Guest Post on Writers Helping Writers

I decided to give my readers an advance head's up on the exciting news that my guest post will be appearing January 4 on Writers Helping Writers.  The post will be about use of colloquial speech in fiction.  I'l add a link once it is posted.  For those of you who haven't yet checked it out, this site is a great resource for writers with hundreds of useful posts on all aspects of writing.  Personally, I check it out at least once a week, usually more often.

Forget Query Letters: Focus on the Query Sentence

As I was lying in bed last night I put myself to sleep writing a facetious ode to the bane of every writer's existence: query letters.  By the time I drifted off I had a pretty good poem going, but of course, when I woke up this morning all I could remember was the first sentence: "Query Letters, O How I Hate Thee."

If someone were to take a survey, I am certain that query letters would rank right up there with resume cover letters and Harlequin romances as the most hated forms of prose. That said, they are an essential step in turning a manuscript into a published book.

So what is there really to say about those wonderful nuggets of gold designed to open the magical world of agents, representation and publication?   A lot, actually.  But it just so happens that most of it has been said already.  So I decided to write from my own personal experience, which happens to be instructive.

First of all, I don't hold myself out as an expert on query letters.  But I am good at learning from my mistakes.  Lucky for me, I make a lot of them.

When my manuscript was finished, I joyfully set out to pack all its wonders into my query letter, hopeful that agents would take the time to wade through the dense prose.  This was their chance at the latest NYT bestseller, after all, and I extolled virtue after virtue.  How am I ever going to fit everything onto one page?, I thought to myself. My solution: smaller type.

With that, I sent out the letter to twenty or so agents specializing in my genre and waited with anticipation like a toddler waiting for Santa Claus.  And my wait was about as productive.  A month later, I had an inbox full of rejections and only one half-hearted 'hit'.

As I stared down at the densely-packed page of convincing arguments as to why my novel was 'it', I had a vision.  For those who have never had one, I imagine it will sound pathetically prosaic. My vision consisted of imagining myself as a poor, overtaxed agent struggling with an overloaded inbox and the unenviable task of wading through thousands of query letters each week.

You know what I realized?  That if I was that agent I would be skimming those letters with the skill of a speed reader, my mouse on the delete key, focusing on the very first sentence and nothing more.

So you know what I did?  I stopped thinking about the query letter as a letter and focused on the 'query sentence'.  What came after that sentence could be pure schlock but that first sentence had to be wonderful, had to demonstrate the potential for my book, and had to focus with a laser-eye on my concept and why it would sell.  Because you know what?  If I was lucky, the agent would read this sentence and - miracle of miracles - go on to read more.  The first sentence - the QUERY SENTENCE - is the all-or-nothing, hail Mary pass.  Nothing less, nothing more.

Translating vision into reality turned out to be easier said than done.  I struggled over my query sentence like Goldilocks and her porridge: too long, too short, too boring, too self-promoting.  But in the end, I had a sentence that was, if not 'just right', at least something I could live with.

So I sent it off to another twenty agents and I received ten requests for the full manuscript. Coincidence, you say?  Maybe.  But the difference was so dramatic that I doubt it.

I debated about whether to include my actual 'query sentence' in this post and ultimately decided not to. I may add it later.  But even without the example, I urge you to consider my advice to forget about the 'query letter' and focus on the 'query sentence'.  The goal is to catch an agent's attention and, if my vision was right, this is the way to do it.

The Mirror Cliche and Other Temptations on the Road to Literary Hell

For once, I am going to write a short post.  I promise.  

I was sitting at my computer this morning forcing myself along on my usual 10-2 writing bout, a euphemism for my excruciating daily wrestling match with my latest novel, when it came time to describe my main character.

The tale is told in the first person so, of course, I was more than tempted to resort to the good old mirror. And the fact that there was a mirror (actually, in my case, a reflective car window) in the scene for reasons other than my protagonist's narcissistic navel gazing justified my temptation. 

Mirror gazing is, of course, a cliched literary device we've all seen.  It is used by the best, and the worst, of us and most readers undoubtedly barely even notice.  I've come across the good ol' mirror in Stephen King, Michael Chabon, T Jefferson Parker, Robert Butler.  And that's just in the past few months.  So I figured I was in good company.

But then I got to thinking about how rarely in daily life I look into the mirror in contemplation of my beautiful features. And I decided that I didn't want to impart my down-to-earth character with the narcissism implied by staring lovingly into the mirror.

A quick google search revealed to me that I wasn't the first writer in the world to become fed up wit the cliche.  Which is why this post will be short: I'm not exactly treading new ground.  A few of the best examples I came across to avoid those tempting reflective surfaces include:

• Description in relation to other characters
• Pure, expository prose, i.e., don't beat around the bush and just tell us already
• Piecemeal character descriptions, i.e., the sprinkle approach to revealing attributes little by little
• Using another character's dialogue to describe the character, as in:  "You bastard, you're just so pretty I can't stand it.  Your button nose, your almond-shaped eyes and your pouty red lips make me go weak in the knees."

 I'm sure there are many more that I haven't listed.  In my case, I went with my last example: another character meets my protagonist and comments on his looks (albeit a bit more subtly than my example above).

But that got me to thinking about other cliches that are out there and I would be interested in reader feedback on your favorites.  A few examples that came to mind from my own writing include:

• Using sighs to denote boredom or frustration.  Oh, I love my sighs.
• Foot tapping for impatience.  I can't remember when I last saw this in real life but my characters do it all the time.
• Rolling eyes to indicate....What exactly do rolling eyes indicate, anyway?  Disbelief?  Frustration?  Boredom?  I'm actually not sure about that one other than that most books I read have at least one instance of eyes that role.
• Circumstance and coincidence:  I actually try to avoid this if at all possible because it bugs the hell out of me when I see it.  Bad TV dramas are the usual culprit.  A little is ok but when major plot points turn on it than count me out.