Signing on a Partial Manuscript: My Untraditional Route to Landing a Literary Agent (and Book Deal)

I never actually queried my agent, Danielle Bukowski. We met on Zoom years before she signed me, though we were connected unknowingly even years before that. Just before the pandemic, I made the somewhat impulsive decision to apply to MFA programs and accepted my spot at Brooklyn College the week before New York City went into lockdown. (My mother recently revealed that she found this “kind of crazy” but now sees the logic in it, my reaction to which would require a separate essay to unpack.)

(Finding an Agent and Publication Much Sooner Than Expected.)

I was lucky to have gotten into a program like Brooklyn, to have something positive to look forward to during the first six months of the pandemic, when the world was a strange brew of uncertainty and monotony. But in my first semester, I got luckier still—a production company read several of my short stories and wanted to option one of them. Delighted and panicked, I called everyone I knew who had ever had a film agent—I used to work in film, so thankfully I had a longer list than most people might—and finally connected with my current, wonderful film rights agent, Alice Lawson at Gersh a few days before Christmas of 2020.

The following spring, at a Brooklyn College agent panel, I was paired up with Danielle Bukowski. In my pre-meeting research, I saw that she had worked with Alice before, a fact that I dropped as casually as possible in my effort to seem “legit” to Danielle. I can only assume that being represented by a film rights agent she knew and respected made a difference. But it was my verbal pitch for my novel Voyagers—something along the lines of “Franny and Zooey meets The X-Files”—that drew Danielle in more. (And I know that comps can feel like a burden for writers, but I come by my love of “X meets Y” pairings honestly; I used to write coverage for a film studio and spent hours skimming Publisher’s Marketplace deal announcements for possible IP. Fellow writers: If you ever think you’ve come up with too unhinged a pairing, just remember that I once read about a project pitched as “Battlestar Galactica meets Ten Things I Hate About You.”) After our meeting, she wrote me: “I’m very interested in reading your novel when you’ve finished and start querying agents.”

That was May of 2021. Time passed. I worked for art and for money. My father died. I graduated from my MFA. Through it all, Danielle kept in touch. Every six months or so, I’d get an email:

“I just wanted to send a quick note before everyone checks out that I’m still very interested in reading your novel once it’s ready!”

“I just wanted to send a quick note to say Hi and that I’m still eager to read your novel when you’re ready to share.”

Each time, I’d reply, with more than a little shame, that I had not finished this novel that she was so excited about, afraid that each time I failed to produce a perfect, completed manuscript, she’d lose interest. Somehow, though, she didn’t. And more importantly, I stopped trying to make something perfect for her. After two years of my stalling, Alice, my aforementioned film agent, finally pushed me to just send out what I had: the first 80 pages of the manuscript and a pitch for how the rest of the plot would unfold. Blessedly, even after all that build-up, Danielle was not disappointed. She loved the pages and the pitch and signed me that June, two years and two weeks since we’d first met on Zoom in 2021.

This was very much not the end of the road. The awful truth of signing on a partial is that you still have to finish the book. Actually finishing Voyagers, literally just writing to the end of the story, took another two years of work. (I have to write the first draft of a piece in order, no skipping around, no matter how long it takes, and yet I also have to know, in excruciating detail, exactly what the final scene will be in order to do so. I’m a nightmare!) Danielle and I experimented with what would get the manuscript over the finish line—should I send her weekly pages? Monthly? Should we have check-in calls at regular intervals? Or a single, terrifying deadline?

We tried out everything and the annoying, unreplicable answer is: The book was finished when I was ready to be finished with it. It took the time it took, no matter how often I wept (for real, my loved ones can attest) about how long it was taking. In July of 2024, one year and many bouts of despair after Danielle signed me, Voyagers went out on submission. It sold a few weeks later to my amazing editors Millicent Bennet and Liz Velez at Harper.

My journey to publication has been miraculously and depressingly non-linear, so much so that I feared, when I was asked to write this essay, that it would hold nothing of value for those starting their querying journey. In my early 20s, when I was still working at my job writing coverage and reading Publishers Marketplace, I wrote a YA novel and queried widely, with a letter that I crafted very carefully and sent out cold. I got several requests for a full manuscript, all of which ended in very kind rejections. Back then, I would have read this very essay and thought “must be nice to have a film agent” then gone back to trying to craft the perfect logline for my novel-in-progress. That one was “a darker Gossip Girl meets a more grounded Heroes” and I cannot tell you how grateful I am that it never got published.

But pieces of that shelved book made their way into Voyagers. A decade later, I was still preoccupied with questions of loyalty and honesty and class and belief. Luckily, this time, I had an agent willing to work with me, even if what I submitted was imperfect and unfinished. Perhaps the best advice I can extract from my journey is this: Don’t rush. Writing is not a race. You will find your champions and finish your novel or collection at the precise moment you are meant to.

This is, I know, so corny. But to paraphrase Infinite Jest—a book I “meant to read” for about 10 years and finally got around to at precisely the right moment—the stupider the cliché, “the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.” So don’t hurry. Or do. You’ll get there when you’re meant to no matter what. Which is, not incidentally, a pretty good summary of the ending to Voyagers.