The queerness of query letters

So, following my extreme U-turn (I have been known to do that in the past, to the amusement of a dear friend), I have been editing furiously and taking breaks from the book itself to begin the arduous process of (drum-roll please) composing the query letter.

Now I remember why I was so keen to self-publish.

As the lovely Graham said, query letters are a form of high art. Composing a query letter uses completely different parts of my brain than when writing the book; more the copywriter centre than the fiction writing centre. This fact made me grumpy at having to do this. “How can this be a fair way of presenting my book?” I railed at my office ceiling. “How can an agent / publisher know whether my book is any good from one paragraph?”

I know there’s an argument that if an author can craft four or five sentences well, then they can craft a book well, but I’m not convinced by that yet. Perfecting a paragraph is a whole world away from characterisation, maintaining tension, describing action and engaging the reader to follow a plot over several thousand paragraphs. However, this process has actually borne some fruit, and inadvertently solved a problem I have had for a long time.

The problem: how to describe my book – no, how to pitch it.

When I am out and about people ask me what I do, and I tell them about my day job that pays the bills for my super hero secret identity – I’m really a writer, and I’m trying to get published.

Nine times out of ten the next question is “Oh! What’s it about?”

Then I stumble over my words, which is rather embarrassing for an aspiring wordsmith. I end up saying something like this: “It’s a YA post-apocalyptic novel. The first in a trilogy. It’s about these teenagers who are a bit special, who are looking for a sister who’s been kidnapped, and a Giant that turns up one night and sets the protagonist on the path to meeting his father that he thought was dead. And it’s about gang warfare, and it’s about their rites of passage. And broken families. And loyalty.”

This is when they nod, frowning slightly as they try to make sense of it.

I hurry on, desperate to convey what has absorbed so much of my life. “Actually, it’s really about consensus reality. That’s a bit of a weird concept, not sure if that’s been done in YA fiction before.” Then I stop, frustrated, as it hasn’t really summed up what happens in the book at all. “Maybe you’ll get to read it one day.”

I wanted to describe all of the different species of trees, without knowing how to summarise the wood and why they should go there.

So anyway, after seeking advice on query letter writing, I realised I need to crack this problem if I was to get anywhere. Thus began a long process of writing sentences about the book, constantly refining them down to their core elements. I felt like a chemist, purifying the themes of the book until I had a revelation.

It’s not about how special the trio are, it’s not about the gangs, and life in post-apocalyptic London, or Zane’s loss of innocence, it’s not about the Giant, and all the other mysteries in the book (those are all important, but not the core of the story).

It’s about three friends trying to find someone, who each swear a different oath and then struggle to stay loyal to each other, whilst honouring the promises they’ve made. All the other stuff is important, but that is the centre of the struggle. At various key points on their ‘quest’ to find Titus’s sister, each of them has to decide whether to uphold those oaths, or be loyal to their friends, sometimes risking their own lives to do both.

So now I am starting to get closer to that query letter. And because of that, I almost have a polished verbal summary for when people ask me what it’s about. If I want to get really silly, I could even argue that when I’m published, I’ll be able to say it to journalists and marketing people too – but I’m not going to be totally delusional yet.

When looking for help with query letters, I struggled to find any examples of ones that had actually been successful, rather than theoretical examples of how not to do it. The one I linked to earlier in this post was a good find, but took me a while. So I thought it might be useful, and interesting I hope, for the writers amongst you to see mine being drafted. You see, even when I had found examples of ones that had worked, I wanted to see what they had left out in the previous drafts!

The one below is the second version. The first is so terrible that I couldn’t bring myself to put it here. This needs a huge amount of work, it’s too long for a start – I see it as laying foundations – but I hope it gives an insight into the steps along the way as I will publish subsequent drafts here too. Please note that when this is sent off, there will be an extra paragraph at the beginning that will explain why I am approaching that particular person.

Zane’s world is simple; don’t join a gang, don’t go into hospitals and don’t go into churches. He’s the only boy in London who thinks that people are kind, but then he’s the only boy in the world who has grown up with his mother. His sheltered life irrevocably changes when he and two other teenagers, Titus and Erin, are thrown together by opposing gang leaders. They form an intense friendship, strengthened by a supernatural connection between them, and vow to help Titus search for his kidnapped sister. Erin struggles to escape her violent past and Zane discovers that the father he thought dead is still alive, and involved with the kidnappers.

Forced to negotiate with the most powerful people in London in order to save Titus’s sister, the trio are drawn deeper into gang conflicts. Oaths sworn in moments of passion set the friends at odds with one another as they fight to keep their promises whilst being instinctively compelled to help each other.

With issues such as knife violence and gang culture being very much in the public eye, ‘Twenty Years Later’ enables young adults to explore these themes within a fantastical context, in a future London which is both alien and all too familiar. The child heroes are extraordinary in their abilities yet face the same problems as any young adult reader, namely absent parents, the emotional turbulence of adolescence and the temptation to join gangs in order to feel safe in a dangerous world.

‘Twenty Years Later’ is approximately 94,000 words in length, I am currently a significant way into the second novel of the trilogy. I would be delighted to send you a sample of the book, or the entire manuscript if you are interested.

The word count will change too… I still have 6 chapters left to edit. Well, back to it!

Tagged as: query letters, ya fiction, YA post-apocalyptic novel