The Good Query

The Good Query

My first book or two had already been published before I began to study in any real depth how a query letter should work. I was lucky – a friend’s editor picked up my first two manuscripts, unagented. That still happens occasionally, but in the years that followed those first books, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to what makes a good query.

The query represents a turning point in the way you think about your project. It’s where your work of art becomes a commodity and where your passion morphs into a business. Query-writing is such a valuable process that even if I were to self-publish, I’d take the time to develop a query to myself as the first step in the promotional process.

When I first began writing queries, I followed the usual formula - why I’m writing, what my project is, who I am – and I didn’t put a lot of time or energy into it. With an ever-tightening market, I spend more time now crafting my queries. I treat them like mini-manuscripts, prewriting and drafting and letting them sit and doing multiple revisions. I pay a lot of attention to my audience and to figuring out what my project is really about, and I make sure my unique voice shines in the letter.

These days emerging writers seem to focus most of their attention on the one or two sentence “elevator pitch” and then build their query around it. I find this backwards. Any project, even a lame one, can be reduced to a sentence or two rattled off on the fly. If you take the time to produce a finely-crafted query, you’ll have all the content and confidence you need to pitch your project to any agent you happen to meet in an elevator.

Though it may sound odd, I often draft the book pitching part of my queries in the early stages of my projects, as soon as I feel them beginning to take shape. Even though it will most certainly change, I find it helpful to consider how a project will appear to potential publishers and readers, in the form of back cover copy, which is how I think of the pitch line or lines.

Despite the grumbling you hear (possibly even from me), placing your manuscript is not a crap shoot or a numbers game. It’s about knowing your book through and through and understanding enough about the market to know where it fits, and it’s about the project earning your conviction that it absolutely must reach its readers.

There’s all sorts of query advice floating around, but the best I’ve found is in a slim little volume called The Last Query by Cindy Dyson. I bought this book not so much because I was intent on mastering the query but because I love Cindy and her writing, and I appreciate the way she engages with and gives back to the literary community. As it turns out The Last Query not only offers great advice but is also a fine example of the type of project that lends itself to self-publishing even though the writer has already published traditionally: a viable topic, a knowledgeable author, and a niche market.

Dyson approaches queries from the agent’s perspective. What will make yours stand out among hundreds and thousands that all follow the same formula? We all like to think our projects are entirely unique, when in truth they’re not nearly as special as we imagine. That’s not to say they’re not worthy of publication, only that we must work hard to figure out how to help our target audience – first the agent, then the publisher and then readers - understand that they MUST have this book.

Consider the fears and desires of agents, Dyson suggests. Ask yourself significant questions about your project, things you might not have considered before, like the metaphorical highlights and the soul of the story. Examine yourself as a writer, including what Dyson calls the “sexy hooks” of your life.

In one succinct, powerful page, the good query merges your best writing with target marketing. In the good query, you leap not just with your best foot forward but with both feet from art into business, a move so smoothly executed that no one will be able to distinguish between them.

Le Mot Juste: The Value and Hazards of Precision

What’s the oldest book about writing that’s still on your shelves? Mine is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, the third edition (it's now in it's fourth). The cover price (new) of $2.75 gives you some idea of how long I’ve owned it.

“No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume,” says The Boston Globe. “The work remains a nonpareil: direct, correct, and delightful,” says The New Yorker.

The Elements of Style is a model of precision. Will Strunk was E. B. White’s composition professor at Cornell way back in 1919. White put his professor’s advice to good use, becoming a successful author (to say the least) in his own right. In 1957, Macmillan commissioned White to revise Strunk’s edicts on style.

And edicts they are. “Professor Strunk was a positive man,” White says in his introduction to the third edition, putting a nice spin on it. “His book contains rules of grammar phrased as direct orders. In the main I have not tried to soften his commands, or modify his pronouncements, or remove the special objects of his scorn.”

When I taught college composition, I used The Elements of Style as a textbook. Among the advice I hoped it would impart to my students:

• Use the active voice
• Put statements in positive form
• Use definite, specific, concrete language
• Omit needless words
• Avoid a succession of loose sentences
• Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
• Keep related words together
• Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end
• Place yourself in the background
• Write in a way that comes naturally
• Work from a suitable design
• Write with nouns and verbs
• Revise and rewrite
• Do not overwrite
• Do not overstate
• Avoid the use of qualifers
• Do not explain too much
• Make sure the reader knows who is speaking
• Avoid fancy words
• Be clear

Never mind that this list includes a few contradictions (as in “Do not overstate” but also “Put statements in positive form”). I took Strunk and White’s call to heart in my own writing, and though as a more mature writer I now qualify some of the advice (“Do not affect a breezy manner,” “Do not inject opinion,” “Use figures of speech sparingly,” “Prefer the standard to the offbeat”) in favor of strong voice, I’m still glad I learned first and foremost to write with precision.

