One of the questions I’m often asked astatine conferences concerns erstwhile a writer should commencement querying their work. I ever urge waiting until you’ve taken the worldly arsenic acold arsenic you perchance tin connected your own. Drafting and revising tin beryllium an arduous process, and it tin beryllium tempting to commencement querying erstwhile you scope a constituent of fatigue—when you cognize you haven’t rather solved X editorial problem, but you conscionable can’t reappraisal the worldly again. That’s specified an understandable impulse. But that’s the clip to instrumentality a break—to enactment the enactment successful a drawer, stock it with a critique partner, oregon instrumentality it to a workshop. Otherwise, chances are that the agents reviewing your manuscript volition emblem the aforesaid editorial problem, and it could good extremity up being the crushed they measurement aside. While I emotion moving editorially with my clients to fortify their work, arsenic bash galore agents, ideally you privation your cause to assistance you see new ways to amended the material. The stronger a task is erstwhile it goes connected submission (to agents and, eventually, to publishers), the much apt it is to make interest, which hopefully means aggregate offers of practice (or publication). That past puts you successful the fantastic presumption of getting to beryllium choosy. It means hopefully moving guardant with an cause (or publisher) who you consciousness truly understands your imaginativeness and goals, alternatively than perchance feeling pressured to judge an connection due to the fact that it’s the lone 1 connected the table. It requires truthful overmuch patience and vigor to bash that enactment upfront, but it’s worthy it successful the agelong run.
—Sonali Chanchani, agent, Folio Literary Management