Elizabeth George On Keeping It Fresh For Twenty-One Books

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Elizabeth George, author of the Lynley Mystery series, which features Thomas Lynley. The 21st Lynley book will be coming out soon. So I think one of the biggest questions that I have for you as a writer and, with my listenership being composed of writers as well, how do you keep not only your Readers, but yourself interested in your characters after 21 books?

Elizabeth: I think that it helps to create more than one continuing character And it also helps to create a character who has a significant background and who has brothers and sisters as well. In doing that, what I did for myself is, I also created many areas for exploration in the lives of all of these different characters that I have. So that keeps the characters really fresh for me. 

Additionally though, I think it's super important to create characters that you actually come to love. I heard P. D. James speak, once upon a time, about Dorothy L. Sayers. She said that Dorothy L. Sayers was actually in love with Peter Wimsey, which may or may not be true. However, that was the strength of her books. She made Peter Wimsey an unforgettable character and I think that it's really important to do that because otherwise you run the risk of saying - oh my God, I've got to write another book with this person in it! Which is the kind of the position that Agatha Christie found herself in with Hercule Poirot, especially. And she said at one point, much later in her career, that she really wished she had created someone different as her main sleuth. Because she was really sick of Hercule Poirot. He was a limited character in that he was by himself. I mean there was Captain Hastings, but he's essentially by himself. We never learned anything about him other than what we learned in the beginning that he's Belgian, that he's a retired detective. He has an egg shaped head and mustache, wears patent leather shoes and likes chocolate. I wanted to paint with a bigger brush than that.

Mindy: They have to have the depth of real people. We have real people in our lives that we continue to interact with for decades, if not a lifetime. So I think characters in fiction need to reflect that as well and have that depth.

Elizabeth: That's what I was going for. And as a result, when I do a new novel with these characters, the moment that any of the continuing characters appear on stage for the very first time in that book, is always really delightful for me. 

Mindy: So, a specific question about writing with a character over a long series of time - and the mystery genre is particularly a great example of this. I was speaking with another mystery author who has been writing a character for a long time, and one of the things that we talked about is the passage of real time, and the character and their aging. Do they exist out of time? Do they exist in time? And how do you handle that? Because for example, you've been writing this character since 1988. How do you handle that particular element when you're working with such a long tail of time? 

Elizabeth: You have a choice. You can freeze the character in time, place and circumstance, the way Agatha Christie did with Hercule Poirot. Or you can move the character through time and I chose to move all of my characters through time. But time has really slowed down for them. In the very first novel, Lynley is 33 in the first novel And I believe he is now 39… 39. Could be 36 - I'd have to do the math, but he's aging very slowly. That was a deliberate choice on my part because obviously if time passed for him the way it passes for me right now, he would be long since retired, probably dead as well. 

So that was, that was the first decision I made. I'm going to move him forward, but it's going to be really slow. But then what happened is that technology has changed so much over the years. When you consider that when I wrote my first book, there were not even cell phones, let alone the internet and everything is associated with the internet. So as a result, um, I had to make a decision: are these people going to be moving very, very slowly through time so that circumstances are going to move slowly? Or are they going to move really slowly through time, but circumstances will be allowed to change - specifically technology. And I went for that option. The characters stay relatively youthful, but technology has changed a lot. And so far, nobody has ever said to me, wait a minute, wait a minute. He starts out when they're using telephone boxes, now they’re talking about cell towers, I just choose to ignore that. And what's really funny is nobody's ever mentioned it to me, personally,

Mindy: If I were writing a long series with that type of success, I would go the same route. I think about these things just as a writer. I also think that within the mystery genre, well within all genres and within fiction and usually per novel, there's something that you're just asking the readers to accept. Suspend their disbelief for just a moment about this one thing and I've always called it a gimme. Your character is existing through time while not necessarily aging. Right?

Elizabeth: Exactly, yeah, it's just more fun that way. I did the math on Adam Dalgliesh in PD James's books. When he finally gets married in her final book… and you know, I mean he would have been pretty darn old at that point. Had she been mentioning his age, which she didn't do. Otherwise, I think he would have been 100 years old and getting married. Most of these books begin with the main characters - being professional crime fighters or they are independent sleuths - but you begin writing their adulthood. 

In the case of the late Sue Grafton, her decision was that she was going to do 26 Kinsey Millhone cases as if they were one right after the other in her life and so she was going to freeze time. As a result though, she had a lot of trouble remembering what things were like. And I think the books were set in 1988. That was really tough. Think of it. We have to go back and go like, what did we know at that time? And there's no technology the way it is today. But additionally, forensic science was totally different in 1988. That's when they first started using DNA profiling and even then that was in its super infancy. Anyway, so it's a lengthy answer.

Mindy: It's a wonderful answer. I think it's something that writers have to take into account if they want to be working with a recurring character. It's something that you probably have to have mentally established early on so that you're taking the right steps at the beginning. 

Elizabeth: I think that's true. You really do have to make that decision otherwise you're up the creek.

Mindy: So you mentioned technology and this is something else that comes up when I'm speaking with mystery and thriller authors today. I think one of the big things that we come across is putting a character in peril. One of the first things you have to do if you're writing in a contemporary setting is to either get rid of their phone or get rid of their cell service. 

Elizabeth: That's right, that's right. It's tough to disappear a character in this day and age. I think this is the first book where I got into significantly using mobile phone service as it exists in London and pinging and following phones based on pinging, which I had never done before and had to learn about. It's really true. And additionally you have to ask how easy is it to commit a major crime? Especially in London. Because in London there are cameras everywhere, CCTV cameras. If you're out on the street in London you are photographed about 300 times a day. The fact that people still decide to commit crimes is sort of a mystery to me because generally what happens is that they broadcast the CCTV film on television and then people can help identify who the person is. And they have those not only for pedestrians but they also have two different kinds of cameras that are dealing with cars. And they have one, it's called the ANPR system. Not only do they show a car passing but they also record everything that is available about that car too. So I mean, you might be driving one of 6000 Ford Transits in London, but  if the ANPR. Camera gets your license plate, and it's all done by computers, they are like – did dit dit, did did dit – okay, here's who owns that car. 