Yes, rules are restrictive, but we must know language, the tool of our trade, and precision tempered with feeling yields beauty. Of course, it’s also possible to take precision a little too far. Known to deliberate for weeks over a single word, nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert championed le mot juste. I’ve read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in both English and French, and while it’s a finely crafted novel, there are several that have made a much bigger impression. An emphasis on micro-editing over larger concerns like character motivation and emotional resonance can yield micro-results.

Narrative Pacing: Making a Run for It

Pacing sounds like the easiest thing in the world: speed up, slow down. You know, like an accelerator.

Au contraire, my dear writers. Pacing is hard. Let’s start with the fact that as readers we take it for granted. We know when an essay or story or book pulls us along, when we can’t put it down. We know when it drags and we set it aside. But even in literature classes, we don’t analyze pacing the way we do characters or themes or syntax, unless it really falls flat, as in the second half of Twain’s Huck Finn. Yet it’s one of the most crucial considerations for the writer.

Pacing is often mischaracterized as having to do only with plot or excitement. It’s actually about tension, which has as much or more to do with character and emotion as with plot. Pacing also has to do with arcs and how we move forward and back within time, sustaining disbelief, interest, and empathy. And it has a whole lot to do with summary and scene and with set-up and backstory as well as withholding and the way we set up endings.

I learned about pacing while revising my first novel for publication. “It feels like you’re racing to get to the end,” my editor said. And I was. I was excited to see that there was an end, that it was all coming together in a satisfying way, and I couldn’t wait to get there.

Pacing is like driving into a curve - you slow down as you’re approaching the important parts, where the action, the characters, the ideas will turn. You accomplish this through finely wrought details, engaging description, and syntax – longer sentences with multiple clauses. But that’s only the beginning.

“Pacing and progression are the most cumulative, most far-reaching elements of writing and thus demand the greatest long-term concentration,” says literary agent Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel. You have to be able to see whether the big building blocks of your project are working right, and often you’re simply too close to the project to be able to judge this for yourself.  A reliable reader can identify problems with pacing, and your own ability to spot problems will increase with some time away from the manuscript. You have to be able to pick out the major milestones in the narrative, Maass points out. “When one goes by, things ought to feel different.”

With regard to pacing, Maass warns of two major traps: set-up and backstory. “So fatal is the business of ‘setting up’ something in a novel that I believe the very idea should be banned,” he says. Backstory must be held for the right moment, when the readers care deeply. Another bit of helpful advice from Maass: the scene after a high point is a good place for subplot action, because it provides a change of page.

“A manuscript must give us a satisfying sense of progressions – but not too easily,” says literary agent Noah Lukeman in The First Five Pages. “It must make us work - but not too hard. It must keep us turning pages – but not leave us feeling it is too much of a breeze.” Lukeman likens pacing to the central nervous system of a book. It’s difficult, he notes, because in order to fully assess the pacing of a project, you have to maintain the whole book in your head at once; in fact, you might find you have to re-read it all in one sitting.

Where you find it’s moving too slowly, Lukeman suggests there may be not enough at stake, or you may be using scene where summary would be more appropriate. Where it’s moving too fast, ask yourself – as my editor asked me with that first novel – what’s the rush? 

The Flexible Writer

When I first began publishing, I coveted the qualities of a real writer: persistence, diligence, tenaciousness, enthusiasm, confidence, humility, patience, and of course a thick skin. But one was rarely mentioned, and I believe it’s among the most vital: flexibility.

By flexibility, I don’t only mean “kill your darlings,” though that’s great advice, and I'm not talking about managing as the revolving doors of publishing slap you with changes in staffing, distribution, and marketing. I’m talking about the kind of flexibility that allows you to rethink, rework, and even start over on a project, whether you’ve written 100 words or 100,000.

It may be that I appreciate flexibility because I’m not especially good at getting things right the first time. But recently I completed a series of revisions on a novel that is, save the title, unrecognizable from its earliest versions. I’m glad I stayed flexible. It made all the difference in the end result.

