Christine Grace's Blog - Posts Tagged "writers-conference"

Three years ago at a writers conference I signed in to pitch to the only agent left—the popular ones were taken. The main genre this agent represented was not the historical fiction I wrote but Christianity. Having written a non-Christian story, naturally I doubted we were right for each other and I told him so. He assured me he represented many genres with the exception of erotica and horror, so I should give it a shot. I dove into the premise of my story then afterward, grappled with questions I had for him—I had to protect the years I’d spent cavorting through the words that became my novel before releasing it to him. Still, I neither experienced a wash of brilliant light, nor visualized my future with this agent. I just had uncertainty.

The standard six to eight weeks later an email from his office arrived that stated, “As we read the manuscript, this looks like borderline erotica. Your query gave no hint of this.” I reviewed the line a second, third and fourth time, stunned as if I'd been given a handful of salt. Had I tapped into or conjured a side of myself I wasn’t aware of? And if so, does one paragraph of an expression of love in a three hundred page historical fiction throw it into a completely different category?

I thought about my story, the research, the journalistic training used for it, the interviews, the methodical deliberate writing, refining and refining over the course of years for historical accuracy, and the notion that from all of this I had spawned erotica. My writing group who’d read and critiqued my book howled with laughter, saying they’ll add this to the list of glib brush-offs in response to query letters that many writers receive, such as: “I didn’t love this enough” or “This would be difficult to place in the current market.” And now, “This looks like borderline erotica. Your query gave no hint of this.” The critique group added further, that although I viewed myself as a creator, I should not insult authors of erotica by announcing my “newfound talent.”

That night, heading to the bathroom in the dark, I slipped on a page in Poets&Writers I’d tagged to read the next day. I flipped the light switch and peeled my toe off a portion of Ben Arthur’s article: “We don’t have to love a piece of art to respond to it. In fact, sometimes it’s the work that we dislike, the work that bothers us, that makes us react the most.”