Imagine you find yourself in an elevator with Oprah. She’s getting out on the next floor, which means you have just ten seconds to persuade her that your book should be in her Book Club.
This advice came through a newsletter from the Newcastle-based quarterly for women writers, Mslexia, who host an ‘Agent Extravaganza’, inviting submissions of pitches to agents representing writers in genres of Children’s & YA, Fiction and Narrative Non-fiction & Memoir. Just 50 words (roughly the limit of a Tweet) following the basic formula: ‘This is a story about X, who wants Y, but is impeded by Z’.
Getting past the anxiety induced by imagining myself in an elevator with Oprah, to say nothing of the elevator pitch itself—in its name its constricted form, the claustrophobic space-time of ten seconds in a metal box, which doors will open and shut on my golden opportunity before the right 50 words have exited my mouth—a maximally abbreviated synopsis sounded simple enough. I have already ~100,000 words or 95% of the first draft of my novel. I thought, maybe it’s time to poke my head out of the cave where I have been incubating this thing and see if there is any interest outside. At least, crafting a pitch will help me to distil what I have been trying over these last nineteen months to articulate.
I gave myself an hour and a half and nearly three weeks later am still tweaking these ~50 words:
Fugue: a story of flight, music and mind
Rhea Woodard moves to New York City in autumn 2005, pursuing music and audio engineer Elliot Garsun, who hears her ‘real voice’. In a soundproof practice room, a violent act shatters Rhea’s Romantic worldview, and she enters a fugue state, processing what has happened through an analysis of Brahms Ballades.
Even after a ‘Pitch Surgery’ excising clichés, this pitch is not free of them. I wonder how Oprah would react.
I recall an Oprah exclusive with Cormac McCarthy, his first and probably last on-camera literary interview after The Road made Oprah’s Book Club and won the Pulitzer in 2007. I found it recently after beginning The Passenger, the first panel of McCarthy’s new diptych also including Stella Maris. These two novels came out in 2022 and are his first to be published since The Road.
‘Oprah’s third eye’ I have jotted in a file of fragmentary creative prompts.
It’s easy to be snarky about Oprah (a New Yorker article commenting on the same interview said so too), but she and McCarthy cover a lot of ground in the course of their <9 minutes.
He tells her that the catalyst for his ‘straightforward’ Apocalypse story was an image which came to him one night at an old hotel in El Paso, Texas. At two or three in the morning he looked out the window. He could hear the lonesome sound of the trains and he saw the town in fifty or hundred years: ‘fires up on a hill and everything laid to waste’. So he wrote two pages about that and for four years the image smouldered in the back of his mind, until one day he woke up in Ireland knowing that it would inform the backdrop of a novel about a man and a boy at the end of the world. (The Road includes verbatim conversations between the author and his son, John Francis, who was eight years old when the novel came out and who bears its dedication.)
Of his process McCarthy tells Oprah, ‘At the core of it, there’s this image that you have, this interior image of something absolutely perfect, and that’s your signpost and your guide. You’ll never get there, but without it you won’t get anywhere.’ Oprah asks, ‘When you start out to write a book, do you start out with that image?’ And the author replies, ‘It’s not so much a conscious thing.’ She asks, ‘Do you write methodically?’ and he responds, ‘You can’t plot things out. You just have to trust in wherever it comes from.’
I have been thinking about all this in relation to Hsin Hsin Ming, a 7th-century AD poem and one of the earliest expressions of Zen Buddhism, attributed to Seng-ts’an, the Third Patriarch of Ch’an. Hsin Hsin Ming could be translated to ‘verses on trust in awareness’. Here Rupert Spira reads Richard B. Clarke’s translation from the Chinese (at 1.55) before his own rendition (at 11.25).
These lines have impacted me especially:
From the Clarke translation:
3.28: Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and passivity, assertion and denial.
4.02: To return to the root is to find meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source.
4.27: Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.
7.32: To seek mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of all mistakes.
7.47: All dualities come from ignorant inference. They are like dreams, or flowers in air.
From Spira’s rendition:
14.40: Do not search for happiness; only cease allowing the thought, ‘I don’t want what is present; I want what is not present’ to run your life.
18.14: For one who is lost in her thoughts and feelings, life is a constant battle of resistance, holding and seeking, and thus she is rarely at peace.
