I came up with a hashtag recently that goes #amNOTquerying to rebel against agents’ ludicrous demands and show them we can do better without them as indie authors
After wasting months of my life querying, I’m going self-pub this year and couldn’t be more excited
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 WOW! Liza you absolutely blew me away with this tour de force of an article ripping into literary agents for their ridiculous expectations and regulations on literature! You absolutely ripped them a new one! Literary agents are as you’ve shown often lazy, don’t know how to spell or basic grammar and don’t like to use their brains. These expectations for a book they’ve laid out prove that wholeheartedly. They have no clue how to write great literature. None! So many great works of literature that have been treasured for decades if not centuries would never have been published because of micromanagement by literary agents. After reading all these ridiculous rules they have for writers, is it any wonder the publishing industry is slowly dying? No one’s allowed to be creative or write in the style they want to write or write how they want to write! Literature has become bland, formulaic, dull, and generic. Like everything else these days in mainstream western culture, is homogenous. Thank God for the internet, platforms like Substack and Indie publishing houses!
The far left are bad at writing great literature just like they are at everything else! I say that as someone who is socially liberal in my political views. In any case, let’s examine the different criteria they laid out and why Liza is on-point in her criticisms of them. A book can’t have 10,000 or more words. This is complete nonsense because many, many great works of literature are much longer than that. It gives the author more space to build out his or her ideas! It’s also allows the author to go more in-depth with their characters. I couldn’t care less if it costs money to print books. Stop being tightwads and let authors take ever long they wish to flesh out the characters, story, plot, themes, etc.
A book must introduce the stakes right away? Total BS! Starting with a character’s backstory helps the readers envision who they are and what their like and understand them and makes the characters come alive. I know because I’ve experienced this while reading many a classic novel or when reading history books. These agents have no idea how valuable it is take the time to introduce a character to the audience. Slow openings as Liza so eloquently stated, cause us to THINK about what we’re reading.
No extraneous details permitted…what a load of horse****! How about oh I don’t know…setting and exposition! Giving the reader of where they are and what’s going on. I should think those are pretty helpful details. Without a description how will the reader know where or why any of what’s going is taking place? What happened to exploring ideas in books?
Flowery writing is bad, are you s-ing me?! Metaphors are part of what make great writing great. If we just outright explain what we mean to the reader the book will quickly become boring and lose all meaning or intrigue. It causes the words to pop and come off the page and the reader can picture what it is like to be there in that moment! The great Vladimir Nabokov changed the world with his opening paragraph in his all-time classic novel Lolita. These opening paragraphs firmly establish who the character is, what their family and upbringing was like, gives you a window into who they are as a person, and the world she grew up in.
You can’t introduce too many characters in the first paragraph and sentences can’t be longer than 15-20 words. Again BS! Readers are fully capable of keeping twelve characters or more straight in their mind at one time as their are intellectual people after all by nature. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann for instance introduces twelve characters at the beginning. Anna Karenina’s main character is absent in the opening chapter and you simply learn about her family members. As to the latter rule, so you don’t want readers to concentrate while reading? You want to give them the written equivalent of an Instagram reel or a TikTok video? If you can’t take or read long sentences than just turn on Netflix and watch garbage like Stranger Things or The Walking Dead so you can be nice and comfy and not to use your brain. Enjoy becoming a vegetable as you sit there and your mind turns into a pile of mush!
I also wanted to add an observation of my own to Liza’s list. Certain content and ideas would never get published or be considered acceptable. For instance, sensitivity readers would make mincemeat out of your novel if it used gendered-language or words that might offend someone. Like if you use terms or words like yes-men, a boy’s night out, man up, you throw like a girl, mankind, actress, coed, sob sister, etc. or sayings like the pot calling the kettle black, I’m not blind! or using racial slurs or the r-word in a non-derogatory way. Or if the content of your story might be even slightly controversial. Like if a writer wrote a story about a German Jewish girl who was bullied in school by her Turkish Muslim classmates for her ethnicity and religion or a novel on a detransitioner campaigning to get the barbaric practice of gender-affirming care for minors banned. There is no way such a book would have a snowball’s chance in Hades of being published. Imagine a book about a victim of October 7th trying to recover from the trauma of what she just experienced or a Palestinian activist fighting Hamas? That novel would never ever see the light of day!
