FIRST IMPRESSIONS by jordan e. rosenfeld
AN ATTACKER HELD A GUN to Matthew Dicks’ head in a McDonald’s when he was 21. He’ll never know whether it was luck or his own methodical nature that allowed him to survive armed robbery, but it’s no coincidence that both luck and method are important themes in his debut novel, Something Missing.
Years after the attack, Dicks was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Already at work on Something Missing by that time, he shared his writing with his therapist, who pointed out telling similarities between Dicks and his protagonist, Martin, a thief who breaks into people’s homes to steal items that no one will notice are missing. “A lot of what makes Martin a successful thief are qualities that helped me get through the day without worrying about people coming into my home with guns,” Dicks explains. “Martin is methodical and cautious. He plans everything to the minute. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was very much the same way.”
The manuscript itself had also begun with a combination of luck and method. An elementary school teacher who’d majored in creative writing, Dicks found himself, simply put, a writer without an idea for a book. Then, on vacation at his
fiancee’s grandmother’s house in Florida—with no cable or Internet to distract him—he began entertaining himself by working on a quirky idea he thought would be a short story. The story kept coming, though, and he’d written three chapters by the time he left. Something Missing was in progress.
“It may sound kooky, but I tell writers that the story already exists and you just need to find it,” he says. Once Dicks found his story, he wrote constantly—even on his wedding day— but still wasn’t sure how the book would end. “On the afternoon that I was finishing the chapter where you find out if Martin goes to jail or not, I still didn’t know what would happen.”
He allowed his writing process to be free flowing and organic, but when it came to getting published, he relied on his methodical nature. He
made finding an agent his summer job. “I really think that publishing is a numbers game,” he says. “Write to 200 agents and you’ll have better luck.” His meticulous search paid off when he signed with Taryn Fagerness of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
Dicks spent six months revising with Fagerness. Before she’d even submitted the manuscript to any publishers, Fagerness verbally pitched it to Broadway editor Melissa Danaczko over lunch. Danaczko asked for an exclusive read. “I started Something Missing around 9 p.m. and didn’t put it down until the wee hours of the night,” she says. “I’m hard-pressed to think of another author, especially a first-time author, who can churn out prose that is simultaneously side-splittingly hilarious and achingly poignant.” Needless to say, she made an offer.
For Dicks, finding passionate advocates for his writing was the luckiest break of all. “I’ve had a lot of people ask me for my agent’s name and I tell them, ‘It isn’t a name you need; you need to find someone who absolutely loves your work.’ ” [WD]
JORDAN E. ROSENFELD (jordan rosenfeld.net) is a contributing editor of Writer’s Digest and the author of Make a Scene.
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