I’ve read that one of the main questions to ask on The Call is about submission strategy. I get why this is important to ask, but I’m not sure how to evaluate the response.

Are there strategies that work better than others? How do I know if the agent’s vision for sub strategy is a good one if I’ve never done it before? What even are the strategies?

Thanks!

I get that drafting a novel can be a long, solitary experience. So over the course of that time, you might get antsy for someone to read what you're working on. But I can't stress enough how much you probably don't need outside feedback yet.

If you're not sure if your story works from a structural standpoint, you need to read more books. In the course of your daily reading habit, if you're reading contemporary (last five years) traditionally published books in your genre, you should be able to see what those authors do to craft stories and compare it to your own.

If you haven't done that, feedback won't be helpful to you yet because you won't know how to evaluate the validity of that feedback, nor will you be able to understand it or implement it.

The rush to get feedback is also leading a lot of writers to bad sources. Your friends and family don't necessarily know anything about writing, and they'll happily lie to your face to avoid ruffling your feathers. Random beta readers you find online have no way to confirm to you that they know what they're talking about either. Paying thousands of dollars to an editor from Fiverr who claims they've got 20 years experience even though they're only 32 years old is putting you in a financial hole your story is unlikely to ever make enough money to pull you out of.

So all that means that when you're in a critical stage of your development as a writer, instead of spending time reading and writing, instead of sharpening your authorial confidence, instead of making the kinds of decisions that will lead to development of your style and practice of writing, you're being responsive to the whims of some random person just because it tickles you to get feedback.

Yes, great authors have great editors, but you are not a great author yet. The editor won't make you great.

The point in which you're ready for feedback is when you've written the draft of a story which, based on your extensive history of reading stories like it, you are confident is a strong story. Then, you edit it yourself for multiple rounds based on your extensive history of reading stories like it. Then, the people you need to get feedback from are either trusted writer friends whose work you admire and who have familiarity with reading for a critical lens, or literary agents who you can pitch for free (yes, agents will give you form rejection, but a form rejection IS FEEDBACK--it means your premise or writing didn't wow enough for more than a form rejection).

Feedback feels good. It's entertaining. "Oh my God, someone read my work and is now talking to me about it!" But until you're highly confident that you've got a winner on your hands, you probably don't need feedback yet.

Tell her happy Mother’s Day. Ask her what her plans are for the day. Tell her what you’ve been up to as of late. Thank her, not because she was perfect, but because she tried her best with what she had. Talk to her for at least ten minutes. Even better if you can send her a Starbucks gift card or something so she can buy herself a little treat.

If we all do it, the Hornets should be able to get the 1st overall pick.

[You're free to do this or not do it. This post is for the many, many people who ask for help coming up with story ideas. If your story isn't about any of the things below, I am not saying your story is bad.]

Think about watershed moments. Weddings. Funerals. Family reunions. The birth of a child. A diagnosis. Getting fired. A break in a cold case. A sudden rise to fame. What are things that change people's lives forever? A good way I've heard it verbalized is that the story you're writing should be about the most important thing that's ever happened to your protagonist.

Go to a new place. The wedding takes place on a tropical beach at a fancy resort. The funeral requires scattering the ashes in the rings of a distant moon. The family reunion is back in the rural Montana farming community. The new child requires the posh Manhattanite to move out to the country for more space. The diagnosis leads to a lengthy hospital stay. Getting fired forces moving back in the parents. The break in the cold case leads back to the site of the summer camp where the disappearance first took place. The sudden rise to fame pushes us to Hollywood.

Explore a layered contradiction ("I like big buts"). So this woman is a parole officer. She's surrounded by sad stories every day or drug addiction, crime, and poverty, BUT she remains doggedly optimistic. She was raised by wealthy parents, BUT she chose to help the less fortunate instead, BUT her belief she's making a difference is slipping. Her favorite parolee is a teenage girl whose close to getting her life back together, BUT the girl surprisingly fails a drug test one day. The parole officer's job is to report the truth, BUT she decides to fabricate the test results instead. She thinks she's done the right thing, BUT the parolee is arrested on suspicion of murder. You can get a long way by layering in contradictions, conflict, and BUTS as you're coming up with the premise.

