[Don’t read too much into this RAMH post’s title.]
Last night, I and 40+ others participated in an interesting webinar called Agent Reads the Slush Pile. It lasted from 8pm Eastern time until close to 10:30. Each of about forty authors submitted the first two pages of a manuscript, including as “identifying” information only the title and genre — i.e., no names. Each of these mini-manuscripts was assigned a random number, which determined the order in which they’d be read. And then the agent… well, the agent read them. Commenting as she went. The idea was to reproduce, aloud, what it was like for an agent to just dive into a batch of unsolicited manuscripts. (And to answer the unspoken question: no, she hadn’t seen any of the submissions in advance.)
How it worked, more precisely: an agent at the agency read the mini-MSS aloud, one at a time, while the lead agent moderated her progress through the reading with little instructions like, “Okay, stop right there for a second…” and “Okay, pick up at the next paragraph.” At each point of interruption or discontinuity she’d point out something like a pattern of word choices or details which were helping (or, more often, hurting) the story at this point. (Considering that it’s the first two pages of a novel, one definitely wants not to include anything like impediments.)
We also had plenty of opportunities to ask questions, which didn’t need to be restricted to the reading/critiques.
I won’t get into details of the critiques. But I will say that it all drove home to me the importance of three precepts, as if you don’t already know these things:
- Choose your genre well and carefully.
- Choose the details you include — also both well and carefully.
- Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
