#249--revised 4x

Fourth revision

Dear Query Shark,

The words were written on a sign posted just outside Aura Jefferson’s hometown of Langston, in rural Oklahoma, and she’s spent her entire life trying to forget them:

“NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOUR HEAD OUT HERE.”

Let's try to make this more immediate: Aura Jefferson's spent her entire life trying to forget the words on the sign just outside her hometown: “NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOUR HEAD OUT HERE.”

Do you see the difference? If you start with the main character it's a stronger sentence. Stronger sentences are better.

At the risk of boring everyone with repetition, I will remind you that when I see sentences like this in a query, I KNOW I will see them in a novel.  This is the kind of self-editing you MUST be able to do. This sentence isn't wrong, but it's not strong. It's not the BEST sentence. I'm looking for the best, strongest work I can find.  I need Doberman sentences, not sheepdog sentences.

For Aura – a strong, independent black woman – forgetting is a kind of survival tactic. She left her little brother and her Grams back in Langston, moved to the city (what city?) and never looked back. Now she’s a physical therapist who helps patients recover from devastating injuries. But white folks in this corner of the world (what corner of the world?) don’t always welcome the help (Aura has heard the “N-word” more times than she cares to count). And a thin skin, no matter what the color, just doesn’t cut it in her line of work. <----good sentence="">

"Kind of" weakens the sentence. I call it girl-speak. If you watch the differences in speech patterns of men and women, you'll notice women qualify their statements MUCH more often than men do.  A lot of "my opinion" "I think" and "kind of" phrases creep in.  You'd be stunned how hard it is to coach women out of talking like that too. Don't let it creep into your writing unless you need it there to illustrate character.  I'm thinking Aura is pretty resolute. No "kind of" about it.

Then her brother Carl, a former basketball star, is murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. When she’s asked to testify in the trial of his killer, Aura meets four strangers, each of whom begins to test the necessary boundaries she has established between herself and the world.

You're losing momentum at "meets four strangers" because it's vague. Vague is Not Good.  Remember, you do NOT need to cover everything in the query. You only need to entice me to read on.  Do we need to know about the four strangers? Is it enough to know she's being tested?

Before taking that witness stand, Aura will need to forgive her little brother for embracing the thug life that got him killed … and forgive herself for abandoning him in Langston. First she’ll have to forget everything she knows about mere survival, and remember what it’s like to really live – maybe even love – again. And that will mean depending on someone other than herself.



At 99,000 words, AMERICAN PRAYER is a story about race, justice, faith and forgiveness in America’s heartland. Told from alternating points of view, the novel will appeal to fans of character-driven fiction such as Dan Chaon’s “Await Your Reply” or Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin”.


You might consider putting more in about the four alternating points of view. I assume one is Aura, one is Dean.  Consider:  The novel is told in four points of view: Aura; Dean the Choctaw-in-name-only defense investigator: POV 3 (short description); and, POV 4 (short description)

That can work if the descriptions are enticing, not just short bios.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

This is better in that it's more interesting. I must tell you however that seeing a novel that's 99k and has four POVs makes me very very skeptical.  You've really chomped on a big challenge. 

Coupled with the flabby sentences, this is still a pass. Calisthenics all around!
Tighten up, revise, resend.  And don't forget to look at your novel and see how much tightening you can do there too.



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Third revision

Dear Query Shark,

Dean Goodnight learned to spell ambidextrous when those English-speaking teachers tied his left arm behind a chair. Southpaws weren’t allowed in the American school and neither was Dean’s first language: Choctaw. Abandoning his heritage, Dean embraced the law. Now he works for the Oklahoma City public defender’s office, trying to save convicted killers from the death penalty. Problem is, this new Choctaw defendant of his? Dean can’t find one damn redeemable thing about him.


I can see what you're trying to say here, but it's not on the page. 

I'm put off by the discrepancy of tone between "learned to spell ambidextrous" with "tied his left arm behind his chair".  Sure, I see what you're getting at but you're missing what would make this powerful. A first grade little boy has his arm tied behind the chair?  I gotta tell ya, I think my reaction would be rage. A very deep burning rage that would never ever go away.  I think I would hate teachers, and English-only teachers a lot.

( My grandmama was left-handed and despite the soft spoken gentlewoman that she was, she still sounded angry when telling us what her first grade teacher did to get her to learn to use her right hand. Mind you, this was 75 years later, and she was still angry.)

And I don't get the connection between abandoning his heritage and embracing the law.  

Some of this may require more nuance than a query letter can accommodate.  That might be the case here.


If you start here ---->Dean wants to believe that the laws make justice possible: for the good guys and the bad. But the corruption he encounters on a daily basis – police coercing confessions, district attorneys suppressing evidence, expert witnesses falsifying forensics – puts him on the losing side of an increasingly unfair fight.

we see the the conflict instantly.

The closer he gets to understanding this brutal murder, (what brutal murder?) the more Dean reconnects with his own forgotten Choctaw upbringing. During the investigation Dean becomes involved with four strangers, including the victim’s sister, Aura Jefferson. In order to save his client’s life, Dean will need to convince Aura that life in prison can represent a more fitting punishment than the death penalty.

Again, I don't see the connection between understanding the murder and reconnecting with his forgotten Choctow upbringing. 

Focus on Dean.  You're getting sidetracked with these other characters.  What does Dean want? What's keeping him from getting it?



But he might have to break the law to do it. And that could spell … well, a lot of things. And none of them are good.

"a whole lot of things, none of them good" is too nebulous to be the stakes of a novel.


At 103,000 words, AMERICAN PRAYER will appeal to fans of suspenseful, character-driven fiction such as Richard Price’s “Lush Life” or Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin”.

I've read LUSH LIFE and this doesn't sound like it at all. LUSH LIFE is set in NYC, specifically the Lower East Side, and is a very taut crime novel.  We get no sense of setting from your query, no sense of the plot, and only a hint that Dean had a pretty awful upbringing.

It's time to punch harder in this query. Get down to the core events and show us why they matter and how they are connected.  Your job here is to entice me to read the novel and you're not there yet.


Thank you for your time and consideration.


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Second revision

Dear QueryShark:
 
-->

Mitigation investigator Dean Goodnight is the only Choctaw Indian at the Oklahoma County Public Defender’s office. His job is to find a killer’s redeemable qualities, in the hopes of convincing a jury to spare them the death penalty.

When you're introducing the reader to a book, it's best to be as simple (and enticing!) as possible.  In the first paragraph you're telling us a lot of things about Dean Goodnight:

mitigation investigator

only Choctaw Indian

public defender

It's not till you get to the second paragraph that you say something that catches our interest.  Thus, that's what you want to lead with, and then fill in the other details later (if at all).

Problem is, this new Choctaw defendant of his? Dean can’t find a thing worth saving.

Consider this:

Dean Goodnight is supposed to find redeemable qualities that will spare a convicted killer from the death penalty. Problem is, this new Choctaw defendant of his? Dean can’t find a thing worth saving.

Delving into the killer’s past, Dean discovers unsettling similarities to his own. And the closer he gets to understanding this brutal murder, the more Dean understands about his complicated Choctaw heritage. During the investigation Dean becomes increasingly involved with four strangers, including the victim’s sister, Aura Jefferson. In order to save his client, Dean will need to convince Aura that life in prison can represent a more fitting punishment than the death penalty.

First, though, he’ll need to convince himself.

