Blog Article

The arrival of a new year and the promise that comes with it is always a natural motivator when it comes to our writing projects. For many, that means something akin to “this will be the year I get an agent.” Below is a list of resources that can help get you into the best possible position to succeed.

Join a Critique Group
You need feedback. Everyone does. And a well-functioning critique group with like-minded writers can be a boon to your writing.

JRW has tried several techniques to help folks find critique partners. In all honesty, I think it’s one of the places where I want to do better. But it hasn’t been for a lack of trying. This year we held a special critique group-themed Writers Wednesday that received positive feedback, and we may do that again in 2019.

A few years ago, the critique group I had been in was slowly dying from dysfunction and lack of participation. So I went to Facebook in frustration and asked if anyone wanted to form a new critique group with me. Because I had been friending other writers for awhile. a few people responded that they were looking, too. Within a month I had a new group. It’s been a great four years now, and I couldn’t be happier. It might seem obvious to others to ask on social media, but it wasn’t obvious to me—I only did it because I didn’t know what else to do. And if I hadn’t stepped out and shouted to the world on my Facebook wall about what I needed, I wouldn’t have this group of amazing people that I meet with every month.

If you’d prefer not to meet in person, there are a slew of online critique platforms, many of which are free. This list on The Write Life is a few years old, but most of the content is still applicable.

Brooke McIntyre of Inked Voices (a past supporter of the JRW conference) wrote a great piece for Jane Friedman’s blog titled “How to Find the Right Critique Partner or Group for You.”

After you put your writing through your critique group and revise, revise, revise, revise, etc (Have you seen our new t-shirt design about revising?), you need to figure out where you’re going to submit.

Find Agents and Editors
There are a ton of places to get information now about editors and agents. One of my favorites is Manuscript Wish List. They keep track of what editors and agents are seeking using social media and agency websites. Not only does the main page have a wonderful set of interviews and articles, there’s an almost magical search function. It features checkboxes where you can select agent or editor along with all of the genres that you are interested in writing. It’s a streamlined, efficient way to find all the agents and editors interested in all the things you are doing. It’s one of the tools I used to find my agent, and I recommend it to everyone.

You can also visit Query Tracker to find more information about your list of agents and editors. Other writers will share the responses they have received, so you can get a sense of how long it typically takes agents or editors to respond, the kind of responses they’re sending, and more.

Don’t forget to read interviews with your chosen agents and editors. Places like Writers’ Digest will give you great insight, and provide strong introductory material for your query letter.

Perfect that Query Letter
At a Writing Show earlier this year, magazine editor David Streever talked about writing queries using a method called “the hook, the book, the cook.” It’s a straightforward way of approaching queries containing three main paragraphs. The first nabs the agent or editors attention with a hook—that would be the reason you are querying them. The second paragraph is a description of the book. The third is “the cook” or you and why you are writing this book. Agent Michael Larsen goes into a bit more detail about this breakdown here.

Additionally, Reedsy has a thorough dive into developing a great query here. Jane Friedman’s a great source of information, and she’s got your back when it comes to queries, too.

Finally, if you’d like to read examples of real queries that worked, check out Writers’ Digests’ “Successful Queries” series of blogposts. I like these because they not only share the queries, but have the agent or editor explain what they liked and why they signed the author. That context in invaluable.

About the Author

Phillip Hilliker has been a freelance illustrator and designer since 2000, creating a variety of work for a wide array of clients across many fields.

It took me twelve years to finish my first novel. I had notes, character sketches, and whole conversations on yellow legal pages, bedside notebooks, and paper towels. I also had gaps between scenes with no idea how to connect them, and months when I wrote nothing.

We are told not to ask relatives to critique our work for fear of hearing only glowing praise. This would have been my mother’s response: “Oh, how wonderful! My baby wrote a book!” My daughters, however, can be brutally honest. I tried out various notes and ideas on them over the years, until Rebecca finally stopped me cold. “Look, when you’re gone, I don’t want to have to go through your notes to find out what happened. So get it done!”

At which point I joined a critique group. Minuet and Serenade was finished within the year.

A critique buddy can be your best friend. Or not. It depends on what sort of help you are looking for. I was randomly paired with a writer who is still one of my best beta readers. She has since moved out of state but we still rely on each other’s editorial opinions. On the other hand, another writer I was paired with defended every word she wrote, informing me that she had taught English. Eventually, I stopped making suggestions, except to say, “As a reader, I must tell you this phrase made me stumble.”

I think the key to finding a compatible critique partner, aside from dumb luck, is to work with someone who has a similar writing style similar. Not necessarily the same genre, but someone whose work habits mirror your own. The work I gave my buddy was as clean and well-edited as I could make it, and her pages were the same. Still a rough draft, but certainly readable. I have been paired since with writers who would give me pages that amounted to stream-of-conscious ideas that must have made sense to them, but my trying to wade through them was not helpful to either of us.

