Perfection?

The winner of yesterday’s The Remains of the Dead giveaway is eatrawfish (Miss B.). You know the drill. Everyone else, leave a comment in this post to be entered into tomorrow’s giveaway!

In the last week, I’ve seen two anonymous comments in industry blogs talking about “how perfect a book needs to be before the editor and agent will even look at it.” See below (bolding mine).

At the Penguin blog, the anonymous commenter asked:

We hear so much about how a book must be perfect, must be a standout in all ways and fashions, before an agent or editor will take it on…but at the same time we know that editing is an absolute necessity, and we see many helpful editors like yourself discussing intensive edits.

How much editing does a book need, then, before you will pass on it? Does voice or concept or a combination of them really carry the day, and plot points can be worked out in edits? What makes the decision for you that you have to have this book, if it isn’t a great story start to finish?

And on the Bookends blog, the commenter despaired:

This statement — “… However very few of them were sold on the first book they sent or the initial project I took them on with…”

I’m sorry, that’s just depressing. True, maybe, but depressing. As perfect as your work has to be to get an agent, and that’s only the starting point? I’m published but am having trouble selling my second book. So maybe I have this in reverse? Either way, yuk…

These two comments seem so similar to me that at first glance, I almost suspected they were made by the same person. I think it was the word “perfect” which sounded alarm bells within me. It sounds almost like a Good Advice Goes Bad post waiting to happen.

Because I’m a writer, and I like to play “what if,” I imagine that this hypothetical single poster has advice-itis. Advice-itis occurs when you spend so much time reading industry blogs and etc., and trying to follow every bit of information you find on each that you become paralyzed. Agent A wants you to start your query letter with a hypothetical question, and Agent B hates it when you thank her for your time, and Agent C says if you don’t compare your work to some other work on the shelves, he’s not even going to look at it. If you try to follow every bit of advice from every single agent, you’re going to wind up with a Frankenstein letter that will please no one. To swipe from Lincoln, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. There is no such thing as a perfect query letter.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as the perfect manuscript, either. If you’ve ever loved a movie that tanks at the box office, then it should be easy to see why a book that some agent though was– not perfect, but something he or she wanted to represent in the marketplace — might not sell. I happened to sell the first book my agent sent out for me. But we’ve also gotten rejections on that book, both from publishers here in the U.S. and abroad. I’ve also found a home for every proposal she’s sent out since, but I bear no illusion that this will always be the case. Rejection is part of the writing life, as is shelving things. Furthermore, as I know I’ve discussed before, I didn’t sign with my agent on the first book I sent her. (It was actually the third.) And yes, those other two are shelved, like all my earlier novels.

The first question seems to ask why, if a book must be so perfect to even get a contract, an editor is even necessary. After all, if a book is perfect, why edit? Penguin editor Jessica Wade responds:

That’s a tough one. I hope not to bore you with platitudes, but I would say that really you ought to make the book the absolute best that you can. Or at least, you should not be rushing happily off to the post office thinking, “I think this is pretty good, but I know the middle is sagging terribly” or “the stepmother’s voice is really not wicked enough and that’s obscuring her motivations…” If you’ve made the voice and plot as strong as you can without outside guidance, the work should speak for itself.

Right on. Also, I think we’re talking about scale. The people the industry folks are preaching too when they talk about only wanting to look at tight, polished, (i.e., “perfect”) work — well, they’re pretty much the choir. The people who pay attention to industry folks talking? They are already the ones who tend to be more serious about editing and polishing and etc. They are the minority.

Slush piles are scary scary places. I’ve spoken to agents before about how they have to wade through so much that it sloppy, terrible, scary, illiterate, haphazard, unprofessional, etc. that by the time they get to something that’s halfway decent, it’s tough to tell sometimes whether they really like the idea, or they are just pleased to come across something that doesn’t hurt their eyes and brains to read. (This is what agents talk about when they say “retuning their ears” or the ever-illuminating Slushkiller essay.)

Damn skippy your books need to be as perfect as you can make them when you send them out. Do you want to give someone an excuse to reject? Of course not. I’ve seen writers send things out too early, rushing projects that needed more time. The result was not pretty. Before I was published, I saw other unpublished writers bragging about the speed at which they could write and despairing that any publisher would be able to schedule them in such a way to keep up with their production rate. Which would have sounded better if the publishers wanted their hastily-scrawled tales to start with.

I had one writer friend, in particular, whose situation broke my heart. She would submit proposal after proposal, or pitch after pitch, and they were all so marvelous and wonderful in concept that she would get all these requests. Then she would rush to complete them, sometimes in a matter of days, and send them off. Most of the time, she’d get a rejection, but sometimes, she’d get a revision request that she’d ignore in favor of rushing off the next project. I lost touch with this writer years ago, but I often wonder what would have happened if she’d followed up on these revisions, or if she’d taken more time with the project at the start. I think this is what editors and agents are warning against when they talk about making your book as perfect as possible before submitting it. Don’t submit first drafts (a lot of people do). Books need polishing and critiquing.

And they also need editing. I said earlier that I didn’t believe there was such a thing as a perfect manuscript. (I’m also one of those who would change my books forever if they didn’t have a due date, so maybe that’s part of it). So editor’s buy manuscripts that are good (great, fabulous, mind-blowing, fantastic, etc. — but rarely, if ever, perfect) and then they edit them to make them better. There is a certain myth among people who aren’t writers that they just slap whatever together, and then hire an editor, who makes it good. But that’s not what editors do. they make good books better, or great books better, or fabulous, mind-blowing, fantastic books better. And that’s why books, even books that stand out enough for an editor to take it on, still need editing. Part of the writing life, again. You get rejections, and you have to do revisions. Those “re” words kill me (also “review”).

So, as you know, I’m writing Rampant right now, though I’ll be taking a short break soon for ROS(B) copyedits. Rampant underwent a lot of rewrites. In fact, as I was going through my files the other day, I saw notes that I had taken on the story from 2004. Three years ago. The first draft of the proposal was written during NaNoWriMo 2005. I played with it for a little while, had it critiqued, edited it hard core, sent it to my agent, took suggestions, then started the book over, from scratch, a year later, in fall of 2006. That version had different POVs, different scenes, and a different feel. I worked on it for another few months (in between work for SSG2,3, and 4) and sold it this last spring. Now I’m working on version 3. Not draft 3. No, it would be closer to draft 23. Version 3 incorporates elements of both 1 and 2, as well as input from my editor. Is it hard to do this? Yep, especially for me. But it’s also necessary. Revision, editing, striving for perfection…

Oops. Did I say the P-word? 😉