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Ten years ago today, on the 40th anniversary of Sandra Day O’Connor taking her seat as the 1st female Justice of the Supreme Court, I published my first opinion piece. “Flirting with Justice” ran in the Los Angeles times, and was also picked up by the San Jose Mercury News and the Miami Herald. It remains as relevant today as it was then, so read it, please! It’s publication opened doors for me to write for other news sources, too, so I thought I’d offer a little bit here about how I broke into writing opinion pieces with this.

I’ve long been an opinion reader, which is the first step to writing anything — to know what it is you write.

I found a great source of how-to information at the OpEd Project, which was started to change who writes history — an organization in which I now mentor.

I chose something I was in a unique position to write about. I’d just started law school when this happened. And a topic about which I’m passionate: having women in prominent roles matters!

I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote.

I knew it could take me months to place the piece because I didn’t have opinion credits (although I did have short stories, essays and novels) or relationships with editors, so I wrote it months before it might run, and pitched it months before too. I had compiled a list of newspapers to which I wanted to submit, and started at the top of the list. I submitted through the general submission door, which was the only way in I had.

And Susan Brenneman from the LA Times pulled it from her (email) slush pile. She is a fabulous editor, and I learned so much about writing opinions from her — not just with this piece, but with the many pieces of mine she has published over the years.

Now I have those relationships, which is important in opinion writing. The news cycle moves so fast these days that if I want to write an opinion about something, I sit down and do it, and pitch it. Sometimes it runs later that same day, before it gets stale.

But if you want to break into this world — and it is a really rewarding space to write in, not financially, but in audience reach and impact — consider starting with something you are passionate about that might also be timeless, so your piece can have time to be found before it turns stale.

Happy Saturday! Which for me, is just another writing day, because I love what I do.

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• A Query Letter/Email (with hook, bio, why you, and thank you very much)
• A Synopsis (or maybe not)
• Manuscript Pages (or, again, maybe not)

I’ll also address here how you put together a list of which agents to query, how many Submissions/how often (and the importance of persistence), what to do when an agent asks for pages, the follow-up, and a few Bewares (aka Run the Other Way If…).

The Query Letter

THE BASICS:
A greeting, three sections, and a signature, totaling not more than one page in 12 point font.  11 point if you absolutely must. Don’t spend a page turn on your letter if you can help it.
It’s a marketing tool! General Motors doesn’t sell cars by saying it’s brown with four wheels.
THE GREETING:

• Dear Annie Agent or Dear Ms Agent: (a colon is the proper punctuation here because this is a business letter).
• Do address to a specific agent, and spell the name correctly.
• Don’t include anything between the greeting and the hook.

THE HOOK

• Use as few sentences as you can pare it down to and still intrigue someone to want to read.
• Make it like the description on the back of a paperback, or on the inside flap of a hardcover – not more than two paragraphs.
• Include the title of your book!
• Consider starting with a question, or with your first few lines of your book.
• Resist the urge to tell the whole story. If you do, what’s left in it for them?

That’s just the start: like a good novel – and perhaps even more so – a good hook generally gets better with a lot of thought. My queries can go through 20 drafts. It’s a pain, but it’s necessary pain.
THE BIO

• Again, be short and to the point.
• If you have publishing credits, trot them out. If you don’t, try to get one or two. I once heard an agent say if a writer can’t get published in his or her local paper, she’ll approaches that query with great doubt.
• If there is a reason you are in a particularly good position to write this book, trot that out. (Are you a prosecutor writing a legal thriller, a doctor writing a medical one, a mother writing a book about motherhood?)
• State your education, writing or otherwise, and career.

WHY I’M QUERYING YOU, MR. OR MS. AGENT
If you have chosen this agent because they represent someone whose work you admire, say so in one line on the letter. More on this later, when we talk about your list.
But do think of a book you like that you think is something like what you’ve written, and drop in that author’s name: “I am querying you because I understand you represent [author name], who writes the kind of novel I aspire to write.”
Note the “aspire to.” Do not say “I think I am the second coming of Steven King.”
THE THANK YOU: “I hope you enjoy the opening of [Name of Your Novel], and thank you for considering my work.” Or “Thank you for considering my work. I look forward to hearing from you.” Confident. Unapologetic. Nice. Not arrogant. Professional.
A FEW NOTES ON FORMAT: Think of this as a literary date; brush your hair and wear clean clothes.

