Why is your story going to grab people? A nugget of query letter gold.

How do we prove that our story has wide appeal, that there’s a market out there just waiting to find it? A query letter to agents or publishers needs to show that it taps into some widespread impulse in society – a desire or a fear that drives people, and that they’ll respond to in our story.

This week I discovered a nugget of query letter gold in an article about the hit series, Long Lost Family: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10962480/Long-Lost-Family-The-Heartbreak-Kids.html

Courtesy of primetime.unrealitytv.co.uk

 If you haven’t seen Long Lost Family, do watch it, but not without a large box of tissues. It features mothers who gave up a child for adoption, often due to the social mores of another era, and who are now searching for that child years later. Also featured are adoptees searching for a birth parent. In all cases, the trail has gone cold, so that ITV’s adoption and tracing experts are the last desperate hope.

My novel Unspeakable Things is about Sarah, whose mother died when she was four, and who has been told nothing about her. Pregnant herself, she moves back the abandoned family home and becomes obsessed with a quest for answers, for which she depends entirely on her long-lost uncle.

Here in a nutshell is the story:

‘Pregnant editor, Sarah, is told that her dead mother suffered hereditary madness after childbirth, and tried to kill her, but is her uncle’s story true? Sarah must discover the family’s dark secret before her baby is born.’

I wanted to show that the story taps into a deep-seated need to know where we come from, so I  researched how many adoptees begin a search for their birth parents when they themselves are expecting a child. Unfortunately, adoption statistics are really hard to come by, so I found myself quoting outdated statistics in a rather dry way. I needed something much more compelling.

Imagine my delight when Twitter led me to an online Telegraph article about Long Lost Family, which last year had an audience of 5.2 million (get that, query letter readers – a huge potential market!) In it, Nicky Campbell, one of the programme’s presenters, himself adopted at birth, summarises its appeal:

‘We’re talking about the most basic-to-life things: attachment, identity, belonging and love. It’s all the stuff that makes the world go round. I think that’s why it resonates with people. They see echoes and reflections and shades of themselves within it.’

Nicky Campbell, I have long enjoyed your shows on Radio 5, your intelligence and humour (with this week this gem: ‘You know how you sit round as a family and debate the great issues of the day, well we were doing that last night, and I’d like to put it to you now. Vinegar. Are you largely for, or against?’) Now you have described with perfect brevity what drives my heroine, and I thank you for that nugget of query letter gold.

What impulses do your stories tap into? Or what books do you love because they evoke a deep response in you – a fear, a desire, a longing for adventure, a fiercely held belief? To start the ball rolling, I wonder if the reason I loved Catch-22 so much as a teenager is because it taps into a feeling you have at that age that much of what you’re being fed as truth or duty is in fact insanity, and you’re the only sane one, trapped inside it. I’d love to hear your favourites and the reason you think they grabbed you!

In Which I Learn 7 Tip for Writing Faster and Read The Casual Vacancy

Thanks to www.dreamstime.com

Well, I think we’re all agreed that life is way too busy as Christmas approaches, so I will keep this short. No news from the Mslexia novel competition, which means either 1) I haven’t been long-listed or 2) they have been overwhelmed with entries and haven’t finished the long-listing process, which I am assured is what happened last time. If it turns out to be 1), I need to rethink, because I have been pinning a lot of hopes on the competition and putting off working on a good query letter while I wait to see if the eggs in my Mslexia basket are going to hatch.

Thanks to fineartamerica.com

In the meantime, I have been working on a short story in the hope of getting it published and gaining some writing credits for that query letter I am putting off writing. I was really struggling to get down to the task. It seems much harder to feel motivated when you are starting afresh on a short story as opposed to sitting down to a novel you are deeply engaged with.

 Then I found something that has really helped, a post by Emily Benet giving 7 Tips for Writing Faster: http://emilybenet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/how-to-write-that-novel-faster.html

Have a look, not only if you want to write faster, but if you are struggling to find the motivation to write at all. Emily advises deciding on a writing goal for the week, whether it is a word count, a number of chapters or just finishing a section. Then she says to set a realistic work count: ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s only 100 words, what matters is that it’s achievable so you won’t be put off, and you will feel happy when you’ve completed them each day.’ This is the tip that has really worked for me. I decided on 250 words because that really isn’t many, but it can feel like real progress in a short story. Emily also advised to write ‘draft’ at the top of the page, because then ‘it’s okay if your writing is terrible; at this point you just want to get the story down. Don’t worry about editing until later.’

This new strategy has made all the difference; it seems less daunting to sit down to write as I am not aiming to spend major time or make huge progress in each session. I worry less about the quality of the writing, since the point is to make progress through the story and get the 250 words down. I now find I am much more motivated, the story is coming along nicely and I am around 3,000 words in.

