Accepting When You’re the Buck-Stopper

You know the saying—the buck stops here. A simple phrase, easily understood. It means recognizing when the responsibility for something lands squarely on ourselves.

In the realm of the aspiring writer, rejection is the norm. We’ll all experience more rejection than acceptance (although hopefully, the magnitude of the acceptance makes up for the sheer number of rejections). There are also a lot of possible reasons for the rejections. Some are within our control. Some aren’t.

When we’re not getting any nibbles, we need to consider all the possible reasons. Here are some that we may like telling ourselves to feel better, and they may even be true.

It’s all subjective. Yes, it is, to a large degree. What one person loves, another may hate. (Just ask my sister.) Maybe the agents you’ve tried so far just aren’t into your premise, but if you keep trying, you’ll find one who feels that resonance.

The agent’s not really looking for new clients. Well, maybe. Kind of. Personally, I think most agents who are open to queries really are hoping to find new clients. BUT … a modified version of this may apply if the agent already has a manuscript to shop that’s in a similar vein to yours.

The agent was in a bad mood when going through hundreds of queries. Possible, I suppose. Call me an optimist, but I like to think most agents are professional enough to keep moods out of it. But they’re human, they’re not perfect, so it could happen. Perhaps more likely is unfortunate timing. If an agent is seeing several queries in a row with similar premises—most of them badly done—and then comes across your similarly-themed query, they might be too burned out on the concept to recognize your fresh take.

All those reasons shift the responsibility away from us. That’s kind of appealing, right? “It’s not MY fault I’m not getting nibbles.” Appealing, but dangerous, because here’s the thing:

The Buck Stops HERE.

Let’s face it. It’s WAY more likely that the reason we’re not getting nibbles is our fault in some way. Here are a few candidates to consider:

The query sucks. This is even more basic than not finding that magical, evasive, perfect query. Glaring errors. Weak writing. Newbie mistakes. Do your homework, get your rear-end kicked by knowledgeable people (such as those over at AgentQuery Connect), and get the basics right.

The premise is stale. Maybe the actual premise isn’t stale, but in the query, it might come across as a tired old rehash of something that’s been done. The query needs to highlight what’s fresh and awesome in your story.

The un-sucky query isn’t doing its job. Getting a well-written query that follows the rules is only the baseline. A query’s job is to COMPEL. It must compel the recipient to read more. That’s probably what I see lacking most often in queries I critique. The writing and set-up are okay, but it leaves me flat. It doesn’t grab me and say, “You must read this!”

The sample pages are letting you down. This is a tricky one, because it can overlap with the idea of subjectivity a LOT. But this is where it all has to come together. Your voice, your technique, your style, your plotting choices, your characters … they all need to sing in gorgeous harmony. One piece off-key can mean a quick rejection.

That last one can be the hardest. It’s easy to say queries are hard. Figuring them out is a whole new learning curve from writing a novel. But it can come down to something as simple and frightening as this:

It might be the writing.

Maybe we’re not ready. Maybe our skills need a touch more development.

We have to be open to this. If we’re not, we won’t take the next step—working harder to improve.

Maybe it’s one of the other reasons—the reasons that are out of our control. Personally, I choose to assume I need to make my work better, because in the end, that attitude will do my writing the most good.

Blowing Students’ Minds

This is one of my favorite parts of teaching—that moment when you tell kids something, and they give you that look.

“Seriously? No way!”

I teach such a wide range of kids, those jaw-dropping moments can come in a variety of ways, especially during the years when I’ve taught physics. Here are a few examples.

• When it’s three o’clock Thursday afternoon for us, it’s eight o’clock Friday morning in Australia.
• How dirt-simple derivatives in calculus can be with shortcuts like the Power Rule, yet still give the same information as the long limit-definition way.
• What happens when you shoot a laser pointer through a piece of diffraction grating (or a prism, or a lens).
• What happens when you look through a piece of diffraction grating at a prism while outside in the sun. (This was accidental, and very cool. We had fun in our color and optics unit.)
• The whole idea of traveling close to the speed of light and all the crazy things that go along with it, like the Twin Paradox.
• The crazy things that just plain sound waves do to cornstarch and water.

It’s Spring (Maybe?) and I Need a Break

After work today, Spring Break begins for my school. Not a moment too soon.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been through state testing, a last-gasp-of-winter snowstorm, a leaky classroom ceiling (still!), and the staff restrooms (adjacent to my classroom) requiring a massive toilet-removing plumbing-exploring procedure to return flushability to our lives. Oh, and other than the state testing, that was all in a matter of two days.

My nose needs a vacation more than anything.

My trusty laptop also croaked after over four years of working hard—fortunately not so badly that I couldn’t get all my files off, and everything important was backed up. (In honor of my five novel protagonists, the replacement laptop has been named Nezra.)

Despite all this, I’m actually in a pretty good mood. I finished the draft of my seventh novel Wednesday night. (Uh, that sounds like a lot. Three are a trilogy. One is last year’s NaNo.) My students handled the chaos in the classroom pretty well. We’re down to T-minus-three-weeks until Mindy McGinnis invades the southwest. And like I said, vacation starts tomorrow afternoon.

So, my plans for the break? As usual, head up to my folks’ place for a week. Do some editing. Critique Mindy’s sure-to-be-mega-awesome revision. Prepare for the aforementioned invasion.

And pray that my classroom isn’t soaked to the core when I get back.

But it occurs to me that I haven’t been on a vacation in so long, I have no idea what the last one was. Maybe the time in grad school I spent Easter weekend with a classmate’s family on the other side of New York state?

