👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 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 is 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.
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
You’re right about lots and frustrated and angered by even more. Most important, it’s not the fault of the agents. They’re innocent. The culprit here is corporatization, which has decimated publishing as it decimates everything it touches. In addition to the corporate chokehold the Big 5 has on publishing, there has been the hundred-year migration from page to screen. You want to talk competition, the novel has been hit by the movie screen, then the TV screen, then the computer screen and now, worst of all, the phone screen. Philip Roth famously said fiction will become a niche activity, like “reading Latin poetry.” We may not be there yet but he was right that the act of reading the long narrative is dying and it’s dying because if we do not train our brains through repetition to sit quietly and focus for long stretches of time—two, three, four hours or more—we will not be able to do it, nor will we want to. And if there is one element that social media, our new (and corporate-owned) ruler does not require, it’s focus. Today’s literary agents live and work, like you and me, in a corporatized world. This world has been forced upon us and we have to navigate this world and tolerate it. Just wait until you need a microchip under your skin to get a bank account or use the internet. And yes, the idea that a 400-page story is to be judged on its first five pages (don’t think you get ten, you don’t) and an explosion, death or some other silly dramatic happening must be inserted in that tiny space is madness, idiocy, but this is what happens when profit-motivated corporations take over institutions such as the arts. Even “cookie cutter” is too creative a term to describe the homogenized and risk-averse art of corporate publishing, the boardroom ejecta. But don’t be mad at the agents. Again, it’s not their fault. They either sell books or lose their jobs and both their industry and the markets to which they sell have been corporatized, hermetically so, there is no escape. Huxley and Orwell were right. You’re rage is delightful, the world needs rage, but your rage is misguided. You need to direct your anger and frustration toward our corporate masters, not your fellow human beings trying to make a living in this awful place. How to start? Simple. Stop buying coffee at Starbucks, etc. Personal boycotts. Stop funding and empowering the corporations that produce the garbage. Also, you may want to apologize to the agents. They’ll forgive you. When it comes to what has happened to publishing, the agents are as angry and frustrated as you.
I am glad to see that others also felt the need for a wordy response to this essay. I edited my blurb to a fraction of the words that flowed through my brain, causing almost a different version of the original intent. LOL.
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?
Your essay prompted many thoughts, most of which I edited out of this response, as my reminiscing leads to endless digressions on personal experiences.
A few thoughts:
*I recalled Mozart, whose emperor had instructed him to write specific scales at the end of his symphonies so that the emperor would know the piece had come to a close. Personal integrity drives art that accurately reflects the intellectual climate of the time, or perhaps of the future.
*The majority of readers in the USA read below the 6th-grade level. This, and the pursuit of capitalistic profit, may require books and even sentences to be short. I'm surprised limiting syllables wasn't listed.
*Too many characters would confuse the contemporary US reader. If one hopes to be published and all the gatekeepers expect 6th-grade-level books, then a writer must drop to that level. Then, the author might achieve widespread recognition and begin to seek out gatekeepers who value genuine literature. This temporarily sidesteps personal integrity, but might lead to income and recognition. Mozart died poor.
*Keep books short by writing series. Many series are on the market; now I know why.
*Each person chooses whether to be exploited or to exploit the situation for future gain, or to stay entirely out of the corporate system.
*Does a University education cause a stiffness that won't relax? Do we expect readers to conform to our education?
Is there an international market interested in your literary work? Imagine being a famous author in China!
I enjoyed your essay and related to some of the frustration. I don't always agree with all my thoughts, but still, they occur.
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?
I am attempting to write an epic-style narrative poem in blank verse. Partially out of spite toward the sort of attitudes this literary agent is demonstrating. Even though I'll likely be the only one who ever reads it, it gives me satisfaction to push back on those attitudes in my own way. I shudder to think of what this agent would think if she read it...
I feel like this article confuses a few elements. You began by talking about the far left enacting de facto censorship. From there, you went on to discuss how this somehow equates to publishers not choosing to publish work that fits the standards of novels from 100+ years ago. If the 21st century market wants 60,000 word books with shorter sentences and early stakes, who are to deny that? That's the essence of a free market. A small elite group of people like classic literature. I happen to be one of them. That said, trends change, tastes change, and publishers are in the business of putting out books that sell to the greatest number of people possible.
...but the market isn't really determining it. The average novel sells 500 copies. People have tuned out and aren't really reading these books anymore. You have gatekeepers killing off an industry they have taken over, but don't seem to understand. I suspect the cutoff of access to some government grants and support will help end this, but maybe not... The only hope is to build something new and see if people are open to reading more challenging material. Maybe not, but it is hard to tell if writers like this are shut out. I suspect at LEAST 500 people would be interested, so it wouldn't be any worse. : )
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.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 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 is 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.
Have you considered publishing serial style (like Dickens!) on Substack?
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.
You negated your whole argument by bringing in a singular political view. Didn’t get past it.
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.
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
"Mr. James, we need you to cut about 400 pages from your manuscript here."
