5 query-writing tips you can learn from my horrible experience

 

Facepalm! [img by striatic]

Years ago, naively believing my novel was finished, I submitted a draft of a query letter to an online community called Writers Net for feedback. The query was horrible, and several people offered advice.

I wrote draft after draft based on a myriad of tips, but never seemed to make any progress. We all got frustrated, zingers were exchanged, more patient folk tried to explain again and again, and eventually I stupidly decided to go with an excerpt of the book, and left the forum. To my chagrin, you can still find the entire conversation when you Google my name.

But now that I have a successful query letter (if not a finished novel), I stopped to wonder what went wrong on that forum. To find out, I trekked back to the scene of the crime and reread 4+ pages of facepalm moments and harsh reminders of the gross literary inadequacies of my youth (which wasn’t even that long ago).

Here, I pinpoint where things went wrong—and explain how you can avoid the same mistakes.

 

1. We didn’t understand one another

We were all writing English, but I didn’t really understand what they were telling me and they didn’t understand why. I should have realized this when, after several drafts, I wasn’t getting any closer.

Lesson learned: If you need feedback, don’t post your work on a public forum (or blog) run by strangers. Get to know the people first. Read their other posts. Make sure you understand their semantics and respect their opinions before you ask them for advice.

 

2. Conflicting advice

Some said to focus on the protagonist, forget the alternate story; others said to focus on the way the two stories fit together. Some said to simply state the connection between the two; others said that was boring. Some even posted examples of successful queries that broke major rules. And since I didn’t know these people, I didn’t know whose opinion to choose.

Lesson learned: If getting advice from a group, don’t try to please all of them. See if you can identify and solve one general problem they all agree you have. (I had two: the hook was confusing and boring.)

3. I didn’t know what “show, don’t tell” meant for a query letter

I asked how “just tell us what it’s about” fit in with “show, don’t tell,” but they didn’t understand the conflict. I’ve since learned: Telling in a query letter refers to fluff language like “gripping,” “page-turner,” “heartwarming,” or anything that tells the agent how the book is going to make them feel.

Lesson learned: Don’t tell the agent how to feel – tell them the parts of the story that will make them feel that way. (Read more about showing vs. telling here.)

4. They kept telling me what was missing, but not what was needed

Chop a book down to two paragraphs and of course things will be missing. Anyone can point out what isn’t there, from the villain’s motive to what makes the protagonist relatable. But that doesn’t mean these things belong in the query. I kept cramming facts in, but the real problem wasn’t that it lacked information: it was just boring.

Lesson learned: Write down the most interesting (yet plot-relevant) facts about your characters, world, and story. Try building your hook around those things.

5. I attempted to tell what the story was really about

This is what everyone tells you to do, and what they told me to do. But it’s wrong.

Lesson learned: If your plot is complex, you cannot tell what it is “really” about. You don’t have the space. Instead, tell what the story seems to be about, in the first fifty pages of the book. (More on that in this post about hook-writing.)

Have you ever had a bad experience with an online writing community? What did you learn from it?

Hooking interest with a killer hook

Between two marketing campaigns, a video, a cousin’s wedding, and a best friend coming into town, I didn’t write a new post this week.

The I in AIDA

HOWEVER – my absence is your excellent opportunity to learn (or review)  how to write a hook – that thing that’s going to grab the interest of friends at cocktail parties, literary agents in query letters, and bookstore browsers who glance at the back cover.

This post explains what a hook is, how to write one, and how you’ll know when you’ve written a good one.

This post gives examples of hooks that will help you write yours.

Have fun, and if you like, post your hook in the comments for some feedback!

NaNoWriMo and manuscript formatting: videos!

It occured to me this week that my How to Format Your Manuscript post would have been much easier to understand in video form. So I made a video! The sound is a little tinny, but still understandable:

Got questions? Got ideas for other instructional videos? Leave them in the comments!

And for all you NaNoWriMo warriors, here’s a music video from italktosnakes dedicated to the November challenge:

How to handle discouragement, rejection, and bad reviews

Image by Binu Kumar

Image by Binu Kumar

You write something brilliant at three in the morning, but by the next afternoon you want to burn it. You query a dozen agents and no one asks for pages. Your agent has submitted to 50 publishers and no one is interested. Your novel is getting awful reviews left and right.

At every stage of your writing career, no matter how successful you are, you are going to get discouraged. There will always be better writers, who got published earlier, made more money, and got better reviews. So take a second and wallow in your self-pity. Go ahead and get a Kleenex. I’ll wait.

You all done? Ready for my next piece of advice? Here it is.

Suck it up and keep writing.

J.K. Rowling was rejected by 12 publishing houses before getting published. Now? If you don’t know who she is, you must be from Mars.

John Grisham was rejected by 28 publishers before being picked up by a relative unknown for a measly 5,000-copy first printing. Now he has over 250 million books in print, in 29 languages. Nine of his novels have been made into major motion pictures.

Agatha Christie waited four years for her first book to be published. She went on to become one of the best-selling authors of all time; And Then There Were None alone has sold more than 100 million copies.

A Wrinkle in Time, Peter RabbitThe Wizard of Oz, and even The Diary of Anne Frank were all rejected multiple times before some publisher took a chance on them and they became unforgettable classics. The list goes on. Don’t believe me? Google it!

Or try searching for a favorite book on Amazon and reading the one-star reviews. No matter how awesome the book is, somebody hated it. Here are things people said about The Book Thief, one of my absolute favorites:

“This book is all hype.”

“From its overwrought beginning to its sloppily tragic ending, this book trots out just about every hackneyed trick imaginable.”

“Most books have a least some redeeming value but the only one I can find for this book is the credit I will get at the used book store.”

See? It doesn’t matter what one person thinks, or what a dozen people think, or even what 90% of the people think. We all know that “most popular” rarely equals “best.” Now, we could take the other extreme and say it only matters that you think your work is good, but that kind of relativism is a sissy way to look at things.

But you wouldn’t be reading this post if you didn’t already care about being a better writer. So today, I’m not going to lecture you about studying more. I’m not going to preach that you need to work harder.

I’m just going to slap you upside the head and tell you to believe in yourself.

Don’t let failure be your excuse for giving up. Everybody fails. The only difference between people who succeed and people who keep failing is that the successful people don’t give up, no matter what anybody says.

So the next time you’re feeling discouraged, rejected, beaten down, remember: you’re in good company.