Query Letters

Okay, I know it's technically Wednesday morning, but seeing as I haven't gone to sleep yet it still counts as Tuesday's blog post---deal? Now, on to the subject at hand:

Query letters. I have struggled with these bastages for coming on five years now. They have been the ever-loving bane of my existence, but I am getting better and better at writing them. I learned a lot of good lessons about what to include at the Pikes Peak Writer's Conference last spring (and I must take this opportunity to plug Writer's Conferences. If you can't afford one, find a way to...even if it means crashing on the floor of a high school friend's empty dorm room to avoid the hotel bill and not going out on the weekends for three months to save the cash. It's totally, completely, unequivocably worth it) and mine is constantly improving.

I thought my query letter was good enough after the PPWC last year. After all, my in-person pitch had gotten the attention of Kristin Nelson, who was my dream agent until she rejected my sample pages (she has now been honorably relegated to incredible-agent-whom-I-wish-had-been-interested), and I figured I was good to go.

Unfortunately, when I sent out my letter to a few more agents that summer, not a single one asked for sample pages. So I thought, hmm...what's missing? The description of my story remained unchanged from the in-person pitch to the written one, so it couldn't have been that. Then I encountered the final paragraph of my query letter. It read, and I quote:

"I am a college student pursuing a Creative Writing degree at Hamilton College in upstate New York, but I grew up in Colorado and plan to return there after I graduate. This is my first novel, and I very much appreciate your time in considering it."

Not bad, or so I had thought. Fairly professional, short, a slight introduction to who I am as a person, and not making much of my lack of credentials. But after my spate of rejections I realized that it was a glaring weak point. There are things that make me very well qualified to write what I write. So I changed that paragraph to include them. Unfortunately I don't have any saved drafts of that version of the query letter template, but it read something like this.

"I am a college student pursuing a Creative Writing degree at Hamilton College in upstate New York. I plan to become a professional writer and have put a lot of thought into how to do so. I grew up reading fantasy books, but as I got older my interests grew to include anime and RPG videogames as well. These interests have combined to make my writing something unique--a fantasy novel that combines traits of anime and RPG storytelling.This is my first novel, and I very much appreciate your time in considering it."

Better, I thought, but not nearly good enough. Yes, those are the reasons why my writing is unique, but there's nothing solid there. Telling an agent "I have these hobbies and they contribute to my writing, and trust me when I say that I take my writing seriously" is pretty weak. It was, to use a term familiar to those of us who have taken a creative writing course, telling and not showing.

For a moment, I sat and stared at my sad little paragraph wondering how on earth I was going to convince an agent that I really am a competent writer with an understanding of the industry and plans to write professionally, as well as a unique voice because of the way I blend my influences.

Then I had my great, breakthrough brainstorm. I decided to write the paragraph I WANTED to send, not the one based off of my credentials so far. It read something like this:

"I am a graduate of Hamilton College with a degree in Creative Writing. I have worked as an intern at a major publishing house. In my senior year at college I wrote my thesis on storytelling similarities and differences in Anime, RPG videogames, and fantasy literature. My experience studying Anime and RPGs has made my novel something unique: a fantasy novel that combines Anime and RPG storytelling techniques to drawn in readers used to seeing those types of stories."

I felt I was onto something. Only a sketch of what it needed to be, really, but a much stronger paragraph, and one that has acted since then as a blueprint for my professional development. As I have completed some of my objectives and discovered new ones, the paragraph has grown. At press time, it reads like this:

"I am a twenty-one year old college student pursuing a creative writing degree who has been preparing for a career as a novelist since the age of fifteen. I have a blog about writing that gets about two hundred visitors a month (http://wakaiwriter.blogspot.com). For the past nine months I have worked on maintaining a World of Warcraft community site and am looking forward to creating a website of my own to provide a place for a community of fans to grow once my book is under contract. In Spring 2008 I worked as an intern at the Editorial Department of (name removed, sorry ;-p) in London. In Summer 2008 as the culmination of a research project I wrote a thesis-length paper on narrative techniques in The Dragonlance Chronicles, Gundam Wing, and Final Fantasy VII. My experience studying Anime and RPGs in addition to literature has allowed me to incorporate elements of all three into my writing, all of which should make it more attractive to my target audience, the teen to thirty fantasy crowd."

My kickboxing instructor has a noise he makes when he's demonstrating a technique and it lands particularly devastatingly. It sounds something like "OOoom." I feel like making that noise when I look at this paragraph. It is, by all accounts, pretty close to what people are looking for, and by the time I send it out, it (and probably more) will all be true.

Most of this was my idea---certainly the thought of turning my list of what I was into a list of what I wanted to be was, and it's one I'm particularly proud of---but I also have to doff my cap to the experience and help I got this year while writing my resume and cover letters for internship applications. In many ways a query letter (especially that about-the-author paragraph) is like a job application, and thinking of it as such certainly can't hurt.

So that's part of the development of my own query letter. Hopefully it will be the development of a successful query letter, but it is no matter what a record of the improvement of a query letter, and I hope that it will be helpful to others who are looking to improve their own.