Commenting on his process in writing “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” a terrific essay anthologized in Literary Nonfiction, Jon Franklin affirms the value of flexibility. He began the project as one in a series of “practice pieces” in which he applied the Chekovian story form to journalism. In particular, he wanted to do something highly paced. Since he’d already earned a reputation as a science writer for the Baltimore Sun, he was able to follow Dr. Thomas Decker into brain surgery. But on this particular day, Dr. Decker wasn’t the hero Franklin was expecting to feature. His patient died.

“I had somehow assumed that the operation would work out okay and have a happy ending,” Franklin says. “Now I had this terrible feeling that I had lost my story. It was an awful day. Here a woman had died and I was feeling sorry for myself because I didn’t have a story and, yet, that’s how I felt. I went over it and over it, and it wasn’t until seven or eight that evening that I realized I did have a story. It was just different than I thought. It was, in fact, a better story, one in which Dr. Ducker, not Mrs. Kelly, was the protagonist. Of all the lessons I learned on that story, the most powerful was that stories change…and a good writer lets them…When a story changes on you, always let go of your hypotheses and follow the story. What you find will be much better than what you abandoned.”

Featured in a recent issue of Poets and Writers, fiction writer Ben Fountain learned a similar lesson about flexibility. Two years after the debut of his 2006 prizewinning story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevera, Fountain’s editor turned down the novel he’d been working on for ten years. He didn’t suggest a revision – Fountain had already done several – he advised him to scrap it. As you might imagine, this came as a big blow to Fountain. Although six weeks earlier Malcolm Gladwell had called him “a genius-level literary autodidact with unlimited promise,” there was the small fact that he’d been writing for two decades and had only the one published story collection. Fountain says he went through all the stages of grief, from denial through depression, before he landed on acceptance. He decided he had other things to write. A few weeks later he started a short story that became the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, released this year with a blurb from Madison Smartt Bell that says it’s “as close to the Great American Novel as anyone is likely to come these days.”

Here’s the thing about Fountain: he never gave up. He proved himself tenacious and persistent in the long haul. But with individual projects, he learned what to believe in and when to let go. In a word, he proved himself flexible.

Description: That Glint of Light

Description has a bad rap: bland, boring, basic. But it's also true that description is often overdone, or done badly.

In Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us, literary agent Jessica Page Morrell explains that good description should get readers out of their worlds by anchoring them in the setting and creating mood. Good description also reveals character and develops emotions. It establishes credibility for future events, and it intensifies scenes, slowing the pace and causing the reader to linger. In short, it’s primarily through description that the abstract is made understandable and that readers are able to suspend disbelief. 

Good description is beautiful, and as Mark Doty says, “Beauty is simply accuracy, to come as close as we can to what seems to be real.”

An obvious path to good description is attentiveness, which is broader than you might think. Sensory images are lovely. We draw meaning from what we see and intimacy from what we taste and touch. Sounds focus our attention, while smells affect the limbic, primitive part of our brains. 

From sensory images, it’s a short hop to show, don’t tell, that old writer’s adage. It’s among the first lessons writers learn: Telling reads like synopsis, while showing reads like art.

But it’s also possible to get way too much of a good thing, especially if you think showing happens only through sensory images. In fact, if taken too much to heart, show, don’t tell is bad advice. Study the writers you love, and you’ll find that part of showing is telling: what characters think, how they feel, what it all means.

Consider this passage from one of my favorite authors, Seth Kantner, in his novel Ordinary Wolves:

Dawna stood still.  The morning night and streetlight shared shadows on her face, glinting her eyes, laying dusk caves under her chin.  Frost jeweled the black silk of her hair.  She stood with her knees close, slightly bent in the cold, her stiff hard tennis shoes pressed together.  A smile lifted the top line of her lip, folding it back provocatively.  Behind her the school waited, for me a terribly cold heated place, for Dawna a pasture of popularity.  My chest was full of air and empty.  I loved her.  I wanted to hold her.  The magazines and TV didn’t know; beauty was Eskimo and brown and named Dawna Wolfglove.

We see the shared shadows, the glint in her eyes, her frost-jeweled hair. We see how Dawna stands, how she smiles. But it’s the oblique parts that set this description apart: the dusk caves lain under her chin, the school a cold heated place, the chest full of air and empty. And the telling is crucial : I loved her.  I wanted to hold her.  The magazines and TV didn’t know; beauty was Eskimo and brown and named Dawna Wolfglove.

