Workspace Opera

Hi! If you’re an un-agented author and you want to get published, you’ll need to focus on getting an agent, which means three things: 

1. READYING YOUR MANUSCRIPT FOR SUBMISSION

I don’t know whether this is a first draft, or something you’ve revised, but you’ll need to do at least three levels of revision: a macro-edit, a micro-edit, and a copyedit.

The macro-edit focuses on all of the big features of the book. This is where you make sure your characters are fully fleshed out; that your plot makes sense and has a defined beginning, middle, and end; that your world building is engaging and realistic, etc. There may be multiple macro-edits as you whip your book into shape.

Once you’ve finished the macro-edits, move on the micro-edits. Micro-editing is about making your sentences flow. In your micro-edits, you focus on fixing your dialog, descriptions, syntax, etc. If you’ve already done all of that while working on your macro-edits, you can also take this time to look for small plot holes, cliches, character inconsistencies, etc. 

After micro-edits come copyedits. Here, you mainly fix spelling, grammar, and style errors. If you haven’t submitted work to formal workshops/writing classes, I’d suggest doing some research on how to style punctuation/paragraphs/pages in fiction. Fiction writing has a ton of largely unspoken style rules, and breaking these rules will make your writing appear more amateur and unrefined than it may actually be. Here are some great sources to check out:

fiction style guide

strunk & white’s elements of style

format your novel for submission

Once you’ve readied your manuscript for submission, it’s time to actually prepare to send it out.  

2. FINDING AGENTS TO QUERY

Most publishing houses don’t take unsolicited submissions. Instead, they take submissions from agents. So when you want to get your manuscript published with any of the big publishing houses, you should look for an agent instead of a publisher.

This answer is already going to be long enough without an explanation about what a literary agent is and why you should get one, so if you’d like more information, I’m going to direct you to this article:

what literary agents do (and don’t do) for writers

An agent is someone who’ll support you throughout your career. This is going to be a very important relationship in your writing life, and so you should do quite a bit of research into them. There are a great number of sources for researching agents. These two are some of the most popular:

query tracker

manuscript wish list

If you need some more advice about how to find the right agent, check out these articles:

on finding the right agent

questions to ask your prospective literary agent

3. QUERYING

Once you have a list of agents you’d be interested in representing you, you’ll notice that they all require query letters. Luckily, I’ve already typed up a thorough guide to writing one of those.

writing the perfect query letter

You’ll want to query a good handful of agents at a time: between six and ten. Agents may get back to you within a day or after a few months, so it’s a good idea to track who you’ve queried, when you’ve queried them, and what they’ve said. query tracker is a good source for this, but you can also just use a spreadsheet or a notebook. This article suggests not giving up until you’ve queried 80 agents or more, which could represent an entire year of querying.

(There’s a reason this is called the “query trenches.”)

Once you land an agent, the rest of your journey to publication will be decided in discussion with them.

Throughout this entire process, from step one to step three, you should be keeping up with the publishing industry, and doing your best to learn about it. There’s only so much I can cover here, and I’ve really only skimmed the surface.

I recommend:

Listening to these podcasts, which will all provide you with vital publishing/writing advice

Reading publishingcrawl.com, which I’ve linked to multiple times in this answer

Reading sites like http://www.writersdigest.com/

And keeping up with the authors you love on social media, many of whom will post about writing/the industry

This is a pretty basic introduction, so let me know if you have any further questions. 

…you guys…

Just read an excerpt from a productivity/goal setting book that concerned Tolkien.

His publisher mentioned that people wanted more about the hobbits after Tolkien published The Hobbit.

So Tolkien started another novel.

And apparently bounced between the depths of despair and the height of confidence for the entire process (he said that: “his ‘labour of delight’ had been ‘transformed into a nightmare.’”)

He gave up multiple times.

That book? Fellowship of the Ring.

You know what kept him going? C.S. Lewis’ support.

First lesson: if you’re stressing over your book, remember that Tolkien did too.

You know what else kept him going while he wrote Lord of the Rings? Well, 

having an income while he wrote, that he didn’t really have to work for. In fact, he held his dream job (Professor of Literature) with a full-time income, that came with a pleasant private office. He sat at work, for which he was being paid to do something else, and actively avoided doing his actual job while he pursued his own unrelated novel.

having a stay-at-home wife to run his entire home and family for him.

having servants…. that helps….

having a large, pretty house within a pleasant 25-minute walk of work.

never having to do:

household maintenance

laundry

cooking

cleaning

Life Admin

the not-fun gardening

the not-fun childcare

The work day of Men of His Time ended when they came home. Women of His Time, and Staff, existed to run the rest of his life. And that’s what they did. Jonald Ronald Rolkien Tolkien was the center of his household universe, which existed to support him in every possible way.

Let’s be real: he was not the person who was up in the night with a teething baby. That was what the nanny was for, followed by the wife. It would have been unthinkable for a man of his time/class to do his own childcare.

Actually, it’s worth noting that he had in particular a Very Intelligent Icelandic nanny, who lived in his house and looked after his four children all day, and was never given a holiday, and told the children lovely bedtime stories about trolls and the Icelandic Edda, and who provided a useful resource for the language and myth he used in LoTR, until his wife became too jealous.

I mean, what could YOU do if you had that much support? Write an epic! probably!!

