Guest post: What gets agent Imogen Pelham excited?

From time to time I’m going to feature guest posts, especially for the writers among you. This time it’s my lovely agent Imogen Pelham. She gets lots of submissions, and she knows what she likes…

A novel is a blaze: a collection of flames, which amalgamate to make something so huge it can feel almost impossible to have it under control. But it starts from just a little kindling.  

It might be a story or inciting situation that you’re regularly turning over in your mind, a character – real or imagined – whose every move and motivation you feel intimately connected to. It might be a wider concept or issue you want to address and explore through fictional characters and situations. But that kindling has to catch, and the fire has to thrive, and become something so much bigger than that little piece you started with.

Like fire, writing fiction is a sort of chemical reaction. At its core, you’re unfolding a narrative; taking the reader from A, to B, to C. But storytelling is so much more than telling a story. It’s a marriage of plot, character, language; it’s carefully chosen dialogue; it’s the rhythm of a sentence; it’s choosing what to show and what to hide. Principally, fiction is tension – whether it’s a thriller or a quiet literary novel – there has to be that taut elastic which hurtles you in and pulls you along. That tension has to begin on the first page, even in the first line. Writing fiction is, in many ways, an art of manipulation.

When I read fiction on submission, it can be frustrating seeing the potential of a novel, but having it not live up to the high standards set by the wealth of brilliant fiction already out there, continually being published every week. Some submissions I receive are clearly from a skilled prose stylist, but the plot, characters, or tension just aren’t there. There might be an intriguing protagonist, a great opening set piece, the promise of an inciting moment, but the prose is rushed; the voices wooden. With so many demands on our time, and our existing unread books looking out at us from shelves or toppling piles, the novel you’re writing has to not only be different – it has to be better.

It’s a terrifying undertaking – getting all the words down and then making sure each word, each sentence, is doing the intended work; that each part contributes to that whole at the right point and in the right way. It’s a sort of madness and a sort of magic, turning that little bit of kindling into a beautiful, enveloping blaze.

Find out more about Imogen Pelham.