So, first the good news: Interrobang founder Phoebe North now has an agent! Click on through to her blog for the full story.

I haven’t really thought about it much before now, but the formation of the Interrobangs really marks a turning point in my writing career (for lack of a better term). Before that I knew a little bit about how the publishing industry works, but I was pretty clueless as to the specifics. I remember being completely bowled over by how much everybody else knew about specific agencies: who was repping what, who was repping who, which agents they was planning on sending their books to, and so on. Before that, I thought it was enough to ‘just write’ (as they say) – now I know that it really isn’t. If you want to get published, you need to know your stuff.

Obviously, Phoebe knows her stuff. We’ve been chatting online since the group’s inception, so I know how much hard work and dedication it took for her to get to this point. If anybody ever says a particular author ‘had it easy’ in the early days, feel free to slap them for me. I’m convinced that almost nobody has it easy. Phoebe and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time agonising over our writing, about whether it’s good enough or commercial enough, about what we’ll do if the publishing industry completely implodes – that sort of thing. And that’s all on top of actually sitting down and writing an entire book, so…yeah. Writing can be difficult, is what I’m saying.

It’s much, much easier if you have a good group of people to commiserate with. Having other people around who know the industry is invaluable, You can share the anxiety and, sometimes, you get to share the successes. I think it’s safe to say that Phoebe’s agenting (it’s a verb now) counts as the biggest success in the group so far. I guess there’s a strange sense of validation in knowing that one of our members has gotten this far.

For those who aren’t aware of the many hurdles you need to jump to get to publication, I should point out that signing with an agent is the very first…or maybe the second, if you count finishing your book as the first, but even then you’re going to need to seriously edit that same book a few times (at least) until you finally get to see it on shelves. So why do people get so worked up over getting an agent? Simple: it might be the first major hurdle, but so many people never even make it that far. It’s the sad reality of the publishing industry, but even getting to that first stage of official recognition takes a monumental effort. Clearly, Phoebe was up to the task, and I know she’ll keep going in similar style.

It might be tasteless for me to stop here and point out that I totally called it about this manuscript landing her an agent, but I did totally call it. In fact, I’d like the historical record to show that the aforementioned calling took place several months ago. I’m going to take this opportunity to make another sage-like prediction: the rest of the Interrobangs are going to get agents within, oh, let’s say a year. I was right the first time, wasn’t I?

One down, three to go.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that there are certain things most authors simply don’t know how to describe well. Even genius-level authors stumble when it comes to writing about these particular activities. In fact, I’ve come across this so often that I’m starting to think it’s impossible for anyone to pull them off properly.

If my hypothesis is correct, it means that the limits of written expression do not lie in dark matters of the human heart; instead, they lie in eating, dancing and sex.

Let’s break out the list, shall we?

1) EATING

I’d like you to do something for me. Pour yourself a bowl of cereal, with milk if necessary, and start eating it. Finished? Awesome. Now, would you describe what you just did as ‘taking a bite of cereal’?

Unless you were trying to dentally bisect your spoon, I’m guessing not.

For some unfathomable reason, the go-to phrase for written descriptions of eating is ‘He/she/I took a bite of food’, where ‘food’ may be substituted for eggs, lasagna, pasta, breakfast cereal or any other consumable imaginable except soup, and I’m guessing someone has even tried it with that one. Even in cases where it should be perfectly appropriate (like a burger, say) it still ends up sounding odd  - possibly because it’s just too overused at this point.

OM NOM NOM

My suggestion for remedying this pox on the face of writing is to avoid overt description of the eating process altogether. It usually adds nothing to a scene (if they’re sitting in front of plates of food, we can assume that they’re eating unless told otherwise), and you can do more with descriptions of things other than people shoveling lasagna into their mouths. Tell the reader where they’re looking, how they’re sitting, if they’re pushing their food around their plate rather than eating it (although that one also crops up a bit too often), but please, no more bites of cereal.

2) DANCING

It’s experiment time again!

Get up from your chair and attempt to dance in a manner which could aptly be described as ‘pulsing’. Don’t worry if you’ve never ‘pulsed’ before; it crops up so much in fiction, I figure it must be easy to do. I’m imagining a sort of full-body spasm, starting at the arms (raised over the head) and ending with a foot-flail that sends you crashing to the ground head first. Granted, this would make it rather difficult to pulse ‘in time with the music’, which is apparently how it’s usually done, but I”m guessing  that’s just a more advanced technique.

