When's a Query Ready?

When is a query ready to submit to literary agents?

I first asked myself this question back in September. I’d taken a class with Writer’s Digest that I was sure had prepared me and my query for agents. I sent the query out. I had some success, but not much. Then, about a month ago, another writer asked to see my query. I handed it over willingly, proud of it, sure that agents weren’t loving my MS because it wasn’t right for them. Turns out, this writer pointed out holes in my query, reasons why the agents might not have wanted to read past it to the pages I submitted in addition to the query.

Okay, so I could handle that. I had another MS prepped, another query written, and I was getting ready to submit it to Pitch Wars. I’d written several versions of this query already, once to send to an agent and once to submit to another writer who does query critiques on her blog, with a few modifications in between. I sent this query to the writer who’d pointed out flaws in the last one. She pointed out flaws in this query, too. I fixed them.

After, I traded queries with several other Pitch Wars people. I made more improvements to my query based on their suggestions. I submitted to Pitch Wars, but didn’t get a mentor. Was the problem my query? Maybe. One mentor gave me excellent suggestions for improvement while another pointed out one huge flaw. I fixed these.

My query hadn’t appeared on the query critique blog that I mentioned, so I forwarded that writer my updated query. I was confident this one was the right one. Well, I was wrong again. With the holidays I haven’t had time to make more corrections, but this writer suggested some good ones. I’ll have to make more corrections.

I’ve also joined a CP group and posted my query to our group email in hopes that these other writers will help me with more suggestions. After that, I’ll make even more corrections. After that, I’ll submit my query and first 250 words to Michelle Hauck and Amy Trueblood’s Sun vs. Snow contest. (If you’re prepping your query, go to their blogs to find out more contest information.) After that, I’m sure I’ll be making more changes.

So…at what point is my query ready to submit to agents? I don’t know. Honestly. If there’s a right answer to this, I’ve never come across it. I’d like to believe at some point I’ll just decide the query’s as ready as I am to be out there in agent slush piles.

You may have clicked here thinking, “Excellent! This chick is going to answer a question I’ve been stuck on forever!” I’m sorry to disappoint you. I wish I could offer you some kind of answer.

You may have clicked here thinking, “Oh! I know the answer! Let’s see if she knows it!” If that’s you, please, please, please comment here and let me know. I’d be forever grateful. Otherwise, I’m going to keep making changes until I can’t make more. At that point, I’ll start sending my query to agents. To paraphrase a character’s thoughts from Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, the chances of getting an agent go up when you start querying.

To Give It Up

The flavor company for which I work gives everyone in the Flavor Creation & Application division the days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day off. Some say this is because we have so many international employees that our company is giving them the time to go home to Germany, China, New Zealand, Brazil, or wherever else. Whether this is true isn’t the point. The point is, I’m from the States—my hometown is three and a half hours north of where I currently live, in fact—and have twelve days off.

Last Friday, I would have told you I had great writing plans for these twelve days. My WIP was sitting at 57,000 words and the climax was approaching. My MS needed a POV change and some tweaks based on CP feedback. I also had many pages to read for my critique partners. And, of course, I wanted to write lots of blog entries. Last Friday, I would have told you I would spend these twelve days doing all these writer things.

Truth? I haven’t answered any writer emails in four days. I haven’t done anything CP-wise in five days. I haven’t touched my MS in six days. I haven’t written a word in my WIP in eight days. I haven’t touched my query for my MS in eighteen days.