I’m so glad your back, Liza Substack has been a bore without you and speaking of your novel, the Leverkuhn Quartet, I’m once again very sorry I couldn’t finish it like I signed up to do. Life and mental health struggles honestly just got in the way. I hope it will be published and win the National Book Award for 2025! Also, please ignore the two goobers at the top who left two rude and totally uncalled for comments and obviously didn’t understand the article. As well as KP’s condescending and snotty comment which was completely unnecessary and totally missed your point.
This is all true and more. Those saying 'why the far left' are missing the unsaid fact that, along with all these 'rules,' you have to be from certain intersectional whatever to even be considered.
The only 'rule' a writer needs care about is that the reader doesn't feel like their time has been wasted by reading their work. Whatever works, works.
Your literary agents appear to think they are film agents, representing screenwriters. Or that novels only exist as pretexts for making movies. Or that people no longer know how to intake narrative information except in the idiom of film. Maybe they're right about the larger public; what do I know? But does everything have to be a "four quadrant" megablockbuster? Can't there be room for a variety of voices, styles, tones, etc?
You should probably stop policing the grammar of your interlocutors. It really makes you look small. But much more importantly, it puts you in their position, enforcer of an arbitrarily strict rule that really doesn't matter that much. After all, which of the excerpts that you included here have "perfect" grammar according to, well, *any* prescriptivist definition of grammar? Exactly none of them. Knock them for ineffective writing if you want, but to do so on the basis of "grammatical correctness" suggests you've learned far less from your literature reading than you think you have. (To intentionally mix metaphors), you blunt your own valid criticism by swimming in these shallow pools of complaint.
Agreed. It really bothers me when someone attacks someone's understanding of writing techniques or rules instead of criticizing their argument. It's a cheap way to devalue their stance so you don't have to listen to them. Bad writing doesn't mean their idea is bad.
Truly great post! The whole reason great literature is great is BECAUSE of the things you should avoid mentioned above. But it’s not just the known giants. Some of the great pulp writers wrote truly beautiful prose. This is why everything published by the big publishers sounds like it was written by the same person…er.. machine. Bottom line, make sure your prose reads like a pile of mashed up wood pulp and you should be fine.
This may seem like a dumb question, but why, with all of the self-publishing tools at our disposal, do we need publishers? Why does publishing still exist as an industry?
Literary agents and publishers are the scum of the earth. There's no chance they'll read anything highbrow and not call it overwritten. R/pubtips is their perfect reflection.
Man, that East of Eden opening is just stunning. I can’t believe it’s passed me by all this time, but now it’s going straight to the top of my reading list. I wonder how Mr. Proust would fare on sentence length?
What’s ironic is that commercial fantasy novels routinely break these rules. They’re typically much longer than 100,00 words, often have a prologue that does not include the protagonist, require readers to keep track of a sprawling cast (including characters who may disappear for entire books and then reappear later in a series), have extensive exposition, and often use long sentences and unfamiliar words. But that’s allowed because the industry knows fantasy readers want that.
Are literary fiction readers not showing publishers what they want? Or is there a disconnect between literary fiction readers and the publishing industry?
I think what Liza is (inaccurately) referring to is the rule of thumb that if a novel goes beyond 100,000 words you should consider making it two volumes. It is not a new idea. Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes because of the high word count. Many ‘long’ Victorian novels were serialised and didn’t get presented as one volume until years later. Great Expectations, for example, was first published as a serial, then later as three volume set, and finally as the single volume we usually see it as today.