• (Repeat) ONE PAGE. 12 Point Type. 11 if you really must.
• Absolutely pristine – no typos, no coffee stains, no pink ink. You’ll be surprised how much agents (who often come from editing) are put off by little things.
• DON’T FORGET TO INCLUDE YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION: EMAIL AND PHONE NUMBER!
• If you’re submitting by mail, use nice letterhead. (You can make it on your printer with good quality paper.) And include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

So Now You Have a Draft of Your Query Letter. Just a draft, though. You know you can make it better. Each time you send it out, try to make it better. Time may not heal all wounds, but it does allow us to see our work with a fresher eye.

The post On Agent Queries appeared first on Meg Waite Clayton.

Writers Links

The Single Best Piece of Advice I’ve Gotten as a Writer

Great Sources for Writers:

Poets & Writers Magazine
The Nebraska Center for Writers

Books on Writing that I’ve Found Particularly Helpful:

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner: perhaps a little overwhelming for new writers, but I go back to the chapter on plotting again and again
The Weekend Novelist by Robert Ray: a goofy title, but it does a nice job of laying out for the beginner a way to write a novel from start to finish
How Fiction Works by Oakley Hall: The Oakley Hall book I have on my shelf isThe Art and Craft of Novel Writing – a great resource for writers at any stage, writing any kind of narrative literature. It’s (sadly) out of print, but his How Fiction Works is a good substitute
The Company of Writers by Hilma Wolitzer: Lovely writing on writing, as well as the importance of calling yourself a writer and gathering with others for support

Two Writers’ Conferences That Helped Me Find My Way:

The Sewanee Writers’ Conference
Community of Writers at Squaw Valley

Sources for Meeting Writers and Learning About Writing:

She Writes
Sans Serif
Redroom
Critical Mass
Readings at Your Local Bookstore
1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started

Submitting Short Works:

A Few Tips for Submitting Short Work to Literary Magazines
Top Five Cover Letter Errors
The Poets & Writers Listing of Literary Magazines

Finding an Agent for a Book:

On Agents and Queries
How to Write a Query Letter
The AAR Listing of Agents
On Slush Piles and Finding Agents
Publisher’s Lunch, a publishing industry email that includes a Friday email of recent deals, including agent names
QueryTracker, an online agent database I offer with the caveat that I don’t actually know how accurate it is

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PADDLING YOUR BATHTUB INTO LONDON:
HOW GREAT STORIES END

“Writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub. Sometimes the damn tub sinks. It’s a wonder most of them don’t.” – Stephen King

The 3 Rules for Ending any Narrative Work

Rule #1 Give the reader what they want, but not in the way they expect it. “SURPRISE”

Rule #2 Do it Slantwise, which means  you have to start paving the Yellow Brick Road at the beginning. “INEVITABLE”

Rule #3 There is no Rule #3.

Seriously, this is what you are going for. Sometimes it’s called the “inevitable surprise.” I think Aristotle’s phrase was “inevitable and unexpected” but I suppose that depends on who is translating.

So we’ll start with Rule #2 and a quick tutorial on plotting

Plot

Plot is “a system of compulsions to the end … leading to the final breakthrough, when meaning is revealed and emotion felt.” – Oakley Hall, from The Art and Craft of Novel Writing

FREITAG PYRAMID is the classical structure: 3-acts built on two reversals (can be 5, or more)

Rule of thumb on Beginnings

Start as Close to the End as you possibly can, and in a moment of instability. Aristotle says begin “in the middle of things.” A good place to start is often at the moment an unsustainable situation receives the last straw. If you need moments from lives before that, you can backfill after the story is going. But don’t start too close to the end or it will look gimmicky.

Compulsions 

Start with a character who wants something, is compelled toward something. The reader is basically going to borrow his compulsion to read from the characters compulsion to … whatever he’s compelled to do.

The Two-Shoe Drop

• Everything that happens in the ending has to be set up before hand. The reader has to hear the first shoe drop somewhere for the second shoe to have power.

• Otherwise, an ending seems arbitrary.So for example, if you are going to destroy Los Angeles in an earthquake at the end, or your hero is going to heroically save say, an adorable puppy from a house brought down by a quake, you need to have a tremor sometime earlier in the story.

• Your ending shoe drop should be the most important one.You can have more than one, but you have to have the most important shoe drop very near London. Otherwise, you have a long, boring last paddle the reader has to slog through. And if it’s really funny, maybe that’s ok, because funny covers a lot of sins. But even then, put the funny before.

