In 2017, I graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing. Along with that came my thesis project which I was sure would be the novel that would get me and agent and would kick off my professional writing career. As part of the thesis submission, my novel had to be read by three professors, all of whom had been published professionally. All of whom had literary agents. Aside from a few minor suggestions—which I promptly addressed—the reviews were glowing.

I was ready.

I had to be. I had workshopped a query letter, I had a polished novel. It was time to start firing away to agents. When I began that process, I had no idea what to expect. The cohort I was a part of had a bit of exposure because one of the adjunct professors in the program was not only an author but a literary agent. It would be a conflict of interest to query him, but he did provide insights into the process. But something I’ve learned since then is that agents are not the best people to provide these insights. It’s other authors and your own earned experience.

And did I ever earn my experience.

I didn’t connect with other authors who were querying. Others in my MFA program weren’t there yet. So, I experienced this alone and without an understanding of what to expect. Sure, I expected rejection. I had grown used to that while submitting short stories to journals. But the rejection that comes along with querying agents somehow feels more final, more painful. Querying an agent is the first step in a multi-step process to getting a book traditionally published. Failing, as I’d come to label it, at the first step was brutal.

I also didn’t use any tools. I was so naive and lost. I manually searched for agents by looking through books I liked, Googling who the authors’ agents were, and compiling a list in a spreadsheet. Even in 2017, this was archaic. But I did it, and I built up a list of 20 agents to query. Knowing what I know now, I realize that was a tiny pool.

But here’s what made things worse. I didn’t even query all 20 agents. I queried—wait for it—seven.

Now, I’ve written about tenacity and how when you have creative optionality, tenacity is especially hard, so that contributed to this. But the other thing that contributed to it was how alone I was in this process. It was the first time I’d done anything like it, and every rejection felt like a door slammed in my face. I hadn’t learned from others, I hadn’t learned from my own experience.

When things got tough, I didn’t just give up because they were tough. I pulled back from querying because I didn’t know better. I was also going through a growth stage in my tech career and learning to be creative with code. So I rationalized to myself that I was fulfilling my creativity that way.

Writing never left me. Or, I never left writing. I just took a six year hiatus from the business side of writing. In late 2023, I dusted off a novel I had written right after I finished my MFA program. By then, I think it had been sitting in a metaphorical drawer for four years. Let me tell you, if you want space from your novel, give it four years. Just kidding, don’t do that. That’s way too long.

This space though gave me a truly fresh pair of eyes to read the manuscript and analyze it. It was good. Much better than the novel I had queried in 2017. I spent a year rewriting, editing, finding beta readers, reading out loud, printing, reading again, and editing again before I felt like it was ready. I also learned how to find community. I found other writers on Threads. I followed Book Threads and Author Threads and Writer Threads. As I found myself closer to querying again, I followed the QueryTrenches Threads. I read hundreds of submissions on Query Shark. I spent hours on Reddit’s PubTibs subreddit. I listened to The Shit No One Tells You About Writing constantly.

And when the new year rolled around, I felt ready to query. This time, I was mentally prepared. I had knowledge and a community and reasonable expectations. I knew of the tools and I knew how to research agents better. And I treated my query process like an experiment.

I knew that if I was not getting a bite on my query letter, I should consider two main things:

1. If the agents were the right agents for my book

2. If my query letter was doing its job

Through these early experiments, I refined my query letter and I got better about selecting agents. I’ll have to write an entirely separate post about the process I finally landed on for finding agents to query, but through all that trial and error, I found a group of agents that I felt were perfect. I, of course, had my favorite. I waited to query that top choice just in case there were any other tweaks I wanted to make. But I felt as prepared as I could possibly be.

Throughout this entire process, I received rejections. Plenty of them. On some days, I felt that old pain in my gut that told me I wasn’t good enough. Thankfully my wife was always there to remind me that I was. But in the round of queries where I felt like I had best refined the list of agents to match my book’s content, something changed.

I received an immediate request for a full manuscript from one agent. Then another. With this confidence, I queried my top choice, and received a full request from that agent as well. Within a couple of days, my top choice agent wanted to have The Call.

Two weeks ago, he offered me representation, sent me a template contract, and told me to take the time I needed to notify other agents and give them a chance to respond.

Since then, I’ve accepted and am officially an agented author! I’ll write more about this soon, but I am happy to be able to say the tenacity paid off. The experience paid off.

