QueryDice #9.1: Take Two!

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours!

Dear Lauren Ruth:

When Prudence O’Brian uncovers a human skeleton in her landlady’s backyard, she doesn’t expect the police or the press to be too concerned. Her mother was brutally murdered and the newspapers didn’t print a blurb. The police were too busy hunting down bootleggers and raiding speakeasies to apprehend her mother’s killer. Pru doesn’t want justice to slip through the cracks again. She decides to uncover the identity of the skeleton herself, but she’s uncertain on how to begin.

I’m already seeing a potential problem. In a mystery, the amateur sleuth needs to have a very solid reason for taking the investigation into her own hands. It is hard to like a person who is a busybody or who is meddlesome. I don’t think Pru’s motivation to get involved in the case of this skeleton is strong enough. She needs a solid connection to this crime…like being forced to investigate it because she or someone close is blamed for it. Now, that’s not to say that you haven’t fleshed this out more in the book, making it believable and acceptable that Pru would investigate this on her own, just that it’s not solid enough here in this query.

That being said, this opening is a huge improvement over the last draft. You’d opened with a question, which is a huge pet-peeve of mine, and you’d provided us with a bunch of information we really don’t need.

Gus Ashton is intrigued by Pru’s quest. He offers her his knowledge as a trial attorney to go places and interview people she wouldn’t dare do alone.

Why? Who is he and why would he offer his assistance to Pru when he could be billing hours? Also, as a side note, this sentence is poorly written. 

Gus is old enough to be her father, but he’s the first man she’s encountered who isn’t intimidated by her intelligence or her dangerous right hook. The farther (further is correct. Farther refers to spatial distance) they delve into their investigation, Pru realizes she and Gus have different definitions of justice, and his is silencing anyone who knows the truth.

This is very vague, which irks me. The difference between a back-of-the-book blurb and a query is that a cliffhanger is ineffective in a query, but intriguing on the back of a book. When I see a cliffhanger like this, it doesn’t make me request just to see what happens, it makes me want to move on to a query that’s made itself clear.

I’m not so sure we need to know anything about Gus. It takes you two paragraphs to get to the most compelling part about him: that his idea of justice is silencing anyone who knows the truth. I would cut the two paragraphs and just keep that one compelling sentence from your first draft: “But discovering the skeleton’s identity also means unmasking a killer whose own idea of justice is silencing anyone who knows the truth.”

I received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Drake University. After graduating from college, I worked as a tour guide at a living history museum. Most of the information we conveyed to the public had to be learned by research. I applied these skills to my novel to accurately portray life during The Great Depression.

This is an excellent improvement to your bio.

Another issue: this is the first we hear that this is a historical novel. Since you unfolded your query and it was unnecessary to mention that this was historical, I worry that you just set the story in the past without weaving that into the story.

My 100,000 word historical mystery, [redacted], is complete and available for review.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

[redacted]

LR

QueryDice #9

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours!

Sociopaths are people without consciences. If you have a conscience, how do you spot someone who has none?

I’m not crazy about this opening. First, I don’t think having a conscience would inhibit your ability to spot someone who doesn’t. In fact, I think the opposite would be more likely. A question as the first line of a query is also a big pet-peeve for me and many other agents. The reason: my immediate reaction, most of the time, is, “I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one who wrote the book.” The only glimmer of hope in this sentence is the word “sociopath” which immediately grabs my attention. Crazy people are entertaining–at least from afar.

In 1932 the use of forensic evidence is in infancy and the mere thought of DNA is a dream. If a skeleton pops up in someone’s backyard there’s little hope of finding out who they were–unless you’re Prudence O’Brian.

This paragraph is very disjointed from the one above it. You’re half-way through your query, and I still don’t know exactly what your book is about. Also, a nitpicker at heart, I have to point out that DNA was first isolated in 1869 and was understood to contain genetic material in 1927. I can assume you meant to convey that DNA was not used in forensics at this time due to a lack of knowledge and technology, but that’s not what you’ve said. When I read this, I questioned your fact-checking, even though I’m actually quite certain you didn’t mean to write anything incorrect. Clarity is very important in such short-form writing.

Pru isn’t a coroner or a detective. She’s a twenty-four year old woman with a penchant for justice and a dangerous right hook.

How can a woman who has no credentials other than being female, tough and into justice, trump the knowledge and experience of the police force or those in the medical fields when identifying a skeleton? This seems far-fetched and overdone.

To find the skeleton’s identity, she’ll brave grimy gin mills, locked office doors, and three story mansions on Grand Avenue.

Without the use of DNA, in a time when there was little hope–even for the police or medical practitioners–of discovering the identity of a skeleton, how could Pru possibly identify the skeleton by braving gin mills, locked office doors and mansions?

But discovering the skeleton’s identity also means unmasking a killer whose own idea of justice is silencing anyone who knows the truth.

I like this sentence. It’s well written, engaging and draws my attention. Whatever you do, keep this sentence.

I received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Drake University. After graduating from college, I worked as a tour guide at a living history museum. Most of the information we conveyed to the public had to be learned by research or by personal experience. I can milk a cow, cook over an open hearth or on a wood burning stove, and lead oxen. I believe the small details of a character’s everyday life are what draw people into a story.

The strongest point in your bio is your B.A. in history. You’ve drawn from this by pointing out that most of the information conveyed during your tour-guide days was learned informally by personal experience. Can you personally experience history? I would consider omitting the latter.

My 100,000 word historical mystery, [redacted], is complete and available for review.

Thank you for your time.

