Weekend Update #10.1: The SWiYNTAs

(For the week ending 18/3.)

Stop Writing if You Need This Advice award nominees:

• Agent Kristin suggests you decide whether your book is fiction or non-fiction, preferably before you write it. When was the last time you read and enjoyed a "message" novel? (Bonus points if it was a message you didn't already believe in. If you say Da Vinci Code, stop writing.)
• The Rejecter implores you: don't send a CD with your query letter. Of anything. This says one of two things to your prospective agent: my query letter sucks, so I hope you'll just read the manuscript, which is in virus_riddled_incompatible_file_format.doc, or I'm really a musician, but every record company turned me down, so I hope you'll listen to the poetry of my rockin' lyrics.
• If your queries aren't even making it past the agent's intern, here's why. Now stop writing. Spencer Ellsworth, who sounds like a character in a Jane Austen novel but is actually the new intern/slushpile marauder for agents Lori Perkins and Jenny Rappaport, kindly details some of his bad writing filters, to save you the trouble of submitting.
• Fiction Scribe explains why paragraph breaks must be used wisely.
• The Rejecter says don't use any words to describe your novel that you can't find labelling a bookstore shelf -- especially "quirky". Never, ever "quirky". "Quirky" says "even I don't know what I've written".
• Jenny Rappaport begs you to send the correct return postage, in stamps. I suggest you don't bother with return postage at all. Anything that makes it easier for the agent/publisher to say "this guy's an idiot, he can't do us the basic courtesy of not costing us money to say no to something we didn't even request" is one step closer to the constant frustration that will make you stop writing for good.
• Slush Pile Diva points out that happy people are dull, and prologues are for writers who can't write beginnings. It's the same post, but it's so nice, I linked it twice.

SWiYNTA-MS:

• If you're lucky enough to secure the services of an agent who doesn't charge you reading fees, Miss Snark recommends that you let the agent do their job.
• If you're lucky enough to get a publisher interested in sending you something on paper, read the contract carefully, particularly to check if the word 'born' has been crossed out of the 'first right of refusal' clause (methinks the lawyer who wrote the contract in question used to work in the music industry).
• Don't be an asshole. Assholes make great entrepreneurs and terrible novelists. A publisher might not care too much about an author's assholarity if the book sells, but the agent will, because no-one likes to talk to an asshole. For every person in the publishing business who is prepared to overlook your assholiness on the off chance of making a buck, there are a dozen who won't give an asshole an even break.
• Finish the damn book, even if it's a memoir, and you're not dead yet. I think you should always wait until after you're dead to finish your memoirs. If you life is interesting, someone else will write about you.
• When you're sending material to an agent/publisher via digital file, remove your comments/notes from the file. And don't send a paper copy with all your revision scribbles. This isn't high school; you don't have to show your working.
• And the one you should tape to your monitor, etch into your bathroom mirror, tattoo on your wrist just above your watch, and burn into your inner eyelids -- don't talk about your work-in-progress, especially in social situations where real writers or publishing folks may be within earshot. Nothing says Wannabe quite like a discussion about a bunch of fragmented ideas that you'll never finish, let alone see through to publication. At best, people who don't know what you're talking about will think you know what you're talking about. At best. Everyone else will wish they smoked so they could stub out a cigar on your tongue.