CREATIVE WRITING
DIFFERENT HATS, SOUND ADVICE
Adam Gauntlett is a literary agent with Peters Fraser and Dunlop (PDF). As A.E. Gauntlett, he’s attracted widespead praise for his twisty, turny debut thriller The Stranger at the Wedding. Wearing both his hats, he offers his top tips on what makes a book work – and potentially catch an agent’s eye
©Jonathan Garrett
Ibegin with a caveat, which hopefully goes without saying: there is no one way to write. There are guidelines, loose parameters perhaps – reader expectations in any given genre – but those guidelines, those expectations, are there to be at once respected and flouted. That’s where the new exists.
As a literary agent, dozens of submissions – whether fiction or non-fiction – pass my desk each week. Sadly, the vast majority of these won’t go much further. There are innumerable reasons for this: the pitch, the timing, and, of course the content itself. But it is not a precise science, and arguably not a science at all. There are various criteria that can be met – answering a need in the market, or else playing to a trend du jour – but often the submissions that speak to us the most do so for reasons hard to pin-point. An interesting turn-ofphrase or a plot that wrong-foots the reader can go a long way, but so too can an inexplicable alchemy of a well-wrought character in a fully formed world. And so that’s where we shall begin.