Mindy: Yes. Yes. And now with the prevalence of doorbell cameras and porch cameras, I remember seeing on the news not that long ago, a woman I believe like forced into a van and she was yelling, screaming out the window when the van went past someone's house. They happened to catch it on their porch cam, called the cops and boom, like luckily the woman was safe and everything was fine. But it is a conversation that I have with mystery and thriller writers, often, as a human being moving through the world today and especially as a woman, it makes me feel much safer. But as a writer I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so much more difficult now. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, it really is. It's very difficult. Of course in England you can take care of that by having something actually take place out in the countryside. They wouldn't even have these because there's never been any, any historic need to have CCTV cameras everywhere. There might be a shop that would have a CCTV camera or somebody's house might have one, but as far as having it the way they have it in London. No, as a writer, you don't really have to worry about that.

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Mindy: So you brought up London quite a few times and I wanted to ask you about writing British police procedures when you yourself are an American. The differences, essentially between these two cultures. I don't know how deep they are or how you go about that research process. 

Elizabeth: Initially, as far as learning about policing in London, the only way that I could learn about policing in London or in any other part of the country was to actually stop police on the street and ask them questions. Things have really altered for me. When I was writing a book called For the Sake of Elena that takes place at Cambridge University. How do I get my Scotland Yard detectives involved in Cambridge University? 

What happened is that I went to the police station, told them what I was doing and told them I needed to speak to a detective. They asked me to put the request in writing, which I did and then a detective called me that night. And from that point forward, I had a really wonderful relationship with him. And if I needed something in a certain police station, he would make the contact for me. And now what happens is my editor's assistant in London is really, really good at putting me in touch with people in, not only in the police, but in various other organizations as well. So, it's gotten a lot easier over the years to learn about policing. 

The tricky thing, though, is that the Metropolitan Police in particular keep changing their setup. So now they have these, I think it's like five policing areas in London, and they all are represented by these really big buildings. In the new novel, Something to Hide the building is called Empress State Building. They take care of a number of boroughs in London as they continue to shut down police stations and try to centralize more and more. 

Mindy: I obviously use the internet for all of my research, and I've had it at my disposal since I began writing. I cannot imagine how much more complex the research process would have been before the internet, because it's really tough. 

Elizabeth: My third novel was called, Well Schooled in Murder. I wanted to write about a British boarding school, and having never been to a British boarding school, I had to learn about them. The best way to learn is always to talk to the people who are there. Where are these schools? And can I find somebody within the school to talk to me? So, I started out by locating a book that was about British schools. And the only copy of this book was at the library at Stanford University. One of my former high school students was a student at Stanford University at the time, so I asked him if he could look at this book and if he could find for me six different boarding schools that might be willing to talk to me. And so he found them and then I got in touch with them the old fashioned way as I wrote them each, the headmasters, a letter to ask if I could come and interview them and see their school. So that's what it was like in those days, where were we before Google Earth? That's an incredible tool. 

Mindy: I use it often if I want to understand my setting and it's somewhere I haven't been. All of the work that you just listed off, and that was just to make initial contact.

Elizabeth: And that's how I got the information on the British boarding school system and you know, talk to headmasters, talk to teachers and talk to students. Pretty big tasks to set something like that up first. Oh my gosh, it was really tough. 

Mindy: Speaking of specific cases or crimes, how do you go about finding inspiration when you're at the 21st novel in the series? How do you ensure that you're not doing any replication? 

Elizabeth: One of the things that is the benefit of writing about London, and especially about England, there are so many diverse locations to be explored and very often it's the location that gives me the inspiration to do the story. For example, in Cornwall, here is a very small part of England that has within it, the surfing community, the hiking community, they have the mining community and they have the fishing community. And so these are all separate walks of life and each of them provides me with inspiration. So when I did Careless In Red, I knew that I wanted to do something that involved the surfing community. Most people would not associate surfing with England, it is a big sport in England. And there are surfing areas all over the coastline, but I figured people really didn't know about that, and so that became the foundation of the novel. 

So what happens when I explore a place is that I get suggestions all the time and I get ideas all the time. And sometimes what happens is that somebody will just say something to me. Years ago I was doing a book signing and this woman gave me her book and she said, you need to set a book in Lancashire. I said really, why? And she said because it's the witch country. And so I handed her a piece of paper and said, write down every place you think I should go. 

And so sometimes it just happens like this. Someone will say, why haven't you written about? And then I add something to it. And then there are times when I take an area that's really familiar to people like the Lake District and I'll find out something in the Lake District that people probably don't know about. In this particular case, it was these towers that were built to protect people from the marauding Scots who would come across the border. I never knew that that existed. That became part of the lives of the characters in that novel. 

Mindy: Yes, you never know when something is going to land in your lap like that and you basically have to be ready. If you could please let my listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your books. 

Elizabeth: My website is Elizabeth George Online dot com. They can follow me on Instagram EGPIX. They can follow me on Twitter at LynleyMysteries and to get the book - wherever you have a bookstore. But it's out now. The book is in your local bookstore, be it large or small.

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.

Janet Sternburg on Hindsight & Tackling Hard Family Truths In Writing

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.

Mindy: We're here with Janet Sternburg who is the author of White Matter, which is a fascinating little bit of family history that touches on something that I personally am very invested in which is the treatment of mental illness and the misunderstanding of mental illness in the past. And how certain procedures - in this case lobotomies - have been overused. Janet writes extensively about this in her book White Matter. So if you would just like to start out by talking a little bit about who you are, what you do and how you came to write White Matter. 

Janet: First of all, I am a writer and always have been from when I can remember. But in 1998 to that I added photography. So I am now a pretty serious fine arts photographer. And my latest work, my newest book is actually a book of photography with text. White Matter came out in 2016. So I hope you'll understand me as someone who both shuttles back and forth between two art forms and sometimes connects them. And who spent the years essentially give or take, let's just say 2016 is when it was published, I probably started White Matter in 2006. That means it took me a very long time to write this book because I wanted to first of all answer a question that is fairly unique to my own family. And then I wanted to answer it in the book by both telling the story of my family and then also connecting it with the larger developments in the history of medical treatment. 

