I mentioned recently about switching tactics and approaching literary agents with an initial query letter rather than a package of letter, synopsis, and sample chapters (based on each agent’s preference). 

Some agents make it known that they will respond within a few days, to query letters. My experience so far has been just that. Two approaches (both returning negative), promoted responses within 72 hours. The first wanted to explore the idea a little further, while the other responded promptly with a pass.

Compare this to the 6-8 weeks of waiting for a response when sending a full package. 

Is a query letter enough?

I do not know any literary agents personally, and can only go by advice I have received from reputable sources, but it seems to me that if I am unable to hook someone in with a brief summary of the work, there’s no way they are going to spend even more time reading an mss.

For now, query letters – which are tough to write, I have to say – will be the way forward unless a particular agent explicitly requests more.

Perhaps if you really do have the next Pulitzer Prize novel, then a query letter might not do the piece justice. But really, as a writer, if I cannot write a letter that grabs an agent’s interest about a project within which lies my future, then I need to give up and go sweep the roads.

I wrote recently about receiving rejections from literary agents. There is always a little disappointment to receive a negative response, after all, you are trying to gain a positive one. But I thankfully never feel it personally, or as a criticism of my idea or writing.

My initial approaches painted the complete picture of the Table Rappers project: it’s scope, plans for the future (seven books), details of the existing audio series, etc. But advice in the 2009 edition of Guide to Literary Agents, suggests a current negative reaction to multi-book proposals:

We’ve been seeing a lot more of these types of “series” presentations lately – the feeling being that the author needs to present a future “franchise” for the agent and publisher to get them more interested. In fact, it may send up a red flag about the author’s expectations.

I can see the logic in that thought. However much passion I have as creator of a series, if the first book doesn’t get a bite on its own merits, there’s never going to be a series.

I can understand why Agents, and publishers, are inundated with series proposals right now, with the successes of Harry Potter and Twilight for example.

When an agent reads about an author’s very first book, there is no way for them to measure whether that author is truly capable of more than one novel – some writers are simply one-hit-wonders.

Change is afoot

So, despite every instinct in me from my professional side to present the complete picture, I am pulling everything but the merest hint of hoping to write a series, focusing on the first book as something that will stand alone if it must.

In addition, I am trying a series of query letters rather than full submissions. If I cannot get some interest in the core idea in the first place, there’s little point in the cost and effort of sending a full synopsis and manuscript sample.

Targets have been designated, so watch this space for news of more rejections once I have them!

In addition to completing the final chapters of Persistent Spirit, I am in the process of the third draft of the first ten chapters. These will be off to some enthusiastic friends for proofing.

The opportunity to submit to a publisher has motivated me to start the third draft before the second is properly complete. Opportunity is never a bad thing, but timing could be better.

It is good to re-visit these early chapters after anything up to a year since I last read them. It has been a satisfying experience re-reading work and genuinely liking what I have written. The text is fairly straightforward, and I think the characters are colourful. But what will other people think?

Questions, questions

I have a number of questions I am hoping my initial proof readers will be able to answer

Too much or too little information?

Getting the balance just right between how much information to reveal at a particular point in the story, against how much to leave out, is a constant struggle. The author, of course, knows all about everything, making it virtually impossible for him to spot gaps in a reader’s understanding of what is going on.

Most importantly, I need to understand what questions a reader might have at the end of each chapter. Controlling that flow of information and maintaining high anticipation, whilst feeding just enough to allow the reader room to take guesses as to future developments (deliberately misleading them up the wrong alley, of course!), is vital in maintaining page-turning momentum. 

Is the dialogue believable without being tedious?

I have stopped reading books where the dialogue has such high realism that exchanges between characters are tedious and mundane. I have also stopped reading books with such condensed dialogue that it is difficult to grasp true character, motivation and relationships. 

Is there enough description of the settings?

Again, a tricky balance between too little information about an environment, leading to incomplete imagery, against too much that threatens the intended pace of the storytelling.

Does the text flow?

I have consciously written in a late Victorian / Edwardian language style, with a little more colour than modern texts, and indulging in long, run-on sentences. 

When creating the audio book version of this novel, I was able to intone my own rhythm to the words. my concern is whether I have been able to apply a similar rhythm to the written version.

I should be afraid, right?

In the back of my mind a voice keeps repeating that I should be afraid of the moment of letting my work out there for other eyes to see. But I am not at al concerned, in fact I am struggling to hold back.

