Submission Etiquette by Smoky Trudeau

You’ve written the next Great American Novel—congratulations! But your work isn’t over. Now, you have to present your work to prospective publishers, and there is a right way and a wrong way to do that.

The first step to submitting your work is to study the submission guidelines for each publisher. Some might ask for a query letter and a one-page synopsis. Others may ask for a query letter and the first three chapters, or a one-page synopsis and the first chapter. Every publisher will want something different, and it is important that you send exactly what each requests—no more, no less.

One thing you always will need when making a submission is a query letter. Your query letter should be crafted with as much care as your novel itself, because this is the first example of your writing a publisher will see. Mess up your query letter and your manuscript won’t even be given a glance.

Open your query with a short teaser about your novel. Take a look at the back cover or front flap of any book in your library where the story is described. This is the sort of thing you are looking for—just enough information about the story to make the reader want to read more. Then, if you have any writing experience, say a few words about that. Include any other relevant information as well. For example, if you have a degree in ancient Roman history and your novel is set in ancient Rome, mention your expertise. If your novel is set in some exotic foreign land and you lived there for a year, mention that. This type of information gives your novel credibility. Say what genre the book is, and give the word count.

Whether you’re submitting your query packet or responding to a publisher’s request to see your whole manuscript, watch out for these Really Stupid Things Authors Do To Screw Themselves:

Really Stupid Thing #1: Trusting Your Spell Checker: If ewe think yore spell checker will fined awl yore miss steaks, u r wrong.

Spell checkers are handy, and a useful place to start your proofread. But they’re not infallible, as the above sentence makes clear. That sentence made it through my spell checker just fine.

Then again, you should never trust your own eyes to catch all your mistakes, either. Authors are notorious for being able to catch spelling errors in other writers’ work, but not in their own. This is because the author sees what a sentence is supposed to say, not necessarily what it does say. It’s always a good idea to have someone else read your manuscript before you submit it for publication. Preferably someone you know can spell.

Really Stupid Thing #2: Admitting You Are Clueless. I’ve seen query letter where the author wrote, “I don’t have any experience, but I think my book is very good and know you will too.” Why would you admit you didn’t have any experience? If your book is good, it won’t matter. If your book is awful, it will matter even less. Never, ever give out negative information about yourself this way. If you consider yourself inexperienced, the publisher will, too. Also, don’t presume to know a publisher will like your book. Of course, you hope they will. But you don’t say that. You wouldn’t be submitting your manuscript to them if you didn’t think it was a good match.

Really Stupid Thing #3: Displaying an Over-Inflated Ego. You may think your YA fantasy novel is great, but that doesn’t mean you write “My book is the next Harry Potter and will make me as famous as J.K. Rowling” in your query letter. Book critics decide whether you’re the next Rowling, or Hemmingway, or Faulkner—not authors.

Really Stupid Thing #4: Making Unrealistic Demands. My publisher once got a query letter where the author wrote, “I will require at least a $10,000 cash advance.” Needless to say, that letter got pitched before the publisher got to the next sentence. Yes, some publishers offer cash advances. But certainly not all of them do, especially when you’re talking about independent presses. Even when they do offer advances, they are likely to be a few hundred dollars, not thousands of dollars. This is especially true for unpublished authors. Advances are just that—advance payment of anticipated royalties. Publishers can’t risk shelling out big bucks on an untried author and then not be able to recoup their losses.

Smoky Trudeau is the author of the newly released Observations of an Earth Mage, a collection of photos, essays, and poems celebrating our beautiful planet earth. She is also the author of two novels, Redeeming Grace and The Cabin, as well as two books for writers, Front-Word, Back-Word, Insight Out: Lessons on Writing the Novel Lurking Inside Your From Start to Finish, and Left Brained, Write Brained: 366 Writing Prompts and Exercises, all from Vanilla Heart Publishing. You can learn more about Smoky at www.smokytrudeau.com, or at her blog on Xanga, http://authorsmokytrudeau.xanga.com. You can also look her up on Facebook.

Write Like An Earth Mage by Smoky Trudeau

My latest book, Observations of an Earth Mage, is a collection of essays, poems, and photographs on nature. I am, at heart, a nature writer.