Ways you keep the compulsion going (and the reader) include

• Obstacles to be Climbed Over, Tunneled Under, Pushed Aside or Blown Up — Strong forces within and outside the character which push him toward one course of action meet strong forces within and outside that push him the other way
  • FWTBT bridge or Javert to Jean Valjean in Les Miserables — Note that right against right makes the most powerful opposition
  • Faulkner: the best fiction comes from the heart in conflict with itself
  • ALL TRUE SUSPENSE IS A DRAMATIC REPRESENTATION OF THE ANGUISH OF MORAL CHOICE
• Foreshadowing: the gun on the mantle in Act I; Or more subtly Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms opening “The leaves fell early that fall” presaging an early death
• Promises Made and Kept
  • Jane Austen’s Emma: Emma Woodehouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence: and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. —> a promise that we are going to see Emma stressed and vexed.
  • Schindler’s List (Thomas Keneally): Opening para shows Schindler comfortably dressed heading for his chauffeured limo, followed by “Watch the pavement, Herr Schindler. It’s as icy as a widow’s heart.” — and that is the story in a nutshell.
• Incompletions that are Later Completed — clues, what does that mean? Sherlock Holmes
• Questions that are eventually Answered — e.g. All the Light We Cannot See: what is it with this stone?
• Dangers that go either to Safety or Disaster — Gatsby’s pursuing Daisy
• Maguffin — something precious and potentially dangerous, for the possession of which forces are contending. Like the stone in All the Light.
• Lit Fuse (lack of Time, which is really a type of Obstacle) — the Nazi at the Door

Endings

So the ENDING —

• Main climax leads to either a winding down of action or a triumphant high-pitch closing; either way the conflict is resolved and our initial concern changes to something else (e.g. wanting a secret be kept changes to the consequences of the secret revealed)
  
• when a story’s ending is properly set up, it falls like an avalanche — your job is to describe the stones as they fall

Fiction is a process of change — which comes with discovery or recognition:

• Epiphany
  Your protagonist realizes something they haven’t before
• Reappraisal
  Your protagonist takes that realization and works through mentally what it means to them (note, this does not necessarily have to be seen by the reader)
• Action
  Your protagonist ACTS in a way that leads to a transformation. Someone else acting to save your protagonist simply is not compelling
• Transformation (or loss of last chance to change)

The Most Important Elements of an Ending, a bit more specifically than Rule #1

• Action by the protagonist. If the ending is brought about by some other force, it is just not as satisfying
• That second shoe HAS to be the most important shoe drop
• The inevitable surprise — what the reader wants but not how they expect it. If you give them what they expect, they might wonder why they didn’t just write it themselves.
  
• Connectedness

Adding power to endings

• Connectedness
  • The Symphony: As much of the symphony you have set in motion to play over the course of the book coming to play together at the end.
    • Often our deepest sense of character comes from symbolic association.
    • Symbols register in the reader’s subconscious, and contribute to the symphony in the end in wonderful ways.
    • Note that you can’t do this all in one draft; it takes rereading and rereading to see what your symbols are, and to nudge them up and together.
    • SO REVISION:
      • If you think, I’m going to make a symbol here of a thunderstorm, it’s going to represent love — that symbol is probably going to clunk.
      • Just write a draft, and then read it and reread it.
      • Reread it more.
      • And more.
      • You are looking for what your own subconscious has done, so you can fine tune it.
        • What subtle symbols have you used?
        • metaphors?
        • connections?
        • accidental repetitions?
      • See what subtle repetitions you’ve used and see what your symbols and metaphors are, and nudge them to better use.
        
• Echo scenes: A scene at the beginning is echoed, but changed
  • • e.g. FWTBT Robert Jordan lying on the pine needles.
• Tragedy and Hope. Or, if you can do the reverse triple flip: Tragedy, Hope, and Laughter. If you can make people laugh and cry at the same time, you will be famous.

Meg Waite Clayton is a New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, most recently the National Jewish Book Award finalist and international bestseller The Last Train to London. Her prior novels include Beautiful Exiles. Her prior novels include the Langum-Prize honored The Race for Paris; The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (now the PEN/Bellwether); and The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. She has also written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face.

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I find the things that move me personally lead me to my best writing, and this is a moment that has moved me for as long as I can remember. It inspired me to major in history in college, with a focus on 20th century wars. My reading about it lead me to the extraordinary efforts of Martha Gellhorn in covering the D-Day invasion — the only female journalist and one of the few journalists of any gender to go ashore in the first days. Her real story inspired the last two novels I have written: The Race for Paris, about a fictional woman journalist and photojournalist which draws from the real women journalists of the time; and Beautiful Exiles, about Martha herself.