At 103,000 words, AMERICAN PRAYER combines elements of historical and literary fiction to paint an intimate portrait of Oklahoma in the mid-1990s, when both the state and the country are on the cusp of radical, often violent, change. It will appeal to fans of suspenseful, character-driven fiction such as Richard Price’s “Lush Life” or Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin”.

Elements of historical fiction? I'm hard pressed to think of what those are.  Historical fiction generally means fiction set during historical times.  I'm not sure there are any elements specific to it that wouldn't also apply to any other novel.  And calling this literary fiction isn't a good idea at all.

What I'm hoping you've got here is a crime novel.  I hope that because 1) that's what I like to read; 2) crime sells a lot better than literary fiction; and, 3) cause this query letter doesn't indicate literary fiction at all.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

There's still no real sense of a compelling plot here.  All you have is that Dean Goodnight has to confront his past, and since he's a stranger to us, who cares. 

 You've gone from too much to not enough.

There's a template for getting plot on the page in the query. Find it. Use it.

Revise.
Resend.



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 First revision
Dear Query Shark,
A killer always runs home. It’s instinct. But investigator Dean Goodnight knows most of those homes are broken beyond fixing. Dean’s the only Choctaw Indian in the Oklahoma County Public Defender’s office. So when his latest client’s crime orphans a young Choctaw boy, when his girlfriend starts pushing for a family, Dean follows his own gut: he runs.

Whoa! There's WAY too much going on here. You've got the killer running, Dean knowing, kid being orphaned, girlfriend kvetching, and Dean running.

You're trying to connect the dots in a splatter pattern here and it's not pretty.

When Olympic divers are scored, the two highest and lowest scores are tossed out, and the score is created from those remaining.  When you dive into revisions here (oh, aren't I clever with the metaphors tonight!) toss aside the things that don't relate to the matters at hand.

Leaving the orphan with a C.P.S. volunteer named Becca Porter - caring for this kid’s not in the job description - Dean throws himself into the new case, looking for any evidence that might save his client’s life. To do so he’ll need to convince the victim’s sister, Aura Jefferson, to move past the anger haunting her since the murder.

At this point I don't know who's who or what's what.  Who's important here? So far you've named or mentioned seven people. That's classic character soup. 

He has his work cut out for him. Aura’s a proud black woman, a physical therapist who doesn’t take advice … she gives it. When Aura goes into a patient’s home, the goal is to teach him how to adapt to some devastating injury. So why is recovering from her own tragedy so difficult?

What? Now I'm lost. If this query came to me for consideration, I'd stop reading right here.

Her new borderline-bigot patient sure isn’t helping. Before he was paralyzed in a car crash, Cecil Porter dreamed of playing pro basketball, just like Aura’s brother did. Maybe this is why she tolerates the old man and his brother: “Big” Ben Porter, a charismatic huckster who’s got everyone in his pocket. Maybe even the district attorney prosecuting Dean’s client.

As Dean chases down leads, as Aura wrestles with the effects of prejudice and regret, as Ben tries to repair the damage Cecil’s accident has wrought on their relationship, Ben’s wife Becca Porter (Dean’s volunteer) uncovers a link between the orphan and her own traumatic upbringing.

Can these five strangers forget their differences, come together, and give this orphaned Choctaw boy a better future? Maybe. But first, they’ll each have to stop running from the past.

At 105,000 words, AMERICAN PRAYER is my first novel. It will appeal to fans of suspenseful, character-driven fiction such as Richard Price’s “Lush Life” or Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin”.

Ok, here's the Wikepedia plot summary  for LUSH LIFE:  

On the way home from a night of drinking, three men—cafe manager Eric Cash, bartender Ike Marcus, and a friend of Marcus'—are accosted by two muggers. Marcus is shot and killed. NYPD Detective Matty Clark winds up investigating the crime, and keeping an eye on Ike's distraught father Billy, whose behavior becomes increasingly erratic. 

Cash is initially arrested for the crime, but later released when the accounts of other witnesses back up his own; his own behavior is affected as he has difficulty coping with the memory of the incident and the stresses of the police interrogation. Interwoven with the main plot are vignettes of the Lower East Side and the waves of immigrants that have come through there and lived in its tenements over the years.

There are a LOT of characters mentioned but we can keep them all straight and we know who the main guy is.  If you need to mention more than one or two characters in your query, this is the way to do it.

 

Thank you for your time and consideration.

This is not a buttoned down query. This is a ragbag of remnants.

Time to revise, restyle, and resend.

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Original query
Dear Query Shark,

It’s 1994 in Oklahoma City: the Waco siege is over, the OJ Simpson trial isn’t.

When a single line appears at the top of a query it signals a log line or a hook.

This is neither. After reading the entire query the only thing this line tells me is the novel is set between April 19, 1993 and October 3, 1995. (More on this later.)

This is a classic example of why "Kill your darlings" (which begs to be a Raymond Chandler title) is good advice.  This opening line is a good sentence. It seems to glow with promise.

But, it doesn't work. It doesn't work because it doesn't illuminate the novel.  Thus it must die.

A good hook is not just an enticing sentence; it's an enticing sentence that illuminates the novel.




A young Choctaw boy named Caleb has just been orphaned by the criminal justice system, both parents jailed on separate murder and drug charges. Investigator Dean Goodnight’s job at the Public Defender’s office is to save the life of Caleb’s father at all costs. But the more Dean understands about this particular killer’s crime, the less he understands about himself - and his own Choctaw heritage.


Have you come across the phrase "character soup?"  This is getting close. Too many characters. Start with the main guy. Tell us what's at stake for him. When we see the choices he faces, it makes us care about him. Right now all you've got is set up.


Dean enlists four seemingly unrelated strangers into the investigation. There’s Aura Jefferson, the murder victim’s older sister and perhaps the angriest physical therapist in Payne County. Her borderline-bigot patient, Cecil Porter, who broke his spine in a car crash nearly fifty years ago. Cecil’s brother, “Big” Ben Porter, who’s not above bribing a few councilmen to bag the construction contract that will determine the city’s future. And Becca Porter, Ben’s wife, who discovers a link between the orphaned Choctaw boy Caleb and her own traumatic past.


And this is classic character soup. We still don't have an inkling of the plot. That's crucial in a query. You've told us who the characters are but not given us a reason to care what happens to them.

Together, these five people might just be able to offer Caleb a new kind of life. But they had better hurry. Because now it’s 1995. On April 19 a bomb is going to go off, and life will never be the same.


Again, this doesn't work. If the OKC bombing is the climax of the novel, you've got to get us interested in the people and events long before it happens. In fact, if it's the climax of the novel, it really has no place in the query. 

More on the log line at the start of the novel:  The OKC bombing occurred on 4/19/95 after Waco and before the OJ Simpson verdict, yes.  But those two events, and in fact the OKC bombing itself, are peripheral to the plot and thus should not be in a query letter.

I can hear you saying somewhat perplexedly "It's not peripheral, it's the climax of the plot - the bombing changed everything." In a novel something always happens that changes everything.  Whether it's the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the flood ravages of Superstorm Sandy, or the death of Old Yeller, something happens at the climax of a book to change the protagonist's world.

Unless the protagonist performed the world changing act (ie shot Old Yeller) the specific event is superfluous to the plot. Thus it isn't in the query.

