“Knock me down, pick me up, knock me down again.
Break my heart, steal my gold, slander my good name.”
—Gordon Lightfoot, “Sixteen Miles”

You’re alone in a room with your keyboard. It’s 11:55 on Halloween. You’re about to start NaNoWriMo.

Your fingers are poised. Your heart is racing. You’ve never done this before. Actually, you have—you’ve done it once, or twice, or even continuously every year since the inception (except the year your cat died)—but you’ve never finished. You’ve finished but you’ve never finished the actual novel. You’ve finished the actual novel, but it was. . .oh, the agony in your gut. . .garbage. It just petered out.

The second hand jumps, the clock ticks over, your fingers descend.

And your mind goes blank.

What’s wrong?

You have no idea what you’re writing about.

THE PLANNING

1) Theme

Something matters to you more than anything in the world. Is it a relationship between two family members who love and hate each other simultaneously, beyond all reason? Is it the marriage you never got over? The pregnancy that came at the wrong time? The difference between your safe little armchair and the terrors of the mind that make your hair stand on end? A glimpse of someone trudging through snow—someone waving good-bye—someone standing at a window at dawn while a sleeper lies dreaming behind them?

Something in your heart is running your life.

Pick it out carefully and lay it on the desk next to you. You’re going to write about it.

2) Character

To whom does this thing happen?

Maybe you find it easiest to write about a character of the same gender as yourself—the best choice for a beginner, anyway—or maybe you feel like exploring the heart of someone completely different. Maybe they’re human, maybe they’re fantasial, maybe they’re historical, maybe they’re futuristic. You share one essential thing with this person: whatever it is running your life, it’s running theirs, too.

Now you know what they need. They need to not lose this thing that matters most to them.

3) Plot

Climax:

That gives you your Climax. You’re going to take whatever matters most to them away.

How are you going to take it away? Easy. You’re going to give them another need that’s simply and completely incompatible with the first need. And at the Climax you’re going to put them in a situation in which they can only have one. Which one will it be?

Hook:

Now you know the path you’re going to send them sliding down. What’s at the head of that path? What’s the first step they take out of their usual life—the life that, up until now, has not included this terrible loss—the hole in the road they unthinkingly fall into?

That gives you your Hook. Let this one simmer right under the surface of your consciousness as you mull over the rest. By the time you’re done with the basic storyline, you’re going to need a really good visual of that moment to start your novel with. Plant a clue in that moment to the Climax. . .it doesn’t have to be obvious, but it must be something that will make sense when the character gets to the Climax. “Whoa, it really was about that all along! How did I get so involved in the rest of the story I forgot to see this coming?”

Faux Resolution:

Now you know who your protagonist is, where they start, and where they end up. What compromise can you give them to lull them into a sense of false security? What can you hand them to pretend, “It’s not going to come to the Climax, honey. You’re going to get away with not facing your demons, after all”?

That gives you your Faux Resolution, which occurs right before your Climax.

Conflicts:

Now you know how yourprtonagist starts and what Faux Resolution they’re going to get. So give them a push. Your Hook forces them to do something to protect themself, but that’s going to turn out to be exactly the wrong thing to do. Why? What are they going to bring down on their head by doing this?

That gives you your first Conflict. You’re going to need three good solid ones, and they’re going to need to get worse and worse and worse as you go along. You’re spelling this poor protagonist’s doom.

And as you spell it, you’re giving this protagonist the chance to show their stuff again and again and again. You knock them down, pick them up, knock them down again.

THE WRITING

Be thinking, as you write, about:

1) Strengths

What strengths does this character have, what weaknesses, what complex, contradictory, ultimately human mix of traits? What’s going to keep leading them into trouble and dragging them back out of it again?

2) Cause-&-effect

Everything the character does makes something else happen. Whatever it is, it turns out wrong, and that forces them to do something else. How does the chain form? After the third major obstacle, how do you let up on them a bit, allow them a moment of thinking they’ve finally outwitted their fate?

3) Tension

“Tension on every page” is from literary agent Donald Maass, and it’s the best writing advice you can get. It’s also linked to Show, Not Tell. Exposition is not tense. Scenes are. Write scenes. Scene after scene after scene. Jump from the end of one scene into the middle of the next. Don’t bother with transitions. Just keep going, running along with this plot, pushing these characters into problem after problem, letting them bail out again, only to fall into even deeper water. As they work their way from one of the three major Conflicts to the other, give them plenty of little conflicts and reprieves. Push them away, pull them in, over and over again. Never apologize, never explain. Just scenes.