My first buddy and I would exchange emails with our current work attached, then meet weekly to go over details. As we each edited the other’s work, we noted spelling and grammar in passing, but did not dwell on such basics.

Her story dealt with the attack of a young girl in the hayloft of a barn in the early forties. I told her I wanted to see the buttons pop off her dress and bounce on the floor. I wanted the girl to be worried about tearing the flour sack dress her mother had made. I wanted to see the dust motes in the sunbeams where they pierced like lasers through the knotholes in the side of the barn.

My story is told of three people escaping through a tunnel as Nazis raided the house above. My partner wanted to be able to feel the terror of these people crawling hastily in darkness, hear the mud squishing on the floor and walls of the tunnel, see the filth on their clothes…one of them a very young and unwilling bride caught in an arranged marriage.

Both of our stories were better for having each other’s support and opinions.

A good critique partner will keep you focused, and point out where you have veered from your path. Setting a regular meeting schedule helps, too. For writers who tend to procrastinate (cough), it holds your feet to the fire. Believe me, you don’t want to show up at that weekly meeting empty-handed.

About the Author

Suzan McKenzie has been to all but two states and lived in seven of them, thanks to 30 years as the wife of a Navy pilot. True to family tradition, her three children and five grandchildren are scattered around five states and two countries. Her favorite activities are reading, writing, quilting, and traveling to catch up with her far-flung family. She currently lives in Midlothian, VA with her husband of 53 years and a rambunctious labradoodle.

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Karen A. Chase is an author, speaker, and brand designer. For nearly three decades Karen has worked as a professional designer creating brands for national and international organizations, non-profits, and authors. In addition to two decades running her own freelance business, she launched 224Pages, her own publishing house in 2011. She has spoken with nearly one hundred historical, corporate, and trade audiences in the US and Canada—both virtually and in-person—about history, branding, and entrepreneurship. Her first novel Carrying Independence was awarded #12 on the 100 Best Indie Books of 2019. She helps authors build brands and websites via the Reedsy platform. Learn more about Karen and her work here.

Serious people take serious things seriously. And we’ve had plenty to be serious about over the past few years. For many of us, recent history has seemed like some combination of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

But.

Serious people take serious things seriously, I say—relishing the repetition, playing with the words. Don’t we all long to see the world returned to its pre-pandemic, pre-post-truth serious playfulness? Don’t we all want to dance—if not with our bodies, at least with our words, our sentences? “A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing,” says Clive James. But it’s more than mere frolicking. “A sense of humor is a sense of proportion,” says John Frederick Nims.

Knowing what to laugh at, knowing when to laugh—that’s sanity.

We are writers, and our first duty is to tell the truth, no matter how ugly, no matter how depressing, no matter how shocking. Writing is our calling. Writing is our work.

But it also has to be our play. Frost said that poetry was play, but play “for mortal stakes.” “The opposite of play is not work—it is depression,” says Dr. Stuart Brown, founder and president of the National Institute for Play. (The National Institute of Play! Aren’t you delighted it exists—in whatever form?)

When I get most serious, when I dig deeper into trauma or injustice or just plain horror, I have to remind myself that (1) writing is an art, (2) writing is playing with language. In college, I was put off by how my profs presented Eliot’s and Joyce’s works as perfect and sacred works of art that I was required to worship. Hell, I thought writing was supposed to be fun.

And I was right (though it’s a lesson I still have to learn over and over). When I heard that, working on Ulysses in the middle of the night in his two-room flat in Paris, James Joyce was constantly scolded from the bedroom by his wife Nora: “Jim, stop writing or stop laughing!”—when I learned that, I realized my profs were missing some essential point in that great novel. And when I read Eliot had added the notes to The Waste Land as an afterthought, as a kind of joke (he increased, rather than decreased, the complexity and ambiguity of the poem), that’s when I realized how funny, how wickedly witty, Eliot was in that poem. And how much sheer fun he was having keeping his reader off-balance and exploiting the darkest vision of his world.

“When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness,” said Stephen Vizinczey.

Well, maybe, but if you close your eyes to comedy, to humor, you close your eyes to life, I say. That bloodbath of a play Hamlet—like that heart-shredder King Lear—is full of laughs, for all its genuine horrors. We are restored to sanity by laughter. OK, I didn’t laugh once at The Road or Orwell’s 1984—but McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong? Yes, yes, yes.

Being serious does not mean being solemn. Being tragic does not mean giving up your humanity.

When my most serious poem or essay or book review is, well, boring—I write a parody of it. I dance with it, I joke with it. And then I find a balance. I find some humanity and sanity. I become human again.

About the Author

Ron Smith is a James River Writers Advisory Board member and former Poet Laureate of Virginia. He was also the writer-in-residence at St. Christopher’s School. His most recent books are The Humility of the Brutes (LSU Press) and a new edition of his Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (MatHat Press). The first edition was judged by Margaret Atwood as “a close runner-up” for the National Poetry Series Open Competition and by Donal Hall as “the runner-up” for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.