Book summary “Marge Piercy”: summary

Introduction

You often feel the urge to write your life experiences into compelling literature, but you struggle to transform raw memories into a structured narrative. You might stare at a blank page, unsure how to begin, how to create believable characters, or how to plot a story that keeps readers turning pages. Writing feels like an elusive mystery, leaving you frustrated when your drafts fall flat or fail to capture the vivid emotions you intended to convey.

Master the creative process, characterization, plot mechanics, and publishing realities to transform raw life experience into compelling literature.

This book treats writing as a craft you can learn, practice, and master rather than a divine spark reserved for the chosen few. You will discover how to sharpen your innate skills through extensive reading and sensual memory. You will learn to hook readers immediately, build multidimensional characters, write effective dialogue, and construct organic plots driven by clear dramatic needs.

The journey continues as you explore personal memoirs, sensory descriptions, historical and genre-specific worldbuilding, and the mechanics of humor. Finally, you will navigate the business side of writing by establishing sustainable daily habits, understanding publishing economics, and managing submission etiquette.

• How do you transform raw life experience into a compelling narrative?
• What techniques make your opening pages irresistible to agents and readers?
• How do you build multidimensional characters and natural dialogue?
• What steps ensure your plots maintain momentum and resolve organically?
• How do you navigate the realities of the publishing industry and manage your writing career?

1. Sharpening Your Innate Skills

To become a serious writer, you must read extensively within your chosen genre and study literature from diverse cultures rather than looking for a simple how-to formula. The best instruction manual for writing is reading the genre you want to write in, observing how other authors handle craft, structure, and pacing. Relying only on British and American literature is insufficient; you need broad exposure to world literatures. Furthermore, reading work that fails can be just as instructive as reading masterpieces. You must learn to read like a writer.

Writing begins with extensive reading, cultivating an adult mind, and harnessing sensual memory.

Apprentice to Reading

You must cultivate an adult mind that can handle rejection, dismiss trivial distractions, and maintain long-term focus without indulging in adolescent self-regard. Drawing on spiritual disciplines like the Kabbalah, an adult mind can put victories and defeats into perspective. It refuses to let daily worries or ego interfere with the craft. Concentration allows you to become so absorbed in the work that self-consciousness disappears entirely.

You can use physical anchor objects to center your concentration, quiet the ego, and eliminate mental clutter before writing. Marge Piercy maintains twelve rocks accumulated over the years on her window ledge representing sacred or meaningful places. By picking them up and weighing them, she focuses her attention and shuts down distractions like casual gossip, worry, and ego-driven concerns. For example, she keeps a rock picked up from the ruins of the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth and another from the Oregon coast. Other writers might use a specific screen saver or meditative music to achieve the same mental transition.

Sensual Memory Exercises

A structured imaginative exercise focusing on childhood environments helps you retrieve concrete sensory details and emotional resonance. The authors recommend a meditation-like exercise where you return in imagination to a specific place from ages four to eight. By visualizing the small scale—looking sideways into hedges or reaching up for door handles—and noting textures, smells, sounds, and emotional states, you gather raw material for creative work. This exercise has been used in writing workshops for twenty years.

The writing process requires two distinct stages: an uninhibited creative draft followed by a cold, analytical critical revision. After concentration produces the initial draft, you must step back mentally or physically by putting the work aside. Then, using a cold critical eye, you evaluate what was actually achieved versus what was intended. Only two percent of cases feature a first draft matching intent perfectly. Typically, twenty to fifty percent of what was imagined ends up on paper. This is the stage for asking structural questions about viewpoint, chronology, pacing, and dialogue, and for cutting irrelevant material.

2. Creating An Irresistible Beginning

Narrative art is fundamentally about time and patterns in time. Unlike simultaneous arts, narrative moves through sequence, transition, and juxtaposition. Because a reader takes time to finish a book, you must constantly persuade them to keep turning pages through suspense and character identification.

Capturing reader attention quickly requires starting in medias res and understanding narrative time.

Editor Attention Span

A writer has a very limited window to capture an editor or reader attention before the manuscript is rejected. In a short story, an editor typically reads only the first page or two. In a novel, they will read up to the first ten pages. If the beginning fails to grab them, the manuscript goes straight to the rejection pile.

