5 Questions...An aspiring writer should ask themselves before pursuing a career as a novelist.

1. Do you have the talent to be a professional novelist? I don’t mean, does your mother or spouse think you are a good writer but is your writing on par with novels, short stories and magazine articles that you’ve read. Or could it be, after you’ve studied the craft of novel writing, written a novel or two and understand how to write a properly plotted story with realistic dialogue and well-developed characters. Have you let anyone read what you have written? Have you received positive, encouraging feedback from an English professor, magazine editor, agent or anyone who should know good writing?

2. Do you have a passion for writing? Like most creative undertakings, writing is a passion project, usually a lifelong endeavor. Real writers have been writing since they could hold a pencil properly--poems, childish stories, journal entries, novels and the like. It is a part of them, a natural expression of who they are. And they write for themselves. They write for free. They write because they love the idea of putting pen to paper (okay, that’s rather archaic) or fingertip to keypad and creating a story from nothing. Passionate writers write because they don’t feel normal if they don’t.

3. Do you have the diligence required to study and learn the craft of writing? Writing is not easy. Oh, writing can be easy but committing to edit, write and re-write until your literary piece is polished like a crown jewel is not. There is a structure or structures to learn, the right one has to be selected for your genre and story. Creating the correct novel structure is almost a geometric calculation, but once you’ve got it…you’ve got it. Themes must be subtly laced through your story. And there is a knack required to create natural dialogue and develop interesting characters. It cannot always be taught but certain aspects can be learned. You must read books on writing, take classes or both and then practice, practice, practice. You must let others critique your writing and then you have to turn an objective eye to your own writing and revise, write and then revise some more.

4. Are you disciplined enough to write novels? Writing is lonely work. Do you work well independently? Can you create and meet self-imposed writing deadlines? Do you have a writing schedule that you adhere to; measured in a daily or weekly amount of hours, pages or words you must meet? Are you committed to writing a novel that will knock the proverbial socks off an agent and compel a publisher to buy your work?

5. Can you persevere? Can you continue to write when it matters to no one but you? Can you continue to write in the face of constant rejection? Sometimes spouses and family members will not take your writing serious. Agents will like but not ‘love’ your writing. Book publishers will not be able to ‘garner the support’ they’d hope to for your novel. You will lose faith in your own abilities and commitment. But ultimately the writing race is not to the swift…but time and chance…

If you have answered all five questions in the affirmative, writing may be the career for you.

Intern N

Open for Submissions

Get ready . . . get set . . . submit!

On October 1^st, we will re-open to submissions. So get ready to send in your queries for new projects. Remember, we want email queries only. But take a minute first to check out the revised submission guidelines on our website, www.elaineenglish.com.

We’re limiting the kinds of works we’re going to represent going forward, so don’t assume that everything you’ve written we’re interested in seeing. We’re going to concentrate on romance, women’s fiction, and cozy mysteries only. For romance, we’re open to all the various subgenres from historical to contemporary, sweet to erotic, romantic suspense, paranormal, steam punk, and urban fantasy, just to name a few. The only exceptions are: we handle very little inspirational romance and if you write time- travel, your burden will be a bit harder, because we’re real skeptics. Cozy mysteries are those entertaining, relatively low-violence, who- done-it stories, typically featuring an amateur sleuth.

Women’s fiction is a bit harder to define, but I know it when I see it. It’s fiction about women and intended primarily for women readers of all ages. It’s often about relationships – mothers and children, families, even generations. It shows women discovering and taking up their place in the world. It can be set in historical, contemporary or futurist times, but the focus, and generally, the point of view of the story, is that of a woman.

Taking time off from submissions has given me a clearer perspective and helped me to focus on what’s really important. It also gave the agency a chance to completely catch up on submissions (can you imagine!) and to overcome the burn-out which seems to be an occupational hazard in this business. So reinvigorated, here we go. Send us your pitch and together let’s find the next great bestseller!

Guest Blog - Perseverance by Hope Ramsay

Today, we're delighted to have Hope Ramsay as our guest. Sharing her story should bring both wisdom and encouragement to all authors. (We also thank her for the nice things she says about our agency!) Here's Hope . . .

This September, a dream came true for me with the publication of Home at Last Chance.

