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A common metaphor used in the writing community for those of us on the hunt for representation by a literary agent is that we are ‘in the trenches.’ I can see the appeal of this device and have even used it myself. The trenches of World War I seemed like an impossible-to-win and impossible-to-escape situation for the poor men trapped in that years-long stalemate. Sending out endless queries about your novel to overworked and overwhelmed agents has a distinctly similar vibe to it. An agent can easily get hundreds of queries each month, thousands by the year, and of those they might sign up as new clients less than a dozen. I can see how that feels, from the author’s perspective, like going ‘over the top’ and into ‘no man’s land’ to face mounted machine guns of which very few survive.

But lately, particularly with the passes I have been getting from agents, I wonder if such a violent and combative metaphor is the right one for the process. After all, we authors are not trying to take the ground from the agents, we are not trying to annihilate them as an enemy but hopefully find an artistic partnership that can grow and flower for years and years to come. Perhaps it is more akin to romance than warfare.

Instead of the corpse-littered fields of France and Belgium, this is the crowded discos and singles bars of the 1970s. The agents are like the single attractive women who have high hopes of finding that special person, that match that works on every level. Authors are the swarms of men, dressed as snappily as they are able, deploying their practiced ‘lines’ in hopes of gaining that look, that, as Dolly so eloquently put it in her song, ‘when a glance becomes a stare,’ desperate to find some way, some ‘trick’ that can make them stand out from all the hustlers vying for that woman’s attention.

And if that metaphor works, then we can see its applicability over the death and destruction of the battlefield. Between the firm rejection and the exploration of a relationship there is a netherworld derisively labeled ‘the friend-zone.’ Now, this metaphor should not be pressed too far or adhered to too devoutly. In relationships far, far too often men are seeking a simple sexual ‘conquest’ and are not seeking a partner to share life with. Such men, with their fragile and brittle egos bruised when rejected by a woman who has proclaimed that they see those men as ‘only friends’ or ‘like a brother,’ vanish, never seen again because all that they wanted was the physical and not the emotional. Writers seeking representation are very, very rarely seeking it for just one book and as such this metaphor breaks down in its analogy. Agents are not conquests but partners, and no one is looking for a ‘one-night stand.’

But it is not without some service and, in my opinion, some emotional value.

This has come to me because lately I have been getting a different style of ‘pass’ from some agents. In these emails and responses, the agents are making it clear that while they did not ‘fall in love’ with the submitted project, they know that someone out there will and encourage me to continue querying and submitting.

Oh, how this feels precisely parallel with ‘I like you as a friend, but there’s some girl out there who is perfect for you.’ This is the rejection I have felt many times before I was so fortunate to find the woman who became my sweetie-wife and the way these passes rhyme with those failed dates of yesteryear is powerful. It fits so much better and resonates so much more truthfully than a battlefield strewn with artillery craters flooded with water and bodies that lay nearly half a century before my time.

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When writers are in the process of submitting materials to agents, who are swarmed with submissions seeking representation, the writers will attempt to glean any hint at all of what was hidden in the pass or rejection sent by the agent. Because the agents are terribly overworked with those submissions, it is the rare pass that is actually composed by the agent with the vast, vast majority being form letters that are dispatched. It is on those form letters that writers engage in the black art of rejectomancy, the usually vain attempt to discern information that is in all actuality not really there.

Many, but certainly not all, agents actually possess a tiered system of form letter passes and while each agent has their own determination of their tiers and how those progress, and very few publish this information. The existence of these levels and what information that they might possibly contain is the rejectomancer’s true goal.

Because I have more than a decade’s worth of emails from agents passing on numerous projects, it occurred to me that I had a resource that might be worth investigating. Recently I have been noticing an increasing use of the ‘subjective’ in the passes coming back to me, a word that I did not really have a strong memory of being used a lot in the past. Now, this business of publishing is very subjective, hence the nearly endless stories of fantastically successful novels having collected a large number of rejections before finding publication and fame. (Dune, passed on by all the SF publishers, was actually acquired and published by a house that did auto repair manuals.)

Were more and more agents passing while encouraging me to keep trying because this business was ‘subjective’ a real trend, or something my mind was just noticing but had always been there?

Well, there were far too many emails to go through manually and I never learned to code, but now there was Claude. So, with help from that A.I. agent, I created files of all those emails and scrubbed them for the word ‘subjective’.

Yup, it was a very real trend, one that has become quite clear in the last few years. Does that information produce any actionable plans? Hell no. And right there is the trap of rejectomancy: you think you are learning things, but you are not. What you are doing, and it may not be entirely without merit, is providing a balm to the wounded ego. It doesn’t tell you why their subjective opinion yielded the result that they feel that they are not the right agent for this project at this time. Perhaps it can give you that little bit of encouragement to keep at it, to keep submitting and to keep writing.

In the end that is the only thing in your control.