In Medias Res

You should start stories in medias res, meaning in the middle of things, rather than using slow, traditional background exposition. Instead of clearing up all background details at the start, which kills suspense, you should introduce something lively or mysterious. You can weave exposition into the story gradually on the fly. Tanith Lee opens her novel Lycanthia with a descriptive scene of a traveler arriving at a deserted wilderness train station in winter, laden with evocative details suggesting something dreadful.

You must follow specific rules to distinguish between chronological events, the writing process, and the actual starting point of the story:

• Never confuse the story's beginning with the beginning of all events.
• Never confuse where you start writing with where the story actually begins.
• Be prepared to scrap a compelling beginning if it does not lead directly into the actual book.

Memoirs should not necessarily start chronologically at birth, but rather with an emotionally engaging, dramatic, or intriguing event. Because a life contains too many events, a memoir can open with trauma, a sickness, a death, a moment of deep shame, unexpected good fortune, or an intense realization to hook the reader. Lillian Hellman opens her memoir Pentimento with a sudden riptide pulling her under during a morning swim on Martha's Vineyard while she imagines talking to her dead former lover.

3. Characterization

Create multidimensional characters by avoiding self-hatred projections and prioritizing subjective self-image.

Young or apprentice writers often project aspects of themselves they detest onto characters to castigate or kill them off. This lack of emotional distance destroys multi-dimensionality, making characters boring and uninteresting, whereas masters like Philip Roth use an unrepentant tone and manic energy to make flawed characters compelling. Ira received a rejection for his novel The Kitchen Man because the editor hated the main character, Gabriel Rose, for reminding her too much of herself.

Subverting Stock Characters

Relying on tired types like the tough guy detective or the Jewish mother leads to flat writing unless you enter the type and subvert expectations. You can use several methods to refresh clichés:

• Extreme exaggeration of the central trait.
• Giving the type an unexpected vulnerability or hobby.
• Inverting the archetype entirely, such as turning a little old lady into a master detective.

In William Goldman's Marathon Man, the dentist Zel is a Nazi war criminal sadist rather than a self-important milquetoast. In Richard Price's Clockers, the crack dealer Strike carries Maalox for a nervous stomach instead of sipping malt liquor.

Writers must avoid emotional clichés and instead convey internal states through fresh metaphors and accurate physiological responses. Telling the reader about an emotion using worn-out phrases fails to create empathy. You need to anchor the emotion in the specific situation, exploring what is happening externally and utilizing fresh physical reactions. In Maureen McCoy's Junebug, seventeen-year-old June visits her incarcerated mother Tess. Her terror is depicted through visceral physical reactions like arms sticking to table graffiti scars and blood rushing through swells of water.

Deep Characterization

A character's internal self-image and how they feel about their body are far more vital to behavior than objective physical appearance. Relying on the cliché of having characters look in the mirror immediately stops the story. Instead, you should explore how a character's subjective self-image dictates their arrogance, insecurities, and actions. Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies runs into a wall and blames the architect for placing the wall there due to his unshakeable self-perception.

While habits, tags, and hobby horses add surface flavor, the true driving force of a character is what they want or want to avoid. Establishing a rich social context, relationships, and contradictions between professed values and actual behavior forms the foundation of deep characterization. In The Kitchen Man, the protagonist's fellow waiters represent alternative choices he did not make, reflecting his dependency on others' opinions.

Writers can portray harrowing or unfair life events without sounding self-pitying by maintaining control, using humor, and portraying themselves as active participants. When writing memoirs or autobiographical fiction, treating yourself as a helpless victim alienates readers. In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt avoids pure misery by maintaining a plucky voice, humor, and a focus on immediate desires like food and warmth rather than self-pity.

4. Crafting Effective Dialog

Normal human conversation meanders with repetitions, interruptions, non-sequiturs, and banal topics like the weather. You should avoid transcribing normal human conversation word-for-word and instead create a compressed illusion of idiomatic speech. Skilled writers selectively listen and capture moments that illuminate a scene rather than reproducing raw audio transcripts.

Dialog must create an illusion of idiomatic speech while accomplishing multiple narrative purposes.

Novelist Irving Wallace observed that interviewer Lillian Ross made her subjects sound like boors by selectively capturing quotes that told the whole story. Good dialog in fiction and non-fiction must accomplish multiple goals at once, primarily characterizing the speaker and showing action rather than telling. Readers judge a character based on everything they say, forming opinions about their worldview, intelligence, and motivations. Dialog gives readers the illusion of discovery because information learned through conversation feels like something the reader overheard themselves. In Storm Tide, the character Stumpy Squeer is given dialog that infuses him with pride and purpose rather than presenting him as an inarticulate mumbler.