In this case, the plot is what's at stake for the investigator if he doesn't help the kid. The plot doesn't depend on the OKC bombing; the world could change for a variety of reasons. It just happens to change this time because of the events of 4/19/95.  

The problem with using Waco and OJ and the OKC bombing here is that you're cloaking your query in buzzword events, rather than showing me what the book is about.  It's a crutch. And the interesting thing here is that it's a crutch you don't need.  You actually  have an interesting concept. You obviously can write.  What you haven't done is tell me what the book is about. That's a deal breaker in a query.

At 105,000 words, AMERICAN PRAYER is my first novel. It might appeal to fans of suspenseful, character-driven fiction such as Don DeLillo’s “Libra” or Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin”.

It might isn't compelling. It will is the phrase you want here.

LIBRA was published in 1988. No matter how wonderful, it's not a book you'll use as a comp because it's 25 years old. Comp titles should always be new titles. New means within the last two years at best, five at most. 


Thank you for your time and consideration.


This is a great example of well-written query that doesn't work. A good query entices the reader to want more. Enticing means you tell us about the start of the book in a way that makes us want to read on.

This is all character set up, timeline and CNN headlines. 

There are LOTS of queries that fall in to this category: well-written but ineffective.

Take a look at the queries that got to YES. (There's a section on the left side of this blog with links to them.)  Watch how those queries enticed me to read more.


Revise.

Resend.

#248-revised twice

Dear QueryShark,

The tiniest spark can send Afghanistan and Pakistan to war. Steven Frisk’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Ali Hassan Ashwari is doing everything in his power to ensure it does.

A CLOUD IN THE DESERT is a 61,000 word Espionage/Action novel. The story follows Steven Frisk, a CIA Operations Officer, as he sets about to prevent what started as a border skirmish from escalating into a full scale war.

"sets about to prevent what started"--great snakes! Parse that out, I dare you.  When you look at or, better yet, when you read it out loud you should hear that this is not smooth writing. He must prevent a border skirmish from escalating into full-scale war.  See the difference?

When I see this in a query, I don't care how wonderful or thrilling the concept may be. This is Not Good Writing, and I know I'll see it in the novel.  And lest I hear snorts of derision from the assembled chums, let me assure you  I know every published novel is not Great Writing, far from it. But most high octane thrillers (which this purports to be) have a forward momentum and energy that keeps the reader turning pages. This kind of inverted syntax just slows us down. One of these days I'm going to assign a minion the task of counting how many times I've said "simple writing is best" and then make all of you write it that many times on the blackboard.

Behind the scenes, a A corporate conglomerate is manipulating the events to help boost their profits through sales to both sides. Will Steven be able to unravel the web of deception that has been laid out before him in time to prevent a nuclear war? Will his former protégé succeed in thwarting him as he tries to set the world back to neutral? Set in contemporary times, A CLOUD IN THE DESERT poses the “what if” questions associated with America’s involvement with both Afghanistan and Pakistan.


Avoid those rhetorical plot questions. Be specific about what the corporate ne'er do wells are plotting. Selling arms to both sides is business as usual, as is contributing to both candidates in an election. It's legal too. What are they doing that's evil?







Professionally, I am an attorney. In my free time I am an amateur military historian, with a focus on World War II and recent Middle Eastern conflicts.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

There's a recipe for getting plot on the page in a query letter. I know it's there: I wrote it. More than once.  If you read the archives, you'll find it.  

Find it.
Use it.
Revise.
Resend.



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First revision
Dear Query Shark,

(A) The tiniest spark can send Afghanistan and Pakistan to war. Steven Frisk’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Ali Hassan Ashwari, a fellow Operations Officer with the CIA, has let himself become controlled by the Invictus Corporation and is doing everything in his power to ensure the war does happen.

A query needs to be nimble.  When you look at that paragraph, what can come out and still give the reader enough info?

For starters, do we need to know Ali is a fellow operations officer? Or that he's with the CIA? Or that he's controlled by Invictus corporation?

Well, try this and see:

(B) The tiniest spark can send Afghanistan and Pakistan to war. Steven Frisk’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Ali Hassan Ashwari  is doing everything in his power to ensure it does.

Which paragraph, A or B, entices you to read more?

My vote is B. It makes us wonder what will happen next and entices us to read on and find out.

The trick for writing a query is almost always leaving things OUT.  Over explaining, too much exposition, too many characters--all those load a query down and make it plod rather than elegantly leap from point to point.

Here's a visual reminder. You want to be Kari Dell (top) not Lee Marvin (bottom)**

A CLOUD IN THE DESERT is a fast-paced, 61,000 word Espionage/Action novel. It is set in contemporary times with recognizable historical events to help create a sense of realism. I have drawn upon my own experiences with most of the locations to give the world of Mr. Frisk a rich and realistic feel.

This is telling not showing. Don't do that. There's nothing about the plot here or what's at stake. You have to have that in a query.

Professionally, I am an attorney. In my free time I am an amateur Mmilitary Hhistorian, with a focus on World War II and recent Middle Eastern Cconflicts.

Yes, I nitpick on queries. These nits tell me how meticulous you are (or are NOT.)  Conflicts isn't a proper noun, thus it is NOT capitalized here. Neither is military historian.  You absolutely have to know this.  If you don't, or are not confident (it's not a character flaw,) hire a copyeditor.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

You need a plot.

And some paring.

Revise.

Let it sit for a week.

Revise.

Resend.

**although in fairness, when Lee Marvin won an Oscar for this role in Cat Ballou, 

he did say there was a horse in Wyoming that deserved half of it.

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Initial query

Dear Query Shark,

A flash-point exists between Afghanistan and Pakistan and only the tiniest spark will send these two countries into war with each other, and Operations Officer Steven Frisk, a Analyst and part-time Field Operative with the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service has been called upon to mitigate this as best he can. Steven must contend with a fellow Operations Officer who has inadvertently gone rogue and is controlled by a global mega-corporation looking to expand its profit and gain a larger footprint as a multifaceted defense contractor. Steven Frisk will be called upon to stop the war, and above all stop the corporation from causing more death in a nuclear war.

The first sentence of this query has 52 words and thus fails the "can you say it out loud in one breath" test.  The reason for that test is that it helps you write a sentence that is taut rather than flabby. Taut is enticing. Flabby is not. (Generally of course)

Second, you're repeating yourself but you don't realize it: "A flash point exists" and "only the tiniest spark will send" are essentially the same thing.

Thus: The tiniest spark can send Afghanistan and Pakistan to war.

You also don't need your main character's entire CV in the intro. Just by  his placement in the first paragraph, your reader assumes he's important, assumes he has something to do with the situation you're setting up.

USE the intuitive leaps your reader will make to pare your query letter down to enticing essentials.

Thus: The tiniest spark can send Afghanistan and Pakistan to war. Steven Frisk's job is to make sure that doesn't happen.

20 words. Instead of 52. 

Then do the same thing for the antagonist. Name him, tell us what he wants and why.

If you can do that in around 20 words, you'll have a nice taut opening.

A CLOUD IN THE DESERT introduces the character of Steven Frisk in a fast-paced, 57,000 word mainstream Espionage/Action novel, the first of a potential series. It follows him as he vies with a fellow Operations Officer, Ali Hasan Ashwari, who has been duped by a corporation into starting not only a conventional war between Pakistan and Afghanistan, both US allies, but also to try to turn it nuclear. You will follow Steven through the deserts of the Middle East, the mountains of Afghanistan, and urban settings such as Islamabad, Pakistan and London. The novel is generally set in a contemporary time with recognizable references to historical occurrences to give the plot a sense of realism. Cities have been researched and in some cases been visited to paint an accurate picture of the surroundings provided in this novel.