When in doubt, add more tension. Make characters misunderstand each other, make them uncomfortable, make them—likable as they are—screw up in little ways. If all else fails, drop a piano.

4) Curiosity

Readers read to learn something they didn’t know. Writers write for the same reason. Wherever you go with your novel, whatever you do to your characters, however inevitable the Climax, you’re writing this to learn about being human. Don’t plan the Resolution, the way the Climax shakes down. You haven’t written the novel yet. You don’t know how it all shakes down.

When you get to the end of the month, and you’ve finally written that outrageous Climax, and you’ve got your protagonist on the floor finally giving it up for dead—then you can think about your Resolution. What did you write this novel to learn about being human? You don’t know yet.

5) Cheating

Most of all, remember: in NaNoWriMo it’s okay to cheat. It’s only 50,000 words. Novels run from 60,000 to 80,000 and more, and that doesn’t count the 25-75% you’ll cut when you go back to revise. (You’ve got to throw it on the threshing floor before you can see what’s wheat and what’s chaff.) If you get to a place where you know something has to happen, but what you really want to write is what happens after that, use a placemarker. I put mine in ALL CAPS so they’re easy to find later. Or a row of XXXX’s with notes on the missing piece. Keep moving. The best scenes, the keepers, are the ones you can’t wait to write.

From your Hook to your Climax. That’s what you’re up to. Characters in scenes. Forgetting about the reader. Just examining human life, in all its terrible, beautiful, significant details—examining it with a magnifying glass.

Take the ball and run with it.

MIDNIGHT!

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

Is it possible to look forward to rejection letters? Because that means I’d be finished writing my WIP. And also finished writing query letters. And yet right now I feel light years away from either. So, despite probably what is a general consensus, I will someday look forward to rejection letters. Honest.
—Terresa Wellborn, comments

Many of my clients decide to take the plunge and hire an editor because they’re so depressed—they’ve gotten a rejection explaining what’s wrong with their book, but they don’t know how to fix it.

I, on the other hand, am ecstatic for them. “You got a personalized rejection! You made it through the Form Letter Revolving Door. That’s golden!” Then we set to work and fix whatever’s wrong in the manuscript.

I can pretty much always see why the agent said what they said, and I do know how to fix it. Once in a very great while, though, the agent’s wrong. One client got a rejection letter so rambling and full of grammatical errors I told her not to bother with his advice. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was obviously not a pro. (There were problems with the manuscript, which we did get busy on.)

The thing to keep in mind is that this is not school. You’re not writing your Work In Progress as homework. And you have absolutely no obligation to do anything with it once it’s done.

I had a long talk with another client the other day who’d written a book he loved just because he wanted to and only started worrying about querying and dealing with publishers after his friends said, “You should get this published!” Beware. Your friends love you, they’re glad to see you happy over your accomplishment and want to see you happier still, and—even more—they picture themselves being taken for sumptuous dinners at the Top of the Mark and introduced to Stephen King once you’re a famous author. (He’ll want to meet your friends.)

They know pretty much zip about publishing, though.

Published authors make squat. Not only that, but in order to get published it’s going to cost time and energy—years of your life, folks—and suffering beyond belief. It’s also almost certainly going to cost some money to get your manuscript into a shape an agent and acquisitions editor can accept. I’m sorry this is true, but it really is.

Last week I finished a full Copy, Line, & Developmental Edit on part of a novel that had great potential, but would almost certainly not have been accepted for publication the way it was. It’s staggeringly beautiful now. I mean: staggering. What the author had written that blossomed and became the entire story when we set it all in its proper order and cleared out the tiny bits of this and that obscuring it? Staggering. If we can put the rest of the manuscript into the same shape, this author is going to be producing work of the quality of Frank McCourt and Khaled Hosseini.

Chances are good the literary agents who rejected The Kite Runner saw it before it was completely edited.

Can I do this to your manuscript? Well, I can’t make you Khaled Hosseini. This particular writer is already a publishing author with a long, interesting life behind him, access to a fascinating aspect of culture, and what appears to be an instinctive understanding of the finest points of Show Don’t Tell.

But I can organize your manuscript and clean out the fluff so it’s a professional work. I can work with you on turning exposition into scenes. And I can help you figure out exactly what story you’re trying to tell and how to do that in a way that keeps a reader’s attention all the way through. I can also tell you what scenes to write for the parts I can see that need to be written but haven’t yet, and I can tell you how to approach the writing and why, and I can tidy the new scenes up into professional work for you when it’s done, as well. I can get you a publishable manuscript an agent or acquisitions editor will love.

