The Business of Patience

This one is about patience.

Patience, that is, and hard work.

Later this summer, Lake Union Publishing (an Amazon imprint) will publish The Swing of Things. The book represents five years of work by co-writers Linda Hull (former RMFW Writer of the Year) and Keir Graff, an award-winning writer, editor, and big cheese at Booklist. Together, they are writing as Linda Keir.

For years, I’ve been hearing about this project over coffees and lunches with Linda. From the very first time I heard the premise of this novel, it sounded to me like a fantastic idea. But, no sale. Reasons for rejection? Keir and Linda have heard them all.

Here’s the tagline: “Told from the dual perspective of a husband and a wife, The Swing of Things is a sexy, provocative, page-turning novel about a suburban couple who want out of their routine—but will they take things too far?”

Many times, Linda thought all the work was for naught. Nonetheless, these two persisted. Draft after draft after draft.

So I thought a conversation with these two might be inspiring, illuminating, or encouraging to others.

If you’re out there working on a project that is taking some time to find a home, consider what these two endured.

Is your idea for a book worthy of committing this kind of time? And effort? Is it worthy of professional feedback from agents and a whole raft of editors at major publishing houses? If you got that feedback, would you do something with it? Rewrite?

In short, this path-to-publication story has it all.

 

 

Question: How did you two meet, and where did the initial idea for The Swing of Things come from?

Linda: We met, ironically, at a conference called Love Is Murder in Chicago (in 2011), but the idea to coauthor a novel about swingers was born in the bookroom at Bouchercon in St. Louis. I was chatting with Keir and an agent named Amy Moore Benson when I mentioned that I wanted to write a book about swingers but couldn’t quite figure out how to go about it. At that point, all my work had a humorous bent and I didn’t see swinging as a particularly funny topic. Weirdly, Keir had been researching the idea, too, and couldn’t decide on an angle, either. Amy said, “You two should write a book together.” We both thought she was crazy, but it turned out she was right!

Question: Had either of you ever co-written anything before this? What was it like to have a writing partner?

Linda: I had written my debut novel, The Big Bang, which I describe as a suburban satire/pregnancy whodunit and deals with the hidden danger of life in the “safe” ’burbs, secrets, and some illicit sexual activity. That said, taking on the topic of swingers and the consequences of unconventional decision making, particularly within a marriage, was uncharted territory for me. As for writing with a partner, Keir in particular, it was and is one of the best and easiest professional decisions I’ve ever made. He generally writes the husband and I write the wife in our stories. Our styles and aesthetic are complementary, but because we didn’t know each other very well, we found that our characters had the freedom to react and interact without the boundaries we impose on ourselves as writers writing every character in a book—or the social conventions of two people who know each other and the other’s real life. Now, of course, we know each other much better, so the dynamic has already changed as we wrote book number two.

Keir: I had co-written several screenplays, and also written some plays, which is highly collaborative. But I had never attempted a 100,000-word novel with a writing partner. We both agreed on the necessity of a detailed outline before we began drafting, so the first stage of the process was to talk through the story for months and months. Having a writing partner takes a lot of the loneliness and self-doubt out of writing because you have a daily sounding board—a lot of bad ideas get nipped in the bud before they even get written. It’s also just fun! And fortunately, Linda’s strengths balance out my weaknesses and hopefully vice versa. I think the hardest part of this particular collaboration was when we shared our first drafts of our first sex scenes, which made us both feel very vulnerable. I know I blushed when I hit send!

Question: How long did it take to write the first draft? And how many drafts did you write before you thought it was ready to shop?

Linda: When we started, we didn’t know each other except to say hi for a minute or two at a conference, so it was a bit of a process. First, we read each other’s work. Then, we talked for quite a while about how we envisioned the story and which thematic elements needed to be included. The more we talked about it, the more we seemed to be in sync. We came up with the idea of each taking a character, he the husband, me the wife, of a couple who are invited and decide to join a group of friends who are engaging in and seemingly enjoying The Lifestyle. We outlined the whole book, which took us about six months. Then we began to write. It took us a year from there to complete the manuscript.

