For writers on writing, finding an agent, and surviving criticism

"Critics are people who ride out onto the battlefield after the war has been fought and shoot the wounded." I'm writing this entry today in a little cafe on Main St. in Santa Monica that I adore, called Panini. It's run by a Frenchman, so there's a sane little garden in the back spilling over with bougainvillea and a fountain for the sparrows, and old French records playing songs like "Oh, Champs Elysees" on the speakers. I could wax rhapsodic over their butter croisants for the next twenty paragraphs, but I won't. I'll leave you to imagine the perfect crunch of the first bite as the flakes fall across your chin and the warmth of the deep soft pastry that melts on your tongue as you lick your lips. I've scared the gentleman next to me with my "mmmmm"ing and "ooooo"ing over every bite. I've interupted his serious political studies on the governement of Tanzania. C'est la vie. I didn't always write in cafes. I used to write at home. But that's a lie. I didn't write at all. I listened to the deafening sound of the silence in my little cabin in the woods, and my endless thoughts spinning madly out of control. The laundry I need to wash, the catfood i need to buy, the roses to prune, the phone dead on its hook. I drove myself insane... unitl I packed up my things and went down to the little cafe down the street full of screaming children, men arguing over tables, and important people chattering on their cellphones. (Remember when it was only important people who had cellphones? in the mid-90's you would go into the movie theatre and hear a cellphone and instead of getting irritated, you would consider the celebrity you may be sharing a dark room with.) There in the midst of the chaos my mind cleared and the blank page unfurled characters and plotlines before me. I wrote with intensity, like Beethoven humnched over the piano I scrawled my lines rocking on my seat and smiling and sometimes grimmacing for the energy of the raw emotion pouring onto the page. In those early years of writing, I had no critics. I never shared my work with anyone. I believed it perfect, translated from the gods. As every young writer should! If you do not start with passion you will bore us all to death with your slow and erudite literary masterbation. Spare us. Bring us life instead. Bring us the fire of your beginnings, and burn across the sky in shocking hues of undreamed imagination so that we are all left pointing and shouting, more alive than before we read your work, more connected to our own humanity. I encountered my first critic in the form of my mentor, the ultimate perfectionist. I kept my writing a secret from him for 3 years, and when I unveiled it, he tore at it like a pitbull off its chain for a bag of groceries. He shredded my soul and spilled my innards across the road to be hit by every truck in town. Now, it's one thing to have a peer shred your work, but a world famous novelist? Survive that. I barely did. I was expected to take his criticism as compliment, because he was paying attention to me. He took my pages and re-wrote them in his own style, claiming I should re-write the entire manuscript as such. He accused me of boring my readers to death, of having no flow, no energy, no wit. Tom Robbins and I were penpals for nearly ten years. When once receiving a letter from him took me to the emotion of a child on Christmas morning, I began to dread the envelopes bearing his odd stamps of Tibetan Peach Pie, and Mad Scientists of the Armegeddon. But he did me a favor in the end. Feeling like rat puke at the bottom of the darkest sewer, I tucked my manuscript into a corner and mourned the last 3 years of my impoverished life spent writing, where a few days each week I had to decide between having dinner or putting gas in my car to get to work. And when finally, I rose from those ashes, I found that my love of my characters and the story I had written was stronger than what anyone thought, no matter how successful or famous or acclaimed. I went back to my work and I grew as a writer. I looked with fresh eyes. I asked the work how it could be better, not an mentor or a critic. I rolled up my sleeves and proceeded to to re-write after re-write. In fact, I re-wrote my novel 9 times. Now, that may or may not sound like much to you, but let me also mention that my first draft was 987 pages long. I re-wrote it down to 947, and then down to 800, and then finally, with a few margin extensions and spacing slightly less than double, I got it down to 534 pages. I had help, it's true. Let me speak to you for a moment of the mircale of the literary agent. If you are very lucky, and you work very, very hard, you might be as fortunate as I to have heaven been an ear and send you Jacques. I was turned down 56 times by agencies. Albeit, they were graceful rejections, often handwritten by the agent with best wishes for my success. But with every rejection piling up, the heart takes a blow. Forget dating; finding your soulmate is a snap compared with finding a literary agent. In the end, I gave up. I put my manuscript away, and i did the only thing I know how to do in such dire circumstances, penniless and petrified and heart-broken. I got down on my knees and prayed. Dear God, I cannot find the path, please make it obvious, please show me what to do, please guide me to my right agent. A week later I was visiting a girlfriend's home, and she had a friend staying from out of town who had been living in Turkey for the last 4 