Dear Editor: You keep telling us the publishing industry’s in massive transition. But the simple truth is I want to be a writer. What are my prospects?—E.P.G.

Yes, the publishing industry is definitely in massive transition. All kinds of stuff is going on, including a bizarre New Wave of thousands of aspiring fiction writers, each of whom is determined that they, personally, need to be richer than the Queen of England.

The question you must ask yourself is: Do you want to be a writer because you belong to that (wildly unrealistic) New Wave? Or do you want it because you simply love fiction?

The thing is the industry as we know it is based on an Honor System established way, way back before fiction writers started styling themselves as the new rock stars. In a nutshell:

The publisher said, “I will provide, up-front and at my own risk, the financial backing, including the accoutrements of the business like editing, cover design, printing, distribution, marketing, and even a cash loan, in certain cases and under certain circumstances, for the author’s living expenses.”

The agent said, “I will provide, up-front and on my own time, unlimited free hours reading stuff I can’t possibly sell—far, far more hours than anybody will ever realize—in search of golden nuggets, along with my carefully-nurtured professional contacts and my expertise in negotiation and navigating the industry.”

The fiction author said, “I will provide, up-front and through my own blood, sweat, and tears, unlimited free hours of my time learning this craft until I’m really good at writing those golden nuggets that are worth all this effort to sell, publish, and, finally, read.”

And between the three of them, they turned out a valuable product. Not usually at much of a profit. Still, it was stuff they were proud to put their names on.

However, now some aspiring writers are trying to renege. They’re saying, “You guys keep providing what you promised to provide, but I’m not going to provide the unlimited free hours of my time learning my craft anymore. I’m only going to provide as much as I feel like. I’m going to bounce into your business with a couple of years or even less under my belt, wanting publication with Every Fiber of My Soul, and expect to be rewarded with enormous profits.”

Understandably, publishers and agents sometimes have a hard time coping with this development, particularly those who have been in this industry for a long time. They do the best they can—the agents and acquisitions editors I know are good-natured, extremely-knowledgeable, and well-spoken professionals who treat their clients with respect and normal human comaraderie—but they don’t always get that treatment in return. And even when aspiring writers are respectful and friendly, far, far too many of them are still failing to bring their part of the bargain to the table.

And there’s absolutely nothing agents and publishers can do about this, because their Honor System says, “Thou shalt not charge writers for the hours and hours and hours and hours of free time you spend reading their queries and submissions.” It’s actually part of the AAR license.

They are being snowed under by fiction writers’ new and wildly unrealistic expectations. They are running out of money trying to keep up with this development and, in the process, losing the very people who make their companies run.

Guess what? Someone else is making a lot of money off innocent people by helping them along with those unrealistic expectations. Snakeoil salespeople.

These are people who don’t know how to write well, don’t love the craft for the sake of the craft, don’t think you need to be a dedicated writer for life, all you need is enough aggressive determination. These are the people who preach, “You have to want publication with Every Fiber of Your Soul.” Why do you have to want this? I don’t know. You just do. They said so. And they wanted you to believe it with Every Fiber of Their Soul.

In the 1970s this mentality fueled Amway.

These are snakeoil sellers. And no matter what credentials they wave in your face—”I did it! I write crap, but I did it! Just don’t ask me why I need to get my hands on your money preaching about it now.”— they are not going to teach you how to be good writers.

I, too, have been making a living as a writer for as long as I can remember. Big deal. It’s not as great a credential as it looks if it doesn’t come with in-depth, hard-won, teachable knowledge of the craft.

Fortunately, I don’t think this phase of the industry is going to last long. I think the wheels of saving grace have already begun to turn. And the solution does involve the writer pulling their own weight. If you won’t put in all those years and years it takes to develop a marketable talent for this line of work, you can pay. Not the agent or publisher, who are honor-bound not to take payment from you. And certainly not someone whose only takeaway is, “Want Publication!”

You can pay someone who has put in the years and years (and years and years) of their own free time learning the craft and is willing to help you leapfrog over your committed hours (and they are waaaaaaay more than you think they should be) to becoming someone really good at writing those golden nuggets that are worth selling, publishing, and reading. Then you can either take your highly-improved chances with agents, or you can pay all the dues you need to pay to enter and win the IBPA awards, where publishers and agents more and more look for the quality that’s missing from their inboxes. You can bring your contribution to the table.

