“Learn to Love the Pauses” – Poetry for Prose Writers

“Read your work aloud.” How many times have we all heard that? Raise your hands. Yeah, you in the back, too. I see you!

Now. How many of us actually practice it? Ah. I see the hands going down. I see you looking at your desk. Some of you silently shaking your heads.

And why is that? Truly, I don’t know, because I do it all the time.

At the OWFI conference this year, there was a workshop on “Prose and Poetry,” which frankly, I hadn’t thought I’d go to because another session looked better. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your point of view – that session was cancelled and the stand-in presenter was . . . yeah. No. So I snuck out and went to the poetry workshop instead.

Truthfully, I don’t read much poetry. Too many flashbacks to “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Wasteland.” Poetry, I was given to understand in middle school and high school, had rules. First, it had to rhyme. It had to have a deeper meaning. It had to Be About Something Very Important. When we wrote poetry in Literature, we had to follow these rules. Do you know how bloody hard that is? Let me tell you. It’s bloody hard!

And when I started taking creative writing classes in college, my poems were always trashed because they weren’t About Something, and they didn’t Rhyme, and – OMG – sometimes they even told a story. Try as I might to write something that the teacher and other students considered Poetry with a capital P, I just couldn’t do it.

Which is why I hadn’t wanted to attend this workshop to begin with. Poetry is not fun for me.

But the session was fantastic.

The presenter, Nathan Brown, is a poet. In fact, he was the 2013/14 Oklahoma Poet Laureate. He started to use poetry as a coping mechanism for dealing with personal tragedies, then got into the habit of writing a poem a day. Yes. I said a poem a day. Sometimes his friends give him challenges – write a poem a day for a month about X or Y, or use this word in all your poems for the next year, etc. He also takes things from his daily life – sometimes entire conversations – and uses them as inspiration.

What Nathan wanted to do in this workshop was show us prose writers that poetry can have a place in our repertoire. Doesn’t mean we have to try to become the next Poet Laureate of the United States (yeah, like that’s going to get funded next year), it just means that we can learn to use it to our advantage.

I know. I hear you. I occasionally write short little funny poems from the viewpoints of my cats (and once, my Mini Cooper), and if it takes me more than 3 minutes to write one, it’s taking too long. Here’s an example:

I tell Mum
that the penalty for waking me up
is to rub my tummy.
And to watch me stretch,
shut my eyes
smile
purr.
Curl my paws around her hand
Rub my head against her arm
And fall asleep again.

At the start of the workshop, Nathan looked at us – we all looked equally afraid and befuddled – and said, “Okay. How many of you write poetry?”

A few hands went up.

“How many of you write free verse poetry?”

Most of the hands went down.

He smiled. “Everyone thinks poetry has to rhyme. But free verse poetry lets us explore and play. Take, for example, the sentence ‘You are not going to believe what he did next!’ What words do you want to emphasize? How do you hear it in your head? Can you write it like that?”

And then, he typed it out:

You

are not 

going to be-

lieve 

what he did

next! 

Maybe you didn’t think about it that way. Maybe yours was more like

You are 

not

going to 

BELIEVE 

what he 

did next! 

Can you see and – more importantly – hear the difference? Read it out loud. Go on. Don’t just read it silently. Read it out loud! There! Now do you hear the difference? Does one sound better than the other? Line breaks become hesitations and pauses (“Learn to love the pauses!” Nathan told us). Capitalized words become shouted.

Why is that? Because we read it out loud. One of the reasons I so hated poetry when in middle school and high school is because we read it silently. It’s not meant for that! Here’s an example. The first link is to the poem “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou. And then there’s a short video of her reading her poem.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46446

Listen to it. Hear the power of her voice, the emphases on certain words, the line breaks. Does it make you stop and reread the poem? Will you ever see those words the same way again, having heard them?

And this, Nathan argued, is why prose writers should write poetry.

But there’s another reason, going back to my opening paragraphs:  the fact that as writers, we need to be reading our work aloud. He asked if any of us did that, and only a few of us raised our hands.

