Another writing status update, as well as a few additions to my website. I’ve put up an entry and an excerpt for Eastward Sings the Wind. It’s good practice for writing query letters and summaries. Which brings me to the current state of my publishing efforts. I need to write a new query, and I am dreading it.
I finished the first draft of Eastward’s sequel, titled Beyond the Western Wall, but I should let it sit for a bit before revising. My last queried novel didn’t get many bites, so it’s time to polish up a different manuscript and start submitting. First I have to decide which novel has a decent chance of getting positive attention, a challenging matter of itself. I think Everlasting Spark has promise…but it’s clearly the first of a trilogy, and a stand-alone might be a safer bet. I’m still holding out some hope for Silver, which has had fairly significant revisions…but is it enough? Few of my rejections from the initial rounds of querying gave much detail about why it was rejected. The idea? If so, there’s not much point in resubmitting, is there? But if the agent was leery instead because of my shaky writing, well…how do I know whether it’s improved enough since then? Ugh.
It’s perfectly understandable why agents don’t give personalized responses to every query. There are only so many hours in the day, and they have to devote some of it to their actual paying work with existing clients. Besides, overzealous aspiring writers might take the response as an invitation to start up a regular correspondence with the agent, wherein they explain why the reasoning for their manuscript’s rejection was utterly wrongheaded. Better not to open those floodgates.
Still, I would awfully like to have specific feedback so I could have something tangible to work on. As it is, I just keep studying all the tips on writing good queries and honing my craft over and over again.
A query letter to a literary agent is a peculiar beast. The tone has to straddle the line between business letter and creative writing. Every word has to be carefully considered, because you only get around one page to say everything you need to say. Some details are fairly easily quantified, like word count and genre. Then there are fuzzier bits, in the need to present an outline of the story that’s quick but enticing. I have learned that condensing a story is much, much harder than writing it in long form.
A highly simplistic template for a successful query might go something like this. “Character begins in Situation. Character wants Something. But when Complication arises, Situation changes. Character must do Something challenging or unexpected to cope with this.” Simple, right? No. Not remotely.
There is also the question of customizing your query for each agent. Certainly you need some degree of personalization. Don’t address the letter to “Dear Agent,” for example. Some will request a bio, some won’t. But do you need to include a specific reason for querying that particular agent? It might help to show you’ve done some research and see the agent as more than just a means to an end. Or it might just come across as insincere. I’ve struggled a great deal with this, wondering if my query reads as a clumsy, ill-fated attempt at schmoozing. I’m also loathe to include a bio because I have no publishing credits, no platform and no MFA. Would it really help if they knew that I’m a 40-year-old former English major with three kids and a very thin resume?
These are the sort of questions I agonize over every time I compose a new query. The only reason I keep at it is the hope of someday catching an agent’s eye amid the hundreds of letters in the slush pile. They keep slogging through the pile, so I keep slogging through the query-writing.
cynthiaailshie 