Tag Archives: novel query letter

Oct 12 2010

The Novel Summary (aka My Two Pages of Stress)

Last week I wrote about the query letter and how much effort had to go into the proper formatting and content. Well, this week I had to tackle the Summary - a task that proved to be equally impossible. My novel is 104,000 words. And somehow I have to find a way to condense that into two pages or around 1200 words? Wow. Good times.

During my first attempt, I subconsciously wrote it like the soundtrack for a movie preview. Queue the bass tones of the voiceover guy’s voice in my head…“In a world gone mad…”

Scratch. Take two.

For the second attempt, I went back to my original story outline and started to pull some of the pivotal plot points out. (Trying saying that three times in a row fast!)  This worked more effectively, although a lot has changed between the four year-old outline and the product I have today. But it was a good start nonetheless – it got me going in the right direction and kept me focused on the big picture storyline.

I found myself jettisoning whole chapters of what I felt were certainly chock full of delectable dialog and tremendous character development.  But again…I had to focus on the main ideas.  So I chopped and hacked away at it in a fashion that would make Jason Vorhees proud.  I even spliced in a few tidbits of dialog to (hopefully) show that I could construct a coherent sentence. All was well for the first page and a half.

But by the time I got near the end of the second page, I realized I was going to have to give up the goods.  I couldn’t leave them hanging.  A summary is no place for a cliffhanger ending.  As author Max Barry comments in his blog post on The Synopsis, “in most cases, it should include all your major twists and turns, including, yes, giving away the ending. (It hurts, I know.)”  I agree Max – the pain, the pain! I hated to do it, but I did it anyway.  After all – it seems to me that if you want to rely on an agent to represent you, you have to be straightforward and honest about everything pertaining to your work, from the beginning.

And so finally after cutting, chopping, hacking, splicing and overcoming my particular hang-ups about a premature reveal, I finished the summary.  Two pages, 1345 words all wrapped up in a tiny little bundle.

This week, I hope to start sending out the query letter, the summary and anything else requested to the literary agents whom seem to have experience in representing my particular brand of story.  Wish me luck!

Oct 4 2010

The Query Letter (aka My One Page of Stress)

Wow.  So much for celebrating.  Last week I finished the second draft of my first novel.  Yea for me, right?  Hardly!  If getting a novel published was a sport, it would have to be high hurdles!  Writing the book itself was only step one in a litany of stuff that has to be done before you’ll ever be privy to that goofy smile you’ll get when you see your name on the shelves in Barnes and Noble!

The next thing I had to do was the query letter, an intro letter that you use to attract the interest of an agent or a publisher.  These are extremely specific in form and content and from what I’ve learned, deviation will not be tolerated.  As I wrote, rewrote, swore and re-wrote again, I had flashbacks to my senior year of college, when I was frantically trying to fill a one-page résumé with the eye-candy that would get my foot into an employer’s door.  Everything had a specific place and a specific format – deviation from it would likely cost your résumé a one-way trip to the circular file.

Back then the issue was trying to find enough relevant content to fill the page.  Now I am trying desperately to cut down the content to keep it at the one-page length.  Of course I could spout pages and pages of sheer poetry on how wonderful my story is, but the cold, hard reality is that I have about 20 seconds to sell my book to an agent who has an overflowing inbox of similar material.  So I’ve got to hit them with something that gives them enough interest to pause long enough to read my Plot Summary, aka My Two Pages of Stress (coming soon to a blog near you).

After so many revisions of the query letter, several of the keys on my keyboard have formed a coalition against the Backspace key, which they now feel receives significant favoritism from my fingers. I cannot blame them.  I spent more hours on that single page than I did on several chapters in the book itself. Nowhere is quality over quantity more apparent than in the novel query letter!

But I am happy to report that the letter is completed, at least in draft, and I’ve sent it to some successful (i.e. published) authors for a critique!  I’ll post an update after I receive their feedback.