This isn’t to say I haven’t had free time. Yes, my husband and I traveled a few days to visit family and spent a few other days with family in town—but I still managed to read Lauren Kate’s TEARDROP (in a little over forty-eight hours because it was THAT GOOD) and I’m about a hundred pages into Alison Cherry’s RED. I didn’t take my laptop with me when I traveled, but that doesn’t excuse me from writing. I’ve been known to snatch the nearest receipt, napkin, or stray strip of paper to scrawl down ideas before they run away from me.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that since the end of the summer, I’ve devoted at least some of every day to something related to writing. Then came vacation and Christmas and suddenly I’m out of my writing groove. The reason I’ve been so disciplined since summer is that I have to be to keep myself going—once I stop, it’s hard to start going again. Emails start to pile up, along with days I haven’t written, and I start to imagine all the things wrong with what I’ve written. This in turn leads me to doubt my chances of ever getting published. This in turn decreases my motivation to jump back into any writing thing. This in turn makes me think I should just give it up.

If I gave it up, that would release a lot of stress. I could spend more time with my husband and more time reading. I LOVE to read. I could read forever and be happy—at least that’s what I can convince myself in moments like these. But then I read something amazing, something that makes me laugh or cry or just think, “Holy &%$&, that’s SO GOOD,” and I start to feel it all over again. What’s it? It is that drive, that desperation to write something that touches some reader the way whatever I’ve just read has touched me. This is what makes me feel awful that I’ve neglected writing for so many days. I can’t give it up. I can’t imagine not writing. I can’t imagine not striving to find a book I’ve written on the shelves of the nearest bookstore.

So here’s the thing. I’ve got a few errands to run. When I get back, I’m going to force myself to sit down at my computer. I’m going to answer the emails I’ve neglected. I’m going to see what CP responses I’ve gotten and dive into my MS or query. I’m going to keep going today, tomorrow, and every day it takes to finish this quest. I’m not going to give it up.

Talent & Grit

Though I love to write and I’m working hard to publish my first novel, my day job has little to do with my writing world. Yes, my flavor work has taught me so many ways to describe the taste and smell of things, which in has turn improved my descriptive writing; but overall, writing and flavors don’t often overlap. Then, once in a while, something happens at a flavor meeting that impacts my writing world.

At this point, the flavor meeting I’m writing about was weeks ago. (I meant to blog about it sooner, but contests, etc. got in the way.) We were meeting because we’d won a huge beverage project. The weekend before, the woman leading the meeting had read a newspaper article about talent and grit that she brought it in for us to read. Her point with the article was that we’d had the talent and grit necessary to win this huge project. I don’t know for sure what newspaper the article came from. I can’t tell you for sure what it was really about. I’ve done Google searches, but to be honest, our discussion quickly left the article and moved onto our own examples, both in and out of the flavor world. The focus of our discussion? What does it take to be successful: talent or grit or some of both?

I’ve been thinking about this ever since.

In order to get a book published, I have to have some talent. Talent, for the sake of our flavor meeting discussion, was innate. You had to have been born with a certain level of talent, we said, in order to be successful, no matter what you were doing. I love what I write, which is a start. I’ve received an amazing amount of feedback in the last few weeks that indicates I have some innate talent. Good thing, otherwise this quest would be so much harder. This isn’t to say, as we discussed in our flavor meeting, that you can’t have success without innate talent. Talent can be taught, as I’m learning with all this writing feedback from contests and my critique partners. Still, it makes this whole writing quest a lot easier if you don’t have to learn everything. Talent.

In order to get a book published, I also have to have some grit. For our flavor meeting, we defined grit as putting as much effort into something as you had to in order to get what you wanted out of the experience. This is huge. This is what my last few months have been all about. If I didn’t have grit, if I didn’t have the determination to get a book published, I would have given up after that first day. I’ve sent out queries for FOR PARIS, FOR LOVE and been rejected and rejected and rejected. I’ve gotten partial and full requests for my MS, but didn’t get an agent from those. I’ve entered WORLD’S EDGE into two contests and didn’t get into either. I’ve spent months and hours and hours writing and editing and helping other writers who in turn help me. I’ve rewritten and deleted and kept at it. Neither FOR PARIS, FOR LOVE nor WORLD’S EDGE has gotten an agent, and without an agent, it’s nigh impossible to get a book published. It could take years to finish this quest, but I’m not giving up. Grit.

The point for me? It takes both talent and grit to get a book published. I’ve got the talent, though I’m honing it daily. The talent part is easy (well, you know, as easy as something like this can be). It’s the grit that’s the hard part. I have to keep going no matter how many times things don’t happen or don’t go my way. I have to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. Publishing a book is a rough business and I’m going to need all the grit I can get to get it done.

POV Pain

A friend and I fought yesterday over which movie to see, The Book Thief or Frozen. There were several levels to our argument, but the one that matters for what I’m writing today goes back to THE BOOK THIEF—the book, not the movie. When I read THE BOOK THIEF a couple of years ago, I loved it. On Goodreads, I gave it four of five possible stars. (This you should know about me: I’m really picky. I rarely rate anything five stars. It takes a damn good book for that, and most books that I’d say are damn good, I still only give four stars.)

One of the main reasons I loved The Book Thief? The narrator of the book is not the MC: the narrator is Death, an outside observer, with a mastery of imagery. I wouldn’t have thought THE BOOK THIEF was as wonderful as I did had it had a different narrator. I didn’t want to see The Book Thief because I was afraid the movie couldn’t live up to anywhere near the book without the narrator and those lovely words.

The narrator, the POV of a book, is very important to me.

Another example is Catching Fire and CATCHING FIRE. Before I saw this second The Hunger Games (THE HUNGER GAMES?) movie, I hadn’t read the books in over three years—I’d bought, read, finished the third book not long after its release. Though I really liked—loved may be taking it a little too far—the third book, I hadn’t liked the second as much. A friend asked if I’d go with her to the movie, so I went (otherwise, I may not have seen it). Truth? I LOVED Catching Fire.

I couldn’t figure out why I’d felt so differently about the book versus the movie. It wasn’t until I (post-Catching Fire) reread the third book that I realized why I loved Catching Fire so much. In the books Suzanne Collins tells the series in present tense through first person POV. While this POV draws in the reader and makes everything feel like it’s happening RIGHT NOW, Katniss can’t know what the other characters are thinking/feeling and therefore can’t convey them to the reader. My favorite things about Catching Fire? Seeing how Peeta and Gale feel about Katniss, seeing the reactions of the other tributes in the arena, seeing what Plutarch and Snow are doing behind the scenes. Katniss in the books just can’t get those across to the reader the way the movie does.

Right, so…why am I going on about POV?

Though I was querying one book, I was entering another into contests. I’d been getting a lot of feedback on the first few pages of my contest MS and most of it was pretty positive. Still, there was some hesitation in what these writers were saying that wasn’t adding up. What was wrong with my first pages? It was sometime after I submitted my materials to Pitch Wars and before Brenda Drake posted the results that I realized one BIG THING that might have been the issue. That BIG THING? I wrote my contest MS in third person. The black beasts stalked her from the shadows instead of The black beasts stalked me from the shadows. This sentence isn’t actually from my MS, but hopefully it gives you an idea of what I realized. I needed my MS to be told in first person. I needed the reader to be closer to my MC.

In theory, it sounds easy enough to change a novel from third to first POV. I sure thought so. Do a mass replacement of she to I. Change her to me. Done in a few minutes. Right? Wrong.

First, lots of girls run through my MS. Not every she is the MC, so every she can’t be changed to I. Also, not every her that refers to the MC can be changed to me; some of them are supposed to be my. (They looked at her compared to They looked at her arms.) Not only that, but I’ve discovered all kinds of them and their that contain my MC and therefore also have to be changed. AND—because those others weren’t enough—when I jumped into my MC’s first person head, more thoughts poured out. Though I’ve cut some words, I’ve added quite a few others. The result is that a project I thought would take a few minutes is taking me hours.

The moral of my little story? Decide your POV before you write the entire novel. It’s hell to change it all after. It’s such hell, in fact, that I’d like to give it up…but I can’t. I want to make my MS better. I want to sign with an agent and get a book deal and see my book on the shelves of bookstores. This quest means I do some tough things, like wade wearily through my MS to make the aforementioned changes. I hope it’ll be worth it. That’s what keeps me going.

Pre-Rejection Rejection

I wanted to write this weeks ago when it happened, but I decided it would be better for the sake of anonymity (for both me and the agent) to wait. I think anonymity is the reason agents are so vague when they tweet their Ten Queries. Now that I’ve experienced it, I’m glad they do it this way.

For those who aren’t writers or aren’t on Twitter, agents occasionally do what they call Ten Queries (or some variation of the name). They grab the slush—query emails sent to them by writers who want an agent—and randomly choose ten queries. They then tweet about these queries: they’ll give the genre of the MS and say within Twitter’s 140 character limit what they think about it. They’ll say PASS if they’re not going to ask for more material from the writer and ACCEPT if they are.

These tweets give me the opportunity to see what agents are looking for and what they don’t like to see in queries. They’ll say they don’t accept an MS in that genre, an automatic PASS. They’ll say the voice or writing is weak, another PASS. They’ll say the writer’s query salutation is impersonal or too personal, which right off is another PASS. They’ll also say they love the characters, the writing is clear, and they can’t wait to read more, an ACCEPT.

One afternoon I was scanning one such agent’s Ten Queries while riding with a friend to a movie. I don’t remember the number of this specific tweet, but the genre caught my eye. The MS I was querying (FOR PARIS, FOR LOVE) was a contemporary YA. The tweet was about a contemporary YA. I was eager to see what this agent thought of the genre. What I didn’t expect was that the tweet would be about me. Of course, the words were general and nothing concrete could tie my MS to this tweet. Still, I knew. This agent was tweeting about my query. The three words that I remember from the tweet? GOOD NOT GREAT.

I know the tweet didn’t prove that this agent was talking about my MS; the proof came soon after in the form of a form rejection email. It said nothing about GOOD NOT GREAT. It said nothing specific aside from my name. Still, I knew. And do you know, it was actually a relief? The agent, without knowing it, had given me specific feedback about my query and MS, even though that feedback had been less than 140 characters. Those that are querying know that specific feedback is a rare thing when an agent’s rejecting you and your work. Those on Twitter know that you can say A LOT in 140 characters. This agent did both.

Now, the question is, did I think this agent was right? Did I think that when the agent said my MS was GOOD NOT GREAT that I should quit querying immediately? In theory, if my writing wasn’t great, its chances of being published were nowhere close to GOOD, let alone GREAT. But of course I didn’t stop. I love that MS. Someone else will love it, too. Every agent is different. Every agent has certain likes and dislikes. This agent wasn’t the right one, but there are hundreds of agents out there. I’ll find the right agent someday.

More Feedback

After a day off yesterday for a haircut, Christmas shopping, and the new Hobbit movie, I have a lot of catching up to do in my writing world. Even without yesterday off, I’d have much to do—which is partly because I received feedback from two more of my Pitch Wars mentors. (If either of you are reading this, THANK YOU! You’re both amazing and I’m so grateful for your feedback.)

One mentor said that she loved my query with one exception—which I fixed a few days ago, before I’d gotten her feedback. We were on the same page here, and I love that. She also mentioned that she likes where the MS starts and the pages are well written. Though my MS wasn’t perfect for her, the right agent will love it. Woohoo!

As for the other mentor, her thoughts were positive, but very honest. Two things stuck with me: one, that my query hinted at horror and that scared her off; two, that I need to do more line editing.

1.       HORROR. So. That. The thing is, I love Stephen King’s novels—except that this statement is way too general. I love Stephen King’s epic novels: THE DARK TOWER series, UNDER THE DOME, 11/22/63, THE STAND. What I don’t love? The horror ones. They freak me out. I haven’t read THE SHINING because I’m afraid I’ll be like Rachel and Joey from Friends and be so scared that I’ll need to hide it in the freezer. This can’t be good, right? Still, I can see how this mentor saw signs of horror in my query. I’m drawn to darkness. I like dark books, dark themes, dark places, so of course my MS is pretty dark. It deals with the fabric of reality and what happens when that starts to break down. It contains black beasts that stalk the MC, who hears haunting whispers and dreams that someone she knows, someone who has disappeared, is being tortured. Dark, right? But horror? (As you’re reading this, I’m sure you’re thinking…so what’s up with the pink flowers? They were my favorite flower from my honeymoon in Hawaii. They remind me that not all is dark. They remind me of beauty and light. That’s why they’re there.)

2.       LINE EDITING. This was my mentor’s way of telling me I need a CP. Guess what? I’ve recruited a few in the past week or so. They haven’t delved deep into my MS yet, but we’re getting to that. I look forward to their suggestions. I look forward to helping them improve their writing and their suggestions helping improve my writing. I love this. Again, this is something I didn’t know existed until I joined the Twitter world. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I LOVE TWITTER.

Aside from horror and edits, this mentor’s most significant message? RESIST IMPATIENCE TO QUERY. I hear you and I’m listening. I’m going to keep working, starting the moment I’ve posted and promoted this. First on my list is to switch my MS from third person to first person POV. This may enhance the horror because there will be less distance between MC and reader, but overall it’ll be a good change. I’ve already revamped the first chapter because of suggestions from a third mentor (the first to send me feedback) and a couple of fellow writers. Yes, I’ll resist my impatience to query RIGHT NOW, but I’ll be making my MS better and better and better. My husband says I need tea and time, both of which I have. Querying will be there when I’m ready.

Up Next

When I wasn’t selected for Baker’s Dozen, I was upset—very upset. (Don’t believe me? See my Plan A’s Dark Thoughts post.) Yesterday I learned I didn’t get a mentor for Pitch Wars…and I’m not upset. I thought I might be, but I’m actually fine. Sure, there’s a twinge of jealousy when I read the #PitchWars feed now, but I’m already planning my next step.

Part of my acceptance might be the “rejection” email I received from one of my mentors. She was very positive and encouraging. She wrote that I was one of her top picks, but that there was one key element missing from my MS that she wanted in her mentees’ novels.  She liked my query and first pages and encouraged me not to give up.

I’m not giving up. I’d like to know what my other mentors thought of my submission—according to two of them, I will get an email eventually—to see if they agree with my other mentor. It’d be great if they did. Whatever their comments, I’m moving forward.

My first step is going to be a few alterations to my first pages and query. Then, I’m tackling my whole MS: I’m toying with the idea of switching it from third person POV to first person POV. I think it’ll have more power in first person, draw in the reader (agent, etc.) more. As soon as I post this, I’m going to change the POV of my first chapter and ask a few new writer friends (yay Pitch Wars!) what they think.

I’m also going to find another CP by signing up on http://cpseek.com/. A CP, for those of you that aren’t writers, is a critique partner: someone who doesn’t have some kind of personal attachment to me and my feelings, but knows about writing and editing and is willing to read through and give me comments on my MS. It doesn’t hurt to have one more set of eyes look at the MS and make sure it’s as ready as I think it is.

Plus, there’s another query contest in January that I’m going to enter. Sun vs. Snow is hosted by Michelle Hauck and Amy Trueblood. (See http://michelle4laughs.blogspot.com/2013/12/announcing-sun-versus-snow.html or http://chasingthecrazies.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/sun-vs-snow-a-new-query-contest/ for details now or wait a few blog posts and I’ll start talking more about this.) This’ll be my third and final contest.

There’s no rule limiting contests, but after this third one—if I don’t succeed in getting to the agent round/getting an agent—I’m going to query. By that time, I’ll be ready. My MS will be more than ready. And maybe then we’ll find an agent.