This past winter I wrote a pair of essays about The Brothers Karamazov that included the admission that I preferred “Tolstoy’s ability to see the angles of everyday life to Dostoevsky’s taste for the manic edges of experience.” That line elicited more of a reaction from readers than anything else I wrote, which prompted me to dive deeper into the question: Just which of these two titans of Russian literature is considered the greater novelist?
As it turned out, I was not the first to consider the provocation. The literary critic George Steiner has provided the most authoritative resolution to the problem with his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which positions Tolstoy as “the foremost heir to the tradition of the epic” and Dostoevsky as “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.” Isaiah Berlin considered the seemingly opposing qualities of the two authors in his enduring essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Nabokov argued in Lectures on Russian Literature that it was Tolstoy in a landslide, while America’s First Ladies have tended to give the nod to Dostoevsky: both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush cite The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite novel.
Still, I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I found online so I decided to get a second opinion — or rather, eight more opinions. I reached out to the foremost scholars of Russian literature as well as avid lay readers I know and asked if they’d be willing to contribute 500 words weighing the respective merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Almost everyone said yes, though a few echoed the sentiments of a distinguished emeritus professor who replied to me from a beach in Mexico, writing, “There really is no competition on Parnassus. From my point of view at least, they are both great writers and now live in a realm beyond competition.” And of course that’s true — just as it’s true that it is fun (and often illuminating) to debate Williams vs. DiMaggio and Bird vs. Magic even though at the end of the day we acknowledge that they’re all irreducibly great.
So with that, enjoy eight very knowledgeable, passionate takes on two of the great storytellers of all time. And when you’re done reading, please go ahead and share your own views in the comments section.
Carol Apollonio, Professor of the Practice of Russian, Duke University
The question shot straight into my brain and disabled the parietal cortex. There was a sizzle and a puff of smoke, and the smell of sulfur filled the air. I groped in the dark for a 50-kopeck piece and tossed it upwards. It clinked hollowly on the linoleum. The flickering light of the candle from above illuminated the tiny but unmistakable image of the double-headed eagle. Heads up: Dostoevsky, then.
His protagonist is the head: bait for smart people. The intellect sends forth an unending flow of words. YES! You’ve thought this exact same thing so many times! How can there be justice on earth if it comes at the cost of a child’s tear? How can God be all good and all powerful, yet allow suffering in the world? If God exists, then how can he allow ME to walk the earth, sick, sniveling, spiteful creature that I am, scrawny spawn of the most abstract and premeditated city on the earth? If God does not exist, though, how can I be a captain? Should I return my ticket? Read on! They give us the bread that we ourselves have made, and we accept it back from them in exchange for our freedom: cheap sorcery in place of miracle. I love mankind, but how can you expect me to love the stinking, jabbering drunk across the table, the loser who sold his own daughter into prostitution so he could sit here and drink? Prove that you exist, then! Move this mountain, and I will believe!
His protagonist is the head, but his hero is the heart. Logic and words will get you nowhere: the more talk, the less truth. Twice two is four, but twice two is five is a charming little thing too. A hug, now, a kiss, a fall to the earth, a leg over the iron railing of a cold St. Petersburg bridge, a pouring forth of tears, a pouring forth of blood, a turning pale, a fainting dead away, an issuing forth of the spirit of decay, a slamming of your own finger in the door, the plaintive sounds of a pipe-organ on the street, ragged orphans begging, the dying gasps of the overworked, bludgeoned horse, the barely detectable breathing of the doomed old woman on the other side of the closed door — you, YOU are the murderer — the clink of coins in the cup, the dizzying whirl of the roulette wheel, brain fever, a silhouette in the doorway, the noble young lady bowing down to the earth before you, YOU, you lustful worm! Shrieks, a rope, a gun, a slap on the cheek, and suddenly…
Suddenly an image appears in the darkness: a thin, timid girl in a green shawl, her face pale and drawn from illness. She smiles joyfully and stretches out her hand to me. I must go, for if I do not, I will keep on talking and will never stop….
Ellen Chances, Professor of Russian Literature, Princeton University
The question, in my mind, is meaningless. One of the worrisome tendencies of contemporary society is its impulse to rank. Who is better? Who is Number One? The question should not be, “Who is the greater novelist?,” but rather, “What do I learn from reading the books of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or of anyone else?
Why does everything have to be a race? Why does everything have to be competitive? This implies that there is a winner and a loser. Why does the reading of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or of anyone else have to be part of a “success” or “failure” story? Framing the question, “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: Who’s the better novelist?,” in this way does a disservice, it seems to me, to the act of contemplating the meaning of these writers’ books.