No, this book was not my first published work. And the book didn't win the Golden Heart in 2010, when it finaled in that contest. Nor was it the full manuscript that sold the Last Chance series.

But it was the book I believed in. Even when no one else did.

See, the original first chapter for this book was finished on April 4, 2001. I can pinpoint the date because that first draft still sits on my hard drive.

The first version of this book, originally entitled Rules of the Road was finished in 2004, and garnered me an agent, who worked diligently throughout 2005 and part of 2006 to sell this book. While she pitched editors I wrote another story featuring Tulane's older brother, Clay, that came to be known as Welcome to Last Chance.

Alas, Rules of the Road was rejected by just about every editor under the sun. The lack of enthusiasm for this book even carried over to the sequel. My agent explained, gently, that in 2006 editors weren't looking for romantic comedy, NASCAR set stories, or any kind of contemporary romance set in a small Southern town. Urban fantasy was in. If you didn't have a vampire you were not cool.

So, for three years, Rules of the Road, Welcome to Last Chance, and a third, earlier book entitled For Love or Money, languished on my hard drive while I wrote a couple of very long classic fantasies. Then, in 2009, in an act of utter desperation, I did two things: 1) I entered Rules of the Road in the Amazon Breakthrough Contest, and 2) I entered For Love or Money in the Golden Heart. To my utter astonishment Tulane's story made it into the final 100 entries of the Amazon contest. And then For Love or Money finaled in the Golden Heart.

Those contest results didn't directly lead to immediate success, but they convinced me to dust off those Rhodes Family manuscripts and seriously pitch them. So one day in April 2009 I sat down across a table from Elaine English and pitched Last Chance for the first time in years.

I was pretty sure that no agent would want this series, which had been so soundly rejected over the years. But Elaine surprised and reassured me. She asked to see them all.

And to my utter astonishment, she agreed to represent me. Then she turned her crew of readers lose on my manuscripts, and she and her readers gave me a road map for some serious edits that turned two of these books into part of the four book proposal that she shopped around in late 2009.

And then, in early 2010, nine years after I wrote the first draft of the first chapter of Tulane' s story, Forever Romance bought the book. And just a few weeks ago, I walked into Barnes and Noble and saw the book sitting right out front.

That was, without question, the most gratifying moment of my very short writing career.

Thank you Elaine. Thank you Forever Romance. This story of a good ol' boy in a pink car has always been near and dear to my heart. It took a long, long time to write and to sell. I had to rewrite it at least a dozen times. And yet, the first chapter, featuring Sarah and Tulane on an airplane, has changed almost not at all since it was first written down ten years ago.

This, I think, is a classic example of perseverance. If you have story that you believe in, never, never, never give up on it. One day you might sit down across a small table from someone and talk about that book, and suddenly, you'll find an ally who believes in it as much as you do.

And the rest will be history.

New Release: Home at Last Chance by Hope Ramsay

The agency is excited to announce that Home at Last Chance, the sequel to the bestselling romance novel Welcome to Last Chance, is now available. Author Hope Ramsay brings the small southern town of Last Chance to life with her wonderful cast of characters once again:

Dear Reader,

You won't believe what's happened. My son Tulane has come back home! You remember Tulane? He'd set out to find fame and fortune in the big, wide world outside of Last Chance, and I'm mighty proud. But that's not the half of it-Tulane isn't only back, he's brought a young lady with him.

Now Sarah-she does PR for Tulane's stock-car team-she's from Boston, but she's just about the sweetest girl you could meet. I think she's meant to keep Tulane out of trouble after that story in the papers, but he doesn't want to talk about it. Anyhow, the Ladies Auxiliary can't wait to start matchmaking and introduce Sarah to our Reverend Ellis. But mark my words, Sarah is tired of being a good girl. And no one is better at breaking the rules and raising Cain than my son . . .

Listen to me going on and keeping customeres waiting. I best get back to work, but you come round again. The Cut 'n' Curl's got hot rollers, free coffee, and the best gossip in town.

See you real soon,

Ruby Rhodes

Be sure to pick up your copy today!

I see, you see, we all see...

Okay, that title wasn't particularly clever, as it doesn't include third person and it's not even the right words, but hey. I though using "scream" might imply something slightly different than the actual topic, which is:

Point of View!