The unique thing about my family is my mother was one of six children, essentially a Polish, Russian, Jewish second generation family. When the six children became adults, two of the six were given lobotomies, but it's very unusual to have two in one's immediate family. And I say immediate because even though it's my aunt and uncle, I grew up with them, they were around all the time, both before and after. So I felt I had to write a book when I realized many years later how unusual this was. You know, when you're a kid, everything seems normal. It's what you accept and only later did I discover - not at all. And then that posed a whole set of difficult questions for me. What happened? How could it have happened? Were the right decisions made? Had my family, who I always thought were good people, in fact done something rather awful to their own kin? Was it the best they could do given the circumstances? So that was the point at which I felt I have to write this book. 

Mindy: You bring up so many good points that I want to continue talking about. But that sense of hindsight - you're absolutely right when you're a child, everything around you is normalized. So you think that other people are living lives that are similar. I grew up in a pretty conservative rural area of Ohio. So I just assumed everyone went to church. That that's what everyone did on Sunday morning, you went to church. I had no idea that there were people that did not participate in Christianity. When you grow up, run into other experiences and you're just like, oh wait a minute! And you have to rethink some of the things that happened in your life. 

But in your case, that means actually questioning some of the decisions and then also the motives of people in your family. I know a lot of my listeners have the intent of possibly doing that as well. But when you're writing about yourself and about your own family, there's always the chance that people are not going to like the way they are portrayed. What was that like for you emotionally as a writer to be going through those movements of questioning your own mother and then your aunt's, but then also reactions within the family that you had decided to write about this thing?

Janet: First of all, I want to begin by saying that I don't consider this a memoir. This is not a commentary on your calling it that because the publisher wanted to - as all publishers do - give it a subtitle that essentially defined it. In the days when we all went to bookstores, it would be the cue - this is where to shelve it. Memoir. Why don't I like it? Because when I hear the word memoir, I hear me. That's the first part of it. Moi, that's the second part of it, in French. Me Me. I am not writing a book of Me Me, on the contrary. But let's call it a hybrid book. Some people have experienced it as almost like reading a novel, a page turner, what is going to happen in this family? Even though the reader knows what will happen. 

And here is a writerly point about that aspect, which is I came to the understanding that it was going to be my voice that would pull the story along. Not me, Janet, but this person telling the story and I had to learn how to tell that story in a way that that aspect would keep a reader going. At the same time, it is  - to use the language of fil,  perhaps which I've worked a lot - its intercut with the history of medical illness, with neurology, some facts about how it works. And that goes back to the title. White Matter is the switchboard in the brain between the limbic ie the emotional brain and the frontal lobe, which makes all the executive decisions. So if you cut that switchboard and you are, for example, schizophrenic, or diagnosed as such, you may still hear voices that say “this is a terrible person, you should harm them.” They won't reach the frontal lobe where the decision is made. So to put it more simply. It's the link between feeling and thinking. And I wanted all that to be in the book as well and I won't go on. But there are other layers that I could talk about. 

So it was a very large job of weaving, not to put too much information in or speculation or material that you would lose the thread of the story. So, having dealt with that question of “not a memoir,” I'll answer your other question directly. It was really hard because these people were people I knew and I did something, I'll tell you briefly what it is. It doesn't mean that anybody else should do it, but it was a good technique for me. I knew I needed to see them as people outside of me, as characters. It's not my uncle. As not my mother. How do you do that for me? What I found was something that you may or may not know. It's called the Enneagram and it's a personality system, in effect, that I won't even begin to get into now. 

But it does have very useful and helpful and not reductive ways of seeing people. Because many personality systems do say, well you're this or you're that. The Enneagram is, I think, very good. So I was able to see, for example, my aunt Jen - somebody who had to get her own way who had underneath that a certain kind of vulnerability. My aunt Etta was somebody who wanted to make peace all the time and would not stand up against others, even though she was a very fine peacekeeper. But it didn't always work. So I was able to take some of those categories and give them to the people I know so that they stood outside me, they were characters. And then I tried - and this is partly why it took so long - to be, and here is a really hard one - as truthful as I could be, without having been there all the time. How do you do that? What kind of license to make things up? 

So I kind of invented a guideline for myself, a little lantern and I called it scrupulous imagination, which meant I gave myself the leeway to imagine. But it was that I put so much thought into all of these people, and what might have happened. Also because my family left behind a lot of photographs and one aunt in particular a lot of writing, so I was able to infer from that. And that's where the scrupulous part came in, as close as I could be, to what I think. So now we get to the third part of your question, what did they think about it? By the time the book was published, they were all gone. At this point in my life, I'm quite alone, because my parents are gone. My aunts and uncles are gone. I had no brothers and sisters. I'm an only child, I don't have children, my cousins are gone, so I'm rather uniquely quite alone. I do have one cousin who is with us, She's 90. When I had done an earlier book called Phantom Limb, she was very troubled. She appeared in the book, I gave her a different name, I gave her different characteristics. But of course people know. She actually said to one of the aunts who was then alive, well how could Janet have done it? Then the aunt who was intelligent, but sort of two faced, said to her, well you know Janet is not telling the story raw, she's made it into something - I would like to hope, a work of art. This book with White Matter, that cousin said - you nailed it. You got it right, I can see them all. Because of course they're her aunts and uncles and her mother and her father. She said -  You got it, I really could see them and you presented them in a way that brought them alive and yet you told the story in a way that made it fair. It was okay. Thank God. 

Mindy: I'm relieved to hear it. I also think that that is probably for a lot of writers that want to write about their own family members, whether they're putting up that filter and that screen of treating it as fiction or like you're saying using like the Enneagram or the personality test to kind of write a caricature of the real person. I think that that's a really healthy approach. I really like that. I am familiar with Enneagram. I think that is a really fascinating choice to help you to develop them as characters. I think that that would probably bring a lot of light and also give you a different perspective.