Asking the question is equivalent to asking, “Which is the greater food, milk or orange juice? Which is the greater food, blueberries or strawberries? Which is better, the sky or the grass, night or day?”
To me, both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are equally great writers. Each focused on some of the important “big questions” of life. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov, asked how a just God could have created a world that includes the suffering of innocent children. Tolstoy, through his character, Levin, in Anna Karenina, asked what the meaning of life is. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy asserted that the essence of life cannot be found by relying on the intellect alone. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy understood that being true to the authentic rhythms of life means respecting the non-linear nature of life.
Each of the two offers profound insights about psychology. Tolstoy emphasizes the ways in which people relate to one another in a societal context. Dostoevsky digs deeply into the individual human psyche. Tolstoy paints a world in which extreme things happen to ordinary people. Dostoevsky shows us the extremes of which people are capable. Each of the two writers describes crises in faith. Each describes the journey to a life of spiritual values.
Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy write in a way that conveys the energy of life. That energy comes about, in Dostoevsky, through the clash of ideas, through the tension he creates through suspense and the use of words like “suddenly.” Ivan Karamazov says that he loves life more than the meaning of life. Tolstoy shows a love of life of this world – the smell of the earth, the beauty of a flower. He speaks about living a life of authenticity.
Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy make me think about what is important in life. Both urge the reader to appreciate those things that money or competition cannot bestow – love, and life itself…
…So who is the greater writer, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are great…And then there is Chekhov, and Pushkin, and Mandelstam and Akhmatova and Bitov… And that’s just the Russians…
Raquel Chanto, Graduate Student, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
It is likely that these words express more about me than about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. I have long ago given up on the idea of objective appraisal of literature: reading is a much more mediated process than we would like to admit. All sorts of ghosts crawl into the pages, a prehistory of tastes and experiences and prejudices and fears. So if I say Dostoevsky is a greater writer than Tolstoy, I only mean he has been greater to me.
My first encounter with Russian literature was as random as can be expected for a twelve-year-old girl growing up in suburban Costa Rica. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky emerged like potatoes out of a giant plastic bag containing several books of ranging worth. I was lucky enough to be, at the time, very young, very curious and seriously uninformed. Unlike most people, I read War and Peace without having the faintest idea of the book’s reputation. Crime and Punishment followed shortly after, with the same scandalous lack of veneration. I loved them both: Tolstoy, for the story he told, and Dostoevsky, for the thoughts he provoked.
Many years and many books later, the two authors continue to inhabit different places in my mind and in my memory. Tolstoy conjures up images of endless steppes and elegant Petersburg homes, where great and complex characters go about the business of living. His books are showcases of literary craftsmanship, epic tales told with impeccable skill. Dostoevsky’s work is less precise, more ambiguous. I experience his books as a ceaseless battle of demons that never rest — not even as you turn the page, as you end a chapter, as you finish the novel and read it again. A Dostoevsky novel sitting on a shelf is a bowl of anxiety and confusion, a bundle of frustrations marked by a desperate need for redemption. His protagonists are shown in extreme situations, where not only their personality but their very nature is put to the test.
What I find mesmerizing in Dostoevsky is not just the details of the story, the particular twists and turns of the lives of Rodion Raskolnikov or Dmitri Karamazov; it is the mere possibility of their existence. It is, in the end, the mind-bending notion that we could be just like them — that any of us, any ordinary, simple human being, carries around the highest plane and the lowest point of moral capabilities. Tolstoy’s characters tell me a lot about themselves. Dostoevsky’s characters tell me a lot about myself. If that is not writing of the ultimate importance, I do not know what is.
Chris Huntington, author of the novel Mike Tyson Slept Here
Reading Tolstoy transports me to another world; reading Dostoevsky makes me feel alive in this one. As I’m reading Tolstoy, I’m drawn into a dream of serfs and country estates, endless royal titles and army ranks. So many beautiful horses! A loyal dog! Women like Kitty and Anna Karenina! But then I put the book down and I find myself using a coat hanger to get the hair out of the shower drain, and it doesn’t feel like the Battle of Austerlitz. It feels like my life again.
On the other hand, many times someone will frustrate me at work, and I hear these words from The Brothers Karamazov thundering in my head:
‘Why is such a man alive!’ Dmitri Fyodorovich growled in a muffled voice, now nearly beside himself with fury, somehow raising his shoulders peculiarly so that he looked almost hunchbacked. ‘No, tell me, can he be allowed to go on dishonoring the earth with himself?’
I say this kind of shit to myself all the time. It’s part of the fun of being alive.