And this is what’s going to save the industry from the tornado fostered and fanned into an inferno by the unscrupulous folks out there telling innocent newbies, “Determination is all you need.”

No. Determination is not all you need. Lowering the bar on published quality is not a viable long-term business model, unless you’re into cheap crap made in China with your name stamped all over it. And even then you’re gambling on your readers’ stupidity.

Love is all you need. Love of the craft, love of the words, love of the imagination and its relationship to language over all other artistic media.

Not love of publication. That’s what agents and publishers are for.

Love of fiction.

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Dearest Editor, On agency web sites, I often read that a writer should know the market for his genre – know what is getting published – what is selling. However, I’ve also read agent interviews where the agent advises that it takes up to two years to get a manuscript published and no one can anticipate the up and downs of the market in the meantime, so don’t worry about what is getting published today. You recommend reading the classics to improve one’s writing. If I am a disciplined writer, what percentage of my time should be spent reading other authors and specifically, other authors in my genre?—Snoopy

Dearest Snoopy: 50% reading, 50% writing, 50% on the rest of your life. That’s the accepted formula.

As far as keeping an eye on what’s selling. . .yeah. The distinction here is between market and audience.

The market is whatever’s going on out there, and the reason to watch that is to jump on the bandwagon. Is everyone else writing YA vampire romance? Quick—write some YA vampire romance and grab yourself a piece of that pie! Is everyone else writing gritty MG urban fantasy? Get with the program—rap out some MG children doing crack in abandoned warehouses! Chop, chop, people. Time’s a-wasting!

The problem, as so many professionals are kindly pointing out, is that bandwagons come and go, while books still predictably take their own sweet time to pull themselves together and trundle on out to their waiting public. And the more heavily we as a species depend upon faster and faster technology for our likes and dislikes, the faster and faster our bandwagons are going to move.

Your audience, on the other hand, is a fairly identifiable substance.

Are you writing for the disenchanted, the disinherited, the disillusioned and depressed? In the 1960s that meant writing dark, deadpan, carefully-researched, detailed, and realistic Swedish crime novels. In the 1970s that meant writing dark, deadpan, detailed, realistic futuristic sci fi about utopias that didn’t work out. In the 1980s that meant writing dark, deadpan, detailed, realistic interviews with vampires. In the 1990s that meant writing dark, realistic, weird, violent urban fantasy about capitalist dreams that didn’t work out, sometimes with vampires. In the 2000s that meant writing dark, realistic, sometimes weird violent porn. In the 2010s according to the some predictions, that means writing dark, violent, pornographic, weird Swedish crime novels.

This is because those of us who identify ourselves as disinherited and disillusioned want validation that our lives—in concrete, realistic terms—really are as bad as we think they are. Even Swedish.

On the other hand, are you writing for the hopefully-inclined and sexually-mature female, the emotional, the fantasy-minded, the middle-income, the dreamer daughter of ordinary businessmen and housewives? In the 1960s that meant writing light-weight magazine stories about women named Kim and men named David who meet on a bus. In the 1970s that meant writing Jane Eyre-based triangles about small, jealous, passively-indignant young women in love with (and servitude to) tyrannical bullies who appear to be succumbing to the advances of sexy vixens. In the 1980s that meant writing about spunky young women in love with men who hit and “forcefully seduce” (this is called rape) them. In the 1990s that meant writing about intelligent, spunky young women in love with hyper-jealous older men involving a lot of lying to each other and a touch of soft-core porn. In the 2000s that meant writing about tough-minded, sexy vixens in love with the intelligent, principled arch-nemeses of the amoral cads, with a bit more than a touch of soft-corn porn. In the 2010s according to RWA, that means writing pretty much anything as long as it’s about two people falling in love. (Preferably with porn.)

This is because those of us who identify ourselves as hopeful and sexually-mature females want validation that our lives—our eternal quests for the sexual passion/true love we were promised as little girls—really are going to work out the way we expect them to.

