One of my favorite things to hear about from writers is how they got their literary agents.
Here’s my agent-story—the falls in the mud, the emotions that sag like low-hanging diapers, and the joy of standing up again. (The pic is of my son, who really did fall in the mud. This is him after being stripped naked–something I never tried in response to bad news from agents. Mmm.)
September 2012. I typed, “The End” on my smart-sleuthing YA mystery, Shatter. Two words never looked so good.
November 2012. I sent out a query to eight agents. One of my top picks requested the full manuscript. (!)
May 2013. After six months of waiting, Ms. Top-Pick Agent rejected Shatter on the same day it didn’t pass the first round of The Writer’s Voice query contest. (Ouch.)
The Very Next Day. In an emotional swing so typical of writing, I accepted the grand prize for Shatter in front of four hundred people after it won the first chapter contest at LDStorymakers‘ writers conference.
July 2013. I was re-enthused. I rewrote the query and got full requests. Like rolling in. Like double-digits. (Overall, I contacted 192 agents in the eighteen month process, 34 of whom showed varying degrees of interest.)
August 2013. I got rejections from full requests. Like rolling in. Like double-digits. “I loved the premise/MC/voice, but I didn’t love the premise/MC/voice,” agents said. I was embarrassed, disappointed, and obsessively hard on myself for entertaining either emotion. I’d known going in that many writers got “no’s.” I’d known it. What was so wrong with being in the same boat as others whom I respected? Or did I only respect success? (Yikes, that thought hurt.) I had to take a hard look at how I judged other writers. Several times a day (or an hour), I had to force myself into an activity just to shut up my thoughts. I did yoga and meditation.
One Year After I Started: Biology kicked in. Eventually, you just cannot feel every bump in the road. I had all the same emotions, but they’d hit for five-minute stretches, not five-hour ones. Anyway, I was sucking the marrow from life by caring so much about something, right? Passion, art—dude, my daily life was the stuff of movies! (Right?) I realized, too, that although my day-job of diapers, soccer practice and Pb&J wasn’t as interesting as the rocky-road toward publication, it was sustaining. Real. My kids, my husband, bike rides, toddler-hugs, first-grade homework, pj dance parties—these never rejected me. I got invested in new manuscript. Turn on the tap of happiness-in-the-moment and eventually the water tastes sweet.
Don’t get me wrong, I still had a quiet hope for publication, or least an honest pride in my work. If I had to, I planned to sit on the story until my baby (my actual human-baby, not to be confused with my book-baby) started kindergarten, and then I’d do the self-publish route. To finish the project. To cross the final t.
Finally, in February of 2014, 15 months after I started, I got the email I’d been waiting for.
I was numb.
Josh Getzler from HSG agency in New York wanted to schedule a time to talk on the phone about how he liked my story and had thoughts for edits.
You’d think I’d type an exclamation point there, but it was more like a year’s worth of emotion hitting me in the gut. Oh, and the conversations—the conversations! My husband said Josh wouldn’t offer representation but would ask me to revise the story and resubmit it. My best friend (who is agented) said he would offer. My parents said, “So an agent isn’t a publisher? There’s a whole other step to this process?!”
Two days later on the phone, the first words after the hello-my-name-is-Josh were: “I can’t offer to sign you.”
(How I took his non-offering-news.)
Attention: the gripe-fest section of this post is done now.
Sure, Josh wanted me to make changes to five of six main characters, radically transform the motivation of the victim and villain, and restructure one leg of the love triangle before he would consider taking on the project. But editing kicked butt over the query-wait cycle. After a few troubled days of shifting my paradigm on the story, I dug into to edits and realized I could edit forever. Truly forever. Josh never needed to sign me, he could just ask me to rewrite the story annually and I would still be happier than I had been querying. Maybe if Josh wearied of asking me to change the story, I could get my sister to do it for me.
So, cool beans. I was happy. I plotted. I stopped querying.
In April Josh and I spoke on the phone at 7:30 a.m. about my edits, which I estimated were about halfway done. This was a scheduled, but casual call, during which Josh was on the subway, dropping his kids off at school.
(My comment: “Children live in New York City?” His comment: “Lots.” My oldest two children walk to school past a goat, chickens, geese, rabbits, and three donkeys. His probably know how to hail taxis.)
We chatted for twenty minutes about the timing of the novel’s eventual submission—should he decide to take on the project after seeing the changes I was making. We volunteered that we both liked the country of Costa Rica. We hung up. I had a babysitter that day, so I told my kids to not chase any chickens and left for the library to write. Josh emailed. “Would you have five minutes for one quick thing?” Sure, I had five minutes. (Note: I will ignore all of your emails and calls during library-writing time unless you happen to be Josh Getzler, sorry.)
I called, and he said, “You know, I was thinking on the subway, why don’t we just make this official?”
How casual is that? I love it. You love it. You’re spared fifteen more sentences outlining my thought-processes.
So that’s how I got my agent.
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