Query critique time--my number came up

[shalanna]

What a way to kick off the New Year! My query for APRIL, MAYBE JUNE was one of the two chosen for Jodi Meadows' blog critique today.

I didn't get an "A"

I'll go make some changes. The summary should be more like this:

April and June Bliss (ages 13 and 14-1/2) sneak away to rescue their runaway cousin Arlene from captivity (they believe) when she's taken by a rogue group of wizards, but the tables turn when they arrive, only to find that Arlene was just using a ruse to lure them for their talents to be stolen--because that's what her group of wizards does. They harvest people's talents (math ability, ballet expertise, natural charm like a con artist has, and so forth) and resell them. The sisters' goal then turns to escaping--and, if possible, preventing the group from doing this to others (by disbanding them).

If only they'd told their parents where they were going. . . .

I think her main problem with the summary was that she saw this as all setup and no actual "middle of the book" stuff. Maybe I need a beta reader to summarize the story and give me what he/she sees as the plot points he/she retained from reading it. That works better than my trying to tell people what something's about. I'm good at extracting and explicating theme, which some people like and others hate. (One agent years ago continually asked me, in rejections, "But what is the book ABOUT? What Have We Learned? What was the point of the characters going through all of this? Was there a reason?" Hence the idea of including that.)

Useful feedback, for sure.

I'm not sure what she really means by "make those sentences work." I don't see J. K. Rowling writing in short sentences all the time. I can't DO it that way, anyhow. If I have to change my style, we'll have to forget the entire dance. My voice and style are already fully formed. If they're out of step with what readers can comprehend, then we're done.

It's tough to decode just what people really want. For example, look at the first paragraph and how she says I could summarize it. Then look at the first line of the next paragraph ("June starts acting strangely and Arlene's boyfriend makes a couple of attempts to steal the ring") where I actually DO summarize, and she wants that expanded with details. If I expanded that very much, it would inflate the word count again. It can work both ways . . . the parts you summarize they say need to be expanded, and vice versa. And everyone who reads a query feels differently about which parts they want to see, I suspect. There's a certain trick to all this.

I don't remember how much that anthology paid, although I know some reviewers treated it as a pro publication. I can just stop giving any "credits" at all in most queries. Some agents DEMAND that you include credits. They put that into their guidelines on their websites, even.

Anyhow, it was an honor to be chosen as a bad example!

Today is being eaten up by my mother's attempts to negotiate selling her car. The guy who sells firewood in our area asked if she'd consider selling it . . . I looked up comparable prices . . . he wanted to negotiate . . . then she looked for a notary who'd work today to transfer the title . . . then she talked to him again and he said he wanted to look at the car after he finished his rounds before he decided it was worth as much as she wants. I have to chaperone all of this and take her over to get the title fixed and make sure he has REAL cash to pay with, if it happens. Sigh. This stuff always involves me. I haven't spent much time with hubby over his vacation. But then he's still sick today and just run-down. Or he's pretending in order to stay away from the car mess! We'll see whether they both back out, or if the trailer loads up the 1985 Lincoln Town Car, Cartier edition.

Comments

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

I gave you two examples of things that could replace the vague sentence without inflating the wordcount. Replace. Don't add.

By making sentences work, I don't mean like JK Rowling or anyone. It's not about style. If I thought you should write like her, I would have said. (I firmly believe everyone should write like him or herself.) By making sentence work, I meant they need to add to the story/summary. They need to do multiple jobs -- show the tension, character, conflict -- all at the same time. If a sentence doesn't do multiple jobs, then it's not pulling its weight.

It's more than possible to write a short query with specific details and give a full accounting of the characters, conflicts, and stakes. That is what I (and others) am asking you to do. I've posted over a hundred queries on my blog over the last year. Take a look at them and see which ones work, which ones don't, and the reasons why. Query Shark does the same thing. I think Public Query Pile has a good reputation, too. Study the queries and figure out what they are doing right, and how you can do the same thing in your queries.

I know you're frustrated, but please keep in mind people are trying to help you. No one is trying to be unclear.

[rene-writer.livejournal.com]

Your most common critique is that you spend too much time on any given subject, so I really think it would help you in general to go through and weed out anything that isn't absolutely important, especially in things like your queries. It doesn't mean that you have to change your style, believe me. I cut almost thirty pages out of my Robin Hood novel by the time I had a final draft (and that was with scene additions and new locations added). I'm not a very verbose writer, but I did have unnecessary and boring stuff in there. Removing it didn't change my style one iota. It just took away what I didn't need. Now, the book is most likely to be published by Penguin next year. (Still in that uncomfortable negotiation, will-they-won't-they stage).

Anyway, my point is that I always feel that you are averse to changing anything for fear of losing authenticity, but no matter how much you change or whose advice you are taking, it is still YOU writing the book and it will still be YOUR voice at the end of the day. You won't mourn all those little sentences, or paragraphs, or even chapters you had to change when you receive your first royalty check.

This is a much longer comment than I meant to leave, but I mostly want you to know that, like jmeadows said, we're all here to help, not hurt you.

