The Write Stuff

Many dream of writing a novel. Meet six Bethesda-area women who are actually doing it

By Sarah Pekkanen

I’m on the phone with Lindsay Maines, desperate for details about her speed-dating experience. Did she wear her skinny black pants? What were the first words out of her mouth? Did she make a connection with the stranger sitting across from her while a monitor timed them to make sure they didn’t talk for an instant longer than 10 minutes?

“I spent half an hour pacing in my hotel room before the date,” Maines confides, and I can still hear the nervous tension in her voice. She rehearsed her opening line over and over, knowing she’d only get one chance to make a good impression, to woo this desirable dark-haired stranger and to enter into a relationship that could change the course of her life.

Maines, by the way, is happily married. Her hot date? A New York literary agent who helped launch an unknown novelist named Emily Giffin onto bestseller lists with Something Borrowed a few years ago. (Giffin has since bought a house near actor Matthew McConaughey, and her books are sold around the globe.)

Maines is hoping the agent will sprinkle some of that literary magic dust over her manuscript, which is why she has traveled from her Germantown home to Allentown, Pa., and shelled out hundreds of dollars for a hotel room and a speed-dating spot at a fiction writers’ conference.

“She asked for a partial!” Maines tells me over the phone, and we squeal with excitement. The agent wants to see the first 50 pages of Maines’ book. In the world of speed-dating, this is the equivalent of exchanging smoldering glances.

If you’ve ever imagined seeing your name plastered across a book jacket, you’re not alone. Throughout the Bethesda area, people are chasing the same dream. They’re pecking away on a laptop at Starbucks, or pulling a half-finished manuscript out of a desk drawer when the kids are finally asleep, or sitting in a dreary office cubicle fantasizing about chucking it all and writing the great American novel.

At The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, people from all walks of life—retirees and teens, stay-at-home moms and attorneys, teachers and journalists—continually pour through the doors to sign up for ever-popular classes such as “Introduction to the Novel” and “The Crucial First Chapter.”

Their dreams are big, and who’s to say one of them won’t follow the trails blazed by John Grisham, the former practicing lawyer who penned a blockbuster between court cases, or J.K. Rowling, who came up with the idea for Harry Potter while riding on a train? Who’s to say the next household-name author won’t be someone like Debbie Demske of Potomac, who was on a business trip when the desire to write a novel struck her with the force of a lightning bolt. Or Julie Wakeman-Linn of Bethesda, who has been quietly toiling away on a book for years?

Being successful, however, isn’t going to be easy. There’s a tricky part to every aspiring novelist’s dream: It’s a snap to fantasize about the book and who will play the roles in the inevitable Hollywood production that will follow; it’s quite something else to do the actual writing.

Ideas that flow through the mind as cleanly and fluidly as a country river tend to get jammed up and polluted when the time comes to write.

“I get frustrated and bogged down and hopelessly distracted all the time,” Demske laments.

Once you sit down to seriously write, agrees Wakeman-Linn, who teaches creative writing at Montgomery College, “you realize 300 pages is a lot of pages.”

So how do they get the book written, which is only the first hurdle standing between a novelist and the gritty, glamorous and sometimes heartbreaking world of publishing? Some first-time novelists, including Paula Whyman of Bethesda, say discipline is key. She forces herself to leave the house so she won’t get distracted by, say, e-mail accounts that beg to be checked every 30 seconds. Whyman recently completed her novel, The People You Meet, by lugging her laptop to Bethesda Library’s quiet room while her kids were in school.

For Demske, the goal is to write something in her home office every day, whether it’s a paragraph or five pages. She can easily visualize her book—in her head, the plot is rich and intricate and seamless—but putting it down on paper is an exercise in frustration she never anticipated while working full time.

Back then, Demske was busy with her strategy-and-planning job with Hewlett-Packard. She was on a business trip when she went to a museum housed in the former New Orleans Mint building and began wandering around an exhibit detailing the early process of making gold coins. As she read an old newspaper article accompanying the exhibit, her mind suddenly began churning with the ingredients of a killer plot.

