Lady Dae Writes

            So I’ve been helping critique a lot of these things lately online and for some reason it made me really want to examine this thing. The Query.

            Okay, so we pretty much know what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to make the agent you’re proposing to want to read more. It’s that simple, but it’s so much more than that. DO we really know what these things do? How they actually work? What they can say about us and our writing without us meaning to do so?

            So let’s start with this. You write a query. You’re excited because you think your book is up to par and there’s just no way an agent can say no to this. It’s good. You can be the next J.K. Rowling and you already see you title in lights on the big screen in Hollywood. And now, with your fresh off the presses query, you’re so excited you just have to send it to an agent.

            I’m telling you don’t send it to an agent. I know. We’ve all made the rookie mistake of getting too excited and ahead of myself. I’m included. But let’s take a step back.  A query is like a skill test. You’ve got 250 words to summarize your novel. 250 words? That’s short. Exactly. Which means this, you’ve got no room for mistakes and typos in this. It takes exactly five minutes to edit 250 words and if you can’t send in a page with no mistakes, then what’s that say about the amount of errors in your novel?

            I’ll give you a typo or two, maybe even three. But things riddles with typos, basic spelling errors, grammar, and capitalization errors are going to turn an agent off because if the writer didn’t take the five minutes to clean up the query, then why in the world would they take the months it may take to clean up the novel? The assumption? The novel is filled with errors.

            So you clean up the grammar. Good to go? Wrong? Let it sit for two or three days and come back. In the case that you’re still in love with it, post it on a critique forum and see what some of them have to say. Nine times out of ten, there’s a clarity issue in the query? Why? Because we’re too close to our novels.

            We know the story, but we’re trying to sum up the story to someone who’s never read it before, just like the people who have never read it in a critique forum. Sure the summary makes perfect sense to us, but that’s because we read the novel. And I know some of you are like, well duh? Who better to know if it makes sense or not than the person who wrote the novel? Well, people who haven’t read the novel can spot confusing things, things that need to be clarified for the simple fact that they haven’t read the novel and are trying to get an idea through your query.

            But I know. Forums are intimidating. I won’t post mine either, but I frequent the query forums and critique other queries so that I can recognize it in my query. You won’t believe how many times I see something and then I go back to review my summary and I’m like, “Oh! That’s the same thing I just commented about in someone else’s query!” It takes practice though and a critical eye, a harsh critical eye for self that is. Not everyone can be honest with themselves though. So these forums help.

            Why do we want to make sure that things are clear in a query? Well a confusing summarization in a query can mean two things. Either the writer is too close to the novel or the query is revealing a glaring flaw in the novel, that being that the novel is confusing. There’s a difference between complex and confusing people. Complex we can do. Confusing? Not so much. So when an agent reads a confusing query or even just a confusing first sentence. The first thought is, “Is the novel and plot of the novel as confusing as this query?”

            The solution is to pick out your main conflict and explain why it’s a conflict and what may happen as a result if that conflict isn’t resolved using a few sub-conflicts and sub-plots that come directly out of the main conflict and main plot to help illustrate your point. Don’t stray from that. If the query has focus, that means the novel has focus.

            Okay so you think you’re ready to go? You’re not. Now go back in and look for receptiveness? Why? The readers aren’t stupid. You don’t have to say the same thing two of three times for us to get the picture and if you’re repeating stuff in your query, it makes me wonder how many repetitive scenes, conversations, issues, words, and phrases there are in a novel.

            I read a story like this. I understood that they were trying to make the point that the couple was willing to fight for their love. But damn it after the first ten times someone told them they shouldn’t be together and why it was wrong and they were still together, I got the damn point. And I mean it literally repeated like this in the story: someone didn’t like the relationship, someone tells them, the couple tells them off, the other someone tries to interfere, the couple servers ties. And it repeated like this and here’s the thing. You would think people who witnessed this would back off and get the point, but they didn’t and people kept doing it over and over.

            That’s redundancy people. It appears in phrases, scenes, words, dialogue, and even characters in the sense that two characters are playing the same role unneeded and redundancy in a query can mean redundancy in a novel.

