A Story of Literary Masochism

Quick note: Last week we talked about the nature of intelligence. For more about that, see this 8-minute video, which was published Wednesday on the Australian website. Aeon.co: “Why we should think of intelligence in terms of goals, not brains.” Popular topic. Here’s another video.

I was content. I had given 20 years of my life to creative writing. I got the MFA. I wrote six novels and a ton of short stories, and got many of them published. I founded and edited two well-regarded literary journals. But after over 1000 queries for my books I never got the big book deal or even an agent. It was frustrating, and when I closed Orca Literary Journal a year ago, I pretty much left all other aspects of creative writing behind, except for this Substack.

I had made some peace with it.

I had my love of cooking, and travel, and a couple of hobbies. I had a great marriage. I had good friends.

To get some of the novels out of my head, I self-published them. But I retained a couple. One of them was a book I had worked on for more than a dozen years. It is a family saga, in which the modern day family’s story is interspersed with diary entries from an ancestor who lived and worked as a face artist during World War I. Beta readers always seemed to like the historical portions more than the present day. And for the last couple of years I had toyed with the idea of pulling that part out and making it its own book.

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with a good writer friend. We started talking about The Face Maker, and that historical fiction section, and he helped convince me that maybe now was the time to pursue that backup plan and see if there was any hope for publication.

And so I set to work.

I went through the manuscript carefully to make sure it was in as good shape as I could make it. I wrote a new query letter and had my friend look at it, as well as several revisions. I wrote a new synopsis and came up with what I thought was a killer log line.

Since it had been a couple of years since I had done any active querying, it was like starting over. Agents move to different agencies, and many of the less experienced ones wind up quitting the business because it is so hard to make a living at it. My agent spreadsheet was outdated. This would take some research.

But I had experience submitting to agents, and I tried to use it to save a little effort. This time, I created an AI search strategy designed to identify New York agents specifically interested in historical fiction. Or so I thought. Frankly, it failed miserably. Of the agents it identified I wound up disqualifying more than half. No matter how many times I tried to refine the search, it still gave me a list of agents who did not fit the description.

On to plan B. This time I used Query Tracker. The returns were not much better. When I checked out the personal pages of the agents returned by Query Tracker, most did not mention historical fiction at all. This could be because agents who represent historical fiction simply include the genre under fiction and don’t mention the specific category.

Next I used my own curated list of literary agencies (which totals nearly 300), and applied a site-specific Google search that targeted the phrase “historical fiction” for each agency site. I got a lot of authors who had published historical fiction, but not too many agents who represented it. Occasionally, though, it would return a possibility.

That doesn’t mean my luck was getting any better.

Here’s an agent who seems like a perfect fit. Oops, the agent is closed. So is that one. And that one…

Okay, here’s another agent looking for historical fiction. She’s open! But wait, she only wants romance historical fiction. Or fantasy historical fiction. Or historical fiction that highlights powerful women. Or historical fiction that features queer protagonists or other marginalized lead characters.

Finding an agent who represented traditional historical fiction was difficult. Often it would take well over an hour just to isolate one.

The only option at this point seems to be researching individual agents…one by one, and reviewing the book deals they had made to see if they include historical fiction…if I could find them.

Or just submitting blindly.

Oy.

The vibes are bad. As bad as they were when I stopped querying the last time.

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The other day, I finally found an agent who mentioned historical fiction and who was open. I sent off my query. A minute later I noticed a new message in my inbox. It was from an agent I had queried two days before. You know what it said. Not for me. I didn’t even have a couple of minutes to rekindle hope before getting a decline.

Now I remember why I stopped querying in the first place.

I know. I know. Don’t get disheartened by just a couple of declines. Any attempt to get something published is going to take a lot of effort and a lot of time.

But I’ve been through all that before, and I’m not sure I want to do it again. I can’t help thinking that although I never achieved my dream of literary success, I had moved past my frustrations and was happy with my life. Now each day I spend a couple of hours in the first circle of query hell1, and during that time I am frustrated, disheartened, and generally miserable.

I know I need to give it some time and really put in a focused effort, but I can already feel that this is going to be a monumental pain in the ass with little hope of a positive return.

Here I am, staring at a screen that has a spreadsheet, and a search engine, and agency webpages, and my query letter, and my synopsis, and my writing sample all open in separate windows. I keep switching back and forth from one to another, trying to keep it all coordinated.

Why am I doing this?

A better question would be, why are we doing this?

Why do thousands and thousands of people, many of whom have no education in creative writing, believe that they can make it as a creative writer? Maybe it has something to do with the American ideal of fame and fortune. We are more obsessed with those supposed ideals than any other civilization on earth.

I recently read about a woman who spent $44,000 to hire a PR firm to promote her self-published book and got nothing. There are thousands of other examples online about people who have paid huge sums of money to publicists, PR firms, advertising outlets, editors, vanity presses, and others just to get their books in the public eye2. A book that typically doesn’t sell very much if at all.

It says a lot about our society. It says something about the myth of upward mobility in our society3. It says something about the American need for personal validation.

I admit, I’ve been there. I’m not sure I want to go there again.

As I am writing this, up pops another email. (I really have to learn to turn the email off when I’m writing.) This one is from Manuscript Wish List. It’s for a session with five literary agents who will review your query letter. $39. Hmm. Maybe I should consider it. At least that way the agents would actually have to look at my query letter. But then I review the agents who will attend. Four of them specialize in YA and middle grade. The fifth one did list historical fiction on her webpage, but when I checked closer she wanted “Female, Nonbinary, or Queer MCs.”

Oy, again.

People don’t read; not nearly as much as they used to. There’s an article coming out in the next Atlantic, titled, “The End of Reading Is Here,” by Rose Horowitch, that reports on declining reading and comprehension in the US. That’s bad enough. But coupled with the corporatization and politicization of the publishing industry it adds up to some serious obstacles for writers who don’t fit the current profile of who is an acceptable writer. I will also admit that this has pushed me to prioritize white male literary agents in my searches. I wish it weren’t so.

Not that it’s completely impossible. Since our lunch my writer friend sent off his latest query, and in the couple of weeks that followed his manuscript was requested, the agent loved it, and he signed with a major agency. The agent, if you really need to know, is a white male.

But if he can do it maybe there’s a chance.

I just wish I could be more optimistic about it.

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