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” If description were only a matter of precise, camera-like attentiveness, we wouldn’t have this beautiful line from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

“Description is made both more moving and more exact when it is acknowledged that it is invariably INCOMPLETE,” Doty says, invoking capital letters as he points out that not everything can be described, or needs to be. “The choice of what to evoke, to make any scene seem REAL to the reader is a crucial one,” he adds. A few elements to ground the reader, and a few to evoke surprise - these, Doty says, will rescue a scene from the generic – from the bland, boring, and basic.

Emotion: What Words Can Express

Emotion is among the few things we don’t have to be taught, assuming that all the normal synapses are firing. No one has to tell us how to be sad or angry or cart-wheel happy. So when we speak of emotional resonance, or of the emotional core of our work, or of the emotional depth of our characters, we’re talking about what comes naturally, right?

Not exactly. It is true what Ron Carlson says, that “The literary story deals with the complicated human heart…people bearing up in the crucible of our days.”  It’s also true that feelings, translated as empathy, are what make our writing memorable and meaningful. But if the transfer of feelings to words were as instinctive as breathing, we wouldn’t need literature. And you can’t simply season your writing with emotion, like pepper in a pot. In the wrong hands, emotion comes off as sappy or melodramatic, or as toying with readers. 

“I was full of a tense excitement as well as regret,” says Del in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, when her father announces he'll have to kill the family’s wayward dog. That won’t do, you say. She’s telling, not showing. Yes, but Munro has earned the right to announce these feelings, through the careful peeling back of who her characters are and the trouble they’ve gotten into.  And in a scene where Del’s brother prays that their dad won’t go through with the shooting, Munro proves she can show emotion, not just tell it: “With the making of his prayer his face went through several desperate, private grimaces, each of which seemed to me a reproach and an exposure, hard to look at as skinned flesh.”

You have to go deep to convey real emotion, boring to bedrock and sometimes beyond. You can’t be lazy or complacent with it. Consider this passage, also from Munro’s novel, in which Del, desperate to not have to view the body of her deceased uncle, bites her mentally challenged cousin, only to be forgiven by her hovering relatives:

“Being forgiven creates a peculiar shame. I felt hot, and not just from the blanket. I felt held close, stifled, as if it was not air I had to move and talk through in this world but something thick as cotton. This shame was physical, but went far beyond sexual shame, my former shame of nakedness; now it was as if not the naked body but all the organs inside it – stomach, heart, lungs, liver – were laid bare and helpless. The nearest thing to this that I had ever known before was the feeling I got when I was tickled beyond endurance – horrible, voluptuous feeling of exposure, of impotence, self-betrayal. And shame went spreading out from me all through the house, covered everybody, even Mary Agnes, even Uncle Craig in his present disposable, vacated condition. To be made of flesh was humiliation.  I was caught in a vision which was, in a way, the very opposite of the mystic’s incommunicable vision of order and light; a vision, also incommunicable, of confusion and obscenity – of helplessness, which was revealed as the most obscene thing there could be.”

Munro starts with a physical sensation associated with shame: “I felt hot.” Avoiding cliché, she expands on it:  “I felt held close, stifled, as if it was not air I had to move through but something thick as cotton.”  She pushes deeper: “This shame was physical, but went far beyond sexual shame,” connecting Del’s feeling with backstory, “my former shame of nakedness,” and goes on to evoke a unique and horrifying extension - organs laid out, bare and helpless. She doesn’t leave us there, shocked, but reels back with a comparison we can all relate to, being “tickled beyond endurance.” A lesser writer might have left it there, but Munro probes deeper, describing the “horrible, voluptuous feeling of exposure, of impotence, self-betrayal.” From emotion comes revelation: “To be made of flesh was humiliation.” To know we can’t escape shame is an anti-vision of confusion and obscenity – one more way for us to feel what Del feels.

Not every emotion must be mined this fully; if it were, the reader – not to mention the writer – would soon grow weary. Like all decisions we writers make, the depth with which an emotion is explored has everything to do with the characters and the spine of the narrative, as well as the style of the writer. In Swamplandia, Karen Russell shows what her main character Ava feels as she tries to deny to her brother that she’s like their sister Ossie, who claims to channel the dead:

“But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a sentence that I could read about my mother. All objects and events on our island, every single thing that you could see with your eyes, were like clues I could use to reinvent her: would our mom love this thing, would she hate it? For a second I luxuriated in a real hatred of my brother.”