            Now the query is tight. Can you send it off now? No! Now that the query is done, see if it interests you. The query can be solid and do its job. Portray clearly the story you’ve written. The question is this. Is the story interesting? Is the story solid and worth reading, because if not, that means you may want to rethink that novel. Someone in the forums I frequent had that problem. The query was solid. The story…not so much.

            Alright then. The story is worth reading you’ve determines. Time to send it off right? Sorry, but now that you’ve spent all this time on your query, go back and do a reread of the novel. Why? Because like I said, the query is a test of your skill and if you had to fix the above problems in your 250 word query, you may have to fix the above problems in that 75k plus word novel. I’ve seen it before, heard experiences of this happening. Some people faked some dynamic queries and what I mean when I say ‘faked’ is that they wrote stellar queries that weren’t an accurate portrayal of their skill and that can kill a writer’s chances. At least with query you can go back, revise it, wait six months and send it back out again, but once the agent gets that novel and their underwhelmed, that’s it. That’s the novel with all the typos and redundancies and all kinds of problems. Some may let you edit it. Some may not have the patience. Better safe than sorry though. Go back through the novel again please.

            Now you can send it. After all that you can send it. But do you see why the query is so important? The query is the first impressions and while we were probably all taught that everything is not what it appears, first impressions matter. No matter how good that novel is, if the agent doesn’t like the query, they’re going to assume they won’t like the novel.

            After a long day of organizing, cooking dinner and taking a long nap, I finally get to my computer to write this. It’s amazing how much time I don’t seem to have when I’m out of school.

            Anyway, I noticed this problem in a lot of queries and summaries and synopses of novels I was helping critique online.

            It is important when doing any sort of summary that you focus on what the MC does, meaning what is relevant to the thing that happen in your novel, not the things that happened. I decided to best put it like this since my oven is having problems.

            If I get on the phone with the service people and they ask what’s wrong with my oven, I shouldn’t tell them how great my oven working two months ago, that it was cooking really evenly and fast, heating up nicely, and made me the best darn homemade biscuits I ever made, and then it stopped working.

            First of all, the fact that my oven made the best darn biscuits ever is irrelevant to the problem. Second, the fact that it used to work isn’t helping the service person assess the situation. They need to know what’s wrong with my oven now. So if I tell them that the pilot light won’t click on keep the oven heated when the oven is on temperatures higher than 400 degrees, that helps.

            Now let’s transfer this to writing a summary or query or what have you. If I’m writing a story about a girl who has to defeat the evil sexist maniac, the start will not look like this:

            Most of that is all background. It really is. What gives it away? I used a lot of verbs in past tense; things like was, didn’t, were, refused. Next, I never say what she does. I say what she thinks should be done, what she refused to do, and what she believed, but not what she does in the story. As far as this goes, it’s everything that happened before the story, might be relevant later, but isn’t the story. I only hint to what the story might be about.

            Heavens forbid I do this for two paragraphs, which is what happens when writers try to focus on more than one character in a summary. But that an entire other minster. The point is, I’ve already messed up.

            The beginning should start more like this:

            After Kiana rebels against the new president’s executive order that declares all women slaves, Kiana sows the first seeds of a rebellion to fight against him. But that wasn’t her intention, and it’s the last thing on her mind when she goes on the run to escape being persecuted for her crime

            It’s not perfect, but the fact is that this is all relevant to the story, and it’s what is happening and not what happened before. Any background information isn’t important. Sure you can get away with it on a back cover blurb, but not in a query or summary to agents.

            My point is when writing your query, if you find yourself using verbs in past tense a lot, it’s the biggest indication that what you have is background and not “story.” Try to focus on everything that is happening and not everything that might happen… well, you can do everything that might happen in one sentence at the end when you make your stakes and risks clear. 

          But we don’t need to know what your character might do, should do, or has done for the entire query or summary. Tell us what they do. That is the story and it can be properly accessed for the most part, unless it's a misleading query...

