There Is No Secret

Against the search for a quick-fix writing life hack

Last week, literary agent Danielle Bukowski wrote about the importance of tightening the first 30-50 pages of your novel, as that’s often the amount editors will read to decide whether this manuscript is worth finishing, or whether it should be rejected outright. If an editor makes it past the first 30-50 pages, it’s likely that they’ll read the whole book.

My brief experience working at a publishing house bears this out. 30 pages was almost always enough to determine 1) whether there was any point to reading more, 2) whether I should pass the manuscript along to anyone else at the publishing house, and 3) what to say in the rejection letter.

However, a frequent occurrence at our editorial meetings was the following conversation:

EDITOR: Devon, how’d you end up liking that novel you mentioned last week? I remember you were really excited about the first fifty pages.

DEVON: Yeah, I finished reading. I was on board for the first half of the novel, but the author dropped the ball in the second half, and I didn’t care for the ending. I’m going to reject.

EDITOR: Sounds good. What else have you been reading?

In other words, if you tighten the hell out of the first 30-50 pages of your manuscript, you’ll still be judged on the rest of your manuscript. An editor won’t think: “Those first thirty pages were so good. I’ll acquire the book and try to bring the rest of it up to that level!” They’ll think: “Those first thirty pages were so good. Shame she couldn’t stick the landing.”

So while supercharging the first 30-50 pages of your novel is a good idea, I want to push back against the implied takeaway:

You’ve been worrying about the first ten pages of your manuscript, when really, you should be worried about the first fifty!

A lot of writers fixate on the query letter, the first page, the first chapter, the first fifty pages, as if absolutely nailing some portion of the book might be enough. The truth is, the whole book needs to be that good—not just the first sentence or the first fifty pages.

You might think it’s the acquiring editor’s job to help you shore up your book’s ending or saggy middle. They’re an editor, after all—it’s in the job description.

But in my experience, while editors are keen and avid line-editors, they rarely do the kind of structural overhaul that some books need. It’s not even that they’re unwilling, but that the risk-averse publishing model prevents it:

DEVON: So what did you think? I know the middle section needs work, and obviously we’ll need an entirely new ending, but if the author is willing, I have a lot of ideas for how we can make this into a great novel.

EDITOR: I don’t know… it seems like a lot of work. I mean, that middle section was rough.

DEVON: Totally agree. I was thinking what we could do with the middle section is shorten it and—

EDITOR: Do we really have the time to commit to a massive edit like that? Why would we pay an advance for something that’s only half-baked?

DEVON: Right. Good point. I’ll draft a rejection then?

This caution is common across the industry. What if an editor buys a book and then it flounders in the editing stage, never really living up to their hopes? What if they buy a book and it takes five years to get it to a publishable state? What if the author’s a nightmare to revise with? Surely, if the author were capable of making this a great book, they would have done so before going on submission.

(Of course, this caution sometimes ends up biting editors, who buy incredibly safe, polished books with absolutely no spark to them, and then the books come out and no one reads them or cares. But that’s a gripe for another post.)

The point is: a lot of writers search for that magic number. How many pages of their book have to be good? How good is good enough? And a lot of publishing advice feeds into that energy by isolating parts of the manuscript that need to be really good.

I see the rationale behind these posts. (I’ve written some!) It is important to have a good query letter: you need an agent to actually read your sample pages. It is important to have a strong opening: you need an editor to actually read your manuscript. But at some point, you’re going to run up against the same problem you started with: you need to write a good book. There’s no secret hack that will get you out of that.

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Shortly after my novel got accepted, I met up for coffee with a writer acquaintance. He was congratulatory about my novel, and wanted to know how I’d found a publisher.

Well, I said, I finished the manuscript and sent it to an agent. She liked it, but felt it had some pretty serious flaws, so she gave me notes for a revise & resubmit. I did a revision with her notes, and then I did another revision with a trusted reader, and then I sent it back to her. She liked the new draft and signed me on as a client. We decided to submit the novel in the spring of 2025. We sent it out, and an editor at McSweeney’s liked it, and made an offer, and we accepted the offer.

