I've found myself in a most unusual position this summer. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. I know of more than one published author who started out interning for a literary agency and then used what s/he learned to write an effective query letter (and manuscript), land an agent, and get a book deal. I don't know of anyone who started out querying and then became an intern. Until now.
In the course of my work for the ELA (Excellent Literary Agent) this summer, I've been tasked with sorting through her query inbox and reading partial and full manuscript submissions. It's enlightening to be on the other side of the query stream.
When I wrote my first novel (over ten years ago) and started learning about publishing, agenting, and querying, I didn't know what I was doing (of course). And even though I haven't exactly come full circle, I do have some valuable thoughts on the subject that might be interesting to...nobody actually. I don't think anyone reads my blog anymore, given my two-year radio silence, but I've started posting again anyway, mostly for my own amusement.
So here is a thought: sorting through incoming queries is like taking a standardized test. That's something I know lots about, actually, because I taught LSAT and SAT prep courses for the Princeton Review (in what feels like another lifetime), and because I'm very good at taking standardized tests.
When you take a standardized test (if you wish to do well on it, that is), you have to approach it from a certain frame of mind. If there are five answer choices, four of them will always be the wrong answer. If a test taker approaches each answer choice by looking for how it could be right, she'll never get through the test. The only way to succeed is to look for something that's wrong. After all, there's an 80% chance that any given answer choice is wrong.
When you take a standardized test looking for what is wrong with each answer, you chug through the questions before the time expires, and you usually do very well. I have found that the same frame of mind applies to the intern reading queries.
If she spends her time looking for what's right with a query, she'll probably find something about 80% of the time. The world is full of writers, and each person, as a unique child of God, has a different story with a unique set of strengths. While it would be truly heartening to request to read the full manuscript for every query in an agent's inbox, the intern would never get through them before the time expired. Just like a standardized test, see?
So the smart intern who has an inbox of three dozen queries to sort through in less than an hour does what any good test taker does: she looks for what's wrong with the query so she can quickly weed out the ones that aren't going to work. And like any good test taker knows, some wrong answers are easy to spot. In the world of queries, here are some good ways to eliminate a query without reading it twice:
1. Character soup
The intern doesn't need to know the first and last name of your main character and his or her five best friends. If you want to include those characters, you can simply refer to them by their relationship(s) to the MC. So the MC's mother doesn't need a name, just a designation as the MC's mother. You don't need last names, either. Those just take up precious word space. We populate our books with characters we grow to love almost as much as our own children, and we don't want them to feel left out of anything. But the query is not the place for them. Here, as in Coco Chanel's world of high fashion, less is more.
2. Word Count
A first-time author with a YA Fantasy clocking in at 200,000+ words is a first-time author who hasn't spent any time researching what sells and what is traditional. If you want to write a 200,000+ word YA Fantasy, you can. It just can't be your first. Plus, it feels like it's only 200,000+ words because you're too in love with your babies to kill them, and no agent wants to hold your hand through chopping your novel in half. Not going to happen.
3. Theme v. Plot
Wordsworth said literature should both delight and instruct. It's fine to put themes in your writing. Don't point them out in a query, especially at the expense of detailing the plot. The plot is the delightful part of a book; the theme is the instruction. Leave the theme analysis to those stuffy college professors who have nothing better to do than publish papers in literary journals that nobody, not even the intern, reads. Use the query to tell the intern who the MC is, what choice s/he has to make, and what's at stake.
Of course, if you haven't read the QueryShark archives, you should do that first. But I think it's valuable to consider the query process from the intern's point of view. If you realize that your query is read, not for what's RIGHT but for what's WRONG, you can pass the first hurdle by making sure nothing is glaringly wrong.
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