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| Mary Connealy with Charlene Patterson and Lauraine Snelling |
7 Tips for a Manuscript
That Will Impress an Acquisitions Editor
By
Bethany House Editor Charlene Patterson
I’ve
been involved in acquiring books for publishers for about sixteen years now,
and for the past eleven years, I’ve acquired Christian fiction for Bethany
House. In that time, I think I’ve encountered nearly every subgenre, every type
of character, and every type of setting, and I’ll be honest: it’s hard to
impress me. So today I’m going to let you in on my tips toward creating a story
that will catch the eye of the AE at your desired publishing house.
Write in genre-Publishing
companies are businesses first and foremost. We love publishing great books,
but almost every decision is weighed on how it affects the bottom line. When we’re
deciding whether to publish a book, we say things like, “This will succeed
because [this similar book] was a success.” “This is worth publishing because
it appeals to the same readership as [this author].” Know your genre, know what
readers in that genre are looking for, and write with those things in mind. You
can still be super creative with your voice, plots, settings, and characters,
but stay within a definable, marketable genre, one the AE and the Marketing
Dept. will recognize. Read bestselling and award-winning books in your genre of
choice and consider what’s working about those stories. Examples of genres are
romantic suspense, Biblical fiction, contemporary romance, historical romance, dystopian,
legal thriller, etc.
Start off with a
bang-A
well-thought-out proposal is great, but almost every AE I know only glances at
the proposal and then skips to the writing sample. We usually have a big stack
of proposals on our desks, so you get only a few pages to pull us in. Make sure
your story starts off in a really exciting way. Get past your first ideas to
something more original—I get so tired of stories that start with a character
arriving on a train or stagecoach, or returning to her hometown, or receiving
an inheritance. Think of a more original situation, and make that situation as
engaging as possible so I’m excited to keep reading. I very quickly want to
know what obstacles the characters are going to have to overcome, and why
overcoming those obstacles is going to be difficult but worth it. By the end of
Ch. 2, I’d like to be able to form this statement about your book: “If [the
main character] doesn’t accomplish [this] by [this deadline], [this bad thing]
will happen.”
Create likable,
realistic characters-Note
that I didn’t say perfect, super sweet, innocent characters. It’s just as hard
to like someone who is sweetly boring or perfect than someone mean. If your
hero doesn’t seem like he could possibly exist in the real world, I’m not
interested. And don’t mistake things like clumsiness, trying too hard to serve
others, or feistiness as “flaws.” Make your characters real, honest people—someone
who might live on your block or might be in your family tree. Make them people
we can root for because they are facing difficult circumstances but are still
persevering.
Flesh out the world-I’ve
heard a lot of editors say it’s the secondary things that make or break a
story—the secondary characters, the secondary plotlines, the secondary romance,
the descriptions between the dialogue. If those things are done well, the book
shines. So make the “world” of your story come to life. Describe it--make me
feel like I’m there, seeing it, hearing it, smelling it. Create fleshed-out secondary
characters and secondary plotlines. Who are the extras you’d hire if this was a
movie? What do they look like, and what do they do all day? How do they
interact with the hero and heroine? What’s going on in history at this time? What
makes the town they live in unique? What are your characters’ backstories and
how does that influence who they are today? Where are they in the birth order
of their siblings? How much schooling did they have access to? What was their
favorite subject? Who is their best friend? Bonus tip: Don’t isolate your
characters, if you can avoid it. It’s hard to create a riveting story with only
a couple people living far away from everyone else.
Put big obstacles
in the characters’ way-Editors
read tons of books, so we’re looking for a story that sucks us in, something we
don’t want to put down even when five o’clock rolls around. That means we’re
looking for conflict, action, adventure, and situations that have us on the
edge of our seat. Why are the Biblical stories of Noah, Esther, Joseph and his
brothers, and Jonah the ones we retell to this day? Because they were in
crazy-impossible situations that still capture our imagination. Always be
making things worse for your characters. Escalate. Be MEAN to your characters. Make
them want something they can’t have, dream something that’s nearly impossible, have
a plan that’s about to go absolutely haywire, love someone who doesn’t love
them back. Put big obstacles in their way every chance you get.