This may come down to having already released the work into the world as an audiobook. Having received very positive feedback over the past year, reminders when episodes are released late, and the audio downloads (several thousand each month and growing). 

That is certainly a significant element in building confidence, but there is something deeper, stronger and more personal wrapped in this project. I have been with these characters and this story, in its various guises, for so many years now. I have no doubt it is something that could find enough of  an audience to make a successful series of books. 

Does that sound arrogant at this stage? I hope not. Confident, yes, but I am under no illusions as to the tree root riddled path before me. But I remain confident that I have a good chance to get this work published. Far, far worse has found its way into print.

For now, it is time to get some real world feedback and make TableRappers into something people will buy, read, enjoy, and thirst for more.

The TableRappers book series is planned to have short story collections spread amongst the full novels – every third book, in fact. These collections will be derived from Keynes’ (the primary protagonist) case files covering his adventures both before Persistent Spirit and after. 

More than simply short stories, these will colour back story and weave both existing and new plots, new characters, and answer some questions about Keynes’ past – and pose a few more!

Weaving webs

What has become increasingly obvious is the growing complexity of the various long term story threads weaving their way around my central characters, and in particular the need to keep everything properly organised. 

I already have the odd email here and there pointing out inconsistencies in the writing – something I love receiving because it clearly demontrates that people are engaged enough in the work to notice! But as the audience for these stories grows, it will become ever more important to keep track of everything.

Where is the solution?

Right now, I don’t have one. 

Yesterday I purchased a pack of Extra large Moleskine Cahiers for the very purpose of trying to pull all these initial story ideas and setups into a single location. Why Moleskines specifically? Well, if you have to ask…

The problem is rather more complex than simply making notes about possible future short stories. Any exchange between two characters with a clear back story, can be a potential short story at some point in the future. Each of these have to be remembered, tracked, and interwoven with the growing tangle of character timeline stories. Sounds daunting? Absolutely!

What excites me about this challenge is the end result of a plausible world in which the interrelations of characters is multi-dimensional which, if I manage to handle the storytelling well enough, will bolster plausibility and most importantly, help the reader to be more involved in what I am trying to create.

I’m 110,000 words complete in the second draft and a flaw has occurred to me within the pacing and structure of the story. The cause is simple and unsurprising: in my week-on-week working to create segmented 20 minute (about 3,500 words) audio book episodes, I have instinctively structured the story around those small segments.

This has created a rather odd story flow when all the pirces are joined into a single, continuous whole.

I knew some work would need doing

There was no doubt from the start that there would be a further re-work before I would feel comfortable tagging this book as finished, but the amount of restructuring as a result of serialization has surprised me; yet is not at all daunting.

My whole attitude to the writing process has evolved over the past year. At the start, I wanted to finish as quickly as possible, racing through sections to keep pace not only with the weekly audio episode schedule, but also my self-imposed notion of hos long I could continue to work on this. The thought of running more than a year on this single project did not sit comfortably.

Now, so far into the book with such a huge effort investment into it, the idea of a large amount of effort still to exert offers no concerns at all. Now, my attitude is if it needs doing, it must be done.

Deciding when it’s finished

A creative work is never truly finished, in my opinion. One must get it to an acceptable point of release, then let it out into the big wide world and move onto the next project.

The changes to Persistent Spirit will dramatically improve the pacing of the middle story. Right now it really does feel as if it has been created in small chunks. The story starts to accelerate, then there’s a cliffhanger point, then it builds once more to another cliffhanger. The rhythm of the text, to me, seems very contrived and is reflected by the flow of events through which the characters travel.

If it takes another year to get it to the right place ready for publication, then so be it (I don’t feel it will take that long, I should add). These novels are never going to be Pulitzer or Booker nominations, but they have to be “right”, at least in my mind.

I was thinking around a recent comment on my character arc post. Kev wrote:

Planning a story arc for a character can be difficult until you know the character fully, this not always the case when you start a writing about/with them.

My response was that I did not feel the character(s) need to be completely mapped out prior to writing – in fact, I would now extend that to purposefully leaving gaps in the character’s personality and back-story that will be revealed by their actions as he lives and breathes the story.

The journey reveals the character

I have had my nose buried in a small book by Bernard Cornwell, the creator of the Sharpe series entitled Sharpe’s Story. If you are not aware, the Sharpe books are a model for how I will initially develop my TableRappers series, and so it was not difficult to find the time to read a book all about their history.

