It’s a Job

The other day I was thinking about how it is no secret that successful authors such as Michael Ondaatje, Stephen King, and Nora Roberts treat writing as a job. None of this pattering about or dabbling business. These guys are serious about their careers which has something to do with why they have published so many successful books. They “go to work” every day and write. For them, it is a nine to five type situation. And it works. (And I do believe they began treating it as a job before they reached their famed levels of success where they had to treat it as a job in order to survive and sustain their level of achievement and success.)

Yesterday*, I was listening to Charlaine Harris on CBC radio, and again, up came the idea that writing is a job. (Job being “a paid position of regular employment” according to dictionary.com.)

So, until you start treating it as a job–even if it is a second job, part-time job, unpaid job, etc.,–how is it ever going to become anything else? How will it leave the status of hobby if you don’t commit to it in the way you would a ‘real’ job?

Just a little food for thought on a hot, hot day.

*I wrote this in July while on the road, but ran into posting issues. And so this post sat in my drafts folder until, well, now.

The Business of Prologues

I was just talking about this over on AgentQuery Connect and thought, “Hey, you know, this is worth repeating on my blog.” And so, here it is. The cold, dirty, hard truth about prologues and querying literary agents.

Click on image to see another viewpoint on prologues

Agents generally “don’t like” prologues because many aspiring writers have given them a bad name. Why? They use them as a crutch (not to say everyone does–sometimes they are a fabulously executed device that is intrinsic to the story) to make up for their failings in areas such as building suspense, creating a good story question, setting up the story, setting, characters, etc. Instead of cutting the first 40 pages of ‘warm-up,’ writers create a prologue that sneaks the reader ahead in the story in hopes that it’ll keep them hooked and maintain them through the ‘getting there’ early stages of the story. Agents also find that, in many cases, prologues can be cut and avoided altogether. <Gasp!>

So, say you are going to query a literary agent and are wondering about your prologue. The submission guidelines say “the first chapter.” Is your prologue truly a chapter? Yes and no. If it is short (I’d say three pages or less) it really doesn’t count as a chapter and should be sent along with “chapter one.” However, if your prologue is regular chapter length (that being around the ten double-spaced pages mark or more) it very much is its own chapter and should be treated accordingly when submitting to agents. Tricky, isn’t it? (And those of you with prologues around 5 pages long are cursing me right now.)

But can you get away with sending off your first chapter without your prologue?

NO! Absolutely not. (And if you are sniffling about how it isn’t your best work, it doesn’t make sense, etc., etc., and you don’t want to send it as you don’t want it to represent your book, then CUT IT.)

You MUST submit your prologue when querying agents. Why? Because it is the beginning of your novel. It is the first thing your reader is going to read and it is going to make the first impression. Say you send in the first three chapters and not the prologue. The agent reads them and asks for more. You send more, plus the prologue. Now they have extra work. They can’t just keep reading from page 49 or 51, or wherever your first submission left off. They have to figure out where this prologue fits in–which involves going back to the beginning of the story and possibly even rereading the first bit in light of this new information.

The cold hard truth: You’ve just wasted their time.

Ask yourself: What sort of impression have I just made?

This is my take on the whole prologue business. Naturally, there are folks who may disagree with this, and that’s fine. There also may be agents who feel differently about this as well. However, I think you can use this advice as a general rule of thumb to keep you ‘out of trouble.’ And if in doubt, check out the agent’s/agency’s blog and submission guidelines–occasionally they will mention what to do about the prologue.

Why Writers Can’t Let Go

According to WIRED, the magazine of intelligent geeks and nerds, it’s the IKEA Effect.

Okay, let me back up a bit.

If you are a writer or know a writer, you may have noticed that they have a heck of a time letting go of old stories. Particularly their first story. They work on it and work on it and work on it and can’t figure out why the heck the world doesn’t find this lovely story of daring and darlings as wonderful as they do. So… what’s up with that?

Well, according to Dan Ariely in July’s WIRED magazine, he says this is due to the IKEA Effect. The IKEA Effect is the idea that something becomes incredibly more valuable to us if we’ve spent a lot of time creating something. (IKEA because we think that our simple shelf is da bomb after we’ve gone through hair loss and divorce tying to put the damn thing together straight and strong. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise–that shelf is fab, darling. <smile and nod, smile and nod>)

Back to writing. The poor, struggling writer has learned so much while writing The 15 Date Rule, er, um, I mean their story. They have spent years… er, lots and lots of time writing, tweaking, rearranging, and editing this fine feast for the mind. Naturally, they are now quite heavily invested in this creation. It’s difficult, if not near impossible, to let go of something that has been given so much time out of one’s life. The effort put into this project is huge making it very hard to say, “Okay. This is as far as this one can go. I can’t do anymore. It will never quite get ‘there’ and thus, it must go in this musty old bottom drawer and stay there forever more.”

Now… if it is someone else’s story… that’s different. We aren’t nearly as invested are we?

And I guess this is why if you’ve ever watched Dragon’s Den (Shark Tank is the US equivalent), this is why you’ve seen some inventors/entrepreneurs who have spent more than the GNP of a small country on an invention that will never fly. It’s because they are suffering from the IKEA Effect and don’t even know it.

So, if you have a story that has popped in mind while reading this, and feel you might be suffering from the IKEA Effect… let go. Start something new. Or, go build a shelf.