What if, more than100 years ago, a young woman from the North and a slave from the South joined forces to solve the mystery of $1 million in coins missing from the mint? Her idea was partially rooted in history, which added to its appeal: A group of young women from Philadelphia had been sent to the South to work at the mint around the time of the Civil War and, at one point, $1 million disappeared.

“Everyone says, ‘That’s such a great story!’ ” Demske says. “But when you try to get the story on paper, it is so much harder to make it as exciting as it is when I tell the story to someone over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.”

Still, it will take more than a bit of writer’s block to keep Demske down. “I have to get the words out and keep going,” she vows. “What I’m looking forward to doing is going back to New Orleans for inspiration. And I hope to write there for a few days.”

Landing an agent

Once you’ve finally finished the book (roughly 300-400 pages, and increasing the size of the font doesn’t count), it’s time to find an agent. It isn’t impossible to sell a book without an agent, but it sure gives you an edge to have one. Good agents get hundreds of letters from would-be novelists every week, and if yours doesn’t leap out of the slush pile of unsolicited work, it’s headed for a quick reincarnation via the recycling bin.

So how do you lure an agent? It’s easier to know what not to do. Agents often get letters addressed to rival agents (oops), notes that reek of despair (“I’ve queried 100 agents and been turned down by them all”) and even abusive, foul-language missives from writers they’ve rejected (which, shockingly, doesn’t make the agent eager to reconsider).

When I call Jeff Kleinman, the agent for The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein—the novel was picked up by Starbucks for its book program—he tells me other things writers have done to try to catch his eye. They’ve offered to give him massages, sent him a tiara as a tie-in for a book proposal, tried to hypnotize him, offered to buy him drinks at writers’ conferences and sent him box after box of chocolates.

Kleinman, one of the founders of Folio Literary Management, which has offices in New York and Washington, D.C., gave the tiara to his daughter, the chocolates to his wife and wisely turned down the massage and hypnosis sessions.

What about the free drinks?

“Well, those you take,” Kleinman says.

What agents crave is professionalism. They have maybe 30 seconds to eyeball a letter from an unknown writer, so if you can’t sum up your novel with crackling, book-jacket-worthy copy, you’ll be lucky to get an impersonal rejection note.

“If you can’t write a good letter, they pretty much assume you can’t write a good book,” points out Whyman, who wrote her novel at the library while a homeless man snored nearby and another regular patron chatted on a cell phone. “I call it the ‘Not-So-Quiet Room,’ ” Whyman says. “But the librarians were wonderful, and it was a great place to work.”

Whyman recently finished her book and sent query letters to agents in New York. The letter-writing proved to be no easy task.

“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to boil down a 350-page plot into three sentences,” Whyman says. Her book, which is set in the summer of 1980, reveals how the murder of the neighborhood busybody by a lawn boy affects her community of characters. The book is fiction, but was partially inspired by a true event—Whyman grew up in the same neighborhood as a Montgomery County teenager convicted of murdering an acquaintance. “It’s a literary novel with lots of black humor,” Whyman says.

Whyman’s hard work has paid off. Several agents responded to her letter, saying they wanted to see her manuscript. Whyman, who recently had a short story published in a Hudson Review anthology called Writes of Passage: Coming of Age Stories and Memoirs, is waiting to see if one will come back with an offer to sign her.

I’m well aware of how much work goes into a simple letter. When it came time to write mine, I Googled articles about query letters…wrote…found Web sites where authors posted their successful query letters and studied Web sites where agents critiqued query letters…and rewrote. Finally, I distilled the essence of my novel into a paragraph, listed my writing credentials and spell-checked that sucker to within an inch of its life. I blasted e-mails to agents I found in the acknowledgements section of novels I liked. If an author thanked his or her agent, I figured it had to be a good sign.

Unbelievably, the day after I e-mailed my query letters, I started getting responses from agents who wanted to see my book. But before you start thinking that my life has followed the path of Grisham’s or Giffin’s, let me stop you with a noise reminiscent of a record needle screeching over soaring, Chariots of Fire-style music. Remember that heartbreaking part of the publishing process? It’s real; I know it firsthand.

