Query Letters, The Synopsis, and Formatting

I'm pretty set on a query letter now. It took a ton of drafts to condense a novel into 180 words. It's not the entire novel, more of a teaser to spark interest from an agent, but still - there's a ton to put in there. I've been through maybe ten or fifteen drafts. None of the pages of notes I made a few months ago made it into the letter, but they were helpful for the synopsis.

The synopsis is more indepth than the query letter - it can't be so much of a tease. The synopsis needs to have the main characters, the major plot points, and the resolution of the story. Fortunately I have more than a few hundred words. Every website and how-to book has a different answer regarding the correct length. Agents (at least those I'm looking at), however, seem to want 1-2 pages. I started my synopsis with the novel outline with select quotes pasted in. That sucker was like forty pages long. I cut it down to twenty pages, then to ten. Then eight, four, finnally two.

I thought if someone wanted a synopsis of a particular length I could choose one of those pared down versions. Good idea, bad result. The twenty pager read decently, but that's because it had most of the good lines and short scene descritions from the novel. By the time I was down to two pages it read like a boring high school book report. Start over.

I started a new synopsis and referred to my old query letter notes. I shot for two pages, wound up with three. Cut, edit, rewrite, edit, cut. A few days later and I have a decent copy. A few more tweaks and I'll feel good about sending it out. I can really start hounding agents now.

I'm an architect and designer by profession, so I know about good presentation - just not about manuscript presentation. I've read enough advice blogs and How I Write books to know I need to stick to a narrow set of presentation parameters. Use a certain font, with certain margins. The header should say this. On and on. Except no one seems to agree what is best. One website said courier with 1.5 inch margins was THE way to format my manuscript. Ok. My 180 page manuscript suddenly became 650 pages. Uh oh.

I turned back to the internet. Another site said courier was NOT the way to go. I should use Times New Roman and definitely not Arial (my preferred font). I did as bid, cut the margins down to one inch and brought the manuscript down to 400 or so pages. I had to put a centered pound symbol ( # ) between every scene break in the book (that took a while). Then I ran the last spell check on those words the dictionary AND the computer said didn't exist (they were right 80% of the time). Bam, ready to go. Time to keep our fingers crossed.

Query Letters

I've been through three drafts of my query letter today. I don't know what the total count is, nor do I want to.

When I first started this process I made pages of notes, thinking that I would work in subplot after subplot. I've distilled the main idea, but I might have gone a little far. My query letter editor says that I've gotten a little too cute and have made things too concise. A little bit of telling instead of showing.

I feel that I'm close though - I've nailed down two of the three paragraphs - they're flowing pretty well. I'm going to lock in the third and ask anyone and everyone for feedback. Then it's on to finding an agent. I've researched quite a few agencies, and have a few names. It's all very exciting.

The Polish Edit is Finished

Time for celebration? After years of writing, I have a novel that I feel comfortable sending to agents and / or publishers. It feels good to have a complete manuscript, though after years of writing and editing, now I have to do something new. Market. Oh boy.

I've been working on a query letter for some time now. A query letter is basically a one page blind sales pitch. You have 300 words to sell your 120,000 word novel. Go! I think I have a pretty firm handle on the letter. Now I'm going to work on translating my working outline (with choice quotes) into a synopsis. I'm not exactly sure what a synopsis is. There seems to be some ambiguity. I'm assuming its a synopsis (and not an outline or whatever).

I'm not starting from scratch on the synopsis, I have the outline to work from, but I have to distill a lot of information. Ugh. I've had to remind myself to focus. We'll see.

I have a list of potential agents - taken from Novel and Short Story Writer's Market. I'm going to look at their websites and narrow them down to a short list of five to send out the query letters to. Depending on the feedback I get, I'll rework the pitch and send out to others. It is exciting to think that I might have an agent in the near future.

The Polish Edit

I haven't had much time in the past few weeks to work on the polish edit of the GIANT, but I've found enough time to make it through the first 40 (of 218 and shrinking) pages. It's going well, most passages flow well and I don't feel the compulsion to rewrite everything. The heaviest work I've done is moving sentences around. I'm trimming a lot of extra words out as well - I've taken 3 total pages out - for the most part individual words and sentences.