But I couldn’t have done it without finding the resources I did, finding the community I did, and finding the tools I did. I’ll link to as much as I can below, but if you’re querying, keep at it. It’s hard, and nothing is guaranteed. And remember, if it doesn’t work out, you can ALWAYS write another book.

Resources

Author Threads

Book Threads

Writing Threads

Query Trenches

QueryTracker

QueryShark

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

I will write a few sentences and then I’m drifting. It’s not quite like falling asleep at the wheel. It’s more like floating in an ocean. One minute you’re in one spot, the next minute, you’re a hundred yards away. But you remember how to get back, and you might have found something new along the way.

I’ve set the audacious (for me) goal of ten pages per day on this first draft. So far, I’ve been able to hit it. But if this were Strava and someone were mapping the run of how I finish a block of ten pages, it might look like this:

I didn’t have this same wandering problem (opportunity?) with my previous novel. That novel came to me pretty well formed, and there wasn’t anything in the way of mystery. That novel was a escape-the-bad-guy type thriller where I could run straight ahead from point A to point B. With this new novel, I generally don’t know where I’m going.

I will write a paragraph and then I’ll realize I’m not quite sure where to take it. So, my hands travel from the keyboard to the mouse. The mouse clicks away from my writing window. I find myself reading articles, scrolling Threads, anything but writing. And then, just as quickly, I find myself back on the page and I’m writing again. It’s half conscious, half sub-conscious.

Taking walks and working out work equally well for this, but I generally can only do each of those things once per day, not every thirty minutes.

My wandering thus far has propelled me forward. As long as I always wander back, I think it’s fine.

A common approach to editing is to read your work out loud. Many people believe this is one of the most critical steps in the editing process because you will hear awkward sentences, repetitions, grammatical mistakes, and more easier than if you were reading in your head. However, I’ve found a major flaw in this approach—at least a major flaw for me, personally.

When I read anything I’m familiar with, whether it’s out loud or in my head, I tend to read what I meant, not what is on the page. So, when reading out loud, I might catch a few issues, but more often than not, I will end up reading my story the way I meant for it to sound and I will even insert words or fix grammar without realizing it as I read. Because of this, reading out loud hasn’t been as helpful for me as I think it should be.

Luckily, while browsing Threads, I found several posts from authors who recommended using Microsoft Word’s read-out-loud feature. This feature uses simple AI to read the words on the page. The problem is that the AI is so simple that its reading is robotic. When the reading is robotic, you can’t possibly pick up on whether your writing sounds awkward or if the robot reading it just sounds awkward. I liked the idea of someone else reading my work to me though. I had a suspicion that it would allow me to pick out issues much easier than if I read it myself.

So, I started looking for better text-to-speech tools. Unlike the modern generative AI craze, text-to-speech is one of the older uses of AI. And because it’s been around for a long time, I figured there were good tools that would create more natural-sounding reading.

Through my search, I came across Speechify. The technology was developed to help people with dyslexia and ADHD have a better reading experience. It was then expanded to more general use cases. Because of its initial focus on helping those with neurodivergent conditions, I believe the quality is significantly better than most tools on the market. With that quality, though, comes a price. Speechify is not cheap. At $29 a month, it might not be a tool many writers want to pay for, but I wanted to give it a shot.

I subscribed and downloaded the macOS app and the iOS app. There are simple keyboard commands that allow you to have any text read to you when using the desktop version of the app, and that’s what I used the most. I opened my manuscript in Google Docs and highlighted the text in the first chapter. I chose the voice I wanted to use for reading and the speed of the reading. And then I hit play.

While it’s not perfect, Speechify reads in such a natural way that it feels nearly like an audiobook. This means I was able to find issues with my manuscript much easier. When someone is reading something naturally, any unnatural flow in your writing will be obvious. This is especially true of dialogue. Speechify doesn’t always read the dialogue with the right intonation, but it’s close enough to get a sense of whether or not your dialogue works.

I just finished having Speechify read my entire novel to me as I edited along the way. It absolutely helped me improve the book in ways I couldn’t have done on my own. That means, even at $29 a month, this is a tool I’m keeping in my writer’s toolbox. I highly recommend it if it’s something you can afford.

I’m not tenacious enough. At least historically, I haven’t been. Tenacity is the drive to push through something when it’s hard. It’s the intrinsic motivation you feel when you want to succeed regardless of the obstacles. Don’t get me wrong, I want to succeed, but I’ve had a hard time pushing through obstacles in the past. At least, I have when there has been an alternative available to me that doesn’t require that same tenacity. Let me explain.

When someone is talented at many things—which if you’ll allow for a potentially egotistical moment, I consider myself to be—they have options. If this type of person struggles or fails at one thing, they can move onto another thing. This is especially true if the person enjoys the other things they are good at. When you have optionality, the need for tenacity is not as strong.

For me, this manifests itself in many ways. In my non-writing life, I work in the software industry. I learned to code late in life, but when I did I was suddenly exposed to options. I could write code for employers or I could start my own companies. What this meant for my writing was that as much as I loved it, I didn’t HAVE to persevere through rejection after rejection. At any moment, I could pivot to doing something else.

However, this doesn’t just apply to writing. As I mentioned, I could start companies because of my work experience and my coding experience. I did this. My companies failed, and that’s fine. That happens more than it doesn’t. The problem, though, is that when I’ve tried to start other companies, I’ve struggled to find the tenacity to push through the early disappointments and troubles that come with starting a company. If the company or product wasn’t getting much traction, I could just pivot to a new product I would build.

As you might imagine, this is a surefire way to avoid success.

Circling back to my writing, I want to talk about how this lack of tenacity because of optionality manifested itself. I received my MFA in 2017. During the program, I wrote a novel. After many edits, I started querying the novel. I received many rejection letters for it, but looking back now, I realize I didn’t actually query that many agents. I didn’t have the tenacity to push through the rejections and keep trying. I didn’t have the tenacity to try to improve the manuscript or the query letter or both.

Contrast this to the early part of my MFA program, back before I felt like I had optionality, back before I knew how to code. I would submit to literary journals, and I had a yearly goal of 100 rejections. This goal meant that I was putting myself out there, and by putting myself out there, I gave myself a chance to be published. Through that process, I had over a dozen stories published. I had tenacity.

Where does that leave me now? I have rededicated myself to writing for two reasons:

1. I love writing and reading and books

2. For my mental health, I need an escape from traditional “work”

This means that after seven years of letting two novels sit on a shelf and nearly five years after my short story collection was published, I am writing in earnest again. This requires tenacity. Reviews, critiques, rejections and more will require me to fight through the desire to run to something else. I need to recapture the same tenacity I had when I was writing short stories.

I think I’ll do it, but guess what? You all get to follow the process as I work on it publicly.

Editing is a personal journey. No two writers will go about it the same way. For me, I’ve found a process that helps me stay focused and shapes what will ultimately become the final product.

Writing a first draft is the easy part. For me at least. That’s the part of writing I love most, where I don’t know what’s going to happen next, where I’m meeting the characters for the first time outside of my own head. The first draft is the only part of the writing process where I enter a flow state. In that state, I can listen to music while writing and it doesn’t distract me. In fact, I think it enhances the writing.

Compare that with editing. When editing, I have never found myself in a flow state. If I have any sound around me while I’m editing, I get too distracted to focus on the work. Without focus, the edits are useless. Now, there are many types of editing, and the process for each type probably varies for each writer. I know it does for me.

Let me explain the various stages of editing and how I approach it.

Second Draft

I know what I’m getting into with the second draft. I’m going to find all of the easy-to-spot plot holes, all the simple grammatical errors. I’m going to find underdeveloped characters and forced dialogue.

That said, I’m probably not going to be making huge structural changes in this draft. So, I will create a new document, paste in the entire contents of my first draft, and I will read and edit as I go. If I spot something on page 200 that doesn’t make sense because of something I wrote on page 20, I’ll go back to page 20 and adjust in the moment.

I do this until I have patched over the obvious plot holes and caught most of the grammatical issues. I will have cleaned up a good chunk of dialogue but the characters will still probably need some developing.

As a quick aside, I create a whole new document because even with version history on documents, I like to have a distinct file copy of each draft I write. It’s like my own personal historical record.

Third Draft

This is where things get interesting and I might deviate from what a lot of writers do (tell me if I’m wrong!). The third draft is all about plot and character development. There will still be cleanup work, but this draft needs to be about the larger picture.

To accomplish this, I once again create a new file for this draft. However, instead of copying the second draft in, I open the second draft side-by-side with this blank third draft. And I write the third draft from scratch.

I type out the same lines from the second draft until I feel like something could be better or cut or adjusted in some way. Sometimes this means I rewrite entire scenes. Sometimes it means I create entirely new characters as I write. And sometimes, though more rare for me because of my writing style, it means massive cuts.

By typing the entire manuscript out again in this draft, I feel connected to the characters and the plot in a way that I am able to shape them into a much more publication-ready state.

It takes a long time to edit this way.

All Other Drafts

For everything after the third draft, I edit inline. I create one final draft file and copy the contents from the third draft in. I then start normal line edits and will adjust characters and plot points as I go. I will occasionally add in this draft, but it’s really about cutting or changing more than adding.

These drafts are the ones where I am also editing based on reader feedback. I don’t send my manuscript out until the third draft is complete. Then, when I get beta feedback, I will act on the feedback I agree with in these drafts.

How many drafts is “all other drafts”? I never know. It might be one more, but probably not. It could be many more. The key is making sure the story works and the characters feel real. It’s all about making sure you are putting the best possible work out there regardless of whether you will be self-publishing or querying an agent or submitting your fifth book to a traditional publisher.

What about you?

I’d love to hear how other writers approach the editing process. Please share in the comments. And as always, if you like my articles, I hope you’ll subscribe.

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Home is comfortable. It’s inviting and familiar and powerful. It amplifies your voice as you write because you know it. Because it’s home.

It’s also a trap.

When setting a story, choosing somewhere you know well makes a ton of sense. What better way to ensure the right amount of verisimilitude? What other way to convince the reader that they are not reading a book or story, but experiencing it? What you can feel and hear and taste in your mind because of your familiarity with the place becomes what the reader can feel and hear and taste. But what happens when your own preconceived notions and deep-set stereotypes about a place seep into your writing? They pass on to your readers. These negative (whether obvious or subtle) suggestions made in passing — because it’s your home and you know it and you don’t recognize the stereotype when it’s right in front of you — spread like a disease.

That’s the trouble for a writer who sets a story in an intimately familiar place. The writer is lazier with that place than they would otherwise be. Sounds counterintuitive, I know. But hear me out. You’re writing an epic fantasy in which the setting is, of course, completely fictional. You research places around the world. You research customs. You pick and choose and carefully construct your world. In doing so, you (hopefully) avoid tired tropes and stereotypes. But, let’s assume you’re writing something based in your hometown, a place where you might still live. Do you do the same amount of research? Do you take the same precautions you otherwise would when setting your story somewhere unfamiliar?

In most cases, the answer is probably no.

David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go and The Weight of This World, has been vocal in his disapproval of how some of the writers from Appalachia (Joy being an Appalachian writer himself) misrepresent the people. He is a staunch critic of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and how it portrays people, saying Vance is not their voice.

While Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir, the same issues surrounding the (potential) misrepresentation of a place apply to fiction.

But there are ways to combat this. After all, writing about your home provides you with a certain level of access in your fiction. It allows you to take parts of you — and your home undoubtedly is a part of you — and extend them to your story. So, you should write where you know because writing where you know allows you to extend yourself beyond the limitation of writing “what you know.” Here are three ways to continue writing where you know without falling into the trap of self-perpetuation of stereotype.

Research the Hell Out of Your Home

I spent most of my life living in Southern Arizona, dodging cacti and rattlesnakes in the Sonoran Desert. And while much of my fiction takes place there, I still research. I read interviews and old newspaper articles. I talk to friends. I read much of what the Arizona Historical Society makes available. It’s all useful. In a region with centuries of Native American history, Mexican and Spanish history, and a history of violence on both sides of the border that runs right through the desert, it’s beyond important to make sure the voice I put out in the world is one I am comfortable with, one that I think represents the people I grew up with as best it can.

So, queue up the old Google machine. Start there, and read anything you can on your hometown (or the place you’re writing about that is intimate to you). Here are some resources to help:

Newspapers.com
Not a free service, but if you’re a writer of any kind, it’s worth the cost. With its powerful search features and enormous archives, you’ll be able to cover your historical research at the same time you’re making sure you don’t slip into stereotypical representations of your setting.

Twitter
Yes, that Twitter. The one that sucks and is awesome and is degrading and is uplifting all at the same time. Use Twitter to connect with people in your region of choice that you don’t already know. Talk to them. Watch the way they interact. Build relationships even if you think you have enough friends from your hometown.

Local Historical Society
Don’t underestimate how willing (and happy) to help the local historical society will be. They want their locales portrayed as accurately as you do. So search their website, check out their book recommendations, email them. They will help you make sure you understand your setting as well as you think you do.

Share Early Drafts With Others From That Place

This is where your friends come in handy. When you share a draft of your story or novel, don’t ask your friends from home for feedback on the story. In all likelihood, they will just tell you, “it’s good.” Or, if they’re like my friends, they’ll just say, “yep, those are words.” Instead, you want to be asking folks from your hometown to check you on the way you show their place. The way you portray their home may feel different to them than it does to you when that place is locked up inside your head.

Read Widely

Cliché alert. But seriously, do it. Read outside of your chosen genre. Read authors with backgrounds that are different from your own. Read books and stories from people of color, from women, from those in the LGBTQ+ community.

Then read some more.

It’s not just about reading works set in the same location as your own, it’s about understanding the way another author uses their voice to convey a place. Read with a critical eye, because as you read widely, you will come across authors who are clearly injecting their own preconceived notions and stereotypes into their works and propelling that out into the world. Understanding what not to do when you see it is just as important as understanding what to do.

So just read.

When I was getting my MFA, professors and advisors seemed to look down on the idea of writing under a pen name. Without a good reason, a pen name could do more harm than good. And this makes sense. Why give away your personal brand to a name that isn’t yours? Why build from scratch when you have your entire life to build from with your actual name?

I published my debut collection of short stories in 2020. Not the best timing with COVID lockdowns and no book events to be found. But it was an incredible moment when my publisher sent me advanced copies of the book and when sales started coming in. The book and, maybe more importantly long term, the author were virtually invisible online. Unless you were going directly to the book on Amazon or some other bookstore, you weren’t going to find it on Google by searching my name.

Why? My name is common, but not as common as others. Unfortunately (for me and my author SEO potential) I share the name with a famous NFL player. Who do you think wins the SEO battle between a newish author and an established football player?

For a few years, I didn’t worry about it. It didn’t seem to matter much until I started thinking about completing my debut novel and looking for representation. Your job as a writer is not just to write. Your job is to also build an audience. It’s also to sell. You have to apply what I call horizontal focus and do everything. If you get an agent and have the backing of a large publisher, they are going to help with marketing, but you put yourself in a better position if you can do some of the marketing lift yourself. With that in mind, my name started to matter a little more.

Whether it’s ego or some sort of narcissistic desire to see my last name in print, I didn’t want to generate a completely new pen name. I just wanted to distance myself from the NFL player if people Googled my name. Fortunately, I have been reading J. Todd Scott for a number of years and even got to meet him at a writer’s meet-up in Dallas once. His name inspired me. I could keep all the elements of my name without being confused with the football player.

My pen name, if you can even call it that, would be J. Edward Hunter.

It works for a number of reasons. First, it sounds literary. Thanks, Dad, for passing that middle name down. Second, my parents and my friends always called me J in high school and many still do now. And third, none of it is made up. It’s my name in a different format.

Oh, and as a bonus, the domain was available.

As authors, we have to walk the line between creativity and promotion. And part of the promotional aspect of the work is to make sure we’re thinking about everything from our social profiles to our names. Pen names don’t always make sense, and if you can write under your own name, you should. But don’t be afraid to play around with it a bit if it’ll help you market yourself.

Marketing isn’t a dirty word. It’s a necessity. So, play the name game if you need to.

As a writer, focus has always meant getting words on the page. However, I realize focus has to be a horizontally applied discipline. Writing is a big part of the process, but building an audience of people who love your writing is another part. Marketing is every bit as important as developing characters and scenes.

In the past, I have tried to apply a focus vertically. That is to say I would focus on writing, then focus on marketing, then focus on craft essays. This resulted in a fragmentation that was hard to follow and reduced the potential benefits. With a horizontal focus, you do many things at once. Some people call this multi-tasking, but that’s a bad word, so let’s stick to horizontal focus.

I've learned this process over the years through my day job where I have to balance the creative process of bringing digital products to life with the practical process of making sure people know about those products.

As an author, this works very similarly, but the audience is varied. Agents and publishers want to see that you can share your work. Any amount of marketing assistance for your work is a net positive, so applying a bit of focus to generating interest is going to go a long way. It may be the difference between landing your first agent or not. It may be the difference between your agent selling your book or not. It may not matter at all. But it's worth the effort.

Here, you see that focus come to fruition. I will be sharing my process, my thoughts on writing, and so much more. I hope you'll follow along. Subscribe so you never miss a post.