This week I took part in one of those events that is a big deal for a small group–the Twitter-fed rollercoaster of angst, passion, and envy known as #PitMad. Never heard of it? It’s a bit like open auditions, but for authors, and on Twitter. Anyone with a completed manuscript, who is looking for an agent (and, thus, a publisher), tweets out a pitch for their manuscript; there is a 3-tweet limit for the day. And, theoretically at least, literary agents are reading these tweets. If an agent hits the little “like” heart that means they want you to send them more.
So amidst the scrolling flood of pitches, retweets, quote tweets, and hearts, one watches and waits, hoping for one of those little red signals to appear beneath one’s own pitch.
And there are so many. Like the lines around the block for a reality singing show, I suppose (I remember, maybe, the elegantly coiffed and slender emcee of American Idol strolling along the block, interviewing the potential contestants, most of whom had slept on the sidewalk, ready for their 15 seconds of humilitating flopsweat? Am I just imagining this? I think it was real–or as real as anything in that milieu might be said to be, anyway). So many, and such impassioned pitches. Because nobody writes an entire book if they don’t really care about what they’re doing. We’re all amateurs, or we wouldn’t be out hustling for an agent. We’re all writing late at night or early in the morning while working full-time and doing all the other things that human beings do. And pouring ourselves into these manuscripts. Because we want people to read them.
I wasn’t sure I would care, to tell the truth, when I began mine. I assumed I could talk some of my family, who are pretty good sports, into reading it, if I every actually finished it. I had begun it as a lark, really. The first paragraph began as a test of my Word edit settings. I had turned off all of the editing markup on Word except for the Oxford comma notification (we use them at work), and wanted to see if it was actually on, so I wrote a bit of stuff off the top of my head.
That paragraph survives as the beginning of my book, although I eventually edited out all of the Oxford comma bits: it had originally had three adjectives per noun, to get those commas in, which made for tough reading.
But as I went, I started getting involved in the characters. They would surprise me, sometimes, as I wrote, spouting off with some unusual ideas while I was trying to write the scene the way I had imagined it the night before, lying sleepless in bed. And sometimes new people would show up, unnanounced, with names and back stories. Where did they come from? Where were they going? I had to find out–and sometimes, I had to figure it out.
It turns out that for me, writing fiction is like playing chess. And I’m not very good at chess. So I always have a plan to win, but I have trouble making it happen, because the other player keeps moving their pieces around. And in the book, I knew where I wanted my characters to get to, but I kept running into impediments. New ideas, plot holes, practical problems created by things I had written previously, things that needed to be explained to the readers, etc., etc.
And by then I had realized that I really did want people to read it. Why else do all that work? I could have just written the scenes I had originally conceived without worrying about whether they made sense. Like fan fiction without an original. But I wanted it to make sense to someone who couldn’t otherwise see into my own head, and that’s why all these roadblocks were appearing. The reader is the other chess player. In my metaphorical game of chess played by people like me who aren’t very good at it. If you’re good at chess, then this metaphor probably won’t work for you–see, you’re already throwing roadblocks up, and you haven’t even started reading yet . . .
So all of those madly pitched manuscripts must have at least this in common: their creators want them to be read. And they have done the writing work, thankless and solitary, that comes with this desire. And so many, I have to assume, including perhaps my own, will not get there.
Because the “heart” from an agent is only one step. It means “send me a query according to the terms on my website,” which an author can often do anyways . . . a cold query. And agents ask for a pitch, comp titles (HUCKLEBERRY FINN meets STEEL MAGNOLIAS), a synopsis, and a bit of the manuscript; one chapter, perhaps, or just the first ten pages. So even after the PitMad twitter like, an agent will not actually read the book. The agent will have to be so attracted by these further materials that they will be moved to ask for a full manuscript. Then, one hopes, they will read it. And then, only then, one person who has not been paid or bound by ties of obligation or affection will finally read the manuscript.
At which point a whole new round of pitches begins: pitches to the actual publishers.
Those are not really my comp titles, of course; I was going for the least appealing possible combination I could come up with. To really “hook” an agent, you need something snappy, like “50 SHADES OF GREY’S ANATOMY” or “STRANGER THINGS x MONSTERPIECE THEATER.” Or so I’m told.
This series of steadily decreasing odds will be familiar to anyone in the music business, or who has survived a job hunt in the humanities in academia (I’ve been in both), where the effort of self-promotion sometimes seems to overshadow the effort of doing the thing one is supposedly good at. And I wonder why, if there are so many people willing to write books anyways, despite the long odds of getting published, and when published, of getting enough attention that anyone actually buys and reads the things, do we have so little room for them, for us, in our society. Why are so many people good at singing, dancing, sculpting, painting, juggling, ventriloquism, acting, comedy, poetry, when there is such little demand for it?
A better question: what happened to the human race, which is obviously suited for a society full of artists, storytellers, comedians, tragedians, mystics, and creatives, that we should have created a society which has so little place for us? We’re obviously not going away–we certainly would have given up by now, if we were going to. But now I can’t even see the society that would fit the human race as we actually are. It’s locked up tight, bursting through the lattice of commercial endeavor in various uniquely shaped explosions and utterances. So keep your eyes open, and don’t miss them . . . the places where what we really are, or could be, breaks through.
PitMad, Oxford Commas, and Playing Chess with the Reader