I'm wondering if I'm overediting this. For the first time in my life I've been reading books on how to write. I never took to English classes too well, and I never had a creative writing class, so finer techniques I'm not too up on. Like words that end in ly (adverbs?) and passive voice - both big no-nos. I turned on grammar check for the first time as well - thinking I would get barraged with warnings (as I did when I used it in college or high school), but apparently I've learned something - most of the warnings were for using contractions or sentence fragments. Sentence fragments.

At the same time I have had the outline for the book open. I'm updating it and adding choice quotes to it. I'll use this to construct an outline and synopsis for the book - though I'm not clear on the difference between the two. One is longer and one is a little more boring - I checked out a book from the library that tells me which is which - I'll have to recheck.

Agents and Publishers

Before I go back to the editing / writing, I'm taking a few weeks off to clear my brain. Now I've been looking at how to contact agents in order to get the GIANT published. I've been reading through a lot of books on the subject and have learned valuable information. The best of which has been how to find an agent, how to write them, and get noticed. Every book stresses the importance of tight and professional correspondence, but that one I already knew. The process of landing an agent isn't too far off from landing a job.

I'm currently working on a query letter - a one page synopsis of the book. A thirty second pitch of sorts. Soon I'm going to put together a longer synopsis - which could be in the neighborhood of twenty pages. I'm going to work from my already established outline, but translate it into prose, and add in the best sentences and passages from the book.

The downside of reading all these books on publishing and writing is that they have instilled doubt in me. Am I really a writer? I don't know all the writing rules, I'm certainly not a professional. I don't even have a creative writing class to my credit. I'm confident the story is there - flow and motivation and all that (that is until I reread the latest draft), but I'm doubting my technical ability. I'm hoping though, that on a reread I acutally do know all the rules, just not what an infinitive (and all the other fancy writing words) is - like a person that can't read sheet music, but can play by ear.

Another draft finished. One more to go?

I'm working on two GIANT related items right now - one is finding and agent / publisher, the other is writing. Having just come from the writing desk, I'll speak about writing here.

I finished up the last draft quicker than I though - it was short - only dealing with four or five chapters, but two of those were completely new. It turned out the newest chapters were the easiest to edit - there was little change needed. It was mostly pacing, dialog and typo pickups. It leads me to think that I'm finally figuring out how to write. I've read a lot of 'how I write books' lately - all by established authors. Everyone of them says they only have three or so big drafts of their novels. That worried me - I've at least doubled that number. I knew that everyone works differently and I'm still early in my writing development, but still . . . So finding those new chapters in great shape boosted my confidence.

The other half of the edit was more rigorous, but well worth it. I had earlier made hand edits to the first few chapters of the second section of the book. The chapters were really suffering from poor flow, bad description, and a serious case of Boring. I cut a ton out of the paragraphs and rearranged a lot of what was left to really pick up the pacing. Additionally strengthened the back story and main character's motivation.

After all this I started a new draft for the cleanup last pass before I start shopping this around. Though all my paragraphs were not indented and had spaces between them. This made it handier to print and correct and had a good look on the screen, but needed to be standardized. It took about an hour and a half to indent all the paragraphs - in the end I took out 30 of 249 pages just by removing white space. Whew. In a few weeks I'm going to sit back down and start the typo pass.

Another Draft is Finished!

I can feel the end of this book coming on. I finished up the new ending this afternoon. There's one whole new chapter plus an epilogue sort of thing. Before those is a chapter that was heavily reworked and a moderately reworked chapter. So . . . those chapters will need a few more passes by themselves to make sure it's fit to be included with the rest of the GIANT.

Furthermore, I have to finish up my hand edit of a few of the earlier chapters and make the digital revisions. Barring any outside life scheduling conflicts, it's about a month's worth of work. After that I'll need to run through the whole thing once for for at least a spelling and typo check and, I hope, at worst a minor here-and-there touch up. It may turn out that it will be a light revision and I'll need a typo check follow up after that. The last thing I want to do is send this thing out and there be a bunch of stupid typos or confusing sentences.

