I'm really pleased to have Robert J. Begiebing as a guest on my blog today. A recipient of the Langum Prize for historical fiction, Robert is the author of seven books, a play, and over thirty articles and stories. He is the founding director of the Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction, and Professor of English Emeritus, at Southern NH University.
I could go on with the introduction, but I think Robert's following post speaks beautifully for his credentials. If you're a writer who wants to make editors, agents and dare I say readers take early notice of your fiction, you've definitely found the right advice to follow. So here's Robert...
Selling Your Novel: Creating a
Compelling First Impression, Robert Begiebing
I’m often
asked how to approach an agent or editor with a manuscript for a novel. Let’s assume that through many revisions and
critiques you’ve completed a novel. You
have a referral or a list of agents and editors to query. You know you only get one shot in the door
with each editor or agent, so how do you prepare the most engaging materials
possible? The three basic elements are
the query letter, the synopsis, and the first thirty pages (or three chapters,
whichever comes first). There are lots
of sources to get help with the first two, but the manuscript sample is perhaps
the most difficult and most misunderstood.
So assuming you know how to set up a manuscript typographically, let’s
focus on the manuscript sample, based on my own experience and on what I’ve
been hearing from editors and agents for years in answer to questions from
others.
What does a
professional reader NOT want to see in the opening of your novel?
·
Giveaways
to your amateurism: all kinds of authorial tics or other repetitive annoyances
and hack constructions, (from the use of ellipses to indicate suspense, to
italics to indicate moments of fear or stress, to single-sentence paragraphs to
indicate climactic zingers or sentimental emphases, and so on).
·
Prologues,
especially lengthy ones, that if containing information absolutely needed
should be reprocessed into the tale itself; avoid, in short, anything that
keeps the reader from getting right into the central drama. A venerable editor at Norton upon
encountering a prologue of any kind used to say, “Get out of the bathtub!”
because she read so many fictional prologues set in tubs where protagonists
ruminate on life and their problems.
What are the
attributes or qualities of successful opening pages, some of which a
professional reader hopes to see in your ms.?
·
Indications
that by your reading, your writing experience and education, and by, in short,
your long and painful apprenticeship, you are no longer an amateur or
dilettante.
·
Energy,
animation, originality of VOICE (a question of your point of view choices and
the narrative persona you’ve created).
One agent told my workshop students he looks for a certain “intensity”
of voice or language.
·
A
texture of mind or descriptive power that comes through the prose.
·
“Profluence”
( we’re getting somewhere, on to something, care where the story is going, a
power of interest, set up early and satisfied later). The Pull: novelist John Gardner’s sense (from
Aristotle) of character (the emotional core) and plot (the profluent focus of
your narrative plan). An engaging drama
has begun.
·
An
“Inciting Incident” that radically disrupts the balance of forces in your protagonist’s life to which he/ she must
react, through progressive complications (a point I borrow from Robert McKee’s
book Story).
·
Drama
vs. Exposition/ Explanations/ Backstory.
Resist the Urge to Explain (RUE) and weave in necessary but brief
segments of backstory later, once the reader is hooked and the drama is fully
underway.
·
A
sense of your opening chapter especially as the crucial “manner by which reader
gains entrance,” to quote Douglas Bauer’s The
Stuff of Fiction.
·
Questions
raised in the reader’s mind.
·
That
opening sentence. As an editor at
Houghton Mifflin once said, “If you can’t write that opening sentence, I don’t have
much hope for your ability to write the rest of the book.”
·
Your
mastery of dialogue (see three chapters devoted to it in Renni Browne and Dave
King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers)
·
A
clear sense of the book’s subject matter and major characters.
·
Any
foretelling of theme, purpose, or significance in an intriguing manner.
Once more,
you certainly want to avoid any coy, irrelevant, or expository/ explanatory material
too soon that might be bottling up your real beginning of the conflict and drama.
Happy
writing. Enjoy the journey.
Your friend,
Robert J. Begiebing
The 20th anniversary edition of The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin, a
novel set in 17th-century New England, will be released on August 14, 2012 and
is now available for pre-order. Originally published the early 1990s, Mistress Coffin was a Main Selection in
The Literary Guild, The Mystery Guild, and Doubleday Book Clubs, and is
currently optioned for a film.
Link to Book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Mistress-Hardscrabble-Books-Fiction-England/dp/1611683386/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1343818134&sr=8-2&keywords=the+strange+death+of+mistress+coffin
