To Query, Or Not...
As a writer the query process is perhaps the most daunting and frightening part of the completion of a novel. yesterday I sent out seven queries to a number of agents who were listed as searching for new writers. I was buoyed by the tiniest bit of confidence because I had recently had such a positive experience with Rachel Dugas of Talcott Notch. I took part in a Writer's Digest Agent One-on-One Boot Camp and I have to say, I was a little nervous. Not about putting my first ten pages in front of an agent to have them ripped to shreds, but about wasting my $200. The reviews of the WD offerings were less than dismal, the number of disgruntled writers far outweighing the ones with glowing recommendations. However, I got lucky. After reading my first ten pages, Rachel told me flat out that there was nothing there to grab an agent. I had been sending out those ten pages for an entire year and now I was learning that there was nothing in those pages to endear an agent to my main character. The action didn't pick up until page ten and I dropped it shortly thereafter.
Of course that kind of feedback momentarily breaks your heart. How can it not? Writing a novel is like raising a small, bratty child that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. It changes direction moment by moment, taking you, the writer, on a rollercoaster ride you could never have anticipated the day you decided to put pen to paper. But I decided to be an adult and look hard at what I initially thought was the greatest opening line I had ever written-- then deleted it. All of it. I sat down with my main character and talked it out with her and found that she was bored. Bored with the opening, bored with my interpretation of her. I ripped apart those first ten pages and plunged her into an entirely different opening. By the time I realized I was on page 36, I discovered my character was a lot more reasonable, headstrong, and interesting than I originally thought. I found that I liked her, quite a bit.
After my monumental rewrite that took days off my life (though to be fair, as Lorelai Gilmore once said, they were the days when I would be wearing fuchsia lipstick far outside my lip line so I wouldn't miss them anyway), I turned to the internet. I closed my eyes and uploaded the new opening pages to Authonomy and waited. To my absolute joy I didn't have to wait long. The first comments I received were positive-- very positive. People liked what I had done, they liked my main character. And then I received a piece of advice that, as of last night, I am incredibly thankful for.
Fellow author Sheena Macleod told me I should look at my long pitch. It no longer matched the character I had rewritten. It no longer told the story. Strangely enough though, writing a pitch for your book, squishing those tens of thousands of words into a tiny box that will catch an agent/reader/publisher's eye, is harder than crafting the novel itself. But I did it. I rewrote my pitch and yesterday morning I sent that pitch out to a laundry list of agents.
And one responded.
Wish me luck.
xx Poison
Of course that kind of feedback momentarily breaks your heart. How can it not? Writing a novel is like raising a small, bratty child that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. It changes direction moment by moment, taking you, the writer, on a rollercoaster ride you could never have anticipated the day you decided to put pen to paper. But I decided to be an adult and look hard at what I initially thought was the greatest opening line I had ever written-- then deleted it. All of it. I sat down with my main character and talked it out with her and found that she was bored. Bored with the opening, bored with my interpretation of her. I ripped apart those first ten pages and plunged her into an entirely different opening. By the time I realized I was on page 36, I discovered my character was a lot more reasonable, headstrong, and interesting than I originally thought. I found that I liked her, quite a bit.
After my monumental rewrite that took days off my life (though to be fair, as Lorelai Gilmore once said, they were the days when I would be wearing fuchsia lipstick far outside my lip line so I wouldn't miss them anyway), I turned to the internet. I closed my eyes and uploaded the new opening pages to Authonomy and waited. To my absolute joy I didn't have to wait long. The first comments I received were positive-- very positive. People liked what I had done, they liked my main character. And then I received a piece of advice that, as of last night, I am incredibly thankful for.
Fellow author Sheena Macleod told me I should look at my long pitch. It no longer matched the character I had rewritten. It no longer told the story. Strangely enough though, writing a pitch for your book, squishing those tens of thousands of words into a tiny box that will catch an agent/reader/publisher's eye, is harder than crafting the novel itself. But I did it. I rewrote my pitch and yesterday morning I sent that pitch out to a laundry list of agents.
And one responded.
Wish me luck.
xx Poison
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