THE FIRST FIVE PAGES

***Note: I will be out of the country from March 11 until May 12, 2016. During that time I will be checking my work email but I will not be working on manuscripts. Thank you for your understanding. Nor will I be posting my blog. I will return to both editing and blogging upon return in mid May.

It’s a funny thing, the first five pages of a manuscript. They say—I’m referring to agents, editors, and publishers here—that the first five pages (or first few chapters, really) should have no back story; that it should be all about dialogue, action, placing the character, the protagonist, into a journey; the point of no return.

I agree that there should be limited back story, that it should use action and dialogue, and that the main character should start their journey. But the back story thing is funny. About a year ago I referenced an article in the 2013 Writers Digest which mentioned that you should stick back story…back. That you should wait as long as possible to use it. At first I agreed. But then I started reading more bestsellers.

It’s ironic, that article in WD, because Lee Child was on the cover. I recently started reading Child’s book, A Wanted Man (Jack Reacher series). Know when back story is used? Page one. Actually, paragraph one. Yup. And it doesn’t ease up. At all. Back story throughout. Then I noticed that the more books I read, the more this was the case. Take The Hunger Games for instance. Back story begins on roughly page five. Yeah. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, same deal, right off the bat.

There are so many books that do not follow these so-called ‘rules’ we hear so often from professionals in the field. The trick and the truth, it seems to me, is to say forget the goddamn rules and just write the best story you can. Sure, there are general guidelines to follow. For example, for a debut novelist, you should try your best to begin the story with a hook sentence. You should try to create some ‘showing’ scenes versus only prose describing and telling. You should place your protagonist on an epic journey that involves high stakes drama: Some kind of ‘death’ should be involved, whether it’s emotional, psychological, or literal. There should be the set-up of hurdles. At the end of the chapter, there should be a tantalizing cliff-hanger.

Those first five pages are what an agent will read and decide on. Ok, let’s be honest; their assistant will read the query first, then the first page, and, if you’re lucky, they’ll read the first five pages. So those pages, of course, have to be solid. Really solid. Make sure there are no copy edit mistakes. Make sure everything is spelled correctly; no logic issues. Make sure you describe the setting, the five Ws, etc. Make sure you’ve got those [high] stakes and that you’ve got the hurdles prepared and the journey ready. The first five pages establish the voice, tone, and the non-verbal contract between the reader and the author: This is how the journey is going to be. Is the reader willing, after page five, to invest hours and hours and days in reading this book? That’s the biggest question to ask yourself. Try reading the first five yourself with that question in mind. Have others your trust read them and get feedback and criticism. Take the first five to a critique writing workshop.

In general, yes, I would say if you’re a newer writer trying to snag literary agent representation and you want to be salable as an author, try to steer clear of back story in the first five pages IF YOU CAN. If it’s imperative to your story, then I say go for it; use it if it works. Remember, what an agent or an editor or a publisher may say about what they accept or not isn’t as important, truthfully, as what’s selling on the market right now. Check out Publishers Marketplace. What’s selling? Truth speaks for itself. Sometimes professionals in the field don’t truly know what they’ll take or what will sell until they read it and take a risk. Risk is a big part of this industry, especially on the agent/publisher side.

So, if you’re a new author and you’re thinking of submitting your book to an agent, my advice is: Write the best book you can, hire a freelance editor, go back in again, and then workshop the book and rewrite, edit and tighten those first five pages as much as you can. And wait until you’ve gone through at least four or five drafts of a book before you submit to an agent; preferably more than that even. We’re talking tight prose. Yes, more and more agents are taking on an “editorial role” in their positions nowadays, but that doesn’t mean the book doesn’t still have to be 95% there. Make it solid; as solid as you can using yourself, critique groups, and a freelance editor. And read blogs about writing and the current industry/market. Blogs like that of Michael Larsen of Larsen-Pomada Literary Agency. Do your research, write the best book you can, polish and edit, rewrite, redraft, and send that puppy out there only when it’s ready.

Then pray to God, sit back, and have faith.