Find your voice-You
hate this advice, right? Because everybody says it and nobody really knows what
it means. I think one of the reasons it keeps getting said is because so many
manuscripts sort of sound alike. The characters and places are sort of
interchangeable with other things I’ve read, and the prose is rather bland. I
mentioned you should write in genre, but you still want your story to stand out
because of its unique flavor. You want the AE to think, “Hey, we should acquire
this author because he or she brings something new and fresh to the genre,
something we don’t already have among our current authors.”
If I gave you three unidentified pieces
of fiction and told you to guess which was from Janette Oke, Tamera Alexander,
and Mary Connealy, I bet you wouldn’t have much trouble telling me which was
which. That’s voice.
So how do you find your voice? Ask
others what stands out about your writing to them, and then build on your
strengths. Figure out how you naturally use words, lay out scenes, let the
reader in on details about your characters. How do people know they are reading
a book by you? Will they laugh? Cry? Feel like they are living in 1865? Fall in
love with the hero? Fear the bad guy? Even when you write in third person,
think about how your characters would write if they did so in first person, and
try to bring that out in the writing style. Think about who your narrator is,
how he or she would talk if telling this story aloud, and try to bring that out
in the writing.
Cut 5,000 words-This
one might be the toughest of all because those words reflect hard work--your
blood, sweat, and tears as you tried to accomplish all the things I listed
above. But stick with me here. A large portion of the manuscripts I turn down
aren’t bad, per se; they’re just boring. Your manuscript has unnecessary words.
Lots of them. Whole unnecessary scenes, even. So go back and be ruthless. Cut
out all the unnecessary stuff, all the boring stuff, any time the action or
tension lags for more than a couple paragraphs, or the characters have long
stretches of dialogue or interior thought, or times when their life is too happy
and easy to be interesting. A breather now and then in a story is fine, but
never let your characters dwell on any one thing for too long, and don’t let
them get too content or settled until the very end. Trimming that kind of stuff
will make your manuscript more engaging and more polished. Every word will
count.
As
a bonus, here are my 7 things NOT to do in your manuscript:
Give your hero
or heroine a weird hair or eye color.
That’s
not a good way to make them interesting or attractive, and it looks strange on
the cover.
Strong romantic
feelings too early in the story.
Let
the relationship between your hero and heroine develop slowly and naturally. It
takes all the fun out of it when they are too in love too soon. I know they’re
going to fall in love by the end of the book. You know they’re going to fall in
love by the end of the book. But your job is to convince me, for several
chapters, that there’s no possible way they’ll have their happy ending.
Write 3 good
chapters and 17 bad ones.
You’re
going to polish those first three chapters a lot because they’ll be the ones
you submit to contests, submit for critique, and put in your proposal. But I
can’t tell you how many times the first three chapters have been great while
the rest of the manuscript was terrible. So polish those first three chapters,
but make sure the rest of the manuscript lives up to that promise. I think the
hardest part of a story to make interesting is the middle, so watch that part
carefully. That might be a good place to add in something new, something
unexpected, up the stakes a little.
Have the
characters step into a church one time or read the Bible one time and it
changes their life.
Also
be very careful about God speaking to characters directly.
Characters who dwell
on the same thing over and over.
It’s
good to be aware of your characters’ internal motivations, tensions, and
conflicts, but you don’t need to remind the reader of them in every chapter.
Remember those 5,000 words you’re going to cut? Start with any time the
characters ponder things internally for more than a paragraph.
Money or love
solve all their problems.
To
be satisfying, the denouement of the book needs to have some basis in real
life, or at least be realistic in the world you’ve created.
Never write it.
Get
those ideas on paper and see what they become. Some won’t work—and I warn you,
you may not discover they aren’t working until you’re in Chapter 14, which is
why you’d better start now. You have to write in order to create a manuscript,
and you have to create a manuscript in order to edit it and make it awesome.
Thanks
for letting me guest post on Seekerville!
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