With simple adjectives and verbs, Russell conveys the paradox inherent in most strong emotions: “helpless, often furious love” and “luxuriated in real hatred.” Like all good metaphors, hers have a visual effect, implying action as she heightens our understanding of Ava’s love: ordinary household items are each “like a word in a sentence I could read about my mother,” and “everything you could see with your eyes” contains “clues I could use to reinvent her.”

Emotional depth is of sufficient interest among writers for Ann Hood to have written an entire book about it:  Creating Character Emotions.  In it, she identifies mistakes writers make with regard to emotion, warning especially of vagueness and ambiguity. “Instead of considering the plot of the story and the character’s own emotional place, the writer relies on a nonspecific emotion and hopes the reader fills in the blanks,” she says, noting that ambiguity is often the result of a writer not trusting enough in her own emotional experiences and therefore not being willing to explore them.

To get it right, Hood suggests making an emotional timeline, first for yourself and then for your characters. Another idea is to use props to suggest emotion, or to show a character trying to hide her feelings. Interior monologue can sometimes be used to great emotional effect, as can an unpredictable emotional response, like Uncle Benny in Munro’s novel, who starts to laugh when confronted with the truth about his mail order bride, who beat her child:  “Uncle Benny chuckled miserably…Once Uncle Benny had started chuckling he couldn’t stop, it was like hiccups.” This is the complicated human heart: paradoxical, challenged, and real.

Transcendence: Writing That Lasts

“I’m in love,” says Reagan Arthur, editor of the eponymous imprint at Little Brown Books. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

That’s how Arthur describes her response to exceptional books. Editors, agents, and readers often speak of books this way, with passion. Can this sort of book love be pinned down, described, analyzed?

Consider Anne Lamott’s enthusiastic endorsement of Kathleen Winter’s debut novel Anabel. “It reads with such caring,” Lamott says. “It’s such a gift.”  How we got here, who we are, what we do now, how we awaken if in fact we do – the novel delves into all of these questions, Lamott says.

Transcendence. That’s what literary agent Noah Lukeman calls a book that addresses such questions.  Of course, not everyone agrees on what transcendence means or where it applies. Winter’s book, for instance, garnered no starred reviews; in fact, a Publishers Weekly review calls its delivery “heavy-handed,” and its Amazon ranking is nothing to get excited about. Still, who wouldn’t be thrilled if even one writer with the chops of Lamott were to rave about the transcendence of our work, saying in essence that the world needs this book, Amazon rankings be damned.

Timing is everything when it comes to transcendence - not the timing of the project, though it is possible that what’s unappreciated in one era may transcend to another - but the writer’s timing in weighing the value of her work. Too much early concern about transcendence can kill a project before it ever gets off the ground. Too much early conviction regarding its importance breeds grandiosity, leading writers to invest large chunks of time into stuff no one wants to read, at which point the writers typically throw their hands in the air and complain that the world simply doesn’t get their particular manifestation of genius.

In The Plot Thickens, Lukeman warns that there are no formulas for genuine transcendence, but he does point to some of its common elements. Though not vague, transcendent works are open to interpretation. “The more levels, the more there is to work with,” Lukeman says. Transcendent writing also features multidimensional characters and circumstances. And transcendent work feels timeless. Regardless of era, readers will deeply identify with it. In reading, they’ll feel they’ve learned something, especially about themselves. 

“Works that leave lasting impressions are usually greater than the sum of their parts,” Lukeman says. “The greatness lies not in any individual character, or setting, or story twist, but in the coming together of these elements.” The ideal work, he adds, takes the audience through four stages, from curiosity to interest to need and, in rare instances, to action.

Though aiming for transcendence can be counterproductive, we can at least shoot for an awareness of what we mean to achieve. Lukeman suggests checking in with ourselves, at the deepest level, to discover what prompts us to write. If we write from defensiveness or insecurity, we’ll likely come off as aggressive. If we write out of pride, to prove how smart we are, our work becomes a showcase for high language and affected speech.  If at the root of our writing there’s fear, we wind up overstating. Revenge, control, deception – there are any number of poor motives that will show through in our work. 

“It is your job to clear the slate, to create a sacred space in your mind just for the writing, free from all your neuroses as a person. The writing must be about the art as much as possible,” Lukeman says. “No matter what your goal or motivation, you should strive to write from a place of truth and love.”  

When it comes to transcendence, try not to try too hard. Pushing for profundity, writing with an agenda, preaching a moral (or two or three or ten): don’t be fooled by any of these self-important pursuits. Humility, vulnerability – these are among the most transcendent perspectives in writing, because they open a work to its emotional core.