In common with other writers, when struggling to write, I often turn to reading since it seems like a constructive thing to do to get the creative juices flowing. I raced through J K Rowling’s novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, and cannot recommend it enough. The characters are brilliantly written, provoking pangs of recognition in the reader as very British ‘types’ in what has been called a ‘state of Britain’ story, but also achieving depth, with convincing backstories and well developed motivation. The quaint, self-important town of Pagford is a brilliant invention and I found myself increasingly compelled to delve into the goings on there, as you are when you are hooked on watching soaps. The bitchy power struggle for a place on the council after the death of much-loved do-gooder Barry Fairbrother provokes a sequence of events that is darkly comical, but as you read on, you begin to feel that it is bristling with the potential for disaster. From the pompous burghers who run Pagford to the drug-addicted underclass who keep social services busy, every character convinced and fascinated me, the teenagers perhaps most of all. Most are so self-involved that by the end when darkness takes over events, the ‘casual vacancy’ of the title becomes an apt description for the place in a human heart where care for and interest in the plight of others should be.

My reaction to seeing the Harry Potter books on film was that the characters and scenes seemed to be almost exactly as I had imagined them from the printed page. Reading this adult novel, it struck me that J K Rowling’s genius is to create characters and scenes that spring to life in our imagination, and this works as well for the residents of a small town in up-to-the-minute Britain as it did for wizards in a half-magical world. I can just see the obese, self-satisfied Howard, the drug-addicted Terri and Fats, the Nietzsche-loving schoolboy.

You sometimes imagine that J K Rowling has taken her money and run away to the very remote, cloistered ivory tower of the successful writer, but The Casual Vacancy suggests that she hasn’t; from this evidence, she inhabits the same Britain as the rest of us, and she’s taking it all in.

Writer's Wilderness

I’m in the writer’s wilderness. It’s that place when you’re not writing your main project, but need to get down to the nitty gritty other things involved if you want to get published. I need to get down to that query letter, and the two short story ideas I have bubbling away, waiting to become actual writing. I’m also in writer’s limbo, waiting to hear about my novel competition entry, my pitch for a feature article, my article on counselling and a poem that I have submitted to magazines.

Like all writers, I’m in it for the writing – the times when I can’t wait to get to the computer and spend every spare minute working away, with a clear task in mind and the creative juices flowing. The nitty-gritty stuff does not do that for me. It leaves me feeling that I’m in a wilderness between those true creative times when I feel that my brain is doing what it was created for. I’m sure it’s what T. S. Eliot meant when he said:

‘Ridiculous the waste, sad time

Stretching before and after.’

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

 All right that’s probably not what he meant, but at least I have shoe-horned one of my favourite ever quotes into this blog. Even if you get nothing else out of this post, you will have read that wonderful line and it will ring in your ears next time something so wonderful happens that everything before and after it seems unbearably mundane.

In my waste, sad time, in my wilderness/limbo (yes it’s tragic isn’t it?) I have been reviewing writing for other people – firstly an excellent query letter and first 30 pages from a dear friend in Hong Kong, which certainly left me wanting to read more.

Secondly, a brilliant first novel by a writer who I discovered through blogging. Below is a brief summary and my Amazon review. Buy this book – I really enjoyed it and was gripped and pleasurably frightened thoughout.

Krakow, 1585
Summoned by the King of Poland to help save his dying niece, Edward Kelley and his master, alchemist and scholar Dr John Dee, discover a dark secret at the heart of the Countess Bathory's malady. But perhaps the cure will prove more terrifying than the alternative...
England, 2013
Jackdaw Hammond lives in the shadows, a practitioner and purveyor of occult materials. But when she learns of a young woman found dead on a train, her body covered in arcane symbols, there's no escaping the attention of police consultant, Felix Guichard. Together they must solve a mystery centuries in the making, or die trying.

Review:

Rebecca Alexander has produced a blend of fantasy, historical and crime genres in this chilling, fast-paced novel. The story, of Edward Kelly in the past and Jackdaw and Felix in the present, grips the reader from the very outset and the pace never lets up after that. There were times when I thought, ‘right, they’re going to do a bit of sleuthing now and things will slow down’, but then the ever-present sense of jeopardy would explode into the foreground once more and the tension would be ratcheted up another notch. I am not usually someone who enjoys fantasy as a genre, but I found more than enough here in the themes of theological orthodoxy and heresy, love, loss, life, death and everything in between to keep me engaged, and the author’s examination of just what lengths we might go to in order to keep a loved one alive were particularly haunting. Having been led to expect a mix of three genres, I also found effective touches of horror; there are moments in the novel that are truly terrifying, and when I stayed up one night to finish it, it gave me nightmares. This in my view can only be a good thing, since a story that looks so long and hard at the boundaries between life and death, and our reactions to them, should fascinate and disturb as this one does. A really accomplished debut from Rebecca Alexander; if there is another one to follow, I will be first in the queue to read it.

That’s all from the wilderness. I’m going away to think of a way of getting, ‘Time held me golden and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea’ into my next post.