Michael Mohr

Twitter: Michael_Editor

Member: Bay Area Editors’ Forum

Fiction: http://alfiedog.com/fiction/stories/michael-mohr/

Noah Lukeman's "The First Five Pages": http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Five-Pages-Rejection/dp/068485743X

I am a freelance book editor. Mainly I do developmental editing on fiction and memoir books. For fiction, I will look at almost anything other than children’s, middle grade, or picture books. For memoir anything goes. Please send me a query and the first chapter to michaelmohreditor@gmail.com. I will respond asap with my rates if I feel I’m a fit for your work.

Formerly a literary agent’s assistant, I became a book editor after being told by so many professionals in the industry that I had a ‘sharp eye and keen wit’ when it came to editing others’ books. Give me a shout. I can do a 5-10 page [free] test edit; that way you can decide if you’d like to hire me or not without dropping a cent. Currently, I am booked solid until July, 2016.

Mary Karr and “The Art of Memoir”

I admit openly: I had, until recently, never read a Mary Karr book. Until I ordered “The Art of Memoir” (Sept, 2015) a few days ago, and devoured it.

Since I am a book editor who recently worked on a spectacular memoir—Christian Picciolini’s “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead,” about one of the first neo-Nazi skinheads in America in the 80s who got out of the movement and changed his life for the good—and since, furthermore, I am working on outlining and researching for my own memoir, I felt compelled to blog about Karr’s book on the art of the genre.

For the most part, I loved [Karr’s] book. Told in witty, intelligent, practiced prose, Karr stirs the memoir pot by helping the reader understand that memoir is about more than just ‘putting your life down on the page.’ For sure, it is about discerning between fact and fiction (memory can hardly be entirely trusted) and about seeking out the raw, true, vulnerable and protected inside of you and forcing yourself, sometimes aggressively, to hold onto that truth for the bigger, more universal, empathetic connection to said Reader (with a capital ‘R,’ as Karr would say).

She talks about the usual in either fiction or nonfiction writing: show don’t tell; use concrete details and the five senses to paint an authentic picture for us and place us there; use standard fictive techniques like character and story arc (the main character, for instance, must transform by the end of the book); and using dramatic “episodic” scenes like fiction versus simply stating or informing or “telling” the reader information, which usually, except in the case of Nabokov, does not include the reader in the experience directly.

But she takes further steps, moving away from the purely academic and into the realm of writer and human being we can all relate to. For one, she is vulnerable and honest by telling us it took her 17 years (in a certain light) to get the courage together to write her first memoir, “The Liars’ Club.” Once she forged the courage and sat down to actually write the damn thing, she tells us it took her nine months working on just chapter one to “get the voice right,” and two and a half years writing the actual book itself, landing with a nearly print-ready manuscript by that point. Also, she delves into her personal policy of handing out copies of the MS to people she writes about before publication and waiting for feedback, discussion, complaint, rejection, etc (although she claims she’s never once had a rejection).

This made me realize two things: 1) That I feel, for the most part, Christian and I nailed these major points in his book, “Romantic Violence,” and that 2) I understand now that I have a lot more preparation and research and thinking to do around my own personal memoir.

Karr made me realize in “The Art of Memoir” how seriously I need to take the penning of my own story, and how careful I must be around using other people’s identities. She mentions the memoirist should always only write from their own eyes, their own POV, not trying to falsely inject what other people were thinking, since that is literally impossible. It’s hard enough attempting to “accurately” recall what we were thinking all those years ago. She gives numbered points on what to do and not do in memoir—which I found helpful, if not slightly juvenile—and says in passing that you should always “write about your enemies from a place of love.”

She also talks about the inherent importance of the inner and outer enemy. In other words, the protagonist, the main character, should be facing some external hurdle in their life, but they should also be battling themselves in some key manner. An outer enemy, and an inner struggle. This, she argues, creates the literary rub that ultimately drives the “plot” and moves the story forward, as it does in fiction as well.