Janet: One of the great things about the Enneagram, even though there's a typology of people, each individual typology has what they call the wings and they take you to how that person would interact with another kind of personality type. And you could get a sense of what the dynamics that I knew what they were already. But I didn't know why it might be inevitable for the particular, let's just say the wound of one person to inflict itself on another. It really did help me work, but whatever speaks to you, you know.

There was something you just said a second ago that I wanted to come back to. I know what it is. I am a very big fan of hindsight, period. And I'll tell you two examples that go to the point of how hindsight is always changing. I am comfortable with the way that I presented the people in White Matter. But just the other day, I was thinking, you know the way that Sam was not very nice to my father. And the other day I was thinking about that in context of something present in my life. And I could see - you know how with a camera you can shift the focus? Well, the focus shifted. I saw different aspects. I saw long shot, medium shot - to use film - close up, whatever it was. The mind brought something new to that relationship. 

The other thing is there are two books of mine that I did essentially in the early 80s, early 90s and they've been in print now… well, the first one for 40 years and the other one for 30 years. Their books about what it means to be a woman who writes, a contemporary woman. They're called The Writer On Her Work. And they were published by Norton. Has kept them in print because, well, for any number of reasons, presumably they still sell. But it was also because they were the first of its kind. And recently the literary archive, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired my archive for those books, which is thrilling. I mean this means that all that material will be there forever. It's everything from my correspondence to the editing notes to the financials. It's all there. 

Now, what is the point of why am I telling you this? Because they asked me to do an interview with them, a written one, about my thinking about these books. So we come to the issue of hindsight and I have had occasion to talk about these books and write about them a fair amount through the years. And it would have been very easy to say, well yeah, you know, pull out the regular old stuff that I've said before. I thought no, no, I'm going to look at it fresh. I'm going to look at this with hindsight. And so for example, when the interviewer said - if you were doing these books now, what would you do? And I said they shouldn't be done now. We need the other voices. We need to hear other points of view. So it's so wonderful to spend a life revisiting and continually using hindsight to reinvestigate one's work in one's life. And now that I'm old enough I can do it. I mean you can do it all your life. But now I really can.

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Mindy: But I want to go back to what you were saying about the relationship between Sam and your father and you kind of reconfiguring that in terms of a film and a close shot, medium shot, and a long shot and that giving you a new perspective. So that is a great example of you using your experience in film and also in photography and tying that into not only hindsight in your reactions to other people's relationships in the past, but also your writing. So if you could talk a little bit about those two mediums intersecting creatively and how they inform each other? 

Janet: That's just a great question. I will add, it's a question I am going to spend the rest of my life answering. I'll also add that, now there are two books of mine that are out of my photography. The first one is called Overspilling World. And in that book there's an essay called “There For the Seeing” that I wrote. There were some other essays. I'm really kind of happy about that. I mean, the filmmaker Wen Wendors wrote an essay about my work and I didn't know him and I thought that was pretty wonderful. But I did write an essay in which I talked about living in the corridor between writing and photography. I talked about how writing for me, I called it the furrowed brow. I really tried to get things right. I'm waiting for a click - it's right. And that click can take years. 

Photography is so much more immediate. It is so much more playful. I don't mean the photographers are playful. I mean the medium encompasses all kinds of subjects and kinds of ways of working. But you do have this joyful thing of going out in the world and seeing what comes to you in that world and bringing it back almost like a fisherman. You know, what do I have in my net? Then thinking, well, is this something that I'm interested in keeping? Do I want to work with it? I don't manipulate, but I crop. Is this something that is saying something about what I'm thinking about and don't even know what I'm thinking about? So it's a dynamic process that does not have as much suffering. 

However, one of the things that really really interests me is the relationship of word to image and I got really interested in the long, long, long time ago when I was working for public television and I essentially got money from my then boss to do a very short film on a writer I adored, Virginia Woolf. The film was not trying to make somebody be her, more to evoke her and there was landscape and an actor who was evocative. And then I used a lot of writing of Virginia Woolf in voiceover and I learned this great big lesson. They fight each other, a whole lot of words and a whole lot of images fight. 

And so I've been thinking about that one way or another ever since. I tried an experiment with a book of poems, Optic Nerve and it's from Red Hen, which is a wonderful poetry publisher, and now prose. And I tried inserting in the poem, not every poem only if some wanted it, a small image the size say of what a stanza would be. So the experience of reading would be starting at the top, going down, encountering an image, and then going on. And I'm not sure it really worked to be honest, but it gives you a sense of how I'm trying to think of them as forms that intersect. 

The newest book that just came out in October is called I've Been Walking and its subtitle is Janet Sternburg Los Angeles Photographs. And they were all images that I took in one year, the year of the Lockdown. Not documenting it. I'm not a documentary photographer, I'm not a photographer who sort of manipulates and tries to make the work into a certain kind of art object. They’re both fine, it's just not what I do. However, what I discovered is that I do have the eye of a poet and that relates now to writing because I'm always, without knowing it, seeing what I think of as the more. And the more is the metaphor, What does this object, what does this thing have beyond how it simply looks on the surface? That's where it comes together. And finally, in this latest book, I do have text sprinkled throughout. So there's lots of times when there's an image and there is no text, it's fair and it kind of floats. I had a great designer I worked with and he got it. He let it float a lot. I think it almost works because it's not completely clear that it's essentially two long sentences, and some people think that it's a caption to the image on the other side. So I keep working at it and also you have to stay interested as you know.

Mindy: I want to come back to something you have mentioned I think is really interesting. The Writer On Her Work, and talking about specifically being a woman, if there were writers out there listening who want to write a biography or memoir that involved family members or a story from their past… and all of us being fairly conditioned as women to always be nice and polite instead of necessarily being truthful. If you have any thoughts on that, as far as specifically female writers who may want to be addressing topics or possibly true life accounts of things that have happened that may ruffle some feathers. The difference between approaching that as a female and cultural expectations, how that works both like internally as the author, but then also maybe even experiencing more pushback because you're a woman. 

