I’ve discussed querying in the past, and I’ve also mentioned the manuscript-mincing site Query Shark. Since I’m back at the point of sending out queries to agent, I think it’s worth reheating the subject.
Query letters are at once the most straightforward and the most complex thing a novelist can write. It’s straightforward in its concept: “Describe your story and make it appealing to others in 300 words or less.” But the simple aim belies the complexity of assembly. You don’t want to ramble overlong about your content or characters, but you also don’t want to leave out key elements that set your story apart. You also don’t want to spoil too much, however. It’s a fine line, or rather a series of fine lines that make the scope of the letter quite narrow and somewhat difficult to maneuver.
It’s a challenge that must be overcome, however. Unless one is of a mind to self-publish (if you’re not sure you are, consult this checklist) you’ll need representation with the guys that put ink on paper for tens of thousands of tomes. And they’re not going to take just any manuscript that floats in from the street. You need to get them interested, and to do that you need a query.
I plan on refining mine and sending it to Query Shark. I’m ready to be torn to shreds. It’s the only surefire way to build myself up enough to knock out the competition and actually get this thing published.
Think of a favorite story of yours, or a beloved character. Chances are there are things about that story or character you take for granted. Here are some examples: Superman fights for truth, justice and the American way. Aragorn is proud of his heritage and wishes to reclaim his throne. Buffy learns of her destiny as a Slayer while she’s a cheerleader in high school. Tyr’s hand is devoured by a dire wolf named Fenrir.
Change one thing about any of those stories, and everything changes.
Warren Ellis changed one thing about Superman. If his spaceship had crashed on Earth twelve hours earlier, it would have landed in Sibera, not Kansas. Hence, Red Son, one of the most audacious and comprehensive Elseworlds stories I’ve ever read. No aspect of the DC Universe is unaffected by this one matter of timing, from Kal-El’s relationship with Diana of the Amazons to Hal Jordan’s origin as a Green Lantern. Superman becomes a heroic symbol of Communist Russian under Stalin, all because of the Earth’s rotation.
Aragorn changed in Peter Jackson’s films. Instead of reforging Narsil the red-hot second he reaches Rivendell in his eighty-sixth year, Aragorn shrinks from his destiny. He fears the weakness of men, unconvinced that the blood of Numenor makes him any different from the weak and corrupt people he’s met and will meet. While some die-hard fans of Tolkien’s works threw back their heads and howled at this change (among others), I found this made his character deeper, more realistic and much more interesting and appealing. How many of us are that confident in our own abilities, our own destinies? How many of us entertain doubts about our futures and our capacity to meet the challenges awaiting us? Aragorn, despite his long lifespan and epic destiny, seems much more like us, and thus we are drawn deeper into his story and that of the Fellowship.
Imagine if Buffy found out she was a Slayer at a younger age. Let’s say she’s six years old, her daddy’s attacked by a vampire at an amusement park and she stakes it with a popsicle stick. Just pure instinct: she jumps onto the monster and drives the wood home through sheer panic. How would her story change? How shallow would she really be with blood on her hands at such a young age? Or go the other direction. Buffy’s in her twenties, married to some pretty jerk who has no time for her, so she fills her days shopping and gossiping. It could be like any episode of Sex & the City until the vampires get involved. How reluctant would she be to respond to the call? What if her husband tried to turn things around given her drastic change in lifestyle, only to discover she’s had an affair with Angel? Think about it.
I mentioned Tyr because of The Drifter’s Hand, obviously. It was more a change of genre than a change of events, but it was still an interesting exercise. It’s extended into other works as well, as the fourth (and final?) draft of Citizen in the Wilds proceeds. I changed a few things, dialed back some characters to let others grow in a different way. The results are a definite improvement. The downside is, more rewriting is required. But if the end result works better, it will be worth it.
A couple of weeks ago I touched on the subject of rewriting your novel. Wendig’s Writing Haus continues to spew fantastic advice on editing, and this mostly concerns phase two, or what he recommends as phase two. When you edit for content, after all, you’re doing something particular with the manuscript: you’re revising it. And at first, you’ll be taking a hatchet to your beloved work.
I know, it’s mostly a matter of semantics, but let’s break it down into a bit more detail.
Revise
Writing a novel, or a story of any significant length for that matter, is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a long haul from your first word to your last punctuation mark. Things will change along the way – your pace, your word choice, the dynamics between characters. It’s important to take this into account as you look over your freshly-forged story. Some of your passages are likely to be weaker than others. Shore them up. If something is happening too soon or too late in the story, trying moving events around a little. Nothing is set in stone.
Rewrite
As you revise, you may find yourself realizing that something just doesn’t work. Maybe a character needs to develop in a different way. Or maybe they’d work better if they were a different race or gender? A single decision can alter huge portions of the text. Don’t be afraid of this. You may want to save a copy of your manuscript under a different name, provided you’re working on a computer instead of by hand. If you are working by hand, you have my respect. No matter how you do it, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, but do let that water out and refill the tub.
