litagent / news / links

this friday comes with some interesting litagent links:

- The evolving role of agents (about changes in the publishing world and their present and possible future effects in the litagent world) (via Nathan Bransford LitAgentBlog)

- 15 out of 2.625 (the query reality of a literary agency)

- The Need to Revise (the writing reality of authors. this made me think of what a friend said: "revise. revise. revise.")

Revision Checklist

a noteworthy list:

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- Does the main plot arc initiate close enough to the beginning that you won't lose the reader?
- Does your protagonist alternate between up and down moments, with the most intense towards the end?
- Are you able to trace the major plot arcs throughout the book? Do they have up and down moments?
- Do you have enough conflict?
- Does the reader see both the best and worst characteristics of your main characters?
- Do your characters have backstories and histories? Do these impact the plot?
- Is the pacing correct for your genre? Is it consistent?
- Is your voice consistent? Is it overly chatty or sarcastic?
- Is the tense completely consistent? Is the perspective consistent?
- Is there sufficient description that your reader feels grounded in the characters' world?
- Is there too much description? (David R. Slayton)
- Are momentous events given the weight they deserve?
- Look closely at each chapter. If you can take out a chapter and the plot will still make sense, is it really necessary? Should some events be folded in with others?
- Do the relationships between your characters develop and change and become more complicated as the book goes on?
- What do your characters want? Is it apparent to the reader? Do they have both conscious and unconscious motivations?
- Do you know what your writing tics are? Do you overuse adverbs, metaphors, facial expressions, non-"said" dialogue tags, or interjections? Have you removed them?
- Do you overuse certain words or phrases? Is your word choice perfect throughout?
- Does your book come to a completely satisfying conclusion? Does it feel rushed?
- Do your main characters emerge from the book irrevocably changed?
- Are your characters distinguishable? Does it make sense to combine minor characters? (Kiersten)
- Do each of your scenes make dramatic sense on their own as well as move the overall plot forward? (Pete Peterson)
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here the blog post, it comes with 148 comments that include additional revision clues: "Nathan Bransford - Revision Checklist"

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from the life of a literary agent...

i just browsed some literary agent blogs, and there was this one post that made me both laugh and cringe.

from the life of a literary agent:

"I've spent the better part of today reading queries and subs. Probably have cleared several hundred out of the queue in one huge go-round. Out of all of those, I requested one full. One! This is unusual. Our hit rate is typically much higher than that. The huge majority of those rejections were for stories that didn't fit our guidelines or were poorly written. Run the spellchecker, folks. Details matter.

At least six of those subs -- and maybe many more, but you sort of start blocking them out after a while -- were for a story type that I've come to think of as The Mantasy...."

and now here, the whole story: The Mantasy

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