Take an old premise and give it a new twist. Emma Pattee's phenomenal book Tilt took the classic natural disaster narrative and made it fresh by making the protagonist a heavily pregnant woman narrating the experience of the disaster to her unborn child. There are endless ways writers can remix and reinvent stories. That's part of why it's so important to read. Some of the best ideas come from moments where you're reading and think "This is cool, but what if it was like this?"

Thanks for any input. Have heavily revised the manuscript in an exclusive R&R. Not querying yet but want it ready just in case.

-

Hi, agent.

I’m excited to share THE BACHELORS, a 91,000 word upmarket novel about a couple whose marriage is tested when the wife accepts an invitation to attend her ex boyfriend's bachelor trip. The story is a drama interwoven with a sense of dread, similar to Emma Pattee's Tilt or Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind.

When Mara’s habit of an afternoon glass of wine cascades into her showing up drunk to school pickup, she realizes her suburban malaise has become a full blown crisis. A chance to blow off some steam arrives when her male best friend from college invites her to his bachelor trip. The reformed party girl is convinced a weekend spent partying in the mountains of North Carolina is the perfect way to shake out the cobwebs. 

Mara’s husband David is stunned. A farm boy at heart from rural Pennsylvania, he finds the whole idea perverse. David’s delusion of their perfectly content marriage is shattered when Mara accepts the invitation despite his objections. 

On the first night of the bachelor trip, Mara finds there’s nothing wild about three overweight millennial men sitting around scrolling on their phones. Desperate for a cathartic rager, Mara goads the groomsmen into wilder behavior. The weekend descends into a haze of alcohol, body shots, fights, and hot tub confessions as Mara nurses a long simmering romance with the groom.

Back home, David has a night out with Taylor, a family friend and Mara’s mirror opposite. He realizes there’s a mutual attraction between himself and Taylor, and with his animosity toward his wife’s trip, he’s not sure he can resist temptation. Worse, he’s not sure he wants to. 

When Mara learns her husband has been out with Taylor, she enters a self-destructive tailspin thanks to a baggie of cocaine. As the chaos of the trip grows, so does the dread. A strange woman has been harassing Mara the entire time she’s been on the mountain, and the woman is growing more threatening.

Mara and David must separately confront their disillusionment with domestic life, the shortcomings of their upbringings, and their anxieties around parenthood if their marriage is to survive its toughest, and most dangerous, challenge yet. 

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Now, if you’re a hobbyist or writing primarily for fun or self-expression, the difference doesn’t matter. You can write whatever you want.

For those who hope to write for an audience, it’s good to remember that anything holding you back from finishing your story or making it click the way you want to is something you can just move on from.

As the author, you have full control over your story. Stories can work in infinite ways. They don’t *need* to be anything.

For the most part, the only things a reader *needs* are to be able to understand the story and to be entertained by the story.

So if you’ve felt the following:

“This scene is boring, but it needs to be here.”

“I don’t know how to write this character perspective, but he needs to be this way.”

“This prologue is an info dump, but I need to explain this bit of lore.”

“My manuscript is 250K words long, but it needs every chapter.”

I’d say you can challenge yourself by making a hard distinction between what you need and what you want. That’s not to say cut everything you want. But the effect will be a story with the best, juiciest, most engaging narrative possible.

If you're self-publishing, readers might not read past that point when looking at your sample. If you're trad publishing, many agents only take a very small writing sample (as few as five pages).

So what's stopping you from giving the reader the exact thing you promised in the blurb on the very first page?

"But there's backstory they need to understand first."

The inciting incident should be concrete enough that we can understand why it's important on its face without needing to know all that much about the world. If not, your premise might need some work.

What make prose special is we have the ability to write characters that slip into the present, past, and speculative dimensions seamlessly. "He swung the sword the way his father taught him years ago in that dusty dojo." The backstory that deepens the meaning of the inciting incident can be introduced while you're pushing the action forward.

"But what I want to show what a normal day looks like first."

Readers didn't pick up the book to read about normal days. You can give them what a normal day was like in reflection, flashbacks, dialogue with other characters. You can do it all in chapter one if you really feel the need to get it in early. But there's no reason you can't do it all after you do the inciting incident.

I think a lot of folks here might be struggling to start/finish works because they're bored. The solution is simply to not write things that are boring. You're the author.

Skip the setup and jump right in.

[Boilerplate disclaimer: This is something I'm just sharing you can try. You don't have to do this. If you don't do this, I'm not saying your story is bad. Just because something doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it can't work.]