            I really shouldn’t be writing about this, because Lord knows mine isn’t done yet, and I have trouble summarizing an article, let alone a 65k+ book, but the fact of the matter is we all have to write it, one way or another if we want our manuscripts to hit a publishers desk. Well, I haven’t decided, but I’m working on one anyway.

            So where to start? The internet people. Just start with googling “how to write a query.” You will find a wealth of information, right, wrong, and out of date, but it’s there and I dare anyone to tell me it’s not. I met a writer at a conference who said she had no information on the query letter and I rolled down all the sites; querytracker, agentquery.net, absolute write forums. I names agents who had helpful stuff on their site and she said, “No. I checked all that stuff. It didn’t help.” My response? “….. Really?” o_O.

            I have to say if none of that stuff helped at all, then she either got discouraged, is just being lazy, or got lost in the shuffle of different opinion which is what I’m suspecting and there are a lot of them. But the advice you can get on queries on the internet is just like writing advice. It depends on the person you’re talking to, the genre they represent, the personality of the agent, and a whole bunch of other variables.

The only real way to discern is to dive in head first and start writing one. It’s going to be horrible. I guarantee it, but you have to start somewhere and sitting around unsure because you’re confused is not the way to start. Anything to do with writing is OJT (on the job training), and you can read about it as much as you want, but execution is not easy.

            My point? Get started now, even though you’re nowhere near done editing the novel. Then go post it on a password secure forum so people can help critique it and don’t have too much pride about your writing that you don’t take sound advice. This is critical? Why?

            Because a query can expose weaknesses in execution, structure, pacing, genre, characterization, and more. It really is like a test for your style of writing and ability to execute, like a sifter. While I admit, this process can get the really good writers tossed to the side because some people are just bad at summarization (like me), it has to be mastered if you want an agent or editor to look at your manuscript. So here are some tips:

            1) Start your query where your story starts. I don’t mean literally of course. Don’t start with the first page, but I mean to start where the story kicks off into action and hopefully that happens within the first ten pages. If not that, hopefully your story starts at the second chapter. Doing this forces you to treat your story the same way. If you’ve got three chapters of back story before any of the important stuff happens. That means you need to go back and kill some of your darlings.

            2) Not too much set up. That means we don’t need to know what happened twenty years ago if the event in your story happened twenty years later. Start twenty years later.

            3)Avoid redundancy and explanation. You’ve got roughly 250 words to summarize your entire novel, a little more or a little less depending on the agent. Don’t waste words explaining what terms mean (that’s especially true in rural fantasy) and repeating points made. I have that problem. So don’t feel bad. It’s a waste of words, words that you can be using to tell more about your story.

            4) Show, don’t tell. Yeah. In a past post about this I said there are cases for both. The query is the case where you want to show how compelling, action packed and fast paced your novel is, not tell the agent. A million books can be described with that.

            5) Focus on one character’s point of view and the main conflict. If you have three main characters, focus on the one that you think is most important or will work best to get you story across and mention the other two like this: so and so is a 75k novel told from three points of view.  Also, stay to the mains story. If your main story is about a girl who has to defeat the evil sexist maniac who wants to make women slaves, then focus on that story, not the fact that the girl is falling hard for a hot older guy who wants to help her fight unless it directly propels the main plot somehow.

            6) It’s a summary, not a synopsis. Yes there is a difference. A synopsis gives away all the main points, and takes you step by step into what happens in the novel and even gives away the end. A summary is a concise short overview of what happens in the main plot by telling a few of the main events and setting up the stakes and what the readers want.

            Above all, the query is supposed to make the agent want to read your novel. So if you break all the rules and it gets the job done, don’t worry about it. You’ve accomplished your goal.

Absolute Write forums (see note)

A note on forums: Be careful on forum critiques. They’re helpful, but everyone has a different opinion. If ten people are saying the same thing, it’s probably advice to heed. If nine people say it’s good, but one person has a problem, you’re good to go. You can’t satisfy everyone. A seventy percent “ok” rating give or take a few is good enough unless we’re talking about a former or current editor. Listen to those!