Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

Too many fledgling writers treat agents like fairy godmothers, expecting them to change pumpkin novels into princes. That desperation allows too many swindling faux-agents to flourish. 

Today novelist Tony D'Souza will tell you exactly how an agent can help you and exactly how they can't help you.

Over the course of his career, D'Souza has published Whiteman, a number of freelance stories, and his new novel, The Konkans. He'll explain how he traveled from Peace Corps to a writing career, despite a number of rejections from his agent.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your agent has played a key role in your career. Could you explain how you located your agent and how you worked together over the last two books? What's your advice for writers with a first novel who are looking for an agent?

I did get an MFA, and while there I met a guy who would later say to me "So you published stories in the lit journals, who cares, nobody reads the lit journals." He said this when we were about to turn 30, and he had long ago left the art to enter the grind as a copy editor in Silicon Valley, and I was a guy with maybe a dozen stories in the lit journals, a few failed novels and nothing else.

But the lit journals were a very important part of my life and still are. Because I believed in my work and loved it and was very proud of those stories I'd published in the journals that no one had read. I was so proud of them that I photocopied the stories and brought them with me to Africa.

While in my service I was stationed in a remote village in Ivory Coast. The next closest volunteer was half a day away by bicycle, so we became friends. Merle Rubine was retired from a long career as a producer at Dateline NBC. Now she was teaching literacy to Worodougou women in the heat of West Africa.

Anyway, reading was a huge part of our lives, I showed my stories to Merle and she asked if she could read them. When she had finished them she told me she had liked them and that I should send them to her friend Liz who was a literary agent in New York.

So I wrote a letter home and my mother mailed my stories to Liz in New York. Yadda yadda yadda. In the next few years I would send Liz a collection of poems called Taliban Whisperings, my collected stories, and a novel called Andalusia. Liz would reject them one by one. Then I sent her Whiteman.

Liz is Liz Darhansoff. She's represented a big percentage of the literary novels we know and love (Brokeback Mountain, Memoirs of a Geisha, Cold Mountain, Whiteman and The Konkans (wink-wink)).