Monthly Archives: May 2021

Dogged Submissions

Publication, Query letters, Submissions,

As a writer pitching your novel—or any other kind of work—your job is to be read. That’s the only job, and you have to get on it. A tough truth, told to a fellow alum, by BookEnds co-director Susie Merrell. But the most important words of encouragement—among so many—that she gifted to me, were in regard to the finished draft of my novel, Provenance. Play all sides of the street, Susie said at the end of my fellowship year, meaning query agents, submit to contests, and to independent presses.

I knew my literary novel would be hard to place in the current marketplace, so I took those words to heart. In fact, I promised, and there were plenty of days in which that commitment was the only thing that kept me querying and submitting. My Submittable queue and other tracking lists grew long. Provenance is my first novel, but I’m also a writer of short stories and flash nonfiction, and I was used to sending pieces out to ten or more places at a time, aiming for 100 rejections a year. (Yes—rejections, which means, in any given year, submitting much more.)

Writing a good query letter and synopsis—not to mention researching agents—often felt harder than writing the dang book. And, I’ll admit, I had little faith that I would ever get an agent’s request. But I’d promised to try, so I honed my query and in September 2020, I started sending out five queries a week, while still entering contests and submitting to independent presses. I also continued to write and submit shorter work. When my first request for the full manuscript came in, I was stunned. Then a flurry of others followed, and I decided to hold back on submitting to small presses. Contests seemed like such a long shot to me, that I kept entering those as I heard about them. 

Over the next six months, many agents passed on my query and many more never responded at all.  But I continued to get requests. Half those requesting agents passed. At the half-year point in March, I’d queried 176 agents. My plan was to wait three months, after which I would consider any queries I hadn’t heard back on as “ghosted.” Then I would start submitting to university and independent presses. 

In early April, I got a congratulatory email saying that Provenance was one of fifteen novels longlisted for Madville Publishing’s Blue Moon Novel Contest. Several writer friends urged me to “nudge” the agents that still had my full. I only ever hoped to be listed or placed in a contest to boost my bio or for just this kind of leverage. But I wanted to wait, because it was already clear to me that if, by some chance, I won, I would accept the prize—which included publication. 

And to my great shock, that’s exactly what happened. Provenance is slated to be published by Madville Press in the fall of 2022. For me, a very happy ending. It’s a long game—writing and trying to publish a literary novel. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Resources:

Two invaluable sources of information on the how-to of getting a book deal, both these amazing women offer additional (paid) services beyond the free listings here:

  • For researching agents and tracking your submissions:

Publisher’s Marketplace

Manuscript Wishlist 

Query Tracker

Duotrope 

  • For researching Independent Presses:

CLMP Directory

Entropy Magazine Where to Submit  

  • Literistic for contests and other submission opportunities  
  • And, of course, Poets & Writers (Agent Q & A’s, contests and other submission opportunities, small press database, and a hundred other things!) 

Sue Mell was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020 and holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her winning novel, Provenance, is slated for publication by Madville Press in the fall of 2022, and her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, was a semi-finalist for the 2020 Digging Press Chapbook Prize. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cleaver Magazine, Digging Through The Fat, Jellyfish Review, Narrative Magazine, Newtown Literary, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Whale Road Review.

Thank you, BookEnds Graduate Assistants!

Literary Community,

This year BookEnds has been incredibly lucky to have Erin Fahy and Hannah Thaggard as our graduate assistants. First-year students in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton, Erin and Hannah have proved themselves to be social media gurus and organizational geniuses, invaluable to our team. We are so grateful for everything they’ve done, and will miss them terribly when they move on to teaching undergraduates next year. Thanks a million to you both!

Erin Fahy
Hannah Thaggard

 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Paul Harding On Generating Heat In Writing

Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, ,

In workshops we tend to talk about point of view and character rather than the psychological resistance we must overcome to realize the potential of our work. We shy away from discussing the challenges of the writing process in favor of the relative concreteness of craft. 

My BookEnds mentor, Paul Harding, didn’t shy away. Through his close reading and annotations of my work-in-progress, he helped me identify forms of self-sabotage and practical ways to remedy them. A case in point: how do we generate energy on the page? Sure, we know it when we read it: “the heat,” some call it. But how do you generate this heat? And how do you stop yourself from tamping it down?

Paul gave me vocabulary to think about this challenge, borrowing concepts from Newtonian mechanics to dramatize the opposing forces at work. 

First up is centrifugal force, which pushes energy outward to spin off in all directions. Also called inertia. (You guessed it, this one is bad). In prose this happens when the writing lacks focus. There’s an overabundance of themes, actions, characters, or information as if the writer is, as Paul described, jumping the rails to see what’s over here and what’s over there unintentionally creating a crippling and dreadfully familiar-to-me narrative sprawl. 

This happens not because we don’t have the technical chops or aren’t good writers. It happens because we fear our story isn’t sophisticated or original or interesting enough and so we keep accreting more stuff to our story. We fear commitment to this story, so we keep adding more in an attempt to hedge our bets, when hedging doesn’t work. The reader bounces from one idea to the next before the necessary connections are made to make the reader curious and interested enough to want to keep reading. The energy dissipates, leaving no heat. 

The solution is to resist succumbing to our anxieties and seeking answers outside the book but rather to stay in it––in the moment, in the story, in the character––trusting the answer lies within. That’s how we cultivate centripetal force––from Latin centrum, “center” and petere, “to seek”––directing the energy inward. Does this sentence convey exactly what I want to convey in the most vivid way possible? Does that sentence do the same, not by adding something new, but rather expanding and deepening what I just conveyed in the last sentence? That’s the way, as Paul showed me, going one sentence at a time. Staying in it. Staying present. That’s what staves off resistance, builds heat, makes art. 

Write this on a Post-It and stick to your monitor (I did):

Resist centrifugal forces! 

J. Greg Phelan was a BookEnds fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He co-founded a writing center on the Jersey shore called Project Write Now where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently working on a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.