This is all filler, and duplicates what you've said in the first paragraph.  When I see that in a query, I know I'll see it in a manuscript.  The query doesn't just tell me what the book is about.  It tells me if you know how to write. (Well, it really tells me if you know how to revise. Everyone writes like this on the initial draft. It's recognizing it, revising and polishing that makes the difference)

I'm also VERY leery of any novel clocking in at 57K.  That's VERY short.  I sincerely doubt much world building goes on in a 57K novel. I know for an ironclad fact there's no subplot with that

word count.

I am an attorney with a background in political science who has travelled extensively. Most of my writing to date has been in a professional capacity, including two published articles on Science-Based Medicine, which is an online medical blog. My articles were entitled “This” and “That”. I have also contributed to collaboration projects within the Pharmaceutical industry as well as THE OTHER , a science-fiction compendium published by Them, where I contributed technical advice on the future of medical science. In my free time I am an amateur Military Historian, with a special focus on World War II and recent Middle Eastern Conflicts.

Aha! Attorneys have intuitive writing beaten out of them in law school with a stick.  Good legal writing covers all the bases.  Good fiction writing leaps elegantly from point to point and lets the reader see the base without actually touching it.

Good legal writing is chess. Good fiction writing is three dimensional chess.

I wish to thank you for the time you took to read this.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Pare down.

Focus.

Revise.

Polish.

Resend.

You should expect at least two more revisions after this one.  Once you do the major paring and refocusing you'll see some of the other problems.

Are you sure you read the archives?

 
 

#247-revised once

Dear QueryShark:

After her mom’s death, Jen McKenna developed an obsessive fear of losing the people she loves. Forced to make a decision that could put her grandmother’s life in jeopardy, her fear becomes justified.

Her When Jen's beloved Grams falls ill and it’s up to Jen to care for her farm. She thought it would be as simple as running Grams’ booth at the flea market and taking care of the herb garden. Instead, life becomes more complex than Jen could have ever imagined. With no explanation why the cut on her face healed overnight, or why the mayor trumped up charges against her to shut down Grams’ booth, Jen’s search for an answer leads to one conclusion. There’s much more to her past than she’s been told.

The last thing she needs is another complication, but when Jen meets Mike, the attraction is instant and mutual. As their relationship grows, she realizes it was more than a chance encounter. Mike holds the key to information revealing the truth about Jen’s heritage. The old rock slab beneath the willow in Grams’ backyard is a Bullaun Stone, an ancient artifact that gives her descendants powers Jen thought only existed in Irish folklore.


Unfortunately, twenty-two years ago her mother made the ill-fated decision to tell a college classmate about the Bullaun Stone. Now he is blackmailing Jen. Either she uses the stone for his benefit, or Jen will lose the only family she has left.

That's not blackmail, it's extortion.  


THE BULLAUN STONE is a mystery with magical elements, complete at 90,000 words.



This isn't a mystery. You're not trying to figure out whodunit. It's more of a suspense novel: how will it end.





And what's Mike's part in the plot. If he holds the key, he's got to be an integral part of the plot but we don't see that.





Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

There's nothing enticing here. The stakes are too low and grandma (beloved only to Jen, not me) should have kept her trap shut all those years ago. She caused all this ruckus and now we have to care if she lives or dies? Not bloody likely.  Defenestrations all around.

Jocularity aside, if the stakes are that Gran dies, we better care about her.  

And I've cut and chopped and sliced and diced enough on this query to have a suspicion that the writing isn't yet ready for publication level consideration. You absolutely must develop an ear for what makes good sentences and paragraphs.

Your query is about the book but it shows your writing. It needs to be precise, elegant and full of voice.  

This isn't and doesn't. 

This isn't an improvement on the initial letter.  

Take some time to really work on this. 
Revise. Resend.

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Dear QueryShark:


An old diary, a stone bench, a poisonous flower, Irish folklore. Jen McKenna has to find the connection in order to save her grandmother’s life and possibly her own.

I'm voting for both of them to die in a wolverine attack. 

The problem with starting out with stakes like "she'll die" is that I don't yet give a rat's patootie about the characters.  Thus I can channel my inner Queen of Hearts and shout "off with their heads" with nary a second thought.

That response (and believe me it's not a response limited to sharks) is why you start with the main character and the problem s/he faces.  

Further, the list itself is just plain boring.  Now if you started with: a wolverine, a shark, an author and a jetpack, I'd be intrigued.  You absolutely positively cannot be boring in the first line of your query.

Jen hasn't been back to her grandmother's house since the car accident that took her mom's life, an accident for which Jen blames herself. Now she returns to care for the homestead when her grandmother is hospitalized.

Ok, here's the sentence you should have started with.  Jen is at Grandma's house and  she's in distress about killing her mother. Ok. Now, what's the problem?

Her curiosity is aroused when she finds her grandmother's dairy (best typo of the week) and an old burlap bag containing a tin box and a worn stone. But right now Jen has a bigger question -- why are her cuts and bruises disappearing overnight?

huh? what? These two paragraphs don't flow at all.  You've done more than take a right turn at Albequerque Albuquerque (oops!) here my Wile E friend.  You've gone straight off the cliff.  The paragraphs are disjointed in the extreme.  You solve that problem by starting with the cuts and bruises. THAT'S the big problem, not her guilt about poor dead Mum.  "why are her cuts and bruises disappearing overnight?" is the first sentence (obviously you'll rework, not just copy and paste.)  It's a WHOLE lot more enticing than that list.

Jen becomes romantically involved with Mike, who offers to help piece together the clues that unlock the mystery of her grandmother's past and Jen's present.  Irish folklore becomes reality when they discover the slab bench under the willow tree is a Bullaun stone. Gifted to her grandmother by her first love, it endows her descendants with special powers the year they turn twenty-one.

Gifted is not a word, and I don't care who says otherwise. 

And this paragraph doesn't really explain anything about the cuts and bruises does it? And Mike is sort of thrown in there without having a real purpose.



Her grandmother's health is deteriorating so Jen devises a way to use ther new-found gift to keep her alive and young forever.  And maybe assuage the guilt she feels over her mother’s death. But Jen and Mike aren’t the only ones who know about the Bullaun stone. Twenty-two years ago, Jen’s mom made the ill-fated decision to share her secret with a college classmate. Now he’s willing to kill for its power.

You might want to get to this a little sooner.

When Jen’s plan to save her grandmother begins to unravel, she must decide to what length she’ll go to preserve the life of those she loves.

 Let me guess here--she'll go to GREAT lengths. She might even volunteer for dangerous duty.  This is too obvious to be enticing.  Only if she would NOT go to great lengths to save the ones she loves would I find this enticing. Me, I'd just throw them to the wolverines and swim off into the sunset.

THE BULLAUN STONE is a women’s light fantasy, complete at 83,000 words.

I don't know what light fantasy is but I'm sure the blog readers will.  (Is it like light bondage?)

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

A word about your typos:

dairy for diary.  This tells me you didn't read this aloud before you hit send. You're either writing too fast, or not letting your query sit long enough before sending. Fresh eyes would have caught it.


ther new-found gift. This tells me you didn't even run spell czech, and that's a problem. 