18.39: To seek our being with the mind is a mistake, for our being lies at the source of the mind; it can never be found as an object of the mind.
21.52: At every moment, experience is always a single, infinite and indivisible whole, and all definitions would refer to parts of the whole.
There is much to unravel in Hsin Hsin Ming, about the mind’s tendency to be captivated and held captive by the appearances of things and thoughts, their apparently discrete forms in space. The mind likes to create distinctions and hold preferences that shroud the true nature of reality, or Oneness. Thus, we are called to cultivate equanimity, attaching neither to a desirable nor an undesirable outcome, so that our labour and its fruits accrue neither a positive nor a negative charge.
Hsin Hsin Ming is radical in our results-oriented culture, which functions on value judgments and solving problems. Indeed, the Way resists the tug of the metanarrative, ‘This is a story about X, who wants Y, but is impeded by Z’.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with hoping my book will find a publisher and an audience by way of a literary agent. But in seeking that end, I must relax any stories about me as X, wanting Y, though I am impeded by Z. With action proceeding from preconceived notions or expectations, there is the potential to get lost in things as I want them to appear and not as they actually are.
From 2017 to 2019 I wanted to start a tech company. I remember how long my co-founder Dan and I spent refining our pitch, The Deck, twenty slides we eventually whittled down to a ‘one-pager’. Earlier on, I had fifteen minutes to stoke the interest of one of the only venture capital firms investing in ‘idea-stage’ solo founders. I presented wildly optimistic calculations showing how my online art-AI platform would generate 100 million pounds of revenues in three years, because that’s what the investor wanted to see: a 100-million-pound opportunity.
So did my first attempt at pitching my novel go. The people-pleasing opportunist in me worked backwards from what she had read on book jackets and projected that, even if it boiled down my project to a caricature.
The marketing of something introduces a tension between the desire for a certain finite gain into which intention is invested, and the acceptance of life as it will unfold. This desire often rests on fundamental misconceptions that get in the way of lasting peace, e.g.: happiness can be obtained; and I know better than life about what it should or shouldn’t deliver. To become implicated in these delusions of the grasping mind is to miss what is always available. Whereas to cultivate the neutral mind is to apply the same soft focus one would to make a Magic Eye pop into three dimensions.
To get too involved in the representation of a thing, according to preconceptions of how it might appear or what it might yield, is to reinforce patterns of conditional acceptance and to distance oneself from what actually makes the thing worth noting. Ultimately, to get to the root of anything, one must drop all descriptions, words or impressions reducing it to something communicable in the realm of relational experience. In the illusion of self and other, there are recipes for prosperity which must be seen through, in order to free up possibilities for real felt abundance.
The Source of all things has no use for definitions. At this level, the most basic of distinctions—the perception of an object by a subject—dissolves into the single infinite and indivisible whole that underlies experience at every moment. Listening to Lucrecia Dalt, I heard it put this way:
An organless freedom, a sharply delineated fog
And when you spoke, you'd have a voice that was not quite you
And not quite me but something rubbed through both of us
Toward the end of her interview with Cormac McCarthy, Oprah flutters her hands in front of her face and asks, ‘You haven’t worked out the God thing or not yet?’ And McCarthy smiles, ‘It would depend on what day you ask me.’ He pauses before offering, ‘But sometimes it’s good to pray. I don’t think you have to have a clear idea of who or what God is in order to pray. You can even be quite doubtful about the whole business.’ And Oprah nods, her cheek brushing her fist, striking the pose of a thinker.
Oprah poses her final question, ‘Do you care, if now, millions of people are reading your books, versus when there were only a few thousand in the early years?’ And McCarthy sighs, ‘In all honesty, I have to say that I really don’t. I mean, you would like for the people who would appreciate the book to read it.’ And Oprah laughs heartily, glancing at the camera, her pearly whites flashing before she declares, ‘Well, you are a different kind of author, lemme tell ya.’
We don’t know where it comes from, we don’t know where it’s going, and it surprises us all the more for being undisturbed by our most valiant intentions. Pitching was a valid exercise, if only for the reason that it prompted me to look back at what I have written, noticing the symmetries and salient points I could not see at the time of their writing. There is a deep drive toward balance, completely beyond the remit of the manager/controller in the front seat of awareness, and the design of my novel shows me that it is not really mine, that my subconscious has structured it as much as my conscious mind has, so I cannot get too precious about it.