Letter to an MFA - Part 3

Part 3 of Letter to an MFA by Josh Henkin

Publishing

    Throughout the semester, I try not to talk too much about publishing; my job is to teach my students to write, and publishing can get in the way of writing.  But then my students graduate and they want to know about publishing, and they turn out to be woefully unprepared.  Part of the blame lies with the MFA programs, many of which don’t offer courses on publishing or on navigating life after the MFA.  A good number of the professors are ignorant of how different it is to emerge from an MFA program now than it was even a generation ago.  I’m only ten or fifteen years older than most of my students, but a year and a half after I graduated I was offered a contract by a major publishing house based on only fifty pages of a novel.  This is almost unheard of now.

    But part of the problem lies with the MFA students themselves.  They seem to think they should graduate with a book contract.  But why should they?  Why should anyone get a book contract?  Many of my students believe being published just happens to you, and they sneer at the idea of marketing themselves, as if doing so is beneath them.  They expect Maxwell Perkins to come knocking.  What they need to understand is that if they want their work to be read they must make it so good the reader can’t resist it, and they must market it so well a publisher will be forced to publish them.  This may feel unfortunate to some and unseemly to others, but it’s the reality, and the sooner young writers realize it the better.

Short Story Collections

    Most of my graduate students write short stories.  Stories are tailor-made for writing workshops in a way that novels aren’t.  But publishers aren’t interested in short stories.  I say this as someone who loves the story form, who has written many stories himself, who is often perplexed by the lack of interest in stories since they seem perfectly suited for short attention spans.  And I would never tell a student to stop writing short stories.  I haven’t stopped writing them myself.  But no one should pretend they can do anything for a young writer’s career.

    Take the case of the recent Pen/Faulkner awards, which would seem to be good news for short story writers.  Four of the five finalists were story collections.  But only one of them—Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children—sold more than 25,000 copies, which was still only a tiny fraction of the sales for Jones’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Known World.  Amy Hempel and Deborah Eisenberg, two of the other finalists, sold 10,000 to 15,000 copies each, but both Hempel and Eisenberg are long-time short story writers who got their start when publishers were more forgiving of short stories, and of low sales numbers in general.  Far more typical is Charles D’Ambrosio, whose book of stories, The Dead Fish Museum, also a Pen/Faulkner finalist, sold only 3,000 copies.

    Will someone publish D’Ambrosio’s novel?  Probably.  He’s a terrific writer and has an established reputation; many of his stories have appeared in The New Yorker.  But my students may not be as lucky.  They enter their story collections in university-press competitions, and occasionally, despite the tremendous competition, one of them wins.  This is certainly reason for celebration.  But it’s also a double-edged sword.  A book of stories published by a university press may sell a thousand copies.  And that number goes into a computer.  And the computer spits out that number when the writer tries to sell his next book.

     But my students tend to ignore this.  By and large, they write story collections for their theses, and in a nod to publishing they link these stories, reintroducing a character or a place, because they’ve been told that linked stories are more likely to be published, that a story collection that gets dressed up as a novel might get invited to the ball.  But aesthetically speaking, these links are cursory (the stories don’t feel linked; they feel like the work of someone who asked himself, How can I pretend these stories are linked?), and even when they are linked they’re not a novel, and these days even novels are hard to sell.  My students like to talk about Jhumpa Lahiri and Nathan Englander, whose debut story collections, The Interpreter of Maladies and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, were critically celebrated and sold incredibly well. 

  But these are exceptions, and it seems to me that through no fault of their own Lahiri and Englander have done more to delude young writers about the publishing world than almost anyone else.  Though literary agents share some of the blame.  They’re quick to tell MFA students that story collections don’t sell, but they will also, in wooing young writers, call attention to the story collections they have sold, as if to say there is hope when there isn’t any.   

Finding an Agent

   It’s often said that finding a good agent is even harder than finding a good publisher.  This may be so, but my students should remember that without writers an agent can’t survive.  And while many established agents don’t take on new clients, often the best agent for a young writer is a young agent herself who may be hungrier than an established agent.

    Why, then, don’t my students approach these agents?  Often they seem to be  waiting for others to help them out.  And while writing professors should help their students, ultimately it’s up to the writer himself.  Besides, connections are overrated.  When I began to look for an agent, I queried nine of them, two of whom I had a connection to.   But neither of those agents agreed to take me on.  Of the three agents who offered to represent me, none of them had ever heard of me before my query letter arrived.  I found them by looking up the agents of writers I admired.  This is public information; you can call the publisher to find out; oftentimes, a writer thanks her agent in the book’s acknowledgments page.  Then I spent several weeks working on a letter that would convince the agent she had to read my book.  Young writers think this isn’t their job, that it’s the agent’s job to sell their book.  But it’s the writer’s job to sell his book to the agent.  If he can’t do that, how can he expect the agent to sell it for him?

Work or Volunteer in Publishing

   The year after I graduated from college, I interned for a magazine where I was the first reader of fiction submissions.  It was the best thing I’ve ever done for my writing career.  Prior to that, I had written some fiction and wanted to be a writer, but I thought I wasn’t good enough.  Seeing how bad the average submission was gave me courage:  if others were willing to try and fail, I should be willing to try and fail, too.  But more striking was the sheer number of submissions.  And among them were some very good ones.  This taught me two important lessons.  First, don’t take rejection personally.  So much is luck; you have to keep entering the lottery.  I know this first-hand.  Both my novels were rejected many times before they found a publisher.   The short story of mine that has done the best, that has been performed on “Selected Shorts” and anthologized in Spanish translation and cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories, was rejected by more journals—over forty—than any other short story I’ve written.   