I'm not rabid on the subject of typos unless they indicate you simply aren't paying attention.  These two say exactly that.  The reason this is a red flag for me is that I envision copy-editing your manuscript for these little errors, and honestly that's not the best use of my time.

Your query letter is NOT the time to be casual about spelling.



This needs to be tightened up to focus on the things that matter. You also need to avoid unenticing cliches and obvious stakes.  Your job in a query letter is to entice me: obvious things and cliches do not do that.

Revise. Resend.

#246

Dear QueryShark:

When Nix’s father locates a good map of Honolulu in 1868, she knows she’s in trouble.

It’s not the trouble of time travel -- Nix grew up sailing from map to map and era to era. Nor is it her father’s opium habit -- she’s only too used to dealing with that. No, Honolulu in 1868 poses a threat she’s never faced -- the threat of remaking her own past.

Her father is undeterred; Honolulu in 1868 was when he last saw Nix’s mother alive, and, for a chance to see her again, he seems willing to sacrifice anything -- or, Nix fears, anyone. In an effort to get his hands on the map, he leads Nix into a political intrigue involving sugar barons, opium dealers, and a plot against the last King of Hawaii, and Nix has to decide how much she will sacrifice to free her father -- and herself -- from the yoke of their own history.

THE GIRL FROM EVERYWHERE is a young adult Historical Fantasy, complete at 101,000 words.  Thank you for your time and consideration.



This works.
The first sentence catches my attention. The rest of the letter tells me who the main character is, what her problem is, who the antagonist is and what he wants, and what's at stake.

If I took on YA novels, I'd ask for pages.

#245-revised once FTW

 Dear QueryShark,

Daniel and Noah don’t know each other from Adam but they both have lain with Eve
and their similar sins are about to catch up with them.

Daniel fears that he has knocked her up, near the scene of his otherwise perfect crime.  His alibi says that he was in a different city, but his baby says he was there, and he must  devise a way to pin the paternity on another man.

Noah isn’t aware that a narcissistic criminal is pulling the strings when he meets and beds  her less than a week later. Unwittingly, he also screws his way into candidacy for fatherhood of the troublesome embryo.

Noah finds himself trapped by this new responsibility in a town he was trying to leave, a town
that’s actually a bigger problem.  It is a quaint little country community by day, but a raging sex
cult by night. He is already a single parent and his young son is verging on adolescence, the
blossoming age of no return.

As he struggles with the choice between disserving his current child by staying, or abandoning
the baby on the way by leaving, the licentious little scene he lives in starts to show signs of
becoming much more dangerous. The religious faction is rising against the carnal, and everyone’s  long kept secrets are coming to light. Skeletons start marching out of all the closets and in a city  with this many bones, the parade promises to turn deadly.

FINISHING SEASON is a 106,000 word thriller. This is my first novel.

Thank you for your time and consideration.
 

HOLY IMPROVEMENT, BATMAN!
Pardon me while I admire how much better this is.

Obviously you can polish some of the longer sentences, but you've got the bones of this in the right places now:  You've got the stakes, you've got a hold of the descriptions.  It's a little too sex-focused for me but I can see someone else picking this up.

Great revision!

Dear QueryShark,

(1)Fallville, CA is a beautiful little community in the Sunshine State, with tall aged trees, flowing green hills, and a festering gash right down the middle: Rollings Blvd.

Flowing green hills? How fast are those hills flowing? This phrase in the very first paragraph of your query stops me cold for two reasons: hills don't flow, and you didn't catch it when you were revising.   

"Flowing green hills" doesn't actually illuminate something in a new way which is the primary purpose of a metaphor.

And something that makes me totally crazy in books (and in queries) is getting stuff WRONG.  California is The Golden State. FLORIDA is the Sunshine State.  A quick google search elicits this info.

These two red flags: error of fact and opaque metaphor mean I stop reading right here. I've read 28 words and I'm sending a form rejection. This is Not What You Want!

Yes, every word counts. Every phrase, every metaphor, every sentence.

(2) Everyone knows what goes on there, but no one knows who takes part. Anonymity is the heartbeat that keeps the street alive. The city is just brimming with untold, disturbing stories but none quite so significant as those of a certain two men.

This is all filler. It doesn't actually say anything specific enough to catch my attention.

You're warming up here. It's ok to write this, but you must catch it and excise it when you revise. 

(3) They don't know each other from Adam, but they both have lain with Eve, and their similar sins are about to catch up with  them.

Now this, this is interesting. Can you see the what makes paragraph (3) so much stronger than (1) and (2)?  Specifics. An illuminating metaphor. If you STARTED with this sentence, you'd have avoided the instant rejection.

You don't have to be perfect. You must be interesting.

Noah, an abandoned single father, struggles to protect his son from Rollings. If he leaves behind his shady business on the Boulevard, they could go broke. But if he doesn't, his only son may soon disappear into the city's darkness.  

This is still treacley but I get the idea.

Daniel, a man on the run, scrambles to fix a damning mistake. What that will require becomes progressively more heinous,  and he must decide how evil he is willing to become in order to save himself.

Again, too general to be enticing but at least the hills aren't flowing.

In the midst of their desperate personal struggles Daniel and Noah violently collide, creating tremors that rock everyone in the city. The veil over Rollings falls. Everything is revealed. Skeletons start marching out of all the closets and for a city with this many bones, one thing becomes certain:

Judgement is coming.

The collision between Daniel and Noah is probably something you want to mention.  And the sonorous voice-over of "Judgment is coming" is more for film trailers than query letters.

"Skeletons start marching out of all the closets and for a city with this many bones" is a sentence that made me believe once you get rid of the treacle and the fluff, you'll have some good stuff.

FINISHING SEASON is a 106,000 word satirical thriller. This is my first novel, written mostly over the course of several  combat deployments.

[I'm very glad you survived several combat deployments.  A sincere thank you for your service to our country.  Now, back to the chomping that might remind you of all the fun you had at boot camp.]

Satirical thriller is a phrase that sets my teeth on edge. What are you satirizing?  There's no satire in this query letter at all.

Second, there's actually no such thing as a satirical thriller. If it's satire, it's satire. If it's a thriller, it's a thriller, but the two are distinct forms.

As a devoted thriller reader, I'm not very likely to pick up a book that satirizes the form or substance of a thriller.

Satire has a great and noble purpose which is largely to speak truth to power.  It's a mighty tool for hammering at the Visigoths supping at the public trough.

It's not a tool you'd want to use for mere entertainment, like reading (or writing) a thriller.

So, this is either a thriller or something else, but it's not a satire.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Focus on the moment things change for Daniel and Noah. Revise the query to show what's at stake. What's their dilemma?

On the other hand if this really is intended as a satire, start over.  Take a look at how other books of satire are described.

Revise. Resend.

Update on QS #224

In today's Publishers Lunch deal list:

Mystery/Crime
Minerva Koenig's NINE DAYS, featuring a damned good criminal now in the witness protection program, who doesn't have much of a chance to adjust to her new identity in the Lone Star sticks before murder strikes, to Toni Kirkpatrick at Thomas Dunne Books, in a two-book deal, by Jessica Alvarez at BookEnds (World English).

I did read the entire manuscript for NINE DAYS and loved it. I knew I wasn't the right agent though, so regretfully sent her the names of some agents I thought would be a better fit.  Sure enough, Jessica Alvarez was EXACTLY the right  choice.

