Two new remote internship openings!

We are once again looking for two remote (unpaid) interns, people who like to read books by authors like:

Tana French

Eleanor Brown

Jacqueline Sheehan

Jodi Picoult

Gillian Flynn

Lori Roy

Laurie Notaro

Celia Rivenbark

Elin Hilderbrand

Kristin Hannah

Jeannette Walls

Kate Atkinson

This is an eclectic list, so obviously you don't need to like everyone on it! But basically, you should like at least two of the following genres: humor, memoir, upmarket women's fiction and literary suspense.

You do not need to have any kind of publishing experience or even publishing aspirations. We are just looking for people who love books and love to read.  You do not need to live in New York, this is a remote internship.  Please note that it is unpaid.

Please send e-mail to nicole@thebentagency.com. Please put "generalist intern" in the subject line. Tell us why you want the internship, attach a resume if you have one although it's not essential, and list the last ten books you read and your ten favorite books.

Please do not apply if you are primarily a young adult/middle grade reader. It's fine if you do some of that, but we already have our young adult/middle grade specialists in place.

If you have applied in the past you are more than welcome to apply again.

We ask for at least a 10 hour a week time commitment.

“Are We There Yet?” Thoughts on Process, from TBA client Danielle Davis

I’m very pleased to share this piece on process, and knowing when you’re finished, from my client Danielle Davis.  I fell in love with Danielle’s writing the minute I read it, and as you can guess from this, she’s one of the most thoughtful, intrepid writers I’ve been lucky to know.  She also has some very good advice to share on the longing we all have to be done, to know that the hard work is complete, and how to balance that against the time that every project must take.  Enjoy!  -- Susan

 

Some call the desire to wrap up a writing project as soon as possible, too soon, “early closure.”

Students often have that.

I have that too.

It’s just so tempting to be done.

But, no. Writing is a process of indeterminable length. And every writer’s process is different, perhaps with every project.

There’s revisiting, reimagining, rewriting. Reading it aloud dozens of times.

For me, there’s walking, playing with the cat, drinking tea, watching Project Runway.

And perhaps most importantly, there’s discovering the heart of the story. Its essence. Its core. The thing authentic to me (you) and the story I (you) want to tell.

I remember the triumphant feeling of finishing my first picture book manuscript. Of course, I thought it was perfect. Hahahaha.

I kept working on it. I got feedback. I joined SCBWI. I even sent it out to agents, to editors. And then, after revision, I sent it out again.

I remember the frustration of thinking, “When is this going to happen?” followed by “Never, obviously.” I wanted process and rejection to be over. Closed. Now, please.

Perhaps it wasn’t yet perfect after all.

I moved on. There was another picture book manuscript. And another. Another. Another. Each written, revised, sent out, and ultimately returned to my mail or inbox.

Over time, I gave up on some.

Others I carried in the back of my mind, so they could root around and grow into something else.

Seven years after I wrote that first one I was up on a cold night, shivering instead of sleeping. The title floated around my head and I couldn’t let it go, just like I couldn’t get warm under the blankets. I loved the title, the characters, the idea. I just didn’t like the story.

I’d have to change it. And I finally had some direction as to how.

It started as a book about a girl who loses something and her magical journey to get it back.

But things had changed in the years since that first draft.

I’d read stacks of picture books.

Studied my heroes: Oliver Jeffers, Mary Lyn Ray, Shaun Tan, and others.

Practiced.

And finally, I’d had some hands-on experience with loss myself.

It wasn’t until my dad was diagnosed with brain cancer that I really got to know him. He was sixty-five. I was thirty. It was kind of late. But in his impending disappearance from the world, we connected in a way we never had or could before. Everything that had been between us fell away. Through those ten months of feeding him spoonfuls, holding his hand, listening, we became real to each other and, though it may sound strange, that’s when I finally loved my father. And he loved me.

Then he was gone.

And I couldn’t get him back.

My character had lost a special thing too, and it turned out no kind of magic was going to bring it back (at least not this time).

So what would she do? How would she cope with loss? What would be her story?

Now the book is about a girl who loses something, grieves it, holds it in her heart, and then, lets her heart grow to be able to love something else. Not the same thing, not a replacement thing, but another, different, also wonderful thing.

It will never be the same, but she opens herself to what is. Now.

While not an autobiographical story, it did take time and personal experience to find the heart of the book. The one I wanted to write, that was authentic to me.

But it doesn’t have to take a number of years or the passing of a loved one to write less than 500 words. Let’s hope not, right?!

When you resist the universal urge to be done, like yesterday already, the early closure monster can stop screaming in impatience, doubt, and despair. (Or you can ignore it.)

You can ask questions like:

What is this story really about?

What’s the heart of it?

Why am I writing this book?

How is it something only I can tell?

You can watch [insert TV show of choice].

The magic, the payoff, is in process.

When you’re there, you’re there.

It’s really about getting to the story in the story. Not the end, but the essence.

In Answer To Your Questions--a post by Jenny

I recently received an email from Chris Branam, a graduate student at Antioch University Midwest.   As part of his course work for their creative writing program, he is required to interview a literary agent and he sent me the following questions:


1.       When did you realize you wanted to become a literary agent?
2.       How was the process of becoming a literary agent?
3.       Where should someone wanting to become an agent begin?
4.       Is New York an essential pilgrimage for anyone wanting to become an agent/writer?
5.       There are clearly trends in the publishing world that spread like wildfire (vampires, YA dystopian novels, etc.) Are there many agents still willing to look at authors who are not genre based and work in literary fiction/non-fiction?
6.       Is it prudent to get some work out there in literary magazines or otherwise before looking for an agent?
7.       Has the publishing world changed since you began your career and in what way?
8.       Is it advisable for an author to keep a blog?
9.       What makes you choose one writer over another?
10.   Is there any further advice for new authors that comes to mind?