Karr encourages us to slowly, piece by piece, tear down the many masks we tend to wear and, over the drafting of your memoir, seek to get closer and closer to the “real” truth, whatever that may be. She encourages memoirists to seek the complexity that is innate and inescapable in the human condition, not creating false characters that are black and white, always good in every way or always terrible. Instead, she challenges writers to push through ego fears and societal [in-bred] insecurities and find those deeper, more core, more complex, more realistic character traits that make us all human, that bind us and make us identify and empathize with each other. Do that, she argues, and you will land yourself a worthy audience.

Using examples like Kathryn Harrison (The Kiss), Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory), Michael Herr (Dispatches), and Cheryl Strayed (Wild), as well as many others, she validates her points one by one using concrete examples to demonstrate literary goals. Karr demonstrates with these and other authors (Maya Angelou’s “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings”) how the practiced and artful memoirist can use dramatic scene, concrete detail, the five senses, “carnal” description, and a universal search for The Truth of one’s self that ultimately speaks universally for all of us, in order to deliver magic and change our lives.

Karr says, “I am not much of a writer. But I’m a stubborn little bulldog of a reviser.” Talking ad nauseam about revising and rewriting and editing her manuscripts, we learn the importance of writing the first draft hot, as Stephen King says, and later drafts cold. Meaning allow yourself to write your ass off on the first or second draft. Then go in with your editor’s brain and cut, trim, delete, add, question, research, doubt, ask, wonder, etc. Eventually, you’ll want to hire a professional book editor (like me) to look at the book with objective, respectful but prying and judicious eyes.

In the end, I feel convinced, after reading Karr’s art on the craft of memoir, that this is, indeed, a very important and relevant genre of literature. She mentions that memoir has traditionally always held a backseat to fiction writing in the writing community and, in terms of the global literary conversation, has always been seen as almost what she might call “literary porn.” Lacking in true quality, craft, form, content. Simply telling one’s own tale from no doubt a subjective and faulty point of view. But Karr reminds us that memoir is a secret language between all of us, the language of the heart, and that, by telling our stories, we help shape our own future and we communicate with each other regarding what life is really about.

Authors often say fiction uses lies and deceit to grasp at the bigger truth. No doubt this is true. But memoir aims the arrow directly at it, without any need to hide behind some façade. I am not criticizing fiction (it’s what I mainly write and mainly edit), but only trying to point out that deriding memoir is perhaps just as false. It takes tremendous courage to write one true sentence, as Hemingway famously quipped. Imagine an author like Kathryn Harrison who wrote “The Kiss,” a memoir about incest with her father. (Karr talks about how the media lambasted Harrison for breaking the cultural mold of not talking about such acts.)

We must embrace each other’s truths on the page, recognizing the courage it takes, the fear we must surpass, and the emotion we must inhabit in order to bleed onto the computer. It is no easy feat. As Karr says in “The Art of Memoir,” only the very young see writing as ‘fun.’ The rest of us find it painful. Especially memoir.

If you’re working on a memoir, good luck. If you need those objective eyes, please do let me know. I am about to leave the country on March 11 for two months so would not be able to look at your material in its entirety until late May or June. But I could give an opinion prior to March 11 and potentially provide a [free] test edit on 10-15 pages to give you an idea of my editing. From there we can make a plan. Picciolini’s “Romantic Violence” is being translated into Portuguese and is being used this semester by a Yale professor in her course called “Violent Extremism.”

Michael Mohr

Christian Picciolini’s memoir, “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead”: www.christianpicciolini.com

Email me: michaelmohreditor@gmail.com

Mary Karr interview (about “The Art of Memoir”) with “The Paris Review”: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5992/the-art-of-memoir-no-1-mary-karr

Mary Karr on writing memoir (interview with WNPR, Sept 2015): http://wnpr.org/post/mary-karr-writing-memoirs-no-doubt-ive-gotten-million-things-wrong#stream/0

GETTING YOUR BOOK TO AN AGENT

Many writers out there wonder how, in the hell, can they get their book into the worthy and capable hands of a literary agent. Well, it’s a process.