Janet: The quick answer is, you betcha I know just what you're talking about. The quick answer also is that you have to kind of layer in age culture, the Jewish older woman who has grown up in a culture of guilt, which doesn't mean that everybody hasn't in some way or another. But just the guilt is like really familiar in my culture. Two things -  thing number one, the Virginia Woolf film so many years ago, it was that part of Virginia Woolf's writing where she says in effect - these will be almost direct quotes because it stays with me. She said - when I first started, I was a young woman and I was writing criticism and I said, flatter, deceive. Use all the wiles of a woman. Then I realized my writing would be destroyed. And then she conjures up this figure she calls The Angel of the House. And The Angel of the House is the one who always defers. If there's chicken and she really likes dark meat, she'll take the white meat. That's literally an image that Virginia Woolf uses. And then - The Angel of the House, I've caught her by the throat and I strangled her. If I had not killed her, she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. 

So yes, it's something I do think people suffer a good deal from, The Angel of the House in contemporary terms, contemporary life. But I want to give it a different valence, which is years and years ago I went to a reading and it was two writers. One was Anais Nin who wrote her diaries and then published her Diaries. There's an awful lot of material in there that has got the potential to hurt somebody, as well as to enlighten people. The other writer was Grace Paley and Grace Paley wrote fiction, but very clearly often about her family. So they're talking back and forth about the very question that you're raising. And Grace Paley said something that hit me a long time ago. She said - I try not to hurt people unnecessarily. There's a lot of writing life, there's a lot of stories to tell. I don't want to live in the world as somebody who just hurts people. I thought, well that kind of takes it to a different place. It's not so much a female place, it's kind of an ethical place. But how you see yourself as a writer. And I found that a useful guide.

Mindy: That is really interesting and it cuts right to the point. The medium in between those two are, not necessarily even a medium -  just taking both into account as you are right. I have not heard the Virginia Woolf quote about The Angel of the House and killing her so that she will not pluck out your heart. But yes. Quite a few of my books recently are being caught up in censorship and getting banned and being challenged. I write about dark topics. I write about tough subjects and if it makes people think then that's wonderful if they aren't comfortable with their own thoughts, then that's not my fault or my problem. 

I never, as you said, wrote with the intention of hurting or harming anyone, I do not feel guilt for what I have produced because number one, it's fiction, but also it is a true representation of the world. My books are dark and aren't particularly safe because I'm writing them for people that aren't existing in safe places. You know, I'm writing them for sexual abuse survivors and I'm writing them for people struggling with addiction. Those are not happy, comfortable places. I must represent them accurately and faithfully and truly in order to paint that picture. So I don't apologize for my work and I appreciate the Virginia Woolf quote while also appreciating the other perspective And you're right, it's not a gender perspective, it's truly ethical, moral, don't hurt for the sake of hurting. 

Janet: Exactly. And something else about that. I think, first of all, the world has really changed. So much more subject matter is out there - permissible, so to speak. One thing that I think is not permissible is what I think of as “triumphal endings.” And a lot of the stuff that's out there that's very dark gets a lot of praise because it moves toward a reconciliation that everybody can understand and feel good about and there's nothing wrong with that. But I personally believe the world is more complex and I don't want to be part of that triumphal - It's OK now, and I've conquered it, even if it isn't in self help, even if it's a really very good writers. I think the world can take the darkness. That William Styron book about his depression, Darkness Visible. But I do know that he did not quote unquote conquer his depression, that notion of conquering and we can do it and the will and all that, I just think life is much more complicated and that his writers and any sort of artists, that's our job. 

Mindy: A lot of the flak that I get from my own writing is that I don't write happy endings. It's a gray, it's a “okay for now” kind of ending sometimes. Or “you may have survived, but you have scars now.” 

Janet: And scars are interesting. Yes, scars are almost a definition of hindsight because they linger. 

Mindy: One of my favorite quotes is from Women who Run With the Wolves, and she says - scar tissue is stronger than skin.

Janet: I don't know if that's true biologically or not, but it's certainly true. I broke my collarbone many many years ago and it wouldn't heal. And so I kept going back and forth. Should I have the surgery, should I have a nice straight collarbone and have everything symmetrical? Ultimately, I decided not to for a number of reasons, one of which, scar tissue turned out to be my friend. Because there was so much of it, nothing hurt anymore. Well, let me put it even in a different way. I'm going to go back to the book Phantom Limb, which has some stuff about it, even though it's very short and very lyrical and very strong. But it is about something that my mother went through and I, the daughter, tried to find out how to help her through losing her leg, amputating her leg, and having phantom limb pain. Did a whole lot of research and thinking about it. But what I discovered is that you really don't want a phantom anything. But if you have it, it can also help you to walk. Because if the phantom makes its appearance - because it's not there all the time. We're talking about the brain now, the same stuff as white matter. I'm fascinated by neurology. If the phantom presents itself, it fools the artificial leg into thinking that a leg is there. Isn’t that wild? What do you take from that? The very thing that causes pain and you really don't, want also helps you to walk. Wowser. That's a good example of scar tissue. No, it's not very attractive. But it is that sense that what doesn't hurt you fattens in some ways. You know, that famous line.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online if you're active online or your website, but also where they can purchase your work?

Janet: I'm kind of out there in that sense. If anybody simply Googles me, they will get a lot of stuff. But there's one thing that's super important. Nobody ever spells my name, right. It's Janet obviously, Sternburg, it's B. U. R. G. You will get my photo website, book website. All my books are on Amazon, both the ones we're talking about and the photography books. For those of you who dislike Amazon, understandable. There's this wonderful thing called Bookshop and it kind of aggregates the independents. All my books are there. There's a fair amount of writing about my stuff. Instagram, which I use a lot these days. It's almost like a diary of what I'm seeing, when I finally decide I like something. Instagram Janet Sternburg, B U R G. So yes, I’m gettable.

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.