I remain in awe of what Martha Gellhorn did to cover the invasion, and even more in awe of what the troops she covered did. I hope you’ll take a minute to honor them all in some way on this 75th anniversary of D-Day. I started by listening to Eisenhower’s words to the troops, below with photos from the day.

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My original intro — and I’m very sorry to say Karen is NOT reading at Books Inc. tonight, but on that tonight we drank champagne, to celebrate her getting the cover of the New York Times Book Review:

I’m in the seventh literary heaven to be introducing today’s guest: Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three story collections, including The Jane Austen Book Club, which spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list; Sister Noon, a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award; Sarah Canary, which was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize; and two World Fantasy Award winners, Black Glass and  What I Didn’t See. Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon says of her, “No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness.” I just finished reading her newest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which is not only an incredibly moving story, but also one that will change the way you think. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, join me for her reading tonight at Books Inc. in Mountain View! – Meg

Karen Joy Fowler: First Words

When I decided to be serious about writing, I joined a local writers’ group.  This was a critique circle of largely unpublished aspirants and I remained in that group until I moved away almost 30 years later.  I quickly realized that I was not very good, but I minded less than you might think, because I was learning so much and improving so quickly that for a long time all was well.

Then it wasn’t.  A few years in and I had corrected the obvious stuff.  I still hadn’t written anything truly good from beginning to end, but it was no longer easy for my beloved group to pinpoint why.  I spent the next three years writing story after story (and if I’m being honest, submitting story after story) with a sinking understanding that they weren’t good enough, but no idea how to make them better.

The dam finally broke when I attended a lecture by Robert Hass.  He was talking about poems and I was writing stories, but that did not matter.  He talked about complicating your endings, about endings that opened a work up and endings that closed a work down, about endings that could be read simultaneously as Shakespearian tragedy and Mel Brookes comedy, and about writing endings you believed to be true.  He told wonderful stories with wonderful endings.

As I sat and listened, smarter than I usually am because of the need to meet the brilliant Hass if not halfway and least somewhere, I suddenly had a new ending to a story I’d been working on and sending out for months.  Twenty minutes later, I had a new ending to another story in progress.  I went home, rewrote those endings and while doing so, came up with a third new ending for a third story.  All of those stories sold within the month and those were my first three publications.

I will add this cautionary note that my improved endings are, I hear, still not for everyone.  You can take that up with Robert Hass. – Karen

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Julia Glass‘s first novel, the National Book Award-winning Three Junes, is on my short list of all-time favorite novels. She’s won the Nelson Algren Award (three times!), the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. Booklist says of her new novel, The Widower’s Tale, “Elaborately plotted and luxuriously paced, Glass’s inquisitive, compassionate, funny, and suspenseful saga addresses significant and thorny social issues with emotional veracity, artistic nuance, and a profound perception of the grand interconnectivity of life.” And gives it a star. As does everyone. I know you’ll enjoy her engaging post about her apparent overnight success – and The Widower’s Tale. – Meg

The Not Quite Yes

I started writing short stories in my late twenties, after ten years of striving to succeed as a painter. Having failed to snag the waitressing gig that was de rigueur for a struggling female artist in New York City, I’d figured out how to pay my rent with the word skills I’d always taken for granted: I was a proofreader and copy editor, a writer of faux travelogues (rhapsodizing over each and every Caribbean island without setting foot on a single one), and a pet columnist (don’t ask). In the seams of my patchwork life, I read novels and stories obsessively, devotedly, and—living alone, traveling far and frequently by subway—for hours on end. I subscribed to the New Yorker and the Atlantic because—yes, Reader, this was a long, long time ago—every issue included two brand-new short stories, often representing a writer’s “debut.”
Language sustained me no less than oxygen; making pictures began to feel oddly parenthetical. I spent my Saturdays mooning through the airless, timeless stacks of the Strand Bookstore, rather than the bright, sparkling galleries of uptown museums. What, I had to ask myself, was wrong with this picture? Even my paintings—scenes in which literally colorful people went about inscrutable tasks among strangely animated objects—suggested that what I wanted to do, more than anything else, was to tell stories. Never mind that I hadn’t written fiction since high school.

I still can’t figure out why this formerly stellar student did not apply for MFA programs or embrace the growing cosmos of the writer’s workshop. Chalk it up to a mix of necessary frugality, Yankee determination, and not a small pinch of grandiosity. Honestly now, had George Eliot or Jane Austen required an MFA? It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that clearly I didn’t need the degree, either, but one benefit I missed out on was a community of fiction writers—and the likelihood that I would have been published sooner. I worked on my stories in isolation for seven years, and it’s a wonder I didn’t quit.

