first hurdle for queries - but I've assumed those assistants are paid, and trained in person. Other agents, well, simply read their queries themselves.

What do you think? Authors? Agents? Interns? Do writers expect that the agent they're submitting to will actually see their query? Is it the norm to use unpaid part-timers without much experience to review query letters or submissions? Are they mostly used to weed out the obvious bad submissions, or so carefully trained that it's a moot point? Should interns be paid? How much supervision and review is required to qualify as "close observation"? Or do most agents slog through their inbox full of queries on their own?

Note: FYI, I am happily represented by a marvelous agent, and have no idea if his assistant passed my query letter on to him - but if she did, she did so promptly. And I am happy to discover that one of my former student writers, Stephanie Nolen, is now an award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent who has written several Very Important Books, which makes me feel simultaneously old and laggardly. 

Another note: Some commenters are assuming these are fly-by-night agents they would never encounter, but that's not the case.

I Shouldn't Promote This, Because I Want It...

... but ... AS King is offering an ARC (advance reader's copy) of her upcoming novel, PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ, as well as a signed copy of DUST OF 100 DOGS, one of my all-time favorites.

It's to benefit Nashville flood victims, so head over to Do the Write Thing for Nashville, and make a bid. On this or something else. There are tons of writing-related items: manuscript critiques, books, chats with agents. Each item is up for three days only.

PS - this one's over, but there are many many more still up for grabs. The women running the auction have already raised more than $60,000 for flood relief - and you send the money directly to the charity, so no worries about overhead costs. This is all done from the heart.

Because Sometimes You Just Need to Laugh

From the always entertaining and sometimes laugh-out-loud-funny Quinn Cummings. Who always makes it seem okay to be me.

This Is Nashville Flooding, Guys

These kids are hanging onto the top of a Jeep. Now do you get it? This is more than a few flooded basements. (Photo by Rick Murray)

Harding Road in the Belle Meade part of Nashville (Photo by Shelley Mays)

This is Interstate-24. Now you see why we've had traffic jams? Roads are damaged; bridges are out. (Photo by Tom Stanford)

Antioch Pike, near Blue Hole (photo by Shelley Mays)

Floating down the Cumberland River - this used to be in someone's bedroom. (Photo by Sanford Myers)

Why Has Vanderbilt Invited Me to a Seminar on Atrial Fibrillation?

Seriously, why would I need to go to Minimally-Invasive Approaches to Atrial Fibrillation or New Surgical Treatments for Atrial Fibrillation? (And yes, they put the hyphen after minimally, not me - I know that ly adverbs don't require a hyphen. Which suggests I may need a seminar on How to Stop Proofreading Everything You See.)

Does Vanderbilt know something about me I don't know?

Yep, This is Just What It's Like

I was considering writing a post about the publishing process (book 1 is now through copyediting and at cover selection; book 2 is at the point where I've decided it doesn't actually suck), but Steph Bowe did it for me. So go read hers. (Yep, she's only 16, but wrote a manuscript that made hairs stand up on my neck when I beta-read it, because I knew I was seeing the start of a great career.)

Why the Nashville Disaster is Getting Short Shrift

I haven't written about the Nashville floods, because, well, I've been overwhelmed. (Yes, I live in Vermont, but spent years in Nashville and am down here for the next month or so, tending dogs and visiting my physical therapist and seeing friends.) Here, stolen from my friend JT Ellison's website, is a brief video to sum up some of it.



All I endured was a weekend stuck in a house watching the rain flow, 36 hours of no power, several more days of no internet, and now very long drives because of flooded-out and damaged roads that won't be open for some time. Many people lost homes, pets, possessions, cars, and more. Some people drowned. It's heartbreaking.

Again from JT, a list of ways you can help:
Calling All Restaurateurs: Red Cross Could Use Your Help
Salvation Army – Nashville
Hands On Nashville
Nashville Flood relief t-shirts
Soles 4 Souls – Shoe charity comes to Nashville’s aid
Nashville Humane Society

Getting Those Writing Priorities Straight

I dash off an email to my agent (who I knew was planning to call me): Off to physical therapy (broken foot).

When I speak to him later, he says, I'm so sorry you broke your foot. I respond: Oh, that was nearly two years ago.

Hey, I had a book to write. Seriously, I didn't have time for PT (and, in my defense, didn't realize how much I needed it.) So now, with book sold, check cashed, revisions complete - I'm taking care of my broken foot.

Well, you've got your priorities straight, my agent says. (Yes, he is laughing. He laughs at me a lot - laughing at my jokes was sort of one of my prerequisites for an agent.)

Yes, I love my agent. And I'm pleased to report that the physical therapy is going well and my foot is much better. (Not that I recommend postponing physical therapy, but stuff happens.)

On Writing and Raising Chickens, and How One Prepares You for the Other

It's no secret that A.S. King is one of my favorite writers and favorite people. And only she could write a superlative blog post on raising chickens and how it prepared her for the world of publishing and writing. An excerpt:

In publishing, desperation is something you want to avoid. Yes, I know you've written two/four/seven/fifteen books and have been collecting rejection letters for years. I know your family members are starting to avoid eye contact. I know this frustration very very well. But look around. Do you think those magazines would be full of all those shortcut advertisements if they didn't know that we're desperate? If they didn't know we are weak? Oh they know. They know the same as the weird lady who sold me those sick birds knew that I had driven three hours, and there was no freaking way I was going to drive back home with no birds.

But now, after the Vaseline, and knowing the events that unfolded over the next two weeks which were disappointing, hard to watch, and ended in burying $70 worth of birds, I can see very clearly that a three-hour drive home with no birds would have been far better. I'd gone temporarily crazy and turned into a collector who just wanted more. I'd become greedy and entitled and forgot that chickens were supposed to be fun.

I'm not going to try to explain the Vaseline, which involves something called "eggbound," a word that tells me more than I want to know about chickens.

But get over to Amy's blog and read this post. And if you haven't already, buy her book DUST OF 100 DOGS. Me, I've bought a zillion copies for friends, and have already preordered PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ.