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.

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.

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.

Ok, Now I'm Excited Again

I was down to the last nine pages of the edit, plus the new ending chapter I had to write from scratch. It turned out that I painted myself into a corner, or wrote a story to nowhere, I suppose in this case. What to do, what to do? I tried diagramming what I wanted the ending to be, but couldn't make it fit with the story I had in place. Uh oh.

If I couldn't make the ending fit the story, I would make the story fit the ending. Here's what I did: I typed my handwritten outline and made revisions. I made a quick sketch of what parts of the story would have to change and noted that on the printed outline. There was quite a bit of red by the time I was finished. To top it off I wrote some character sketches. Some would say you should write those before your fifth? draft. Whatever.

With these vital documents in hand I turned back to the computer. Draft 5 became draft 5a and away I went. Much to my surprise a lot of what I read was actually good. The first few days of the edit I flew through 20% of the novel. Not bad. The effort wasn't the slash and burn then rewrite extensively affair that previous revisions have been. Of course, this is not a major revision, just a tweak (hence the A in the draft number). For the most part I moved around sentences and paragraphs. I did write a fair amount, but took out much less. I added about eight computer pages and only took out one and a half.

The first few days went well, but the next two (also the last two) have been a little slower. A little background: There are two sections to the book - Before and Now. Before takes place (somewhat confusingly) in modern times. Now is 100-200 years in the future when life as we know it has been destroyed. Before is about 20% of the total. The past few days I've been working on Now, which during the previous edit I added a lot to the beginning. Reading it this week, it showed.

Some paragraphs looked scabbed together while the rest were obviously untouched or completely new. It might have been quicker for me to start over, but the thought of all that white is so intimidating. Methodically I moved paragraphs and sentences around to make the story flow with the new outline. On top of that I added a few paragraphs - Now was just not flowing as well as Before. There was so much revision that I added a new chapter. It's a short one, but it explains a lot to the reader. Previously I had spread out too many revelations through the entire story. Now, in Now, the reader gets a Cliff's Notes type explanation of the future (remember that Now is in the future).

To make a long story short - I have made some good changes that will make the story purposeful and upon reading my work over I feel that all the writing is finally at a level I am proud of.

Digital Edit Complete

Draft 4a is complete. Now it's on to draft 4b. The titles don't mean much.

I found that I again had to rework the ending a bit. It no longer fit the characters and their personalities. Nor did it fit my revised (slightly) plot. The story is better now though. Every time I revise, it gets better. Which makes me wonder if I will ever stop revising. Will there be a point where I am satisfied?

I hope.

Here's my new plan. I'm going to do another digital edit. Hand it off to my wife. She'll make suggestions on a physical print. I'll probably make some markups on those pages and once again make digital revisions. From there I may have a friend or relative take a look at it. Then probably make a few more changes. I hope at that point its ready to head off to some agents. My new thinking is to have this commercially published (assuming there are interested parties). If not I'll give self publishing a shot. I've put so much effort into this, I want to see something come of it. Or maybe I'll publish it online. We shall see.

Self-publishing