For one thing, I’ll be blunt: If you have a connection of any kind, use it. If you can nail down a referral, that will help big time. But assuming that’s not an option, and you have to go in ‘cold,’ here’s how you do it.

First off, start by writing the book all the way through. You’d be amazed how many agents tell me that writers submit partially completed manuscripts (or queries that pitch partially completed books). Unless it’s nonfiction—and that’s a different deal—finish the book first.

And not only finish it but have that puppy shining solid. I mean really, really polish that book. This means that you workshop it, get feedback, make changes, etc. It means that you show it to a lot of people both writers and professionals. It means that you hire a professional book editor (like me) to edit the book with skill and patience, from an objective viewpoint.

It means you go over those first five pages again and again and again. Attend writers’ conferences, read agents’ and writers’ websites and blogs about what a good 2016 book (in your genre) does and is and has. Research, research, research!!! And when you’re done with all that, research some more.

Ok, now you’ve got a tight, polished book. You’ve done your research and you know your genre’s preferred word count (the target for fiction in general, minus sci-fi, is about 70-90,000 words), the stakes are high, you’ve got solidly created characters and a strong world built. You’ve hired that editor and have made the suggested changes you agree with. You have read websites and blogs and conferred or consulted with at least one professional with or without a fee about the book industry and specifically your book.

Now is the ‘fun’ part. I am being partially sarcastic, partially serious. Time to look for an agent. This requires more research. Pick maybe ten agents to start out with, maybe even only five. Your call. Do NOT pull the amateur move where you pick out 50 agents at huge firms and send a generic query. They will laugh and reject it without even taking a sip of coffee to think about it. They live to reject this stuff. They also live to find the next J.K.K. Rowling. Trust me. Make it easy for them; make them HAVE TO look at your idea.

Pick your five or 10. Now research. Go to their websites. Don’t know where to start? Google, my friends, Google. We live in 2016; there are no excuses anymore. Fifteen years ago, sure, it was a little more limited. But not anymore. Ok, go to Google, type in ‘Young Adult Romance’ literary agents, or whatever genre you have written. Then go through the list. Star these places on your computer. Make a list on a word.doc file of each agent.

Now, when you look at their sites, make sure they represent YOUR genre (of the book you wrote) and that they seem to like your type of book. Let’s say you wrote a dark, edgy YA book (Young Adult). Find the agent who represents ‘dark, edgy YA.’ Usually it will say this in the bio in one form or another. Also, go a step further. I know this is irritating; it takes time. Go to their client list and Google some of their titles sold. Note where they sold the titles to. This will help you decide if you want to saddle up with said agent. What are your writer’s goals? Small house, medium, large? You can find all of that out online.

When you find a couple of client titles, look hard for any key words of the plot/summary of the book in the online description or the review of the book. If you find any similarities to your book, blammo! You’ve now got a [query] first sentence hook! Use that to compare to your book in the first sentence of your query. It will show the agent that you gave a crap and that you did your homework and that you are genuinely invested in that SPECIFIC agent. This will win you points; you will be that much closer to actually having your work looked at by an agent. There is still no guarantee, the work must speak for itself, but you at least have a higher chance.

Aside from that, make sure you write a killer query letter. Research how to do that online. For query writing and agent spotting, check out Chuck Sambuchino’s website (CLICK HERE). He’s great. Make sure your query follows guidelines and is three succinct paragraphs: a short paragraph about the genre, word-count, audience, and setting/hook sentence; a middle graph about the book (mini synopsis); and a third and final graph about the author (you), any credentials or publications you might have, why you’re the best person to write the book, etc. We’re talking 250-300 words tops. The closer to 250 you can get, the better. Just hook the agent’s attention, that’s really your sole goal. And also have a one- and two-page synopsis. That’s for another post.

Write on.

“You said it. Let’s edit.”

**

Michael Mohr

Freelance Book Editor (Send a book to michaelmohreditor@gmail.com. I charge 5 cents/word.)

Read my Substack writing on culture, politics, personal essays, fiction: SINCERE AMERICAN WRITING