I came up with a hashtag recently that goes #amNOTquerying to rebel against agents’ ludicrous demands and show them we can do better without them as indie authors
After wasting months of my life querying, I’m going self-pub this year and couldn’t be more excited
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 WOW! Liza you absolutely blew me away with this tour de force of an article ripping into literary agents for their ridiculous expectations and regulations on literature! You absolutely ripped them a new one! Literary agents are as you’ve shown often lazy, don’t know how to spell or basic grammar and don’t like to use their brains. These expectations for a book they’ve laid out prove that wholeheartedly. They have no clue how to write great literature. None! So many great works of literature that have been treasured for decades if not centuries would never have been published because of micromanagement by literary agents. After reading all these ridiculous rules they have for writers, is it any wonder the publishing industry is slowly dying? No one’s allowed to be creative or write in the style they want to write or write how they want to write! Literature has become bland, formulaic, dull, and generic. Like everything else these days in mainstream western culture, is homogenous. Thank God for the internet, platforms like Substack and Indie publishing houses!
The far left are bad at writing great literature just like they are at everything else! I say that as someone who is socially liberal in my political views. In any case, let’s examine the different criteria they laid out and why Liza is on-point in her criticisms of them. A book can’t have 10,000 or more words. This is complete nonsense because many, many great works of literature are much longer than that. It gives the author more space to build out his or her ideas! It’s also allows the author to go more in-depth with their characters. I couldn’t care less if it costs money to print books. Stop being tightwads and let authors take ever long they wish to flesh out the characters, story, plot, themes, etc.
A book must introduce the stakes right away? Total BS! Starting with a character’s backstory helps the readers envision who they are and what their like and understand them and makes the characters come alive. I know because I’ve experienced this while reading many a classic novel or when reading history books. These agents have no idea how valuable it is take the time to introduce a character to the audience. Slow openings as Liza so eloquently stated, cause us to THINK about what we’re reading.
No extraneous details permitted…what a load of horse****! How about oh I don’t know…setting and exposition! Giving the reader of where they are and what’s going on. I should think those are pretty helpful details. Without a description how will the reader know where or why any of what’s going is taking place? What happened to exploring ideas in books?
Flowery writing is bad, are you s-ing me?! Metaphors are part of what make great writing great. If we just outright explain what we mean to the reader the book will quickly become boring and lose all meaning or intrigue. It causes the words to pop and come off the page and the reader can picture what it is like to be there in that moment! The great Vladimir Nabokov changed the world with his opening paragraph in his all-time classic novel Lolita. These opening paragraphs firmly establish who the character is, what their family and upbringing was like, gives you a window into who they are as a person, and the world she grew up in.
You can’t introduce too many characters in the first paragraph and sentences can’t be longer than 15-20 words. Again BS! Readers are fully capable of keeping twelve characters or more straight in their mind at one time as their are intellectual people after all by nature. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann for instance introduces twelve characters at the beginning. Anna Karenina’s main character is absent in the opening chapter and you simply learn about her family members. As to the latter rule, so you don’t want readers to concentrate while reading? You want to give them the written equivalent of an Instagram reel or a TikTok video? If you can’t take or read long sentences than just turn on Netflix and watch garbage like Stranger Things or The Walking Dead so you can be nice and comfy and not to use your brain. Enjoy becoming a vegetable as you sit there and your mind turns into a pile of mush!
I also wanted to add an observation of my own to Liza’s list. Certain content and ideas would never get published or be considered acceptable. For instance, sensitivity readers would make mincemeat out of your novel if it used gendered-language or words that might offend someone. Like if you use terms or words like yes-men, a boy’s night out, man up, you throw like a girl, mankind, actress, coed, sob sister, etc. or sayings like the pot calling the kettle black, I’m not blind! or using racial slurs or the r-word in a non-derogatory way. Or if the content of your story might be even slightly controversial. Like if a writer wrote a story about a German Jewish girl who was bullied in school by her Turkish Muslim classmates for her ethnicity and religion or a novel on a detransitioner campaigning to get the barbaric practice of gender-affirming care for minors banned. There is no way such a book would have a snowball’s chance in Hades of being published. Imagine a book about a victim of October 7th trying to recover from the trauma of what she just experienced or a Palestinian activist fighting Hamas? That novel would never ever see the light of day!
