Lukeman, Noah

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LUKEMAN, Noah

PERSONAL:

Son of Brenda Shoshanna (a psychologist and psychotherapist). Education: Brandeis University, B.A. (English and creative writing, cum laude).

ADDRESSES:

Office—Lukeman Literary Management Ltd., 101 North Seventh St., Brooklyn, NY 11211.

CAREER:

Literary agent, author, and actor. Lukeman Literary Management Ltd., Brooklyn, NY, founder and president, 1996—. Creator of publishing rights Web site Prepub.com. Formerly manager for Artists Management Group, New York, NY; previously affiliated with book publishers, including William Morrow, Delphinium Books, and Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

WRITINGS:

The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 2000.

The Plot Thickens: Eight Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to The Practical Writer, Penguin, 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Poets and Writers, Writers Digest, and Writer.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A third guide for writers.

SIDELIGHTS:

Noah Lukeman is president of a literary agency whose clients include the Dalai Lama and Gene Hackman, as well as winners of the Pulitzer Prize, American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Award. He came up through the ranks of New York publishing, started one of the first and most successful publishing rights Web sites, PrePub.com, and in 2000 produced a best-seller of his own, The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile. All of this would be impressive for an individual of any age, but Lukeman was not yet thirty years old at the time his first book was published.

Despite his youth, Lukeman has a strong foundation from which to provide writers of all ages with guidelines for crafting a good story; in half a decade as an agent he reviewed some 50,000 manuscripts. Based on this experience, his The First Five Pages— the first part of a planned three-part writer's guide—focuses on the honing of the first five pages, which, if an author does not sharpen them, may well be the only part of the manuscript an editor will ever see. The second part, The Plot Thickens: Eight Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, concerns plot, and a planned third volume will address dialogue.

In The Plot Thickens: Eight Ways to Bring Fiction to Life Lukeman asserts that "character is destiny," meaning that what characters do springs from who they are. Therefore, if a writer knows his or her characters intimately, plot will follow. "Lukeman's advice is practical," wrote Mark Rotella in Publishers Weekly, adding that the book is "without a hint of the flakiness that creeps into many writing guides." According to Chuck Leddy in Writer, "The Plot Thickens is a highly useful book that is written in an accessible style and filled with valuable examples."