Other acceptable dance moves include gyrating, grinding (thankfully never described in detail) and the ultra-generic ‘moving’; as in, ‘she moved with the music’ – uh, good to know.

Simply dancing, without recourse to bizarre descriptions, will result in scorn being heaped upon you by the other patrons of whichever plot-riddled nightclub you happen to have found yourself in. Really, can you blame them? If they bothered to learn how to pulse, then you’d better make damn sure you do the same.

3) Sex

There is an annual award given for the worst sex scenes in literature. Here it is (NSFW). Here’s a sample (not NSFW):

She holds him tight and squeezes her body to his, sending delightful sailing boats tacking to and fro across the ocean of his back.

-Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz, who hopefully does not frequent marinas.

People, this one isn’t difficult. Don’t use metaphors. Don’t use analogies. Do not, under any circumstances, make torturous quasi-religious comparisons between certain body parts and places of worship, particularly if those places of worship are being ‘defiled’ by any kind of serpent. Avoid describing activities which are only physically possible for members of Cirque du Soleil.

In fact, don’t bother describing it at all unless it’s necessary to do so. (Are you sensing a pattern here?) There’s a reason why the fade to black has been so consistently popular for decades.

Bad books.

We all know they exist. We’ve read them, even if we’d like to forget about them. Sloppy books, books with such clumsy construction and awkward writing that you only ever finish them despite the words on the page, and not because of them.

If you’re a writer–or if you just appreciate clear communication–the existence of these books probably makes you cringe, tear your hair, and rend your garments (whatever that means). News that a poorly-written book has been well-received by the public or the publishing world can be painful. Word of six-, and seven-figure advances despite clumsy stylistics can feel vaguely nausea-inducing.

All those dramatics over ineffective writing hide a shameful truth, of course: at some point, we all write something terrible.

I mean it. I’m sure that every writer on Earth has produced at least one draft chock-full of Said Bookisms, unnecessary adverbs, clumsy descriptions of action, and awkward phrasing. But the key word here is “draft”–when it comes down to the wire, there’s really no excuse for these kinds of amateur writing mistakes.

Why? Because as a writer, you have ample opportunities to revise. Pre-publication/beta readers are great for cluing you in to where you’ve gone wrong. I can’t submit a draft to the other Interrobangs without having it come back to me covered in comments (which is just the way I like it!). And with the help of the Internet, it’s easy to find dedicated readers who will tear your prose to pieces (the AbsoluteWrite forums are a good place for that). But even if you don’t have outside readers, careful consideration of your own writing on a sentence level can kick your prose up a notch–make it more readable, fluid, and fluent.

Here are a few sentence-level edits you can make to let your writing better serve your story:

• Remove adverbs, particularly around dialogue, she said, tersely. The problem with adverbs is that they often indicate that your verbs are weak. Rather than having someone “laugh softly,” consider having them “chuckle.”
• Don’t be afraid of the word “said.” Conversely, in effective dialogue, it’s the words within the quotations that should largely convey tone. Overly relying on your thesaurus turns writing into this experiment to see how often you can avoid the word “said”–and these experiments are distracting to your reader.
• Be careful with your -ing verbs. Too many gerunds generally can slow down your reader–worse, they imply (sometimes against the writer’s intentions) a simultaneous action. “Running up the stairs, Jimmy grabbed his knife from his bedroom.” That’s just not possible unless Jimmy is in two places at once!
• Needless action descriptors. Readers don’t need to know about every. single. movement your character makes. In fact, it’s tiresome, and will try the patience of even the most zen reader. Most readers will skim to character interactions and dialogue when faced with a wall of text. Try to use as few words as possible. For example, “Walking down the street, Jeanie swung her hips, putting one foot in front of the other. She rounded her mouth into a small ‘o’ and blew a thin stream of air past her lips,” can easily become “Jeanie walked down the street, whistling.”

Editing this kind of sloppy draft can be a little boring, but always results in cleaner, more readable prose. Clean prose won’t make you an amazing writer–you need great characters, story, and thematics for that–but it will let your reader focus on what really matters. Let your writing serve your ideas, instead of distract from them.

My brother recently asked me why all literary novels seem to be about a diverse group of people interacting with a single object/person/place in the past, and are subsequently drawn together when that same object/person/place becomes important to them again. Also, there are usually Nazis involved. I was initially going to tell him that this was an unfair assessment of the rich tapestry that is the ‘literary’ genre, until I remembered that I have personally come across at least a dozen examples of the exact kind of plot he’s talking about. Broadly speaking, then, literary novels are all about a diverse cast of characters interacting with things over several generations plus there are Nazis.

