Going Solo

WHEN I finished writing my debut novel, I did what I understood every writer who wants to publish a novel must do: I started submitting it to agents. Some years earlier I had worked with an agent on a novel that didn’t sell, but I chalked up that experience to simple bad luck and set about querying agents for the new book. Ten months and more than sixty query letters later, I had a small stack of glowing reader reports and reluctant passes, but no offers of representation.

The universe, it seemed, was once again politely but firmly saying no. But as I read the responses I was getting from agents, something bothered me. They seemed to genuinely like the book. They just couldn’t figure out how to sell it. They wanted me to amp up the story, worrying that it was “too quiet,” which I read as agent-speak for a book driven more by character development than plot. They also feared that women, who read more fiction than men, studies consistently find, might not gravitate toward a love story told from the perspective of a man in the grip of his addictions—in other words, a character who isn’t always sympathetic.

On a purely commercial level I could see their point, but every time I considered rewriting the novel in the ways they suggested, instead of feeling amped I just felt tired. The book they seemed to be asking for wasn’t the book I’d set out to write. And based on what I was hearing from agents and from other