A Book for Sale: Chapter Three

This book-pitching lark is starting to get emotional.  Strangely, surprisingly so.

Every time I read an article about how to find a publishing agent, I well up.  It feels overwhelming to have written a book that’s ready to be published at all.  Now I’m vastly intimidated by the real prospect of pitching that book to professional strangers.

(It’s so much safer to be in the midst of writing a book than to have finished one.  Is that why I took so long to write Something Else?).

I finished reading my manuscript last week.  It’s covered in red squiggles and notes about themes, as you’ll see in the photo at the top of this page.

I’d have probably taken longer over this task, but I promised myself that I wouldn’t read any other books – too many voices – so I started getting antsy.  I have to have at least one book on the go, and mine doesn’t count because it’s… well, mine.

I wasn’t reading my own book for pleasure, either.  As I went through it, I wrote a short summary of each chapter, which will (I hope) help me write the synopsis.  I also scribbled down a few things that occurred to me as I read.

Something Else answers the question: “What happens when you blow up your life?”  It’s also about how we’re shaped by our actions, rather than random events.

My protagonist, Helen, is a 28-year-old woman in a dead-end office job, which she fell into because it felt like the only option.  She’s engaged to a kind and loving policeman, but she’s having a secret affair with her married boss.  When the affair is spectacularly discovered, Helen loses everything.  She has to rebuild her life, but how?

As I read the book, I realised there were several points at which readers might be expecting something terrible to happen.  Helen’s fiancé is called out to a disturbance during a family dinner.  Her sister is pregnant, and she’s 100% convinced all will be well.  But the drama doesn’t come from potentially scary moments like these.  It comes from the things Helen chooses to do: have an affair, then go on the hunt for answers.

I hadn’t thought about this until I read the book without my ‘editing’ hat on.  It left me free to just take in the story.

For the first time, I also felt how exhausting it is to be in one person’s head for a whole book.  I’d wanted Something Else to have the feel of a dramatic, fast-paced action movie but with an emotional plot, so I wrote it mostly in the first person present.  There are no real breaks.  At points it’s exhilarating, at others you have to stop and rest.  It’s probably not the kind of book you can read in one sitting.

Other notes I jotted down:

• Something Else is a story about the ‘crisis point’ in a woman’s life. Get married and have a family, or… not?
• What do you do if you don’t get married and have a family?
• It’s also about fear – of the unknown, of our feelings, of speaking up – and trying to overcome it.
• Sometimes, Helen is deeply unlikeable. Is that OK?  (I think it is.  I want to read about characters who feel real and do interesting things.  That isn’t always nice).
• A family can be shaped by how everybody in it chooses to deal with one tragic event.
• Friendships warp and shift over time. Some endure, some don’t.

I’m going to start writing my pitch after I’ve researched publishing agents to pitch to.  Part of the advice I’ve read involves looking at where your book will stand on the shelves.  Which other books would I compare it with?  How does it differ?

I thought of three books in particular: Olive by Emma Gannon, The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell, and Motherhood by Sheila Heti.

The Panic Years

Motherhood

Olive

Each of these books deals with the nagging question of motherhood, which is admirable and refreshing.  Though each one also disappointed me in its own slight way.

Olive was billed as a novel about the “taboo of not having children”, but had a cop-out ending which I won’t spoil.  (Also, Olive’s friends had an annoying habit of saying “Oh Ol” when they talked to her, which nobody would say in real life and thus I found it jarring!).

The Panic Years deals with the ‘crisis point’ as I had referred to it, only from the perspective of a mother.  As a child-free woman that didn’t resonate with me, and I felt weirdly excluded from a conversation I wanted to be part of.

Motherhood is a deep and intoxicating read, but from an older woman’s perspective: Sheila Heti’s protagonist – herself – is 37.  She asks herself a lot of questions, and her choice is often presented as ‘art or motherhood’: interesting, but all too prevalent in this type of book.  Not all child-free women are writers or artists (it’s interesting that all three of these books have writer-protagonists).

Something Else is different, then, because although it deals with the same time in a woman’s life, Helen isn’t a heavy drinker and/or an artist, and she’s not just trying to decide about marriage and children.  She’s trying to find out who she is.

For now, I have my copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook (a must!) to help me form a list of potential, pitch-able agents.  When I have that list, I’ll write:

• A query letter about my book
• A one-line pitch (this will be HARD!)
• A full chapter synopsis

Eeek.

Onwards.