It's sad but true. Imagine how many publishers have unwittingly buried future legends
You’re right about lots and frustrated and angered by even more. Most important, it’s not the fault of the agents. They’re innocent. The culprit here is corporatization, which has decimated publishing as it decimates everything it touches. In addition to the corporate chokehold the Big 5 has on publishing, there has been the hundred-year migration from page to screen. You want to talk competition, the novel has been hit by the movie screen, then the TV screen, then the computer screen and now, worst of all, the phone screen. Philip Roth famously said fiction will become a niche activity, like “reading Latin poetry.” We may not be there yet but he was right that the act of reading the long narrative is dying and it’s dying because if we do not train our brains through repetition to sit quietly and focus for long stretches of time—two, three, four hours or more—we will not be able to do it, nor will we want to. And if there is one element that social media, our new (and corporate-owned) ruler does not require, it’s focus. Today’s literary agents live and work, like you and me, in a corporatized world. This world has been forced upon us and we have to navigate this world and tolerate it. Just wait until you need a microchip under your skin to get a bank account or use the internet. And yes, the idea that a 400-page story is to be judged on its first five pages (don’t think you get ten, you don’t) and an explosion, death or some other silly dramatic happening must be inserted in that tiny space is madness, idiocy, but this is what happens when profit-motivated corporations take over institutions such as the arts. Even “cookie cutter” is too creative a term to describe the homogenized and risk-averse art of corporate publishing, the boardroom ejecta. But don’t be mad at the agents. Again, it’s not their fault. They either sell books or lose their jobs and both their industry and the markets to which they sell have been corporatized, hermetically so, there is no escape. Huxley and Orwell were right. You’re rage is delightful, the world needs rage, but your rage is misguided. You need to direct your anger and frustration toward our corporate masters, not your fellow human beings trying to make a living in this awful place. How to start? Simple. Stop buying coffee at Starbucks, etc. Personal boycotts. Stop funding and empowering the corporations that produce the garbage. Also, you may want to apologize to the agents. They’ll forgive you. When it comes to what has happened to publishing, the agents are as angry and frustrated as you.
I am glad to see that others also felt the need for a wordy response to this essay. I edited my blurb to a fraction of the words that flowed through my brain, causing almost a different version of the original intent. LOL.
Thanks, Liza, for speaking for so many of us!
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?
Your essay prompted many thoughts, most of which I edited out of this response, as my reminiscing leads to endless digressions on personal experiences.
A few thoughts:
*I recalled Mozart, whose emperor had instructed him to write specific scales at the end of his symphonies so that the emperor would know the piece had come to a close. Personal integrity drives art that accurately reflects the intellectual climate of the time, or perhaps of the future.
*The majority of readers in the USA read below the 6th-grade level. This, and the pursuit of capitalistic profit, may require books and even sentences to be short. I'm surprised limiting syllables wasn't listed.
*Too many characters would confuse the contemporary US reader. If one hopes to be published and all the gatekeepers expect 6th-grade-level books, then a writer must drop to that level. Then, the author might achieve widespread recognition and begin to seek out gatekeepers who value genuine literature. This temporarily sidesteps personal integrity, but might lead to income and recognition. Mozart died poor.
*Keep books short by writing series. Many series are on the market; now I know why.
*Each person chooses whether to be exploited or to exploit the situation for future gain, or to stay entirely out of the corporate system.
*Does a University education cause a stiffness that won't relax? Do we expect readers to conform to our education?
Is there an international market interested in your literary work? Imagine being a famous author in China!
I enjoyed your essay and related to some of the frustration. I don't always agree with all my thoughts, but still, they occur.
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?
I am attempting to write an epic-style narrative poem in blank verse. Partially out of spite toward the sort of attitudes this literary agent is demonstrating. Even though I'll likely be the only one who ever reads it, it gives me satisfaction to push back on those attitudes in my own way. I shudder to think of what this agent would think if she read it...
I appreciate a “slow” opening - even prefer them. I’m reminded Melville doesn’t introduce Captain Ahab until chapter 28. Wonderful essay, thanks!
I feel like this article confuses a few elements. You began by talking about the far left enacting de facto censorship. From there, you went on to discuss how this somehow equates to publishers not choosing to publish work that fits the standards of novels from 100+ years ago. If the 21st century market wants 60,000 word books with shorter sentences and early stakes, who are to deny that? That's the essence of a free market. A small elite group of people like classic literature. I happen to be one of them. That said, trends change, tastes change, and publishers are in the business of putting out books that sell to the greatest number of people possible.
...but the market isn't really determining it. The average novel sells 500 copies. People have tuned out and aren't really reading these books anymore. You have gatekeepers killing off an industry they have taken over, but don't seem to understand. I suspect the cutoff of access to some government grants and support will help end this, but maybe not... The only hope is to build something new and see if people are open to reading more challenging material. Maybe not, but it is hard to tell if writers like this are shut out. I suspect at LEAST 500 people would be interested, so it wouldn't be any worse. : )
Is there even a Left in the US?
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.