Let’s talk about this. This is one of those things that, when you think about it, is generally pretty common sense. The problem is, I think people get so caught up in telling their stories and trying to get all the information out there, they don’t always think about it.

Some people have only a little trouble with this- a couple slips here and there, just something to keep an eye on. Some people have no trouble. Some people have lots of trouble.

The easiest place, in my experience, to have no trouble, is when you’re telling something from a first person POV. Because in first person, it’s pretty easy to tell what belongs and what doesn’t. Even when you’re not thinking about it, when you’re writing you generally know you can’t switch to someone else’s thoughts if your narrator doesn’t know them, unless your narrator is psychic. I think even if you weren’t paying terribly close attention, you wouldn’t make a mistake like:

“I was sitting at a booth and watching the bar door when my dad strolled in. He saw me and grinned.

‘Hey, Elsie!’

‘Hey dad!” I gestured for him to sit down.

Behind Elsie, Frank watched jealously, sipping his coke and thinking of the best way to get her alone.”

First person is probably (certainly?) the easiest way to get close to your main character. It gives them a very distinct voice that builds their character, instead of just basing it on their actions. But of course, it can be very limiting, because you know your narrator so much better than anyone else (unless you play around with how you use the first person. See: Sherlock Holmes, for example (but really, see them. The real, Conan Doyle stories, I mean. They’re amazing). Watson is the first person narrator, but the stories are, of course, actually about Holmes).

Third person is where it gets tricky, because there are so many ways to do it, and people try to combine them. Pick one.

Some people opt for omniscient third person, where the narrator sees and knows everything about everyone. This is easy because it lets you tell anything you want about what anyone is doing. It’s difficult because it distances you from your characters a bit more, so you’ll have to work on revealing their inner thoughts and desires without doing too much telling. And if your narrator is really going to be omniscient, you can’t get too close to one person for too long, because that’s more…

Close third person. Close third person is a favorite, and probably where I see the most mistakes. In close third person, you pick one character- your main character, almost always- and the third person narrator doesn't leave their side. Or their head, since you can usually see what they’re thinking, as well. The narrator is not an actor in the story any more than the omniscient narrator is, but they only know what the character they are close to knows. Thus, the narrator (and the reader) can’t know what other people are thinking or doing unless the main character knows, too.

An example: The Harry Potter series, with a couple of exceptions (generally one chapter in the beginning of the book that shows what Voldemort’s up to) is told in close third person, close to Harry. We don’t know anything until Harry does (well, we might figure stuff out faster than he does, but only based on the information he knows). The story does not, all of a sudden, follow Hermione for a day or an hour, even if what happened to her was important. We have to wait until she tells Harry about this. This is a drawback of close third-person (it would be really convenient if the narrator could just show/tell us what Hermione did), but it’s necessary. By not leaving the one character’s side (and mind), we know them intimately fairly quickly. It’s similar to first-person in this way; it’s an excellent way to really develop your main character. Of course, it’s also more of an effort to develop the characters you’re not close to. But (clearly) every POV is a give and take.

I've seen more problems with this than one might expect. A close third person narration will suddenly switch to a different character, which is horribly disorienting.

Don’t get me wrong: you’re allowed to switch viewpoints. Quite a lot of books do it. But it has to be at regular, set intervals- chapters, for instance. This is Jeff’s chapter, now Christine’s. It has to be obvious. The POV can’t switch in the middle of, say, a phone call. If the character on the phone is not the character we’re close to, we do not know what the person on the other end of the line is saying. We just don’t. Maybe they’ll tell us in a minute; but until then, we don’t know. A couple of other interns have written about changing POV, however (one about a year ago, and one in March), so I won’t go into too much detail about that. I do recommend those posts if you need help on that though.

To sum up, don’t stray. Switch, coherently, if you’d like, but don’t stray. Pick a point of view and be true to it, even when you’d like to let us know a bit of information that’s going to be hard to work in. It can be frustrating, but it’s worth it for a polished, coherent, smooth read.

This is more a call to double check your work than anything. I know that most writers know the differences between POVs. But like I said, sometimes it’s one sentence of slip-up, or just a switch that’s a bit disorienting. Make sure you know exactly where you’re going with your narrator’s voice, and make sure everything fits.

Hope this can help, live long and prosper and all that,

-Katie