How To Get Over The Transom

In the days of my youth, most business offices had transoms. You don't see them anymore. A transom was a narrow window over the top of a door. It could be opened to let some smoke out and some ventilation in.

In magazine and book publishing, the term came to be applied to unsolicited manuscripts. The offerings didn't come from an agent. They came over the transom. Most of the manuscripts disappeared as unceremoniously, but those with promise won a reading.

What quickly distinguishes a reject from a keeper? For the writer who goes over the transom - the writer whose reputation is yet to come - three factors are important. These are the first impression, the first paragraph and the first whistle.

It is astonishing how indifferent the amateur author can be toward the most elementary rules of submission. The first page of a manuscript creates an immediate impression. If the novel, article or short story has been bicycled for months in search of a buyer, at least the first page should be made pristine. Every line must be correctly punctuated, every word correctly spelled.

I mention these kindergarten reminders because a manuscript came over my transom in August that broke all the rules. The author misspelled two words on the first page. He had left out a comma where he needed one, and he had inserted a comma where it did not belong. Moreover, the thing was single-spaced and the pages weren't even numbered. Aaargh! Appearances count.

The first paragraph can make or break. In a busy editorial office, dealing with a dozen transoms a day, the first few sentences are vital. All of us can remember great leads: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." So Dickens began "A Tale of Two Cities." Melville hooked us with, "Call me Ishmael."

Sinclair Lewis was equally laconic: "Elmer Gantry was drunk." In "Another Country," James Baldwin began slowly: "He was facing Seventh Avenue at Times Square." In "Butterfield 8" John O'Hara lured his readers: "On this Sunday morning in May, the girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York awoke much too early for the night before." In "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Harriet Beecher Stowe led us softly into the story: "Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine."

These were good leads. What were the best and worst of times? Who was Ishmael? What had the girl done to make her a sensation? Who were the two gentlemen drinking wine? Good writers set their hooks with the first bite.

I digress long enough to recall the tale that is told of a frustrated novelist. He began with a marvelous first sentence: "Naked, Elaine stood at the window watching John come up the walk." It was perfect. The sentence had a nice lilt. It held true to the best tradition of the Genre of the Ripped Bodice. Alas, the author then fell into a writer's block and John never made it to the door. Thus the manuscript ended.

For some years I was charged with hiring editorial writers. Applicants sent in samples of their work, and I looked for the first whistle. Let me explain by example. The other evening I fell to reading a suspense yarn by Jonathan Kellerman, "The Web." He was describing a remote island in Micronesia. Seen from a low-flying plane, narrow roads "were coiled like limp shoelaces."

This was on Page 2, barely 500 words into the novel. I said, "Whew!" On Page 3, we meet a boy "as talkative as an all-night disc jockey." On Page 7, the author looks at banyan trees, whose "aerial roots dripped like melting wax from several boughs, digging their way back into the earth."

Now, these were not the greatest similes ever minted, but they had the ring of a WRITER at work. If freelancers are to hook the jaded reader in a publishing house, they should work for the first whistle.

(Copyright 1996, Universal Press Syndicate)