That’s my job.

You have to do your work, though. You have to commit yourself to becoming a professional writer. As Chris Ryan says in the Client Testimonial he wrote for me, I don’t reduce your workload, by any means. I increase it.

So it doesn’t make sense to hire an editor if you’re just shooting to get published without becoming a professional writer.

And it certainly doesn’t make sense to shoot to get published if you’re not interested in becoming a professional writer.

Writing—publishing. Publishing—writing. Two completely different animals.

Write your WIP because you want to. Write it because you love the act of writing, the characters, the world you’ve created for them to live in. Write it because your days and nights are way more fun this way than they would be if you didn’t write. Write because you want that book to live in your house with you for the rest of your life.

But don’t write it because you think first you have to do this, then you have to write a query letter and synopsis, then you have to suffer through years of rejection waiting to get discovered. You don’t. This is what people are talking about when they say, “If you want to write, you must be prepared for hell.” What they mean is, “If you want to publish.”

Again. Writing—publishing. Publishing—writing. NOT THE SAME THING.

And if you do want to be a professional writer, then by all means work on your WIP for as long as you need to in order to make it the book you most want it to be. Luxuriate in it. Wallow in it. Spend your days learning craft and your nights dreaming stories. Look forward to learning query letters because they, too, are one of the marks of a professional writer. And look forward to rejection letters because they come at the end of the long, long road of the first step in learning this particular craft (out of all possible crafts) that is becoming a piece of you, this profession that you want to be a part of who you are.

But even then, remember: You have a life. Just the one.

Get out there and live it.

For those interested in what a professionally-edited Word document looks like with its Track Changes, my husband, the writer Jeff Osier-Mixon, has volunteered a fragment from a Work In Progress. Unfortunately, due to glitches between Word and OpenOffice, that file is temporarily unavailable. Please see the Free Edits of Novel Hooks and Climaxes for examples of Copy & Line Editing.

You don’t have to floss all your teeth. Just the ones you want to keep.
—dentists’ motto

Everyone’s weighing in these days on the big question: “Do you really need to hire an independent editor? Don’t agents love you just as much without one?”

This is complicated by the use of “editor” for three different jobs in the publishing industry: someone in charge of the writing staff of a periodical (a magazine or newspaper editor), someone who acquires manuscripts for a publisher (an acquisitions editor), and someone who, independently and freelance, works with an author to translate a manuscript from talented amateur to talented professional.

Most folks point out that the blogosphere is absolutely ripe to bursting with amateur critiquers peddling themselves as independent “editors” without actually offering more than what you could get from a moderately-accurate grammar- and spell-checker. This is an excellent thing to point out.

Never part with your hard-earned cash without incontrovertible proof that this “editor” seriously knows how to edit.

And I don’t mean they’ve just taped Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules to their monitor, either.

I mean:

• They know how to read a synopsis and/or manuscript and help the author create from their original vision a concrete, smooth-moving, tension-laden plot to grip the reader from hook to climax.
• They know how to disentangle a currently frustrating manuscript and show the author what’s redundant, what’s sagging, and where to write new scenes to move the plot powerfully forward.
• They know how to find out what’s going wrong when a seemingly beautiful manuscript comes back time and again from agents with a “not quite” rejection letter.
• They know how to line-edit paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of both first-draft and heavily-polished material into professional style without losing the author’s unique voice.
• They see enough manuscripts to recognize rookie mistakes and common overuse of specific techniques.
• They’re familiar enough with the mechanics of publishing to know what authorial tricks publishers are likely to balk at, especially from newbies.
• They know not to put a comma between a subject and verb, no matter how long the subject or how wispy the verb.
• They’re also keeping a keen eye on the Gutenberg-sized shake-up of the publishing industry.
• And they even know what’s wrong with Leonard’s 10 Rules and why.

I mean they have glowing, enthusiastic, explicit testimonials from previous and current clients, both published and unpublished, explaining exactly what those clients like about their services, posted somewhere easily-accessible to all and sundry. (You shouldn’t have to ask. Why keep such things secret?)

In an ideal world, there’s actually some way for you to engage them cheaply and with minimal fuss in complex conversation about their deeper understanding of the craft for as long as you like before you even discuss their editing services.