As I lead my every day life (so unlike ice-skating in Moscow or cutting grain on my estates), just imagining that I resemble beautiful Levin is to invite self-ridicule. I like him more than he would like me. I’m not nearly as nice, nor as sincere. I find that I can openly admire Prince Myshkin, however, because in The Brothers Karamazov, I’m right there doing it. I’m Dmitri or Ivan, holding Alyosha’s hand. The message of the brothers is that we are all each other; we share each other’s passions. We suffer identically. We demonstrate things differently. I can be innocent and guilty both.
That, to me, is life.
Borges, I believe, said there was something adolescent about a love of Dostoevsky – that maturity demanded other writers. All I know is, when I first read Crime and Punishment, that book represented a lot of work for me. I didn’t get it! What did I have to feel so guilty about, at eighteen? I hadn’t DONE anything. I was frantic with potential energy. I would have been better off with War and Peace – because I had the temperament of Prince Andrei, ready to go to war. I was angry with myself and frustrated, but I had no major regrets. I certainly could never have understood Ivan Fyodorovich’s madness. I had just spent a summer drifting with a beautiful 17 year-old girl on Harrison Lake; if you’d asked me why Prince Myshkin pursued the troubled Nastassya or allowed the beautiful Aglaya to get away, I would have had no idea.
In adolescence, I was loyal with my friends, but also so fiercely uncompromising that I would never have endured a friend like Myshkin’s Rogozhin. That kind of bond would only come later for me, when I understood what it was like to tie myself to someone for life- when I understood what mutual forgiveness was. When I was in my early twenties, one of my friends drunkenly stabbed another. It wasn’t serious. One of my best friends asked me not to see a girl he’d broken up with. Instead, I married her. Later on, I lost her. I chased her in the snow, like Dmitri. I understand Dostoevsky now. What adolescent understands these things?
In any case, I realize that the “competition” between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is just an exercise in love. No one really has to choose one or the other. I simply prefer Dostoevsky. For my last argument, I will simply cite an expert far older and wiser than me:
Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again, and I do not know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin. It’s not the tone but the wonderful point of view – genuine, natural, and Christian. A splendid, instructive book. I enjoyed myself the whole day as I have not done for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.
-Leo Tolstoy in a letter to Strakhov, September 26, 1880
Andrew Kaufman, author of Understanding Tolstoy and Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Virginia
All mediocre novelists are alike; every great novelist is great in his own way. Which is why the choice between nineteenth-century Russia’s two supreme prose writers ultimately boils down to the question of which kind of greatness resonates with a particular reader. My own sympathies are with Tolstoy, and even my criteria for judging a work of fiction, I admit, are relentlessly Tolstoyan.
“The goal of the artist,” Tolstoy wrote, “is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.” By this standard Tolstoy’s novels succeed where Dostoevsky’s fall short.
True, Dostoevsky saw and felt modern experience in all of its isolating, tragic depth. He showed the obsessive power of ideas and the psychological crises, cracks, and explosions of the soul that have become familiar in our modern world. What he doesn’t do, however, is make you love life in all its manifestations. In fact, when he tries to do so, he reveals his deficiencies.
At the end of Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov flings himself at the feet of Sonya, who has followed him to Siberia where he is serving his sentence for double homicide. Sonya jumps up, looks at him and trembles. “Infinite happiness lit up in her eyes; she understood, and for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that at last the moment had come…” If this smacks of modern soap opera or those maudlin French novels Dostoevsky was raised on, that’s because it is melodrama. Sonya’s “infinite love” is an ideal, “the moment” that has supposedly come, an abstraction.
What modern readers need, Tolstoy believed, is not more lurching after “infinite happiness” or “the Great Idea,” as Stepan Trofimovich, near the end of The Demons, claims to have discovered, but the ability to embrace an imperfect reality. The author of Anna Karenina teaches us how to seek meaning not through grandiose romantic strivings, like Anna and Vronsky, but within the limits of imperfect social and family structures, like Kitty and Levin.
Tolstoy’s novels depict the norms and continuities of human behavior by means of grand narratives that expand slowly over time and against the backdrop of vast natural tableaus. “As is usually the case” and “such as often occurs” are phrases you encounter frequently in Tolstoy. Dostoevsky’s world, by contrast, is one in which you can come home one evening and “suddenly” find an axe buried in your skull. Life is always on the verge of imploding on itself. Tragedy is just around the corner, or in your living room.
Tolstoy’s living room is a place where people, well, live. It’s where dark-eyed, voluble twelve-year old Natasha Rostova comes running with doll in hand, or where, a decade later, she enjoys with Pierre one of those endearingly mundane conversations between wife and husband about nothing and everything.