A recent study found that when we read silently – whether it’s a book, a poem, whatever – the muscles and ligaments in our throat and jaw try to ‘speak’ microscopically. We’re not even aware of it. But this is in part why awkward prose tends to trip us up, why we notice it – even when we’re reading silently. So, we really do need to read our work aloud!

Poetry can help with that. I’m not saying you need to dust off your old Lit book. Poetry, as I’ve discovered in the last few years, doesn’t need to rhyme. It doesn’t need to be about Big Issues. It can be inspired by everyday things. I mean, my kitties write them, for crying out loud! How literary can they be? 🙂

And since poetry should be read aloud . . . it will get you in the habit of doing that, too. 🙂

https://www.brownlines.com/

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2012/september/karma-crisis-nathan-brown

http://publishingperspectives.com/2015/01/nathan-l-brown-self-publishing-poet-laureate/

OWFI 2016: Great Query Letters for Great Agents

A few weeks ago, my friend Debra Dockter and I went to the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation (OWFI) conference. It’s one of two that I get to attend every year – well, almost every year. We get to meet other writers, hear from great agents and editors, and have fun. And we also get to learn something.

This year, I was able to attend several sessions. The first was with agent Sam Morgan (“If I am your agent, I am your friend, your parent, your sibling, your coach, your cheerleader, your lover – well, maybe not your lover! – but I will be whatever you need me to be!”), who is with Foundry Media.

As an agent, Sam gets hundreds of queries in a month. Some can be tossed in the first sentence. Some lead him to new clients. What makes a good query letter stand out? Sam wanted us to know.

• While there are some rules Sam has seen broken, there are some you can’t ignore, such as:
  1. Get his name right!
  2. Know what genres he represents! And don’t send him something else.
• In the query, he wants to learn a few things about your book. Top of that list is: Who is the main character? Get this across – not just their name, but who they are, and especially what’s your MC’s problem?
• Give a taste or a hint of what’s to come. Put yourself on the page. Your voice will come through. Is the novel humorous? Your query should give us a taste of that humor.
• Having said that, don’t write your query letter in the voice of your MC. Just don’t.
• Get him to want to read the book, by any means necessary. Ask others to read your query. Do they want to read the book? If not, keep revising. Sam generally wants to see authors follow the basic rules of querying, but noted that a couple of his current clients broke every single rule imaginable in theirs – but that’s what it took to get him to want to read their books. Not to say that you should, however.
• In the query letter, show why you wrote the book. Show what made you stay with it and finish it. Show him why you gave up time with your family and friends, why you had to DVR the last season of Game of Thrones, why you got up an hour early or went to bed an hour later, to finish this book. (I know, I know! A tall order!)
• If you’ve published in the past, you can put that in – it means someone else has read your work, and liked it enough to publish it. However, if you don’t, it’s not a deal-breaker for him.
• Likewise with social media – if you have a large social media following on Facebook or Twitter, great, include that in the query if you can, but it’s not necessary.

(This is querying, as in sending a letter or email to an agent, not pitching. While similar, they employ totally different methods, so keep that in mind.)

But Sam wanted to be sure we understood that it’s not all about him choosing a new client – it’s also about you choosing an agent. Believe it or not, it’s your choice, and you are in charge! Just because the agent makes an offer to represent doesn’t mean it’s the right person for your book, or you should accept without hesitation. You need to ask questions. You need to be sure this is exactly the right person for you and your novel. You need to make sure you can work with this person for the next 6 – 24 months. So Sam gave us some questions you need to ask potential agents:

• Editorial work? How hands-on is this person in that process?
• How many other clients do they have? How many books have they sold? To which houses? (And, although he didn’t say it, for how much did they sell?)
• What does the agency do in terms of advocating for TV/foreign/audio rights? What about e-book rights?
• Then decide: is this person worth 15% of your profits? If you have any doubts at all, you need to keep looking.

One other thing Sam wanted us to know is something that Deb has been dealing with for the past couple of years:  especially if you’re a debut author, assume the publisher will do NO promotion of your book. Plan to do it yourself. It becomes a cyclical thing – the publisher will tell you that they won’t promote your book because it’s not selling. You think, “But how can it sell if you’re not promoting it?!” Their response? “Not our problem. It’s not selling.” So you need to be able to discuss promotion plans with your agent as well.