Are you writing for children? In the 1960s that meant good-bad realistic morality tales like The Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, Little Women, Roald Dahl’s fantasial morality tales under the guise of dark humor, and clever fantasy like Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. In the 1970s that meant Tolkein-based fantasy like Prydain and Narnia, sci fi like Madeleine L’Engle, and and realistic children’s stories like All-of-a-Kind Family, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Judy Blume’s exploratory realistic YA (a brand-new genre). In the 1980s that meant the brand-new genre MG rather than children’s fiction, in exploratory realistic stories for younger kids like Judith Viorst’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney and light-weight pseudo-realistic series fiction like Sweet Valley Twins. In the 1990s that meant retro fantasy like Margaret Wise Brown and Amelia Bedelia and hyper-commercialized fantasy like Harry Potter and movie tie-ins like Disney. In the 2000s that meant, um, Harry Potter and movie tie-ins. In the 2010s, god help us, let it not be YA shock-value bandwagon dragged into the MG arena.

This is because children, by and large, are children and need both fantasy and reality to validate their experiences of this unbelievably surreal event you all call “life.” And because they are also, as newbies to the party, sitting ducks for advertising—not to mention PTSD.

Now, you can analyze these lists and see where the market moves. Over the past five decades realistic fiction has pretty much veered from so-called “safe” topics to so-called “edgy” or what the authors would like to think of as “ultimate unsafe” topics. (Although this is an illusion, since there are always topics too abhorrent for even the worst of us—super-punk Sid Vicious was grossed-out by a young woman who brought her abortion to the bars with her in a plastic bag.) Why the move toward unsafe? What is attractive about writing unsafe fiction? We actually hashed this out in a discussion of YA literature last week, so I won’t repeat it. We have our reasons. (And our therapists.)

Fantasy-type fiction, on the other hand, has become increasingly wildly creative, from Dr. Seuss’s wacky striped pod people and Maurice Sendak’s ground-breaking Wild Things (talk about dark and edgy! those darn things want to EAT you and were, in fact, based on Sendak’s intimidating Old World relatives, of which I’ve had a few myself) to a vast, sweeping panorama of everything from urban/horror/extreme to sci fi—including historical and futuristic, with and without time travel—to mythical/paranormal/after-life to alternate reality to bizarre mixes of any and all of the above and now moving into multimedia through ebooks.

Yes, the drift in this case has also been toward shock value and previously inappropriate content. But not all of it. A lot of the exploration in fiction going on these days is purely for the sake of creativity, much as the Moderns of the 1910s and ’20s screwed with accepted literary modes of their day just because they realized they could. (For the record, the core Moderns were also into shock value—when the virginal Stephens sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, first met the men of their future Bloomsbury Group around 1905, one asked about a stain on Vanessa’s dress and another answered drolly, “Semen.”)

And throughout the ages, while you’ve always been able to make a nice buck if you just imitate a trend-setter faithfully enough, you’ve also always been able to make an even nicer literary impact if you can dig deep into your understanding of craft and literature and creativity and the connection between humans that lives in stories to set your own trend.

Of course, that’s what Stieg Larsson did. And you saw what happened to HIM.

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Dear Editor, I am ready to begin my second book after spending over two years on my first novel. New characters that have been swimming around in my head for months, scenes I know exactly how to write, a climax that is spectacular – they are all there, and yet I’m hesitant, daunted by the work that is ahead of me. Is this normal? Does this desire to protect my sanity from my art mean I don’t have the chops to be a writer?—No Van Gogh

You poor people. Who’s been teaching you there are “signs” you “don’t have the chops to be a writer”?

There are signs you don’t have the chops to be a mail carrier in early twentieth-century Africa. That would be a severe disability at judging distance and a tendency to clip trees when you fly too low over them.

There are signs you don’t have the chops to be a spelunker. That would be claustrophobia, terror of the dark, and nightmares about being buried in an earthquake under tons of crushing earth and rock.

There are signs you don’t have the chops to be an alligator wrestler. That would be the existence of alligators.