“I am a realist in a higher sense,” Dostoevsky rightfully claimed. But Tolstoy was a realist in the total sense. “The hero of my tale… is Truth,” he wrote. And that truth is one every generation recognizes as its own, not just those in a state of social crisis or existential despair. If Dostoevsky urges us to reach for the heavens, then Tolstoy teaches us by artistic example how we may touch the transcendent here and now in our messy, fleeting world.
Gary Saul Morson, Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University
A Soviet anecdote has it that Stalin once asked the Central Committee: which deviation is worse, the right or the left? Some fearfully ventured “the left,” others hesitantly offered, “the right.” The Great Helmsman then gave the right answer: “Both are worse.” I answer the question, “Who is the greater novelist, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”: Both are better.
Dostoevsky spoke to the twentieth century. He was unique in foreseeing that it would not be an era of sweetness and light, but the bloodiest on record. With uncanny accuracy, The Demons predicted, in detail, what totalitarianism would be.
Bakhtin understood the core principle of Dostoevsky’s ethics: a person is never just the product of external forces. Neither heredity nor environment, singly or together, fully accounts for a human being. Each person retains a “surplus,” which constitutes the self’s essential element. True, some people, and all social sciences aspiring to resemble physics, deny the surplus. But they apply their theories only to others. No matter what he professes, nobody experiences himself as a mere play of external forces. Everyone feels regret or guilt, and there is no escaping the agony of choice. We behave as if we believed that each moment allows for more than one possible outcome and that our freedom that makes us in principle unpredictable. Without that unpredictability we would lack humanness. We would be zombies, and no one has ethical responsibility to zombies. Hence ethics demands: always treat another person as capable of surprise, as someone who cannot be explained entirely at second hand.
Dostoevsky despised both capitalism and socialism because each treats people as the mere product of economic (or other) laws. If socialism is worse, it is because it also presumes that experts know how to organize life for the best and socialism not only denies but actively removes choice for a supposedly higher good. At best, this view leads to the Grand Inquisitor, at worst to the nightmarish plans of Pyotr Stepanovich.
Tolstoy speaks more to the 21st century. His novels’ key concept was contingency. At every moment, however small and ordinary, something happens that cannot entirely be accounted for by previous moments. Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy also denied the possibility of a social science, which must always wind up resembling the “science of warfare” preached by the generals in War and Peace. Like macroeconomists today, these “scientists” are immune to counter-evidence. To use Tolstoy’s word, social science is mere “superstition.”
If social scientists understood people as well as Tolstoy, they would have been able to depict a human being as believable as Tolstoy’s characters, but of course none has come close.
If we once acknowledge that we will never have a social science, then we will, like General Kutuzov, learn to make decisions differently. We intellectuals would be more cautious, more modest, and ready to correct our errors by constant tinkering.
If we have left the age of ideologies behind, we may need Dostoevsky’s warnings less than Tolstoy’s wisdom.
Donna Tussing Orwin, Professor of Russian and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, and author of Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy
I inclined first to Tolstoy. His combination of moral sensibility and love of life appealed to me, and I didn’t like Dostoevsky’s over-the-top world of the self in crisis. The two authors have much in common, and yet diverge in ways that make comparison irresistible.
Both associate the self with moral agency; for both therefore, the individual is the ultimate source of good and evil. For both, goodness, which consists in overcoming selfishness, is natural but weak. For both feelings trump reason in the soul, though Tolstoy is closer to the Greeks and the Enlightenment in his association of virtue with reason. For Dostoevsky, reason is always tainted by egotism, and therefore he relies on love to spur moral impulses. Dostoevsky concentrates more on evil; for this reason his writings anticipate the horrors of the twentieth and the nascent twenty-first centuries. Tolstoy depicts crimes, such as the lynching of Vereshchagin (War and Peace) or uxoricide in Kreutzer Sonata, but not the pure malice embodied in such Dostoevskian characters as Stavrogin (Demons) or Smerdyakov (Brothers Karamazov). Tolstoy’s most evil characters, like Dolokhov in War and Peace, seem to invade his texts from another (Dostoevskian?) world. Dostoevsky also portrays pure goodness. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (The Idiot), even though he is named after Tolstoy, is more virtuous than any Tolstoyan character could be, and so is Alyosha Karamazov. Both authors are wicked satirists. Tolstoy’s rationalizing solutions to social ills can seem naive, while Dostoevsky’s high-minded ones seem sentimental.
Tolstoy’s fiction encompasses a broader range of experience than Dostoevsky’s. No one has described childhood, family life, farming, hunting, and war any better. This reflects his affinity for the physical and the body. Not coincidentally, Tolstoy is also celebrated for his portraits of nature and animals. Dostoevsky usually associates the physical with the base. (Compare fleshy old Fyodor Karamazov with his ethereal son Alyosha.) In his writings illness often brings insight, while Tolstoy mostly (though not always) prefers healthy states to unhealthy ones.