After the query letter responses, I sent out copies of my manuscript by UPS and e-mail, then sat back and waited. A few weeks later, I went to pick up my kids from school and checked my answering machine for messages remotely, which was completely natural since I’d been out of the house for seven minutes.

I’d gotten the call. Victoria Sanders liked my book. She asked me to come to New York to meet her and her staff. In a misguided effort to sound professional, I spoke in a voice several octaves below normal when I called her back. I became paralyzed with fear that I’d have to talk to Sanders this way for the rest of my life.

Before going to New York, I e-mailed one of Sanders’ most well known clients and explained that she had expressed interest in my book. “Is she still your agent?” I wrote.

Minutes later, a reply arrived in my inbox.

“This is Victoria Sanders,” it said. “I answer [author] Karin Slaughter’s e-mail when she is on her European tour. Yes, I’ve happily represented her for seven years… .”

Already I was offending agents, and I hadn’t set foot out of Chevy Chase!

Looking back, I realize how lucky I was. In addition to being a great agent, Sanders has a sense of humor (I eventually learned that she’d laughed out loud when she read my e-mail). But writers don’t always have such an easy time connecting with the right agent.

Wakeman-Linn, the creative writing instructor, was thrilled when a reputable agent fell in love with her novel. Unfortunately, the agent still hadn’t sold the book a year later. Worse, she hadn’t even tried. “It was terrible,” Wakeman-Linn says. “I was very inexperienced, so I didn’t realize this wasn’t the right agent for me.”

Wakeman-Linn was confident that she was on to a good story. Her book centers around two Zimbabwean men, one black and one white, who were raised like brothers, and it details what happens when everything they love—their homes, their livelihoods and even their lives—are threatened. So she started looking for a new agent.

Lindsay Maines tends to check her e-mail compulsively as she waits to hear from her dream agent, the one she met at the writers’ conference.

There’s an interesting story behind Maines’ book. It’s about a woman who is raising her three children while her rock star husband travels the world. There’s more to it than that, of course, but here’s the hook: Maines is married to a rock star who travels the world while she stays home with their children.

 Dan Maines, her husband for six years, plays bass guitar for the heavy metal band Clutch, which he started with three buddies while they were attending Seneca Valley High School in Germantown. The places they play range from D.C.’s 9:30 Club to venues in Japan and Russia.

Lindsay Maines’ unique insights into the rock ’n’ roll life are all tucked away in her book, which she wrote at her kitchen table between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. while espresso propped open her eyelids. Now her hopes are in the hands of the New York agent who seemed so pleasant during the speed-dating session. One night, Maines tears herself away from checking her e-mail long enough to go out for Chinese food with her husband at P.F. Chang’s. Incredibly, the fortune she pulls out of a cookie reads: “You should write a book.”

It’s got to be a sign, Maines thinks.

Getting Published

Signing with a good agent is huge—but it isn’t the only path to getting published. Take Potomac writer Jeanne Adams, who retired from the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development a few years ago and finally sat down to write her novel. Her first book, she says, wasn’t publishable. But she kept writing.

Adams joined Romance Writers of America and its affiliated chapter, Washington Romance Writers, and entered her second novel in the organization’s Golden Heart contest. She ended up being named one of 72 finalists out of about 2,000 Golden Heart entrants. She mentioned this to an editor for Kensington Books at a writers’ conference. The editor’s ears perked up, and Adams passed along her manuscript.

Weeks later, Adams was driving her kids to camp when her cell phone rang. “Hey sis’, hang on,” she hollered. “Boys, keep it down!”

It wasn’t her sister.

“This is Kate Duffy from Kensington Books,” the voice on the phone said. A few minutes later, Adams was screaming so loudly that her 2½-year-old started to cry. Duffy had offered her a two-book deal. Dark and Dangerous landed in bookstores on June 1 and is a top pick of Romantic Times Book Reviews magazine, and Adams is at work on her second book for Kensington.

As for Wakeman-Linn, she decided that since she was between agents, she’d submit her novel for the biennial Bellwether Prize, founded and funded by bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. The prize is mouthwatering: $25,000 and a contract with a publishing house. Past judges have included Anna Quindlen and Toni Morrison, but the identities of current judges are shielded, presumably to prevent an onslaught of chocolate and tiara deliveries.

