>I was talking with a non-writer friend of mine the other day and we were discussing literary agents.

I was trying to explain how it works:

• how you know you have a good agent
• how they make the contacts in places an author can’t
• how slow the industry is as a whole
• how a new author is walking in new territory
• how everything with an agent your still getting to know is risky
• how much there is to learn
• how many things can go wrong
• Etc….

He said something that really boiled it all down to a digestible size morsel: “Sounds like literary agents are a lot like Realtors. You’ve got some who are go-getter’s and walk neighborhoods knocking on doors and others who sit in the office filing their nails waiting for the phone to ring.”

There are so many agents out there. The chances of a new author landing one of the big-names is very small. It happens, and when it does, it’s great. But when you look at the numbers…well, they’re less than encouraging.

Still, I think there is a lot to be said for younger, hungrier agents. But the big caveat there is that you don’t know until you try them, until you put your book in their hands, until you work with them on edits and ideas, until you receive emails and phone calls in a timely manner, until you’ve gotten thorough and satisfying answers to your questions.

Bottom line, unless your agent is uber-agent, you won’t really know how the business relationship will work out for both of you until you’ve spent some time working with them. Unfortunately, that time could be wasted time, depending on the agent, the author, the market, a million different factors. Even top agents don’t always fit with your ideas or your personality.

I guess you just have to gather that experience, tuck it away, keep writing, keep learning, keep your ears open and your fingers on the keyboard. At the risk of offending, I don’t think a prayer now and then would hurt either.

I often feel like this industry is a big, old crap shoot.

Any advice on agents?

>I suspect that all writers are superb escape artists–after all, if reading is a good escape, writing has got to be the ultimate. Then again, I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to get away from.

There are pros and cons to escape. I think the key to knowing when you’ve gone from good to bad to ugly is consequences.

I’m a grand master escape artist. I’ve got so many escapist ideas I could do nothing but escape reality everyday for a year. Good thing I also have a relatively strong work ethic and a streak of compulsiveness or I could potentially be divorced, broke and unemployed.

The good: taking a focused break. A break with purpose that allows you just enough escape to get your balance back and enables you to face reality again with a clear head and renewed determination. You know you’re at the “good” level if you feel refreshed and ready to go when life rushes up at you.

The bad: letting the break linger, unproductive. This diversion tends to drift past a reasonable amount of time. When reality encroaches on your escape, it means you’ve dwelled there too long. The bad escape can quickly sink into…

The ugly: important elements of reality go ignored for too long and consequences start cropping up–the bills don’t get paid, laundry reaches the ceiling, cats start scouring the neighbor’s house for food, kids call and ask, “Where are you? I’ve been waiting at school for two hours.”

I’ve never actually been guilty of forgetting the kids…but those others…well, let’s just say I’m dealing with a few of them at the moment.

What level escape artist are you? What are your favorite forms of escapes–from life, from writing, from whatever?

>I suspect that all writers are superb escape artists–after all, if reading is a good escape, writing has got to be the ultimate. Then again, I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to get away from.

There are pros and cons to escape. I think the key to knowing when you’ve gone from good to bad to ugly is consequences.

I’m a grand master escape artist. I’ve got so many escapist ideas I could do nothing but escape reality everyday for a year. Good thing I also have a relatively strong work ethic and a streak of compulsiveness or I could potentially be divorced, broke and unemployed.

The good: taking a focused break. A break with purpose that allows you just enough escape to get your balance back and enables you to face reality again with a clear head and renewed determination. You know you’re at the “good” level if you feel refreshed and ready to go when life rushes up at you.

The bad: letting the break linger, unproductive. This diversion tends to drift past a reasonable amount of time. When reality encroaches on your escape, it means you’ve dwelled there too long. The bad escape can quickly sink into…

The ugly: important elements of reality go ignored for too long and consequences start cropping up–the bills don’t get paid, laundry reaches the ceiling, cats start scouring the neighbor’s house for food, kids call and ask, “Where are you? I’ve been waiting at school for two hours.”

I’ve never actually been guilty of forgetting the kids…but those others…well, let’s just say I’m dealing with a few of them at the moment.

What level escape artist are you? What are your favorite forms of escapes–from life, from writing, from whatever?

>Well, maybe I should retitle that: The Funny Things Compulsive Writers Do.

I’m rewriting the first chapter of my current WIP for the Daphne. My goal is to make the first scene heart-thumping, eerie, tense. My character hears a noise, one he knows is familiar but can’t immediately recognize.

The sound is the shuffling of a deck of cards.

I really had to think about how that would sound, because I didn’t want to **tell** the reader that’s what he heard. I wanted the reader to **hear** it.

(Trivia: This is a rhetorical device–ONOMATOPOEIA: the use of words that imitate the sound the word describes.)

That one description took me hours. I tried to imagine the sound. Then I searched out my daughter’s playing cards and shuffled them over and over.