years. A walking dictionary of lanuages, he is. Darling Toby. Heart of gold. He read my book in pdf format on his computer when it was still 947 pages long (He also reads Homer in the original Greek), and called me and said, "You know, this very accomplished literary agent visited me in Turkey, a friend of my godmother's. I will call him and tell him of your work. I loved your book, and I think he will as well." When you've lived through rejections for years (i sent my novel out exclusively to one agent at a time, waited the 3-8 weeks, got rejected, and then sent it out again. Unlike multiple submissions, this gets your work read faster), you just don't hope. I waited a few weeks to call Jacques, and when I got him on the line, I was as nervous as a schoolgirl saying lines in a school play. I managed to stammer through the basic premise to my book and say a few ridiculous things like, "It's really Harry Potter for grown-ups", and to my surprise, he requested the first 200 pages of my book. Now, that could be great or terrible. The first 200 pages of my novel introduce the characters their setting, and build tension. On page 200, there's an explosion of pace, and suddenly all these components you've seen static are in motion, like watching the cogs of a great clock spring to life. I thought, I have to send him the entire manuscript, and I did. As he tells it, three days later a package as heavy as a bowling ball arrived in his mailbox. Lucky for me, he forgot he only requested the first 200 pages, and thought that he was interested enough to request the entire book. He read it in two days and called me at 7am California time on a monday, singing my praises. I was taking a bath, tears streaming down my face. At last, an agent. And not just an agent, an angel. He edited my entire novel himself before we started sending it out, and he has been loyal through the entire process. Indifatigable. Well, almost. There is a moment in everyone's life when the child becomes the adult, a moment that marks you forever as the person who will now check the closets for monsters instead of being the one who calls in your jammies for the closet to be checked. Mine came after 18 rejections from major publishers. My agent sat before me at a very posh little hotel lobby in Beverly Hills, despondant. I reached across the table and patted his sleeve. "We will make it through this," I said. "The novel will sell, you will see." And that was it. Blink. The girl was now a woman. I had just reassured my agent, the one who I had always assumed would be there to comfort and reassure me. ANd that moment changed me forever. I knew then that I was the captain of a very great ship, and that everyone who came on board was there to help me, but only I could steer. No one would ever have the heading but me. Ever. I want to end this entry by sharing a piece of writing by a writer I admire for her audacity. She's very famous. She's very prolific. And like great successful people, everyone has an opinion about her work, good and bad. (Pray for that lucky fate one day. If you are despised it means you are recognized by the masses and your work will live forever, for better or for worse.) I leave it here for you to ponder, because she wrote the words with my own feeling infusing them. I read them and I wept for the truth they contain, for to be a writer is a perilous journey with a great many torments. It is a calling and nothing less. Those who are not called should never begin the journey. There is simply too much pain. Anne Rice writes: As a writer I'm driven by grief. I think it's important that we as writers, find out what drives us. Not so much that we find out; what's important is that we give in. That we don't fight it. That we just say "Yes, we will go with this pain. Yes, we will endure this. Yes, we will explore this." We must try, in our work, to make a meaningful universe in the pages we write. We'll try to do that. We'll have that faith, we'll have that strength. Sometimes, it's so dark and so difficult when you have to grasp things, you have to look for signs, you have to look out the window and see a sign in the way the flowers are blooming on a tree. Or a letter comes. A letter comes from a reader of your books, and that reader says to you the perfect things to keep you going. ...as a writer you have to be open to the darkness. You have to be open to the sorrow. Whereas other people may scurry past and say I have to get on with my life, you can sit there and you can feel that sorrow pass over you. You can feel that great lamentation come out of you... you go into the imagination and you create a story and that story is going to have whatever wisdom you have been allowed by God to acquire. And it's going to be good. And that keeps you going. That keeps you working. That keeps you open to all the signs that are going to come to you. And above all, as you go on, whether you're a writer or a person trying to go on learning from things, you try your best to be charitable to others. Never never to hurt their feelings. Never never to be cold. Never to be indifferent. Never to think that your grief or your pain, entitles you to do that to another human being. The words from St. Paul are absolutely true - we must have charity, and we must have love. That's what grief has taught me. It's taught me to love. I think I can love more deeply now than ever. I think God has been very good to me in giving me that capacity. I want to put that into my novels... With peace and blessings to you, Kaia Van Zandt