Exercise Four: Letter to Agent

So today it is the 4th day! Of what, you ask? "That time" of the month? The 4th day stuck on the side of a mountain in a snow storm with no peanut butter? No. It is the 4th exercise as detailed in the Writer's Digest 12 days of simple writing exercises. I have all of them listed in this blog post: Le Grande Experiment. It's time to tell an agent how great I am.


Dear Fabulous Agent:


I'm sure all agents sit and wait for that "tell all" letter, where the crazy writer goes on about themselves instead of their manuscript. Well, Writer's Digest told me to do this, and I'm sure they had their reasons.


I was greatly inspired by Stephen King's On Writing. He says (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) there are competent writers, good writers and genius writers. He says that a competent writer can become good with a lot of hard work and practice, but that genius is something you are born with. And no matter how many days of simple writing exercises you attempt, it will ever elude you. I do not fool with genius. I'm not worried about it. I will not attain it. What I am, in my humble opinion, is a competent writer, probably on the road, or perhaps even now, threatening to achieve almost-greatness. What I think are great are my worlds. I make them out of nothing. Goat hair floating on the wind and a pile of ash on my sister's carpet and I can come up with a magic system, a landscape, populate that landscape with heroes and heroines, victims and villains and throw them all in a story. I think I'm honest as a writer. I'm hard on myself. I don't let 'em off easy is what I'm saying. I don't bring down Gods to save folks, unless the Gods are carefully written in and promise to play by the rules. Or if they break the rules, everything goes all to crap and it would have been better if they'd just left well enough alone. I think I'm original. I make a very good turkey sandwich. I like to twist genres and tropes. If I went to Hogwarts, I'd probably get put in Hufflepuff for being such a loyal friend. And as the ponies tell us, friendship is magic.