The Setup: Agent Feedback

There’s an interesting resource known as The Manuscript Academy that offered a Submission
Strategy workshop a few months ago. I posted some thoughts about having attended that,
including some of the ‘lessons learned’ in my first newsletter.’
Another service this group offers is project review and feedback from an agent or editor (or as
many as you’d like) on their ‘faculty’. So, I submitted the first ten pages of TANGLED
DARKNESS to an agent looking for new psychological thrillers early in the year. It did take
several weeks, but the response was very detailed and helpful. The questions posed were
thoughtful and balanced.
Looking back, I think the most interesting and useful comments were these:
“I found that there were opportunities to further establish ‘baseline’ exposition for the plot, so
that when Leslie [the protagonist] is thinking ‘hey, maybe I’ve been reading this wrong’ we can
appreciate the little details of how she previously thought all the office dynamics worked…
Establishing those baselines in the pages is for me the major editing challenge. There are many
characters in the office, so having a clear understanding of how we should think and feel about
Leslie’s workplace before we start learning the nuance allows us to follow along for the ride…”
The agent’s message was clear — I could improve on the setup. I’d been writing the opening
thinking that ‘exposition’ had little to no place in the beginning of the book, at least in my genre.
But I came to look at the book’s beginning through the lens of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I
needed to get just the right amount of exposition on major characters in the beginning to
establish a baseline. But not so much as to divert from the story moving forward.
Hopefully, I’ve stuck a good balance and will be back at the querying journey soon. But also,
this lesson is currently helping me think through the beginning of my next story. Really working
on getting the porridge just right.