Choose me!
A few weeks ago, I received an email from a writer letting me know that another agent had offered him representation. The agent wanted an answer by the end of day Friday. I was way behind the eight ball having not yet received the proposal. Plus, the other agent had put a clock on the process.
Anyhoo, I spent a few hours reading and rereading the proposal because I really liked the writing, thought the idea was saleable, terrific title, but I also felt it needed some work. It needed to be more intense, to build more, in order to pay off. I called the writer, we spoke for close to an hour about my editorial concerns. Then about marketing, platform, etc. He seemed to click with my ideas. I hung up thinking we had a great conversation; I hoped to get the client.
Next day, email arrives. Turns out he had a half dozen offers of representation. It boiled down to me and someone else (you say that to all the girls). He explains that he went with the other person for reasons largely intangible. In other words, I was a great lay but smell you later. I want to reply with two words: big mistake.
Instead I say, write the best book you can. I say, you’ve got a lot of talent. I wish him well and I actually mean it. That said, I ask if I may know the identity of the victorious agent so that I may take out my voodoo doll. Writer gamely tells me. Readers, I was so hoping for it to be an agent I loathe, which is sort of like looking for a haystack in a haystack. But alas, it was one of the smartest and loveliest agents in the biz.
I put my pins away.
Filed under: Agent, Rejection, Writers | 15 Comments »
My office is starting to look like a maternity ward at the full moon; it feels like all my clients are delivering their pages at the same moment whether it’s a final manuscript, a draft, a chapter, a treatment, a partial. If I know one thing about writers it’s that they hate waiting to hear what people think. The minute they hit send, the bomb starts to tick. Lots of writers go right to the dark place, imagine the worst. Though some are confident, and when they hand you the pages they will tell you so. It makes me think of a small child proudly handing you a page from a coloring book, the crayon insanely outside the lines. Some go into free fall and pick at their own flesh. Some start shooting off revisions: Wait! Read this draft! or If you haven’t read yet! It’s the worst, like waiting for a guy to call after you’ve fucked him.
Do you ever regret anything you’ve written, wish you hadn’t published it, or even just shared it with another person? Now that my daughter is a teen, I sometimes gulp hard to think of what she will think of me if she reads my memoir. I was quite cavalier when I wrote it. My motto: secrets did the most damage. It was the stuff under the carpet that kills. Now, the carpet’s looking mighty fine.
If you want excellent advice on how to write a pitch letter, go to 
I studied pottery throughout high school. Junior year, we had a teacher who started the term by asking us to make kiln gods to “protect and bless” our firings. These were, in effect, clay finger puppets. To show what I thought of the project and my eternal hipness, I created a little man giving the finger.
When I was in high school, I met a woman in my poetry class. We were from opposite ends of the earth, meaning she was an athlete and I was a deadhead. We discovered our shared love of poetry and entered into a clandestine friendship, exchanging our diaries and poems for each other to read. After graduate school, I would meet a prose writer with whom I formed an instant bond. We could say anything about each other’s work. Gloves off. Bring it on. Twenty-five years later, she is still the little bird on my shoulder, still my first reader. I remember reading in Joan Didion’s memoir, 
Betsy Lerner 