I mean they know a hawk from a handsaw, people.

If every manuscript being queried today had been through a really good (not just copy edit) professional edit first, the quality of manuscripts agents saw when they opened their inboxes tomorrow morning would jump like a kangaroo. (Just as the quality of the manuscripts publishers’ editors get from agents is—hopefully—measurably greater than what they get through direct submissions.)

So why doesn’t everyone recommend good independent editors for all aspiring writers?

It’s mostly confusion.

Independent editors are on the cutting edge of the changing face of publishing. Some publishing professionals still think reputable independent editors are impossible to differentiate from amateur critiquers trying to make a quick buck off the industry. There are very confident, definitive-sounding explanations out there written six months, nine months, or even some years ago assertively claiming that edited manuscripts are no more attractive than unedited manuscripts.

This is silly. Of course well-edited manuscripts are better-written than unedited manuscripts. Even Hemingway’s manuscripts were better after Maxwell Perkins got his hands on them. Even Kerouac’s scroll manuscript was unpublishable before he and Malcolm Cowley spent a month working it over. Even publisher’s editor Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye had to be edited by Alan Rinzler.

Agents and publishers just don’t want you to think professional editing—even really good professional editing—is a guarantee of publication. It’s not. There are no guarantees.

It’s also partly a very real sense of responsibility. Although my list of requirements for potential independent editors is reasonably exhaustive, many publishing professionals don’t know where to find such an editor on short notice, particularly one they can personally vouch for, particularly one aspiring writers can afford.

And it’s also financial. Independent editors get paid.

Now, a funny thing happened in the publishing industry thirty or forty years ago. We went through all this the first time. But it wasn’t independent editors we were talking about then. It was somebody else.

It was literary agents.

Did you know we didn’t always have agents? Of course you did. Once upon a time, there were writers, and there were publishers, and ever the twain did meet. Writers queried publishers’ editors, and publishers’ editors acquired and edited their manuscripts.

Then someone wrote a book claiming everyone was a writer, they just didn’t know it, and suddenly Being a Writer became one of the Top 10 Destinations. Suddenly writing magazines were born. The writing workshop was born. The writers’ MFA was born.

The flood was born.

And suddenly publishers’ acquisitions editors were drowning in manuscripts from everyone who up until then had been a writer, but just hadn’t known it.

Was the first literary agent some acquisitions editor’s husband or wife trying to pick up part of the workload so they’d still have someone to talk to over the dinner table? The best friend of a bunch of acquisitions editors? An acquisitions editor gone renegade? (Plenty of them do.)

We do know Morton Janklow of Janklow & Nesbit Associates was the one who bumped agents’ commission from the old standard 10% up to the current standard 15%. He also sued William Morrow for trying to refuse to publish a book. * (That’s what happens when you tangle with an ex-lawyer.)

Not only that, but publishers routinely told writers, “You don’t need an agent.” (Some of them still do.) You know why? Because they didn’t want writers thinking agent representation was a guarantee of publication. It’s not. There are no guarantees. Publishers themselves have been known to buy books and refuse to publish them.

Even so, these days agents are everywhere, the gatekeepers of the inner sanctum, and I support them with all my heart. You bet I do.

Even though they cost money. They can’t guarantee publication. And they’re not essential.

The big stick agents carry is access to acquisitions editors and the leverage to negotiate big advances. Top agents understand the business of the industry because they help make it. The contract itself isn’t rocket science. My husband and I have signed real estate contracts that make publishing contracts look like Sesame Street. You can learn them. You have to try.

There have also always been small presses, as well as imprints of large presses, who commonly work directly with authors, no agent involved. My friend Cynthia Wall, author of The Courage to Trust, was asked to write her book by Cypress House Publishing and is now being asked to write a sequel. (Did Wall hired an independent editor? Yes, she did. Does she share her royalties with an agent? No, she does not.) And as the economy carries us all toward the waterfall of the Death of Giant Advances, negotiation is becoming less an issue of leverage and more an issue—as it should have been all along—of long-term goal-setting and, most importantly, cooperation.

In fact, with the advent of self-publishing, the implosion of the big houses and concurrent rise of small presses, and the massively-networked ease of Print On Demand and e-publication, agents are actually getting less essential.

And there are literary agent scams. Boy, are there. You track them down the same places you track down independent editor scams: Preditors and Editors and Writer Beware.