One early passage reminded me of Kev’s comment:

… I knew I needed a hero, but I never once sat down and tried to delineate him in my mind; instead I let him develop as I wrote the book … Sharpe was pretty much a mystery to me when I started writing [the first book].

Even at that stage, Cornwell aimed to write a series of books about his roguish rifleman in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, having himself been inspired by C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels. Yet, the central character of Sharpe was little more than a sketch, with simple back-story and a handful of influencing circumstances. Sharpe revealed himself as much to the author as he does to the reader.

I like that way of writing. Reading a book should be a journey of discovery, so why not writing it, also? Of course, there’s the ever present risk of having to re-work already written passages as a result of some late revelation, but writing is re-writing anyway.

The characters write the story

You may think it is the author who directs the passage of the story. But it is, in fact, the characters. Sometimes they surprise you with their actions. You may have one direction in mind but on writing, they can take off an run in a completely different direction. It is exciting (and sometimes troubling to get them out of whatever complications arise out of their actions)!

This may become an additional challenge for me from the second TableRappers book onwards. By book two, there will be few surprises buried in my characters’ personalities and lives. Though I do have a few clues to currently firmly secured skeletons here and there, I may find the adventure of discovering more of the people I am writing about to be more predictable – for me, that means less interesting.

I will only know for sure when I am deeply embroiled in book two. Hopefully, if the situations into which I throw my hapless characters are interesting enough in themselves, everything will work out just fine.

Book two, A Shot in Time,  will be a very intriguing exercise and I anticipate quite a contrasting writing experience that I am very much looking forward to.

Arcs are, of course, essential. The reader must follow a character’s journey through each story and that journey must somehow create change around, and more importantly within the character. He may even end up coming full circle, but there must always be a curve of some description – linear characters invariably lose the reader’s interest.

The problem arises in writing multiple books in a series. One must develop plausible arcs for the main characters within each book while maintaining a much broader arc across the entire series.

Letting it all out too early

The first book seems to be the toughest in this respect. The inclination is to develop a thoroughly gripping character arc for the tortured primary protagonist just as with any standalone novel. But it is vital not to play all the cards too early, leaving so few options across the remaining stories that our protagonist might need a dramatic personality change in order to remain interesting! This seems to happen frequently in long running soaps.

Holding too much back

On the flipside, there’s the danger of keeping too much back. Playing out the character arc across so many books in the series that it becomes flattened with each individual story dulled and uninteresting.

What about a book series with no absolute final number of stories? Without understanding the end, how can you develop a character arc that will find completion and not leave your readers dangling in the dark?

Dimensions are everything

To offer the broadest opportunities to develop smaller character arcs within the overall arc, fully formed characters, it seems to me, are the key. Characters do not need to be complex, but they do need to have realistic, multiple dimensions – sometimes conflicting dimensions are the most interesting to write.

Such characters merely need a situation thrown at them and they take on a life of their own. Writing their actions and reactions to a situation is much more straightforward with a well defined character.

I’m no expert, of course, I’m merely on my first novel, but it seems clear that to sustain my characters across an undefined number of books, they must have a great deal of substance.

Early thoughts in early days. Ask me in ten years if these ideas worked!

I’m not going to let out exactly who mugged me of a couple of hours of reading, suffice to say it is an author with a widespread online presence, a very “geeky” following, and this particular short story was in the sci-fi genre (no horror involved).

It all started so well

I was enthusiastic after the first few pages. A balanced dose of exposition but with the correct amount of colour and no need to take notes to keep up with information overload.

Then something went “eh?”

The main character changed personality. Or at least, reacted to a situation in stark contrast to what one might expect based on the information of him gleaned during the opening of the story.

Then it all fell apart

All it took was one of those “stuff happens that would actually be plausible if I could be bothered to go back and tweak some earlier stuff, but hey, what’s the point” moments.

I did not finish reading the story.
Having been mugged for enough of my time, I almost threw my Sony reader across the room in disgusted frustration, feeling the urge to email everyone I knew who liked this author’s work for some compensation. This is why I stopped reading science fiction so many years ago, and why my reading in general decreased as I found so little that satisfied.

Where to go next?

I have a vacation coming up and require the necessary reading matter to accompany what has been pre-defined as two weeks of total relaxation. In light of the above experience I am once again in the realm of mistrust that deepens with every – far too frequent – disappointment. Am I fussy? Do I simply have too high an expectation? I have no idea, but choosing a book for the holiday is a tricky affair.