Revise Again
After you’re done rewriting, it’s time to revise again. Dropping text bodily into your manuscript has likely left some ripples. Descriptions may need to change, events happen sooner or later, etc. Every time you do this, though, you’ll likely find yourself doing it with progressively smaller tools. If your first edit & revision was done with a hatchet, this time it’ll get done with a steak knife. If it was the steak knife’s turn last time, you’ll be using a paring knife this time. Paring knife, scalpel, screwdriver… the tools get smaller and smaller as the work moves closer and closer to being completely done and, in an ideal world, publishable.
How quickly to you find your tools shrinking? Have you ever tossed out something you wanted to keep and found the story was better for it? Has there been a time where you’ve found the story going in a direction you did not expect, and had to revise the beginning to reflect this? Feel free to share.
If you ask a writer for advice, quite a few of them will simply tell you to read. I’m reading the second novel in A Song of Ice and Fire and I may start the new year with a fresh read of Lord of the Rings. I also read articles on Fark and the Escapist. I know I’ve said it’s important for writers to pitch and keep pitching, and as much as I have ideas for articles, I don’t know if I have just the right mix of time and acumen to give the Escapist exactly what they’re looking for.
I write fiction. It’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was young.
As a writer, reading also is a means for us to recharge. After A Clash of Kings I plan on reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress for the first time. Not only am I a fan of Heinlein, he’s the reason I started writing fiction in the first place and decided it was what would drive me in life.
I’ve written on Heinlein severaltimes, and even reviewed the one film adaptation of Starship Troopers. But the book that affected me the most deeply was The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I had a copy of my fathers’ that I read a few times, and I wish I knew where it was. That’s a book that needs to be read again.
For the most part, it’s part hard science-fiction, part rumination on the nature of myth. As the story goes on, the sci-fi bits fade into the background as the ruminations grow. The concept of every myth being true, the erasure of characters and the part those characters play even when they’re aware of being part of a myth grabbed hold of my twelve-year-old brain and didn’t let go. But it was this, at the very end, that completely overwhelmed me.
“Who was writing our story? Was he going to let us live? Anyone who would kill a baby kitten is cruel, mean cruel. Whoever you are, I hate you. I despise you!”
Now, a lot of the novel is admittedly forgettable. I want to read it again to see if that’s because I was young and had even less retention than I do now, or if there’s just a lot of filler in there. But the concept, the idea that worlds created by the writer of fiction are, in some way shape or form, real – that stuck with me. I put the book down and knew, on a deep level, I wanted to write stories like that for the rest of my life.
I’ve lost sight of that goal, for varying reasons to varying degrees, multiple times over the last two decades. It’s been there, in the back of my mind, sometimes growling at my ignoring it and sometimes screaming at me to get my shit together. I’m at a point where I can’t not have a day job, but I’ve wasted enough time not writing. I need to work a steady job to keep myself and my family fed, housed and clothed, but I also need to keep writing. Hence the Free Fiction, the blogging and the stubborn refusal to return to a car-based commute. I can’t write and drive at the same time.
I write to create these new worlds and populate them with characters that other people can understand, relate to and maybe even sympathize with. I write to not necessarily change lives but to provide a means of escape. I write because, in the end, it makes me come alive like nothing else ever has. When I’m creating stories, I’m in a mental place that can be difficult for me to reach under other circumstances. It’s a place where my energy is being focused in a way that both invigorates and calms me. And it’s possible that the results of this creativity will be something other people can enjoy, something that helps them forget about their troubles and lay their burdens down, if just for a little while.
I know I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before, but it bears repeating, if only as a reminder to myself.
The truth that every novelist has to face is that you’re not going to get everything right in the first draft. Nobody does. It’s likely that George Lucas wrote a single draft of his prequel scripts, and look how those turned out. No, multiple drafts is more than just a means of editing out grammar mistakes and adding missed punctuation. If that’s what you’re looking for at this point, by the way, let me direct your attention over yonder to the Writing Haus of Wendig.
What I want to talk about is rewrites.
I’m not saying you’ll need to rewrite your novel, but you will almost certainly need to rewrite part of it.
As you write, your characters are going to grow and change. At least, they should. I’ve talked about this before. The tricky part is, you don’t want that growth to be spontaneous and unexplained. A character’s motivations should begin somewhere in the story. If you trace the character’s plot line from the end to the beginning, and lose track of where a change happens or don’t see it happen at all, it’s time for a rewrite.
Now, the prospect of a rewrite can be intimidating. But the good news is, it’s very unlikely that you’ll have to rewrite the entire work. Chances are, there are one or two areas in the narrative that just need some restructuring, a few conversations that need to be reworked, etc.
Of course, if you do find yourself rewriting great swaths of text, you may want to step back and take a look at the story as a whole. Why was this such a problem? Are you fixing it in the best way? What else will need to change as a result?
Whether you need to rewrite a little or a lot, don’t be afraid to do it. The end result is always going to be better than what you began with. Characters will grow more smoothly, plotlines will advance and complicate organically and your readers will be drawn in further to the world you create. I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing about those prospects I don’t like.