But I still recommend agents. Absolutely. Some of my best friends are agents. Agents have the time and motivation to keep an eye glued permanently on publishing, track its permutations, network with other publishing professionals, build relationships with publishing houses, attend conferences, hash over late-breaking industry news in graphic detail, and generally manage an author’s career so the author has time to—guess what?—write. Besides which, agents like this stuff! Writers, if they’re smart, like to write. They’re not the same thing.

Most of all, the agent’s role as gatekeeper is more important now than ever.

The truth is the business of selling fiction is nothing like the craft of creating it, and if you’ve put all your energy into learning the craft, you can easily be mowed down by the maddened hordes stampeded toward the business end. Agents may have been invented to alleviate this problem, but now the sheer numbers mean, honestly, the busiest agents need agents of their own. (That’s why they hire assistants, rely increasingly on recommendations, and even refuse unsolicited submissions.)

Agents building relationships with good independent editors only makes sense in today’s publishing environment. Those of us in the trenches with aspiring writers know who’s got fresh ideas. We know who’s in it for the long haul and who’s an amateur looking to take advantage of what seems, to them, like a glorified lottery. We also know how to turn an over-used plot into a fresh take on a proven idea. And we have time to help you. Agents and acquisitions editors—although they also know this stuff—do not.

And as acquisitions editors edit less and less, more and more agents are struggling to edit their clients’ manuscripts without either the time or training to do it effectively. Don’t believe anyone who tells you excellent agents aren’t taking on editing chores because acquisitions editors no longer have time to do it. They are. And this bodes ill for everyone concerned—especially the reader of the future.

Reputable agents and publishers—the smart ones, in my humble opinion—are already turning their sights our way, particularly as the economy makes the growing lack of publishers’ in-house editing more and more obvious and entrenched.

Which will make it much easier to differentiate the really good independent editors from the amateurs.

Which will help everyone involved. Enormously.

Welcome to the new world of publishing.

Hey, guys! Jane Friedman of Writer’s Digest has a post this morning containing links to a whole plethora of stuff on her blog about the world of writing and publishing.

Why am I telling you this? Well, for one thing, Jane and I had a chat on Twitter the other evening about writing advice, and that was fun.

But the real reason is she’s got a post on Hiring a Professional Editor vs. Getting Amateur Critiques. It’s an excellent post. And she asks those who’ve had experience with professional editors to chime in!

What’s today—the first Monday of the month? Let’s call this Meet the Editor Monday.

So, I woke up LOATHING my own fiction this morning. It’s a loathe-your-own-fiction kind of morning at our house today.

Do you ever get that feeling?

Here’s something you maybe don’t know about being a professional fiction editor: it’s a one-way pass. It’s a developed skill, yes, that takes decades to hone and even then—like every skill—can never be entirely perfected. There’s a certain mind-set I go into to read a new manuscript, in which I can catch the structure issues, awkward phrases, and character inconsistencies popping out at me. It’s almost hypnosis.

I remember reading such things when I was an amateur and only getting a, “Go/Don’t Go,” response from my head, but now I can tune my brain to get a ton of information, and what doesn’t pop out I know how to outline for. It’s a great job. Have I mentioned that before? I LOVE this work.

I’ve spent thirty years letting my manuscripts go cold and then hauling them back out again, fighting my way into that mind-set, outlining and analyzing, re-reading words I know better than my own telephone number for those pop-outs. After awhile, it all becomes a blur. Did I change that before? Did I just think about changing it? Have I changed it back and forth multiple times and just forgotten? What the heck was the significance of the purple hat, anyway?

I mean, a professional bookkeeper should be able to keep their own books, right? A professional jockey should be able to ride their own horse. A professional ball-player should be able to throw a ball to their own kid.

I know lots of professional carpenters who built their own houses.

But editing is the bizarro reality of combing wet hair. It’s infinitely easier to comb your own wet hair than to have someone else do it for you. It’s exactly the opposite with editing.

And it’s due to one thing: perspective.

I used to read tarot cards, free, for anyone. They’re great! I once read the cards for every single person on my backpackers’ bus through New Zealand, both islands, including the driver. And if there is one thing tarot and fiction have in common, it’s the need for perspective.

Tarot is a game with symbolism. They’re just a handful of archetypical concepts, and the odds that one out of any given eleven will ring a bell are pretty good. So I could sit down with a total stranger and tell them what the cards said about the relationships between the archetypes in their lives, and they’d reel back in their chair gasping, “How do they know?”

They don’t know. They’re cardboard.

