Shaping Your Manuscript
Mr. Levine reads 4,000 fiction and poetry manuscripts each year for Tupelo Press, one of America's most acclaimed independent literary publishers. He shares his advice on what editors like to see.
- Use 11 or 12 point Times Roman or other clean serif (Garamond or Palatino, for example), nothing smaller or larger.
- Beware the frontispiece poem (that poem of yours that you might have elected to place before your numbered pages, or before your table of contents). This practice draws far too much attention to a single poem and, in my experience, the selected poem more often than not (80% of the time?) turns out to be one of the weakest poems in the collection.
- When ordering poems in your manuscript, pay no attention to which poems have been published (and where), and which poems not. At the conclusion of contests, I often (call me perverse) go back and look at the acknowledgment pages. I find that most poets place an inordinate (and mistaken) reliance on their publishing history in ordering poems, assuming that because such-and-such a journal took a poem it must be better than the poems not taken, or that a poem taken by Poetry or The Paris Review must be better than one taken by a lesser known print or online publication. I am almost always amazed—amazed—by which poems have been taken and which not (and by whom). Believe in all your poems, and order them according to your sense of where they belong. Period.
- When organizing the manuscript, think about each poem according to: mood / tone; dominant images, characters/speaker, setting/season; chronology, and whatever other categories you deem important to your own work. However you organize your collection, keep in mind that you are creating a book, and you cannot really know how the poems interact with each other unless you've done this work.
- Make sure the poems that begin your collection establish the voice and credibility of the manuscript. They should introduce the questions, issues, characters, images, sources of conflict/tension, etc., that concern you and that will be explored in the book. Think about the trajectory of the manuscript: you want to set the reader off on a journey, a path toward some (even if undisclosed) destination.
- Find an effective title: from the title of a significant poem in your collection, or from a line in your poem, or (perhaps to create some tension or mystery) it may not appear in your collection at all. That said, create about 20 contrasting titles and live with each for a while. Print out a title page for each possibility and look at them early and often. Obviously, you'll have ample opportunity to re-title your work after it's accepted by a publisher, but so many titles (of even terrific manuscripts) are so ill-thought out or just plain bad that I find I have to get over that initial reaction in order to give a collection its due.
- Other considerations:
a) don't send in a photocopy that's been copied so many, many times that it has inherited smudges or the type has faded;
b) send a cover letter if you like, but never a resume, and if you do send a cover letter, make sure it's addressed to the intended press and not some other press (you'd be surprised!), and don't address your cover letter to the contest judge (you'd be surprised!), and don't say you're in the process of a complete revision and will be sending the revised manuscript in a week or two (you'd be surprised!);
c) don't include dedications and thanks on a contest manuscript (plenty of time for that later);
d) be judicious about epigraphs—mostly they're just so much hardware unless a poem clearly addresses the words or theme of the epigraph.
Source: http://jeffreyelevine.com/2011/10/12/on-making-the-poetry-manuscript/
Categories: Advice for Writers