When Mindy and I get together, I suspect there will be some plotting about a future invasion, heading farther west … and involving another certain critique partner.

Anyone else have Spring Break coming up? Any exciting plans? Or are you looking ahead to summer?

Write What You Know … Or Don’t … But Only Sometimes?

We’ve all heard that tired piece of so-called advice: Write what you know. If you go traipsing about the writerly corners of the blogosphere, you’ll find a lot of posts about why that’s ridiculous.

And it is, especially when taken literally. If my novels were strictly based on things I know (i.e., have experienced), my family should be very worried about me. (Alternate dimensions? Human-alien hybrids? Uh, yeah.)

In some senses, though, I do write what I know, because I use my knowledge in lots of different ways as I write. I have deaf characters in two different projects. Yeah, that’s something I know a thing or two about. If I didn’t, I don’t think I would dare attempt to write them. But there are other ways to gain that knowledge than by day-to-day living it.

I think we all know that we need to do our homework when writing, researching and educating ourselves about various topics that weave their way into the story. In that sense, we will write what we know, only we didn’t know it until we needed to write it. (And as a friend recently noted, our search-engine histories can look really … um … interesting.)

There’s knowledge, and then there’s experience. Obviously we write about things we haven’t experienced, and in many cases, we never could experience. (Again, crossing dimensions? Or, say, what some catastrophic injury feels like? Or what it’s like to murder someone?)

But here’s a thought: Are there some things, probably less out of the ordinary than the examples I mentioned, that you really must experience yourself?

A fellow writer recently posited that there are—that certain things will never be written well by a person who hasn’t experienced them firsthand. I’m not going to go into it, because I don’t want to color the responses.

Can you think of anything? Any at all? Or is the idea a load of hooey?

Make your case, for or against. I’m really curious to see what the general consensus is.

You Gotta Represent

If you’re like me, you probably didn’t learn much about data and statistics when you were in school. There were bits and pieces sprinkled throughout my math textbooks, usually at the end of a chapter, and usually sections that teachers deemed skippable.

Not so anymore. Since just before my teaching career began, data and statistics have been getting a lot more attention in math curricula. One of the last courses I took for my bachelors degree was a stats class where I learned about box-and-whisker plots for the first time. When I started my internship a few months later, I discovered kids were learning about those plots in Pre-Algebra.

It makes sense when you think about it. We have data flying at us every day in the form of survey results, charts, and infographics. It’s important to be able to interpret all that information with a critical eye.

Something getting particular emphasis is the idea of sampling methods and using a representative sample. Say you’re doing a survey on career goals among the student body at your school. You’re not just going to ask the kids in the advanced art class and call it good. Likewise, if you want to know the average height of teenagers, you’re not just going to measure the basketball team.

I got to thinking about this in reference to writing. Specifically, getting critique and feedback. It kind of follows the examples above, plus the reverse. You want to be a little bit narrow (if you’re looking for information relating to teenagers, including grandparents in your sample doesn’t make sense), but also not too narrow.

What determines “narrowness” in this case? There are certain things any reader can point out for you—typos, grammatical errors, things that truly don’t make sense. But for the more subjective “Does this work or not?” questions, you probably don’t want to seek the opinion of someone who doesn’t read or even like your genre. If such a person comes along and gives their opinion anyway, you should see if anything’s valid, but don’t get too carried away with it.

At the same time, you don’t necessarily want all your feedback to come from people who only read exactly the kind of thing you write, who may even write very similarly to you. Like I’ve said before, my critique partners are great because even though we all write YA, their strengths and preferences vary enough from mine to push me out of my comfort zone and make me stretch.

Have you had a representative sample in your beta readers and critique partners? How did you get that perfect selection?

It’s Not Rocket Science—Just Read the Directions!

I had this experience in elementary school, and I bet some of you did, too (then, or at some other point in your life). My teacher passed out a quiz/assignment. The first thing it said was, “Read everything before doing anything.” It then proceeded to list a number of random tasks, from writing your favorite color in the right margin to hopping around the room on one foot.

The very last item said, “Write your name at the top of the paper and do none of the items listed here.”

A good chunk of the class got through some of the sillier tasks before catching on.

Okay, that was third grade or something. Kids are still learning that whole follow-directions concept, right? By the time we’re adults, it’s a no-brainer, right?

Not right.

I see it with my teenage students. Student: “What am I supposed to do for #13?” Me: “What do the directions say?” Student: “Umm …” Me: “Maybe you should read them, huh?”

But teenagers aren’t adults yet, right? By the time we’re old enough to legally drink, smoke, and otherwise shorten our lifespan, we know better, right?

Still not right.

If you follow agent @SaraMegibow on Twitter, you’ve probably seen her weekly #10queriesin10tweets. She goes through ten random queries in her inbox and tweets whether she’s passing on it or requesting, and a quick reason why.

Guess what one of the most common reasons for a pass is? Wrong genre. You can find Ms. Megibow’s fair-game genres easily, on AgentQuery, QueryTracker, the agency’s website, or her page on Publishers Marketplace.

Yet people still query her with thrillers and non-fiction and who-knows-what-else.

Want to look smart? Be one of the few who doesn’t go hopping around the room on one foot. We’ll have plenty of time to make ourselves look like idiots later, in slightly more intelligent ways. (Yes, let’s aspire to be intelligent idiots.)

What directions do you find people not reading when they really ought to know better? Want to confess to your own “shoulda paid more attention” faux pas?