4th Street Diaries, Day n+1

Yes, there is more write-up. Yes, it's weeks after the con. I was tired (still am); deal with it. ( Cut for length... )

The drive was an interesting experiment, and I'll probably do something similar next year. Which I will totally have the opportunity for; I can't wait for next year's 4th Street.

The Two Problems With Query Advice

So I've been thinking about query-writing advice, as one does when trying to write a query. There's a heck of a lot of it out there, and yet, I feel like I'm flailing in a vacuum. I've decided there are two problems with the way most people give query advice.

They give very basic, beginner-level advice, because that's easiest. Okay, you've got to start somewhere; might as well be at the beginning, yes? So everybody does a few basic don'ts, then a quickie example of how to do it right. The example is almost always an simple action story -- because action stories are the easiest to summarize query-style. But what if your story is non-standard, if the A-plot is philosophical rather than action-based, if the motivations are more complex than "MC meets bad guy, bad guy does something bad, MC stops it"? The standard action-story example isn't going to give you a lot of guidance.

What's worse, every query-feedback forum on the internet is going to push you to cram your story into the standard-action-story style of query, because most of the members on those forums don't know anything other than what they've seen on the same basic advice sites. So when you go for feedback, which really is vital to writing a decent query, you're likely to find yourself distorting your understated character drama or knife-edge ethical dilemma into sounding like a straightforward action story. That's damned discouraging, because that's not the story you fell in love with enough to write a whole novel about; it's also going to sabotage your chances, because any agent who bites based on your action-sounding query isn't going to appreciate the bait-and-switch effect when they read the story you actually wrote.

They give very basic, beginner-level advice, because that's where they think the problem is. And granted, sometimes it is. There do seem to be an awful lot of people out there producing query letters without the faintest idea of what should be in one. But honestly, if someone's managed to figure out they need a query without reading Query Shark, or Janet Reid's blog, or Nathan Bransford's extensive series on the subject, or Pat Wrede's excellent example, or any of the other very good sources you can find in just a few quality minutes with Google, is one more run-down of the basics going to help them?

Because sometimes the problem isn't that the prospective querier doesn't know those things; sometimes it's that they're not applying them right, and they don't even realize it. It doesn't do any good to say, "You have to talk about what happens in the story," if the prospective querier blinks and says, "I thought I did." When you're stripping out massive amounts of detail -- and you have to, if you're condensing an entire novel down to a couple of paragraphs -- it's far too easy to overshoot and strip out too much detail. But the querier knows those details; they've got a whole book's worth of details in their head. So they don't necessarily realize that to the query-reader, "an old heartbreak" doesn't have the same connotations as "the man who claimed to love her so he could cheat off her exam and steal her place in a prestigious apprenticeship, thus ruining her career." Or that "crossing a line she never wanted to approach" doesn't immediately conjure up "doing the same thing she's been trying to stop the bad guy from doing, by sending her daughter into the enemy's camp where she'll be subjected to destructive brainwashing, in hopes that the kid can hold it together long enough to ferret out the enemy's weakness from the inside, and oh yeah, also lying to the man she loves and using him against his friends." Or whatever your complex and hard-to-explain fictional situation might be.

It's somewhat the same problem that a writer faces when setting a scene or revealing a character's backstory. The difference is that in a novel, you can just use more words (hopefully interesting ones) if you need to make something clearer. In a query, you're working under an artificial and extremely tight word limit, and every extra-word-for-clarification you give to one thing will have to be taken away from something else.

This type of querier doesn't need the same beginner-level advice all over again; what they need is enough perspective, enough separation from their own work, to realize that what to them is a very significant statement is next to meaningless for someone who hasn't been living eyebrow-deep in this story for years. That's hard. It's even harder than getting enough perspective to be able to critique your own story, and we all know how hard that is.

If anyone's got any tips on how to achieve that perspective, I'd love to hear 'em.