I recently completed another manuscript and, despite never having success with this before, decided to pitch it to literary agents. Hope springs eternal, they say. Of course, they also say there’s no fool like an old fool. But I digress.

​Other than the two who assisted me with contracts I secured on my own, I am not a fan of literary agents. One of my biggest criticisms is their insistence that they can judge a full-length manuscript based solely on the first five pages. I consider this preposterous, unless the first five pages are either thoroughly brilliant or equally awful. Most, I’d imagine, probably fall somewhere in the middle of the literary bell curve.

​Being the curious sort, I decided to do some research on the subject. Surprisingly, there are a number of articles covering this. Some include interviews with agents. Here are a few of the things they claim to base their five-page decisions on:

1. Bad proofreading and editing. Understandable, to a point, as long as they don’t miss the forest of the story through the trees of a few typos.

2. Overwriting. Again, understandable to a point. Most readers aren’t likely to enjoy being bogged down by dense prose at the very beginning of a book.

3. Too much describing of scenes and characters. They want to see these developed as action is taking place. Sometimes, though, a little early picture-painting can make for pleasant reading. It depends a lot on what comes after, which you’d completely miss if you stop too soon.

​The remaining reasons were, in my opinion, not merely subjective. They sounded more like made up excuses for not reading any further. Not specific, in other words. What the agent felt “looked right” to them based on their personal tastes, maybe. Or possibly, as I suspect, influenced by personal biases they might be unconscious of or are reluctant to admit publicly.

​So again, being the curious sort, I went to the site of a large, online bookseller and took a sneak peak at preview samples of some of those agents’ sold books. I was seeking enlightenment: what would my first few pages need to look like to rate getting those agents to move on to Page 6?

​Well, guess what? None of those novels started out any differently than any others I have ever seen, and I have seen oodles. They all begin by describing scenes and characters, sometimes quite heavy-handedly, and walk the path toward the beginning of what I assume would becomefairly typical story arcs. Nothing to write home about, in other words, and nothing to indicate that what followed would lead to anything special.

​So what gets an agent past page five, if it isn’t just the writing? I have some opinions. What are yours?​​

Joel Bresler is the author of

Bottomless Cups

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USA – UK – CA – AUS – IN