Great Tips for Writing Your Synopsis (in Which I Also Get Query Letter Envy)

Thanks to www.lucasthorn.com

The reason I dreaded writing the synopsis for my novel is that it is much too much like work, and not enough like writing. I love finding time to write, sitting down and letting the creating juices flow, or if I’m at the revising the revision stage as I have been lately, letting my nit-picking instincts ... well, pick nits. In my day job as a book editor, I love editing books but huff, puff and procrastinate when I need to write marketing copy. This reluctance stems from a similar root to my synopsis writing anxiety – the worry is that, if the book you are editing or the novel you are writing doesn’t come out sounding lip-smackingly irresistible, it may be because there is something lacking in the product itself – and you really don’t want to be discovering this at the copy-writing stage, when you have already invested a lot of hard work. This is why many novelists write a synopsis at an early stage, and revise it as they go along; and it’s why as book publishers, we write marketing copy when a new book is being proposed, then refine the vision for the book at an acquisitions meeting, and finally create a book to fit the glowing write-up with which we started.

When I sent an earlier draft of my novel, Unspeakable Things, to a consultant, one of the first things she asked for was a synopsis, and her strong recommendation was to access the free downloadable workshop on synopsis writing from Mslexia Magazine. I could not agree more; there are several great workshops here, and when I could put off synopsis writing no longer, I turned to this one:

www.mslexia.co.uk/shop/goodies.php

The workshop explains exactly what the synopsis is for, who will be reading it and when. There is great advice on layout, structure and contents. What’s really good, though, is that the workshop takes you through an unthreatening series of exercises, and when you have completed them all, declares – there you go, put that together with that, add these bits where needed, and you’ve got a workable draft for your synopsis.

I launched in and soon found myself writing a 25 word ‘elevator pitch’ or summary paragraph for Sleeping Beauty, Pride and Prejudice, and a film of my choice. Here’s what I wrote – you have to guess what film is is (it’s my favourite – answer at the end of this post).

Thanks to: www.binarymoon.co.uk

 Here’s what I wrote:

•      ‘A princess is cursed by a bad fairy to sleep for 100 years until a lover awakes her with a kiss.’
•      ‘A lively, intelligent woman is annoyed by a fascinating man, but his pride and her family’s shame keep them apart, until a crisis unites them.’
•       ‘A kind psychiatrist has failed a suicidal man and must redeem himself by helping a sensitive boy who is constantly terrified by visions of ghosts.’

I then had to write a 25 word summary for my own novel, including, if possible, the main character, his or her main quest of challenge, his or her main obstacle and the main setting. This was probably the biggest challenge, but the warm-up exercise had got me thinking hard about what the key elements of a story are, and made me assess my novel in a useful, summarising way. My summary paragraph went through at least six drafts as I worked out what was the really central dilemma driving my main character and plot. I settled on:

•          ‘Pregnant editor Sarah is told her dead mother suffered hereditary madness after childbirth, but is her uncle’s story true? Is the family secret darker still?’

When I had completed the draft of the synopsis, I had a few words to spare, so went back and refined it further to:

•        ‘Pregnant editor, SARAH, is told her dead mother suffered hereditary madness after childbirth, but is her uncle’s story true? Sarah must discover the family’s dark secret before her baby is born.’

Having dreaded writing the synopsis, I found myself enjoying it, fascinated by the process of cutting through to the very essence of the story and laying it bare. I hope the synopsis will be needed because I’m hoping that the judges of the Mslexia Novel Competition will want to see it, along with the whole novel. If not – gulp –  I’ll at least have a strong synopsis to send out to agents. And I’ll be looking up Mslexia’s advice on writing the opening pages, and the query letter...

With all this going on, I also agreed to read and assess a friend’s combined query letter/synopsis for her first novel – yes, can you imagine, she has been advised that US agents want the query letter and synopsis squashed into one page! Have they no attention span?! It was when reading my friend’s writing credits that I became distracted by what I can only call query letter envy. My friend has writing credits. She has had short stories and essays published in a Hong Kong-based anthology, and in a book about expat women in Asia. Having written for most of my life, novels and screenplays and poetry (as a teenager), for the most part my writing hours –  weeks, well let’s be honest, years – have been spent crafting long, much rewritten works that have not seen the publishing light of day.

 I realise that I have to put this right. I was asked to write an article for a counselling organisation’s magazine, but never quite got round to it – well, I have written it now, and hope they still want it. I have written an article on coping with OCD in the family – I’ll be looking for a support website to send that to. A screenplay I wrote would make a good short story. I will pitch an article to Mslexia Magazine, and write a poem for their latest theme, Troubled Minds. My mind is buzzing with ideas – that workshop helped me get my synopsis out there, now my query letter needs to sparkle like my friend’s!

With thanks to derekwinnert.com

The answer to the film synopsis quiz was of course, The Sixth Sense.