You know what you have to do to be a writer? Sit at your desk putting words on paper, reading great literature, and studying the craft with all your heart and soul for about twenty years. That can be boring as hell for someone who’s not really interested in that stuff. But chops? You don’t need no stinkin chops. All you need is obsessive-compulsion and a sincere fascination with such a thing.

Now, I’ll tell you two years is not really long enough to learn the craft. So if the novel you’ve been working on for two years is the first writing you’ve done, be aware you’re probably not finished with it.

It’s possible your reluctance stems from a subconscious knowledge of this, and you’re afraid to move on because you know the first project isn’t completed. It’s possible all you need is permission to start on a new project while that one’s going cold in a drawer.

No Van Gogh, buddy?—You’ve got my permission.

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Is it true that a writer should not begin a chapter with dialogue?—Talkative in Toledo

You know, this is another of those rules that get trotted out periodically to (supposedly) offer aspiring writers a short-cut to stardom. “Never use adverbs!” “Never use dialog tags other than ’said’!” “Never use passive voice!” “Never use auxiliary verbs!”

They generally have a kernel of truth in them. It IS possible to over do modifiers—adverbs and adjectives alike. It IS a problem when your characters tend to ejaculate their words instead of saying them. Yes, passive voice CAN interfere with clean, strong writing. And, certainly, a plethora of auxiliary verbs can slow down the pace and complicate your sentences needlessly.

But go ahead, jot this down, and stick it up over you desk:

You can do anything in fiction you can get away with. Unfortunately, nobody’s ever gotten away with much.—Flannery O’Connor

Once upon a time (the 1970s) it suddenly became quite popular to start chapters and even novels with dialog:

“Drop the gun!”

“You’ve killed him, Harold!”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

It was considered the ultimate in author invisibility. Writers like Armistead Maupin wrote entire books mostly in dialog, not nearly as competently as the brilliant Ivy Comption-Burnett, either, and readers ate them up.

This was because the younger adults at that time, a massive target market, were the first generation to grow up entirely on radio and television. Their brains had been programmed for dialog.

After several decades of this, backlash set it. Now agents and acquisitions editors are saying, “Enough already! WE’VE READ ALL THE DIALOG.” They haven’t, of course. But sometimes they sure wish they had.

Begin a chapter with dialog ONLY when you need that particular technique to perform one of its signature tasks:

1. You need the reader to hear what’s happening before they see because it’s something that will forward the plot better if it’s seen first in context, and you’ve been over-doing the exposition at the end of the last chapter, so you wake the reader up with a switch in technique:
   
   “It’s Aunt Vi’s stethoscope!”
2. You need to grip the reader with the relationship between these characters first and foremost, and in order to further the plot you have to make a point about the invisibility of the voice:
   
   “Shut up and tell me. My dad’s yelling for me to get off the phone.”
3. You need this scene to be in total darkness, and you don’t want to slow down the flow of the plotline because you’ve already described the dark at the end of the last chapter:
   
   “Get off me, for crying out loud. I’m going to want that eyeball later.”

You’ll notice all of these reasons involve forwarding the plot. That’s right. You’re not here to look smart. You’re here to tell a story.

DO NOT begin a chapter with dialog just because:

1. You’ve been raised on television and that’s the way you’re used to scenes starting. (In movies, the dialog often starts while you’re still looking at the previous scene—this is a transition technique that’s much more clumsy and obvious on the page.)
2. You’re too lazy to envision the scene before you try to write it.
3. It’s the only tension technique you know.

And if you really want to begin a scene in which characters are talking, but you don’t have a really good reason to begin with the dialog, use a couple of lines of description or action first to flag down your reader’s attention.

They’re pretty quick. They’ll get it.

(UPDATE: Random Chapter-Starting Dialog Award goes to @jefro_net for: “That’s the margarita talking.”)

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My novel is historical fiction. Its setting is almost unrecognizable nowadays. From the animals that once lived there to what the people wore, it almost seems like a fantasy. I feel like I have to over compensate with details to explain that it was once real. How do I establish a proper setting without drowning the first few chapters with facts, facts, facts?—Kathryn Estrada

Yeah, this can be daunting. Fortunately, there’s a fact about writing great fiction that plays right into your hands here:

TELLING DETAIL.

