Robin McKinley Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Will you read my manuscript?
RMcK: No, I'm afraid not. There are at least two reasons for this. First, I don't have time, and second, my opinion is of no practical value to you. If your story or book is good enough that you should be sending it out to strangers to read, the strangers that should be reading it are agents and editors and other professional publishing house readers. If it's not good enough you should keep working on it, or write something else to continue the learning process from another angle, or burden friends and family with requests for input — people who love you will put themselves out for you, and can be of very great service to you, but try not to abuse the privilege — or join a writing group (if there isn't one that suits you, start one of your own) where everyone reads and reacts to everyone else's work.
Once it is good enough, don't waste time with people who aren't connected to the practical side of publishing. You want to get into print, don't you? Or why else would you want me to read your story? But I'm not an editor or an agent. What I think doesn't matter a bean — and I have no particular sense of what is 'commercial', either, so something I liked a lot might be impossible to sell and something I loathed might run a million copies. Publishing is, yes, a business, and commercial may be a dirty word, but it's a dirty word about the bottom line: an agent can't afford to take you on and an editor can't afford to offer you a contract if they don't think you're going to earn them money. If you run through all the big houses and find you have a large handful of letters saying 'beautifully written, can't sell it', try the little presses. (You find lists of both, plus agents and agencies, with descriptions of what they publish and what they are looking for, in annual books like Writers Market and a variety of magazines — ask at your library, or, if you can't bear to ask, poke around in the reference section yourself.) Meanwhile, write something else, and try not to think about it. If your little darling comes home yet again, get the list which you have already made of who you're sending it to out of the bottom drawer with the envelopes and the address labels you also have ready, take it out of its old envelope, put it into its new one (with the SASE and a fresh copy of your cover letter, and if the first few pages of the ms are beginning to look a little draggled, reprint them too) . . . and send it out again. Do not think about it. Thinking about it will only depress you, which is counterproductive. Agents and editors have finely tuned antennae for what will sell, but they're not perfect, and their opinions are still subjective and individual. What you're looking for is a subjective and individual opinion that matches what you've written. So if you think your manuscript is good, keep sending it out. But go on writing something else. Breaking into print is an enormous, glorious, intoxicating triumph, but the only, the only thing that makes you a writer, is writing.
And by the way, it is a myth that you have to 'know somebody' to get read by a professional. It's true that if you write a cover letter saying that you're Robin McKinley's best and oldest friend and send it with your book to her agent, her assistant will pass it on to her instead of reading it herself (this wouldn't actually do you any good, by the way, because my agent is one of my best and oldest friends, and she'd ask me about you, puzzled that she'd never heard of you, and I'd say, Who?); but agents' assistants are professionals too, and they only reject things they know their bosses won't want. And what their bosses don't want does not necessarily rest on literary merit. Aside from that dreaded word commercial again, an agent who specialises in literary fiction, for example, won't want to take on a naval historian; and a publishing house that only accepts outlines and sample chapters will send a complete ms back to you unlooked at. You also have to be careful about multiple submissions. Some houses and agencies accept them and some don't. (This is why you read the descriptions in Writers Market, and tailor your list of possibles and what you send to each of them accordingly.)
And if you ever need to cheer yourself up by remembering that acquisition editors can be really seriously stupid, look at what one of them wrote to Ursula K. Le Guin
So get on with it and good luck.
Q: If you weren't a writer what would you be? Have you ever wanted to be anything other than a writer?
RMcK: I would have liked to be a veterinarian but I would never have passed the exams so it's just as well I didn't get very far with that one. I had a brief romance with the idea of training to be a veterinary assistant not so many years ago as a way of getting myself out of the house and hanging around with animals more, but I married Peter and moved to England instead. The problem with being a vet or a vet's aide, of course, is that the animals generally dread you; you're going to do something awful to them and it will probably hurt. Probably you have to have a stronger character than mine to be upheld by the knowledge that you're doing them good after the twelfth dog in a row has cowered in a corner away from you and howled, or the twelfth horse in a row has tried to step on you or mash you against the wall of the stall, or the twelfth cat in a row has hissed a 'repel all ogres' hiss at you and shot out several inches of glittering claws. So now I garden and ring bells. See above. I don't know of any way to earn a living as a bell ringer but when the writing is going badly I threaten to throw it over and become a jobbing gardener. Since I am miserable gardening in soggy cheerless English winter (January rain is a brute) this does not have quite the force of conviction it might, probably on a par with what I used to threaten when I still lived in the States, to throw the writing over and become a long-distance truck driver.
I might have stayed at least at the outskirts of the horse industry for longer if my experience of being barn manager at a horse farm hadn't been so traumatic. I'd been hired originally as assistant to the current barn manager who then got pregnant to escape, and I was promoted because I was there. By a year later my doctor was telling me I had an ulcer in my near future and was I under any particular stress at work?, and I decided to get out before I cracked any further. I loved and love horses, but I'm not especially gifted with them — and horse people, by and large, drive me crazy, although another of my dearest friends is the woman who first gave me dressage lessons and thus proved to me (after many years of sitting on a horse) that I could learn to ride.