Early on during this period, I was a full-time copy editor at Cosmopolitan magazine (which also, incidentally, published two short stories in every issue, by the likes of Laurie Colwin, Laurie Moore, and Elinor Lipman). Most nights, I worked on my stories by longhand in my Brooklyn apartment; during weekday lunch breaks and on weekends, I’d use my office typewriter to transcribe the final drafts. And then I would send them out to every reputable literary quarterly I knew of (Grand Street, Triquarterly, Sewanee Review et al.) . . . each story going out to no more than one journal at a time (a rule that some schoolmarmish writer’s guide warned me I must follow), along with my no-gimmicks cover letter and diligently postage-paid SASE.

Six afternoons per week, my hopeful heart throbbed as I opened my rickety mailbox. Each time, for weeks or months on end, it sank: not at rejections—how I began to long for rejections!—but at the general silence. Some stories never came back. Once in a blue moon, having been held hostage for two months or more by the faceless editor whose approval I craved, a story would return to me in my carefully addressed manila envelope, a teensy form rejection tucked under my paper clip. Without exception, the stories looked as pristine as on the day I’d sent them out. I’d page through, hoping to see a coffee ring or doughnut crumb haloed by grease, any proof that a human being had read these words. (One bizarre cruelty of the now-defunct SASE protocol was that my rejections came to me with my handwriting on the outside, as if I were telling myself to face the mediocrity of my own imagination.)

Increasingly desperate, I realized I had nothing to lose by sending my stories to the big guns as well. I found the name of the fiction editor on the masthead of my current Atlantic; as for the New Yorker, where the omission of a masthead seems to declare, “Don’t bother us geniuses here, lowly Earthling,” I went to a party where I met a successful writer who shared the name of her editor there (though she told me not to use her name by way of reference).

I sent my next finished story first to the New Yorker. Not two weeks later, there was my SASE in the box, mocking me yet again, far sooner than usual. But this time, clipped to my manuscript was a full page of typing, on letterhead stationery, signed by the editor to whom I had addressed the story. He said many kind things about my story—things that showed he had read it, really read it—and then he told me why he couldn’t take it. He told me, and I will never, ever forget this, that I had “talent to burn” (a phrase I puzzled over at first, never having seen it). And he told me to send him more.
I wept. I think I’d been sending out my stories for two or three years at this point, and finally, finally, FINALLY, somebody had read one and responded. He spoke about my characters as if they were flesh and blood, their emotions as if they mattered. My protagonist actually frustrated him; he thought her too “hapless.” (Was I too hapless? I remember thinking.) I called one of my best friends and read the letter over the phone.

I went back to work on the story, responding to the editor’s comments, and sent it to the Atlantic. Again in record time, I received a reply: this time from an editor junior to the one on the masthead. It was another rejection, but it was several sentences long, most of which were encouraging and kind. Throughout her letter, the editor wrote in second-person plural, as in “We thought your descriptive powers quite novelistic” and “We’d love to see more of your work.” The royal we? I’d take it. Pages of my manuscript were bent, soiled; this in itself was cause for celebration.

This one-two punch of hopeful highbrow rejection gave me energy, yes indeed, to burn. People who cared passionately about fiction, who wanted new writers to publish, who had the power to make that happen, were on my side. Or that’s how it felt.

For the next four or five years, this dance of rejection, revision, resending, rethinking, rebounding continued. In all, I sent fifteen or twenty stories to my correspondents at each of those esteemed magazines. Once, the editor at the New Yorker asked me to revise a story and send it back to him. With obvious regret, he rejected it again. But I did not give up. (Remarkably, over all that time, as I continued to send my stories to the quarterlies as well, I received only one reply from any of them that gave me any hope: a scrawled sentence—Sorry, please try us again—on the miserly form rejection. The initials that followed were illegible.)

Finally, I won a modest prize and saw my first short story published in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. I was 37 years old. After that, no doubt because of it, I started getting real replies from the quarterlies. Two of them took stories of mine. Meanwhile, I came to realize that it was time to attempt a novel. In her rejection of an absurdly long story entitled “Collies,” my now-longtime correspondent at the Atlantic had praised it but remarked that it looked like the beginning of novel. And that’s what it became. It became Three Junes.