I can't claim any part of this success because the query didn't need any revisions.  I'll just have to settle for knowing Query Shark and QS readers were the first of soon-to-be-many to recognize this wonderful new writer!

Huzzahs all around!

#244-revised 7x

Revision #7


What if the world you think benign, isn't?



You've been revising so much you've forgotten one of the basic rules of querying: do not start with a rhetorical question. This isn't a philosophy class, it's a business letter. Get to the point.



On September 10, 2010, the inhabitants of Christchurch, New Zealand, are woken from the illusion of living on firm ground by an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale. As aftershocks lay waste to the city, Daphne Smith's life is shattered from seismic events set in motion by husband, Henry.

The inhabitants of Christchurch New Zealand are not the main character in this novel. Start with the main character.  What choice does she have to make?

You don't need to say Richter scale since that's how an earthquake is measured. You can just say "7.2 earthquake"

And the earthquake has no relevance to the story as far as I can tell.  You're using it to be all artistic and stuff ""seismic events set in motion"

Don't be afraid to be plain.  
Don't be afraid to write very simple sentences.
Fancy is not the equivalent of good.




They're losing their debt-laden dairy farm from a tax audit, with Henry's subsequent foolhardiness incurring a Serious Fraud Office investigation. When Henry is killed (stalking the tax auditor), Daphne is forced on the run with mysterious new friend Beth to escape the meth-tweaking gangster commissioned by Henry to sell their dairy herd out from under the bank. When the gangster catches up with them, Beth's association to him and hacktivist past are revealed, but she's wounded on intercepting a bullet meant for Daphne. Beth demands a dreadful promise of Daphne, which may mean Daphne's incarceration to secure her own freedom.


Now you're getting to the good stuff but it will help if you're specific here. What promise?




At every turn Daphne is unable to claw a way back to the settled life wrenched from her; grieving Henry, her fate decided by lovers, friends and enemies, until her choices pare down to a single act above a roiling sea on the crumbling cliff tops of Bank Peninsula, where she holds Beth's tenuous life in a death caress.


You don't need this. You only need the first act in a query. Leave us wondering what happens next.



Daphne's story will confront your notions of living and loving in the dawning era of Big Data, where the illusion may be volition itself.

 This is classic tell not show.  Don't tell me about what the story will evoke. Evoke it.
The only way to do that is with the story. What happens. What's at stake. What are the choices being made.

You have no idea what your readers "notions" about anything are. Don't assume. 

And I don't understand what "where the illusion may be volition itself" means.  If I can't understand a sentence, you might dismiss me as stupid,  but it's not going to get you what you want: a request to read the manuscript. I'm not urging you to dumb down anything here. I'm telling you that trying to be fancy is NOT an effective strategy in short forms like queries. 


Woman Alone is a 130,000 word literary fiction novel.  


This is better but it still needs work.
------------------------------------------


Revision #6

Daphne's story begins with betrayal from her increasingly erratic and secretive husband, Henry. His pig-headed failure to take advice has landed them in a disastrous tax audit leading to the bank filing for their bankruptcy. Then his written threats to the Revenue result in a brutal police raid on their farm. Daphne leaves him, hoping he will come to his senses, but there is to be no reconciliation when he is run over and killed by the auditor, the circumstances to be subject of a police inquiry and sensationalist media scrutiny.

At her most vulnerable Daphne is befriended by ex-employee Beth, bearing the offer of using her hacking skills (from a past she is trying to escape) to defraud two million dollars from the farm's bank by selling the dairy herd ahead of a mortgagee sale and converting the proceeds to Bitcoin. But Daphne has lived an honest life, and struggles with her conscience. Worse, Beth's plan is a double cross, her eye on the herd money for herself, in league with an anarchist lover from two decades past.

What's at stake here? Daphne struggles with her conscience, sure, but there has to be something more important at stake then guilt. If she accedes to Beth's plan to sell the dairy herd, what bad thing happens? If she does not, what worse thing happens? What will she lose in either case? What's at stake for her in these choices?


You've got something at stake later on in the paragraph marked *** but that's too late in the query. And it's too late in the book.

Stakes are what create tension, and if nothing is at stake till 2/3 of the way through the book, the pacing will seem slow.


Until Beth falls in love with Daphne. She knows her love will be unrequited, but double crosses her old partner in crime. Beth and Daphne's fates become bound together, desperately trying to escape Beth's meth-tweaking accomplice who is out for revenge. They are pinned down by him and in their narrow escape Beth takes a bullet meant for Daphne, leaving her grievously wounded.

While both women are on the lam in the remote hills above Bank Peninsula, New Zealand, Daphne learns what matters to her. She is living, but the knowledge is too late given her constricting circumstances. And she is trying to deal with Beth's feelings for her, yet carrying the tumult of unresolved loss for Henry and her previous life. Although more pressing are her responsibilities if Beth's wound is mortal. If she seeks the medical attention Beth requires, then her friend's hacktivist past will see her in more trouble than Edward Snowden and she is likely to do more time than Chelsea Manning. Beth would rather die than be caught by the authorities and secreted to the US on the next FBI flight out of Wellington.

***So Daphne's life turns full circle; betrayed by the man she loves, hounded by the authorities, will she betray the woman who loves her, in order to be able to start a new life on the right side of the law?

And throughout Daphne's journey, from toiling on their dairy farm toward a future with Henry, to holed up with Beth on the cliff tops above a roiling sea, another character reeks its violence; the series of over eighteen thousand aftershocks that followed the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, which reduced the lives of that city and surrounds to rubble.

Last Woman Down, my first novel, is 126,000 words.





A query is not a synopsis. You've got way too much information here. You need to set the stage only so the reader will want to dive in to the pages you include with the query. You do NOT want a complete run down of the book.


This is MUCH better than the earlier efforts. 


 ------------------------------------------------

Fifth revision

Dear QueryShark:

Daphne Smith could not have cared less when informed of her husband's death. By that time the farm was lost, as she had assumed was their dairy herd; her girls. Now Daphne was forced by Henry's antics from being a wife sleep walking through her life, to legal plaything swatted back and forth between interrogations and court appearances at the whim of bewildering bureaucracy.   


Former farm employees, Beth, and farm manager John Paul, rally to her aide. But Beth is revealed to have has a criminal computer cracking history, and John Paul - if that's his real name - will never give a straight answer to a simple question about himself. When John Paul informs Daphne that on Henry's instructions he's sold the herd from under her creditors‚ noses creditor's noses and converted the proceeds into untraceable Bitcoin currency,  She faces an impossible choice. Slow, public bankruptcy through the courts and local media, with possible jail time for being partner to a fraud she had no knowledge of. Or trusting John Paul's plan for her fantastical escape, at the price of having to and leave behind everyone she loves. Her decision complicated by a suspicion But are John Paul and Beth may be acting secretly in concert, for a purpose unknown to her?
 

You're getting the hang of paring down (just look at that first query and you'll see the progress you've made)  But you've still got these godawful awkward sentences** and if I see them here, I know I'll see them in  your novel.  This is INSTANT rejection.  No matter how interesting the concept, no matter anything else, if I think I'm going to be editing at this level on your manuscript I'm not going to read on.  It's imperative that your sentences flow smoothly in a query. (And also your novel of course) 

**But Beth is revealed to have a (Beth has)

**her decision complicated by a suspicion (she's suspicious)

Daphne throughout is preoccupied by the puzzle her husband became. How could he have changed so much to do what he did? How did she let her life leak away for a man who would not allow her a family, and who took and took, never gave back, with the final reward for her love being police and tax officials on her door with truncheons and tasers?



