Who comes up with these clichés? Thinking is silent, of course you can't hear it.
Anyway, the point is, I'm just going to dive right in, and get to work. You all met Kristen yesterday, and if you didn't, just scroll down to the post beneath this one.
Today I'm featuring her query again, this time with my thoughts, in red text.
Here we go:
Dear Mr./Ms. Agent:
I’ve read your profiles and interviews on xxx blogs/web-sites, and I am impressed with your sincerity and your passion for good quality children’s writing. I hope you will consider my middle grade novel, SILVER POOL OF LIGHT, for your list.
I'm not going to cover this first part. I mean I could say this is too short and too generic to really qualify as true personalization of a query letter, but I get the feeling you were just giving an example, and wouldn't intend to write your personalization this way for every query you send in.
Eleven-year-old Eve Tilton, a self-proclaimed “blossoming” celebrity, YES! This is the kind of thing I always try to fight for in the queries I critique. In 7 little words (okay, yes, some are hyphenated), you've given us a wonderful idea of who our character is, showed us why we should care, and done it with voice. NOTE TO READERS WHO QUERY: This is how you introduce an MC. has been afraid of the ocean since living through a horrible I'm not sure you need this. I can't imagine surviving a deep ocean accident that would be anything but utterly terrifying. If there is a key plot reason for this, get more specific. sailing accident at the age of five. So maybe she's can't fully remember the details? Just the paralyzing fear? When she spends the month of July on Martha’s Vineyard that sounds like torture for someone with her fears. with her step-siblings and great aunt, she hopes for privacy. Privacy? That seems odd. I can't remember thinking about privacy at eleven, and I'd be picturing Eve hoping not to drown. Lately Eve’s been forced to share so many personal details on celebrity blogs and the ever-growing iGirl website…it’s becoming tedious. Okay. Now I'm confused. Forced by whom? I get that she's some kind of eleven-year-old iCarly or something, but who is forcing her to do this, and what details is she sharing?
So your opening paragraph starts out strong, with incredible character, and decent hook, but it soon gets muddled for me (subjectivity). I don't have a clear idea of what the plot is going to be, which isn't necessarily required this far into the query, but it's giving me a sense of "I thought it would be about this, but it's actually about that," which is not usually good.
Plus, Eve has a secret friend—don't use em-dashes in queries. It works here, because I pasted from your word doc, but email clients do funny things to advanced formatting like this. Besides, this works better as a sentence. she doesn’t want her step-sibs snooping around in Aunt Tibby’s attic when she’s writing to eleven(-)year(-)old Jane Mayhew. Because Jane lives in 1874. Eve doesn’t know how it works—em-dash maybe the diary they write in time-travels, or maybe the sea chest the diary is kept in. But if she writes in the diary and places it in the chest, and waits…Jane writes back. From 1874. I really like this. It sounds like a fascinating premise, but the problem here is that your plot is only getting more muddled as things go on. Right now I get the feeling that the plot is the correspondence between the girls, and the fear of the ocean and the iGirl stuff is all backstory. I obviously could be wrong.
This paragraph suffers from much the same problem as the first. It's well written, with good voice and cool ideas, but it's not cohesive, in the big picture sense, with the rest of the query. Right now I have no clear idea what the main conflict in this book is, and I've read too much not to know that by now.
It’s pre-occupying, technically this verb makes sense (though as a word preoccupy does not need to be hyphenated) but I don't think it works here. I think you want something stronger. writing back and forth with a girl from more than a hundred years ago. They write about what they have in common: funny aunts, clueless fathers, acquaintances with more interesting lives than their own. But just as Eve is invited to hob-nob with film stars, Wait. What? So the internet celebrity stuff is not backstory? Now I'm really confused. It's not that you can't have subplots in the novel, and I'm sure they work well there, but your query needs to focus on one main conflict. she discovers that Jane is going to board a doomed whaling ship. Eve enlists Liam, her twelve-year-old, slightly smelly step-brother, to help her keep Jane off the ship. Can they time travel? Or do they have to convince her with a letter? As they plot and plan, she tries to focus on Jane, but it’s so hard to concentrate on tempests, malaria, and whale blubber when you’re invited to a movie star’s private beach…. You only need three dots in an ellipsis. Eve faces difficult choices, knowing that if Jane boards that ship, she will die in an accident eerily similar to the one Eve survived the day her mother died. I do like the way you sum this up. Well done on summarizing.
SILVER POOL OF LIGHT is complete at 48,000 words. How do you fit all this plot into so few words? Last summer I completed the advanced novel workshop at the University of Iowa, isn't this one of the most prestigious writing programs in the country? Good stuff. and have attended numerous SCBWI writing workshops. I hold a certificate I didn't even know you could get certificates in writing. I may have to look into that myself. in Children’s Writing from Emerson College and am a member of SCBWI. Please visit my writer’s blog: Don’t Forget the Samovar, at blogspot.com. Excellent bio. I wouldn't change a thing.
Per your submission guidelines I have pasted in the first 5/10 this is like your personalization I think, just an example. pages below. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Okay. So the pros are that you've got great writing, great voice, and great ideas in this query. That's good news, because those are harder to fix.
The problem is that this query lacks focus, and may be too long. Without the to and from lines, it's 390 words. Now I'm not going to tell you there are rules about query length, because I don't believe in that crap. I've seen a query that had less than 50 words and it blew me away just as much as it did Janet Reid. I can't think of an example, but I'm sure there are longer queries that work too. As long as it serves the story, don't worry about length. Problem is: I worry that your length here doesn't serve the story.
Try to focus on one plot line, one conflict, and the one choice that must be made. I think it's the correspondence with the historical girl, and the need to save her, but I can't quite tell for sure.
Sincerely,
Kristen Wixted
That's all, folks.
So what do you guys think? What would you change? Do you think she really needs to cut as much as I think she needs to cut? How would you write a better opening hook for this story?
A NOTE ON ELLIPSES: There is actually apparently some debate about the point I made about three dots in an ellipsis. Some manuals of style describe a terminal ellipsis that can use four dots, but only if it ends a sentence or a paragraph. There is also debate . . . on how to space ellipses. When I write them in fiction, I always surround each dot with a space on either side, because I prefer the way it looks, but there are publications out there that will tell you that is wrong.
I'm going to continue to suggest to Kristen that she only use three dots (you'll notice some of hers do only have three dots, so the one with four may have been on purpose), but I would like everyone to keep in mind that like all the advice I give, it is highly subjective, and should only be followed if it resonates for you (the author).