The choice between formal speech, slang, or obscenities reveals a character's background, education, and psychological insecurities. English contains distinct levels of formality due to its historical layers of Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, and Greek. Characters may adjust their speech patterns depending on who they are talking to, which can create rich psychological ambiguity. A college-educated professional in white-collar work reverted to a tough-guy parody of street talk when speaking with blue-collar workers in auto repair shops.

Handling Dialect

When writing in a regional dialect or patois, you should aim for flavor rather than exact phonetic pronunciation that blocks reader comprehension. An overly accurate transcription of a thick dialect erects an impenetrable wall between the reader and the work. The goal is to convey authenticity while keeping the text completely intelligible. The author gave up trying to read a novel written by an American in the dead-accurate Kingston patois of the movie The Harder They Come because she could not penetrate it.

Historical and science fiction writers must construct an illusion of period-appropriate or alien language without making it unreadable. If you try to use actual historical slang that is too obscure, the text becomes quaint, curious, and uninteresting to modern readers. Similarly, alien characters must speak intelligible English unless the story specifically centers on communication barriers. In City of Darkness, City of Light, the author abandoned the idea of using modern Black ghetto speech as an equivalent for 1792 sans culottes language because it would completely destroy reader belief.

Silence can be just as revealing as speech, and dialog can be used efficiently to pass significant periods of time in a narrative. A lack of verbal response or a telling physical reaction often conveys more emotional weight than extensive arguments. You can structure brief exchanges interspersed with indicators of elapsed time to move the plot forward rapidly. An author illustrated a three-week delay, followed by a month-long wait, and a final confrontation using just four lines of punctuated dialog exchanges.

Simple tags like he said or she said are transparent and allow readers to ignore them as mere markers. Action or physical description tags are effective because they let readers visualize the characters while hearing them speak. Indirect dialog summarizes spoken interactions and creates a flattening effect useful for irony, humor, distancing, or skipping known information.

5. Make Em Suffer And Plot Mechanics

Every compelling plot is rooted in a quest where a protagonist has a clear dramatic need or yearning that sets them into motion. Without a driving desire or goal, characters simply exist in limbo without generating narrative tension. You must establish what the protagonist yearns for, what obstacles stand in their way, and how their pursuits create movement.

The Quest

Stories are driven primarily by character flaws and desires or by external events and crises, though the best fiction merges both approaches. In plot-driven fiction, obstacles come from external forces and chance rather than personality. Character-driven stories stem from the protagonist's specific traits, history, and vulnerabilities.

Master writers combine deep psychological characterization with external action. In James Lee Burke’s novel Burning Angel, external obstacles like a trashed house drive the plot. In James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy, the protagonist Joe Buck's naive and trusting personality generates his troubles.

A macguffin is a fabricated object whose sole purpose is to create a yearning that propels characters into motion and forces them to overcome obstacles. Readers do not need to care about the intrinsic value or logic of the object itself. Their attention is riveted by the action and the characters' drive to acquire it.

In Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, the characters obsess over a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon. The attention is sustained by the action rather than the statue's details.

Conflicts and Coincidences

Conflicts in fiction generally manifest as interior conflicts, interpersonal conflicts, or external conflicts arising from the natural or societal world.

• Interior conflicts stem from flaws like guilt or fear.
• Interpersonal conflicts arise between individuals through interactions or chance.
• External conflicts involve natural disasters or societal pressures that put characters to the test.

In Annette Williams Jaffee's novel Gone to Soldiers, a young French Jewish teenager named Jacqueline escapes the historical roundup during the hot summer of 1942 when she is nineteen. Twenty thousand Jews are picked up by the French police in Paris, but a quarrel with her mother leads Jacqueline to stay out with her non-Jewish boyfriend, Henri.

Coincidence is an acceptable tool to launch a plot but a flawed method for resolving one. Readers readily accept coincidences if they occur early to set up complications and establish the premise. Using a sudden coincidence to resolve the narrative feels manipulative and cheats the reader. A protagonist winning the lottery in an early chapter is accepted to study the impact of sudden riches. Resolving a destitute character's struggle by having them win the lottery at the end feels unearned.