Literary Agent Lucinda Halpern On Common Query Mistakes

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Lucinda Halpern of Lucinda Literary and she is one of our agent guests that is here to talk a little bit about her own agency and then of course some tips and tricks for all the authors that are out there in the query trenches. And also we're going to have a conversation about why you need an agent in the first place. That's a question that keeps coming up for me whenever I do any type of interview. So let's just start Lucinda with you, telling us a little bit about yourself, what you represent, your agency. And one of the things that we talked about earlier, I know you're excited to share some of the workshops and events that you do for aspiring writers that helps kind of separate Lucinda Literary from the pack. 

Lucinda: Thank you so much Mindy. I'm so happy to be here today. I'm happy to tell you a little bit about my background which is an unconventional path to literary agenting.I started in the publicity department of HarperCollins. I moved on into an online marketing role at Scholastic that was pretty separate from the book division but did inspire a love for all things online marketing for authors. Later on I moved to a boutique literary agency. I had a wonderful mentor there and got to work with Gretchen Rubin on The Happiness Project, which was really a highlight of my career. 

But I always was an entrepreneur who wanted to start my own business and everyone who knew me knew that. So I started Lucinda Literary which is now 11 years strong. We’re based in Manhattan. We represent elevated self help. So books by PhD’s, usually science or research backed or you know a TED speaker or an expert online in some way. Health, lifestyle books, memoir. We have a new agent doing narrative nonfiction which is fantastic and more literary fiction. So we do a bit of fiction now. Some Children's books. Business books are really what we're known for. So it's a varied list which was important to me. The mission of my agency was really books that change the way we work, think and live and the belief that every good idea and every writer's voice needs to be heard. So that's all worked out superbly well. And I'm so grateful. 

The new innovation that we're most excited about at Lucinda Literary is our signature courses called Get Signed. We also have these live events and workshops with a ton of experts that I'm connected to. Or I give guidance on writing a book proposal or guidance on building your platform, all of the things that are critical in today's ever more prohibitive market, and they're made for writers entering the publishing process. So it doesn't take an advanced degree in publishing. I get to meet all kinds of writers that way. It’s a supportive community where they get to help each other out. I get to workshop your material, it's really everything I love about being in this business and it's sort of unique that a literary agent who's actively selling and talking to publishers every day in New York is also making this a priority. So we're really proud of it. 

Mindy: It is important to talk about those different approaches and like your own journey being a little bit different, especially starting in publicity. I think that's a really interesting starting point to have your feet in. I would imagine that's highly significant for you and your life as an agent and the skills that you acquired. 

Lucinda: Yes. So you get really used to rejection and you have to fight passionately for your authors. It's all about blanket pitching, also developing contacts and personal relationships, but really fundamentally about advocacy and tenacity and follow up and selling all of which becomes really important when you grow to become a literary agent. Of course, I had to learn all of the negotiations for specific book rights contracts. But I found that that early background in simply doing outreach for authors and learning that landscape was particularly important. And now with marketing being the order of the day for any author, fiction or nonfiction, having a deep understanding of the media landscape in the online marketing world is just critical, I think.

Mindy: I was reluctantly dragged kicking and screaming to TikTok. I'm 42. And so I'm just like, I don't want to do this. I don't dance like that's never going to happen. Featuring just books and you know, other people's books and my books. But you know, you mentioned marketing being so much a part of an author's life now. We are not just writers and a lot of people hate that, but it's simply the truth. So do you have any advice about how to jump those initial barriers of Oh, I'm not a salesman? 

Lucinda: Many writers we work with from novelists to PhD’s are marketing phobic as they begin. I try to encourage people to do what's right for them, what's authentic to them. That's what I've seen our successful authors doing they find the audience, they message to them constantly, but not in an annoying way, like in an actually helpful way where they're lending valuable content or if you're a novelist, you're lending a unique voice, unique spin. We really try to guide authors on the right path to what's authentic to them. 

I would say that of course it differs for fiction and nonfiction in the spaces where we represent. Editors are looking for a large social media following or online platform, but it doesn't need to be millions of instagram followers. Right? That's a myth. What it needs to be is a very engaged audience. And I often tell people that an email list is more important than your social media following. And it's all about the way you present this to an editor or an agent. So that's one type of author that requires that online platform. Another type of author could be a psychologist or, you know, I keep going back to professors and PhD’s or a financial professional. No one's expecting you to have a large public presence, what you need to have is a network. You know, you need to have a speaking schedule or organizations that you're affiliated with that will sell your book as a novelist or memoirist. The best thing you can do is get your story out there even in small slices, right? Like with notable publications online, just sort of prove those writing credentials because otherwise you don't want to be invisible on Google. The last thing you want is for an agent or an editor to Google you and find nothing. What that says to the recipient is that you have no audience around you.

Mindy: Writers that are new to the concept of a writer also being a marketer and promoter. It's something you just have to swallow. That's where we are. The industry is very much changed from what it was 20 years ago and you just have to move with that flow. 

Lucinda: Yes, that's it. But this will touch on one of the other points that I know is of interest to your listeners, which is that with the pandemic, it's actually a great time to get online right? Like we're spending more time at home. We're spending more time online. So yeah, it's crowded out there. But there are so many ways you can virtually connect with an audience, whether it's on Instagram or whether you're a novelist offering book club appearances. In ways you don't need to work, travel and speak as hard because it's a more informal, intimate way to meet with a large swath of readers. So I think there are more tools available to those authors who are loath to market as well as those who are really excited to market. 

Mindy: I agree with that and I know that there's always a little bit of reluctance to put yourself out there, especially like I was saying like, I don't want to learn a new platform. I do well on Twitter and I do well on Facebook and it's like, why do I want to put myself on TikTok? But it's like you can find ways to use these platforms that fit you. And of course, like you said, if you hate something, if you try it and it's not for you, then don't do it. I tried to crack Tumblr so many times and I was like, okay, this just isn't working for me. Like I'm out. 

A lot of aspiring writers, I think, view agents almost as an US versus them, they're gatekeepers. The first roadblock that you have to overcome. All of the verbiage that I hear specific to agents, when we're talking about people that have been rejected over and over and over, they build up this negative thought cloud around them when really, once you get an agent, what you want to be thinking about instead is -  who is this person that I am going to be working with closely about something that I am emotional about, someone is going to be a business partner, someone that is going to be helping me? Instead of I have to overcome this person, I have to force this person to like me, notice me. It really is a partnership. 