Dostoevsky’s fiction aims at the revelation of character to the fullest extent possible. He believes that each individual is unique, however, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to others. His protagonists vacillate between good and evil; this makes the future of any one of them, even the most virtuous, unpredictable. Tolstoy’s characters are complex but not unique. The variety among them (greater than in Dostoevsky) is a result of a practically but not theoretically infinite number of combinations among all the possibilities inherent in human nature, and the interaction of these with the outside world. Tolstoy depicts the intersection of chance, historical forces, and character. In his view, the more disengaged we are from outside circumstances, the freer we are. Tolstoy gravitated in old age toward Christian anarchy, while Dostoevsky in his last novel (Brothers Karamazov) seems to advocate for a Christian theocracy headed by someone like Zosima.
I still prefer Tolstoy’s earthiness and expansiveness to Dostoevsky’s brilliant, edgy anatomy of the psyche, but I can’t imagine life without them both.
Joshua Rothman, graduate student in English at Harvard University, and author of the column, Brainiac, which appears every Sunday in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section
I have the usual reasons for thinking of Tolstoy as the “better” — really, as the best — novelist. There’s the incredible variety of scenes and subjects he explores; there’s his precise, uncluttered style; there’s his epic tone, with its special combination of detachment and humanity. And I’m always overpowered by the way his novels describe everyone from the inside, even the dogs and horses. I have the same reaction to Tolstoy’s writing as his sister-in-law, Tanya Bers, who was the model for Natasha in War and Peace: “I can see how you are able to describe landowners, fathers, generals, soldiers,” she told him, “but how can you insinuate yourself into the heart of a girl in love, how can you describe the sensation of a mother — for the life of me I cannot understand.” I think Tolstoy is better at “insinuating himself” than any other novelist.
It’s Tolstoy’s scenes, though, which impress me most. Tolstoy, I’m convinced, is the single greatest writer of scenes in literature. Dostoevsky is often given credit for being more “dramatic” (George Steiner, in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?, calls Dostoevsky “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare”). But Tolstoy’s novels are unique in the way they’re constructed entirely out of short, perfect, easy-to-read scenes, and in the way those scenes build on one another until they address the most complex issues in a nonchalant, natural way.
Take the run of scenes around Kitty and Vronsky’s ball in Anna Karenina. In the first scene, Kitty and Anna are sitting on a sofa. Kitty invites Anna to the ball, and suggests that she wear a lilac-colored dress. Then a gaggle of children run to Anna, Anna takes them in her arms, and the scene ends. Reading the scene, we understand that that’s how Kitty sees Anna: as a mysterious, beautiful, poetic young mother. Then, two scenes later, Kitty arrives at the ball, wearing a peach-colored dress, and sees Anna — in black velvet. That’s the scene when Anna steals Vronsky from Kitty. Right there, in the juxtaposition of those two scenes, which are only two or three pages apart, you have the difference between childhood and adulthood, and between sexual innocence and experience. No other novelist can show you so much, so quickly.
It’s not just that his short scenes move quickly, though; it’s that they let Tolstoy focus on very ordinary things, like the color of a dress. One of the best scenes at the end of Anna Karenina is organized around a thunderstorm; in War and Peace, he does two scenes around an oak tree, bare and then in bloom. In each scene, the details feel unremarkable — but, over many scenes, they assemble themselves into a structure that’s more than the sum of its parts. Tolstoy called that structure a “network.” Dostoevsky built up networks, too, of course, and in some ways they’re more powerful. But I prefer Tolstoy’s ordinary materials to Dostoevsky’s extraordinary ones, because they can teach you to uncover the “scenes” and “networks” in your own life.
Images of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky via Wikimedia Commons
So I did the best I could from afar. I gratefully signed with an agency, and we sold my first and second novels, The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico and The Baker’s Daughter, to Random House/Crown in a two-book deal. But within twelve months, the blush of first love rubbed off the bloom, and I discovered that my first agent was not my match. In fact, we were remarkably unmatched. I now empathize for the swept-off-their-feet celebrity nuptials that end in tears and divorce.
Beth Hoffman (author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt):
Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories:
Lydia Netzer, author of Shine, Shine, Shine:
Christina Haag, author of Come To The Edge:
Laura Harrington, author of Alice Bliss:
Kristina McMorris, author of Bridge of Scarlet Leaves:
Reading this post was perfect timing for me. I am five weeks into querying agents about my debut young adult novel. I’ve been studying a few for over a year, hoping we would be a fit, only to accidentally hit send on the wrong query email message to one of my top choices! I got a no rather quickly and expectedly, my bad for sending it with a sick little one and not much sleep- but I was so excited.
