Here’s a tragedy in one act: I wrote a novel a few years ago, a thriller with a bit of sci-fi seasoning in it. I told my agent the opening premise, and she immediately said something like ‘that might be good as long as the next words out of your mouth aren’t xxx’ where xxx was a plot twist that was 100% exactly what I’d just written.
There was what scientists call an awkward silence.
That’s always a sobering moment for a writer who often thinks they’re being clever. I was a bit dismayed, but I thought on it and realized that the plot twist was, in fact, a bit overused and obvious, and so I delicately chopped 54% of the novel out of the manuscript and set about re-writing the second half of the book with a different plot twist. Which wound up ruining everything and the book was and remains a disaster.
The lesson isn’t about the shopworn plot twist; you can sell a shopworn twist if you try. No, the lesson here is that writing to hit someone else’s target is usually a mistake.
You My People
That doesn’t mean my agent was wrong. My agent is less than enthusiastic about a lot of my work, which is perfectly natural, and she’s usually very smart about it. My agent is looking at my work as the person who will have to try and sell it, so naturally she has a different perspective on it. But what I’ve slowly come to realize is that there is very likely someone out there who would read that manuscript and be amazed by it. And that’s what it’s all about: Finding your People.
By and large, my agent is my People. When she dislikes something I’ve written, I usually end up realizing she was right about it. And often when she pushes back on a novel I want to go out on, it’s purely from a market point-of-view—she might admire it, but she doesn’t think she can sell it.
As a writer, you need objective opinions and feedback, of course, but you also have to know who you are as a writer and what you’re trying to accomplish, and stick to that. Instead of constantly revising and re-working your manuscript to match the last round of feedback, you need to find the people out there who will read your work and be instantly drawn to it. Those are your People. In other words, there’s an agent out there who will read your work and love it. There’s an editor out there who will read your book and decide that whatever the P&L says, they’re going to publish it. There are people out there who will love your work and want to put effort into getting it out there. All you have to do is find them.
How to find them is a whole other story involving tears, despair, and stolen diamonds. But I’ve said too much.