The writer acquaintance was still looking at me intently.

So… that’s how it happened, I said.

Uh-huh, he said, skeptically, like I wasn’t telling the whole truth. He kept asking the question from different angles throughout the rest of the coffee—How did you get an agent? Did you know the agent beforehand? Did you know the editor? So, you revised the novel, what do you mean you revised it?—and he didn’t seem satisfied with my answers. I wasn’t giving him what he wanted—I wasn’t telling him the secret.

Many of us have been on both sides of this conversation. Wherever you are in your writing career, there’s someone below you asking for the secret, and someone above you whose secrets you’re trying to extract. “You got a 6-figure Hollywood deal? What’s your secret?” “You got a short story accepted? What’s your secret?” “You finished something? What’s your secret?”

And yet, when you actually hit one of these writing milestones, you realize: there is no secret. There’s just some vague alchemy of talent, hard work, and good luck.

Of course, this is not to say that asking those questions is pointless. It’s important to research whatever stage of the process you’re at, whether by asking around, or subscribing to publishing advice newsletters, or reading about success cases.

But there’s a point at which you’ve researched everything you can research. You know what to expect, you know what’s typical, you know what’s possible, and you know what you have to do.

If you keep researching beyond that point, you might just be in search of the secret.

There is no secret.

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But if there is a secret, it’s this:

Your writing is a package with three things in it.

1. Concept

2. Execution

3. Writer

Anyone who evaluates your writing—publishers, literary agents, magazines, film/tv producers, admissions committees—will consider all three parts of this package. How good is the concept? How strong is the execution? How well-established is the writer?

We have all probably read a book that had only one out of three components going for it:

• A banger concept with shoddy execution by an unknown writer

• A superbly executed novel with a forgettable premise by an unknown writer

• A dreadful novel with a dreadful premise by a famous writer

I won’t even rule out the possibility that you’ve read a novel with none of these things going for it. But generally, a published book will be strong in at least one of these three categories, and probably more than one.

So if you are struggling to find an audience for your writing, it’s worth considering: in which of these three categories are you strong? How can you work on the categories in which you’re weaker? Have you maxed out any of these categories—and if so, where should you turn your attention?

Here’s what I mean by “maxed out”: let’s say you’re a relatively unknown writer working on a quiet literary novel. You’ve gone through 18 drafts with trusted readers: friends, fellow writers, freelance editors. You’ve polished every inch of it. And yet it still isn’t selling.

It’s possible you’ve maxed out on execution. You’re not going to change the fate of this book by working even harder on the execution. It’s time to look at the other two categories more closely. Is this concept good enough? Have I done enough to make myself appealing as a writer?

The same thinking applies to the other two categories. If you are a household-name celebrity and you can’t sell your memoir, there must be something seriously wrong with the concept and/or execution. (I saw some celebrity books cross my desk at the publishing house that were just ghastly. One ten-page proposal included a scan of a drawing on a napkin.) And if you come up with a ridiculously commercial premise, and the book doesn’t sell, the solution isn’t to come up with an even more ridiculously commercial premise. Focus instead on the execution, or on expanding what you offer as a writer: platform, credentials, connections.

There’s a lot of good advice out there that corresponds to these three categories. The trick is to know how best to direct your energies. Maybe you’ve been focusing too much on execution when your credentials are really what’s holding you back. Maybe you’ve been obsessing about the strength of your concept when your execution is the bigger problem.

When in doubt, work on improving all three. And keep in mind that this breakdown (concept/execution/writer) is meant to help you think about selling your book. If you want people to actually enjoy your book, you’re going to need to crush it on the execution. Not just the first fifty pages—the whole thing.

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Earlier this week I reviewed Stephen Fishbach’s Escape! for the Los Angeles Review of Books. I’ve really fallen off the wagon as far as reading books goes, but I tore through this novel. Let’s put the fun back in literary fiction!

Stay tuned for next week’s post, where I will contradict everything I said in this post by offering advice on opening pages.

Thanks for reading!