But practicing that eye for plot has helped me enormously in catching things that pop out of manuscripts. The less I know about the extraneous details (how many times you’ve had to rewrite the tricky scene at Plot Point 1 when the protagonist meets their nemesis face-to-face for the first time, what in your own life this is based on, why this is an adventure and not a love story), the more vividly what’s there pops out.

It is insanely difficult for me to read the cards for myself. In the same way, I know way too much about my own writing. Infinitum. When I reach the Self-Loathing Phase of Revision, I’m like the Hindenberg.

It’s as though your fiction were your family, and you’re so used to it you don’t even notice Uncle Henry’s guy friends hug and kiss him a lot more than most uncle’s guy friends do, because your grandmother has always been adamant he’s just waiting for the right woman to come along; Aunt Petunia’s uncontrollable rages seem exactly like rages, but everyone else says they’re just high spirits; cousin Chris has terrible bad luck with the police, the elders all think, even though it looks a lot like bad judgment. It can really be quite a surprise to reach middle-age and realize, “It is kind of odd we have to avoid mentioning religion in front of Grandpa, even though we share his beliefs, isn’t it?”

Families can be strange as hell and still look perfectly normal from the inside. As my husband says: “weirder than a sack of aliens.”

So welcome to you own fiction, folks. Is it impossible to tell whether or not Uncle Henry’s secret life comes through to the reader, when it doesn’t come through to his mother? Are you wracking your brains over how to show Aunt Petunia’s rages from an angle that leaves some doubt about whether or not she’s just a high-spirited kind of gal? Can you create legal entanglements for cousin Chris without losing the motivation of the rest of the crowd in overlooking them?

And what IS wrong with Grandpa?

There’s a point at which you just throw up your hands and say, “I hear ice-fishing in Alaska is a fascinating hobby.”

I, however, know how to spot this stuff in other people’s work and how to fix it. I’ve been training for decades, professionally and personally, and I’ve got clients whose work makes me proud of the field of fiction.

Today I may LOATHE my own work.

But I love yours! I’m really excited about yours.

Josh Olson raised the roof this week with his blisteringly straight-forward rant in the New York Village Voice, I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script.

I’ve never seen one of his movies, I’ve never read any of his scripts, I’d never heard of him before I read his article, and I’m not even sure I’m spelling his name right. But I like Mr. Olson.

Do you know why?

Because he’s asking people to show some respect for a professional writer’s time and skills.

There’s a good reason to want a professional writer to read your work, and that’s that a professional is skilled. A professional knows how to spot the mistakes and the successes, knows how to do it successfully without the mistakes, and knows why and how they know. These are all great qualities to bring to a new manuscript.

And if they’re exceptionally skilled, they might even know how to impart this information in a kind way that does not crush the delicate ego of the author of the work. Yet another great quality, and not one to be taken lightly.

But how does a professional know all these things?

They LEARNED.

They weren’t granted this knowledge at birth by the good fairies. They didn’t get it as a door prize when they came down the chute. They aren’t just luckier than everyone else out there who wishes they were a professional writer.

They paid their dues and LEARNED.

Anyone who wants the benefit of a professional’s dues can also pay their dues—by investing their own time, money, energy, or years of their life to learning the same stuff. If they’re in a hurry, they even have the option of buying a short-cut! You can do that. Anyone can.

All you need is a really good editor.

Now, you guys are lucky. You already know an editor. Not only that, you know a really good editor. You know a really good editor who also happens to have a personal stake in being as kind as possible to aspiring writers—she believes in being a good person, she believes in fiction, and she’s willing to put a certain amount of her karma out there to help nice, sincere, struggling writers get accepted by agents and publishers.

You know a really good, kind, cheap editor.

Why am I so cheap if I’m so good? Because I recently lost my gravy train in the world of salaried professional editing and have had to start building freelance clientele from scratch. A year from now, I will not be this cheap. But right now I am.

Not everyone out there knows a really good, kind, cheap editor or knows how to find one, so they sometimes wind up violating common courtesy in their pursuit of a career as a writer. But just because they don’t know where to buy a short-cut doesn’t mean they can’t invest their own time and energy and years. Those are all dues, too.

So please spread the word, people: Show respect to other writers.

Pay your own dues.

There’s literally nothing I like better than being asked my opinion. Whee, doggies! You bet.

Lady Glamis has a situation going on over on her blog. Someone’s getting some real passive-aggressive treatment from their agent.