I asked Chris if I could answer his questions on my blog, since it struck me that this might be good information to share with aspiring agents and writers alike and he graciously agreed.   

Here are the answers to Chris's questions.

1.  When I was a kid, my mom got me this great book called something like, "careers for people who love to read."   I have no idea if it's still available but it pretty much changed my whole life because it was then that I realized I wanted to be in publishing.  Then, in college, I took a terrific class called "Magazine Editing and Publishing" and Joyce Johnson, author of IN THE NIGHT CAFE, came and spoke to us.  I'll never forget it because she told us, in so many words, "When you're an editor, you can't buy what you want to because you have to answer to a bunch of different people in house who will tell you what you can and can't do.  Be an agent--you have a lot more freedom."   And so that pretty much decided it for me.  I knew I was pretty independent and entrepreneurial and that I'd probably be a lot happier if I could make my own decisions about what books I wanted to work with.

2. It was hard, really hard!  I started out as an assistant to an agent.  I sort of had it in my head that I would be an assistant for a while and then one day I would magically get a promotion and someone would say, "congratulations, you're an agent!" and I would start selling books right away and be paid a salary for it.   But it really didn't work that way--my boss, understandably, wanted an assistant, not a junior agent.  So after a few years I left that job and went to work for an agency that paid me on commission alone.   I had a mortgage and no salary, so I had to really hustle to make a living--looking back, I think it was a great way to start, because if I didn't sell books I would have been in a lot of trouble.   I also thought it was going to be really easy to sell books and it turned out it was hard.   I had  to create a name and a reputation and I had to get a sense of what editors were looking for--and I also had to build a client list from scratch.

3. I think with an internship or at a publishing course or really both.   And then start as an assistant either for a publisher or for an agent.  I always wished that I had some experience at a publishing house so I had more first-hand knowledge of how the acquisitions process went.   I did work at a book store for a while though, and that has been invaluable experience just in terms of understanding how people make decisions about what books to buy.

4.  Not necessarily.   Kristin Nelson, for one, has been a very successful agent without ever living in NYC.

5.  A great many agents focus still on literary fiction.   Look at people like Eric Simonoff, Bill Clegg, Marly Rusoff, Leigh Feldman, and Zoe Pagnamenta, just to name a few, who are very successfully focusing on selling literary works.

6. There are a lot of ways to attract the attention of an agent these days.  You can publish in literary magazines, you can create a successful blog or vlog, you can build a twitter or Facebook audience, you can self-publish successfully, or you can just be a great writer with a great concept.   I tend to advise people to focus on what they do best--if you are a good short story writer, for instance, focus on magazines.   If you are good at social media, focus on that.

7. I blogged on this recently and so I'll be lazy and just link to it here.

8. Well, see my answer to 6. above.  I think if you are good at it and you enjoy it and you know how to drive traffic to it, yes, you should blog.   Otherwise, not.   If you don't like it, you probably won't be consistent, which is important when you're blogging, and if you don't know how to drive traffic to it, it's not going to do much in terms of building your audience.

9. Quality of writing, quality of ideas, in a nutshell.   There are other factors but those are the biggest.

10. Tenacity is more important than anything else.  It even trumps talent, I would say.   Believe in yourself and never give up, no matter what.  

Thanks very much to Chris Branam for contacting me with such good questions and for letting me share them with you.   Chris can be found blogging here if you'd like to reach him.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Jenny

Beginnings, Endings, and the stuff in between--a post from Jenny on editing your ms

Lately I've been reading some really otherwise great manuscripts that seem to share the same three problems.  Since I'm seeing these missteps so much, I'm figuring that maybe I should write about them in the hopes that my advice will apply to the books of some of the readers of this blog as well.  The good news is that these problems are all very fixable--so read on and see if you think your book might be suffering from these same three writerly mistakes.

1. You don't need the first 50 pages.   Let me clarify.  You needed to *write* the first 50 pages.   You needed them to understand your characters better by giving them a back story.   But now that the book is done, your characters are alive and interesting and informed by the knowledge that these pages gave you.   So while you needed to write these pages, the reader doesn't need to read them.   Trust your characters to reveal themselves in the rest of the book and cut out the back story that is now slowing your book down.  

2. Your characters need to *feel* more.   I think "show don't tell" has been drummed into our heads so long and so often that we forget that we do need to let the reader into our characters' heads.   While we don't want you to do a big info dump of character development and we do want your characters to reveal themselves through action, you still also need to tell us sometimes what they are thinking and feeling along with that.  Let's call your main character Bob.  If you put Bob in a crazy situation, remember to tell us what his reaction is to that situation--or poor Bob will feel flat and lifeless to the reader.

3.  Your ending is rushed.  Readers love a satisfying ending.   Think of all the times you raced through a book only to feel let down by the ending.  Try to go in the opposite direction with your book.   I find a lot of writers want to have ambiguity or loose ends in an ending and I think that often that's the wrong impulse.   The beauty of a book, as opposed to life, is that we can have an ending that ties things up, or at least ties a lot of things up.   An ending should also provide a thorough, complex explanation of any motivations or happenings that seemed mysterious throughout the book.   I'm noticing that many of the endings I am reading in unpubbed manuscripts these days would be improved by adding at least an entire chapter of material.  

Do you feel your manuscript might share some of these issues?  Let me know in the comments.   And happy revising!

Jenny