   The second lesson I learned is that an editor will do anything not to read your work.  Every sentence has to be perfect and essential.  This is true for aesthetic reasons, certainly, but also for publishing ones.  If you think an editor will read to the tenth page, which is when your novel really begins, you don’t understand what publishing is like.  A typo in the second sentence, a spelling mistake, and your manuscript goes in the rejection pile.  It astonishes me how often a student will send work to an agent or editor that hasn’t been properly proofread.  A writer needs to treat her work like she cares about it if she expects others to care about it, too

   And while my students are at it, I suggest they consider leaving New York.  I’ve had many talented graduate students who are too busy trying to make a living either to write or sell their work.  True, if you move to Idaho, you’re unlikely to run into an agent at a party.  But a lot of people have met a lot of agents at a lot of parties, with little to show for it.  I went to graduate school in Michigan and stayed there for another six years.  I doubt I’d have finished my first novel, much less sold it, if I’d been living in New York.  The odds are so stacked against the young writer that he needs to do everything he can conceive of to give himself a chance.  So conceive of Michigan, or Idaho.  Write your book.  Spend time on it.  Then spend time marketing it.  It can be done from far away.  There’s email now, and Fax machines.  Then, if you get lucky and you’re so inclined, you can move back to New York.

Joshua Henkin’s novel Swimming Across the Hudson was a Los Angeles Times notable book of the year.  His new novel, Matrimony, will be published by Pantheon in October.  He teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College.  He can be reached at http://Joshuahenkin.com.
   

Comments

[jay]

Jhumpa Lahiri would probably be a perfect example of what you are getting at…adding in assumption here, but even after her successful and prize winning first collection her follow-up was: a novel. A novel that clearly would have/should have worked better as: a short story. But novels sell better. Not too mention, in a way, a hell of a lot less work.

Another example could be Chuck Palahniuk writes a bunch of short stories. But novels sell better. So he writes a bunch of (really bad) interstitial bits that (badly) tie the stories together. Boom: back on the NYT bestseller list.

I’m unsure (in both cases, among others) if this is totally the decision of the writer, or if they are swayed/threatened/bribed/whatevered into the expansion.

Amy Hempel may very well be the last of the breed that writes *solely* shorts.
j

[Charlie]

You got that info about book sales out of the Washington Post article. It wasn't accurate then and it isn't any more accurate now. That's the way web information goes, I guess, and I don't really care that much, but thought I'd let you know anyway. Meanwhile, your main point merits serious consideration and discussion by MFA students.

[C.M. Mayo]

As editor of Tameme, I am delighted to read your recommendation that MFA students volunteer in publishing. I know my own perspective--- and know-how--- have improved as a result of editing Tameme (first a literary journal, now a chapbook series). Certainly, I have much more appreciation for the work, some of it delightful, much of it thankless and tedious, that editors (and copyeditors and proof readers) must perform. And let's not forget marketing--- dealing with distributors, working bookfairs, mailing postcards, maintaining websites, (and blogs!), etc etc. The PR and sales staff shoulder a big job indeed. It sometimes seems that literature makes its way into the hands of readers by magic. It does happen that way, I suppose, sometimes. Anyway, a tip for those who might want to volunteer: check out www.clmp.org the Council of Literary Magazines and Small Presses. It lists many dozens of worthy literary publications, many of which, I am sure, would welcome volunteers.

[Anna Clark]

I responded to this post at my website, Isak (www.isak.typepad.com).

Here's what I wrote:

Letter to an MFA

Doesn't quite have the same ring as Rilke's jewel, does it?

Nonetheless, Josh Henkin's ongoing letter to students of the craft is worth a look-see. I don't agree with all of his points--particularly, that publishing and the business of writing should be included in an MFA curriculum. Or, the careerist thrust of his piece in general; he somewhat abashedly notes his disapproval of students writing story collections as theses, because they don't sell as well.

For my part, I found that while there's plenty of ways to learn about agent-seeking and how to write a cover letter (see any craft section in your local bookstore), learning to write well is far more time-consuming and intensive. And if you choose your genre based on sell-ability, then I think you're damning yourself.

It's rare to have a community of engaged writers writing and reading together; who wants to steal some of that precious time for publishing business lessons that you could learn out of a book, or, at the very least, over dinner with an experienced writer? I'm grateful that my fiction program at Warren Wilson College made fiction its motivation, means, and end. Yes, I want to publish. Yes, I want to learn about the business of it. But most of all, I want to write well. I spent 2.5 years consumed in fiction (with a splash of poetry), and even that wasn't "enough" (whatever "enough" means).

Moreover, while plenty of talented and accomplished writers milled through the program as faculty and students--folks who'd won major prizes, written and/or translated bestsellers, edit major magazines--the lack of a "publishing" focus in the program resulted in a more even-handed vibe. There wasn't much of a hierarchy; competitive spirits were at a minimum. You were introduced as "fiction writer" or "poet" at your reading, rather than getting a lengthy bio of all the places you publish.

That makes sense to me. We're all working very hard in a beautiful art together. That's the top accomplishment of all, if you ask me, one that earns my inherent respect.

[bolino]

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