Raymond Chandler. J.R.R. Tolkien. Amy Tan. Zane Grey. Joseph Conrad. Dashiell Hammett. Anne Rice. Thrillers, thrillers, thrillers, thrillers. What do they all have in common? The detailed subject matter is unfamiliar to the reader.

Readers very commonly read just to learn something they didn’t know. That’s why technical thrillers are so unbelievably popular. Are espionage thrillers only read by spies? No. They’re read by people who feel super-smart if they think they know the truth about how spies really operate. It’s cool stuff. It adds an aspect to the reader’s life they didn’t have before.

The problem is that most aspiring writers come to fiction thinking you have to describe everything, even stuff the reader already knows exists. You don’t. You need to pick out those telling details the reader can’t see for themself and use them to snap a reasonably familiar scene into sharp, unique focus.

Is your scene in an ordinary San Francisco apartment where a freaky guy is deciding whether or not to give the detective who’s caught him stealing a priceless heirloom a fall-guy to keep him quiet? Don’t worry about the apartment. Your reader knows what they look like. Describe anything in it that’s unusual or eye-catching or—most definitely—forwards the plot. And take careful note of the characters themselves. The freaky guy is a huge pale character with elaborate rings on his round, white fingers. He moves his body in a certain way. He looks at the detective in a certain way. He considers his options, weighing the detective and the fall-guy and the noisy Peter Lorre character at his elbow. . .in a certain way.

Is your scene around a campfire? It’s nice to get a good, fresh image of how fire looks in the dark. But it’s even more important to catch those details that place this particular campfire in this particular place and this particular time. Is the wood myrtle? Eucalyptus? Pine? Oak? Does it throw off a lot of sparks? A dull glow? A fierce heat? Is the fire huge? Small? In a pit with stones? In a sandy depression? Framed by fired bricks? What sounds can you hear around it in the dark, what animals would come near for comfort (in Australia the wallabies love campfires), what animals would creep toward the sound of voices, what would object (birds get annoyed about being woken), what would prowl the limit of the firelight hoping to catch a tasty morsel on its bumbling human way to take a whizz? Use the things about those animals that are different from what the reader expects to snap them into focus. If I had saber-toothed tigers in my story, I might use a detail about how the muscles of a big cat move under the fur, but I’d definitely mention the way the light catches the edge of a unique crack in the foot-long left tooth.

How would your characters respond to this campfire that is so utterly and intrinsically familiar to their lives? How would they respond to their knowledge or lack of knowledge of the animals or lack of animals? What kinds of gestures and mannerisms develop in people who typically spend their lives around campfires? What’s perfectly normal to them that would be a telling detail to your reader?

On and on and on. . .

All of these tiny elements add up, in the reader’s mind, to an experience. And whether your characters are someplace quite similar to or quite different from the reader’s daily life, the vividness of that experience is what makes your story.

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Dear Editor, Physical violence, sexuality and adult scenarios such as drinking and drugs seem to be filtering down into the younger genres. Must YA writers ride this wave to be successful?—K

Dear K,

NO.

You do not need to push the limits of taboo to write good fiction, for YA or anyone else.

However, there’s a reason these things are turning up. And they date back to a groundbreaking book published in 1970 called Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume.

Before Margaret, there were things you addressed in children’s books, and there were things you left to the discretion of the children’s parents. It was a real shock when Blume hauled a child’s relationship to religion out into the light and let it belong to the child rather than the parents, and readers—children and adults alike—responded powerfully.

Ever since then, YA fiction has found a lucrative market in “taboo” subject matter. The idea is to talk to kids about the things that are actually important to them, around the false restrictions of their responsible adults. This is a function of the 1960s and our culture-wide revolt against hypocrisy and faking social “norms.” Blume’s book could not have been published ten years earlier.

It all looks so healthy and honest and freeing from this angle.

However, there are two dangers associated with this trend of exposing “taboos.”

One is that adults don’t experience taboos the same way children do, so unless you’re as gifted and clear-sighted as Judy Blume you run the very real risk of insincerity, the very hypocrisy this exposure of taboo is intended to combat.