But you don’t have to be a nature writer to need to know how to write about nature. It’s the rare novel that doesn’t at least have some element of nature in it, and writers of all genres need to know how to write about it convincingly, even writers who never get closer to nature than their local city park. Of course, there’s not enough room in a blog column to teach an entire course in nature writing, but here are some tips to make sure your scenes evoke Mother Nature in her finest light, as well as some exercises to get your creative juices flowing:

Use specific, descriptive language. Descriptive, specific language is what distinguishes beautiful prose from the mundane. While this is true for every element of fiction writing, nowhere is it more true than with setting description. Yes, I could have written the sentence, “It was foggy at the river,” as the opening to Chapter 22 of my novel, Redeeming Grace, and readers would have gotten a general idea of the setting. But I didn’t write that. I wrote, “The cool, early autumn air hugged the still-warm sandy shores of the Choptank, enveloping the river in a surreal, steamy fog. Water droplets clung to each blade of grass in the yard, dangling precariously like a precious crystal earring from a dainty lobe. The air smelled sweet, a sticky mixture of fish and pine.” Specific, descriptive language turns a bland sentence into words worth savoring and creates a three-dimensional, color picture in the reader’s mind.

Engage the senses. When you take a hike in an apple orchard in full bloom, you smell the blossoms. When you walk along the ocean shore, you hear gulls overhead and waves crashing on the beach. Make sure your readers can smell, hear, or even taste your nature descriptions. In my novel The Cabin, I could have written: “Corrine walked into the forest,” and left it at that. But I didn’t. What I wrote was, “The first thing she noticed was the smell. It was the same scent she had breathed in every time she walked in the forest, but this time, she could break down the individual essences perfuming the air: rotting rhododendron blossoms mixed with moss-covered granite and cold, crisp water. She had never noticed granite had a scent—like the air during a thunderstorm, vaguely electrical—or that water could smell cold.”

Don’t get carried away with this, of course. You don’t have to engage all five senses at once! But don’t rely only on the visual.

Use unexpected, surprising phrasing and metaphors. A good trick here is, when describing an inanimate object in nature, such as a rock, liken it to something animate. You might write something like, “The granite rock was like a gray whale in the middle of the meadow, swimming in a sea of big blue stem and purple coneflowers.” The rock is inanimate; a gray whale is animate. Doing the opposite works well, too: when describing something living, like an animal or a flower, liken it to an inanimate object: “The flock of Canada geese overhead looked like the Blue Angels doing maneuvers at an air show.” Another trick is to compare something small to something large: “When the hiker wandered too close to her babies, the mother marmot charged like a rhinoceros.”

Do your research. I recently read a lovely book that was set in what today is Turkey several thousand years BCE. The main character had a pet cockatoo. What’s wrong with that? Cockatoos are from Australia. There would have been no cockatoos in Turkey five thousand years ago. If you are writing a nature scene in a work of fiction, please remember to ensure the plants, animals, and weather phenomena you write about actually exist in the place you are writing about. Don’t have grizzly bears attacking tourists in Shenandoah National Park; don’t put triggerfish in the Great Lakes, and don’t set white Christmas stories in Sydney.

Beware of purple prose. Purple prose is prose that is so over the top, so flowery, it breaks the flow of your essay, story, or poem by drawing attention to itself. It often is exaggerated, overly sentimental, and evocative beyond the call of duty. To avoid falling into the purple prose trap, evoke only one or two senses at a time. Use only one metaphor to describe something, not five. In short, don’t get mushy.

Practice, practice, practice. Learning to write about nature (or anything else, for that matter) is no different from mastering any other art form. Picasso’s first painting probably wasn’t a masterpiece. Chopin had to learn to play a scale before he could compose and perform his piano masterpieces. Rudolph Nureyev took dance lessons before he became a world-class ballet dancer. Anything worth doing is worth learning how to do well, and that means practicing!

Ultimately, the best way to learn how to write about nature is to spend time in the woods, on the prairies, at the seashore, or in the garden. Nature is as close as your backyard or city park. Second, read nature writing. Read modern day nature anthologies, like my Observations of an Earth Mage. Read the classics, like Thoreau’s Walden or A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Read nature poetry. Read novels where nature plays a thematic role, like Moby Dick. Then, go to your keyboard and write!

Smoky Trudeau is the author of the recently released Observations of an Earth Mage, a collection of prose, poetry, and photographs celebrating the beauty and splendor of the natural world. She is also the author of two novels, Redeeming Grace and The Cabin, as well as two books on writing, all from Vanilla Heart Publishing. An ardent outdoorswoman with a deep reverence for nature, she lives in California with her husband, daughter, and a menagerie of animals, both domestic and wild, in a ramshackle cottage in the woods overlooking the San Gabriel Valley and the mountains beyond. When she isn’t working, Smoky spends her time hiking in the mountains, camping in the Sierras, splashing in tidepools, and fighting the urge to speak in haiku.