[dennismhavens.livejournal.com]

Uh -- 1985 Lincoln Town Car, Cartier Edition? Do you actually HAVE one of those, or is that the vehicle from the novel of yours that I've never read? If that's a for-real automobile belonging to one of y'all, we need to talk.

I don't know anything about writing. I just write. Most of what comes out, I like. But I'm obviously not a writer, because NOTHING you tell me about these agents makes any sense. Is the word count an issue in YA books? I thought they were supposed to be wordy, like the Potter stuff. But like I said....

[adamheine.livejournal.com]

"My voice and style are already fully formed."

Don't believe that! You can always grow, and you will if you want to. Even the oldest, most successful authors still change and grow.

Keep going. You'll be surprised at what can change.

[pameladean]

I think your sentences do plenty of work already. I see this advice at all levels -- scene, sentence, individual choice of words -- and always remember a moment during the heyday of the Scribblies. We were critiquing one of Steve's chapters, and for some reason everybody had picked on different words, scenes, sentences, and phrases as "unnecessary." Steve suddenly exploded, "What do you mean, necessary? THE BOOK IS NOT NECESSARY! Nobody will die if it is not written! Necessary to what?"

Most of us had to back off and admit to having become overly zealous in our attempts to create a lean mean everything; one sentence was, in the end, deemed unnecessary because it repeated information previously provided.

I think demanding work of sentences (or scenes) comes out of a similar mindset, and personally I am completely contented if my sentences do one job at a time. I like to save their overtime for significant moments.

P.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I like books that can be reread. If the words do only one thing, you read them, and if everything you write is transparent, then there's nothing left to be discovered on rereading.

This isn't relevant criticism for you - anyone who writes 'the early sunlight dripped onto her shivering head like milk that had been down the well for a week' does not suffer from a lack of specific detail pulling its weight, nor would I call it overly generic. (In fact, I am trying to find a sensation that *I* can relate to in this, and I'm failing - iIt works in the context, it just wouldn't have occurred to me to write this.)

For me, making scenes and events work harder was good advice because this way I can pack more story into the same amount of words.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to take the summary you've given here and rewrite it in your own style. This isn't your final query, but this should be the backbone of it. Your story starts a trifle sooner, with the magical doodahs that Arlene leaves behind, but otherwise, raw as this paragraph is, it captures the core of your story: who is involved, what must they do, what problems do they face.

Also, I totally get the point about 'making the sentences work harder.' This is something that goes for the book itself as much as for the query: pick relevant details. Pick what's special about *this* person, *this* situation, this book... and do it in your voice. 'June starts acting strangely' is bland and voiceless. 'June starts eating frogs' might not be your voice, your story, but it's a good example of _showing_ that June is acting strangely... and adding voice and detail. And the best thing is, that it takes more or less the same number of words.

And I have to agree with jmeadows about the general wordyness of your query not reflecting well on the book. Take, for instance

leaving behind a journal-style book for April to find. The journal is a magical tome that shows a different scene or text every time she opens it, and that displays itself to others as a benign math notebook or Bible stories (so that April is the only one who knows it is magic).

If this were my query, I'd replace it with _plants a magical journal in April's drawer that only she can read_.What's relevant is that this thing is magic and only April can read it. Everything else - how it works, what exactly it shows - it not necessary right now.

[coneycat.livejournal.com]

I am not sure how this discussion turned toward your style *as a novelist* when the only thing critiques was your *query*. It seems to me that the critiquer told you your query was twice as long as it needed to be, *and also* that many of the details you provided weren't effective ones. It sounds like you could easily cut back the query to the expected length, using the summary you provided in the comments on her blog (which she said was a fine and effective short summary.)

By the time she was critiquing your details, she seemed to be working on helping with your future synopsis, which *will* need details. Effective, on-point details.

Do yourself a favour and don't turn this into a battle over your "voice." A query letter is a query letter. I'm a natural essayist myself, but if an exam asked me to provide a short-essay response of 300 words or less, I just did it, and collected the marks. (And as a wordy writer who needs to get submitting this year, I read that whole thread with great interest, because every flaw in your query is apt to turn up in one of mine!)

Good luck in 2011!

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I used to roll my eyes at the idea that a query gives you an adequate taste of a writer's skills - there's so little of it, and it follows such a predictable pattern, but after reading Jodi's blog for some time and reading queries like she does with an agent's eye, I have changed my mind somewhat, because there are certain habits - wordiness, repetition, choice of words that's just a little bit inappropriate, lack of focus - that make one suspect that the story itself will suffer from the same weaknesses.

That doesn't mean that queries are universally useful in finding good books - how many books have you liked the backcover blurb off and hated or vice versa? - but I can see how they will be used to weed out things that an agent isn't interested in, or to say 'hey, great wordcraft, I wonder what the pages are like.'

The hill I'm willing (and not, sigh, unlikely) to die on is that I am writing a kind of book that's not overly sought-after right now, so the query and sample pages need to shine all the more. And in the end, if it encourages me to become a better writer, I can't even say 'that sucks' because I don't object to it at all.