The one infallible trick that will get you an agent.

I can’t say that if you do this one thing there is a 100% probability that you will get an agent, but if you do this thing, you will hit your own personal highest potential probability of getting an agent.

I’ve noticed, when it comes to accomplishing what seems like impossible tasks that casual viewers seem to default to two different schools of thought.

One is thinking that there is this one weird hack. I don’t think you see this anywhere more prominently than in the world of weight loss. If someone loses weight, people will ask, “How did you do it?”* I’ve heard so many strange “hacks” discussed: two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar a day. Don’t eat anything white. Drink a tall glass of water before every meal. Intermittent fasting. As if a thing that is very difficult that millions of people want to do would be as simple as two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. No one wants to hear “I spent several years in intensive therapy dealing with psychological issues related to my persistent feelings of emptiness and undoing years of weird messaging related to food while embarking on an exercise program that made me really physically uncomfortable at first.” *never mind that you should never ask this question, because their weight isn’t your business, and the answer to your question may be “Cancer” or “Debilitating depression.”

90s kids, remember this commercial (still picture below, not a video, though you can find it) that asked how Asian people have such good skin?

The hack? Crushed up pearls. That’s why Asians look so youthful. We’ve been crushing up pearls for century and smearing them on our skin.

The word “hack” says “actually, the answer is easy, it’s just esoteric. If only you knew what secret is being exchanged amongst the chosen few about apple cider vinegar…”

Whether they say it or not, sometimes it seems like authors are looking for an agent hack. They get overly obsessed with the exact procedures of querying—whether they should include their prologue or not, whether they can include 11 pages instead of 10, if they nudge too early will this put the agent off—as if there was specific procedure, a series of levers that if you push them in the correct order, a buzzer will ring and an agent will slide out of the machine in one of those plastic eggs that you have to break in two. As if one of these tiny bits of minutia—nudging too soon, synopsis without double spaces between paras—will make an agent reject an excellent book.

You know who doesn’t really get asked that “How did you do it?!” question? Marathon runners. Why? Because they are the most boring people on earth. (I’m saying this with affection as someone who trained for and completed albeit slowly a half marathon.) Everyone knows the answer: They ran. A lot. Yes, there’s some other stuff, like rest days and weight training, but ultimately the answer is, “I went for a run. Then I went for a longer run. Then I went for an even longer run. This happened over a series of months.” There’s no good story there. No good hack. I think the reason no one really asks them is because the answer will disappoint.

I’ve mentioned before that after my first book was published, occasionally I would come across someone (honestly? They were all male.) who would say, wistfully, “I always wanted to write a book.” I think these people are tapping into the more accurate “marathon training actually kinda has a low bar for entry (mobility of some sort), but is grueling in its actual practice.” (This wistful statement has always bothered me for reasons I have a hard time articulating. I think it’s because there’s a slight air of “I always wanted to, and therefore I could have, but just didn’t.” But you didn’t, so maybe you couldn’t have..? No one ever says to a professional oboe players, “I’ve always wanted to play the oboe.”)

The “trick” to getting an agent is not getting into Breadloaf or Iowa so you can join the inner cabal of the writerly elite and this is the ONLY way to do it, making the barrier for entry expensive and difficult. (incidentally, I went to both Breadloaf and Sewanee and neither got me an agent. I was a slushpile find. None of my friends who I went with got their agents there, though I assume it happens. Probably not as much as you think though.)

The “trick” is not riding whatever content wave that happens to be in the zeitgeist. It was not as if The Girl on the Train was written with the intent of being the next Gone Girl, but rather it was already sitting on someone’s desk just when Gone Girl was blowing up so a publisher decided to acquire it and do a marketing campaign to force it into being the next Gone Girl. (Because if you think of it, these books have nothing in common other than having “girl” in the title.)

And the “trick” is not, for the love of Jesus, accosting the agent in the bathroom at a conference. (Don’t do this.)

The trick is not even become a really good writer and write a good book.

It’s to become a really good writer and write a book, and then another book, and keep writing books even if you keep getting rejected, you seem to write the right thing at the wrong time, you’re too X when the market wants Y, you’re to Q when only Ps are buying, you have too much plot or not enough. It is some combination of talent and persistence and allowing your talent to continue to grow despite suffering a variety of slings and arrows. It isn’t a hack. It’s a marathon, I’m afraid, and marathons have all that grueling stuff but also ups and downs. There was a part when I did the half marathon in DC where the route went pretty close to my house. I thought for a moment, you know, I could just go home and no one would ever find out. I could have gone home then. I could have stopped during this horrific uphill part near the zoo. Or when my joints were absolutely killing me and I was more or less hobbling like an extra in The Walking Dead. The thing is, you only get that chocolate milk and the silver blanket if you actually cross the finish line.

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This is a bit of a shorter post than usual, but I am prepping for my research trip to Croatia, which starts tomorrow! I did want to note, and I get can get more into detail when I get back, that starting mid-February I will have a very limited number of openings (3) for people interested in developmental editing. This could take the more traditional form of “I have been told this book has X and Y problems and want a developmental edit” to less traditional forms of “I want to punch up the characters in this book” or “I have written myself into a corner here and don’t know how to get out.” Edits don’t have to be on an entire book, but could be on a 100 page section. And as always I’m available for query or first 10 page edits.

Keep safe and sane, friends.