At 71,000 words, AUDIT 4891 is a first novel. Thank you for your time and consideration.


Even this sentence is awkward. The fact that it's 71,000 words has no relation to the fact it's your first novel.

This is the better arrangement: AUDIT 4891 is my first novel. It's 71,000 words. OR AUDIT 4891, my first novel, is 71,000 words.

See the difference?


If you don't, your eye isn't keen enough to self-edit. You need to do a couple things to train your eye:

1. Help other writers edit their work. I don't mean hang out your shingle as a professional editor. I mean join a writers' critique group, or get involved with online crit groups, or in some way get involved with other writers at the editing level.

2. Read more. And I don't mean read for pleasure. In fact, you should probably just start with writing out by hand the text of a novel you love. This will get you in to the bones of the novel. You'll really see it for the first time if you're writing it out. The physical act of writing also helps your brain to see what works. Not typing on to a computer screen. Actual hand writing.

This is also a very good way to memorize poems.





Take some time to work out the kinks here, and also take a look at your novel.  It's not going to do you any good to have a nice taut query letter if your manuscript is a mess. (There was a question about just that problem on my blog this week)

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fourth revision

Dear Query Shark:

Henry Smith had been a foolish man, his litany of mistakes, lousy judgement and foul moods, precipitating a series of events that would end his life on Christmas Day of 2012. Daphne Smith, by the time she was informed of monomaniacal Henry's death, couldn't have cared less. At least that's what she told herself, forced from being a wife sleep walking through her life, to legal plaything swatted back and forth through interrogations and court appearances at the whim of bewildering bureaucracy.

Consider this:

By the time she was informed of  her husband's death Daphne Smith couldn't have cared less.

See the difference?  Instead of telling us that Henry is monomaniacal and his litany of sins, let's get to the heart of it: his wife doesn't care. Leaving his sins uncatalogued actually gives the sentence some appeal:  it's not the norm that a wife wouldn't care that her husband is dead.



It also has the benefit of starting with the right person.


Nothing in a life of dairy farming and marriage had prepared her for the relentless forces dispassionately unleashed against her. Her only allies two unlikely strangers with murky histories and unstated agendas: white suited, pot smoking John Paul, and feral cracker, hacker, Beth.

You're using adjectives here to prop up one-dimensional characters.  That's not a good sign. If I see it here, I know I'll see it in the novel. If I know I'll see it in the novel, I know there's heavy lifting ahead for revisions.  I'm very very unlikely to ask for the full novel if I know there are major revisions required.

 

"white suited pot smoking" doesn't actually tell us much. Neither does "feral cracker, hacker" although it is a phrase that belongs in a poem. These phrases give us images but no sense of character.

And "relentless forces dispassionately unleashed against her" is as blank a slate as "shadowy forces" "billionaire recluse"--in other words, not good writing.

And in the end an impossible choice. Slow, public bankruptcy through the courts and local media, with possible jail time for being partner to a fraud she had no knowledge of. Or a fantastical chance to escape, but at the price of having to leave behind everyone she loves. All the time trying to piece together the puzzle her husband became: how he changed so much; how he could do what he did. But mostly, how she could have missed her life seeping slowly away for a man she once loved, who took and took, never gave back, until the police were on her door with truncheons and tasers.

I actually like what you've set up here as the impossible choice, I just wish you'd write it more simply.  I keep hammering on the need for simple straightforward writing in queries.  It's VERY HARD to do.  It looks easy until you try it.  But try you must.  The way to do it  is make every sentence start with the subject, then the verb, then the clause.  Once you have things in the write order, and the sentences in chronological order, you can see where the bones are. THEN you can  
decorate/revise.

Using the first sentence as an example:

By the time she was informed of  her husband's death Daphne Smith couldn't have cared less.

If you revise that to subject/verb/clause:

Daphne Smith could not have cared less when informed of her husband's death.

Which sentence is stronger?   


 
You can see here that paring down got us to that first sentence, then putting the words in the "right" order got us to the next place.  PLAN ON MULTIPLE REVISIONS as you work on your query.  It's not a matter of revising just words.  Sentence order, paragraph order---all those change as you get things streamlined.  This is why it takes a while to revise.  You simply can not hurry this process.

At 71,000 words, AUDIT 4891 is the first in a trilogy of literary fiction novels.

I always urge you to leave off the "this is the start of a series" even in genre fiction, let alone literary fiction. The novel must be able to stand alone.


This is better-you've got the length under control, and the character soup is gone-  but it still needs work.

Remember the goal here is to entice a reader to want more, not argue the merits of a case.

Revise. Resend.

 --------------------------------------

Third revision

Dear QueryShark:

Henry Smith has been a foolish man, and on Christmas Day of 2012, it's going to cost him his life.

This is a very good start to the query. Notice it's NOT a log line.  It's a classic hook.  Do I want to find out what happens next? You bet I do.

Why does this work?  We don't know anything about Henry Smith, but we've all done foolish things.  Raising the stakes to "it's going to cost him his life" makes us wonder what he's done that's been THAT foolish.

(2) Henry has hit the wall of his middle age, barely coping with the small decisions, let alone the important ones. His marriage is faltering and stress level peaking trying to keep a debt-laden farm afloat. Now dire consequences result from not telling wife, Daphne, they have been selected for an income tax audit.

And then...oof. Lots of exposition. Lots of exposition that doesn't entice me at ALL to read on. You went from enticing to splat in record time here.

(3) Worse, on receiving the audit notification Henry finds the thought of having to hand over their lives in annotated bank statements and source documents for examination by a complete stranger makes him physically ill, and cannot bring himself to comply. He foolishly replies to the investigator that he has always voluntarily paid the correct amount of tax, and so is no more obliged to cooperate with the tax department than a Jewish mother had been morally obliged to show the SS officers where she was hiding her children.

We're on the third revision and fourth iteration of this query. I'm starting to get the feeling that you're writing this book to make a point.  That's a VERY dangerous thing to convey in a query.  I don't read books to be "educated" about stuff. I read for entertainment. If I learn something along the way, that's all good and well, but this paragraph makes me think you're going to be soapboxing about the evils of the tax system.

None of us like to pay taxes (well, ok  I know a couple people who don't actively hate it but that's as far as I'll go.)

But we've all become accustomed to the requirements of the internal revenue machine.  Showing someone your bank statement isn't some sort of "oh my god, hide the children, the Visigoths are upon us moment."



And asking us to care about a guy who thinks that this IS a Visigoth moment is very very tricky.  Our sympathies are much more likely to be engaged if Inland Revenue has done something untoward.



The more Inland Revenue try to reason with Henry, the more intractable he becomes until he fatefully threatens there will be consequences for the investigator if he and his wife are not left alone. The Department has only the single option: to raid the Smiths on their farm, in a joint operation with police.

Oh good, the Visigoths ARE arriving.  You might be better off leaving all the stuff in paragraphs 2 and 3 and just saying something like Henry refused to cooperate and now the Visigoths are upon him.

