Rachelle Gardner Calls for Romance
Literary Agent Rachelle Gardner has announced on the Rants and Ramblings blog that she's adding some new genres. She's now actively seeking romance, cozy mysteries, and female-driven suspense.
Fair warning: Rachelle is specific about what she wants. First, the author needs to be previously published. (This disappoints. I know a couple of writers who deserve the chance to submit.)
Second, the book needs to appeal to female readers and to contain at least one strong female character. Guess what? This is a trend in publishing in general - and one that isn't about to change anytime soon. Jump on. Strengthen those women.
Third, she's looking for manuscripts that fit four specific romance lines: Barbour's Heartsongs Presents, Harlequin's Love Inspired, Summerside's Love Finds You, and HarperCollins' Avon Inspire. She details each and encourages authors to examine the series and the publisher guidelines further before submitting to her.
Share on FacebookObservations on Writing from Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore (Photo: Linda Nylind)
In the current issue of Tin House, Hope/Dread, Michelle Wildgen offers up "A Conversation with Lorrie Moore" about a writer who's inspired her for many years. In the interview, they discuss the midwest, humor, teaching, and her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, published in September 2009 by Knopf. Here are just a few of the gems:
On the problem of stiff characters--and the solution of roughing them up a bit:
Sadly, all my characters are alive for me. Even the ones that seem like zombies to others. So it's not me they must come alive for. But if characters seem dead on the page, they simply need to say or do more. Or they need to have a really interesting thought. Even a thought so banal it's interesting. Or they need to be killed or maybe not killed but just roughed up a little or they need to be driven out of town on a rail, an expression I've never used before and so am not highly confident about its meaning. Also? I never talk about sensitive matters with my kid while driving. I think that's not a good idea. We listen to the radio and bounce around or else fall into silence. The car is part disco, part church. But I never turn it into therapy. I made the mistake of buying a car with a moonroof, which could be used as an exit if sensitive topics were being broached. There is a writing lesson in there if you look hard.
If you can glean the writing lesson at the end of that passage, let me know!
Then, on paying attention to the place where you're living while writing (for her, Wisconsin) and what it offers:
I live in America's diaryland and breadbasket, and the way food has become both politics and art is really breathtaking. But when you live where food is grown it should be part of the world you write about, it seems to me. There are times that we eat in a way that people on this planet never before have--on the deliciousness scale, I mean. I was interested in a character whose dad was providing food to restaurants she herself couldn't afford to go to. I had that meal in mind from the very start of the book: that somehow she would finally have to go and taste her dad's potatoes in that fancy place. When I finally got to that scene I probably put too much food in it. I was so excited.
A Gate at the Stairs
As a lover of food and cooking, that comment set my mind racing. More remarks on writing from this acclaimed novelist and short story writer can be found in the interview. So, too, are Wildgen's awestruck observations about Moore's prose:
Her work is also so particular and so singularly observed that a reader can recall these images years later: a teenage girl noting that her mother's shaved armpit resembles a prickly fruit, the fingerlings potatoes lopped off at their bumpy little knuckles, the tiny mouse heart packed in snow that is a blood clot in a baby's diaper. But while any decent writer can turn a phrase, Moore's language reaches beyond describing. It isn't about guyssying up the page, but is the evidence that the writer preceives, in almost unbearable detail, the moments most of us wish went undetected in our bodies, our conversations, our reachings toward and failures at connection.
I'm running off to get the book....
Moore is the author of several books and story collections, including Birds of America: Stories, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and Self-Help.
Share on FacebookA Change is Comin’… (On Chick Lit, but observations we should all be aware of)
Prospect Park West by Amy Sohn
This fabulous Chick-Lit-meets-Hardcore-Reality book came across my desk recently. The first thing I did after reading it? Search out what's been going on with Chick Lit these days.
I meant just to see what new books were being published. I wanted to make sure my prospective client's idea was as "fresh" as it immediately seemed. Instead, I encountered a debate over the current facelift of Chick Lit. In The Death of Chick Lit: How the Recession is Transforming the Genre, UK author Susan Bilston chronicles how the collapse of the international financial system led to fast and furious plot revisions of the US edition of Sleepless Nights. She needed to avoid the "cheery consumerism and "aimless career-dithering" typical of the genre and insert strife and character growth. Her solution? Emphasize the threat of lay-offs and restructuring and have the characters seriously reflect on what they really want to do. She sums up:
I’m guessing chick-lit authors around the country are penning similar lines. In the next months and years, expect to see plots that turn on overcoming repossession and job-loss, not shopping and sex. The frothiest novels must respond to a more sober age. Like many American businesses, chick-lit must reinvent itself—fast—if it’s going to survive.
It seems that the recession has left its mark on even the fictional Bergdorf shoppers.
The women's magazine Jezebel, not surprisingly, responded to this shift with a great deal of cynicism in Is 'New Chick-Lit' Just a Different Kind of Obnoxious.
The new, recession-era chick lit may tell the stories of women who pare away the fat in their lives to find true happiness, but this is a lot easier if there's some fat to begin with.
Doree Shafir, in Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets an Update, wants to just get rid of the term altogether given what she considers a serious revamping of the genre:
Welcome to the new narrative of the New York woman—just don't call it chick lit. If these three recent books are any indication, the genre is about to get an update. “The Prince Charming narrative is just not accurate to people's lives,” [Amy] Sohn [author of Prospect Park West] says. “There's so much anxiety around finding a mate that no one really thinks about the actual marriage when they're trying to find someone.” Froelich concurs, with a twist,“None of my friends are about, 'I must get married,' ” she says over lunch. “They're about, 'I want to stand on my own two feet.'”
... Sohn, Froelich [Paula Froelich's Mercury in Retrograde] and Grazer [Gigi Levangie Grazer's Queen Takes King] are eager to move beyond the idea that for today's New York woman, getting the man is the key to happiness, instead choosing to portray women's lives as complicated—from career problems to loveless marriages and divorce, and conflicted feelings about having children.
After reading these articles (plus this one and this one), I started contacting people I knew were writing not only Chick Lit but also women's commercial fiction. Why both? Because what's happening in the Chick Lit world does have some bearing on what happens in women's commercial fiction. While Jezebel and many others might define Chick Lit more strictly as fiction featuring Shopaholics and trust funds, many writers find their ostensibly literary or mainstream novels marketed or reviewed as if Chick Lit. This includes writers from highly acclaimed MFA programs.
I can't help but see this facelift as a good thing, whatever you think about Chick Lit (or that elder version so pejoratively called Hen Lit). If you're pitching a novel about a contemporary female character facing relationship and career changes, then consider including some measure of financial realism into the tale. I've seen too many books as an editor where the character's dream job just fell into her lap or when the mentioned job seemed superficially considered at best. Such a fuzzy crafting of character bio makes it difficult to see the foundation from and on which the character develops.
By the way--that incredibly fresh Chick Lit book that appeared on my desk? That character's job is insane. Revisions are underway. I can't wait until you get to read it.
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