Thankfully, the new Sony Reader will be an enormous help as it currently contains over 130 books, of varying lengths, genre, and author. If the chosen vacation read proves another disappointment, I can always switch to some classics from Wells, Conan Doyle, or Algernon Blackwood (my current favourite).

For the first few years as an aspiring stand-up comic, one must tread the rocky paths of the open spots. These are the 5 minute – or if you are lucky 10 – slots that most smaller comedy clubs make available to new comics honing their techniques.

The open spot routine goes as follows:

• Travel for 2-3 hours to the venue
• Hang around for 1-2 hours waiting for your spot
• Spend 5 minutes in front of a disinterested audience who paid to see ‘real’ comics
• Hope the club promoter saw enough promise in you to give you another spot in a few months
• Go home and re-consider any gags that did not generate a laugh

That may seem rather cynical view, but that is the process when reduced down to its core. It is genuinely much more fun that it sounds, however. These open spots are best handled by packing them with quick-fire gags and quips; fire stuff into the mic, then get the heck off. I found the minimal audience interaction very uninspiring.

So I moved into running a couple of (very) small clubs and acting as compere. The compere spends several time slots working with that night’s audience, warming them up, cooling them down, and generally creating each appropriate segue from the previous to the next act. Most importantly, there is an evolving relationship over the period of the show.

I’m getting to the point, thank you for hanging in there…

I experience a similar problem in the difference between writing a short story compared to writing a novel. But this is not centred around the act of concise writing.

I want to get to know them

Stories are about people – at least I believe mine are, regardless of their respective settings. There’s little more satisfying than learning about the characters one places into a story, understanding their nuances, discovering their quirks, ’seeing’ them play out their lives.

The short story simply does not have the space or the time for such luxuries and that is where my challenge lies. These are interesting, nay fascinating people (they must be as I am including them in my story!).

The dead end of death

This problem is particularly acute in a series of short stories I am writing and planning which will form a collection entitled “Six Deaths” – the title is something of a giveaway – and as you might guess, each character has but a brief sojourn within the pages. And there lies my personal challenge when writing shorts: I want to know these individuals, get under their skins, understand who they really are before… well, let’s just say before they up and leave.

I find writing short stories about the characters that inhabit Edwardian London in the TableRappers book(s), so very much easier and satisfying because I know them such that I do not feel I am missing out on learning about them as individuals.

It feels so utterly disrespectful to create a character for the sake of merely a few thousand words. Perhaps I just need to grow some thicker skin and be a little more ruthless with my characters. Hmm… Six Deaths, how more ruthless can one be..?

The day-to-day demands of working in the UK but with colleagues based in San Francisco, presents challenges to available time. With work heating up for me at around the time it should be winding down each day (early evening), and the potential for it to extend well past a sensible bedtime, the only controlled and contained time span to write appears first thing in the morning. But there’s a problem… I cannot write in the mornings!

I was lucky enough to have time for a lunch with the entertainingly cranky John Dvorak while in San Francisco a few weeks ago. We chatted about writing. He, like nearly all the writers with whom he is acquainted, writes better in the mornings “before all the crap of the day has taken hold”.

I, on the other hand, rarely find the juices flowing until darkness has set in and there’s a distinct chance that the day is not going to throw me another twelve curve balls. There’s a psychological security in that knowledge, you see.

Before it becomes a full-time prospect

It’s my first novel. Like any fledgling writer, the chance of earning a living wage from such projects is marginally better than winning the National Lottery. Four of five books under my belt and there’s a chance of that dream, but for now writing must find its place amongst everything else.

So how on earth do I switch into becoming a morning writer?
I am one of those slow-wakers: up to an hour of numb-brain, zombie-shuffle during which breakfast, some BBC news, and the necessary ablutions seem to occur without any real effort or conscious intent. Eventually, there I am at my desk tip-tapping my login ready for the morning’s mundane tasks. Creative writing is far from my mind.

When it’s dark and the work day is done, my mind comes alive, creatively. Characters speak up and scenes play themselves out so that I have to type twice as fast to keep up. When all the gears are properly lubricated, 800-1000 quite acceptable words in an evening session is not unheard of. In the morning, I am lucky to find a coherent sentence any more creative than an email or a blog post.

I do not believe in insurmountable obstacles, and have discovered way to dramatically increase the chances of triggering creativity when it becomes necessary. Although a method for morning writing still eludes me, I’m looking forward to solving this particular problem.