In January, a letter arrived at Wakeman-Linn’s home. She’d been named a finalist. She reacted like any sensible novelist would: She called the contest’s organizers to make sure that they’d really sent the letter, that it wasn’t a mistake, and that she, Julie Wakeman-Linn, was truly a finalist.

Then she levitated through the ceiling.

The Letdown

At the end of May, the long-awaited e-mail from Maines’ dream agent arrives in her inbox. She holds her breath and clicks it open. It’s a lovely personal note, and the agent thinks Maines is a great writer. But she’s passing on representing Maines’ book, handing it off to a fellow agent.

Maines knew it was unlikely that the first agent she approached would take her on as a client, but she can’t help feeling disappointed. Instead of wallowing though, she makes a decision: she’ll spend the money to have a professional editor review her manuscript. She’ll strengthen it, then start contacting agents again. She’s not giving up.

Wakeman-Linn receives the news that her book didn’t win the Bellwether Prize. But she can’t imagine abandoning her novel. How could she? Over the nearly six years that Wakeman-Linn has been fine-tuning it, there have been times when her thoughts about the book have been so obsessive that she has failed to hear her husband speaking to her.

“He’d say to me, ‘You’re talking to your characters, aren’t you?’ ” Wakeman-Linn says, laughing.

Her book is currently being read by several agents—being a finalist for the Bellwether Prize carries enough clout to make the publishing world take notice—and Wakeman-Linn remains hopeful. “The wonderful thing about writing,” she says, “is the more you write, the better you get.”

Although it seems hard enough to write a book, never mind spending months or years rewriting; most manuscripts require revisions. The more I learn about the publishing industry, the more I find out that it’s normal to rewrite until your fingertips are bruised and the carpal tunnel pain has traveled all the way to your shoulder blades. When my book finally went out to editors, one—who happens to be my dream, pie-in-the-sky editor—comes very close to buying it. Tragically, close only counts in horseshoes, and who cares about a game only Ralph Lauren models play?

I go back to New York and Sanders and I confer over coffee. I take her advice: We’ll pull back the submission while I write a second book. We’ll approach my dream editor again when I have a second manuscript in hand, and we’ll keep hoping. Maybe an editor will fall in love with the second book and want to work with me on revising the first.

Despite the crushing disappointment—I had spent two years on and off working on the book with nothing to show for it—the second book, about the tangled relationship between twin sisters who are leading very different lives, somehow comes easier. I’ve read some books on plotting. I’ve taken an online writing class and met a few critique partners. I became friends with two published novelists, Susan Coll, author of Rockville Pike: A Suburban Comedy of Manners and Acceptance, and Adriana Bourgoin, author of Nine Months in August. We have encouraged each other and commiserated over lots of sushi at Raku.

The statistics are sobering. Most first books fetch advances of $5,000 to $10,000, and then sink without a trace. And those, perversely, are the success stories. Every year, countless manuscripts are submitted to agents, publishing houses and contests and soundly slapped with a rejection stamp. It’s enough to drive the creative spirit into oblivion.

Except that the creative spirit is much tougher than that.

It keeps fighting through the rejections and the rewrites and the long publishing odds that make winning the lottery look realistic.

“As we all wait, the only thing to do is to write something new,” Wakeman-Linn says.

“For most of us, it’s the love of doing it” that keeps us going, Demske agrees.

I’m not sure I’d be able to stop writing even if my next eight books were rejected. This business is glamorous (well, not the part when I’m sitting on my couch in sweat pants, swilling stale coffee and staring down a blank computer screen) and it’s gritty and yes, it’s also heartbreaking. But aren’t most things that are worthwhile in life?

See that guy hunched over his laptop in Starbucks? He believes. So does the woman at the next table over, her eyes glued to her computer screen as she crafts an entire world out of thin air. They aren’t worried about the statistics right now, because they’re hopelessly, gorgeously lost in their imagination, which, as it turns out, is one of the coolest places you can be.

Sarah Pekkanen, a humor columnist for Bethesda Magazine, has written for a number of other publications, including People, Washingtonian, The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post.