The other is that the relationship between fantasy and reality is not at all as simple and clear-cut as many pundits would like to believe. Fantasy influences reality, just as reality influences fantasy. It’s a cycle that feeds on itself. So while the publishers are asking themselves, “Are there enough readers in our YA audience who can relate to personal experiences of violence, drugs, and sex to justify the cost of publishing this?” the children are asking themselves, “If everyone else can relate to this, how can I adopt these experiences as if they were my own so no one will know what a Goody Two-Shoes I really am?”

Our kids these days are exposed to an extraordinary level of violence, adult sex, and drugging in our popular media. Oh my god. And studies show now that the human brain records witnessing even a facsimile of a traumatic event as experiencing it. This means in movies and fiction, as well as marketing. Any time the emotions associated with trauma are triggered, the brain records that in the part of the brain where memories of traumatic experiences are stored. In other words: we’re giving our kids real PTSD through their so-called “fantasy” life.

How do you know which of your readers have suffered traumas and need help healing and which of them have not?

You don’t. But any time you publish a book, you hope to sell it to as many readers as humanly possible. So the effort is certainly in the direction of bringing these traumas to teens who’ve never experienced them before. Hello, PTSD.

You know what people suffering PTSD do? They obsessively re-visit facsimiles of their original trauma in an effort to work through the pain. They also obsessively visit that trauma on others—most notably innocents who aren’t yet acquainted with it—in an effort to validate what they’ve suffered, to make it “normal.”

Welcome to the lucrative self-feeding YA market for taboo.

Does this mean we should avoid fiction with potentially traumatic subject matter? Not at all. Honest and insightful examination of the wounds many teens suffer in secret is a big step toward helping them heal.

But should we ride the bandwagon sensationalizing potentially traumatic subject matter for the sake sales? Encourage young writers to focus on trauma over content?

Well, I don’t know, guys. How far are you willing to go in promoting a cycle of “normalizing” sensationalized teen violence, sex, and drugging—and traumatizing readers for whom these experiences aren’t normal—just to make a buck?

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Dear Editor, So, when should I begin building my promotional platform?—Kathryn

For fiction? Screw platform.

Focus on your story.

Donald Maass and Lisa Rector talked about this in our interview, and what they said makes a lot of sense: the platform thing is a bit blown out of proportion regarding fiction.

Some publishers are even writing articles now about the fact that online presence accounts for, actually, quite a small percentage of overall sales.

You know what sells in fiction? A gripping idea that plugs into the collective social consciousness of a certain time and place. The Twilight books do not sell on the quality of the writing. They do not sell because Stephenie Meyer was all over the web before she started querying agents. They do not sell because vampires were a fresh and new take on love stories.

They sell because she hit the right note between current popular genres in our culture—paranormal, specifically vampire, and romance—and a new angle—YA. And once she hit that note, she sustained it. She hasn’t tried anything new. She just keeps giving her readers what they expect. (I’m guessing she also got an agent in her corner who really knows the ropes.)

Now, I don’t necessarily recommend trying to be Stephenie Meyer. I think she should learn her craft. But you can learn your craft AND do what she’s doing right, and then you’ll have published fiction to be proud of.

What’s your novel? Mystery? Romance? Thriller? Fantasy? Sci fi? Horror? Historical? Adventure? As we’ve seen from the rise of romance in this time of economic catastrophe, love stories fit in pretty much anywhere. Everyone wants that little extra thrill. Mix romance with any of the other popular genres, ask yourself, “What is nobody else doing with this genre right now?” and use that as your jumping-off point for story.

Then focus on your protagonist(s) and make them the most interesting, human, multi-faceted, deeply motivated character(s) you possibly can. Give them intense, overriding needs: finding love, fighting danger, restoring justice to an unjust world. They will tell you what their story is about.

Create a rock-solid plotline out of that. An unexpected hook. Hair-raising conflicts and complications. A climax like electrocution. You know the drill.

Then spend a long, long, long, loooooong time enjoying every minute of writing that story scene-by-scene, development-by-development. Luxuriate in it. Wallow in it. Fill your mind with your imaginary universe, roll around in it, get it all over you.

