Sol Stein on humanity and authority

My good friend and fellow novelist Larisa Zlatic sent me an excerpt from a good writing book by Sol Stein. Her excerpts from Stein on Writing include these:

The first step in revision is to make a judgment about your main characters. Character problems must be dealt with before beginning a general revision. This method of revision makes certain that you have humanized your characters.

Do you think about them in situations that are not in your book? If so, good. It means your characters are alive in your mind and should come alive in the minds of the readers. If you can’t think of an important character in situations away from the story that character may need more work. Ask these questions:

• What is about your character that you like especially? Is it also your own trait? If yes, it is a symptom of the autobiography trap, creating a character that is too like yourself. Resolution: give a character a trait (positive or negative) that you absolutely don’t have.

• If you’re going on a vacation how would you feel if your character were going along? Would you look forward to that? You may need to add some sparkle to your character, some interesting eccentricity, personality characteristic that will make his company more enjoyable.

I have Stein's How to Grow a Novel on my bookshelf, and Chapter Eight offers on advanced point of view. He summarizes the explanation of how to distinguish first from third from omniscient, then he says, "I can't recall a manuscript that didn't have a couple of glitches in the handling of point of view. Sometimes dozens. The need to be caught in revision. The novelist's authority depends on it."

Authority in writing transmits the "dream state" to the readers, the means to lock them into the world you've created. And believe me, I'm working on maintaining authority in Viral Times right now.

Keep a query professional

The Kristen Nelson Literary Agency has a helpful newsletter for the writer who's nearing a query letter date. That's the deadline I'm approaching for Viral Times, once the revisions are finished. One of the agents at the Nelson Agency offered this advice about writing the query.

Advice of this type often tells a writer not to do silly things, like mail chocolates along with a letter. But at least the agency's Sara Megibow (at left) affirms some things you should do in a query to an agent.

• State that you found our agency through agentquery.com or Preditors and Editors, or aar-online.org, etc.
  

• Note that you have looked at our website and have read the submission guidelines
  

• Mention any of the books represented by Nelson Agency which you may have read
  

• Repeat your contact information right in the body of the query letter (you can hardly ever put your name, title of work and email address in too many places).
  

These are all things that one might do in a job interview too, and following these guidelines always come across as professional to me.

In order to stay professional, try to avoid these common mistakes:

• Don’t be overly self-deprecating (i.e. “I know I have no experience and I am sure you don’t have time to read my work, but…”)
  

• Don’t be too casual (i.e. “Yo! I love to write and I think my stuff rocks!”)
  

• Don’t include religious blessings or quotes in the official query letter (although many people do have these kinds of quotes at the ends of the email as a footer, and that seems fine to me)
  

• Don’t be cutesy (we find that fancy fonts or colorful backgrounds do not help the professional tone of the query letter)