I want to find someone who loves my book and will be a champion for me and the work. I hope to be friends- that my agent will be able to handle my multiple personalities- the neurotic writer and pragmatic business person. I tell myself every no takes me one step closer to a yes. Come on yes!
-Holly
It’s clear to me after writing my second novel that I’ve got the wrong agent. He won’t touch it, and I’m afraid he doesn’t understand my work at all. The trouble is that he hasn’t sold my first novel yet. I’m halfway through a third, which is YA and may be what he considers “more commercial,” but the relationship has become painful to endure.
As yet, I’m unpublished anywhere, and given how distinctive (read: weird, uncategorizable, “subversive”) my work is, I don’t like my chances in the slush pile. My gut tells me to hang on to this agent until I make a sale, either on his steam or my own. It seems like without a book in the world I’ve got little chance of finding my one, true agent.
Any advice from the Millions-verse?
Thanks for the post. My only comment is to the line “I welcomed every agent suitor.” This makes it sound like you put out a mating call and agents came running. Truth of the matter is, most authors have the opposite problem: even hearing back from agents, who are drowning in slush piles.
New writers need to know how difficult it is to get any agent to even pay attention, never mind picking the right one.
I think there’s an opportunity for you to talk more about landing an agent, which involves 1) writing something great 2) that agents think they can sell and 3) networking more than querying.
cheers
Too many new authors do think of their work as a beautiful new born and believe that everyone see their work as they do. If they would view their manuscript as something that has to be commercially viable as they are putting their words down or editing, the end result would be more favorable.
Thank you all for reading! I so appreciate you taking the time to comment and share your stories. It makes the process of finding a literary “match” feel less cumbersome to hear other writers’ experiences.
Holly, good luck and keep at it! Finding an excellent representation match takes time. Like dating, the “no’s” are just folks moving aside so you can find the agent that fulfills all three of the Cs. Wishing you all the best!
Stu, Just know (as I learned the hard way) that once your agent sells your book, you are committed/stuck to them for the duration of that contract. So, in my humble opinion, if you aren’t happy and are resolute that this is NOT your agent match, I’d chance requesting your manuscript back from the said agent and finding someone who you feel confident to “represent” your body of work and you as an author. Just my two cents to take or leave. Good luck, my friend!
Todd, words of true wisdom! Thank you for commenting. Yes, there is oodles more to landing an agent than I’ve discussed here. There ought to be a course on it… a handbook or something! As a “new writer,” I learned from the school of hard knocks. I’m forever grateful to The Author’s Guild and their legal team for shepherding me through most of the legalities involved. I encourage all authors to do the same. Be wise and know all your options and rights! (http://www.authorsguild.org/) Thanks again for bringing up that it ain’t all roses and love songs, Todd.
Great discussions. Thank you all again!
Zoinks. That’s food for thought, all right. For some reason it had never occurred to me that I might be asked to sign a contract for a certain period of time.
Since I’m basically repping my first two novels by myself at the moment, sending them to houses that don’t require agented manuscripts (like McSweeney’s, Small Beer, and other oddball small presses open to cross-genre weirdness), I suppose I could always break optimistic and plan to sell one on my own.
Thanks so much for your input, Sarah.
Absolutely my pleasure, Stu.
If you aren’t already a member of The Authors Guild, I highly encourage you to sign up. There’s a minimal yearly fee and they are BEYOND amazing in helping authors read between the lines of agent contracts. They were instrumental in my “love story.” Once you are a member, all of their phenomenal legal services are at your beck and call. Whatever you decide to do with your manuscripts, I suggest you check in with them. They may not be able to give you an absolute solution, but they’ll give you the finest, unbiased advice in publishing. That I can guarantee… and you can quote me to them.
Good luck, friend!
http://www.authorsguild.org/
That’s funny — I just got off the phone with them! They were wicked helpful from the first word and gave me far more confidence than I woke up with this morning. It sounds like as long as I’m in the minor leagues, I can get by just fine with a membership there, then use their advice to find the right agent.
That’s it, then. My mind’s made up not to hand my new MS to my old agent. This has been a torturous month, but I’m feeling all sunshiney now.
This is internet serendipity at its finest. Many thanks.
Stu!
I am clapping (literally) my hands for you. Congratulations! “Wicked helpful” = The Authors Guild. You penned it beautifully.
So glad you took my advice to call them, and that you now have a plan for moving forward! Trust me: You have saved yourself months–*years* even– of heartache.
Lord, I know we’ve just met here, but I could pop a bottle of champagne in your honor. Happy day to you!