Technical irregularities are discovered in Henry and Daphne‚s tax returns, and they are forced into bankruptcy, which finally breaks the unravelling thread of their marriage. Having lost everything Henry moves to Christchurch, keeping his promise to the investigator there would be a price exacted of him. Daphne is pulled into events her former life of certainty and known futures has not prepared her for. Henry is killed; whether by accident or intent is not initially known. Daphne is faced with ruination in the courts, or a seemingly fantastical chance to escape; but can she trust the two people offering to save her?

This is too much of the story.  A query needs to leap nimbly--this gets us down in the trenches of things and plods.



At 71,000 words, AUDIT 4891 is the first in a trilogy of literary fiction novels. Novel two will be the detective story of Daphne‚s parents searching for their daughter who has disappeared. Further tragedy envelopes the family when Daphne‚s mother is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The final novel follows a harried, grief-stricken, but stronger Daphne fighting for her freedom, if not her life, in a situation that appears impossible. Plus she must find how she can support her father through events that have overtaken him surrounding the death of his wife.    


No No No.

Don't waste a single one of your 250 word allotment on what the next book is about.  Focus solely on this book.

I'm still convinced the protagonist here is Daphne, who through no fault of her own ends up bankrupt and widowed, but that's just me.

Make sure we don't think your protagonist is a witless curmudgeon. It's hard to make me sympathize with a guy who refuses to do what I do all the time: cough up financial info. It's harder yet because part of my job is insisting that book publishing contracts include an audit clause that lets me be the Visigoth storming the gates of a publisher.


Revise. Focus on enticing us to read more, not reciting what happens.

-----------------------
 Second Revision

Dear QueryShark,

You're sorting through your office e-submissions, QS, query after query, perhaps reading first paragraphs to get a feel for the ones with promise. Your snail mail is delivered, stacked on an in-tray that is already full, your eyes drawn to the letter sitting on top, pressing the pile below it down by the sheer weight of the state. It’s a brown window envelope with HMRC printed in bold, ominous font on the front.

You realise that cliché one’s heart flutters and stops has a firm basis in reality.

In reality, your heart flutters, stops.

You’re beginning to understand the significance of bypassing the salaried option with your Agency, and taking the independent contractor route.  That entertainment expenditure you claimed last year, and the conference in Fiji may have been a bit hopeful as tax deductions go.

There’s nothing for it. Gritting your teeth, you pick up the envelope and in a single fluid motion, put your finger under the fold-over flap on the reverse, running it down to break the seal of the glue before losing your resolve. And your nerve.

Damn. It’s as bad as you thought.

You're up for an all-taxes audit. The investigator wants your bank statements, both business and private accounts, every withdrawal and receipt annotated. Also other relevant source documents, plus a narrative, up to three A4 pages, please, setting out your financial and business interests. The audit will begin with a two hour interview you have no legal choice but attend.

Faced with the shock and awe powers of the tax department, far greater than the police, what are you going to do?

If you are prudent, QS, you will suck up the discomfort at this invasion of your privacy and comply, hoping you’ve missed nothing in your returns.

Unfortunately, Henry Smith was not such a prudent man. If you want to know how it ends for him, you’ll find out by reading AUDIT 4891, a 71,000 word literary fiction – best I can describe it - first novel.  This is the initial novel of a trilogy following the story of Henry’s demise, killed on Christmas Day of 2012, and how his wife, Daphne, is pulled into events her former life of certainty and known futures has not prepared her for.




This is a classic CLASSIC example of why you don't want to use gimmicks in query letters.  For starters, we get letters from the tax guys all the time. Between the tax forms for certifying residency in the US, the tax forms and notices for any of the myriad of taxes we pay, and just the general notices we get every year cause a name and a number don't match on the 1099s, tax notices are a daily event.

And if the tax man is coming to call, most likely he's sending that notice to my home address. The address I use to file my returns.

So, right from the start you have not made me bond with your protagonist.  You've just made me think "no no no." And that's bad bad bad.



And "if you want to know what happens, read the book" is one of those phrases that sets my teeth on edge. I'm sure you didn't know that or you wouldn't have used it.  

A query MUST tell me the protagonist and the choices s/he faces.  I know it's hard to do with this book, but you can't dodge the bullet with a gimmick.

No gimmicks in queries.

That's a rule. A big one.


Revise. Resend.

--------------------------------


First revision
Dear QueryShark:

Henry Smith has been a foolish man, and on Christmas Day of 2012, it's going to cost him his life. His marriage is faltering and stress level peaking trying to keep a struggling, debt-laden farm afloat. Then dire consequences result from not telling wife, Daphne, they are up for a tax audit. Worse, refusing to cooperate with the auditor, he gives the tax department only one choice; to raid the couple on their farm, jointly with police. So begins a psychological cat and mouse struggle between Henry and the auditor in the dangerous streets of earthquake damaged Christchurch, New Zealand, as the citizens of that city try to claw their lives back to normalcy while living through two major quakes, and the sequence of over twelve thousand aftershocks that followed.

Keep the focus on the characters and what faces them specifically.

You're telling us that he doesn't cooperate with the auditor but not why.  That's a key element to understanding what choices Henry faces, and what the stakes are in the novel. Right now there's no choice, so Henry just seems like a intransigent old codger.

Daphne is left distraught by the events of the raid. Henry was tasered trying to punch the Inland Revenue supervisor, and taken away unconscious in an ambulance. She feels violated, helpless and alone. With no trust in Henry left, she leaves him and the farm to reconsider her life. Unfortunately she can‚t escape the repercussions of his leaving hospital and then increasingly anarchic actions stalking the auditor and his family, publishing their private lives to his public blog. Finally on Christmas Day, 2012, events in Christchurch come to their tragic conclusion, Henry killed. Daphne is faced with a cruel choice that a previous life of certainty and known-futures has not equipped her to make. In the end all she can do is choose between family, or saving herself, then step into her doubts



These are some very awkward phrases
"With no trust in Henry left"
"increasingly anarchic actions stalking the auditor"
"Henry killed"

Either this is incredibly sloppy proof reading or you don't recognize this isn't polished writing. No matter why, this kind of writing is an automatic rejection.  A query isn't just about the book, it's about how well you write and revise.

Also, you've listed the entire plot. This is more like a synopsis than a query. A query should just entice the reader to want more, not give the whole plot away.

This novel, while self-contained, is written as the first part of a series.


INCOME TAX AUDIT REFERENCE 4891-IRDCHCH - A MEMOIR BY DAPHNE SMITH is a 68,000 word literary fiction first novel, shifting in tone from the grim parody of Orwell, to the comedic satire of Tom Sharpe, and set in our age of big data where the Western taxing state, unleashed by the financial collapse of 2008, has become the surveillance state.






I'm not sure how you chose this title, but it doesn't make any sense to me at all. For starters the first four words make it sound like an IRS circular. While I've read IRS circulars (who among us hasn't) I don't pick them up in bookstores for pleasure reading. The next two words are gibberish. The last four words make me wonder if the book is a novel or a memoir.



You've got three strikes on the title. Normally I say it doesn't make any difference what you title a book in a query, but in this case, it actively dampens my interest in the book. Good titles are compelling. One or two words are best, four at the max. You're basing this book on 1984. Notice: one word. And when it was published in 1949, it was spelled out as Nineteen Eighty-Four. You may not know what it means if you haven't read it, but you don't think it's an IRS circular! 


This is better than the initial query, but it needs more work.  

Revise 
Focus 
Polish 
Resend

--------------------------
Initial query
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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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.