I’m so glad your back, Liza Substack has been a bore without you and speaking of your novel, the Leverkuhn Quartet, I’m once again very sorry I couldn’t finish it like I signed up to do. Life and mental health struggles honestly just got in the way. I hope it will be published and win the National Book Award for 2025! Also, please ignore the two goobers at the top who left two rude and totally uncalled for comments and obviously didn’t understand the article. As well as KP’s condescending and snotty comment which was completely unnecessary and totally missed your point.
This is all true and more. Those saying 'why the far left' are missing the unsaid fact that, along with all these 'rules,' you have to be from certain intersectional whatever to even be considered.
The only 'rule' a writer needs care about is that the reader doesn't feel like their time has been wasted by reading their work. Whatever works, works.
Have you considered publishing serial style (like Dickens!) on Substack?
Your literary agents appear to think they are film agents, representing screenwriters. Or that novels only exist as pretexts for making movies. Or that people no longer know how to intake narrative information except in the idiom of film. Maybe they're right about the larger public; what do I know? But does everything have to be a "four quadrant" megablockbuster? Can't there be room for a variety of voices, styles, tones, etc?
You negated your whole argument by bringing in a singular political view. Didn’t get past it.
Same feeling. Too much petty identity politics and not enough literature.
Not sure what "the far left" has to do with disdain for long sentences and too many characters.
People struggle to think beyond politics, the powerful contemporary forces.
"Mr. James, we need you to cut about 400 pages from your manuscript here."
You should probably stop policing the grammar of your interlocutors. It really makes you look small. But much more importantly, it puts you in their position, enforcer of an arbitrarily strict rule that really doesn't matter that much. After all, which of the excerpts that you included here have "perfect" grammar according to, well, *any* prescriptivist definition of grammar? Exactly none of them. Knock them for ineffective writing if you want, but to do so on the basis of "grammatical correctness" suggests you've learned far less from your literature reading than you think you have. (To intentionally mix metaphors), you blunt your own valid criticism by swimming in these shallow pools of complaint.
Agreed. It really bothers me when someone attacks someone's understanding of writing techniques or rules instead of criticizing their argument. It's a cheap way to devalue their stance so you don't have to listen to them. Bad writing doesn't mean their idea is bad.
It's sad but true. Imagine how many publishers have unwittingly buried future legends
Thanks, Liza, for speaking for so many of us!
Truly great post! The whole reason great literature is great is BECAUSE of the things you should avoid mentioned above. But it’s not just the known giants. Some of the great pulp writers wrote truly beautiful prose. This is why everything published by the big publishers sounds like it was written by the same person…er.. machine. Bottom line, make sure your prose reads like a pile of mashed up wood pulp and you should be fine.
This may seem like a dumb question, but why, with all of the self-publishing tools at our disposal, do we need publishers? Why does publishing still exist as an industry?
Literary agents and publishers are the scum of the earth. There's no chance they'll read anything highbrow and not call it overwritten. R/pubtips is their perfect reflection.
WhAt ArE tHe StAkEs
Fuck you.
Man, that East of Eden opening is just stunning. I can’t believe it’s passed me by all this time, but now it’s going straight to the top of my reading list. I wonder how Mr. Proust would fare on sentence length?
Proust had to self-publish.
What’s ironic is that commercial fantasy novels routinely break these rules. They’re typically much longer than 100,00 words, often have a prologue that does not include the protagonist, require readers to keep track of a sprawling cast (including characters who may disappear for entire books and then reappear later in a series), have extensive exposition, and often use long sentences and unfamiliar words. But that’s allowed because the industry knows fantasy readers want that.
Are literary fiction readers not showing publishers what they want? Or is there a disconnect between literary fiction readers and the publishing industry?
I think what Liza is (inaccurately) referring to is the rule of thumb that if a novel goes beyond 100,000 words you should consider making it two volumes. It is not a new idea. Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes because of the high word count. Many ‘long’ Victorian novels were serialised and didn’t get presented as one volume until years later. Great Expectations, for example, was first published as a serial, then later as three volume set, and finally as the single volume we usually see it as today.
I appreciate a “slow” opening - even prefer them. I’m reminded Melville doesn’t introduce Captain Ahab until chapter 28. Wonderful essay, thanks!