Slushpile Chat: an Author and Agent Discuss the Art of Revision

Agent Jenny Savill (left) and author Sara Grant join Notes from the Slushpile to share a few tips on how to improve your manuscript and pitch your work to agents. Jenny is an agent at Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd and Sara is the author of Dark Parties.   

Sara: I used to hate to revise a manuscript.

The joy of writing came from that initial rush of telling myself the story. Once I’d written the story down once, I had a difficult time going back and figuring out how to make it better. Reading and re-reading a manuscript from start to finish might catch the typos, but this linear review doesn’t often significantly improve a story.

Sara's YA books (US covers)

I read a lot about revision and devised a system of reviewing my manuscript that looks at the big picture first and then by character and chapter, scene, paragraph, sentence and ultimately word by word. Revision can be a painful and endless process, but it’s necessary and incredibly rewarding.

Would you agree, Jenny? How many times do your writers typically revise their manuscripts with you and then with an editor?

Jenny: I agree, and the answer is: multiple times.

I will take on an author because I am excited by their writing. For me, it’s a strange combination of personal literary taste, instinct, commercial musings and, strongest of all, a conviction that here is a project that deserves to see the light of day – a story that needs to be shared with editors, a manuscript that deserves to become a book.

If I can visualise it on the shelf, I’m half way to phoning the author. Having taken the author on, I will work with them to get their manuscript to a point where it is submittable to editors. Sometimes this involves a lot of work, sometimes not so much, depending on the issues with the project when it arrives with me – all manuscripts have different things that need working on. It’s not unusual for an author to do several revisions with me, followed by tweaking.

On occasion, a manuscript can land in my Inbox where all the main elements of the novel are already working to a high degree. These projects will typically need only a couple of small revisions to get them ready for submission to editors.

Much as I enjoy working with authors, there are only so many hours in the day

Much as I enjoy working with authors, there are only so many hours in the day and this is of course the sort of manuscript I pray for..! So, before submitting to agents, writers need to do all they can to get their draft manuscript as ready as possible. You want your manuscript to knock an agent’s socks off, but if the agent is stumbling over spelling or typos, never mind plot inconsistencies or pacing problems, there’s obviously less chance of that happening.

 So, my advice is to learn how to revise your manuscript – speak to other authors, listen to editors - and find a way of doing it that works for you. Revisions don’t stop once you have an agent – and they carry on once you have an editor. They are a necessary on-going process.


Sara: It’s good to know that I’m not alone with multiple revisions. You will probably recall that I received nine, single-spaced revision notes from my US editor on the first round of edits for Dark Parties. (And I learned from her blog that she typically writes up to twelve pages of notes to writers the first time around.) Published authors don’t often talk about this exhaustive revision process.

I supposed we’d like our readers to believe our novels come out perfectly formed. Oh, if that were only the case.

Sara's younger fiction 

It’s easy for writers to get pulled in a million different directions during revision. When I talk to other writers about revision – whether it’s one on one or during a workshop – one of the first things I ask them to consider is: What’s at the heart of their story? Why are they writing it and why are they the only person who can write it?

If you want to be published – as you’ve pointed out, Jenny, writing is collaboration with agents and editors. You have to know why you are writing your story and what’s important to you so that when agents or editors ask for changes – and they most certainly will – you know the heart of your story and you can remain true to that throughout the revision process. This clarity of purpose shines through the prose organically and subtly.

That’s one of my top tips for revision. What’s one of your top tips for writers?

Jenny: One of my top tips would be this. During the revision process your manuscript will change – sometimes in dramatic ways. You might find that if you write in the first person it brings the voice alive; that if you change the tense the story flows more easily; or that two very different narrators, rather than one, add tension and texture to a flat narrative.

Perhaps you need to flesh out the world of the story. Perhaps you need to rein it in. It might be that the manuscript stays basically the same structurally and changes only in more subtle ways, but one of the things that tends to happen is that old stuff from earlier drafts lingers in the latest draft.

So part of revising should be checking for stuff that no longer belongs in your manuscript and getting rid of it. This sounds easy enough, but when you’ve been looking at your story for months on end, it can be really hard to spot these things, and what you don’t want to do is end up deleting something that is actually working.

Part of revising should be checking for stuff that no longer belongs in your manuscript and getting rid of it

 So, take a break, do something else or write something completely different for a while. Give the manuscript to someone who hasn’t read it before to read and feedback on. Return to it with fresh eyes, at which point there is a checklist of things you can do to make sure it is working – and this is where Sara, armed with her highlighter pens (!), excels. Hers is a helpful, hands-on strategy to help authors revise methodically, without losing sight of the heart of their story, or the reasons they started to write it in the first place.

Sara: After you’ve polished your revision until it sparkles, the best piece of advice I can give writers is: GET AN AGENT!

I tell anyone who will listen how important it is to have an agent. On a personal level, writers need someone who can offer advice and critique. And from a business prospective, agents can market your work globally in a way that writers simply can’t. They know the market and business of publishing so writers can focus on their story.

I knew from our first meeting that Jenny was the agent for me. She understood Dark Parties and was genuinely interested in teen fiction. I wanted a partner in the process from brainstorming ideas to giving editorial feedback along the way. And Jenny has exceeded my expectations in every way imaginable.

