The Strange Business of Asking Someone to Believe in Your Book

For years, “The Better Son” existed almost entirely in my head.

Then I wrote it.

The first draft took about four months. The editing has taken considerably longer. Now, after years of carrying the story around and months of revising it, I've begun sending it to literary agents.

That's a peculiar transition.

Until recently, I was the only person who had to believe in the book. My beta readers changed that, of course. Their reactions mattered. Some saw things I hadn't seen. One reader, in particular, recognized something in the Italian-American world of the story that told me I'd managed to create what I was trying to create.

But ultimately, I could still close the file and go back to work.

That's changing.

An agent who receives my query doesn't know Michael Santoro. Doesn't know why I made him the way I did. Doesn't know which parts of his world came from my own experience and which parts I invented. Doesn't know the years I've spent thinking about the people and events behind the story.

The agent gets a few paragraphs and some pages.

That's it.

And that's fair.

In fact, it's exactly what should happen. A novel has to work without its author standing beside it explaining what he meant.

That's one of the things I've learned during the revision process. I've become less interested in explaining the characters and more interested in letting them reveal themselves. Michael doesn't need me to tell the reader who he is. His decisions should do that.

The same is true of the novel itself.

I've spent a lot of time wondering whether a story about people of my generation, shaped by a culture that has changed considerably, will matter to readers who didn't grow up in that world. I still don't know the answer.

But I'm beginning to think that's the wrong question.

The story isn't really about being Italian-American. It isn't really about organized crime, either, although crime is what sets much of the story in motion.

It's about what happens when ordinary people find themselves in circumstances they never expected to encounter—and what those circumstances reveal about them.

That's something I suspect travels pretty well across generations.

So now the book is beginning to make its way beyond my office.

There have already been some rejections. There will undoubtedly be more. There may eventually be an agent who sees something in the manuscript and wants to take it further.

I don't find any of that particularly frightening.

I've spent most of my adult life making decisions without knowing exactly how they would turn out. Some worked. Some didn't. You make the best decision you can and live with the result.

Writing a novel isn't much different.

The difference is that this time the thing I'm putting into the world isn't a business, a career, or a balance sheet.

It's a story that has been living in my head for years.

Now I'm finding out whether it can live in someone else's.