Writing a New Ending

I've had the opportunity to devote a lot of time to writing as of late, and feel that if I don't take the opportunity to do it now, I'll never have it again. So, I've been writing and editing, writing and writing a lot these past few weeks. I think its paying off - the proof of course will be when I try to shop this thing around. Most of what I've been reading lately is good - there's not a lot of cutting and rewriting anymore. I'm not sighing and asking myself why I wrote so much terrible nonsense. Not to say that everything is golden - there are still rough patches here and there.

Today I made it to the end of the draft and started writing a new ending to the novel (the GIANT). I was afraid of this - I know what the ending is - I don't have an outline, but its only a chapter or two. I do have a number of conversations sketched out as well. BUT - for the most part it would have to come out of my head and end up on the screen - the screen that is blank. To counter this end of the line blankness, I pasted in a paragraph that I had cut from the old ending, but wanted to rework into the new ending, so I could fool myself into thinking I was just rolling along with the edit as I've been doing for months now.

Turns out, I didn't have much to fear. The words just poured out of me, which was a relief. It was going so well that ideas for further along in the ending were coming to me, so I wrote them in as well. Not bad.

While I've been working on the computer, I've been hand editing a few chapters from earlier in the book. They are the first three chapters from the NOW section of the novel (see earlier posts if you're confused, but NOW is basically the second half of the book). There are some ROUGH stretches in these chapters. I've discovered a shortcoming in that I have trouble describing places. Description of action comes much easier for me. This is something I'll have to work on.

As soon as I'm finished with this hand edit, I'm going to make the revisions to the digital file. Then I'll go back and edit the as yet not finished new ending. From there I'm going to go through the whole thing again and check for errors - hopefully it won't need much intensive editing. If all goes well its a spell check and I'm off to look for agents and publishers.

Writer's Block

My former understanding of writer's block came from popular media. Writer's block was something like this: a writer sits in front of his typewriter staring at a blank piece of paper, unable to think of the final paragraph that will finish his next great american novel.

Here's what I think it is now. Writer's block is an impasse between the brain and the paper (or screen). I'm editing now, and its going pretty well, but I find patches that I want to rework. Usually these are parts where my intended theme or idea just isn't coming through - there was a problem with the langauge. Ha! Sometimes I find the words to fix it, sometimes I just struggle with the idea still in my head. It's SO frustrating to type a few words, then delete them, type some other words, then yell ARGH and delete those. I get fidgety - if I have music on I'll turn it off, no music on? Well lets hear some tunes - maybe that will help.

Too often I have walked away from the computer and come back later (sometimes its 15 minutes, sometimes a day), but I'm really trying to stop doing that now. This book isn't going to write itself for one, but I'm also not going to get better unless I force myself through the tough patches. I'm too far along with this novel to leave problems to be fixed in later drafts. I don't see too many more drafts before I start shopping this thing around for publishing (thankfully - what a long road its been). So I do my best to sit still and type my way out of all the plot messes and descriptive duds I wrote myself into. The proof, ultimately, will be in the reading - my hope is that when I'm finished most of the next draft will just be picking up typos and switching "there" into "their" and "wonder" into "wander" - wish I would have paid more attention in fourth grade english.

Rough Roads and Smooth Sailing

My slow editing, writing, and rewriting continued, but today I made it over the hump and really slammed out some pages. I know I talk a lot about the number of pages I have left, or the number I get through in a day, but it's not a quantity issue. With the revising, assuming I'm paying attention, when I make it through pages quickly it means what I'd written previously is good. Slow days indicate a lot of problems and necessary slow revisions.

I mentioned in the previous post there are two sections to the book: Before and Now. Before, being roughly present day and Now being the future. The slowness of late has been with the first few chapters of Now. The chapters set up a lot of the background (nuts and bolts sort of stuff) for this future world as well as the beginning of the journey for one of the main characters. Apparently I've struggled mightily with this part. It's getting better now, but I think I'll print those chapters and give them a hand edit.

There's two main characters in the Now section and I've reached the point where both are active in the story and I find the reading and writing much smoother and enjoyable. One of the problems before the second character joins is the lack of dialogue and the amount of information the reader needs to understand what is going on. I want to get into the story quicker, but I need to set up the ground rules first. Previously I had distributed this throughout the novel, but my editor advised me to front load more of it as she was confused in several places. I think with another physical print and on screen edit that section should be pretty tight.