A satisfying plot resolution must issue organically from the characters, their relationships, or the preceding events rather than relying on outside forces. You must avoid dropping characters arbitrarily or using external interventions like a deus ex machina to resolve conflicts. The ending must feel correct and earned based on the psychological realities established earlier. In a rejected manuscript critique, an author's narrative failed because the crooked sheriff and other vital characters simply dropped out of the final quarter of the story and were dismissed in a single concluding sentence.

Every compelling plot relies on a quest, clear dramatic needs, and organic resolutions.

6. Personal Narrative And Viewpoint

A successful memoir requires a unifying shape, character depth, and psychological exploration rather than a mere chronological list of factual events.

Readers look for meaning and perspective in personal narratives. A narrative must squeeze mundane facts to reveal human truths, whereas raw reportage and unadorned statistics remain dull and unengaging.

A World War II combat photographer documented historical milestones with exact precision, but his manuscript was repeatedly rejected because it lacked personal emotional toll and read like a boring list of dates and movements, such as March 23, the date Montgomery crossed the Rhine.

Mundane and unglamorous experiences can become international best sellers if investigated by a curious mind for deeper insights. Writers must dig beneath surface events to explore inner life, longings, and behavioral nuances. Characters within a memoir must be multi-dimensional rather than simple walk-on figures.

May Sarton wrote about illness, solitude, and her garden, producing international best sellers translated into many languages, whereas former combat photographers and undercover detectives failed to place their suspenseful manuscripts because their characters lacked depth. May Sarton authored forty-eight books and died at the age of eighty-two.

Disguising a real-life incident by changing names, places, genders, or time periods helps you distance yourself from the material and remain emotionally truthful. By shifting the setting or perspective, you can explore volatile material without worrying about exposing yourself or betraying real people.

Marge Piercy used an autobiographical novel as a strategy in Braided Lives to tell the story of a working-class Detroit woman wanting to be a writer despite lacking family support.

Autobiographers must decide what to leave out because they cannot include every detail of an entire life. Unlike biographers who never know enough and must research for years, autobiographers know everything and require a strict narrative strategy and theme to anchor their focus.

Russell Baker spent years gathering a massive four-hundred-fifty-page manuscript of family interviews about the Great Depression, only to realize he had omitted himself and his mother.

Viewpoint Strategies

Fiction writers generally choose among three basic viewpoint strategies to manage the emotional distance and chemistry between readers and characters.

You can intentionally keep readers at a cold emotional distance using omniscient or ironic tone, encourage strong identification with a single character, or offer a choice among multiple alternating viewpoints. Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season alternates viewpoints between the father, mother, younger sister, and older brother.

Viewpoint characters vary in reliability, acting across distinct literary roles:

• transparent lenses that share observations honestly;
• naive observers who know less than the reader and build suspense;
• flawed and duplicitous narrators who force you to separate objective reality from their obfuscation.

Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita explicitly warns the audience to beware of a murderer with a fancy prose style.

Switching viewpoints across a complex narrative gives multiple angles and dramatic irony at the cost of momentum. Maintaining distinct linguistic rhythms and vocabularies for each character ensures consistency across the narrative track. Marge Piercy took Gone to Soldiers apart after the second draft to write it as ten separate novels before reassembling them in six total drafts.

Labeling a personal narrative as fiction provides the freedom to invent emotional truths and scenarios that never strictly happened in reality. Ira Wood's mother asked him for years about a Chinese restaurant scene in The Kitchen Man, even though they had never once gone out for Chinese food together.

7. Descriptions Setting And Research

Descriptions in fiction and memoirs must always serve multiple functions, such as advancing the plot, setting the mood, or revealing character, rather than merely acting as decorative scenery. You should ensure that every descriptive element does double or triple labor. Details chosen should implicitly communicate character traits, social status, or historical background without bringing the narrative momentum to a halt.

Descriptions must perform multiple labor functions, backed by rigorous research databases and expert fact-checking.

In Small Changes, Beth sees herself as a wedding cake in her mother's vanity mirror, reflecting her feelings of alienation and inadequacy compared to her sister Nancy. Connotative language acts like a musical score in a film, setting the psychological mood and subliminally signaling what kind of events to expect. Chapter one of Tanith Lee's Lycanthia shifts from a comforting pastoral train ride to a sinister, freezing winter landscape that connotes imminent harm.