I might have made a half-decent editor. I worked on the Other Side of publishing off and on for a number of years; the problem I found with even lower level editorial work is that it ate up my writing energy. I know there are people who have fabulous day jobs — including editorial directorships and other dizzy literary heights — and come home and write great novels in the evenings and weekends but they're the turbo-charged model with overdrive. I'm a moped.
Really it doesn't bear thinking about what I would have ended up doing if I hadn't been a storyteller. I hope if I hadn't been a storyteller that enormous piece of my mind and heart that contains the story telling would have been occupied by some other plausible career option instead.
Q: When are you going to write another Damar book?
RMcK: I have no idea. It isn't up to me, it's up to the story.
This one makes me tear my hair out rather, and it may be the second most common question I hear, after Where do you get your ideas? — and the answer is just as unsatisfactory. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that people who aren't writers don't understand how out of conscious control the writing process is but I get this question occasionally from other writers too which really makes me feel like I've taken a wrong turning somewhere and wound up on another planet where creativity is better organised.
There's some personal input on the long Damarian silence. The first Damarian novel was a Newbery Honor Book and the second one won the Medal itself, which is a big deal in the American Library Association world, and it was American librarians who accounted for 80% or more of my hardback sales. At the age, then, of thirty-two, three novels and four books into what I hoped was a long productive career, I was getting the worst, most hair-tearing question of all: So, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? I was not a very self-confident thirty-two-year-old, and it still seemed to me there was some kind of accident involved in my writing books at all: lightning had now struck three (or four) times, I was well over the line of probability, and What are you going to do with the rest of your life clearly indicated that the only place to go from here was down. I'd also had a well meaning editor tell me that it was naïve if not arrogant for a writer to think that the reading public was going to go on wanting to read her books — each author tends to have a very individual voice, after all, and to remain interested in many of the same themes and ideas, even if said author is clever enough to set the plot on Guam one novel and in Kalamazoo the next. The reading public will catch on, and say, Oh, no, not the meaning of life again?, and head for the video hire store. This conversation still haunts me.
At the same time, my stories are used to having to batter their way out through frenziedly inventive psychological obstacle courses — my fears and neuroses are resourceful little monsters. So I believe there's more going on with the absence of the next Damar novel than just that I have a few screws loose. This comforts me, by the way, and I'm much harder on myself about everything than anyone else could ever be, so I can use a little alleviation of guilt.
It's also not that I haven't tried. The half million seriously out of control words referred to in the essay on how Rose Daughter got written are the next Damar novel, or rather, I think, the next three Damar novels. When I realised I had more than one novel on my hands (although I did like the idea of vaulting over the aggrieved fantasy trilogy question in one swell foop: Damar has never been a trilogy, even back in pre-Sword days; it is and has always been a Series of Indefinite Length) I panicked. I fumbled finishing off the first one and when I sent it to my editor she turned it down. That manuscript, with a lot of drafts of what comes after, is still sitting in a couple of boxes on the bottom shelf of my desk. The thing is I can't keep three novels' worth of stuff in my head all at once. I might be able to hammer it down to two, but it's definitely more than one book, and the bones of my skull start smoking at the prospect. When I was first trying to write any of Damar at all — fragments of those first attempts appear briefly in Aerin's visions at the end of Hero, after she falls through the ruin of Agsded's tower (and by the way, the God That Climbs and Falls is not a reference to Damarian religion, it's a joke) — I felt overwhelmed by the amount of Story there was to divide up somehow into individual stories that I might be able to write down, since for some reason I seemed to have been elected Damar's historian. Well, perhaps this is Stage Two of the dividing up and sorting-out process.
I also take great — arduous, exhausting — pleasure in retelling folk and fairy tales. What I've been doing with myself since Hero is, to me, time and blood and effort well spent (although I do wish I wrote a little faster). In my hierarchy Damar isn't the ultimate summit; there are other mountains around.
But the bottom line is, it isn't my choice. You don't write stories like you might build a bookcase. You don't get up in the morning, decide that you're going to put seven chapters together to make a novel, whip out your tape measure and decide how many words, order the paper by the square foot from the office supply shop, sit down and start stamping the pages with black ink in a quantifiable pattern, and polish off the rough edges with a sander at the end. It's not up to you. You write what you are given to write, and you just go on hoping you will go on receiving those gifts. Damar hasn't seen fit to oblige me to write about it lately. Maybe the administration there is still cross about all the things I got wrong in Sword and Hero, or is fed up with my timidity over the box on my bottom shelf.
(PS: I enlisted a friend recently to help me think of snappy answers to When are you going to write the next Damar novel?, for the inevitable encounters, not to say collisions, at the next book convention I go to. My favourite is: I have. They all die. Her favourite is: I have. It's a series called Damar High School.)
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