Electronic Ink

Writer and MFA juror Elizabeth McCracken posted a series of tweets with advice about applying to MFA programs. Most of it sounds startlingly similar to advice new writers receive about finding an agent.

A few tips don't apply (you don't submit letters of recommendation to an agent, you should query a completed novel rather than a short story, etc.), but here's the gist of much of her advice:

1. Submit a strong, completed work that you've revised and edited.
2. Follow submission instructions.
3. Mention the right program/agent in your essay/query letter.
4. Don't lie.
5. Demonstrate professionalism.
6. Explain why you want this program/agent and not why it/she should want you.*

Visit GalleyCat for the full Storified version.


*That's not to say that writers (or applicants) should beg or downplay their credentials, but there's a place in query letters (and applications) to mention why you're interested in this person or program, and it's an opportunity to show that you've done your research. The portion of the query that discusses your book is your chance to show what you have to offer.

Most writers who have done their research obsess over the query letter like nothing else. We read countless templates, lists of dos and don'ts, agent blogs, and examples of successful query letters. The blogs and guidelines tell us to be brief, be clear, avoid rhetorical questions, don't get into backstory, prove we know something about the agent, give a word count (and it had better not be more than 100,000 words), and, above all, get the story on the page.

So, what do the successful queries have in common? Quite often... not much.

Take this recent GalleyCat post listing successful queries from a wide swath of genres. They're attention-grabbing (which is really what matters), but several of them break at least one rule that an agent blogger somewhere has railed about.

Let's start with the adventure query. The novel is about 50,000 words longer than many publishers will accept from a novice, and the writer appears to be querying a young adult novel (though this isn't totally clear) based on the agent's interest in "adult fiction."

Then there's the fantasy query, which has one paragraph full of rhetorical questions and another that is almost as long as some query letters. While many agents insist that 250 words is the target, this query is over 400. The thriller is 500, and a large chunk of that is author bio.

The literary fiction example has plenty about themes and Big Ideas, but almost nothing about the novel's plot.

Of course, one of the most memorable winning queries for me was a letter read aloud at the recent Backspace Seminar. There were three or four agents on the panel, and after explaining why several query letters failed (no sense of the conflicts or story, rhetorical questions, beginning with backstory, vague pronouncements of doom, too much scene-setting, etc.), they read a handful that had enticed one or more of the agents at the conference. And then they got to an Iliad of a letter that had been chosen... by an agent who was absent.

It broke just about every principle they had just discussed. It was sprawling in length (almost two full pages) and meandering in its content (the plot summary described several different settings without giving any idea of how the characters or stories connected). As they read, you could see the agents struggling to explain how this one had succeeded.

In the end, the answer was that there wasn't a specific reason--something in this query had just resonated with the agent who had picked it or matched with something she was looking for. And that was the same explanation the agents gave when they disagreed at other times during the panel. A character description would strike one agent as vague and another as clever. One agent liked a chatty bio, and another thought it was too personal. Several queries were nixed because they contained too much backstory and set-up while another of the winners had a long paragraph that was nothing but world-building.

My takeaways from this are threefold:

1. As in writing, you can break the rules if you break them well. In most cases, however, it's probably safest for me to assume that I'm not going to break them well, so I'll stick to the guidelines as much as is feasible.
2. You'll be forgiven some query-writing sins if other aspects of the letter are excellent. But again, I'd rather avoid giving any agent a reason to say "no," so I'm going to assume that I'm not the exception.
3. Most importantly... a certain part of this process seems to rely on getting the right query to the right agent at the right time. 

Scanning GalleyCat today, I saw a story about Hugh Howey, author of the self-published Wool series, signing a book deal with Simon & Schuster (you know, to go with his movie deal).

What struck me most wasn't Mr. Howey's incredible (and incredibly unique) success, but rather a paragraph reprinted from Simon & Schuster's press release. It's a near-perfect example of the kind of book summary paragraph we try to write in our query letters. Here it is:

Wool is the thrilling story of a post-apocalyptic world in which a community lives in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. Inside, men and women live within a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them from the toxic outside world. But a new sheriff is about to be entrusted with fixing her silo, and she will soon learn just how deeply her world is broken. The silo’s inhabitants are about to face what their history has only hinted about and never dared to whisper: Uprising.

What makes this example so impressive? Let's make a list.

• Satisfying plot tease. I know enough about what's going to happen in this book to be interested. Things gone awry in an underground silo? Political uprising? And... A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN? Yes, please. 
• One could argue that "how deeply her world is broken" is too vague (and what is she "fixing her silo" from?), but the setup gives us an idea of what's gone wrong ("regulations they believe are meant to protect them").
• No spoilers! I'm most of the way through the Wool Omnibus Edition, and each of the five stories contains at least one major surprise. This summary doesn't really give any of them away.* What it does give me is a feeling of envy that whoever wrote this managed to walk the line between teasing and spoiling.
• Succinct setup. One of the hardest things in writing a query letter for speculative fiction is explaining your setting. You have to give the reader some sense of when and where you are (Narnia? The Horsehead Nebula in the year 30,000?), but you can't spend all day doing it. As the author, it can be hard to know when you've done enough. Your readers need to know that your story takes place in a silo. 
• Wait, a silo? Why? Well, see, bad stuff happened, and now the outside air is all toxic-like, and so people have to live in a silo to be safe.... 
• Here, the writer gave us just enough information for the rest of the description to make sense. "Post-apocalyptic" is a good signal, and the "toxic outside" comes up in the context of mentioning the (problematic?) rules that govern silo life. I don't need to know what happens if people go outside. I don't need to know how long people have been in a silo. I don't even need to know why the outside is toxic. I know that the outside is toxic in a post-apocalyptic kind of way, and that explains why people live in a silo. Any sentence beginning with "In the years after [terrible crisis or something]..." would be too much of a digression.

