For the better part of my life I've wanted to write fiction. Last summer I wrote an outline and from it wrote a 273 page manuscript about a girl from the midwest who runs away from home and is forced to make an inner journey on the mean streets of a sweltering urban hell as she supports herself in the world's oldest profession and takes stock of her life.
I allowed a couple of objective and just plain mean people read it. They loved it and asked when I was getting published. My question is this. WHEN AM I getting published. I learned after completing the project that publishers don't take manuscripts from authors who DON'T have agents. Hence the days of sending your manuscript to Bantam or Simon and Schuster are long gone.
If you're famous or infamous literary agents salivate at the thought of you putting your incessant ramblings on paper as they can sell millions of copies of a book that is filled with pics of your dog or you doing laundry. I mean come on, Paris Hilton's DOG Tinkerbell is a published author for god's sake. Celebs, pseudo celebs and the idiot by products of condomless celebrity sex can get books published while men and women with premises that would make great books fall by the way side and continue to work in factories simply because no one want to listen to an unknown.
Literary agents are like ugly girls on an aircraft carrier to unpublished writers. They KNOW they're sought after so they're considerably more selective than they would be under normal circumstances. Let me give you a scenario. You're a lit agent and a security guard from the University of Mississippi has written a manuscript. Do you give it the once over, or let him get lost in the shuffle of other authors who clamor to be published? Chances are you'll do the later. Congratulations! You passed on "Soldier's Pay" and Mr William Faulkner will simply have to find SOMEONE ELSE to publish his works and his Nobel and Pulitzer prizes will not equal a few million more in sales for YOUR agency. The downside to being TOO selective is that they may very well be missing out on the next William Faulkner, Stephen King or Amy Tan.
I'm not trying to imply that I and every other unpublished author out there should be mentioned in the same breath with Faulkner, Tan, King, Stienbeck, Sinclair and Capote, but at the same time if literary agents never let us past their receptionist the world will never be able to judge for themselves. I and every other unpublished author out there write for the joy we get from telling our stories. I'm actually 125 pages into my second book about a first year teacher in an inner city school (I work as a substitute teacher in an inner city school by the way) and I write simply because I love doing so. But who knows, the literati may be too busy waiting for Tinkerbell's latest saga to care about what unknown writers in Houston, Sioux City, Madison Biloxi are doing.