Forget about the life of a marketer.

You’re not a marketer. You’re a writer.

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I have worked and reworked my short story from flash fic into a 20,000 word novella and back to a 5000 word story. Now I feel it has lost the punch it had when I first wrote it, but I can’t seem to identify what it was that made it good to begin with. How can I figure out what was magical to begin with and put it back in?—@jefro_net

Sucks, doesn’t it?

Sometimes the punch that made it good to begin with was simply the fact that you hadn’t read it a zillion times before. I once brought a poem to my workshop that everyone loved. My professor, in particular, loved the kick at the end. Then after I’d changed a couple of words way up at the beginning, he said it no longer kicked. Well, it wasn’t the ending that changed. That was a problem with the kick not surviving a second reading.

Sometimes the punch disappears because the first time you wrote it, you wrote it with a natural sense of rhythm and when you rewrote you weren’t paying attention to that. So you need to let it go cold and then go through with a heightened sensitivity to the flow of the sentences.

And sometimes the punch disappears because you’ve inadvertently removed the fresh and surprising elements in your efforts to focus the storyline. It can be hard as heck to tell when something extra provides that perfect little llapa and when it completely diverts the reader’s attention in the wrong direction.

I hope you saved your original. (Always save your original!) It’s probably cold by now. I’d take a nice, uninterrupted hour to sit down with it and read it through as objectively as possible—for best results, read a couple of good pieces from your favorite literary magazine first and then approach yours in the same mindset, as a stranger—and see if you can identify those great moments that hooked, intrigued, and tickled you originally, especially the parts that kicked you off the page and into a place you didn’t expect to go.

You’d be amazed how much you can learn about yourself as a writer this way.

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Dear Editor, I recently watched The Road. I hated the movie because I felt like the stupid decisions the characters made were the only thing furthering the plot. They jumped back and forth from the frying pan to the fire so often, I was kind of hoping they’d just go ahead and end it all. How do I keep tension high, but keep my characters intelligent?—Kathryn Estrada

This is a fabulous point to make: the distinction between the characters’ motivation and the writer’s. Do not confuse yourself with your characters. They are not you.

The bad news is that this is a common failing in work that’s been well-outlined. You know where your characters have to go and what they have to do in order to get where you want them to be at the climax, when you intend to blow them sky-high. So you make them go and do those things. You have the power.

And in the process of accomplishing this, you strip them of the power that should rightfully be their own.

You have confused your motivation with theirs.

The good news is that this can be cured with ONE FIX.

Cause-&-effect.

Now, I’m being a bit disingenuous pretending this one fix is, you know, just the one thing you have to do, like turning on a radio. It’s not. It’s a mind-set you have to adopt now and forever, and you have to train yourself over the long haul to think in terms of cause-&-effect throughout the entire writing of every novel you ever produce, from the first squirt of an idea to the final polish.

Cause-&-effect means everything your characters do has effects, which ripple outward in all directions. Does your protagonist decide to go home after a twenty years’ hiatus? That causes certain things (and no others) to happen. Does your villain decide to give in to their urge for pyromania? This causes completely different things to happen. Do your characters say things they shouldn’t? Those cause effects. Do they go places they know better than to go? That causes effects. Do they meet or not meet, travel or not travel, exchange or not exchange information, turn left or right at the crossroads? Every single thing they do. . .causes effects.

NOT ONLY THAT. But the causes are different depending upon the characters.

You know why? Because characters are driven by needs. Each of your characters must have distinct and different needs. (What’s the fun of reading about a bunch of people who all have the same need? As Niles Fraser once so succinctly said about waltzing, “H’m. Boring. Yet difficult.”)

And needs are motivation. That motivation causes those characters to make the decisions they do, to choose the things they choose, to cause the effects they cause. The ways in which these conflicting needs cause conflicting effects are the complications that drive your story. And the inevitability of this chain of cause-&-effect (your characters need to make these decisions, they can’t avoid it) is the inevitability you need for a truly stunning climax.

Boom, boom, boom, from hook through development to climax: cause, its effect, which is a new cause, with a new effect, the tension of the inevitable. . .boom, boom, boom.