And I hear so many people talking about agents and the hunt itself in a negative way, which I totally understand. To be upfront. I was querying for 10 years. I understand the frustration and the hurt of rejection. I know it so well, but I also know that yes, you do need an agent, because I hear a lot of people saying, you know, I'm just going to do this on my own. I was in a chat the other day where someone asked me - why do you have an agent? Like at this point you could probably sell books on your own. And I was like, well, I mean, I guess I could but I don't like getting screwed. That's where I am, right. So, if you could talk a little bit just about having an agent and why it's important. 

Lucinda: Absolutely. It's so funny that I've found myself more recently, especially with the pandemic, of being in the chair of convincing certain authors that they shouldn't self publish and they should go the traditional route for reasons X, Y and Z, which we can certainly talk about. But as you know, Mindy, you know, an agent is the first step to getting a major or even an independent publishing deal, because we are the trusted gatekeepers and that's really about our relationships and our taste. Editors will know of a certain agency or certain agent and they either leap to their submissions or they don't. So much like the publicity business, it's a relationships business and you don't want to go cold at approaching your dream publisher, you probably won't break in that way. 

So yes, you need an advocate for your rights to protect your interest to draft the contracts and all of that. As you touched on, it's really about having a lifetime partner, like we call ourselves doulas, at least in the literature, you’re birthing your baby into the world. One of our authors said, I wouldn't just trust you with our books. I trust you with my life because it really is that right? The book sort of permeates every part of your emotional life and your career. And so, it is super important to trust your agent. Super important to share an editorial vision and to know that that person is a strong business advocate for you. 

I do understand what you're talking about with the query process. I know how disheartening it is. It's even harder now, in our email only world. We used to send printed manuscripts to the desk of an agent and, you know, in the mail and someone would be reading those manuscripts. Now, It's like what if you don't get through with your subject line? Or what if you get caught in someone's spam filters? If you're doing this cold, it can just be very, very disheartening. Of course there are tips that we have for breaking through the slush pile. 

Coming back to your original point that you hear from others. It surprises me. I think we need to segregate the disheartening process of querying from the actual later relationship you form with an agent because in our experience, we're the champions for your book. We don't succeed unless you succeed. Our livelihood is based on your livelihood. So that makes for something mutually beneficial. Whereas the querying process where agents get a bad rap is no one gets back to me. How do they not see it? Here's something that's interesting because the purpose of a query letter is to hook someone into a conversation. It's a critical data point. If your query letter is not getting requests, there's a problem with your letter. If your letter is getting requests, but no one's biting on your material, it's a problem with your material. So it's not like every agent out there is just ignoring me and I don't get in. If I don't have a personal connection, there is probably an issue with how you're presenting your material. 

Mindy: People resent hearing that. I mean basically the answer is like - it's not me. It's you. Yeah, it is hard. It's difficult. But the query writing processes its own skill. It's its own piece of marketing itself. So moving on from that, why don't you share some of the common query mistakes that you see. 

Lucinda: Well, so many, I could talk about this for a long time. I do have some funny reels on Instagram about it and we certainly talk about it in our workshops. The most common is that I leave reading a letter and I don't know what the book actually is, in two sentences - an elevator pitch. I don't know what it is and I don't know why you are in the best position to write it. So using the example of a memoir, your life story could be incredibly important and so many people want to share their life story with the world, especially if there's trauma, if there's, you know, tragedy involved, they want to touch other readers with that story. I admire that so much. But if you have built no audience around that particular story beyond your immediate network of family and friends and you're not a trained technical writer. So, Tara Westover, Educated, being such a popular example of a memoir that really it was so successful because the writing was gorgeous, but also the plot was otherworldly and and relatable at the same time. So it took us on this journey that most people don't experience, but they could relate to the family dynamics and that to me. Makes for a really compelling query letter. We called the query letter of your movie trailer, you're giving us a taste of the drama and the action and it has to feel that action packed in your letter and you're also talking about why you're the person to write it. Those two aspects need to be there. 

Other top query mistakes. It's not a personal approach, it's a slush approach. So the number of times I get a letter where it's someone who writes genre fiction, we don't represent genre fiction. Why am I receiving this? It feels like something that is total slush. I'm not going to pick it up. There's got to be, you know, some sort of personal intro, there's got to be a closing that elicits interest. It can't be so passive. We see a lot of passivity in these letters. Please let me know if you'd like to see the material. Is that how an agent would advocate for your book? You need to find some leverage, you need to find some urgency. Maybe it's the timeliness of your book. Maybe it's riding the coattails of a book like it that's been really successful. Book publishing, like film, it's a lookalike business. If it looks like something that was super successful, we'll take a look at it. Those are some top points you need to hit in your letter.

Mindy: Something that I talk to people about a lot, because I offer editorial services and I do query reviews for people. This is something that I tell people and I could be wrong, but my reaction when I open a query letter when they open with - Hello, my name is Blah Blah Blah and I am writing to you seeking representation. My first reaction is - no shit right? 

Lucinda: Yes, I know, right?

Mindy: They might follow up with the title of their book. My book is a 85,000 word historical fantasy. And I always tell people -  listen, every single person writing to an agent is number one, seeking representation. Number two has a title, word count and a genre. Put that at the bottom, put your hook at the top. Grab the agent and then if they're interested they can get down to the bottom. My other thing is - because I see a lot of especially new writers that are overwriting. For example fantasy and sci fi, they tend to get a larger word count because of world building. They also are cooler markets right now. So I always tell people if you open with  - my 120,000 word fantasy, the agent might be out just because of that word count. You have an absolutely bang on like, oh my gosh, that is an amazing concept. If they get to the concept and then they get to the bottom they see the word count. But like yeah, maybe I'll look at your 1st 10 anyway just to see. But in my opinion, they're going to close as soon as they see a word count, that is just not something they want to take a shot at.