[redacted]

I would like to get to know Pru (by the way, I love her name) better. I like that she has a killer right hook, but what is her personality like? Why should I care about her? And why is involved in the justice system? Is she just a meddler? A P.I.? This is unclear, which brings me to another point: clarity is something you’re lacking here, and I think the query would improve with more fleshing out of characters, plot, and logistics. Lastly, where’s the sociopath? That’s the most interesting part!

I wish you the best of luck. I believe there’s a story in there.

LR

“If You Build It, They Will Come…”

“Find your voice and you’ll find success…”

This is what an old creative writing professor told me years ago. And even though I did have some vague understanding of what “voice” was, she was so mystical and secretive about it, she might as well have been telling me, “If you build it, they will come,” while staring blankly off into space from her ivory tower.

Creative writing and old, pigeon-holed professors behind me, I think she was actually on to something. Because the best way to keep your readers coming back for more, or to snag them to begin with, is to make them fall in love with your voice.

But what the hell is “voice”? This sounds like the pompous, hoity-toity “theory-speak” only encountered in stuffy colleges. There are many definitions for voice. Every agent, author and editor has a different way of explaining what it is, exactly. I think we all mean the same thing and we’re using different words to define it. Here’s my explanation:

It’s the feel, the sound, the atmosphere that surrounds you when you’re reading that author’s work. Maybe it’s a distinctly English voice—very prim, and proper and as comforting as hot tea and crumpets, maybe it’s a very bachelor-esque, casually and drily funny voice like Jonathon Tropper’s.

Stephen King has an extremely casual voice. I always feel like I’m sitting in a crappy diner listening to Mr. King when I’m reading his novels. If he started using prim-and-proper speech like, “Dag-nabbit! You’ve made me cross!” we’d wonder if he was joking, and then when he discovered he wasn’t, we’d feel very disconnected. That would not be Stephen King’s voice and then whose is it? If these swings happen too often, it is hard to feel comfortable within an author’s voice and we start to dislike reading that book. Personally, I think this is because we don’t feel secure, we don’t feel like we’re heading in a defined direction. Who are we getting the story from?

Another example: Lauren Weisberger, who wrote The Devil Wears Prada, has an extremely youthful, fast-paced and hilariously funny voice. She can write this:

Attempting to drive this $84,000 stick-shift convertible through the obstacle-fraught streets of midtown at lunchtime pretty much demanded that I smoke a cigarette.

“Fuckin’ move, lady!” hollered a swarthy driver who chest hair threatened to overtake the wife-beater he wore.” I raised a shaking hand to give him the finger and then turned my attention to the business at hand: getting nicotine coursing through my veins as quickly as possible.”

But even though her skill-level might allow it, she cannot then also write something like this, from Stephen King’s Just After Sunset.

“Night came on and the stars unrolled across the sky from east to west like a rug with spangles in it. A half-moon rose between two peaks and sat there, casting a sickroom glow over this stretch of the highway and the open land on both sides of it. The wind whistled beneath the eaves of the station, but out here it made a strange open humming that was not quite a vibration. It made him think of Pammy Andreeson’s hopscotch chant.”

The difference in voice is so obvious its almost palpable. Both are excellent, I loved both books—differently. When somebody says you must find your voice, they mean you can’t write parts of your book in King’s more literary, more meandering and casual voice and then other parts in Weisberger’s laugh-every-other-line, fast-paced jaunty voice. When you mush different voices together—because you don’t yet know yourself as a writer—the result is always just as yucky as when you mush foods together.

However.

Some authors have or use more than one voice. Jodi Picoult is a great example. All of her books are told from the points-of-view of several very different characters. She happens to have great skill in pulling this off. She can allow us to inhabit the mind of a child just as comfortably as that of a cynical grown man going through a tough divorce—and the voice in each section is different, necessarily.  But there is still, even though the voices in the sections differ, an overarching Picoultian voice. It’s very calm, and very poignant, no matter who is telling the story for the moment. And that, I believe, is Picoult’s true voice—the calm, poignant, slightly literary sound that overarchs all of her books.

Some authors use different voices for different books. Jennifer Weiner is one of these. Good in Bed, which was chick-lit that I absolutely loved, had a voice similar to Lauren Weisberger’s in The Devil Wears Prada, above. Funny, down-to-earth, fast-paced, etc. But when chick-lit supposedly died, Weiner switched over to a more women’s fiction-y voice. I won’t speculate on her reasons for making the switch, but sadly, I haven’t bought a single book of hers since. Her voice just went away and that was what had kept me reading.

In sum, and perhaps what I should have said to begin with: the voice is what you hear in your head, the feel you get when you’re reading a particular book. You can’t see, hear or feel a story, so the author’s voice in a book becomes as meaningful and critical as aesthetics in a movie.

 

LR

 

 

>The Flash Moment

>To my great delight, I’ve been completely inundated with queries and proposals since I officially opened to submissions on Monday. Occasionally, I look away from my computer screen and I’m reminded that there’s a world happening beyond it–one that isn’t composed of letters in a row.

There are queries I know I’ll reject after the first sentence. But I read them through anyway–just in case. There are queries that have nothing technically wrong with them that I reject anyway because I can’t get excited about them. I’ve heard from writers all over the globe with stories spanning age groups and genres and oceans. I’ve been entertained, annoyed, excited, abused, uplifted and bored. I’ve requested tons of proposals. I’ve rejected more.

But just now, a proposal stopped me in my tracks. This author was so talented that I heard her voice in the very first short sentence. How inspiring. In everything I read, there is a specific moment when I get a flash of certainty that I’m in good hands, that I’ll come away from this just the tiniest bit different–or not. In this proposal, that moment happened in the first sentence. And I just had to smile.

What about you? Have you ever had The Flash Moment?