So if you’re planning to query agents soon, hopefully some of these tips will help you out. And if you write fantasy or science fiction, I would encourage you to query Sam – he’s funny, enthusiastic, and if I wrote in these genres, I would definitely query him!

Here’s Sam’s page on the site Manuscript Wish List:  http://www.manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/sam-morgan/

. . . and here’s the pitch! Pitching at writing conferences.

This weekend, I’ll be at the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation (OWFI) conference, and I’m supposed to pitch at least one of my novels.

Here’s the thing:  I can’t! 

How many of us can walk into a room and immediately start to talk about ourselves? Some can. Some of us can’t. I can’t. Give me someone else’s book to pitch, and I’d be great. Give me my own novel to pitch, and I sort of dissolve into a dribble of incoherent pudding. You know, like Donald Trump trying to talk about – well, anything.

See, I’ve done this before. Four years ago, to be precise, I pitched at this same conference. And I was lucky enough to not only get a request for the partial, but also (later) for the full. The agent was serious about the book, but . . . I realized it needed far more work than I’d realized when I pitched it, and so I bowed out. It was a hard choice, but I think I made the right one for me at the time.

This time, I’ve got two novels that I could pitch, and agents there who seem like decent fits. It’s just hard because a.) neither novel is really ‘done’ yet, and b.) I HATE TALKING ABOUT MY OWN WORK!

You know how sometimes you have dreams that make absolute sense at the time, and then when you start trying to describe them to someone else, you can’t explain why the polka-dot dog/unicorn things were at a meeting between you and Caligula, or why the Japanese businessmen were all wearing alien suits? Yeah. That’s what I sound like when I try to explain my urban fantasy novel. “There’s ghosts,” is about as coherent as I get.  Nicky’s easier – somehow “My protagonist is a 14-year old rumrunner in the 1920s, trying to save his family and avoid the Klan” rolls off the tongue a bit more easily than “My protagonist sees ghosts and moves to England and then has all these ghosts she has to sort out there, and oh by the way it’s the first in a series.” Right. Who’s going to want to read that? 

In fact, I’ve always had an aversion to pitch sessions. It’s not the end-all, be-all of publishing, in my mind. (Of course, I’m neither an agent nor a published author, so take that as you will.) I think I communicate better in writing. Makes sense. We’re writers. Why wouldn’t we be better in writing than in person?

I also want to point out that in the brief amount of research I did for this post, I ran across some blogs from agents in which they decry the whole pitching process. Yes. That’s right. Some agents don’t like pitch sessions. For various reasons. Andy Ross sums it up like this:

When I get pitched at conferences, too often I find that the attendees have been so over-coached that by the time they get in front of the agent, they act like their heads are going to explode. They read from note cards, they recite  from memory in a sing-songy way, they stare at me with an intensity that spooks me out. A lot of times they are taught that the 10 minutes they get to spend in front of an agent will determine whether their book will get published. AND EVERY SINGLE WORD THEY SAY DURING THE PITCH MUST BE PERFECTLY CRAFTED AND CALIBRATED.

Oh, puh – lease!

And I’ve listed those blogs at the bottom of the page for your enjoyment later.

But if you’re hell-bent on it anyway, here’s a few tips I’ve picked up:

1.) KNOW YOUR BOOK INSIDE AND OUT. And I don’t just mean the plot – know your characters, too, including your antagonist. What do they want? Who’s trying to stop them from getting it, and why? What motivates them? What’s their main problem?

2.) WRITE YOUR PITCH. You will not read from this, unless you are so nervous that reading your script is better than bolting from the room. But this helps you solidify what you want to say. You get only a few minutes – anywhere from 5-10 minutes – to get an agent interested enough to say “send me the first 50 pages.” So your pitch needs to be . . .

3.) BOLD, CONCISE, INTERESTING, ENGAGING.  I KNOW. That’s a huge order! I hear your gears grinding in agony already. Don’t start with your setting. Start with your main character and his/her main problem. Why is it interesting enough that this agent should spend time reading about it – and then, hopefully, spend time selling it? Remember, your time is short. Your pitch should be, too. Why? Because . . .