Lucinda: I couldn't agree more. I mean the other analogy we use is the Amazon description, like if you think about the fact that your query letter is your pitch and what this might look like to any cold reader on Amazon, you hook them in right away. You have to and then it's about who wrote this and what's their credential for doing so. I think there's so many poor titles out there to your point, to lead with the title, especially if it's not a strong one, can be an automatic turn off. So I would much prefer leading with the elevator pitch. That's 1-2 sentences which we all need to sell books, keeping things succinct. It's just the best elements of your story, fiction or nonfiction.

Mindy: Absolutely,I agree. And I'm glad to hear that backed up by an agent since that's the advice I’ve been giving people for 10 years. We touched on it a little bit. You were talking about self publishing and the indie world versus the trad world and how you occasionally have authors that you are almost pushing towards - Yes, you need to try trad even though it can feel like there are so many barriers in the way. Obviously Indie Pub and Self pub has come a long way from where it used to be. I write underneath a pen name and I do that in the indie pub world and it has its benefits, it has its drawbacks and the same is true under my real name, which I write in the trad pub world. So if you could talk a little bit about how a person can evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses and make that decision. 

Lucinda: First of all, I love that you've taken a hybrid approach yourself. I mean, what a fantastic experiment that gives you insights to guide other writers.

Mindy: Experiment is the right word, definitely. I’m still trying to work things out. 

Lucinda: So if I were trying to assess this myself as a writer, I would really begin with my existing built in audience. If it's very small. Again, if it's something your mother would love but no one else will know you,  I might think that it's better for self publishing just very honestly. And by the way, with self publishing successfully, if you want to have a long publishing career and you maybe want to go the traditional route later on, you need that self published book to sell. So be prepared to run it like a small business and assemble, assemble the team and give it your best shot. Because otherwise, when you approach agents and publishers later on, those sales numbers are poor. It's not working to your advantage. 

The second is if the topic is very niche, what's the best way to figure that out? Go to comparative titles. If you go to comparative titles and you know, again, in my world, it's a business book. So I'll get queries that are -  I'm writing a book for law professionals, that are middle managers. It's starting to feel really niche. To me, if there's no individual application, we want books that touch the corporate executive as much as they touch the stay at home mom, because we want to think in terms of beliefs and practices, not in terms of small, granular vocational specific things you can do. So if the topic is niche, you're going to find that out by searching for comparative titles on the topic and seeing that hey, they're largely self published or they're published by a press I've never heard of. Probably this fits in that wheelhouse rather than approaching HarperCollins for it.

As a novelist, it's obviously a bit tougher to gauge, right? Because if you think the writing is gorgeous and you've been told that, I always advocate for a professional view like yours Mindy, you know, someone who's an experienced author or editor or professor who's reading this and you trust for their brutal honesty and this person or people in your writing group say to you, this is unbelievable and you've got to try the traditional path. Then it's not about what your existing audience, it's about the writing itself. And then for me personally, which can be tougher to assess without a conversation, without an agent, it's about the idea, you know? Is the idea so novel, so different, so counterintuitive or something that, again, using the lookalike term looks like something that we've seen, but has this other breakthrough element? The big idea, fiction and nonfiction alike, is just so compelling to publishers. So the best thing I can advise aspiring writers to do is go through that painful query process if they think there is a seed of potential on the basis of their writing their platform or their big idea and see if you can find an agent that way and do whatever you can to be in conversation with the publishing insider. They will give you the market expertise.

Mindy: I know that a lot of people that want to go the self publishing route, I hear them saying that they want to do this because they want to avoid the pain of rejection. They want to avoid and they're not understanding that rejection will find you no matter where you go, rejection sees you every morning when you check your sales. Rejection, when you're applying for promotions through different platforms. Rejection when you are soliciting reviews from review sites. Rejection is part of the game, no matter where you are going. And so if you want to go the self pub or the Indie route, simply because you're trying to avoid having your feelings hurt, you need to get a new set of feelings.

Lucinda: You need a thick skin. Reviews will absolutely break you. So if you're not prepared for the rejection from agents and by the way, our agency, the agency, I know they're pretty kind with their rejections. It's pretty much a template - lead with the positive elements then go into the critiques and maybe it's just as simple as, it's not the right fit for their list at that time. Maybe they have a competitive title. Maybe the market isn't doing X right now or their relationships aren't looking for it. You can't take it so personally, there are a lot of haters out there as reviewers on amazon, right? Like every hater wants to be vocal these days. You've got to have thick skin. It's so important in this career. And fundamentally you have to have the burning belief that writing is not a choice. It's something you need to do. You've got to wake up and do it every day and you've got to see it through, no matter who finds it. 

Mindy: That's very true. I mean, in the end, you have to be doing this because you believe in your work, not because you're looking to become rich or famous.

Lucinda: We all suffer from rejection and the need for validation. You'll find that you'll find your reader, it's a long road, as I always say.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you share with my listeners where they can find you and where they can find Lucinda Literary online and what your submission requirements are?

Lucinda: Thank you for asking that. It's funny, like many of you writers listening, we are also making this concerted effort to market ourselves on social media and through an email list. And I've had plenty of ambivalence about that process. But I thought it was so important because here we are telling authors to do it, if we're not doing it ourselves and we don't really understand the challenges and the insights like, how can we be guiding others? So we're doing that. So you can find us basically on all social media at LucindaLiterary. On Twitter. I think we're at @LucindaLitNYC I myself am @LucindaBlue. Elsewhere across its @LucindaLiterary and then of course our website is helpfully Lucinda Literary. There you will find all of our services. Our live events our courses are free, resources for master classes. I mean there's just a ton and I really recommend subscribing to the email list, which you can do through the website because we send out every Thursday, either an expert interview or tips and strategies for querying. And I just have so much fun what feels like an intimate correspondence with the writers who are on our list. So those are all the ways you can find us. And in terms of querying, we have a portal, it gives you a few steps to go through to make sure that, you know, you want to do the work to actually get to the right agent and pitch the right thing. You can just find that through the submissions tab on our website. 

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.