It still astonishes me that, without a community of fiction-minded peers or any writerly context other than my work as a “pet journalist,” I persevered through seven years of nothing but rejection. Like, what part of NO didn’t I get? But there’s stark, impersonal rejection, and then there’s the I-am-determined-to-one-day-accept-you rejection. What I think of as the Not Quite Yes. I know now that the letters I received from those two editors at those two magazines (who, in their own way, persevered on my behalf) were probably what kept me going. To this day, I have never been published in the New Yorker or the Atlantic; as recently as two months ago, I’ve received further rejections from successors of my two correspondents of a quarter-century back.

We are past the era of SASEs, of weekend forays to borrow the office IBM Selectric, of (alas) fiction in the pages of nearly every mainstream magazine worth its pulp. But this much remains true: As long as there are fiction readers, there will be editors and publishers of fiction who passionately want to hand the first yes to someone who’s weathered a tsunami of no.

How perfect it felt when I discovered that the editor who loved and bought Three Junes—let it be noted that every other editor who saw it said no (however politely)—had been a protégé of my correspondent at the New Yorker. Nothing thrills her more than putting a writer in print for the very first time. In the world of literature, there just may be a God. – Julia

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Pencil, from the Latin penicillus, meaning “little tail.” Little tail?

Not everyone writes even occasionally with the old fashioned yellow pencil with pink eraser top anymore. This astonishing fact came to my attention through a more newfangled way to communicate, the Facebook post. But the lowly pencil remains my writerly tool of choice. I use #2 lead, no doubt a holdover from my formative bubble-tests years. The lead isn’t really lead, either, but rather graphite mixed with clay; I’m okay with that.

I’m not exactly monogamous in my writing tool relationships. I write my novels (and everything else I write for publication, for that matter) primarily at a keyboard. When I journal I often use a pen, blue or black ink, I don’t much care. But there is nothing like the freedom of a pencil as I’m taking the muck that is first draft and trying to make something of it. Not quite right the first time? Erase and try again!

I keep a yellow Ticonderoga in a white marble pen holder my uncle gave me many, many years ago, so that I always have one handy. I carry them around by the ten-to-a-box in my backpack. I have an electric sharpener, and a tiny little manual one, and I sharpen far more often than I floss.

Still, I wear out the erasers long before I use up the pencil lead.

Like many a pencil-user before me, I struggle with the dilemma whether to toss a shot-eraser pencil or not. Such a waste of fine pencil lead (or graphite with clay, as the case may be), but the alternative is to be forever cringing at the scrape of eraserless metal pencil top over manuscript page.

Perhaps I erase with too much enthusiasm?

It turns out I’m in good company on the eraser-thing. Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote and rewrote everything in pencil, had this to say on the subject: “My pencils outlast their erasures.”

Great writers erase.

There is another downside to my pencil affection, or to my eraser addiction anyway: dirty pink pilly eraser detritus. On my manuscripts, my chair, my clothes, and sometimes even my dog. But I’m as okay with that as I am with the graphite and clay thing. All those pink pilly things filling up my world mean the writing is going well. That I’m open to change. That a few not-exactly-right words aren’t the end of anything, but rather the beginning of something else. – Meg

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The letter:

Dear Ernie,
I am writing this late at night after a long think by myself, & I am afraid it is going to hurt you, but, I’m sure it won’t harm you permanently.

For quite a while before you left, I was trying to convince myself it was a real love-affair, because, we always seemed to disagree, & then arguments always wore me out so that I finally gave in to keep you from doing something desperate. Now, after a couple of months away from you, I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart. It’s alright to say I’m a Kid, but, I’m not, & I’m getting less & less so every day.

So, Kid (still Kid to me, & always will be) can you forgive me some day for unwittingly deceiving you? You know I’m not really bad, & don’t mean to do wrong, & now I realise it was my fault in the beginning that you cared for me, & regret it from the bottom of my heart. But, I am now & always will be too old, & that’s the truth, & I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy – a kid.

I tried hard to make you understand a bit of what I was thinking on that trip from Padua to Milan, but you acted like a spoiled child, & I couldn’t keep on hurting you. Now, I only have the courage because I’m far away.

Then – & believe me when I say this is sudden for me, too – I expect to be married soon. And I hope & pray that after you thought things out, you’ll be able to forgive me & start a wonderful career & show what a man you really are.

Ever admiringly & fondly,

Your friend,
Aggie

The first photo is from Hemingway’s passport a few years later — handsome, right? The others are of Agnes, and Hem on his crutches, from the JFK library.

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