4.) THE AGENT WILL WANT TO ASK QUESTIONS. If they’re interested, they’re going to ask questions. Mine did. It might be about the setting, the plot, the characters. They might ask if the novel is complete. Maybe they’re curious about you – what led you to write this, what research you’ve done. Take deep breaths. Answer them. Remember that the more questions they ask, the more interested they are. As ‘Miss Snark,’ Literary Agent, says, the well-prepared author will win the day if they have the following answers ready:

• genre
• word count
• plot line
• hook
• who would read this?
• is it like any books I’ve sold?
• what’s interesting to you about the characters and story ?

In fact, one of the questions they might ask is “Why did you choose me? Why do you think I’m a good fit for this project?” You’d better be ready with a killer answer, based on . . .

5.) YOUR RESEARCH INTO THE AGENT. Never, ever, unless it’s one of those last-minute, hey-we’ve-got-a-free-agent things, go into a pitch session without researching the agent first. Why do you want them to represent your book? What makes them a good fit? It can’t be their resemblance to George Clooney, sorry. It needs to be a real answer. They represent your genre, for one thing, They’re looking for X fiction or X nonfiction projects. They recently sold X, which is similar to your book because __. One thing that caught the eye of the agent that requested my manuscript was that I knew she’d graduated from Harvard with a degree in Early American History; that gave us common ground and since my book dealt in part with history, she knew chances were good that my research was sound.

I still don’t know if I’ll pitch. I know there are a couple of agents at OWFI that would be a good fit for Nicky, but he’s nowhere near done. And I do not want a repeat of the last time – a whirlwind of rewrites that ultimately left me feeling hollow and browbeaten. (Not by the agent:  by myself!) But at least if I decide to, I can walk in there knowing a bit more about what agents want.

 

Here’s a few articles and blogs about pitching to agents at conferences:

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/7-tips-for-pitching-to-an-agent-or-editor-at-a-conference

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/how-to-pitch-agents-at-a-writers-conference

https://www.thebalance.com/how-to-pitch-your-novel-at-a-pitch-conference-1277304

http://www.writing-world.com/publish/pitch.shtml

http://www.writing-world.com/publish/pitch2.shtml

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/4-questions-agents-ask-at-pitch-sessions

http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2014/01/rant-pitch-sessions-are-spawn-of-satan.html (From an agent who actually despises pitches – and wants to revamp the entire process.)

https://andyrossagency.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/how-to-pitch-to-an-agent/ (Tips from an agent on what he’s looking for in a good pitch.)

http://misssnark.blogspot.com/2007/02/pitch-sessions-at-writing-conferences.html (THIS one is fantastic – both funny and insightful.)

http://nelsonagency.com/category/query-letters/pitch-sessions/

https://carlywatters.com/2013/05/06/how-to-pitch-an-agent/

Can We Make Writing Conferences Better?

There are two writing conferences I try to attend each year:  the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation Conference in May, and the Rose State Writing Conference in September. Both usually have fantastic lectures, workshops, meet-and-greets, and it’s a great excuse to hang out with other crazy people who have invisible friends in their heads all the time. 🙂

But there’s something that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for a while:  how much can you really ‘get’ from a writing conference?

I truly believe you can learn something in almost any situation. But take this year’s Rose State conference as an example. As I looked around at the other attendees, I saw one of two things:  they were either much younger than me or much older than me. But they were all beginning writers.

In one session, a YA discussion, the presenter mentioned that her first novel had gone through nearly two years of overhaul between her agent and editors. TWO YEARS. I really couldn’t wrap my mind around that, even though I’ve seen it firsthand! I’ve seen the slaughtered pages, dripping red ink, returned from the editor in a FedEx box. Heck, I do it to myself for fun. 🙂 But I could see the other audience members . . . and that number wasn’t sinking in. Maybe because I’m a teacher, I could see that they weren’t ‘getting it.’ In fact, you could almost see them thinking Wow, well, that won’t happen to me. 