Most truly,
Sarah
Great post! – As new authors, I think there is the urge to get somebody-anybody- who will offer to be our agent. My first novel had 15 rejections, and by that time I was onto novel 2 which is what I’m focusing , and coming to the end of now. So this was fantastic advice. In it for the long haul, like a marriage is a great analogy, and I shall definitely look into joining the Author’s Guild. Thanks so much :-)
As a penniless country bumpkin from rural Iowa, I can relate with the hilarity of any pie in the sky thoughts of jet setting to New York. Where I fail to ‘click’ is the part where I have the ability to pick and choose an agent. I gave up some time ago submitting cold called, slush pile queries. There may be a mere five degrees of separation between any two souls, but it appears as though I am lacking degrees number three and four to ‘network’ with anyone in New York. Currently, I am working on my fourth self-published Iowa based novella. It’s a lot of work to market and distribute, etc., but I really get to know my readers and have developed a niche market that is genuinely devoted. The whole agent query process definitely soured me. Let the gatekeepers have their keys. The modern world has tarnished the sparkle of them anyhow.
I never could get an agent. I got my book read by James Frey, Eric Simonoff, and Michael Signorelli (Harper/Collins).
The book made the short list of the SFU/Anvil Press First Book Contest.
I have pieces of it published in SubTerrain, a quarterly literary magazine.
There is something missing in the above essay. Why did you have agents courting you when most novice or unpublished writers find it harder to retain an agent than to get a publishing contract?
Are you really that good? Are you a journalist? Something doesn’t make sense here.
Wait! Let me rephrase that. Why let the facts get in the way of your slick, breezy, dishonest essay?
Charles Schwend wrote: “If they would view their manuscript as something that has to be commercially viable as they are putting their words down or editing…”
I would take the “as they are putting words down” out of this sentence for a couple of reasons. Writing is hard for some, and when you’re newly working at it, inserting a self-editor at this stage might be self-defeating. Second, you’ve got to love the book you’re working on, focusing on that as you’re doing the first draft more than commercial possibilities, or no one else is going to love it.
But for editing…definitely. If you’re serious about trying to publish, then everything you do after writing “THE END” on the first draft needs to keep “commercially viable” in mind.
@Jesse
“Why did you have agents courting you when most novice or unpublished writers find it harder to retain an agent than to get a publishing contract?”
Agreed. I posted above questioning the same thing. Sarah, this is a good, inspirational article but there is indeed something missing. 99% of authors do not have agents courting them.
What special circumstance did you find yourself in where this was the case?
Elaborating on this would provide great context while also managing the expectations of your audience, who are probably beating themselves up because they dont have agents courting them.
cheers
99% of authors seem to view agents as the keepers of the magical keys to the kingdom, as if the only thing standing between them and a flourishing career is representation.
The truth is that you need an agent once your career is already rolling. The only special circumstances I’ve seen involve conspicuous excellence and/or family members who are A-list career bestsellers.
If you’ve got a great novel, you still need to become noticeable — through short stories, awards, or networking — before you can get an agent who’ll do you any good. Your career is in your own hands; an agent usually just manages it.
There are exceptions, of course, but they’re so rare that it’s far healthier to take a serious look at the market and acknowledge that this is a long game indeed.
A.K.,
Thanks for sharing your struggle to find an agent. Your positivity and determination is just the kind of drive that will propel you right into the hands of the excellent agent meant to represent *you*– your writing and you as an author. Good luck and never settle!
For a handful of folks who are curious about the line “I welcomed every suitor.”
This was an essay about finding your one, true match. My first match was not, so I can’t accurately write an essay about that first process as I, obviously, completely botched it. What I meant by “welcoming every suitor” was that if an agent showed interest in my work, I *flung* open my door: “Come on in!” I’m sorry I didn’t elaborate on the painful 9 months of querying for my first manuscript (The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico). It was my thesis novel, having just graduated from a three-year, in-residency creative writing MFA program. So if you add that on top of everything, I’d say I sat alone with my writing for nearly 4 years in an attempt to get my foot in the publishing door.
For every positive suitor/response, I received two rejections. However, I didn’t let it deter my resolve to get my book published. I pushed on… sent three new queries for every rejection. I inundated NYC with my letters. A majority, I simply never heard from– lost in slush piles across Manhattan. In the end, I probably sent my work out to nearly seventy agencies from NYC to California. So yes, I had multiple “suitors” but I cast a WIDE net and wasn’t particularly picky… as this essay warns.
That’s my hard knocks story. Again, mine is not at all unique. Every writer has been through some semblance of this tale of desperation, frustration and nail-biting hope breaking into the biz. Many have had it far harder than I did, so I can’t write a piece expounding on the trials and tribulations. Nobody wants to read a pity party and I, especially, don’t want to write it because in my case, the ending of my first literary marriage was a sad and painful one (i.e. author-agent divorce).