In certain narratives, the setting or landscape functions as a primary actor and a living presence as vivid as any human character. In Stanislau Lem's Solaris, the ocean on the planet is a living actor, and in Isaak Dinesen's Out of Africa, Kenya serves as a vital participant in her marriage and life.

Research and Fact-Checking

Extensive research projects require computer databases rather than notebooks or rigid filing card systems to allow flexible cross-referencing. Traditional spatial filing systems limit access to a single path or label. Computer databases allow you to retrieve specific notes through multiple intersecting descriptors.

For the World War II novel Gone to Soldiers, the author maintained a database seven times as long as the book itself, and the database for the French Revolution novel covered thirty-two high-density discs.

Writers should consult domain experts to review drafts for specialized jargon, anachronisms, and cultural accuracy, rather than relying solely on copy editors. While copy editors focus heavily on grammar and punctuation, they frequently miss major factual errors. Bringing in people with firsthand experience helps prevent glaring historical mistakes.

Before finalizing Gone to Soldiers, the author had a former bombardier and shipyard worker, a Rosie the Riveter, a Holocaust survivor, a Holocaust scholar, and a French professor review the manuscript. About five boners slipped through initial expert checks into the final manuscript.

Historical research often leads to conflicting records, forcing you to accept that history fades and enter the realm of the unknowable. When researching a convoy for the Duvey chapter titled The Black Pit in Gone to Soldiers, the author found that every single ship list in Washington and London records was different.

Memoirists can successfully counteract the fallibility of memory by using sensory triggers like period music, scents, old photographs, and childhood objects. Consciously utilizing physical items from the past helps retrieve forgotten feelings, details, and scenes that factual recall alone cannot reach. The author used a tin box of buttons saved from her mother's sewing drawer to recall what her mother wore on a special trip, which inspired a poem called Unbuttoning.

8. Genre Specific Craft

Historical fiction, science fiction, mystery, and short stories demand specialized architecture and worldbuilding.

Historical Fiction and Sci-Fi

Historical fiction requires meticulous research into everyday details rather than relying on clichés or anachronistic dialogue. You must study period slang, clothing, architecture, and food to create an authentic flavor without alienating readers with overly archaic language. Understanding minor details of daily life prevents blanket assumptions about historical periods. A peasant family in Normandy in 1780 would not furnish with Louis XVI furniture, just as Umberto Eco set The Name of the Rose in 1327.

Marge Piercy researched the French Revolution for her novel City of Darkness, City of Light and discovered that the most obscene street newspapers looked like academic journals rather than modern sensational tabloids.

Science fiction demands immersive worldbuilding that connects speculative elements to human conflicts without relying on tech jargon. Authors must explore how changes in technology, biology, or social structures ripple through a culture while keeping the focus on believable, engaging characters rather than stock tropes.

In Piercy's novel He, She and It, set in the year 2059, the multi-national corporation Yakimura-Steichen enforces strict clothing and body display norms reflecting rigid gender roles. Fantasy and speculative genres provide a liberating metaphor to explore intimate traumas, social criticism, and taboos safely. By transposing real-world anxieties, domestic abuse, or social critiques into alternate settings, you can address painful subjects indirectly through monsters, aliens, or magic. Josh Whedon used vampires, werewolves, and demons in the television series Buffy, The Vampire Slayer as metaphors for the emotional violence experienced in high school.

Mysteries and Short Stories

Mystery and crime novels require rigorous plotting and direct observation of police or courtroom procedures rather than television tropes. Unlike more improvised forms, mysteries must be carefully outlined beforehand so that clues are fairly planted and the denouement satisfies the reader's sense of justice. You cannot rely on page 301 in a poorly structured manuscript where a murderer is implausibly revealed as a psychopath.

Piercy sat in on trials in Barnstable Court, Superior Court in Boston, and night court in Manhattan while researching her books.

Short stories function more like poems than novels, relying on tight single viewpoints, specific time slots, and resonant epiphanies. Short fiction cannot accommodate excessive digressions, multiple viewpoints, or sprawling subplots. It thrives on a single focused event, a strong narrative voice, and character insights that stop short of miraculous lifestyle overhauls. A fifteen-year period can be captured through a series of suggestive moments in a marriage story.

James Joyce used the imagery of falling snow throughout his short story The Dead to reinforce the mood until the final sentence.

