Lest They Be Forgotten

A Writer's Life in Three Minutes

(This is a true story: my quest to find a literary agent several years ago. Another cautionary tale for those looking for the short cut to success. I have since found a literary agent, but the road was long. First published in the anthology Tough Times - Black Moss Press, in 2010)

A Writer’s Life in Three Minutes

 I once attended a writers’ conference in San Francisco where authors were given an opportunity to speed-date with literary agents. Each author had three minutes to make his pitch. At first, I thought that this exercise was trivializing the novel I had worked on for six years—how dare they ask me to boil it down to three minutes? My indignation was compounded when the agents informed the authors that they in turn had only 30 seconds to pitch the chosen manuscripts to their publishers before final selections were made.

I was surprised at how packed this conference was: 400 writers—make that, wannabe writers. Stock markets around the world had imploded, but there was no recession inside here; as unemployment lines climbed the hills of this beautiful city, amateur writers (perhaps some of them were from those very lines outside) had shown up in force at the conference centre, in the hope of landing that dream contract and living forever after isolated from the dullards of society, with royalty cheques and celebrity-appearance invitations pouring in. And I had thought that Canada was the only country inhabited with more writers than readers!

I practised my pitch in my lonely hotel room, and however hard I tried, I was still running well over ten minutes. After all, I had to tell them how much I had sweated, how many rejection slips I had earned, show them the scars. They had to feel my pain, before I told them what my book was all about. And then I had to launch into all the juicy bits of my novel... Three minutes? Duh!

On the big day, I humbly stood in line behind my fellow scribblers, feeling as if I was going to the gallows. There were about ten different lines snaking about the room, each destined for a literary agent. Some agents looked bored, others were trying to focus above the nervous chatter, and others seemed genuinely interested in finding a needle in this haystack of dreams about to land on them. I had my script prepared—I had reluctantly cut it down to three minutes, feeling that my best bytes had been sacrificed, like I had given up my wife, first born and dog all in a fell swoop of my editing pen. Three minutes!

When my turn came, I did all the wrong things, naturally. I made no eye contact, did not relax, I just stuck to my script and rattled away. There were only three minutes, damn it—I was not going to waste them on chit chat. I knew I had blown it when the bell rang, even though the kindly agent asked me to send in a sample of my work. I thought she was being polite.

Before I got to the next table, I re-grouped. This was not how I had planned things. What was the agent buying? Me—that was all I had to sell! The novel was incidental; it had come out of a complex set of fears, imagination, ambition and experience called “Me, Inc.” That was what I was selling. I threw out my script. Blast it, I had worked on this novel for six years, I should be able to talk it through back to front. I took a sip of water from my bottle and sat down in front of the next agent. I was beaming with revelation.

I saw three other agents during the remainder of that session, and my performance only improved each time. I opened myself up for them to see Me, Inc: what I had written, and why, and what new contribution I had to make to the literary canon already out in the universe. And surely, I told myself and them, if I hadn’t made a contribution, then I did not deserve to be there. Every three-minute stint thereafter, was sacred. I blotted out the outside noise, reaching into myself, facing my Maker as it were, and rendered an account of what the years in my life had produced. Place, protagonist and problem: that’s all that mattered and I stuck to them. In three minutes! I felt good.

Those three agents also asked me to submit sample material in the end. I felt that the three minute segments were the best ones that I have experienced in my life as a writer. Yes, it is possible to distil a life down to three minutes, I realized, just as it is possible to blow it out into a five hundred page novel or a five thousand word short story—that demonstrates the skill, and is the job, of the writer.

It’s been a long time since I returned from that conference. Some agents responded, “....unfortunately, we are unable...” Others did not bother. And I am hoping that all of them do not reply, because I can then cling to the hope that somewhere out there, someone is still reading my material. Hope is a nice thing to preserve. And in the meantime, I practice distilling my ideas down to their essence—that is what the writers’ conference really taught me.