Over the River and Through the Woods

Someone brought up the Rain Room at the MoMA
while at dinner last night. Talk about a dynamic setting!
You can read more about it here.

I recently got back from a service project trip in Guyana, where I was one of six adult advisors leading a group of 33 high-energy high school students into the thickets of that country’s coastal plain. We were quite cut-off from the rest of the world – only one solar-powered electricity outlet, no internet, no phones (with the exception of a mobile for emergencies), and no running water. There were monkeys, apparently, though we didn’t see them, and a parrot with a clipped wing that squawked in a way that approximated but didn’t quite replicate a human voice. We bathed in a stream and slept in hammocks. And everything—the entire town—rested on white sand, despite the fact that we were well inland from the country’s coastline.

It was incredible to watch the 33 kids shed the baggage of their everyday lives and connect with one-another in often surprising ways. I think the way the kids changed and opened-up throughout the week was in part a product of them getting to know each other through working together and finding a sense of belonging with the group, but that it was no doubt facilitated by the fact that they were in a foreign country, outside of their usual romping grounds, and therefore they were uninhibited by the pressures that typically act upon them. There’s no doubt about it: Travel changes people.

Which brings me to this point: Setting is essential to character. The same character behaves differently depending on where he is, when he's there, and whom he’s there with. I've noticed a lot recently in my submissions that even when a writer is nailing the the dialogue and the pacing, the setting somehow gets left behind; without it, you will lose many of your potential readers. More importantly, you'll miss an opportunity to make your character more dynamic and more realistic as he reacts to his various surroundings. Here are some of the problems I've noticed:

WriteOnCon! Pitch Fest Pep Talk

Edgar Degas. The Ballet from Robert le Diable. 1871

The kind folks at WriteOnCon asked me to contribute a post about working on your pitch for the upcoming Mid-Winter "Luck o' the Irish" pitch fest. So I did!

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of signing two fantastic new clients. The books are very different. One is a contemporary middle grade standalone set in New York. The other is a steampunk young adult mystery set in the Caribbean. One just touches on the idea of a first crush. The other jumps head-first into first love—and heartbreak. But they had something in common, too: They came to my attention by way of pitches. Neither author was sent by referral; nor are they friends of friends or former publishing colleagues or armed with MFAs and writing certificates (so far as I know, at least). I learned about the authors because they both wrote books, and then they wrote pitches. I read them because those pitches were good.

So that’s the good news: a well-written pitch, when backed up by a well-written book, is worth something. You are not doomed to slush pile limbo.

Query Diaries

John Singer Sargent.
Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes. 1897

Hi there,

I wanted to focus on what worked in this latest batch of queries, instead of what didn’t work. I ran a feedback giveaway recently (Thank you to all who participated: I got just shy of a hundred submissions and made one offer of representation!), and there was a definite pattern in what got my attention versus what did not. Here are four reasons I decided I needed to read on:

• Complicated Relationships. Query letters that successfully establish a complicated character dynamic will always interest me more than just a high concept. (The ones that really make me sit up combine both of these.) If your main character has been betrayed, let down, abandoned – this automatically creates character tension. But don’t forget: It’s possible that your character is the one who betrayed someone, let someone down, or abandoned someone, too. I love a high concept, but without great characters and great relationships, the story won't come to life.

From the Archives: Liar & Spy review

Hi all,

Thinking of querying me with a MG? I am pasting an old, somewhat silly book review I did for a now defunct blog for Rebecca Stead's Liar & Spy. Take a look to see what I love about Rebecca's writing. And happy writing!

Yours,

Pete

--

I love EVERYTHING about this cover.
There's something just so wonderful and
"Hey Arnold!" about it, and that one
lonely light on in the building...

Well, it’s happened again: Rebecca Stead wrote a book, I read it, I cried. It all began on a Wednesday. More specifically, it all began this past Wednesday, when I was walking through the hallowed halls of BookExpo America. (Editor’s note: Hallowed? Not really—it feels more like a cattle-drive.) For those of you who don’t know, BookExpo America, or BEA, is an annual pilgrimage of bloggers, booksellers, publishers, librarians and other bookish industry types to the Javits Center in New York City an undisclosed location.  When I saw that the venerable, Newbery Award-winning Rebecca Stead was giving out and signing advanced copies of her new book, my heart sang. My limbs grew lighter and lighter until I felt like I might fly. Then I saw the signing time: 1:30 PM on Wednesday, smack-dab in the middle of my lunch appointment with a wonderful client of the literary agency where I work. Panic ensued. I started throwing my fists skyward and thrashing my arms as though drowning, because that was the sensation I felt knowing that I was going to miss Rebecca Stead: Drowning in disappointment. Not actually. But inside there was a fair amount of turmoil, which was quickly resolved when I forced my coworker at gunpoint my coworker kindly volunteered to wait in line and get a copy of Liar & Spy for me. And, get this: said coworker/hero had Rebecca Stead sign it for me.

On Scouting

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Caspar David Friedrich. 1818

While talking to an author on the phone this week, my previous job -- story editor and book scout -- came up, and unsurprisingly, the author had never heard of book scouts and didn't know what they did. I say unsurprisingly because the job description for book scouts is so elusive that even they often joke that they can't quite nail it down (as the openings of the Publishing Perspectives and Observer articles below attest to).

Scouting hinges on strong relationships in publishing with editors, agents, and publishers, and a strong eye for the type of material your client is looking to buy. (This article describes scouts as the "black ops" of publishing.) Working as a film scout in particular meant that I had to evaluate not only a book's literary merit, but also its cinematic potential. Scouting is a grueling job, and describing it to anyone outside of the industry isn't much easier. Luckily for me, Emily Williams, a former scout, did a wonderful overview on the profession a few years back for Publishing Perspectives. While Emily worked as a foreign scout (meaning her clients were foreign publishers interested in buying US properties for translation) and I was a film scout, most of our job descriptions overlapped. If you're curious to learn more, check it out here:

Publishing Perspectives -- Inside the Secret World of Literary Scouts (part 1)

Query Diaries

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Manet. 1882.

As of Saturday at 7pm, I was all caught up on queries. I requested two manuscripts since the last roundup: (a) a tech-driven sci-fi YA; (b) a middle grade contemporary with a great concept and the promise of a lot of heart.

                 

So what didn’t I request? Here are a few reasons I rejected queries this week:

Query Diaries

**Any queries submitted before 4pm ET on Sunday, 1/13, should have a response—either a decline or a request for more pages.**

This past weekend I opened up our query inbox for a giveaway in which I provided short personal feedback for any project I declined submitted to me before 4pm ET on Sunday. It was a great exercise, and I saw some very interesting projects in the slush pile -- even if they weren’t all right for me. I thought it might be useful to provide some general observations on some common reasons why I declined a book, beyond lack of personal interest in a particular genre.

There were some projects where I never got beyond the query letter because: