SHALLA CHATS with Jonathan James

“Agenting Short-Story Collections”

by Shalla DeGuzman

First off, who’s Jonathan?

Jonathan James, M.A., Ph.D., literary agent with over 20 years experience of editing, teaching, and publishing, of the James Literary Agency of Chicago, Denver, and New York, seeks queries regarding new works of quality literary fiction (no genres) and short-story collections from both established and
emerging authors.

Since 1997 we've represented clients' work to commercial mainstream, academic, and small presses both in the United States and internationally. Please do not send any synopses, sample chapters, or partials until we've asked. Query via e-mail only.

No reading fees, 15%D, 20%I, no editing or other pre-sale fees.

Recent Sales: Books due out in 2008:
How They Met, and other stories, David Levithan, Knopf It Was Like My Trying To Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, Diane Williams, FC2. The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America, Daniel Brinks, Cambridge UP

I ’m negotiating other deals with several independent presses as well.

Shalla: Hello Jonathan, how are you? Thanks so much for joining us.

Jonathan: Thanks for having me, Shalla. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Shalla: Please tell us about your most recent sales. Any short-story collections among them?

Jonathan: Yes, I’ve actually placed a couple of collections over the last year, one to a mainstream house, and one or two with independents.

Shalla: How would you define literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction?

Jonathan: Literary fiction is the absence of genre. I’ve always felt that genre is more a reflection of the writer than it is of the work. When I hear aspiring writers ask questions about what genre their work falls into, that makes me think they either haven’t been reading, haven’t been reading enough, or haven’t been paying attention.

A literary novelist writes literary novels, whether they take place in the present or a hundred years ago or an imagined post-apocalyptic world. If a writer has adopted the conventions of a genre, he or she is writing in that genre, regardless of who the characters are or where or when the story takes place.

I don’t like formulaic work. I don’t like work that deems itself the next Harry Potter by aspiring writers who deem themselves the next Tolkien. (I could live without both Potter and Tolkien, to be perfectly honest.)

Those who query me about the next bestseller they imagine they’ve written or how much potential said manuscript has to become a blockbuster film, these are people I don’t want to bother with, because they’re not writing or thinking about literary fiction. (And if they claim the opposite, they just don’t understand what literary fiction is.)

Shalla: How do you judge a short-story collection? What kind of short-stories do you like?

Jonathan: I judge a collection like I would a novel, I think. A novel-in-stories is a collection that I (a) prefer to read and (b) have easier time selling to an editor. The fact that the collections that are selling by first-timers are, for the most part, interconnected stories, comes as a disappointment to most new writers, but there you go.

Fitzgerald said that if we were lucky, we had one or two stories to tell and spent the rest of our writing lives retelling those stories, so it shouldn’t be such a bummer to these writers. (They just need to be a little self-aware and see that having one or two fully developed POV characters makes them look a lot more skillful than eight or nine poorly developed ones, with seven having only slight variations.)

I like literary stories. I don’t read sci-fi, or fantasy, or romance, or detective, or anything formulaic. Formula bores me. Diasporic or humorous stories are in vogue right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m as drawn to them as everyone else is.

I’m still impressed by those stories that explore a component of postmodernism, that are formally innovative, can either go horribly right or horribly wrong. The best stories are the ones that leave a lasting impression, that are and aren’t like everything else I’ve seen before, and that aren’t so caught up in trying to sound smart and writerly that they lose sight of what they’re out to accomplish in the first place.

Shalla: Do you look for authors through reading literary journals, literary reviews and magazines? If you do, which ones?

Jonathan: To a certain extent, yeah. I think it’s important to know who is out there writing what, who’s publishing what, what’s going on in the industry. Everyone needs to know this stuff. Not just agents.

It never ceases to surprise me when I get query letters that tell me the writer has no knowledge of the current trends. A lot of students of writing only read stories in The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly (which has pretty much entirely phased out its fiction) or the well-known little magazines (that’s the term that used to be used for literary journals) like Paris Review or Granta or Ploughshares. Yeah, those places are publishing the best of the best, etc., etc., but to me it’s akin to only going to see the latest Will Ferrell comedy or Mission Impossible VII.

You have to read other less talked about work in addition. The internet is a good place for a lot of really interesting, groundbreaking fiction that either just isn’t print friendly or maybe just doesn’t have enough mass-market (and I mean that with a small m) appeal.

Shalla: Let’s say, you’re reading a terrific magazine and you find a short fiction on there that is just amazing.

Would you: a.) contact its author and see if, together, you could create an attractive short-story collection to sell to a publisher Or b.) contact its author and ask for more samples of work before you consider signing with him/her Or c.) none of the above

Jonathan: If I read a story in a magazine by a writer who has even only a few publishing credits, chances are he or she already has a collection.

The majority of so-called first-time novelists are actually getting novel number two or three published. Aspiring writers don’t know this, think that someone sat down at a computer and in six months out came this amazing book that immediately got snapped up by Scribner’s and released in hardcover a week later.

More likely what happened was that the writer wrote a number of short stories, some working better than others, attempted to pitch this as a “collection,” found that there was nothing linking the stories other than the fact that the same writer wrote them, threw that in a drawer, began working on book one, spent a year with that, sent it around, had no luck, threw that in a drawer, began book two, halfway through revising began sending some of the stories from the collection out, got one picked up, continued revising book two, got some promising leads, but no takers, etc., etc., etc., until book three or four finally gets published, but only after about 3 years and 5 or 6 serious (i.e., not just running spellcheck) overhaul revision drafts. Glamorous, isn’t it?

Maybe, at that point, the writer has realized that the best way to sell the collection is to heighten the similarities and overlapping between the stories instead of trying to squelch it, and then perhaps—and this is on the assumption that the first published novel wasn’t a total bomb—we can pitch it as a novel-in-stories. Maybe it gets picked up, more likely by an enthusiastic independent press who really likes the writer’s work than the first mainstream house, and so, there it is.

Shalla: Lastly, do you have any tips for authors on how to put together a good collection of short-stories? Any books they should read? Any workshops they should attend?

Jonathan: Focus on the stories. Don’t think about your work as “preparing a collection.” Write twenty good stories and see if the ten best could be linked together as a sequence.

Now, granted, not every book of short fiction published today is as I’ve described. There are many good collections of work that don’t feature the same POV character and would be pretty hard to describe as a novel (yet people still will try to, trust me). What you’ll find these books are doing, though, is maybe following two POV characters through a linear sequence of events, much like a novel would. Again, this raises the question of what is the difference between a story collection and a novel. And I’d say that’s as easy to answer as what’s the difference between creative non-fiction and fiction that is heavily imbued with “autobiographical elements,” or any literary fiction for that matter.

The answer I like the best is that there is no difference and each book should be read and dealt with on its own terms. But of course we need context for everything, so the questions will present themselves no matter what.

Books to read would be every good collection that could pass for a novel (or every good novel that could pass for a collection of stories).

Over the last decade we’ve seen Junot Diaz’s Drown, Matt Klam’s Sam the Cat, Jami Attenberg’s Instant Love, Elizabeth Crane’s When the Messenger is Hot, Thomas Beller’s Seduction Theory and, more apropos of this discussion, The Sleep-Over Artist, Erika Krouse’s Come Up and See Me Sometime, Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which I have to admit I have not yet read, but I wouldn’t doubt that it deals with a lot of this stuff. These are all examples of collections being published and read today, and so they’re worth studying on that basis alone.
The collected tales of Hawthorne and Poe and Bret Harte are important, no doubt, but learning what makes those tick will almost certainly work against someone trying to write and sell in today’s marketplace.

I don’t advocate attending workshops—they tend to focus on a lot of the wrong things—but I do recommend anybody serious about learning how to write to join a college-level writing workshop, either at a local university or community college, or, in the absence of that, a writing group. These are often advertised on the internet, at community centers, public libraries, and sometimes on bookstore bulletin boards. Often they take place at cafes or libraries or bookstores or in people’s living rooms.

Writing is not a spectator sport. Sitting and listening to theories about writing or reading and writing in a vacuum ain’t going to do much for you. You need to get out there and get feedback—honest feedback, which, yes, at times, is going to be brutal, but, again, you’re there to learn, not to be patted on the head and told how great you are and what a genius you are.

Publishing isn’t a nice business. It isn’t about hand-holding. If your mother likes your story, it’s not going to matter much unless she’s guest editing Ploughshares that month. (And even then, it’s probably not going to help you all that much, since chances are your story already got rejected by the Emerson College undergrad intern who read it first.)

Reading, first and foremost, is how you learn to write. Reading, and thinking about what works and why. Learning what makes beautiful sentences beautiful. Building an aesthetic. And to do that, one must have an arsenal of books, ideas, sentences, characters, words, and the rest behind her.

Shalla: Thanks for being brutally honest with us Jon, we will certainly be reading and learning and reading some more. By the way, before we go, would you like to add any encouraging words for writers?

Jonathan: I think the easiest and the hardest thing to do for a writer to do is to just ignore the so-called business of writing and just focus on learning how to write. And learning how to write is an on-going process. It's not easy, it's frustrating, and there are no guarantees of success--and I'm not just talking about publication--but if that means nothing to you, if you're determined to push forth despite the odds against you, chances are, you really were meant to write. And if it's something you're meant to do, nothing else matters.

Shalla: Thanks for sharing your expertise, Jonathan! For more on Jonathan James and the James Literary Agency, Inc. please email him at: jameslit11@hotmail.com

Shalla DeGuzman's short stories have appeared in Poetic Diversity, the Mosaic Literary Journal, the Mad Hatters Review; her articles in The Scriptorium and L.A. Freepress; her skits at the Stella Adler Theatre. Shalla, a former writer and producer of a health and fitness cable show, is currently writing a new novel. She is President of The ShallaDeGuzman Writers Group; the Senior Editor of SHALLA Magazine where she interviews literary agents, publishers, editors, and authors; and the Publisher for SHALLA Publishing. News! Shalla has been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. SHALLA Magazine, which features short stories and excerpts from top, award-winning writers, now sold at www.amazon.com! For more on Shalla: www.shalladeguzman.com