We recently connected with Clarissa Harwood and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Clarissa, thanks for joining us today. Have you signed with an agent or manager? Why or why not?
It took me seven years, three novels, and hundreds of query letters to find an agent. Even though I was already a university professor when I began querying agents, I knew very little about the non-academic publishing world, and like many other new novelists, I thought I was ready for an agent because I was excited about my book and so were my family and friends!
The first novel I wrote that I felt was worth publishing was finished in 2007, and after making minor revisions, I started querying agents. After about a year of querying with no success, I shelved the novel and wrote another novel. I repeated the process of trying to find an agent with that novel, and again I had no success. Finally I wrote a third novel, and this time I was smarter about revising. I had assumed (again) that because I was already a good writer and even taught students how to write academic papers, I wouldn’t need to substantially revise or edit my own fiction. This is the biggest pitfall I see with other writers too: just because we are literate and even an expert in the field we’re writing about, we think we are good writers. You can be an expert on the topic you’re writing about (even if the topic is your own life) but that doesn’t mean you know how to tell a story that will keep readers turning pages. This was a big lesson for me, and once I learned it and made substantial revisions, I started receiving positive responses to my query letters. And by positive responses I mean personalized rejections that showed me the agent had actually read my manuscript!
By this time it was 2014 and I had sent 76 query letters for my third novel. Of those, I received 13 requests for the full manuscript. In the fall of 2014 I got a call from an excited agent who offered to represent me: Laura Crockett at Triada US Literary Agency. Laura was a new agent at the time but she was working for an established agency. She turned out to be the perfect agent for me, and she is still my agent 10 years later!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I have loved writing stories since I was a child, but I never wanted to make writing my full-time job because I was worried I’d lose the creative spark if I felt the pressure to write just to pay my bills and put food on the table. I also always loved history. As a student, I came close to choosing history as a major, but English literature won out. For my PhD I specialized in nineteenth-century British literature, and as a professor I’ve had the pleasure of teaching the great writers of that period. My knowledge of nineteenth-century literature and culture constantly inspires me with ideas for stories. But there is a disadvantage to being a novelist with an academic background—I had to unlearn my formal academic writing style and figure out how to tell a good story in an engaging way.
Given my background and interests, I suppose it’s not surprising that I write historical novels. I have always felt that historical fiction communicates a fuller, deeper truth than dry facts and dates do. To be able to convey that authentic historical experience through storytelling is a powerful and dangerous thing! I’m also fascinated by the tension between historical accuracy and historical authenticity. Perfect accuracy is impossible without a time machine, of course, but even the things we can know for certain about the past can’t be exactly reproduced because readers wouldn’t find them compelling or even believable. For example, I once read this line in a novel by George Eliot: “Where do you hang out?” If a character in a historical novel were to say this, readers would certainly object to this use of apparently modern slang. As a reader, I’m often jarred by modern-sounding language. I remember seeing the word “cash” used repeatedly in a novel set in the Renaissance and wondering why this respected historical novelist would use anachronistic language. Imagine my surprise when I looked up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary and found that “cash” was indeed used as early as the sixteenth century to indicate ready money.
I’ve had to cut some wonderful Victorian and Edwardian phrases out of my writing to avoid creating this jarring effect. For example, I’ve seen the phrase “she looked at him with all her eyes” in Victorian novels and think it’s a lovely way to describe a woman gazing at her child or suitor, but when I used it in an early draft of one of my novels, my critique partners told me it made them think of a spider!
It’s a delicate balancing act for an author to create an authentic setting that readers find believable while avoiding the kind of accuracy that distances readers instead of inviting them into the story. But I love the challenge, and I love to see how other authors handle it.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I grew up with a romantic notion of what a writer’s life is like, probably because it was my own fantasy. I imagined living in a beautiful Victorian mansion (or even a cute attic at the top of a Victorian mansion) with several cats for company, writing whenever inspiration struck me and never having to worry about making enough money to support myself and my cats with the royalties from my book sales.
The reality of a writer’s life, whether you write full-time or not, is that if you write only when you feel inspired, you won’t write much at all. Inspiration often comes after you start writing on any given day, not before. The best writing advice that works for me is “butt in chair” and “lower your expectations.” And unless you’re Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks, even multi-published authors don’t make enough from their royalties to quit their day jobs.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Society needs to support creatives by buying their books/art or their services and by spreading the word among family and friends. Every time I discover a new author or artist, I tell everyone I know to buy their work. Social media helps a lot in getting the word out too.
I love the way creative people already support one another, but it would be great to be able to find one another more easily. A website or social media site devoted to creatives discovering one another, like yours, is a great start!
Contact Info:
- Website: clarissaharwood.com
- Instagram: @clarissajharwood
- Facebook: @ClarissaHarwoodAuthor
- Twitter: @clarissaharwood