So I raised my hand and asked the presenter to explain just what kinds of rewrites were required of her. She noted that her agent had requested some, and then her first editor had read it and said, “Look, there’s too much supernatural stuff in here. Cut all that.” And when she did . . . it gutted her book completely. She had to start over and restructure her entire plot. And you know what? I still walked out of there with the sinking feeling that most of the writers still had that it won’t happen to me mentality.

Which makes me wonder . . . is there a better way or a different way to approach this idea of writing conferences?

Lots of conferences have 1 or 2 people giving the equivalent of an hour-long lecture. Some have panel discussions, where audience members ask questions and the 3-5 people on the panel answer them. That limits how many questions you can have.

For some people, a writing conference might be their only chance to interact with other writers and talk about their craft. Maybe they belong to online writing communities; maybe not. Maybe they have a local writing group; maybe they don’t, or maybe it’s rubbish. So should writing conferences do things differently? Rather than two days of lectures, should we have more workshops instead?

Rose State does this a little – they have the fabulous First Page Panel during lunch on Saturdays – but this year, I think we only read 12-15 of the 55 submitted first pages.

I understand that workshops would, by their very nature, require more time and fewer participants.  I also know that there’s a lot of people who would be very reluctant to submit their work – and conversely, those would submit their work and reject any and all criticisms. That’s just the nature of the workshops. Plus, how would you run them? Have everyone read some of their work aloud? Provide ten minutes to read a page or so?

Well, that’s if you workshop items. But what if you did it the other way around?

I attended a writing workshop many, many years ago (don’t ask how many), in which we were required to do things like “give synonyms for ‘said'” and write a first paragraph based on a few items. It was great because it gave us something to do. We weren’t passively receiving the information; we were being guided in our learning.Think about it:

• First Page panels could give way in the afternoons to First Sentence and First Paragraph workshops. Now that we’ve seen the need for attention-grabbing openers, how can we tweak yours to make it better?
• ‘Creating Character’ lectures could give rise to ‘here’s ten minutes, and here’s your scenario:  create a character that doesn’t belong here, and then explain why he/she does.’ Or working on attendees’ own characters. What works, and what doesn’t?
• Explaining why dialogue needs to actually work could give way to a page or two of published examples – and then attendees could bring along their own manuscripts and start to look the over with partners, figuring out where their own dialogue needs tweaked, rewritten – or scrapped altogether.
• Or, attendees could be given the same page from a manuscript (real or not) and asked to identify why X and Y (dialogue, let’s say) does’t work – and then have them rewrite it so that it does work.
• Research – why not? Everywhere has wi-fi these days. Have attendees bring laptops and tablets, and put them to work researching. Have everyone bring a list of things they need to know, and then work with them as a small group to figure out how to research it.

Workshops could be easily ‘ramped up’ and ‘ramped down’ to adjust for experience and expertise. You could even have two tracks – one for beginner writers, and one for experienced writers who have a manuscript they’re polishing. Maybe the same workshops could be offered both days – so let’s say the mornings could be the basic lecture-type sessions, and then the afternoons would give way to the workshops. Allow attendees to do two workshops a day, at 1 1/2 hours each, and voila! You’ve given them something to do. 

And before you ask:  NO. I don’t for one second think that conferences should charge more for those workshops. Writing conference are, frankly, too expensive as it is.

If most writing conferences are attended by beginning writers, then it stands to reason that this sort of workshop would work best for them – a solid block of time for guided exercises, giving them a toolkit they can take home and put to work.

Would it be easy? No, of course not. For one thing, most presenters at writing conferences are agents, editors, and – of course – published authors, and for good reason:  they’re the ones in the know. And I don’t for one second think they should be scrapped from the program. Not at all. We love picking their brains and hearing their experiences. We need that. But not all of these presenters would necessarily make good teachers for the workshops. They’d have to be chosen carefully, to ensure that they have the ability to lead those sessions. But can it be done? Of course it can.

Anyway, these are my thoughts. I’d love to hear from writers who’ve attended conferences and see what you think about them. Do you have further suggestions? Other ideas? Let me know!