9. Voice Humor And Publishing Reality

Humor often arises from personal pain and structural devices, while writing about family involves legal and personal risks.

You can generate comedy by pushing situations to absurd limits, piling on ridiculous details, creating unexpected turns of events, or repeating a pattern where characters make the same mistake. Writers need sufficient emotional distance from a painful subject before they can apply comedic technique and find humor in it.

Joseph Heller took years to capture the absurdity of war in Catch 22 after serving in World War II.

Humor Techniques

Humorous writing relies on specific structural devices:

• a unique voice;
• extended metaphors;
• exaggeration;
• snowballing details;
• reversals of expectations.

Effective comic characters must be fully realized personalities driven by obsessive needs and fanatical fixations rather than flat buffoons. David Sedaris uses his insecure, self-deprecating persona across various mundane and bizarre work situations.

Writing About Family

Writing autobiographical fiction about real family members involves navigating personal guilt, family friction, and legal considerations regarding privacy and defamation. Authors often experience ambivalence and fear of confrontation when rendering family members in fiction, yet emotional honesty provides a truthful rendering of lived experience.

The author's first novel The Kitchen Man faced 24 rejections from mainstream publishers before being published by a small press, eventually drawing mixed reactions but ultimate acceptance from the author's parents.

10. Writing Habits And Business Realities

Maintain a daily writing habit, understand publishing economics, and act as an entrepreneurial author.

Daily Writing Habits

You do not need massive blocks of free time to finish a manuscript. Allocating one hour of high energy daily is enough to complete a first draft.

• Dedicate 1 hour of concentration every day.
• Write a page a day over 365 days a year.

Allocating too much time often leads to unnecessary fussing, rewriting functional sentences, or procrastinating. Self-censorship and shame rooted in social expectations prevent you from exploring authentic personal truths and complex human contradictions. You internalize prohibitions and fear public ridicule or disapproval regarding unconventional emotions, leading to shallow or imitative work guided by your inner censor. Writing workshops are most effective when participants commit to helping a writer achieve their own specific vision rather than imposing personal tastes. You must distance yourself from your personal distaste regarding certain genres or emotional subjects and provide constructive feedback to help the peer improve their specific work. A writer who prefers dry, laconic prose must learn to give useful feedback to someone writing emotional accounts of childhood sexual abuse or police procedurals with firearms.

Publishing Business

Chasing fleeting literary trends is counterproductive because the market quickly saturates before a multi-year book project can be completed. You must follow your own genuine passion rather than trying to replicate current fads like memoirs, spiritual books, or minimalist fiction. Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Robert Sabbag's Snowblind touched on national interests at the right time, but their authors wrote out of personal passion rather than trend forecasting. Small presses offer a vital alternative for quirky, original books that large conglomerate publishers reject. Unlike large publishers focused on brand names and blockbuster bestsellers, small presses keep books in print longer, allowing niche titles to develop an audience.

Modern writers must act as entrepreneurs, actively marketing their work and building an audience through readings and public engagement. In a crowded market featuring 125,000 books published every year, relying solely on isolation is insufficient. You must secure readings, write query letters, and network. Achieving modest fame or a book deal does not translate to wealth, and financial returns for writers are frequently modest. After agents take commissions, publishers deduct advances, and taxes are paid, a sizable nominal deal breaks down into a very small annual income spread over years of writing. For example, a nominal paperback deal amount of $100,000 breaks down into a $50,000 hardcover publisher share, a $7,500 agent commission, and a $42,500 writer share on paper. Once the $15,000 initial advance is deducted from the writer share, you are left with an approximate annual income of $9,000 over a three-year book cycle.

11. Practical Information And Submission

Submission Etiquette

Editors receive vast numbers of submissions and will discard or ignore poorly formatted manuscripts, those missing page numbers or running titles, or those lacking a Stamped Self-Addressed Envelope. Even the smallest presses receive 20 to 30 manuscripts weekly, while 60 to 100 other manuscripts are in the pile competing for attention. About 15 percent of writers fail to include a Stamped Self-Addressed Envelope.

Follow manuscript submission rules, secure literary agents when appropriate, and embrace self-publishing alternatives.

