Giving Up Fantasy to Get the Dream

The thing about getting down about querying is that it's easy, but it's smarter not to give up precious time to it.  Indulge the frustration, sure - at least from time to time.  But do the work.

All of us think we are the Special One ... the one for whom querying will NOT, somehow, turn out to be a lengthy process.  All we have to do is hit a list repping our genre, and it won't take but a few agents to find the one(s) who'll fall in love with our work.

Take a walk down the street, though, and consider definitions.  What I write, in historical fiction, is only one kind of many, many types of stories that are also historical fiction.  The general definition of the genre is WWI or earlier ... but a person born after a certain period, writing about it - someone born in the 1970s, setting their work in the 1950s - may be considered to be writing historical fiction.  Taken to a certain kind of conclusion:  there is histfic set in the duration of my own lifespan, kiddies.

Sobering.

But a good object lesson.  Just because an agent lists histfic among her or his interests does not mean they all see the exact same sepia-toned portraiture when they envision the genre.  They don't all even see the same cultures and countries (and it's all too easy for us hidebound writer-types to forget about this).  Many love stories of historical figures, or royalty, or the notorious - but many others want their characters to be closer to the ground, not the celebrities of the historical record.

Good writing is key, of course - but it does NOTHING to abbreviate the process.

In a room of 200 people, maybe ten will all share a certain type of taste.  The job of querying is to politely approach these 200 strangers, to tell them what you've produced, and to find out whether they are one of those magical ten.

There's no way, in advance, to really KNOW what someone likes.  Even reading interviews and researching, as necessary as it is, only eliminates:  it doesn't guarantee that elusive simpatico.  As we do with finding images in the clouds, or recognizing ourselves in our horoscopes, when we read interviews, we may create "matches" the other party doesn't subscribe to.  Just because *I* think Josephina Doe will surely adore my work because she repped a histfic set in France, or said that thing in an interview about loving old musty castles, doesn't mean she doesn't prefer a little bodice-ripping or happens to find the religious-history aspects of my story deadly boring.  Or that she's not in a bad mood the day she receives my query, or has had sixteen other musty castle lovers quoting that same interview at her in the space of a single week.

You just have to go through the room full of strangers.

EVERY one of us will think, at the beginning:  "I won't have to do that."  That first in-person pitch that was so animated and friendly, ending in a request for a partial ... feels so good.  As to that, so does the second, and the third.

Doesn't matter.

Every author with any brains will get over the fantasies, and get down to work.

And learn that eight weeks go by less painfully if you let go of the entitlement  of talent, and take on the job at hand.



I have said (at the top of this very page):  hope is what ambition is made of.

Hope is great, and beautiful.  But ambition is the only way to get an agent.