I’m on the phone with Lindsay Maines, desperate for details about her speed-dating experience. Did she wear her skinny black pants? What were the first words out of her mouth? Did she make a connection with the stranger sitting across from her while a monitor timed them to make sure they didn’t talk for an instant longer than 10 minutes?
“I spent half an hour pacing in my hotel room before the date,” Maines confides, and I can still hear the nervous tension in her voice. She rehearsed her opening line over and over, knowing she’d only get one chance to make a good impression, to woo this desirable dark-haired stranger and to enter into a relationship that could change the course of her life.
Maines, by the way, is happily married. Her hot date? A New York literary agent who helped launch an unknown novelist named Emily Giffin onto bestseller lists with Something Borrowed a few years ago. (Giffin has since bought a house near actor Matthew McConaughey, and her books are sold around the globe.) 
Maines is hoping the agent will sprinkle some of that literary magic dust over her manuscript, which is why she has traveled from her Germantown home to Allentown, Pa., and shelled out hundreds of dollars for a hotel room and a speed-dating spot at a fiction writers’ conference.
“She asked for a partial!” Maines tells me over the phone, and we squeal with excitement. The agent wants to see the first 50 pages of Maines’ book. In the world of speed-dating, this is the equivalent of exchanging smoldering glances. If you’ve ever imagined seeing your name plastered across a book jacket, you’re not alone. Throughout the Bethesda area, people are chasing the same dream. They’re pecking away on a laptop at Starbucks, or pulling a half-finished manuscript out of a desk drawer when the kids are finally asleep, or sitting in a dreary office cubicle fantasizing about chucking it all and writing the great American novel.
At The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, people from all walks of life—retirees and teens, stay-at-home moms and attorneys, teachers and journalists—continually pour through the doors to sign up for ever-popular classes such as “Introduction to the Novel” and “The Crucial First Chapter.”
Their dreams are big, and who’s to say one of them won’t follow the trails blazed by John Grisham, the former practicing lawyer who penned a blockbuster between court cases, or J.K. Rowling, who came up with the idea for Harry Potter while riding on a train? Who’s to say the next household-name author won’t be someone like Debbie Demske of Potomac, who was on a business trip when the desire to write a novel struck her with the force of a lightning bolt. Or Julie Wakeman-Linn of Bethesda, who has been quietly toiling away on a book for years?
Being successful, however, isn’t going to be easy. There’s a tricky part to every aspiring novelist’s dream: It’s a snap to fantasize about the book and who will play the roles in the inevitable Hollywood production that will follow; it’s quite something else to do the actual writing.
Ideas that flow through the mind as cleanly and fluidly as a country river tend to get jammed up and polluted when the time comes to write.
“I get frustrated and bogged down and hopelessly distracted all the time,” Demske laments.
Once you sit down to seriously write, agrees Wakeman-Linn, who teaches creative writing at Montgomery College, “you realize 300 pages is a lot of pages.”
So how do they get the book written, which is only the first hurdle standing between a novelist and the gritty, glamorous and sometimes heartbreaking world of publishing? Some first time novelists, including Paula Whyman of Bethesda, say discipline is key. She forces herself to leave the house so she won’t get distracted by, say, e-mail accounts that beg to be checked every 30 seconds. Whyman recently completed her novel, The People You Meet, by lugging her laptop to Bethesda Library’s quiet room while her kids were in school.
For Demske, the goal is to write something in her home office every day, whether it’s a paragraph or five pages. She can easily visualize her book—in her head, the plot is rich and intricate and seamless—but putting it down on paper is an exercise in frustration she never anticipated while working full time. Back then, Demske was busy with her strategy-and planning job with Hewlett-Packard. She was on a business trip when she went to a museum housed in the former New Orleans Mint building and began wandering around an exhibit detailing the early process of making gold coins. As she read an old newspaper article accompanying the exhibit, her mind suddenly began churning with the ingredients of a killer plot.
What if, more than 100 years ago, a young woman from the North and a slave from the South joined forces to solve the mystery of $1 million in coins missing from the mint? Her idea was partially rooted in history, which added to its appeal: A group of young women from Philadelphia had been sent to the South to work at the mint around the time of the Civil War and, at one point, $1 million disappeared.
“Everyone says, ‘That’s such a great story!’ ” Demske says. “But when you try to get the story on paper, it is so much harder to make it as exciting as it is when I tell the story to someone over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.”
Still, it will take more than a bit of writer’s block to keep Demske down. “I have to get the words out and keep going,” she vows. “What I’m looking forward to doing is going back to New Orleans for inspiration. And I hope to write there for a few days.”
Landing an agent
Once you’ve finally finished the book (roughly 300-400 pages, and increasing the size of the font doesn’t count), it’s time to find an agent. It isn’t impossible to sell a book without an agent, but it sure gives you an edge to have one. Good agents get hundreds of letters from would-be novelists every week, and if yours doesn’t leap out of the slush pile of unsolicited work, it’s headed for a quick reincarnation via the recycling bin.
So how do you lure an agent? It’s easier to know what not to do. Agents often get letters addressed to rival agents (oops), notes that reek of despair (“I’ve queried 100 agents and been turned down by them all”) and even abusive, foul-language missives from writers they’ve rejected (which, shockingly, doesn’t make the agent eager to reconsider).
When I call Jeff Kleinman, the agent for The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein—the novel was picked up by Starbucks for its book program—he tells me other things writers have done to try to catch his eye. They’ve offered to give him massages, sent him a tiara as a tie-in for a book proposal, tried to hypnotize him, offered to buy him drinks at writers’ conferences and sent him box after box of chocolates.
Kleinman, one of the founders of Folio Literary Management, which has offices in New York and Washington, D.C., gave the tiara to his daughter, the chocolates to his wife and wisely turned down the massage and hypnosis sessions. What about the free drinks?