(I discuss this all in much greater depth in Chapter 14 “Plotting Your Way Out of a Paper Bag” of The Art & Craft of Fiction.)

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Dear Victoria, I’ve just been offered my first book deal by a professional digital publisher. They’ve sent me a deal sheet and asked if I have an agent or if I will be doing my own contract negotiations. As I’m a new author and have been focusing my efforts on writing for ebook markets like Ellora’s Cave and Samhain, I hadn’t given thought to approaching an agent before. Now, I’m getting dizzy looking at this deal and feeling in over my head!

Should I change my mind and query an agent with this deal? Or is it possible to successfully negotiate a contract without one? My concern is that I am not sure where my fiction career is heading after this book. I might continue to write novellas for ebook companies. Admittedly, I have a short attention span—but I also wish to hone my craft and get a few publications under my wings before submitting to larger print publishers. Are there resources for agentless writers? Thank you!—Christine

Well, congratulations, Christine! An offer of publication is always a nice thing to have.

I’m glad you asked about this situation, as I think it’s becoming more common these days. And I’ll tell you: I recommend getting an agent.

There are several reasons for this:

1) A lot of digital-only publishers are on the up-&-up. And a lot of them are not. This is because digital publishing can take very little effort on the part of the publisher—depending upon their standards—making it all income and almost no outlay for them. If they get you to sign a contract giving them the bulk of whatever profit is made, they just made their money for nothing more than being smarter than you. Thanks, guys!

The same is true of Print-On-Demand (POD). Recently, a client of mine negotiated without an agent with a small independent publisher who wanted infinite POD rights to her novel. She got a lot of advice from friends and professional contacts and eventually, when the publisher refused to budge, pulled out of the negotiations. She now has an agent shopping her (very beautiful) novel around and is feeling incredibly thankful for having escaped that close call. And she’s not a rube, either—she’s a highly talented and very intelligent writer, with a lawyer husband looking out for her best interests.

Unless you’re already a veteran of the industry, the one way to make certain you’re not tangling with a snakeoil salesperson is to get a licensed agent involved. Reputable acquisitions editors are always gracious about understanding the need for this.

2) A licensed agent has a vested interest in your book being the best it can be before it’s thrown to the lions. Shady publishers do not. Agents are looking at getting 15% of as many sales as they can possibly get out of not only this book, but every book you write from now on. They don’t want 15% once. They want 15% for the rest of your working career. Otherwise they don’t get to eat.

Shady publishers want as much as they can lay their hands on right now, before you wise up and realize you’re giving something for nothing. So they publish a lot of stuff that is simply not ready for publication. Take my word for it: you do not want your name published on your early drafts. Remember what Anne Lamott said? Those early drafts—as much as you might love them when you first write them—are shitty.

3) There’s a lot more to publishing than ebooks. As Donald Maass pointed out in the interview Monday, ebooks are only about 4% of the market, while there’s a whole plethora of such things as territory and sub-rights involved in all types of publishing: digital, audio, print. Do you know what those things are? Because a licensed agent does.

4) Even if you know all about territory, sub-rights, print, audio, and ebooks, are certain your publisher is decent and intends to be completely fair with you, and know for a fact that your novel has been edited by a high-level professional editor into the best shape it can possibly be. . .a licensed agent has the clout of multiple authors and their multiple wonderful, salable books that a single author simply doesn’t have. Make no mistake: the author-publisher relationship is fundamentally confrontational. They have something you want—publication—and you have something they want—a book. Both of you want to get the best financial deal. An agent steps into the breach to represent the author’s interests in a way that no publisher (unless they intend to go broke) ever will.

Now, CAN you negotiate without an agent? Sure, you can. That’s what my co-author and I did with my first book, Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators. Guess what? We got taken to the cleaners by our acquisitions editor at Prentice Hall. Joke’s on us.

However, agent-hunting can be a huge hassle and take forever, especially these days. So if you aren’t interested in that whole song-&-dance, you can at least join the National Writer’s Union. They are extremely helpful and, although they can’t represent your interests to a publisher the way an agent can, they can certainly work with you to make sure you don’t get sold snakeoil.

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