We sent portions of the manuscript to our agent as we completed them, and he was as blown away with the results as we were. He gave us suggestions throughout, so the first draft was fairly polished. That didn’t mean we didn’t have to do a couple more drafts based on additional comments made by him and other agents within the agency.

Question: Who did you submit it to? How long did you wait for feedback? Any idea how many editors read it? When was this?

Linda: Our agent sent the book to a targeted list of high-level editors at all the big houses. He really believed it was a commercially desirable, high-concept project that was going to sell fast. I believe there were about 15 editors on the first go around, and I’d say two-thirds of them read it very quickly. There were definitely stragglers, though, and a few that never got to it at all.

Keir: To give you an idea of the whole timeline, we started making our first notes in June 2012 and completed our first draft in December 2013. We finished an edit in spring 2014, after which we went out on submission. By that summer, we had a long list of rejections, many of them somewhat encouraging, from some of the best names in the business. We did another draft that fall based on the feedback we’d received, followed by another round of submissions, and another draft in spring 2015 for one editor in particular who believed she could sell it to her editorial board if we played up the domestic suspense elements. We did, but she couldn’t.

Question: Was the feedback consistent? When did you decide to take another run at the story and do some major rewrites? What did your agent advise?

Keir: We heard a lot of praise for the quality of the writing and how seamlessly we were able to blend our voices. We heard “smart, sexy, and well-plotted” and that the characters were “authentic and well-drawn.” We also heard “the kind of purely commercial fiction for which we’ve often had a hard time getting traction,” “has a lot of commercial potential,” and “too commercial”—all of which puzzled us because it sounded as though the book had too much sales potential.

But the biggest and most consistent issue seemed to be that the book contains a lot of graphic sexual content and yet is neither romance nor erotica (“publishing ‘issue fiction’ that’s also highly sexual is hard”). We always felt it was a work of general fiction or women’s fiction, but many editors fretted that booksellers would not know where to shelve it.

There were a few comments that cropped up frequently enough (regarding length, pacing, and the second act) that we felt we could address them, but so many editors had such different takes that it was frustrating at times.

Linda: Our agent never lost faith, telling us it would sell, we just had to find an editor who fell in love with the book. And he was right!

Question: With the latest/final draft, did you have a hunch it would be the one? I hate to even ask, but if your agent had not sold it, would you have been able to dive in one more time and make changes?

Linda: We’d given up almost entirely. Dejected, and not hopeful, we went back to a previous draft which I’d been asking our agent (Keir and I share the same agent, which is a story for another blog post) to send a copy to a particular editor named Alison Dasho. I knew her and thought she might connect with the work. Our agent liked the idea, but had been reticent to send it because she was at Thomas and Mercer, Amazon’s crime imprint. While our book was making the rounds, however, Alison moved over to Montlake Romance, a decidedly different imprint within the company. As fate would have it, our agent sent it off to her just as she’d become established enough in both genres to acquire something that didn’t fit entirely in either! With her enthusiasm and a bit of wrangling, she was able to bring the project to Lake Union, a third imprint within Amazon that publishes commercial and book club women’s fiction. We were thrilled to learn that the editorial team at Lake Union was as excited about the book as Alison. The next thing we knew, we had an offer.

I should note, though, that the final draft turned out to be a blend of two drafts, the “regular” version and the “suspense” version, so all the editing we did leading up to the sale was anything but in vain.

Keir: We discussed submitting to some very small presses, as well as the possibility of self-publishing. Neither of us really wanted to take that on, but we didn’t want to discard a book we loved, either. We did ask ourselves whether we could have done one more revision—the very thought was excruciating, but we probably would have done it. And, of course, once we did sell it, we did!

Question: What was it like when you heard the word “sold”?

Linda: I swear, I could hear the birds singing to me in the trees, but it was still such a head-scratcher. Why had this book taken so long to get to someone who really got what we were trying to do? We’d faced so much rejection for the weirdest of reasons. But it was such a relief to know she connected with our story in all the ways we hoped she would.