Writers must learn to endure rejection without taking it personally or reacting unprofessionally against editors. Rejections are rarely about you personally and usually stem from market fit, economic issues, or personal tastes. Responding angrily to rejection letters is considered rankly amateurish. Ira once destroyed a novel by constantly rewriting it to satisfy 16 different rejecting editors before finally putting it aside to restore his original vision. It took 10 years before Ira could tackle his destroyed novel again.

Agents and Self-Publishing

An agent is necessary to sell a finished novel or nonfiction proposal to a large mainstream publisher, but not required for small independent presses or poetry collections. Good agents know which editors have clout, understand complex publishing contracts, and help navigate the industry. You must look out for predatory business card agents who charge upfront fees instead of taking a standard commission.

Contracts involve specific financial terms:

• 15 percent commission for sales;
• 20 percent commission for foreign rights.

Ira submitted his novel The Kitchen Man to independent presses himself after failing in New York, but had an agent represent his next novel, Going Public, to handle subsidiary rights. Over one hundred thousand titles are published every year. Because the literary field is overcrowded, books do not sell themselves.

The traditional image of the solitary genius is obsolete. Modern writers must act as creative entrepreneurs who actively promote their work through touring, publicity, and community building. Writing books is rarely a self-supporting financial proposition, and most serious authors must maintain other means of income. Only a tiny percentage of writers reach best-seller lists, and the median income for an American writer remains extremely low at $5,000, making a day job essential. David Foster Wallace received an $85,000 advance and $42,500 in royalties for Infinite Jest, which took 5 years to write and sold 30,000 hardcover and 60,000 paperback copies.

Self-publishing is a viable and respectable alternative when traditional publishers reject original work, provided you maintain realistic expectations and avoid vanity scams. You can utilize print-on-demand technology or e-books to bring unique regional or niche books to market. Legitimate alternatives must be distinguished from exploitative vanity publishers that dump unsold inventory in garages. Teri Woods self-published her rejected urban lit hip-hop novel True to the Game after 20 publishers rejected the manuscript. She sold 500 copies initially from the trunk of her car in Harlem before launching a successful publishing company.

12. Immersion In Literature And Craft

Immersion and Exercises

Emerging writers often mistakenly look for books about the writing process instead of immersing themselves in actual memoirs and novels. You must read literature as deeply and critically as filmmakers study cinema or lawyers study case law. See how other writers solved craft problems. A student expects us to recommend books about the journey of writing rather than pointing them to great literature.

Writing primarily for self-expression or in journals for therapeutic reasons serves a valid purpose. That work differs completely from writing for publication. While some raw journals get published after intensive editing, most books intended for modern readers require mastery of craft elements like beginnings and characterization.

Writers benefit most from craft books by actively completing the suggested exercises rather than just reading about them. Classroom testing shows that exercises genuinely work to build skills provided you actually attempt them.

Avoiding Reinventing The Wheel

Raw note-taking or personal journaling should not be confused with a structured manuscript. You must shape your material heavily to turn it into a novel. Writers often collect random ideas on laptops or notepads. Struggling to turn thousands of unstructured pages directly into fiction without a plot or shaped characters is overwhelming.

A student in class had a thousand single-spaced handwritten pages about his family expecting it to magically turn into a novel.

Refusing to learn standard craft techniques under the guise of pure originality usually results in flawed work. Writers who refuse to read widely or use established techniques because they want to invent everything from scratch produce poor results.

A friend who hates cookbooks insists on inventing every casserole from scratch and makes terrible dishes like well-done roast lamb in salsa. You achieve better literary results by embracing proven methods and active practice.

10 Key Ideas

1. Writing begins with extensive reading, cultivating an adult mind, and harnessing sensual memory.
2. Capturing reader attention quickly requires starting in medias res and understanding narrative time.
3. Create multidimensional characters by avoiding self-hatred projections and prioritizing subjective self-image.
4. Dialog must create an illusion of idiomatic speech while accomplishing multiple narrative purposes.
5. Every compelling plot relies on a quest, clear dramatic needs, and organic resolutions.
6. A successful memoir requires a unifying shape, character depth, and psychological exploration rather than a mere chronological list of factual events.
7. Descriptions must perform multiple labor functions, backed by rigorous research databases and expert fact-checking.
8. Historical fiction, science fiction, mystery, and short stories demand specialized architecture and worldbuilding.
9. Humor often arises from personal pain and structural devices, while writing about family involves legal and personal risks.
10. Maintain a daily writing habit, understand publishing economics, and act as an entrepreneurial author.