Now, all of their questions were answered extremely intelligently by quite a good-sized crowd, so I’m not thinking there’s much new I can tell anyone about the industry. I can tell you not to expect an agent to edit your book, because they are not typically trained editors, they are trained agents, and even if they were the vast majority haven’t got that kind of time. But maybe I can help put this whole issue into some context. And I’ll do it the way I do everything else on my blog. . .by telling you guys a story.

I got my first agent in 1996 at a writer’s conference, although—I know—everyone says agents don’t get clients at those things. She did. I did. I was a newby to book publishing, too. That was great.

I had a novel in early draft (which I never did get into decent-enough condition to send out). What I had that was worth something was a book already at the publisher’s, which unfortunately my co-author and I had already signed a contract for. I didn’t want to just sign it blind. I wanted to get an agent, for heaven’s sake! But my co-author refused to involve an agent on the grounds that it might annoy our publisher’s editor. The book was riding on his name, so I went along with him and only later showed the contract to my new agent.

She said it was a travesty.

So our book came out, and I did another draft of my novel for my new agent (which still wasn’t enough). And I started writing book proposals on new nonfiction works for her to start shopping around. I didn’t know beans about book proposals, but that was okay because I’m not sure she knew a whole lot about them, either. It was a long time ago—the publishing industry has gained about 100% more writers since then, not to mention literary agents, and things like this weren’t as carved as stone as they are now. My agent had a last name that’s extremely well-known in publishing, she was chock full o’ excellent stories about famous people she had hobnobbed with, great fun to visit, and I was doing a couple of book-readings for my just-published book around the San Francisco Bay Area, getting excited about being a published author. Altogether, a pretty thrilling time.

Then I got pregnant and, in short order, sick up the wazoo with morning sickness, and I stopped doing book-readings and book proposals and writing of any kind and just lay on the couch a lot thinking about chucking my lunch. I was in love and newly-married and a published author, so that was all still wonderful. But morning sickness SUCKED.

A lot of other things went wrong right around that time, too, including black mold in the bedroom and our landlord and lawyers and whatnot—you know how drama always seems to dogpile you.

My agent and I were now spending only as much time talking as it took to deal with the fact that our publisher’s editor (the one who discouraged both me and my co-author from letting an agent see that travesty of a contract she wanted us to sign) had not 1) edited our book before publishing it, 2) read the final draft of our book before publishing it, 3) sent me galleys to proof before publishing it, with the result that 4) it came out UP TO THE EYEBALLS with typos. No kidding—to this day, if you look on the page facing page one (page zero), you find a charming quote attributed to “Irish Murdoch.” Plus my co-author inserted various cartoons on his own authority, one of them making light of pedophilia, which he inserted into one of my chapters. This was a book about children, aimed at parents and teachers and educational administrators. Apparently nobody on that project but me knew that pedophilia is not a joke to the people who care for children.

So my agent was sending faxes and making phone calls, demanding some accountability from the publisher, all to no avail. Our editor ignored her. She could afford to—she was the head of her department at that publisher. I’d met the woman and not particularly liked her, so I wasn’t surprised, but my agent and I were both pretty bent. I wrote a letter to the editor threatening legal action after I found out she’d gone to press without sending me the galleys, and it scared her, so she kind of made an effort to act a little more professional after that for about a minute, but not much. Altogether what you could consider an unpleasant experience with publishing.

The book sank. It was important, it was the first of its kind, it was positioned beautifully (it came out the week of a local industry-wide conference highlighting its exact subject matter, which we didn’t know until it was too late because the publisher’s marketing department didn’t do a lick of marketing research). The book was actually timed to coincide with a Presidential edict, if that’s not too rich for you. There was a real possibility we could have gotten a statement from the White House supporting it. But it sank.

I didn’t really care. I was on the couch thinking about chucking.

About a year and a half later, when my son was old enough to walk and I got a chance to go back to work, I finally gave up waiting for my agent to get results and went to the National Writer’s Union, which, to her credit, she’d advised me to join the minute she met me. They told me to collect all the information about her communications with the publisher and they’d help me write a letter to the top brass.

The thing is, my agent wasn’t really interested in taking my calls anymore. I’d been a mom for a year and a half. I hadn’t been a writer. I hadn’t produced any salable book proposals. I hadn’t done a rewrite on my novel. I hadn’t even been tech writing in all that time. Just a walking Need-Meet-er for the toilet-impaired. I knew she was getting tired of hearing from me.