So, Jenny, what are you looking for in a writer? Any do’s and don’t’s for people who are submitting to you?

Jenny: *blushes* I look for a good understanding in the writer of who they are writing for, what they are writing and why they are writing it. A sense of humour is always good. Not only does it make working with an author fun, it helps us through the tricky patches. The willingness to receive feedback in the spirit in which it is given and to work really, really hard at revising, going forward.

In the writing, I want to feel from the first page that the writer is in control of the story and that I, the reader, am in safe hands. I love being surprised - by an original voice, a character who confounds the reader’s expectations, a plot that doesn’t go where you think it will, brave use of language or structure, an unusual setting.

Make me laugh. Make me cry. Give me a stunning and satisfying ending

The thing that children’s books often do so much better than adult books is to give the reader a fresh and insightful take on the familiar- so I will be looking out for this. Make me laugh. Make me cry. Give me a stunning and satisfying ending, even if there is to be a sequel.

Sara: Speaking of satisfying endings, I think we should wrap up for now.

My final advice is READ! READ! READ! Read the genre and age range similar to the book you are writing. Read the books you wished you’d written. Read the classics but also what’s new on bookshelves.

Dissect the stories you adore and determine how the author made you fall in love with his/her book.

Also buy the book. Support your fellow writers and the industry you want to join.

Best of luck with crafting and editing and revising you novels!

Sara and Jenny have teamed up to offer a day-long workshop on 15th June and again on 2nd November to help writers polish their manuscript and make it stand out from the slushpile.

Playing with Peril: Fairies in Children's Books

by guest blogger, Paula Harrison

Paula Harrison is the author of Faerie Tribes (for older readers) and The Rescue Princesses (a younger series). She wanted to be a writer from a young age but spent many happy years being a primary school teacher first. She finds inspiration in lots of things from cloud shapes to snippets of conversation. She loves sandy beaches and eating popcorn. She lives with her husband and children in Buckinghamshire, which is nowhere near the sea. Whenever possible, she packs her family into the car and journeys far and wide to find a sandy beach where she can paddle in the waves.

It came to me one teatime – one of those goose bump ideas. You know: the kind that make you run round the room searching for a pen. Fairies live among us.

But these fairies weren’t the tiny creatures that live under a toadstool at the bottom of the garden. They look like us. They talk like us. Your next door neighbour could be one of them and you would never know.

The first thing that happened was that my fairies turned into faeries, because apparently this is what you do if you want to make it clear that you’re writing for children aged 9 + and there will be darkness in the story. The spelling change made me think about some of the different representations of these magical folk in children’s books. (I’ve left out YA here and focussed on books up to ages 12/13) First up there are the kinds of fairies you get in young, girl-skewed series such as the popular Rainbow Fairies.

These small creatures are beautiful and friendly and perform all sorts of useful tasks as guardians of pets, flowers, special occasions and so on. Is it all sweetness and light? Not completely, because you also have a magical villain called Jack Frost with his goblins.

The fairies in Michelle Harrison’s Thirteen Treasures trilogy are a lot less friendly than those in young fiction and are quite capable of inflicting serious harm if you get on the wrong side of them. These fairies remind me of the ones found in many folktales: capricious and not to be trusted. Also for older readers, the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer gives you a completely different take on the wee folk. I love these fairies and the way they combine magic with technology. They fly around kitted out with all sort of gadgetry and there’s even a centaur as the technology whizz.

So how did I want to represent my fairies, I mean faeries? I knew from the start that they would belong to different tribes and that Laney, my main character, would be a member of the Mist tribe even though she doesn’t know that at the start. Mist faeries draw their power from water and can perform great things with it. Other tribes would draw on their own elemental powers.

I wanted them to feel a strong connection to the landscape around them, even though they’re hiding their true nature from the human community they live in. I also knew that not all of them would be good and that using a faerie’s “dust” (their dead body) would bring the greatest power and the greatest curse of all. 

There are lots more children’s books with fairies in that I haven’t covered here. What are your favourites? Let me know in the comments! Faerie Tribes: The Crystal Mirror is out now!

These Are The Things That Make Us Anxious: Matt Haig and Writers' Neuroses

by Jo Wyton

For the past couple of months, Matt Haig has been blogging for The Book Trust. He's an honest guy, and a great writer, and many of his posts have struck a chord with me both as a writer and a reader.

A couple of weeks ago, he posted about the many (many many many) neuroses he has as a writer. I know A LOT of writers, and I can say that between us, we cover these particular neuroses. Several times over. I don't know many writers who aren't neurotic - but then, I don't know many people full stop who aren't neurotic in some way, and when you're doing something creative, and putting this huge chunk of your soul on show for people to judge, neuroses are pretty much inevitable.

Matt's neuroses are the inner buggings of a published author - these are the things we all have to look forward to. (Lucky us, eh?) For now though, whilst we're lingering on the slushpile, there are even more. Because, yes, we worry about what will happen once IT happens and we find our book on a bookshelf. But that's not enough to worry about, so we also develop a special set of neuroses to take us through the queries and rejections and dreams and knock-backs.

These are the Things That Make Us Anxious: