Dear QueryShark
Winston Smith has been a foolish man, and on Christmas Day of 2012, it's going to cost him his life.
This is a great opening line. Do I want to find out what
happened? You bet.
On top of a faltering marriage - and there’s been no sex for
eight months - not only has he neglected to tell wife, Julia, their heavily
indebted dairy farm is up for an income tax audit, but he’s corresponded with
the auditor that "the thought of having to hand over my life in letters
and source documents for examination by you, a total stranger, on pain of
punishment, makes me physically ill," and he will not be cooperating with
the Inland Revenue Department.
And then you take veer so completely off the path of taut, lean prose that it's almost like you've morphed into Prolix Man.
And then you take veer so completely off the path of taut, lean prose that it's almost like you've morphed into Prolix Man.
For starters, don't quote the novel in the query. Also, we
don't need to know why the marriage is faltering, just that it is. And the only
thing we really need to know is the audit is going to be a big surprise to
Julia.
Tom Parsons life previously could have been summed up in a word: inertia. Married to mousy Sally, the one girl he dated at high school, their marriage has become routine since the birth of their son, Syme.
Tom Parsons life previously could have been summed up in a word: inertia. Married to mousy Sally, the one girl he dated at high school, their marriage has become routine since the birth of their son, Syme.
What? Wait. Who? What happened to Winston and Julia? This abrupt segue is confusing.
Remember, I'm not sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea, savoring your query.
I'm not reading this like I read a novel. I'm sitting at my desk, I've got ten
minutes before a scheduled phone call and I’m trying to find the queries that
entice me to read on. In other words, I'm reading fast and mostly skimming.
Whether you think this is a good idea, or fair is immaterial. It's reality
and a smart query writer will
write to his/her audience.
What that means: You make sure I know who a new character is
by telling me "Inland Revenue agent Tom Parsons"
And you don't have FIVE NAMED CHARACTERS in the first two
paragraphs. At the most you have two.
Only planning on a four year stint when taking his first job
at IRD, he’s still there after over quarter of a century(1). Now his teenage
son has announced over saveloys and tomato sauce he’s got his school girlfriend
pregnant, and the physical relief Tom has sought in the flesh of his mistress,
Jill, IRD Customer Services, working the floor above his stalled career, is
treading a complicated path: he doesn't get her jokes, he doesn't get her kink,
his libido is all but destroyed by the stress of work, his audit of Winston and
Julia Smith - culminating in a combined police / IRD raid of their house during
a twentieth anniversary tea where a naked Julia had been trying to revive their
love life - has entered the Kafkaesque with Winston now stalking Tom and his
family and posting their movements to his public blog – ('if Winston and his
wife have no right to be left alone, or privacy, neither will Tom Parsons.')(2)
And were that not enough, Tom has a sore back giving him hell, and Sally has
become an emotional wreck, pushed beyond her limits by Smith in his spotlessly
clean overalls and shiny gumboots watching their house from the street, while
trying to cope with life in a city caught in a civil defence emergency.(3)
This paragraph has 221 words and three sentences. This is an disaster of epic proportion in a query letter. Remember, I'm reading fast, skimming even. Even if your novel has Faulknerian sentence structure, YOUR QUERY CAN NOT.
So the lives of Winston Smith and Tom Parsons cross tragically in the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand, as its inhabitants survive hardship through the series of over ten thousand aftershocks following an initial 7.1 magnitude earthquake on September, 2010, and the subsequent fatal earthquake of 22 February, 2011,one hundred and eighty six people killed; the only constant
being the unpredictability of the next shake, and the "sound of the
demolition crews removing the jig-saw of the city from the Canterbury Plains a
piece at a time."
You don't need all this detail.
The two men's modern day parable will change and devastate the lives of all involved:
Here's where I stop reading. Parable is an almost instant rejection. Show me a good story, and if I can see the connections or the lessons implicit within, you'll have done a good job. Let me reach those conclusions on my own.
Winston Smith will go under the wheel of Parson’s car, but only after first seeing his marriage destroyed, and loss of the farm he has worked his life for, as the bureaucratic machine of IRD begins the serpentine process of liquidation and bankruptcy.
Don't reveal the outcome of novel in the query. You destroy any desire to read the book to find out what happens.
Tom Parsons life devolves to failure and absurdity: his mistress's book club is reading Fifty Shades of Grey, and sex has become a gauntlet of humiliation, which he gets enough of at work; the Marxist feminist co-op running the corner fish and chipy won’t serve him because he’s a bloke; due to Smith's stalking, Sally has found out about his affair, confronted him in his y-fronts in his mistress’s kitchen, and thrown him out to live in their condemned, roofless Red Zone home; finally he can’t communicate with Syme in his son's first time of needing fatherly guidance, and then on Christmas Day of 2012, his nemesis stalker appears before the bonnet of his car, walking across an intersection - all witness reports agree to his initial acceleration, but did he then try to brake before impact?
One sentence. 138 words.
For Sally Parsons, ‘the sleep walk of her life was ended, an itinerary ... reporting her husband’s unfaithfulness shaking her awake, as the city had been, buildings and lives uprooted from the known and the safe;’ finding a strength to live alone with her anxiety. Her first task is to sort out the mother of the girl her son has made pregnant, ensuring access to the child when born.
Syme Parsons travels from boyhood to a nascent, ill-formed manhood with limitations already on his future. Albeit he's lucky to have made it out of youth, thanks to Winston Smith saving him from the violence of an out of control Facebook street party.
.
And Julia Smith will be left with the biggest decisions of her life. Leaving her husband in the hospital after he was tasered in the IRD raid trying to punch Parsons boss, O'Brien, she moves to the Mahau Sound to decide if she loves Winston, if she can trust him again, and if she will ever move back. She begins a journal on their lives in the hopes of figuring a path through the startling and frightening mess her life has become - the press are using scary words like fraud and evasion with her name after them, which she knows are lies. Then when Winston is killed she is faced with two choices:
Watching helplessly while the bureaucracy slowly pulls her life apart: “Looking at the correspondence, all these suited, vicious men and women pushing and poking me, I can’t breathe. I can be sitting with a cup of coffee on the deck here in the Mahau, listening to cicadas in the manukas below, watching a seagull gliding freely in the wind, while on my lap is a letter that has politely separated my skin, leaving a tear from which my blood is filing out in an orderly fashion, commanded by statutory threats and court arraignments, to puddle around my feet, a sticky mass, until it slowly trickles through the gaps between the stained, splintered boards, and into the hard, dry ground beneath the house."
Or she can take the personal fortune offered to her in Bitcoin crypto-currency from an illegal sale of their dairy herd, and escape to the mysterious movement blossoming in the USA called Western Spring: a fishing boat can take her from the beach at Kaikoura to a sea-steading oil rig. Although to do so means losing everything she has known: leaving her life, not telling her parents or friends, nor seeing them again, in an act more selfish to them than what Winston has done to her, in order she can disappear into the silences where government spooks can’t hear. Although first there are two questions troubling her. What part in all that unravelled on the farm audit has been played by her new friend, diminutive, tattooed Beth Charrington, with her hacker past? More ominously, who is the pot smoking Philip K. Galt who has been installed to manage their farm, and who appointed him?
oh boy. MORE named characters. At this point, frankly, I'm pretty lost about what the actual story is and who the protagonist is.
INCOME TAX AUDIT REFERENCE 19:84 - A MEMOIR BY JULIA SMITH is a 66,000 word literary fiction first novel, in which the major characters of George Orwell’s 1984 are transported to the twenty first century
oh. It's Julia's story. Ok. You'll want to start with her then, and write this query about what choices she has to make.
and the age of Big Data where the taxing state has become the surveillance state, the taxing authorities unleashed in their police state powers by the aftershocks reverberating from the global financial crisis, tasked with extorting the money necessary to keep the crony zombie economies of the West on life support atop the Keynesian hubris of debt built up over eighty years of profligate politicians bribing their electorates with the illusory promise of the free lunch offered by the welfare state. Depressingly, this is not a work of magical realism, fantasy or sci-fi; no tax law, or privacy busting power of tax administration, have had to be changed or added to, for this novel to exist, which is written as the possible first part of a series set in the present day milieu of a coming economic collapse built on and dwarfing that from August 2008.
You're writing a novel to make a point. This is always a huge red flag to me. I don't read novels to find out about the coming economic collapse. I read novels because I like good stories.
This paragraph has 221 words and three sentences. This is an disaster of epic proportion in a query letter. Remember, I'm reading fast, skimming even. Even if your novel has Faulknerian sentence structure, YOUR QUERY CAN NOT.
So the lives of Winston Smith and Tom Parsons cross tragically in the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand, as its inhabitants survive hardship through the series of over ten thousand aftershocks following an initial 7.1 magnitude earthquake on September, 2010, and the subsequent fatal earthquake of 22 February, 2011,
You don't need all this detail.
The two men's modern day parable will change and devastate the lives of all involved:
Here's where I stop reading. Parable is an almost instant rejection. Show me a good story, and if I can see the connections or the lessons implicit within, you'll have done a good job. Let me reach those conclusions on my own.
Winston Smith will go under the wheel of Parson’s car, but only after first seeing his marriage destroyed, and loss of the farm he has worked his life for, as the bureaucratic machine of IRD begins the serpentine process of liquidation and bankruptcy.
Don't reveal the outcome of novel in the query. You destroy any desire to read the book to find out what happens.
Tom Parsons life devolves to failure and absurdity: his mistress's book club is reading Fifty Shades of Grey, and sex has become a gauntlet of humiliation, which he gets enough of at work; the Marxist feminist co-op running the corner fish and chipy won’t serve him because he’s a bloke; due to Smith's stalking, Sally has found out about his affair, confronted him in his y-fronts in his mistress’s kitchen, and thrown him out to live in their condemned, roofless Red Zone home; finally he can’t communicate with Syme in his son's first time of needing fatherly guidance, and then on Christmas Day of 2012, his nemesis stalker appears before the bonnet of his car, walking across an intersection - all witness reports agree to his initial acceleration, but did he then try to brake before impact?
One sentence. 138 words.
For Sally Parsons, ‘the sleep walk of her life was ended, an itinerary ... reporting her husband’s unfaithfulness shaking her awake, as the city had been, buildings and lives uprooted from the known and the safe;’ finding a strength to live alone with her anxiety. Her first task is to sort out the mother of the girl her son has made pregnant, ensuring access to the child when born.
Syme Parsons travels from boyhood to a nascent, ill-formed manhood with limitations already on his future. Albeit he's lucky to have made it out of youth, thanks to Winston Smith saving him from the violence of an out of control Facebook street party.
.
And Julia Smith will be left with the biggest decisions of her life. Leaving her husband in the hospital after he was tasered in the IRD raid trying to punch Parsons boss, O'Brien, she moves to the Mahau Sound to decide if she loves Winston, if she can trust him again, and if she will ever move back. She begins a journal on their lives in the hopes of figuring a path through the startling and frightening mess her life has become - the press are using scary words like fraud and evasion with her name after them, which she knows are lies. Then when Winston is killed she is faced with two choices:
Watching helplessly while the bureaucracy slowly pulls her life apart: “Looking at the correspondence, all these suited, vicious men and women pushing and poking me, I can’t breathe. I can be sitting with a cup of coffee on the deck here in the Mahau, listening to cicadas in the manukas below, watching a seagull gliding freely in the wind, while on my lap is a letter that has politely separated my skin, leaving a tear from which my blood is filing out in an orderly fashion, commanded by statutory threats and court arraignments, to puddle around my feet, a sticky mass, until it slowly trickles through the gaps between the stained, splintered boards, and into the hard, dry ground beneath the house."
Or she can take the personal fortune offered to her in Bitcoin crypto-currency from an illegal sale of their dairy herd, and escape to the mysterious movement blossoming in the USA called Western Spring: a fishing boat can take her from the beach at Kaikoura to a sea-steading oil rig. Although to do so means losing everything she has known: leaving her life, not telling her parents or friends, nor seeing them again, in an act more selfish to them than what Winston has done to her, in order she can disappear into the silences where government spooks can’t hear. Although first there are two questions troubling her. What part in all that unravelled on the farm audit has been played by her new friend, diminutive, tattooed Beth Charrington, with her hacker past? More ominously, who is the pot smoking Philip K. Galt who has been installed to manage their farm, and who appointed him?
oh boy. MORE named characters. At this point, frankly, I'm pretty lost about what the actual story is and who the protagonist is.
INCOME TAX AUDIT REFERENCE 19:84 - A MEMOIR BY JULIA SMITH is a 66,000 word literary fiction first novel, in which the major characters of George Orwell’s 1984 are transported to the twenty first century
oh. It's Julia's story. Ok. You'll want to start with her then, and write this query about what choices she has to make.
and the age of Big Data where the taxing state has become the surveillance state, the taxing authorities unleashed in their police state powers by the aftershocks reverberating from the global financial crisis, tasked with extorting the money necessary to keep the crony zombie economies of the West on life support atop the Keynesian hubris of debt built up over eighty years of profligate politicians bribing their electorates with the illusory promise of the free lunch offered by the welfare state. Depressingly, this is not a work of magical realism, fantasy or sci-fi; no tax law, or privacy busting power of tax administration, have had to be changed or added to, for this novel to exist, which is written as the possible first part of a series set in the present day milieu of a coming economic collapse built on and dwarfing that from August 2008.
You're writing a novel to make a point. This is always a huge red flag to me. I don't read novels to find out about the coming economic collapse. I read novels because I like good stories.
You're MUCH better off leaving out all the references to why
you wrote the novel and just let the story entice me to read on. I'm a smart
shark. I'll get what you're on about if you spin a good story.
Thank you for considering this work for representation.
[I have written to the literary agent of George Orwell's estate, A.M. Heath,
for permission to use the characters of 1984 in this manner. Copyright for that
work ends in six years. To date I've received no reply.]
Thank you for considering this work for representation.
Leave this out of the query
Summary of Submission:
Title: INCOME TAX AUDIT REFERENCE 19:84 - A MEMOIR BY JULIA SMITH
Genre: Literary Fiction
Word Count: 66,000 words.
Status: Sixth edit, and I'm putting in words I've previously taken out, so
document now final. Considering professional edit.
Summary of Submission:
Title: INCOME TAX AUDIT REFERENCE 19:84 - A MEMOIR BY JULIA SMITH
Genre: Literary Fiction
Word Count: 66,000 words.
Leave this out. I really really don't want to know how many
edits you've done or if you lack confidence the novel is ready to show anyone. That's what "I'm considering a professional edit" means to me.
My Website: [redacted]
Contact Details: Per signature below.
My Website: [redacted]
Contact Details: Per signature below.
You have 1334 words in this query. A good taut query is 250.
You have too many characters, and too much of the book.
Go back and read the damn archives and find the many many
places I've listed how to set up a query template to get plot on the page.
Limit your sentences to 10 words on the revision. Then figure
out which sentences need to be longer. No sentence should be so long you can't
say it aloud without taking a breath.
Queries are not novels. The style you employ for your novel
may not work in your query. Write
your query to be read by someone reading at a brisk pace.
Start over.