You can pretty much read the writing on the wall.

So I continued to call and leave messages, which I knew she would not return, and to call when I thought I could trick her into picking up, which in the days before caller-ID I could. And I finally got her on the phone and told her what I was doing with the National Writer’s Union and asked her to send me all her communications with the publisher on my behalf. Thank you for everything, sorry you couldn’t get results, that damn editor, I know you did the best you could.

I knew I’d never hear from her again.

What is the moral of my story?

The publishing industry is brutal. It is made up not of a handful of supremely talented, dedicated, genius-level professionals devoting their lives to publishing the books that need to be published and helping deserving authors get their just rewards. It is made up of a GAZILLION people of all stripes and colors, many of them talented, many of them dedicated, a few of them even genius-level, but not one of them guaranteed to make anything happen with all the other gazillion of them involved. Not one. I’m telling you: not one.

It’s all hype, folks. They’re not even the ones producing it. It’s hype that writing a whole book will result in a great query letter. It’s hype that a great query letter will result in a great agent. It’s hype that a great agent will result in a great publishing deal. And it’s hype that a published book will result in a career as an author.

Where does all the hype come from?

Unfortunately. . .us.

Look around, people.

But you know what was worth all this? (Aside from the end of morning sickness). The evening after I gave my new agent my partial to read, she called me at about six-thirty p.m. and said to me, “I never call anyone after six. Ever. But I had to call you. I love this. I love your book.” And while I was standing there reeling—thinking of everything you practice saying for just this moment when a literary agent calls you up and says just exactly that—she started quoting me to myself.

She did. She read my own words out loud to me over the phone.

So I can die happy. I didn’t sell that novel. I didn’t even get the publisher’s editor who screwed us over so badly to say, “Woops, I’m sorry.” I certainly didn’t get my one published book published properly, without too many obvious typos (for heaven’s sake) or with some teeny, tiny modicum of marketing by—I don’t know—maybe the publisher’s marketing department.

But a literary agent called me up and quoted me to myself.

And that’s got to be good enough.

Where’d they go?

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed my blog posts have disappeared—all but the latest and those containing your own work.

How many of you are familiar with a thing called copyright?

If you want to be writers, you’d better be.

Wow, I had about six golden months of blogging my little heart out, waxing eloquent on anything I wanted, safe in the knowledge that the only people reading it were my husband and two writer friends. It was wonderful! Then I got some exposure among the mega-numbers, and suddenly I had readers. And you know what? It was even more wonderful! Cool people with smart brains saying nice things! Appreciation is such an amazing invention!

Then yesterday I discovered something I’d been hoping wouldn’t happen—someone out there didn’t just quote me or refer to me or throw up a link recommending me. Someone lifted an entire post and published it on their own site. Without so much as dropping me a line.

Friends, there’s this little social and legal convention called ASKING FIRST.

Remember kindergarten? Remember the sandbox? Remember seeing someone else playing with a really cool toy they’d brought from home and having a great idea about how to use it and wanting to just snatch it and show everyone? Remember the teacher kindly but firmly reminding you: “We don’t take things from others without asking”? And it wasn’t enough to just slip in an announcement, “I’m going to take that.” You had to actually ASK.

And abide by the answer! <—important

Now, I know as well as you do that social conventions on the Internet are in great turmoil these days, as blogs become as common as conversations and piracy issues are hammered out in full view of everyone. I also know—better than many, I’m guessing—how easy it is to have a lapse in common sense and inadvertently put myself in the position of having to apologize for some stupid blunder. So I’m willing to cut a certain amount of slack.

But social conventions are not the same thing as legal conventions. And copyright covers everything anyone writes. It’s theirs. As it should be.

Folks, I work hard on these blog posts. I put thirty years’ experience and education and writing skill into them, and I do it so all of you out there standing where I stood thirty years ago can get that leg up I so desperately needed then. I like to be a nice person—I really do. It makes me feel superior to mean people.

I also do it to promote my own (laughably-cheap) services. I have to make a living, like everyone else.

Please don’t take my hard work and use it to promote your own site without even asking. That’s not nice. And it’s kind of a slap in the face to someone who’s putting in a lot of free work for your benefit, whether you ever hire me or not.

You may be giddy over the virtual anarchy of this booming technology. But anarchy is no more or less than society based entirely on good manners.

Remember your manners.

ASK FIRST.

If you don’t, you’re violating legal copyright and opening yourself up to a lawsuit. And that works for all written material, writers.