Keir: It was a monumental relief! At the same time, it took a while to sink in. Writing a book and then publishing it is always such a long and complex process that I have a hard time celebrating any of the landmarks because I know there’s always more work ahead. Do we celebrate the first draft? The final draft, presuming we know what that is? Do we celebrate the sale of the book and its publication? I think the right answer is that you should celebrate every milestone, but I sometimes struggle to do so. I will say that, when I finally received my finished copies of this beautifully published book, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction.

Question: Are you, in a way, glad the book wasn’t picked up and published in an earlier form? Is the final version a better book today?

Linda:  Yes. We did four edits for Amazon, all with editors who understood our vision of the story but had ideas that made it better, stronger, and more cohesive. With the exception of killing a couple of dearly beloved darlings (one scene in particular that we called “Playing Doctor”), we were both amazed at how much more polished the story became. In fact, we were so impressed, we requested the same developmental editor we’d had on The Swing of Things for our next title with Lake Union Publishing.

Keir: We went through enough drafts that, at times, I felt as though I was losing track of our “real” book—but my worries were unfounded. Every revision contains improvements, and the constant rewriting made our best scenes even better while forcing us to continually make the central themes more explicit. (While, coincidentally, making some of the swinging scenes slightly less explicit!). This is definitely the best version of the book we were capable of producing.

Question: So, total number of years of work? And total number of rewrites? And how many different titles along the way?

Linda: I can remember standing outside a restaurant in NYC, phone to my ear, after we’d reedited the manuscript at least four times. I’d just had lunch with Josh, our agent, who’d given me a new set of editing suggestions based on comments he’d heard back from the most recent round of rejections. I had a vision of Keir standing on the ledge outside of the Chicago high-rise where he worked as I told him we needed to go through once again. It was a good thing we were writing partners, because he panicked and I could totally see what my agent felt needed to be done. I marked most of the edits on the plane ride home, and Keir was able to go through and make the changes fairly easily. I should say that we take turns talking each other off the ledge, as I’ve been up there many times myself!

Our working title for the book was White Rock Project, but our first-choice title was always Swing Set, which we both loved. When the book sold to an imprint of Amazon, they immediately nixed the name because they also sell actual swing sets. (Keir also writes middle-grade fiction, which is another good reason for the name change.) Things got a little bit challenging after that, as we batted around different titles with the marketing department. We all had the same goal in mind but some very different ideas how to reach it.

Finally, we were all able to agree on The Swing of Things—which we feel is perfect.

Question: Are you each better writers today having gone through this? And how much easier was it to collaborate on Book Two?

Linda: I can’t speak for Keir, but I feel like I’ve grown tremendously as a result of writing The Swing of Things. I write much more quickly, with an open mind, and more ease about both the big picture and the minute details. Book Two was written in seven months from start to finish. We understand each other’s style, writing habits, and even life schedules to the point where we can not only divide up who writes which character(s) but the various tasks involved in the novel writing process. For example, Keir writes much more cleanly than I do in a first draft, while I always have an eye on the overarching story and important beats and threads no matter how minor the scene. Because we both are cognizant of this, I allow myself to write my scenes in a rough draft way, knowing Keir will take a pass through and clean up my run-on sentences and weird word choices. By the same token, I do big-picture edits on his beautiful first-draft prose to ensure the story stays on track. It’s a well-oiled system of divide and conquer.

Keir: I’ve gotten worse. Just kidding! I feel I’ve become a far better writer over the past few years, and collaborating with Linda is a big part of that. As she said, Book Two was so much easier (and will, I suspect, be even better). I often reflect that it’s fortunate we’re not both bad at the same things. To anyone out there searching for a writing partner: Find someone who’s good at different things than you are.

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Update: After posting this, I realized I had missed one obvious question.  So, over Twitter, I sent Linda & Keir the following last question this morning (June 5):

Question: Could you have made it as solo writers through the editing gauntlet and Tunnel of Patience? Or did having a partner help in this case?

Keir (via Twitter): I’m very patient and persistent but I don’t think I could have run this gauntlet without Linda running alongside. And I certainly couldn’t have written this book on my own! This was a true collaboration every step of the way.

Linda (via Twitter): Right back atcha!

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