Think Before You Query, Part Two by Catherine Czerkawska
Jam tomorrow. Yum . Judging by the response, last month’s post urging caution before going all out to ‘find an agent’ struck a chord with a lot of writers. A number of people told me they felt that constantly responding to the advice of others had actually hampered them in their careers. Which is not to say that we don’t need good advice, because we do. The problem lies in judging when the advice is genuinely in the interests of you and your work, and when it’s given in order to make your project fit some other agenda, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the quality of the writing or with your own interests and obsessions. With the benefit of hindsight many people can see how rewriting the same novel countless times or trying to write an imitation of the current best seller on the promise of some hypothetical jam tomorrow has turned out to be a fruitless (or should that be jam-free?) exercise. To be fair, there used to be few other options. We were tied into the submissi...