Because nobody was forcing him to do anything, ever, he slept late and woke up late. sounds nice

Tolkien did not do laundry. He did not cook meals. He did not clean the house. He did not wrestle rice pudding down the necks of his screaming babies, while calmly and lovingly answering his schoolchild’s questions. He wasn’t making a cake while talking to his boss on the phone and wiping up the dog’s sick. He did not spend hours every day in the process of keeping his home together, or sorting the affairs of his four children, or sorting out the wifi. The Care and Keeping of Tolkien was outsourced to wife, servants, scouts, assistants, waitstaff.

He would have received free meals at work, although he usually walked home for lunch, where he was served food and alcohol that he took into his private study. but if he didn’t want to do that, Oxford profs of His Time could just get free lunch. He could ring a bell to be brought tea and snacks at work. And then he would go home and be served dinner.

Going to the pub with his friends, who supported and admired him! Sure!

not having to go home in the evening to his four toddlers and children, because he was a Man of His Times! and he could totally just spend evenings holed up in a pub with his admirers, because he was not required at home to help, or parent, or do anything in the home, except be served a glass of beer and go into his study.

god, imagine spending hours in the pub on a work night with a bunch of highly qualified literature professors telling you how smart and lovely and amazing you are. heck YES you’d be encouraged.

The Hobbit was already popular so it was probably quite helpful to know that while writing the next work.

Working and writing in a place that is generally considered to be an inspiring setting for academia and literature. Want to write Elrond’s Council? Sit down at a beautiful old stone table and start writing about the table. Want to write about a tree? Go write under your favorite ancient tree in the Botanical Gardens. Want a snack? Ring a bell and a scout will bring you toast and a cup of tea.

I mean, he wasn’t exactly spending his 40 hours a week under a manager’s baleful eye while he manned the self-checkouts at the Tesco in Coventry, or pumped gas for minimum wage in Montauk, scribbling notes into his phone. He floated around The City of Dreaming Spires, dreamily making art, while several people labored very hard so that he would be untroubled by Real Life while he floated.

Let’s be real. Tolkien’s literary accomplishments are very impressive, but he L I T E R A L L Y

was doing them on his work clock with the full support of a pit crew.

To be fair, I love the man. And I love the huffy apologism in the Tolkien Gateway: “Writing  [The Fellowship of the Ring] was slow due to Tolkien’s perfectionism, and was frequently interrupted by his obligations as an examiner, and other academic duties.”

I’m ??? sorry that writing a novel on the company dime was frequently interrupted by occasionally having to do his job???? oh my god I love and hate this so much,

Dianna Wynne Jones, of Tolkien’s students at Oxford, commenting “of Tolkien, they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…”

maybe because that’s what academics are SUPPOSED TO DO, it is their job,,,

He would also deliberately mumble incomprehensibly, ignoring his students, deliberately delivering terrible lectures, so that they would all go away; but Dianna actually wanted to receive some of the education she’d been promised:

“I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid).”

God love the man! Deliberately teaching so badly because he planned to alienate his students and collect a paycheck! He would be flayed on social media for less, today. There would be news articles about the Lazy Professor. He would be fired, and buried, and dug up, and fired again.

Dislike: Artworks who hypersexualize women (esp. those fantasy books with scantly clad women warriors, ewww); bonus points if we’re talking about a Lolita book cover that focuses on Lolita being a temptress or something like that. That’s peak disgusting. This includes whitewashing covers.

If you have a difficult time plotting, try writing or outlining your story backwards—from the end to the beginning. Writers who have a difficult time outlining, plotting, and planning their stories often benefit from this technique. You’ll need a general idea of what your story is about for this to work, and of course you need to know the ending, but you might be amazed how helpful this trick can be.

Why is writing backwards easier? Basically, instead of answering the question “this happened… now what comes next?,” you’ll be answering the question “this happened… so what would come right before that?” which narrows the possibilities for your next move and can help keep your story on track. (Incidentally, it’s also the way Joseph Gordan-Levitt’s character comes out on top in the film The Lookout.)

Writing backwards can also help you more tightly weave together your subplots, themes, and character relationships, and keep you from going too far down any irrelevant rabbit holes.

If you don’t want to write or outline completely backwards, remember that you’re free to jump around! If you’re feeling stuck in your story or novel, jump to the middle or end and write a few scenes. Many writers get stuck because they feel they have to write their story linearly from beginning to end, which results in an overdeveloped (and often irrelevant) beginning and an underdeveloped ending.

Like I legit thought two of my friends would find this funny and it blew the fuck up

Which just isn’t true. 

Planning “properly” or the traditional way doesn’t work for me. I still plan but it’s more loose. For me when I start a story I know the beginning  and the ending but have very little idea how i get from point A to point B until I write it. Since I write linearly and usually as continuously as is possible it works for me.  And sometimes even with that the story changes drastically because I’ll be writing and suddenly a character is saying or doing things I didn’t expect but it makes sense and makes the story better

So I go with it and the plan is now thrown out the window and I have idea where I’m going but I’m excited and interested to find out

So you don’t have gremlin characters and that’s nice for you because I’m sure you can plan your plot carefully but for me I like it when I read back what I just wrote and I’m like “Whoa this is like…accidentally really clever” 

It’s still annoying at times but it’s what works for me.

I do experience that “wait, let’s change this!” phase, as every writer, but in the planning phase, not in the writing phase. I wasn’t born good at planning, hell, I still have a lot to learn, but I saw my stories become so much better in every aspect with careful planning (it might take months, for a novel), and I’d love to help people achieve that fantastic feeling.

Like I legit thought two of my friends would find this funny and it blew the fuck up