So please forgive me, kind readers, if I chose to focus on what *does* work, what I wish I would’ve known to look for, what makes a good relationship with your agent– not just from my perspective, but from all of the fabulous authors that graciously shared their own literary agent stories. My aim was simply to aid those that could use both the applicable advice and a little cheerleading in the midst of this exasperating and often very long process. Don’t give up, don’t rush, wait patiently for the one that will be your champion.
Are we all friends again?
Cheers!
Except it’s all totally different for non-fiction. I found this interesting, and sort of wished for a minuet that I wrote fiction. But I ams what I am, as Popeye wisely said.
Sarah,
Thank you for the information in the article and for your follow up comments.
My questions pertains to your comment: “What I meant by “welcoming every suitor” was that if an agent showed interest in my work, I *flung* open my door: “Come on in!” I’m sorry I didn’t elaborate on the painful 9 months of querying for my first manuscript (The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico).”
So with hindsight, would you have said, “no” to the first agent? I would like to understand what you would’ve done differently.
I’ve signed with a small press for two novels. They specialiaze in romance. My women’s fiction manuscripts do not fit their niche, and I’m seeking representation for those works. How do I avoid the pitfall of “first agent divorce”?
Warmest Regards,
Linda Joyce
Thanks. One of the more helpful pieces I’ve written on agents, a subject that bewilders me.
Ms. McCoy, is there a place or a way to find agents who specialize in taking stories to film?
Dear Linda,
First off, congratulations on your upcoming two novels! Thanks for reading this essay and taking the time to reply so thoughtfully.
To your questions: What would I have done differently? How do I avoid pitfall of agent-author divorce?
A: I’m a woman who believes that every event has a purpose–even the ones that may be perceived as “mistakes” and “bad.” The bottom line for my Ex agent was written in dollar signs. I’m eternally grateful to her for negotiating my first two-book contract with Random House. I count myself entirely blessed to have gotten my foot into the publishing world with such a phenomenal start. However, where we failed to see eye to eye was on the personal level. She didn’t fit the three C’s for me, personally. Irreconcilable differences, to use a divorce settlement term.
I wish I would’ve known that business deals and being a power negotiator are excellent attributes for one’s literary representation; however, if that’s the total package, you’re in for some heartache. It’s like marrying someone because they look fabulous on paper. They’ve got a good pedigree. Well off. Good credentials. Good family. Good job. They present all shiny and smiling. You say the vows, make it legal, then move in together and realize you simply do *not* click.
Clicking, chutzpah and character are as important as being able to sell-sell-sell. Thus, this essay’s content. Doing it differently… if I couldn’t have met them in person, I would’ve had more telephone conversations with all my prospects. Chatted with them more than just a couple of times to see how they were over time. That’s what I did during my two years of “dating” to find my treasured, current agent– my match.
I hope that helps somewhat. Good luck, Linda!
Yours truly,
Sarah
Dear Shelley,
To be honest, I’m not terribly familiar with literary agents who deal exclusively in book-to-film. I assume that many of those might be located in Los Angeles/California so it might help to focus on researching specific agents in that area.
Also, it helps to simply ask. That’s another great piece of advice I wish I would’ve taken– ASK QUESTIONS. Ask the agent all the questions you like. If they are your match then they want to hear them. As your possible “representation” in the broader publishing community, they need to embody all the factors that are important to you.
So, Shelley, if book-to-film is high up on your list, ask what book-to-film projects they’ve worked on and get the name(s) of their dramatic/film sub agents in Hollywood. A quality literary agency will be open with sharing that information. Once you have a name/company, you can Google around and decide if that suits your career vision.
Also, you could look at the contemporary books that have been made into films already (Ex. The Help, Lincoln, Brokeback Mountain, Twilight). Find the authors and their agents. There’s a place to start!
I hope that gives you some ideas. Happy agent dating, Shelley.
Yours truly,
Sarah
You people are pathetic if you akin your agent to a partner. They are just an ugly part of an even uglier wall of pretenses which make up publishing. I find that agents juggle you on their own terms not yours–how is that like a marriage? Sure I get along with my agent but unlike you people I actually understand that it all falls on my shoulders. It’s my book. My career and I’m only a fraction of my agent’s thoughts. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll start thinking about them in the same way.
I did get a publisher for my book. I have some bitter experiences with agencies but I can’t relate them here because my publisher doesn’t want me cutting loose with the pathological stuff anymore. It alienates people.
Early Out, published by Mountain Springs House. Nice new cover, new day, new me. Different you. Maybe.