Yesterday I said that push-ups are a good motivational tool because they're hard and because they're potentially embarrassing if you don't do them properly. I'd like to follow up on that thought.

Late last week, I submitted my query letter to the Evil Editor. EE is an anonymous blogger, and he and his minions offer feedback on submitted query letters and synopses. That feedback tends to be very blunt or very humorous, and it's frequently both.

How horrible, you might say, to have one's (admittedly flawed) work torn to pieces for an audience of the blog-reading public. Yes, but that's the whole point. Because when someone has taken your work apart, it's easier to see how to put it back together. And if you're getting form rejections, you may need this.

The feedback is useful, but so is the humiliation. It's worthwhile to have someone publicly say why you're missing the mark. It's even more useful to feel that someone is poking fun at your work for entertainment value.* That's what negative reviews are.

Critiques are always painful, but I don't understand writers who shun them because of the embarrassment factor. That's like saying you've got this marathon coming up, but of course you're not running practice miles, that chafes your toesies. If you aspire to have your book published, your opus will eventually be out there for public comment, and at least some of those comments will be negative. Prepare yourself early to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous reviews.

Thank you, Evil Editor and Evil Minions, for spending time writing feedback for total strangers. And thank you for making it so damn entertaining. If anyone reading this is interested in query letter feedback, consider this a hearty endorsement.


*My spouse laughed aloud at EE's critique. 

Query letters: the author's most dreaded 250 words. You may rewrite your opening pages 43 times, you might read every line of dialogue aloud (and if you don't, you should!), and you have probably stared at the blinking cursor while the words in your turning point scene rearrange themselves into alphabet soup. But you probably don't obsess over any portion of your novel the way you obsess over your query letter.

And if you're wondering, "What's a query letter?" you need to back up 5 or 10 or 20 steps and do some research to get your bearings. Query letters are what authors send to literary agents and editors to convince these industry pros to read their manuscripts. Query letters are important because said agents and editors will generally base their decision to read/request manuscript pages on what they see in your query letter. They're hard because many writers have trouble describing their work in a way that's succinct, clear, and engaging.

There are lots of fantastic resources for authors trying to write and perfect query letters (Query Shark is a great source that shows how authors have turned messy queries into manuscript-request machines, and the now-retired Miss Snark has offered plenty of, um, snarky but helpful feedback on query letters and other topics that confound new writers). Lots of agents blog, and almost almost all of them have something to say about what makes for good (and bad) queries. If you're trying to get a handle on query letter basics, it's worth it to pull up several agent blogs and see what these folks are saying. Other helpful agent blogs include Kristin Nelson's Pub Rants (this is also a good chaser after heavy doses of snarkiness and sharkiness), BookEnds LLC's blog (no longer updated but a wealth of useful archives), and agent-turned-middle-grade-author Nathan Bransford's blog (another safe place for you fragile flowers who prefer a pat on the shoulder to a kick in the tush).

What makes a good query? Assume that the agent or editor you are querying is on a sleep deficit, under the influence of burnt coffee, and reading 50 other queries alongside yours (and this is probably all true). You want to write something that will pierce the haze of caffeine and run-on sentences and compel your reader to request more. So, briefly...

• Be specific. Don't give away the ending (and don't meander into subplots and secondary characters), but tell your reader who the main players are and what the conflict is. Think about what excites you when you read book jacket summaries. This information should come first--if you can't entice your reader to care about what happens in your book, the rest of your query won't matter.
• State your business. If an agent/editor loves your idea, s/he's praying that your book is finished and of a salable length. The only folks who query on proposal (read: unfinished projects) are nonfiction (non-memoir) writers, and the only folks who query Game of Thrones-length mega-tomes are George R. R. Martin. Most agents and editors expect debut authors to write 70,000-100,000-word manuscripts, give or take. Oh, and don't forget your genre. It should be fairly obvious based on your summary, but this is a good litmus test for you and your prospective agent/editor. A suspense novel about a woman uncovering her husband's dark secrets is going to read differently from a women's fiction novel about the same.
• Personalize! Remember how you're reading agent blogs? They don't just tell you query letter basics. They also tell you what that agent loves/hates/wants more of. Part of convincing an agent to represent your work is convincing him/her that your writing is a good fit for his/her particular interests. You don't have to read five books from every agent's client list, but you should show that you know what they're looking for, even if it's a simple "Your agency's website/Writer's Market listing says that you like cozy mysteries/spy thrillers/urban fantasy...." And MOST importantly... query the agent by name! "Dear Agent/To Whom It May Concern" mass emails have a tendency to land in the trash bin.