Targeting Your Dream Literary Agent with Your First Chapter

Your First Chapter is Often Your Most Important Chapter, at Least When it Comes to Getting Agent Attention

Getting literary representation is one of the most difficult aspects of getting published, at least if you’re trying to get published by the larger publishing houses and their imprints. You send out query after query, track all your rejections and partial and full manuscript requests by literary agents on a spreadsheet or querytracker.net, and pray that one of them (or, if your manuscript is that good, multiple agents) offer you representation. And this is after you’ve spent months or years writing and revising and rewriting your novel. If you’ve gone through the process, you know how trying and exciting and depressing it is, and you know how slim the chances are for you to be successful at the end of it. But there are things you can do to improve your chances, and part of that is targeting your dream literary agent with your first chapter. It takes work, but if you’re going to do it, why not give it your all?

If you’ve gone through the process, you know how trying and exciting and depressing it is, and you know how slim the chances are for you to be successful

Before I get into what I do and have done to get agent attention (I’ve had an agent and been offered representation twice by agents with impressive clients), I want to talk about basketball. In particular, one player, Kobe Bryant, and his approach to basketball. Kobe, may he rest in peace, was one of the all-time greats of the sport. But it wasn’t just his ball-playing skills that separated him from other players, or his athletic ability, or the players around him; all these things helped. What separated Kobe was that he was a student of the game. Kobe broke down the offensive moves players made step by step so that he could counter those steps while playing defense against them. If a player couldn’t go left, he forced them to. If they faked a shot, he knew they were faking it in advance because he watched one of their feet go backwards as they pretended they were about to shoot. He did the same while playing offense: he knew which players to shoot fadeaways on, because he knew the percentages the way coaches and sportscasters did. He knew where the picks were going to be. He even admitted to reading the referee manuals so that he could predict where on the court referees were required to stand so that if he needed to he could foul someone without being called for the foul because he would do it where the referees couldn’t see him commit the foul. That is being a student of the game. That is how you should approach acquiring a literary agent.

But it wasn’t just his ball-playing skills that separated him from other players, or his athletic ability, or the players around him; all these things helped. What separated Kobe was that he was a student of the game.

Before I list out the standard steps for acquiring a literary agent, including the schmoozing events where you pay to play at conferences and such, I want to share the effort I put forth when I think a certain agent should represent me (as you can tell, part of my personal way of attacking this is by being confident, irrespective of whether that confidence is merited). It will require work. It will require a commitment of time that you may believe you don’t have. But here it is: read every first chapter of every book that your dream agent has represented over the past two or three years. Let me say that again, in case it didn’t sink in: read every first chapter of every book that your dream agent has represented over the past two or three years. Then ask yourself these questions:

Is the first chapter of my novel similar to the first chapters of the books my dream agent represents? (It doesn’t have to be, but if you see a pattern, and that pattern falls outside of what you’ve written, your chances may not be as good as if your first chapter did fall into that pattern).

To further break down what I mean:

Do the novels my dream agent represent start with a deep dive into character? (Obviously this is a pretty broad question, as pretty much all novels begin with a character. But there’s a noticeable difference between the beginning of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters and, say, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig). There’s always a certain feeling you get while reading one novel that you don’t get when you’re reading some other novel. Often, it’s the musicality of the narrative voice. Or how the author begins: dialogue is different than description is different than summary and so on. Let’s take the beginning of The Waters:

“Once upon a time, in the black muck floodplains of unincorporated Whiteheart, where the taxes are low, farm families used to grow the sweetest, tenderest celery, Whiteheart Celery. Which is to say the town was not named for the European settlers who sought to destroy the rich Potawatomi culture that preceded them; the place was instead named for the crop that the settlers planted, the crop that supported, for half a century, the people living here.”

The next paragraph continues with the beautiful language and history Campbell is writing about, but it also introduces us to herbalist and eccentric Hermine “Herself” Zook and, eventually, her three daughters and the peoples who live in their rural neck of the woods. The novel is literary fiction, and it requires readers to immerse themselves into a world that is rich in lyrical language and imagery and just an overall ethereal state of being that transports the reader to somewhere clearly very different and distinct from the normal everyday world in which most of us live.

THE WATERS by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Now here’s the beginning of Haig’s The Midnight Library:

“Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene school in the town of Bedford. She stared at a chessboard on a low table.

‘Nora dear, it’s natural to worry about your future,’ said the librarian, Mrs Elm, her eyes glimmering like sunshine on frost.

Mrs Elm made her first move. A knight hopping over the neat row of white pawns. ‘Of course you’re going to be worried about the exams. But you could be anything you want to be, Nora. Think of all that possibility. It’s exciting.’

            ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’”

After that opening, we continue with a bit of dialogue, but then we go into backstory, some more dialogue, and character description. But unlike The Waters, which continues to build the magnificently detailed world in which Herself and the other characters live, which is a huge part of the novel, The Midnight Library continues, in essence, in media res, or in the middle of the chronological plot, through dialogue and scene that has the reader moving more quickly along the page. There’s a different vibe, and thus a different experience, that you feel when reading one book versus the other. Some books are quick reads, and some are not. I’m not saying one is better than the other; all I’m saying is that your dream agent may prefer one over the other when choosing what she’ll represent.

Now, if I had written a novel I felt provided me with the same feeling that The Waters provided me while reading the first paragraph and then the first chapter, I would look further into who her agent was and what other writers he or she represented by going to the agent’s website. I would then (if I didn’t already have the book in my library) go to Amazon or wherever I could read the first chapter or two of their other clients’ novels, looking for any similarities. This is not to say that agents aren’t diverse in their interests, only that often there’s a certain musicality or style that you may pick up on that resonates somehow or some way that says, “Hey, this agent likes books that do X in this way rather than in that way.” I know, it’s a little confusing, but I think you’ll get what I mean once you give it a go.

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig

The point of all this is to say that when you target literary agents you should do your homework the way Kobe Bryant does his homework. You must be an interested, inquisitive student of the game. You must put the extra time into learning what an agent is seeking, and a great part of that is knowing what they’ve already sought. That means researching the books they represent, the style(s) they are keen on, the types of novels they tend to pursue—character driven novels? Plot-driven novels? Voice? Certain genres? Certain types of characters in certain types of predicaments? It’s your job to find the commonalities. Yes, the agents do let you know what they’re looking for. But some of their descriptions can be vague. One agent’s profile may say he represents “work in several categories of fiction and narrative nonfiction,” while another may say they represent “a range of creators, love fresh stories about magic, and that they seek commercial and literary fiction featuring underserved voices, unforgettable places, and complicated families.” While the first is limited in terms of what they’re seeking, the second, however more detailed their description is than the first, still doesn’t tell you enough. This is where you must put your student hat on and get to work. If you like one of the books one of these agents represents, find out the last two or three years’ worth of books they’ve represented that got published, and dive into the first chapter or two of each of those books. You may be doing yourself a disservice sending out queries to agents if you’re not putting in the effort to know what they will or won’t consider representing.

Now, here are some of the questions you should be asking yourself once you are targeting literary agents with your first chapter:

1. Am I starting the novel at the right time, at the right place, and with the right character? An agent, just like a reader, wants to be engaged, and they want to be engaged immediately. They want a hook that’s going to propel them forward wanting to know more. They’re going to want to see that you know what you’re doing, and while fiction is subjective, you still have to start off with getting that hook stuck in them so they can’t swim away.

2. Is the agent/reader asking themselves questions as they read? You need to create intrigue, to create some sort of mystery, to have the reader/agent wanting to know more about the character or problem/hurdle(s) they’re facing. Which means there needs to be trouble, and it has to be somewhat clear what that trouble is that your character(s) are facing.

3. Are you showing instead of telling? I know that you’ve heard this countless times if you’ve been writing for more than five minutes, but it’s true. Mostly. I say mostly, because, like any rule in writing, if you’re good enough at what you’re doing, you may be good enough to break the rules and still keep the reader hooked. In general, however, readers and agents want to ‘see’ what’s happening rather than have the narrator recapping the actions of your characters.

 . . . like any rule in writing, if you’re good enough at what you’re doing, you may be good enough to break the rules

4. Is the narrator’s voice interesting? Engaging? Are they an unreliable narrator? Voice is one of the most important things that agents and readers look for. If an agent doesn’t find the narrative voice interesting, they’re going to stop reading. Narrators need to be distinct. They need to have an interesting and consistent tone. What’s their perspective? Do they use a certain style of language? All of these things should be compelling to the reader/agent. If there’s not an interesting narrative voice, you can kiss your reader goodbye. This voice should be there from line one.

There’s always going to be great books and great opening lines and chapters that never see the light of day in terms of either getting representation or publication. Writing and fiction are subjective. The number of unpublished or posthumously published authors is more than we can fathom. But if you’re querying agents and seeking representation for your novel, collection of short stories, or whatever, to give yourself the best chance of success you must be a student of the game, and the game here is the agent you’re targeting for representation. Know what they like. Know what they represent. Know what they’re currently seeking (and make sure they’re open to submissions, because often, they aren’t). And then, once you’ve decided on a dream agent, read every first chapter or two of every novel they’ve gotten published in the last few years. It’s possible you may need to start your novel with a different character. Or with a different scene. Or with a different chapter, because it’s more in line with the books that agent represents. I’m not saying to change your book to something it’s not, or to something you don’t want it to be, only that you want to make sure you’re doing everything to best get you to the next step after you’ve finished the writing, and that’s getting the agent who’ll fall in love with your book enough to want to represent it.

Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com

Author Cully Perlman

*I do not receive any financial benefit from any of the works mentioned in this post, unless you purchase my novel. Then I'll get about a nickel or so. Maybe.