Of course, you could do this kind of thing for all genres. There will always be novels that buck the trend, but in general you can fit any particular book into a neat little genre box based on a few key tropes. I think this is probably more true for some genres or publishing categories than others, though. (This is where people will probably start throwing things at me in the comments.) Fantasy and science fiction are usually pretty rigid about genre tropes in terms of the mainstream stuff, although I think that’s probably been changing lately. Urban fantasy is often derided for being formulaic, in that a lot of UF books tend to sound identical to each other, but I’d say that’s more an example of a genre that’s become highly refined; its fans really know what they want, which means that there’s less room for experimentation. Ditto for crime novels. As for Young Adult…well, that’s where things get a bit difficult.

One of the things that first attracted me to YA was the way it seemed to allow for endless transgression of genre boundaries. When I first started following the YA industry closely (as opposed to just browsing the shelves at my local stores), I was struck by the way nobody seemed to be in any hurry to sort books into discrete boxes – within the loose confines of ‘Young Adult’ as a publishing category, there seemed to be endless room for diversity. Now I’m not so sure. It’s true that a lot of YA authors do things that you couldn’t do in other categories, but whether those things are actually worth doing is another question entirely. There’s also a certain level of rigidity creeping into YA, as anybody who spends too much time on Goodreads could tell you. (Oh look, a booklist called ‘Best YA of 2011′. Can I guess what 90% of the books on it will be about without knowing anything about them? I can? How utterly astonishing.)

I’d like to suggest that a truly genre-free world probably doesn’t exist anywhere in publishing…or at least anywhere in novel publishing. Something approaching such a utopia might just exist in the world of manga, though.

That’s the Japanese cover for the first volume of ‘Planetes’, a manga series about a group of people who collect space debris for a living. They don’t just do that at the beginning of the story, until the ‘real plot’ shows up, nor do they do it as a flimsy pretext for something more exciting; it’s actually about people who collect space debris for a living. And it’s awesome.

But that’s an outlier, right? Well, sort of…

That’s the cover for a volume of Saturn Apartments, a series about space window washers. Which is to say, people who wash windows. In space. Again, it’s awesome. I’m also reading Children of the Sea at the moment, which is kind of like what would happen if somebody got all those crappy YA mermaid books, threw them into a blender and poured in a few bottles of liquid creativity. It’s really not the kind of thing that I could imagine finding a home anywhere else.

My point here isn’t that the Japanese comics industry is absolutely chock full of weird, genre-defying flights of fancy, because it’s not; most Shonen Jump series these days are painfully derivative if you’re familiar with the magazine’s handful of endlessly-recycled clichés. Rather, I find it telling that these things exist at all. There seems to be a staggering amount of diversity in manga, with established genres for everything from ‘manga about businessmen’ to sports manga to cooking manga. (By which I mean manga where the story is focussed around cooking, not non-fiction cooking manuals.)

I don’t really know why this is the case, but it certainly makes for good reading. You can find almost any kind of story represented in manga if you look hard enough, from the most formulaic action/fantasy stuff for kids to off-the-wall, highbrow fare. A lot of this stuff feels like it probably couldn’t be done elsewhere.

This is sort of what I thought YA would be like during my early days following the industry: not that it would be a kaleidoscope of wild experimentation, but that there would be room for at least a few examples of almost anything you could think of. Sadly, that is not the case: Paranormal Romance is still stubbornly entrenched as the big genre of YA, true Science Fiction is still hard to come by and ‘Dystopian’ novels became homogonous faster than I would have thought possible even in my most cynical moments.

I guess what I’m saying is that YA feels like squandered potential. I think teens are a lot more open to stories that don’t fit comfortable into genre boundaries, yet the entire industry seems focussed around love triangles and the next big Paranormal Whatever. Where’s the YA equivalent of Planetes, with some everyday aspect of a teenager’s life realistically transported into a future setting? (And I mean genuinely ordinary, in the same way that Planetes is very literally about a working-class guy’s struggle to achieve a dream that he can never afford on his measly wages.) I know there are things like that in the ‘adult’ SF world, but I have a feeling it could really find a receptive audience in YA. I would love for YA to be known as a place for unusual genre titles – not really crazy stuff, just something a bit further from the norm.