When I still hadn’t found a satisfying description, I went online and hunted down some shuffling sound clips. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound over and over.

Still, I couldn’t get it right.

So, I enlisted my CP, Elisabeth, in the chore. (Thanks, E. You’re a good sport.)

It started with: Riiiiiiiip, whiiiiiiisp.

Which evloved into various posibilbities including: flaaaaaap, whiiiiiisp; fwaaaaaap, whiiiiiisp; fwiiiiiip, whiiiiiisp.

I closed my eyes and listened another dozen times. I said the words along with the sound to see if they fit.

And I got it: Thwaaaaaap, whiiiiiisp.

Let me tell you, listening to the sound clip of those cards shuffling in a quiet house was as eerie as I thought it would be. I only hope I conveyed that adequately in my WIP.

You try it.

Go to: http://www.pdinfo.com/sfxM2H/Games.htm. At the bottom of the page, listen to the shuffling clips (use the right listen link if you have Windows, the left if you have Mac) and tell me how you think that sound would be portrayed in the glorious written word.

What extremes have you gone to for that “just right” element in a book?

>Well, maybe I should retitle that: The Funny Things Compulsive Writers Do.

I’m rewriting the first chapter of my current WIP for the Daphne. My goal is to make the first scene heart-thumping, eerie, tense. My character hears a noise, one he knows is familiar but can’t immediately recognize.

The sound is the shuffling of a deck of cards.

I really had to think about how that would sound, because I didn’t want to **tell** the reader that’s what he heard. I wanted the reader to **hear** it.

(Trivia: This is a rhetorical device–ONOMATOPOEIA: the use of words that imitate the sound the word describes.)

That one description took me hours. I tried to imagine the sound. Then I searched out my daughter’s playing cards and shuffled them over and over.

When I still hadn’t found a satisfying description, I went online and hunted down some shuffling sound clips. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound over and over.

Still, I couldn’t get it right.

So, I enlisted my CP, Elisabeth, in the chore. (Thanks, E. You’re a good sport.)

It started with: Riiiiiiiip, whiiiiiiisp.

Which evloved into various posibilbities including: flaaaaaap, whiiiiiisp; fwaaaaaap, whiiiiiisp; fwiiiiiip, whiiiiiisp.

I closed my eyes and listened another dozen times. I said the words along with the sound to see if they fit.

And I got it: Thwaaaaaap, whiiiiiisp.

Let me tell you, listening to the sound clip of those cards shuffling in a quiet house was as eerie as I thought it would be. I only hope I conveyed that adequately in my WIP.

You try it.

Go to: http://www.pdinfo.com/sfxM2H/Games.htm. At the bottom of the page, listen to the shuffling clips (use the right listen link if you have Windows, the left if you have Mac) and tell me how you think that sound would be portrayed in the glorious written word.

What extremes have you gone to for that “just right” element in a book?

>

>

>After I’d been writing a while, maybe a year, I had a hard time reading because everything I read was so good. I was past the honeymoon period and had come to realize not just how much work and talent was involved in writing, but how much of that talent I lacked.

I was in the deep bend of my learning curve, struggling to get that grand vision in my head down to my fingertips. I found myself reading a book thinking, oh, my God. How do they do that? Where did they come up with that? How did they learn to write like that? And my Eeyore syndrome would peak: I’ll never get there. That’s just not me.

But the compulsive part of me pressed on. I wrote, I learned, I read. I took courses, attended conferences, and read some more. And, of course, I wrote and rewrote.

I got better — almost impossible not to do when you work at something so damn hard and actually take the advice given you from those talented people in your writing world.

I started reading again with a fresh perspective. Oh, I like that. They did that well. I can do that, too. I’ll just tweak it and do it in my own way, to fit my voice and my story. And I continued to get better. I broke some temporary ceilings in my writing, took that laboring next step.

Then I found myself at a stage where when I read, I find one of three categories of writer:

>After I’d been writing a while, maybe a year, I had a hard time reading because everything I read was so good. I was past the honeymoon period and had come to realize not just how much work and talent was involved in writing, but how much of that talent I lacked.

I was in the deep bend of my learning curve, struggling to get that grand vision in my head down to my fingertips. I found myself reading a book thinking, oh, my God. How do they do that? Where did they come up with that? How did they learn to write like that? And my Eeyore syndrome would peak: I’ll never get there. That’s just not me.

But the compulsive part of me pressed on. I wrote, I learned, I read. I took courses, attended conferences, and read some more. And, of course, I wrote and rewrote.

I got better — almost impossible not to do when you work at something so damn hard and actually take the advice given you from those talented people in your writing world.

I started reading again with a fresh perspective. Oh, I like that. They did that well. I can do that, too. I’ll just tweak it and do it in my own way, to fit my voice and my story. And I continued to get better. I broke some temporary ceilings in my writing, took that laboring next step.

Then I found myself at a stage where when I read, I find one of three categories of writer: