Agent Questions: Please share a favorite sentence from the manuscript you are submitting.

When an agent asked me to share a favorite sentence from my manuscript, I blanked. I could come up with a favorite scene, but a favorite sentence? I don’t even remember the great movie lines. When I hear them, I might be able to identify the movie, but it doesn’t work the other way around. And how do you isolate a sentence from the story itself? Even the most memorable lines fall flat if you don’t know the context.

Besides, I’d like to think that each of my sentences is brilliant. If I didn’t like it, why would I put it in? Well, I will admit to an occasional dud, but not on purpose.

Seriously, though, I believe in simple, direct writing that challenges my middle-grade readers but doesn’t frustrate them. Ornamentation is not my style. So after scanning my manuscript, I chose this sentence.

“As I swam, the water acted like a mirror, reflecting the curve of the approaching shore, the black trunk and branches of the lone tree, and the green of its leaves.”

So is it my favorite? Probably not. But it does reflect my writing style.

And that will have to do.

Agent Questions: What is the last book you've read?

As mentioned in the last post, I’m commenting here on a series of questions asked on one agent’s submission form. The question for this week is, “What is the last book you’ve read?”

At the time, the last book I had finished was One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, so that’s what I said. Not only was it an honest answer, but it may also have been a fortunate one. After all, I was querying middle-grade historical fiction, and One Crazy Summer is middle-grade historical fiction. That wasn’t unusual, either, since I often read within my genre.

If I had filled out the form two days later, I would have had to say that the last book I had read was Chestnut Street by Maeve Binchy, which is adult literary fiction. Several weeks earlier, the answer would have been the P.D. James mystery A Certain Justice. And right before One Crazy Summer, I read The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, a humorous YA by Julie Berry.

It was an agency submission form, and I don’t know what the agency was hoping to discover. Does it want me to be a well-rounded reader or to stick to my genre? And I question the usefulness of the question. What can an agent tell from a single book title?

When I filled out the form, my answer indicated that I had been reading within my genre.

But I don’t always.

Agent Questions: Which writer has most influenced you?

As I continue to search for an agent, one thing is clear: they all want something different. That’s why it’s important to read the submission guidelines on their websites and customize each query. A few want just a query letter, although most want a query letter and a certain number of pages or chapters. Others also ask for specific information about the author. While some of these questions are straight-forward, others are perplexing. I’m going to spend the next three weeks looking at questions from one agent’s online form, starting with “Which writer has most influenced you?”

Many writers have inspired me, and I can’t pick out the one with the most influence. But saying that wouldn’t answer the question, so I put down Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, and dozens of other books.

Here are just a few of the many authors and books that I loved as a child:

·       Louisa May Alcott, with favorites including Little Women, Rose in Bloom, and An Old-Fashioned Girl;

·       Laura Ingalls Wilder’s entire Little House series;

·       Mary Norton’s Borrowers series;

·       A series of childhood biographies that I called “blue true books” because of they had blue cloth covers at the time (now branded as “Childhood of Famous Americans”); and

·       Alice Turner Curtis’ Little Maid books (e.g., Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony). My mother owned them as a girl, and I found them in my grandparents’ storage room.

During junior high and my first two years of high school, I read George Elliot, Grace Livingston Hill, and Charles Dickens as I curled up on the couch on our enclosed back porch. Then we moved, and my reading tastes went with me, supplemented by Ellery Queen and Rex Stout. Later, I discovered Agatha Christie, Jane Austin, and C.S. Lewis.

But who influenced me most?

It’s anybody’s guess.

Dueling Memories

My older brother has Parkinson’s Disease and has been spending a lot of time with his memories lately. That made me think of one of the problems with writing memoirs. Here is a reprint of a post I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog on October 5, 2016.

Dueling Memories

One of the first things I learned in law school is that if ten people witness a crime, they will have ten different versions of what happened. Everyday life works that way, too.

Memoirs tell what happened to the writer through the writer’s eyes. But memoirs are not fiction, so they must also tell the truth about the actual events. How do you balance and reconcile these two concerns?

Take an example from my life.

My family lived in Jordan when I was six. We didn’t own a car, but we hitchhiked and took buses all over the Holy Land. It was mountainous country with narrow shoulders and no guard rails along the roads. So whenever the bus or car I was riding in went up a mountain, I closed my eyes and asked, “Are we on the falling off side?” If the answer was “no”—meaning we were on the side of the road near the mountain, I would open my eyes and look around with interest. If the answer was “yes,” they stayed tightly shut.

My entire family agrees on that much of the story.

On the day before Christmas, we were on a bus headed up a mountain on the way to Bethlehem. It was raining, and the roads were slippery, but we weren’t on the falling off side so I wasn’t worried. Then, without warning, the bus slid across the road. Again, we agree on that much. But from there, our memories differ.

I swear that one wheel slid off the mountain and left the bus hanging over the side. That’s what my terrified six-year-old mind saw as we scrambled out and huddled in the rain. My mother had a different memory—she said the bus slid sideways until it blocked both lanes but it never left the road.

With help from the male passengers and other men from the cars that couldn’t get past, the driver got the bus back on the right side of the road, loaded the passengers who were brave enough to chance it, and continued on to Bethlehem. Make that the passengers who were brave enough to chance it and one terrified six-year-old who had to be bribed by her parents.

Mama and I have different memories about where the bus landed after sliding across the road. Mama was probably frightened, too, but she was older and more rational. And the fact that the men managed to get the bus back on the road with no special equipment and without sending it over the edge strengthens the argument that her memory is probably the correct one.

But my memory was my reality, and that’s part of the truth, too.

So how should I handle this incident if I were writing a memoir about my childhood in Jordan? It is among my strongest memories and one of the most dramatic things that happened while I was there, so I couldn’t leave it out. But should I tell the story as I remember it or as it really happened?

I would treat it the way I have treated it in this blog post. I would start by giving you my reality and then describe why the external facts were probably different than I remembered them.

In my case, the evidence indicates that Mama’s version is the correct one. But sometimes people have dueling memories and the fight ends in a draw. When I am sure that my version is correct, I go with it. But if there is any chance that the other person’s memories are more accurate, I will at least acknowledge them.

A memoir has to be true to the world as the writer saw it at the time. But it isn’t fiction, so it also has to be true to the actual events. Or as true as you can be when people have dueling memories. Sometimes that means qualifying your memories by adding someone else’s.

But your memories are your reality, and that carries its own truth.

__________

The photograph at the top of this post shows the road descending from Wadi al-Mujib in Jordan. My husband took the photo on a family trip in 1998.